THE HERMIT TREMBLES: PETER NOONE LOOKS BACK

THE HERMIT TREMBLES: PETER NOONE LOOKS BACK

FEATURES

by

John Mendelssohn

On a warm, smoggy Saturday morning on the verge of September, this journal’s man on the West Coast called on Peter Noone, who, from farther than an arm’s length away, appears not to have aged two weeks in the decade and a half since he led Herman’s Hermits to the very apogee of adolescent acclaim.

Now the frontman of an Epic recording group called the Tremblers, the blithe and affable little Englishman had this to say for himself:

Herman’s Hermits weren’t one of those bands that got signed because there was a British Invasion. We’d been going around England in a van for three years before that, and everybody wanted us, all these record company guys with white shoes and golf clubs in their cars. “We don’t want him," I’d say. “Why not?” the others would say. “That’s Dick Rowe, the biggest man at Decca.” “I don’t like him,” id say. “He plays golf.” When I was a kid, we lived opposite a golf course, and the people we saw on it were alien to us. We lived in a council house—a project. If you wanted gas, you had to put a shilling in the meter. They didn’t trust you to pay for it once you’d used it. That’s why I chose Mickie Most as our producer. I’d seen him on a show with the Everly Bros, and the Rolling Stones. “I’ll bet he doesn’t play golf,” I said to myself. “I’ll bet he doesn’t even want to

16 magazine created this image of us as nice boys, but we were as bad as the worst of them, especially after Bobby Vee introduced us to the cherry bomb on our first American tour. If you were kids, like we were, and Ed Sullivan had just said on TV that he liked you, you could get away with mprder. I can’t remember any miserable pans. I never allowed myself to be trapped in hotel rooms—I never fell for that one. If the hotels were surrounded, I’d just wait until 1:00 to go out. Most 13-year-old girls can’t stay out that late. Sure, sometimes so many girls would climb up on the top of our limos that it would look like the roof would cave in, but that was all part of the game. If we’d been selling insurance instead,'maybe people would have slammed doors in our faces. Do you see what I mean?

Most guys kept score of how many girls they’d had, but I didn’t, ’cause I was looking for Miss Right. It wasn’t until I was about 20 that I realized groupies weren’t really in love with me. I phoned up this girlfriend of mine in New York, and she had Jimi Hendrix over. That’s when it dawned on me.

"I didn't want to be stuck in Las Vegas playing our 20 greatest hits every night for 13 weeks. —Peter Noone"

It was funny how they made us out to be part of the British Invasion even though when we first came over we played only American music. My ear was tuned to the American Forces Network, and we never played any British songs at all, not even the ones the Beatles had written.

I’d been an audio freak as a kid—all I’d wanted were tapes and bits of wire. Once I was trying out this method of recording direct onto my Telefunken from the ' television speaker when this play called The Lads, with Tom Courtenay, came on. In the background they kept playing this song called “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter.” I used to listen to that tape and think, “Boy, that’s a real fun song.” I was into 20’s and 30’s English music hall songs because of the sexual innuendo, and I thought it must be one of those old numbers. We learned it for non-rock ’n’ roll gigs like weddings and bar mitzvahs. Older people wpuld hear it and uncover their ears and say, "Oh, great—thate’s a song we can deal with.”

We stuck it on an album when we found ourselves one song short. “Don’t worry,” Mickie Most says. “We’ll hide it on side two, track three or something.” But when the album comes out in America, all these disc jockeys start playing it. I’m saying “No! No! You 11 ruin our image!” We wouldn’t let MGM release it until after the album had sold a million units, which was just unheard-of in those days. “If you release it,” they said, “it’s a guaranteed Number One.” They really knew the way to a 16year-old boy’s heart, they did.

The next thing I know, all these people are calling from America, saying, “You got any more of dem Mrs. Browns?” That’s what killed us in the end. There was no way we could grow from that, and when flower power and San Francisco and Jimi Hendrix came along, they just destroyed us. It was preconceived that we would wind up in Las Vegas. “Look at the demographics of these kids! At the Ohio State Fair, they played to 100,000 people between the ages of 9 and 64!” The other guys in the band were more than willing to give up the fight. It is a fight to stay in the rock ’n’ roll business, even though it’s easy to stay in the music business. But I didn’t want to be stuck in Las Vegas playing our 20 greatest hits every night for 13 weeks. I wanted to go on tour. I always wanted to so something new, to be Mr. Hip.

