John Mayall

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars (The other side of the Screwdriver)"

The John Mayall Connection... (the organ transplant).

I often muse upon the fact that there's only one generation lucky enough to be able to claim being born at a time and place enabling them to have experienced events encompassing no world-wide war, a free health service, the birth of rock music and (by inference) the electric guitar, space flight, the first man on the Moon, instant world-wide international communication (and efficient contraception).

More specifically in the case of rock music, Bromley and Beckenham in Kent, U.K. seems to have been something of an epi-centre for cultural advancement and I come under that fairly narrow category. Luck of the draw, obviously (almost makes one believe in Fate).

It was the 1960's that enabled the Blues music of the Afro-Americans to become accepable and further, even known of to a wide audience, eventually returning the favour to the U.S.A. where it was rooted. The Rolling Stones had a major hand in this acceptance and many English bands of the time also helped to spread that popularity. John Mayall was a key figure in this spread of the Blues.

I had the great good fortune to have seen John Mayall in the early London Marquée Club gigs around 1965 and 1966. That venue was also host to many other top bands of the day and I saw performances by The Who in the week that "My Generation" was released and Manfred Mann among others. To see Pete Townshend lay his 12-string Rickenbacker up against a 100-watt Super-Beatle stack purely to allow it to feed back tuned to a chord, while he "windmilled" on his other guitar was, to say the least, a revelation - and, for the time, louder than anything that had come before.

John Mayall, in 1965 had not yet acquired the trademark Hammond organ of the "Beano Album" and I think was playing a "Bird" console organ (like Cherry Wainer used to use; correct me?). John had a couple of guitarists that I saw before Eric Clapton joined him for later gigs as The Bluesbreakers, of which I also sampled the delights at Bromley Court Hotel.

The obvious choice for a keyboard player in a rock band is the Hammond and I eventually got the chance to own one in 1989. It was an M102 that hadn't been ever split, that is, cut in half for ease of transport. Dick Studholme, a blues guitarist who worked for Eric Snowball in Maidstone, had one for sale and only wanted £300 for it. There was a Leslie cabinet to go with it but I simply didn't have the space in my small cottage in Yalding. But I bought the Hammond and paid up front cash for it to secure it, before it went to anybody else.

Dick insisted that because he'd been using it on the road, it ought to be serviced before I got my hands on it and called in a service engineer who knew all there was to know about the instrument. Apparently when the guy came to do the job, he recognised his own signature on the inspection ticket in the back of the cabinet enclosure. After doing the service the guy took a note of the serial number with the promise to check his records back at his workshop to source its history.

Meanwhile, I took delivery of the organ, much to the chagrin of my wife (big organ, small cottage).

So the deal was done, money exchanged and goods delivered. Dick called after a day or so to tell me that the engineer had found out from his workshop records that the organ had been sold on, second hand, to John Mayall in early 1965, making it obvious that this was the actual instrument used on the infamous Bluesbreakers "Beano Album" with Eric Clapton! Dick was a wee bit annoyed that he'd sold me something so cheaply that was probably very collectible and had refused to give me the engineer's contact details.

Unfortunately, Dick had proved to be a bit too unreliable for me to continue to do business with right around that time. He'd commissioned some expensive re-building work on a mandolin that his girlfriend had smashed and repeatedly failed to turn up to collect and pay for the job. Several meetings were arranged and never happened, causing me to lose several days' work. I'd had to threaten to burn his mandolin in my wood stove to achieve payment. That worked but the work I had lost negated the eventual money paid. I hate that kind of dysfunctional behaviour and that was the end of our contact, except for abusive emails sent to me a couple of years ago after I had found out some other interesting stuff about the organ.

I had contacted Christie's Auctioneers to ask what they would value the Hammond at, given its history with John Mayall. After research, they estimated a reserve value at around £20,000, providing I could supply provenance, which of course I couldn't because Dick was so miffed at me and the world in general. He's still miffed, by all accounts. But none of that helps, because...

My wife quickly got irritated with the presence of the Hammond in our living room and I asked a local recording studio in Staplehurst (which had a lot of spare floor space and which I'd been using in yet another attempt to record Wilfred Whale) if they would please keep it for me. They agreed, willingly, on the understanding that it would be available for session use. That seemed fair and we arranged a delivery date. At the time I was driving a Ford Transit van, servicing seven music shops in Kent as a travelling guitar technician, carrying sometimes full loads of guitars to and from my workshop, so transport was easy. Except...

Driving to the studio, all went well until I got to Staplehurst and turned into the track leading to the studio. A car pulled straight out in front of me without the driver paying "due care and attention". This forced me to swerve violently, causing the light strapping I'd used to stabilize the organ in the back to slip, resulting in a catastrophic act of gravity and inertia. The poor thing fell over, flat on its back, in the back of the van. The carpeted interior made no difference to the result.

When I recovered and unloaded at the studio, it was very bad news indeed. A large part of the entire very complex wiring loom inside the organ was ripped out. Some notes played but only in a couple of the drawbar registers - it was useless and repairs would have cost much more than I'd paid for the instrument. I didn't have the provenance so it had become, at a stroke, virtually worthless.

As a footnote, a few years ago I had an email correspondence with John Mayall during which we both expressed extreme regrets at the sad story of the demise of his trusty old friend, which he also said he would love to have owned again, for old time's sake. Who wouldn't?

Bugger! Bugger! Bugger!

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars" & "The other side of the Screwdriver".

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