With John Withey From Toxteth To The Ritz

From the moment I heard Buddy Holly sing “That’ll Be The Day” one lazy summer afternoon in 1957, I knew I had to learn guitar. My problem was I neither had a guitar nor the means to buy one, and even if I had, how would  I be able to play guitar, no one had a clue what planet this rock n roll music was from let alone learn how to play it.

Help From A Cunard Yank

I decided to enlist the help of my friend Freddie a Steward on the Caronia (a Cunard liner that sailed from Liverpool to New York) I asked him to bring back anything he could find about learning to play guitar. He returned with a thing called a Fake Book, this was an illegal compilation of a hundred or so songs in single line musical notation with guitar chord symbols above. The problem was it was not rock- n- roll, they were show songs, light operatic pieces and top twenty hits by the likes of Johnny Ray, Slim Whitman and Frankie Laine. However, the great thing was, I knew from a little research I had done while Freddie was away, that if I learned some chords,  I could fit them to Buddy Holly's songs, after all most rock-n-roll songs have only three maybe four chords, all I had to do was learn to play them in the key of A major, as this was the key  in which Buddy played almost all of his songs, eureka ! I was made.

The Mythical Fender Stratocaster

We did not know it at the time because we had only heard his records, but Buddy played a Fender Stratocaster guitar, Freddie had  managed to get a picture of  Buddy playing one , this was nothing like the guitars we knew, It looked like it came  from a planet beyond Pluto. the only way we knew it was a guitar was that it had six strings and some frets on the fingerboard. It looked and sounded like nothing on Earth.  there was no way a sixteen year old kid from Toxteth the poorest suburb of Liverpool  could get hold of one of these mythical instruments.

Help was at hand by way of my seventeenth birthday I managed to persuade my Dad to buy me a guitar, not one from Buddy’s planet  but  from Rushworths music store (the same Rushworths that unbeknown to me the Beatles had purchased their first guitars). He bought me a Broadway semi acoustic.

Two Steps Closer to the Ritz

I practised till my fingers bled, I nearly drove my Mother and siblings mad, I played that guitar every spare moment, I bought every Buddy Holly and Elvis record and worked out the chords from the tabs in my Fake Book. By this time I had enrolled in the Merchant Navy, and took my guitar along for company. It was fabulous; I became a minor celebrity entertaining the rest of the crew with my repertoire of rock- n- roll songs. We fashioned a bass from a tea chest and broom handle and percussion was provided by a washboard. I was the Elvis of the Blue Funnel  Line; we played every port of call  from Port Said to Singapore, Hong Kong to Bali. What an amazing thing an instrument can be, it can make you friends, you need no intro' to girls and best of all it can make you rich.

The Mersey Beat Boom

By the early sixties practically every street in Liverpool  had its own version of the Crickets; our street was no exception.  Brian a school pal and pianist had formed a band called the Del Renas and they needed a bass guitarist, so I quickly had to, not only, convert my limited knowledge of chords into bass notes but  somehow procure a bass guitar. Our solution in the absence of funds was believe it or not to make one. A guy we knew Tony Jackson who eventually became the bass player with the famous Liverpool band the Searchers had a Fender Precision bass guitar and he allowed us to trace around it to get a vague copy of the shape.(long story short)we managed (with the help of a carpenter and car painter) to produce an acceptable sounding instrument that  I consequently used for 10 years as a professional musician, only parting with it when I changed disciplines again and eventually got my own beloved Sunburst Fender Stratocaster.( see my home made  guitar below at the merseybeatnostalgia link.on the June post). I'm the guy on the right.

On To The Ritz

As I have written in my other post on Guitareasy  the  Del Renas  were part of the Liverpool scene for three years and we played all of the venues in the area; 41 times at the Cavern , plus Iron Door, Tower Ballroom, Litherland Town Hall etc. We appeared with the Beatles, Jerry Lee Lewis. Little Richard, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and many many  more. We recorded on the This Is Merseybeat albums, our contributions were “When Will I Be Loved” “Nashville Blues” and “ Sigh Cry” Also with the Beatles  on their first UK  tour at the Preston Guild Hall, and we followed them into the Top Ten Clubs in Hamburg and Hanover Germany, for two month long residency prior to their first big hit in 1963. All in all a fabulous  journey from the back streets of Liverpool to eventually having my own band at the Manchester Ritz. Rubbing shoulders with film stars, prime ministers and miss world.

To Play Guitar Was My Dream

These days budding guitarists no longer have to send a friend across the Atlantic to find a fake book,  struggle to learn guitar, or even make their own . They have a myriad of resources at their disposal from c/ds on playing guitar, to online courses on guitar tuition. But  remember anything can happen if you just have the dream and the commitment to see it through, you too can go from Toxteth to the Ritz, or indeed any place you want.