Two of them still have a group called Herman’s Hermits that plays bars on Long Island. They’ve got people with beards in the band to hide the fact that there’s no Herman left. We became distant after that. I’d hoped they’d be in other bands. It would have been good for me if one of them could have joined Genesis or something, ’cause that would have proved that they were good.

I left the band on December 31, 1969. MGM had gotten an injunction against us that prevented our making records for anybody else. I felt that we’d done them a big favor. We’d come along with the Animals at a time when all they had was Connie Francis. We’d sold a lot of records, and a lot of people had their jobs because of us, but they’d begun to schnide us around.

After that, I’d go see these groups that were just starting up and tell them “You’re so lucky to be in a band that didn’t sell 50 million records in the 60’s.” They thought I was really weird. “This guy must be doing a lot of drugs now or something,” they’d say to one another. Do you know what I mean?

I made a single of David Bowie’s “Oh, You Pretty Things,” and it was a smash. When I did it on Top Of The Pops, Bowie was on piano, one of Mott the Hoople on guitar, and one of Hot Chocolate on bass. They still show that spot on English television as one of the classic moments in rock ’n’ roll. Then I made another single with Bowie called “Right On, Mother.” When the BBC banned it, I got real pissed off at England.

At the time, I was still on this real middle-of-the-road television series called The Mike Yarwood Show. It was supposed to last 13 weeks, but it lasted three years, and all during that time I was becoming more and more Mr. Show Business—you know, “A funny thing happened to me on the way to the show tonight.” I’d wanted to be Gene Vincent, but I seemed to be winding up as Wayne Newton.

See, I’d been the typical working-class boy who’d made it big, and I figured if I wanted to hold on to all that, like my three gardeners, I had to keep doing things like that show and children’s theatre as insurance. But one day I said to my wife, “Let’s go somewhere. Let’s not decide where until the day that somebody buys the house. ” This guy, Mr. Fox comes along and pays me cash for it, and now I have enough money not to be terrified about the possibility of the next check not arriving. I’m down to my clothes, my records, some furniture, a good stereo system, and my paintings.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 19

(I was 15 when I first went on the road, and I met people with different lifestyles, like the British ambassador to Brazil or something, and I learned to appreciate nice things. I figured paintings would always be there—not like gold records, which stop being any good when they get Old. It’s a strange thing—my paintings have made money for me. I must have a Top 40 eye for art or something!)

Anyway, we put everything in this Avis removal van and move down to the South of France, to a great little house with a piano in it. I start to play music again. Before, I’d been a musician who never played music—I listened to it, but never made it, apart from being on stage, when it was “HenryTheVIIIMrs.BrownSomethingGood There’saKindofHush.” We had so many hits, and we couldn’t disappoint anyone by not playing one of them.

People kept turning up in, the South of France offering me deals, but they were always something like, “You remember that ‘Mrs. Brown’ song you did? Well, I’ve got one just like it!” What kept me from going crazy was rediscovering music. I listened to everything—I’d buy 200 albums at a time, even things like King Crimson and Yes. I went back and studied things. I’d phone somebody who’d worked on an old Beatles album and ask them how they got such-and-such a sound. Once again I was pulling wires out of the back of the TV where is says, “Do not touch this, it is dangerous.”

I came over to L.A. to have a look around in August, 1978, and somebody tells me that where you go here now is this little Chinese restaurant, Madame Wong’s.

So I go, arid these two little guys carry their amps and drums on stage, go, “Plinkaplinka... testing: one, two, three,” change, and come back on to do their set . I liked the smell of that. Every time I’d talked to anybody about putting another band together, they’d said, “Forget it, man. You need $200,000, label support, and all this tuffstuff.” But these guys don’t have a label They’re playing through crap gear for 20 people, making maybe 10 bucks for the group, but they’re working.

So I really got into being a band where you carry your own gear on stage and drive your van into the night, just like I dreamed about doing when I was 13. “Wow, we won’t have to go home every night, and we can stay in... hotels!” Here I am. I’ve already done it once, and sold 50 million records. People see this boxful of gold records I have and say, “Nineteen sixty-five? I was in the fifth grade then!”

Irvthe meantime, my business manager is going crazy getting five per cent of nothing. The last time I really made any money was 1973, when we did that British Invasion revival tour. It was only 18 dates, and they paid me a lot of money to do it, but in the end I thought I’d blown my career. I was just like Chubby Checker—he was King of the Twist, and here I was, “Mrs. Brown” and “Henry The VIII” forever.

