Never meet your hero...
My first blog post for QoE is going to be about R. B. Kitaj
and it’s a theme I may well return to.
There is a show of his work coming up at Pallant House in
Chichester. Check it out...
This company wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the fact
that two decades ago I walked into one of my favourite haunts, Houbens bookshop
in Richmond, and saw a book of Kitaj’s work on the shelf. I had to wait to
payday to buy it but even so I remember creeping back into the shop and devouring
it page by page. It was replete with so many ideas and so many good drawings
that I found myself making notes in a little moleskine type book. As soon as
payday came I drove over to Richmond to get it and it was a Friday night. I remember
that I read it that night while the James Whale show was on. A St Martin’s
student named Trudy Barber who drew in a not dissimilar manner to Kitaj used to
paint live on that show which is why I watched it and a decade later we met by
chance but that’s a story for another blog post. If you want to be taught life
drawing by Trudy, she’ll be doing a day course on April 15th so get
in touch with us!
What excited me about Kitaj were two things. He drew
beautifully and he had great ideas. Unfortunately he often repeated his ideas over
and over again in different interviews which I believe were only done in
writing. I would be interested to know if he ever gave a proper live interview
although all indications are that he never favoured this approach.
I didn’t care for his painting style except for a period
in the seventies when he produced an amazing series of work in a very contrived
but beautiful painting technique. ‘From
London (James Joll and John Golding 1975-76’ is an excellent example of this period. Unfortunately (to my mind
at least) it eventually gave way to an altogether more expressionist style and
a love affair with Van Gogh and Cezanne in the extreme. His last few years
produced the outcome of his long obsession with the notion of ‘old age style’
which seemed to have derived from his interest in Titian and Cezanne and had
been evident in some of his earliest writings on art. I can’t stand those
paintings although I can understand that they derived from a terrible desperation
brought about by the so called ‘Tate War’ of 1994 and the death of his second
wife Sandra Fisher that summer.
Despite me not liking all of his work, I thought of him
as one of the most tremendous powerhouses of creativity alive and now he’s dead
that view has not diminished. In fact, he inspired me to go and do an art
history degree at the University of London and Cezanne became my art idol too. I
go to the Kitaj books on my bookshelf when I need inspiration, or fortitude or
just plain comfort. His writing and his drawings are like complex and finely
honed Jazz guitar playing to me. And that brings me to another hero of mine...
When I wasn’t in Houbens I was often in Potters Music
shop at the top of Hill Rise in Richmond. You won’t find it now. It closed in
1999 after four decades of business. Run by Gerry and Sharon it sold the most amazing
Blues, Jazz, and Classical records. There were some amazing rarities. I saw a
copy of the Howling Wolf/Electric Mud album for £4.50 and I didn’t buy it! What
a mistake!! It’s now a collector’s item.
On a Saturday in Potters you might see one of the
Attenborough’s or Elvis Costello. It was rumoured that Eric Clapton bought an
amplifier from there when he was in the Yardbirds but I have no idea if this
was true or just an urban myth. I loved it. It still had little 60’s listening
booths to try before you buy. There was always a great selection of instruments
for sale. I bought a Hohner chromatic harmonica in G from there in 1978 for £16.
I bought records by Blind Willie McTell, Rev Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt and
just about every Leadbelly record I could lay my hands on. And then one
Saturday afternoon I discovered Davey Graham’s 1964 record ‘Folk, Blues and
Beyond’. I was amazed by this record. There were actually two copies in the
shop and I wish I’d bought them both because now they are collector’s items.
I listened in and out to that record and tried to learn
as much as I could from it. I used to hum it in my head while walking down the
street. I wondered how I might find the man himself to ask him about the Guitar
parts that I couldn’t learn from the record. There was no internet in those
days; no Facebook, and nobody was a couple of mouse clicks away.
Another favourite shop of mine was Dobell’s in London. Like
Collets that came later, it was a fantastic Blues/Jazz/Folk record shop. I was
in there one day and it struck me that I should ask if anybody knew Davy Graham
and if he gave Guitar lessons. They did know him and yes he did. I was given
his phone number and off I went as if I had discovered the Holy Grail. I rang
Davey and we arranged a Guitar lesson. It was £8 a lesson and I trekked some
twenty miles to 11 Lyme St, Camden with a very heavy Guitar case and the best
Guitar I could afford (which wasn’t much). Apart from the record, I knew
nothing about Davey. If I had its fair to say I would have had some forewarning
of what he would be like and what he was like at that time was entirely unpredictable
from one lesson to the next.
