To encourage me to be social, my parents sent me to something called Jewish Youth Club but I had nothing in common with those kids. They honored the Sabbath and went to synagogue every week. That wasn’t for me.
I was very good at football, and for a while Ray and I hung out with the other kids who played sports. But we soon gravitated more to music and spent a lot of time at home, listening to music. One day, I took some of the money I had saved up from working crappy jobs and went to the local record store. I wanted to buy a single I had heard on the radio. I didn’t know who it was by, but the chorus sounded to me like ‘Sharp And Round.’
‘Do you have “Sharp And Round”?’ I asked hopefully. ‘I don’t know who it’s by.’ The sales had no idea what I was talking about. He looked it up and couldn’t find it, so he told me they didn’t have it in stock. But it might be out there somewhere.
I went to another shop and asked if they had the song. ‘I don’t know anything by that name,’ replied the guy at the counter. He pursed his lips, creased his brow, and looked thoughtful for a moment. Then his eyes lit up. ‘Is it possible you’re thinking of “Shop Around” by the American band The Miracles?’ He dug it out from the shelves and put it on.
‘Yeah, that’s the one!’ I enthused. I bought it, took it home, and played it until the grooves wore out.
There was always music in the house. When I was very young, Phil and his friends used to listen to Stan Getz, Shorty Rogers, and Charlie Parker. My dad listened to jazz records, too, but he also liked classical. So, Ray and I heard a lot of interesting music from an early age. We were especially inspired by radio programming in the mid-60s, including Radio Luxembourg and American Forces Radio Network, which we’d listen to at our friends’ houses. The audience for American Forces was largely black, so we’d hear soul music and R&B and say, ‘Wow, what the hell is this about? This is amazing!’
That was really how the British Invasion was born. Kids didn’t want to listen to the lightweight programming of the BBC and buy these silly, shitty records that were coming out. We loved Motown and Stax Records, but we wanted something more gritty and real, and we heard that in black blues music by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and other Chess Records stuff they played on American Forces Network. In addition to sounding great, it was simple; a lot of it was composed of three chords. We thought, Man, we could do something like this.
My sister, Evelyn, should have been right there with us. She wanted to be a professional singer when she was young, and she had a gorgeous voice. She would sing and I would harmonize with her. I discovered I had a natural talent for harmonies when she was singing the black spiritual ‘Down By The Riverside.’ I joined in and, without thinking, locked into the vocal harmony as if I had rehearsed with her for weeks. From then on, any time she sang a melody to a song I knew, I’d harmonize with her, and we’d sound great.
Evelyn was married to a BBC producer named John King, who could have helped her with a singing career. Maybe he could have helped all of us. Ray sang amazing harmonies as well. We would have made a great professional singing trio, but in the final years of his life, my father decided his daughter should not undertake a career singing onstage, and he forbade her from singing professionally on any level—not even in local clubs.
She was crushed, but Dad has his reasons. He had played jazz in different cities and seen the way young women performers were treated and taken advantage of. As angry as she was, Evelyn obeyed my father and didn’t perform ever again. Instead of spitting sour grapes, she was supportive of all three of her brothers and even convinced her husband to manage Simon Dupree & The Big Sound. After we got a record deal, she co-wrote songs that became B-sides of some of our hit records. And, before all that, she gave me my first guitar—a Spanish acoustic that set me on my path to writing songs.
I learned a few chords and created progressions, which was as easy for me as connecting dots. I had a good ear, so once I learned those five basic open chords, I listened closely to my records and tried to play along. I turned to Ray, who was already a damned good violinist.
‘Yeah, that’s just E, A, and B on guitar,’ he confirmed.
‘Okay, let’s do that,’ I said, and in no time, we were jamming together. To me, E, A, and B are still the most important chords in the world. The key was to interpret them in your own way—to inject your own emotions and experiences into them and own them. Everyone who joined a band did that, and the good ones could use the same chord as everyone else—sometimes in the same basic patterns—and turn them into completely different songs that reflected their personality and aesthetic. That was the start of the British rock movement.
I always loved music, but that’s not the only thing that made me want to be a pop star. Life in Portsmouth was predictable. It was boring. I thought being in a popular band would be different and exciting. At that point, it wasn’t what everyone else wanted to do. Maybe in America kids were living in awe of Elvis Presley and idolized this wave of early rock’n’roll, which was obviously stolen from the black blues. Elvis, Bill Haley & The Comets, The Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens . . . none of that moved me. It sounded like white bread compared to the stuff on Chess Records. It was anemic and boring, and it didn’t catch on in the UK the way it did in America.
Then everything changed. On October 5, 1962, Parlophone released The Beatles’ first single, ‘Love Me Do.’ Two days later, UK radio started playing the song for the first time, and my life was never the same; it went from black-and-white to full color. That rumbling guitar rhythm was the passenger seat for the glorious vocals. The bass and drums anchored the sound, and it took us several listens to realize that soulful howl was a harmonica. Everything fit. The pieces connected. I was fifteen, and I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I continued to be at or near the top of the class, but when I got home I was no longer interested in playing sports or even bunking off from school. I wanted to write music and get it played on the radio—like The Beatles. Ray was the perfect partner, a musical genius. He was fourteen, and he was being coached by a special tutor to join the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.
‘Hey Ray,’ I said to him one day after school. ‘I’m putting a group together. You gotta join.’
Part of the reason I wanted him in the band was because he was my brother and we were tight. I also knew he was a great musician, and he’d be able to help write great songs and play them with unmatched skill. At first, my parents were upset that Ray wanted to be a pop musician instead of a classical violinist, but they liked the idea that we were in it together and they supported us unconditionally.
Ray helped me put together chord patterns that provided a musical bed for his melodies. Then he bought a bass for ten pounds at a pawn shop and mastered rhythmic counterpoint immediately, and we were able to work on songs in a more conventional format. It was a clunky old thing made by the English company Grimshaw, but it did the trick until we could upgrade our gear. Ray could have been a great and probably well-respected violinist, but he saw more upside in playing with a rock band, and he brought his musical training with him. We immediately had a leg up on our contemporaries. Ray could play two instruments well, and, unlike a lot of signed artists, he could read and compose music. Our initial batch of songs was hardly radio-ready, but I’m sure Robert Browning’s first poems weren’t earth-shattering either.
My parents knew that Ray and I were bright and could have gone in any number of directions, but unlike many kids from enlightened Jewish families, we weren’t pushed in a certain vocational direction. My mom always worried about my dad’s late-night activities and was anxious about whether we’d have enough money to put food on the table or buy presents for Chanukkah. She was a worrier, I guess. That was part of her genetics, some of which I inherited. I’m sure she would have been more at ease knowing that I was a doctor and Ray was, say, a lawyer, and we’d be able to make good money in stable job fields. But she saw how much we loved music, and—even after my father’s chosen path led to his early death—she wasn’t going to dissuade us and destroy our dreams, as Dad had done with Evelyn. It wouldn’t have helped, anyway. Ray and I were determined to take after our father (only without the hedonistic indulgences), and we were well aware of the insecurity that could come from that line of work. We also saw how exciting and creatively rewarding it could be.