So I start going around trying to get a deal. These record company guys are taking the meeting ‘cause I’m “Herman” and they remember me from when they were in the fourth grade. I don’t know exactly what I want to do, so I’m asking them, “Well, what do you think?” Which is all wrong. You can’t ever ask people at record companies what they think, or you’re fucked forever, ’cause they know nothing from nothing, especially about music.

Finally I ingratiate myself.into being asked to do a song for the soundtrack of this movie that will probably never come out. I’ve got nothing that fits the sequence where the song’s supposed to be, which is §irls rollerskating in a swimming pool. I decide that even though they’ll probably throw it out, I’ll do an Eddie Cochran sort of thing. I go to the sjudio with an engineer from England I’ve known for 15 years, Roger Harris, and it’s a disaster right from the beginning. Roger says, “Let’s get gome of them fuckin’ Southern rock ’n’ rollers down here—they can play this Eddie Cochran shit.” He calls some of the Heartbreakers, and they come down immediately because I was Herman. They play exactly what I ask them to, but after the third or fourth take I can tell it’s not going to make it even with these guys. So Mike Campbell says, “Why don’t we try it like this?” They take my song, shake it about a bit, and hand it back to me a thousand times better than I thought it could be. Here I am, 32 years old, asking this young rock ’n’ roll guitar player, “Which finger you playing with?”

The session finishes and I’m sitting there with Roger, who does a lot of expensive drugs, saying, “Roger, I’ve...got...to...get ...a...band. How do I do it? I’m asking ’cause I haven’t done it since I was 12, and that was all, “ ’Ere, can you play A minor? You can? Then let’s form a band!”

Now I have a tape that’s representative of me. I take it over to Bruce Johnston’s one night. “Shit,” he says, “who’s that?” I say, “It’s me.” He says, “I never knew you could sing. Hey, you know CBS have offered me my own label.”

“Forget CBS,” I say. “I’ve already spoken to them, and they’re not interested.”.

But he takes the tape to the people who offered him his deal and presents it as being by an L.A. group called the Dominators, and they’re jumping about, wanting to sign them.

I’m in trouble, ’cause there are no Dominators. So I go to Stan Lynch [Heartbreakers’ drummer] and ask him to help me. I tell him, “I always meet the wrong people. I go to the Whiskey and wind up talking to some guyTrom Epic who saw me in Wyoming in 1953 or something. Or I go backstage and say, ‘Hello, I’m Peter Noone,’ and the band says, ‘Great! You were in the Monkees, right?’ ”

Stan tells me to get Robert Williams of the Pop to play drums. I get him, ’cause he’s a big guy, like Stan, and I’ve always believed that drummers had to be big guys.

Then I call Greg Inhofer, who I remember from this acid-rock band in Minneapolis that took me out and got me drunk one night when I was Herman. He’d sent me a record in England with a look-I’ve-finally-madethe-Big-Time letter. The record was Blood on the Tracks. “Wow,” I thought, “this guy’s played with Bob Dylan!” I call him up and he packs his pregnant wife in the car and schleps out straight away.

We go through a procession of bass players who want to be Stanley Clarke. “No,” I tell them. “John Entwistle can play that way ’cause it’s only him and Pete Townshend.” They say, “But listen,” and go, “Lubbada-lubbada-lubbada.” Finally we find Randy Rice, who goes, “Lubbadalubbada-lubbada,” when he’s offstage, but plays along with the bass drum when he’s onstage.

Finally we get Geo Conner to play guitar. Every time I’d go to a club, he’d be in a different group—Tonio K’s, Dyan Diamond’s, Jamie Sheriffs—all at the same time.

We go on the Midwestern leg of the Beach Boys tour, 22 dates. The Midwest turns out to include everything from Rochester to Louisville, so we’re driving 13 and a half hours after we come off stage in a rented station wagon and my BMW 320i. It used to be, “Five minutes, Mr. Noone.” Now it’s, “You lot, on stage!” I’m carrying my own little Vox amp out and going, “Plinka-plinka...testing: one, two, three,” just like the little guy at Madame Wong’s, except in front of 12,000 people, in cities where I’d sold more than the Beach Boys!

It’s mostly season-ticket gigs, like the Pine Knob Pavilion, and the first 20 rows are always full of old ladies groaning, "Oh, you’re too loud.”

“You’re too old for rock ’n’ roll,” I shout at them. “Move to the rear! Go buy a hot dog!” The kids love it.

And I’m in a band again!