It was a golden time—an age of sexual exploration spearheaded by the mass availability of the birth control pill. Many of these girls were raised to be prim and proper, and their parents were convinced their daughters wouldn’t have sex until they were married. One popped pill later, they were ditching their boyfriends (who they hadn’t yet had sex with yet, because they didn’t want to develop a bad reputation) and hooking up with pop stars for the night. All this pent-up sexual frustration flooded out of them, and they gave into their urges because they didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant or making anyone in their town think they were easy.
It was like a bonus for all of our hard work—a fringe benefit that turned me and lots of other pop stars who had never been natural Casanovas into sex objects, for lack of a better term. As long as they were of legal age and I wasn’t seriously dating anyone, I was open to exploring that world. It was the 60s. No one shamed these girls or warned them to tone down their sex drives. It was fun, exciting, rebellious, and largely harmless. And there were no consequences.
Our first major tour was an odd bill with seven bands, including The Beach Boys. It was in early 1967, and Helen Shapiro, The Nite People, The Marionettes, Terry Reid, and Peter Jay’s Jaywalkers were also on the tour. We were third in the lineup—not the co-headliners, but a respectable spot for a band who had only had a handful of songs on the radio.
We were excited to meet The Beach Boys, whose heavily harmonized surf-pop was unlike anything else. ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Good Vibrations’ are still in my personal top ten all-time musical masterpieces. But man, for a bunch of guys from sunny California who made upbeat, positive-sounding music they were miserable and mean. They disliked us right away. I later found out they disliked everyone, and the few times we saw them offstage they were fighting with one another. I couldn’t imagine why they were unhappy. They were huge stars. They could have been friendly to us, but they ignored us the whole tour. Why? We were no threat. We were schlubs compared to them. We couldn’t even afford hotels. Even worse, they could hardly play their instruments. Apparently, the backing musicians who played on their albums had been denied entry to the UK, so The Beach Boys had to play like a real band. They sounded like beginners, and Dennis Wilson in particular hardly knew how to play drums. It reminded me of my old school friend Andy Mead playing with pots and pans. What a letdown it was to see your idols fall in front of your face!
Sometimes we spent the night at bed-and-breakfasts in northern English cities like Manchester and Newcastle. Unlike hotels, you couldn’t book ahead. You’d have to go there after the gig and knock on the door at one or two in the morning to see if they had any rooms. When one was full, you’d move on to the next until either you found somewhere to spend the night or you resigned yourself to sleeping in the van—which on cold, rainy days was practically a guarantee of a restless night. Sometimes there was a ‘vacancy/no vacancy’ sign in the window, which usually meant either you had a place to stay or you didn’t need to bother knocking. Even when they weren’t full, it wasn’t always easy to get in. There was never a front desk, so you had to keep knocking until you woke up the owner of the house and she came to the door.
‘Do you have any rooms?’ I’d ask whoever opened the door. Even if there was a vacancy sign, sometimes the caretaker would look at our long hair and scraggly appearance and tell us to move on.
‘But your sign says …’
SLAM! The front door would shut hard in our faces, threatening to shave the scruff off our chins.
Some of these bed-and-breakfasts were worse than pay-by-the-hour motels. When we stayed in Salford, Greater Manchester, we asked the woman there if she had any rooms. ‘I have three doubles and one single,’ she said. There were seven of us, so it seemed like it would work out even though the doubles had double beds, which two smelly guys would have to squeeze into.
Before anyone had the chance to say anything, I jumped in and said, ‘I’ll have the single.’
Phil shook his head, annoyed, and resigned himself to sharing a room with Ray, and everyone else was too tired to argue with me. Besides, I was the singer. I deserved it. And boy, I got what I deserved. When I got to the room, I found out that it was a single, all right, but there was a drunk sailor in the bed, snoring loud enough to make the windows rattle. I went back to the front door and knocked again until the woman returned. ‘You gave me a single and there’s already someone in the bed,’ I sputtered.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s what I told you. There are three doubles and a single, and I gave you the single. There are no other rooms.’
There was no arguing with her. I had to sleep next to this bloke. It was either that or sleep on the floor. Good thing he didn’t wake up, or he might have belted me for getting in bed with him.
In that specific situation, I took the mistreatment lying down. More often, though, we stood up for ourselves. And we had a way of getting revenge on landladies who slighted us. Most of these places served breakfast in the morning, so when we got up, we scoped out the dining area to figure out what kinds of shenanigans we could pull.
‘What do you want for breakfast, eggs or kippers?’ was something these women often asked us. If they weren’t friendly, well, you could make a good mess with eggs if you rubbed them into the fibers of a rug or stirred them into your coffee and then spilled the concoction over the tablecloth. But kippers, which are bits of smoked herring, made for better ammunition when there was a good place to hide them. We especially liked wall artwork, and our favorite move was for one person to lift the picture a little bit from the wall so that someone else could slide some kippers into the space between the wall and the frame. Then we’d push the painting back the way it was. No one knew there was smoked fish underneath but us.
A couple of times we came back two or three weeks later and told someone on the staff that there was a horrible smell in the dining room and they should call an exterminator. They’d acknowledge something smelled horrible but never figured out what it was. Not once did any of them think of looking under the picture, because by the time the kippers began to rot, the smell permeated the entire room. We’d keep a straight face and act irritated and disgusted, and then when we got back to our room or the van we’d laugh until we almost peed ourselves.
In our defense, we only pulled pranks when we weren’t treated well, and not all landladies were harpies. There was a lovely lady in Edinburgh, Scotland, named Mrs. Williams, who had a soft spot for musicians and treated them all—the biggest and the smallest—like VIPs. Some of these acts became big stars, but most of them were still unknown, which is why they were staying in a small-town B&B. Mrs. Williams didn’t care. She loved music and respected the musicians, so she talked to the bands and learned everyone’s likes and dislikes. She’d let bands sleep until three in the afternoon and then take special orders for breakfast—eggs, baked beans, scones, bacon, juice—and make everything fresh to match your schedule. The more orders, the merrier. One time we stayed there at the same time as Pink Floyd and The Move, and she made us all breakfast at different times in the afternoon. We were always grateful for her hospitality, and we never pulled any silly antics. I can’t promise that other bands weren’t more mischievous, but if they were, she never told us.
When it came to Simon Dupree & The Big Sound, I got the most attention because, well, I was Simon Dupree. I was the first one people came to for autographs and interviews. Some of the guys in the band were annoyed by that, but not Ray. He was never disappointed or angry that I was the center of attention. He saw the value in having a representative for the band, and he didn’t want to be the spokesperson.