On the first lesson he showed me some diminished scales and
chord progressions that he had played on ‘Folk Blues and Beyond’ and explained
them to me. It seemed a good start. He didn’t have a copy of the album and I
wished I had bought both copies so I could have given one to him.The second
lesson was interesting but came with a full fifteen minutes lecture on the
evils of drug taking (I still got charged for this part of the lesson which was
intensely annoying as I didn’t share his passion for pharmaceutical exploration).
The third lesson was great but very offbeat and came with a set of rules. He
didn’t want to discuss ‘Folk, Blues and Beyond’ as that was, according to him,
music that he created when he was an unskilled musician (his words). It became
apparent that a perverse inverted snobbery was afoot in his psyche in which he
made a dividing line between the period in which he made his great Sixties
recordings, and the period in which he learnt classical Guitar. He also broke
off the lesson to give me a long lecture on the Guitarists he didn’t like and
why. This was fascinating but I will not repeat it here. What was gratifying
though, was that he didn’t charge me for this part of the lesson.
Other lessons were very smooth until what became the last
one. He was in a bad mood from start to finish. He berated me for my scruffy
notation (I have terrible handwriting and my music notation is, to be fair to
Davey, worse). He then decided that he would only do one of three things with
me. He would a) Teach me to play classical Guitar which wasn’t an interest of
mine and which I didn’t have a Guitar that was suitable b) Teach me to play classical
Indian music properly which did interest me or c) Teach me to play Jazz Guitar
which was right up my alley. I agreed on the third choice. I left Davey to go
down the corridor to the loo and when I came back I could hear him playing ‘How
High the Moon’ to himself very beautifully. I opened the door to the living
room and he stopped immediately. I resumed my place and he asked to look at my
Guitar. It was all I could afford at the time and it was an old Yamaha steel
string folk flat top. I loved it though and I still have it after all these
years of playing a Martin. He examined it with a faint air of disgust, although
he had never bothered to really notice it up to this point. ‘The B string is
way too loud. Can’t you hear that? This is useless. It’s Rubbish’. I felt that
a line had been crossed. To insult my Guitar was to insult me. I was annoyed
and felt that although what he said was undoubtedly true, one can only play
what one can afford. I pointed out that he had probably had to play cheap
Guitars himself before his Martin which had been followed by the famous blonde
Gibson. There was a silence that you could pierce with a knife. It was obvious to
me that Davey in a good mood was wonderful but Davey in a bad mood was not
somebody I wanted to be around. I marched home twenty miles with my heavy Guitar
case and felt thoroughly worn out and miserable.
I phoned him three days before the next lesson as I had
found that I was going to have to be away. He told me that he expected me to
pay double on my next visit for cancelling. I told him that I had given him
fair warning and he should accept that. To be honest, after the last lesson I
wasn’t taking prisoners and I saw no reason why I should. It wasn’t the money
that was the issue to me, it was the principle. He tried to smooth things over
but I had taken more than enough of what I perceived as his erratic behaviour
by then and I cancelled the Guitar lessons. We never spoke or met again and I
went back to playing ‘Folk, Blues and Beyond’ on the turntable and loving it
for all the reasons I had on the first day I had listened to it. The Guitarist
who made that record was no longer around. He had been replaced by somebody else
who I didn’t recognise as the originator of that incredible recording and I
didn’t care to know him. Here’s the bottom line to this story. It seems obvious
to say it, but never meet your heroes. They never match up to your imagined expectations
and why should they? They are only mortal after all.
And so, at one point I found myself in the vicinity of
Kitaj and I chose not to ask for anything more than the joy of observing one of
my art heroes without actually having to deal with him as a person. I am going
to the friends view at Pallant on Sunday morning and I will enjoy it because I
have had twenty years of enjoying this man’s ideas and creative aspirations
without that enjoyment being dispelled by the real person. RIP Kitaj and RIP
Davey. I wish I hadn’t put the phone down on you thirty years ago.
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