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One Train Later: A Memoir - Hardcover

Summers, Andy

 
9780312359140: One Train Later: A Memoir
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0312359144 ISBN 13: 9780312359140
Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

In this intimate, revealing work, Andy Summers writes fluidly about his first guitar, his experiences with earlier bands, his relationships and encounters with Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, John Belushi, and The Police, and more.
Less-known is Andy's early musical career in the U.K., where he achieved moderate fame. But after Andy ended up in California, ultimately finding himself out of work and teaching lessons, he returned to England, where serendipitous circumstances found him on a train with Stewart Copeland. The rest was history. This is the moving, gently (and often acidly) funny memoir of a premier guitarist who ultimately found himself at the top of the world.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

ANDY SUMMERS is a Grammy Award winner and an inductee in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Guitar Player Hall of Fame. He has followed his work with the Police with a career that encompasses more than twelve solo albums, soundtracks, and collaborations in addition to concerts and exhibitions of his photography around the world. He lives in California. Visit his Web site at www.andysummers.com.


ANDY SUMMERS is a Grammy Award winner and an inductee in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Guitar Player Hall of Fame. He has followed his work with the Police with a career that encompasses more than twelve solo albums, soundtracks, and collaborations in addition to concerts and exhibitions of his photography around the world. He lives in California.

Aus dem Klappentext

The train jerks to a halt, and as I get out at Oxford Circus, Stewart gets out with me. We look at each other, laugh, and make the standard remark about it being a small world. But this is the brilliant collision, one train later and it might all have turned out differently.
In this extraordinary memoir, world-renowned guitarist Andy Summers provides a revealing and passionate account of a life dedicated to music. From his first guitar at age thirteen and his early days on the English music scene to the ascendancy of his band, the Police, Summers recounts his relationships and encounters with the Big Roll Band, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the Animals, John Belushi, and others, all the while proving himself a master of telling detail and dramatic anecdote.

But, of course, the early work is only part of the story, and Andy s account of his role as guitarist for the Police---a gig that was only confirmed by a chance encounter with drummer Stewart Copeland on a London train---has been long-awaited by music fans worldwide. The heights of fame that the Police achieved have rarely been duplicated, and the band s triumphs were rivaled only by the personal chaos that such success brought about, an insight never lost on Summers in the telling.

Complete with never-before-published photos from Summers s personal collection, One Train Later is a constantly surprising and poignant memoir, and the work of a world-class musician and a first-class writer.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One

I am born at the edge of the River Wyre in Lancashire, where my dad is stationed with the RAF in the north of England. Housing is in short supply and he makes the purchase of a Gypsy caravan. It is a romantic move, but one of necessity. My mother is known as Red; she is pregnant, and works in a bomb factory alongside a gang of northern girls called the Fosgene Follies. One day, in her ninth month, she becomes intoxicated by the fumes leaking from a faulty bomb and, having contractions, is carried back to the field where she lives with my dad. I come into this world a few hours later, and the queen of the Romany vagrants in the next field pays a visit to my mother. She hands over a small piece of silver, six eggs, and a piece of white linen—all traditional gifts intended to bring a propitious future. Sitting on the floor with a pack of tarot cards and a meaningful look on her face, she looks up at the young flame-haired woman leaning back into the pillow with her baby and begins shuffling the cards. But Red, with her attraction to the occult still in place and me dangling from her nipple, struggles up and looks across expectantly.

Red gives up her job as a bomb packer, and as the war comes to an end my parents return to the south of England and the beaches of Bournemouth, with their huge rusting curlicues of barbed wire and lonely skeletal piers. I stand on the promenade, clutching my mother’s hand as my dad explains to me through the biting wind that we have blown up the piers to prevent the Germans from getting onto our shore. My five-year-old brain is filled with hordes of helmeted men racing across the sand with thick stubby guns. Around the town are the ruins of several buildings, destroyed after the Luftwaffe dropped their remaining bombs before heading back over the Channel to Germany. What if one lands on your head? I wonder. Would you blow up?

Near our house on the outskirts of town is a large wooded area by the name of Haddon Hill. Filled with oak, pine, beech, chestnut, and birch that spread for miles, it becomes the arena of my childhood where other boys and I wrestle and fight in the dirt, throw stones at dogs, torture cats, start fires, steal birds’ eggs, and piss on flowers. Sometimes we find old boxes of gas masks and other wartime paraphernalia that have been guiltily dumped among the trees. We instantly put these things on and race off into the elms and oaks, howling at the top of our lungs. At the end of an afternoon with hours of ambush, screaming, and cruelty under our belts, we return home. As the evening stars emerge and the lampposts in the street begin to create their yellowish flare, we trail into our mothers’ kitchens looking like miniature versions of the home guard. With our gas mask tubes bouncing on our puny chests and sensible sweaters, we look upward to ask with a voice muffled by rubber tubing, “Can I have something to eat, Mum?”

The woods fill my imagination, because secretly I am a nature lover, something I don’t betray to the other boys, and I become an expert on secret paths, trees with holes in them, owls’ nests, places where you can find slowworms and adders, the pale blue eggs of the chaffinch.

I scrawl weird signs in the dirt as if they contain hidden meaning, my keys to the whereabouts of a rookery or a dump of used wartime supplies. I spend every minute I can in this place until I feel as if I know every vein on every leaf, the knots in trees, where rolling waves of beetles race from under rotting logs and where the venom-filled adders lie in wait. The thick smell of decomposition pervades my senses like a perfume, and under the low-piled clouds I kick my way through dense leaves, used condoms, tea-colored ferns, and tossed Black Cat cigarette packs, wearing a vivid blue cloak because I am Captain Marvel. I find a fragment of a letter in the ferns, but all I can make out in the rain-smeared writing are the words Mike, it’s been too long. And I become obsessed with a man called Mike. Who is he? Who wrote this letter? Where are they now? What happened? I stand at the local bus shelter with sheets of rain obscuring everything and stare at women in the queue, wondering if one of them is the one who wrote those words.

Between the ages of seven and twelve the overpowering sense of nature makes me feel drunk, and in a future filled with electricity, lights, and loud music, it will linger like a sanctifying echo, a chord I used to know. After my mother switches out the lights I sit in bed with the Dr. Doolittle books and read by holding back the curtain, which lets in the flickering light of the lamppost from the street below. Inspired by his adventures, I begin collecting birds’ eggs, lizard skins, flowers, grasses, and weirdly shaped rocks. I make careful notes about these objects and look them up in my Observer’s books. I fancy myself as Doolittle junior, a son of nature strolling through long grass with a pipe in my mouth. I pore over books about plants and animals and take to making long lists of names, which I give dimension by gluing lizard skin, bird feathers, and dead flowers onto pieces of cardboard until my bedroom becomes a personal museum and acquires a slightly strange smell.

As I pull myself closer and closer to these things both living and dead, the world—in my nascent imagination—becomes alive and vivid. Now, as if for the first time, I see it teeming with natural events, a connection between all things, a web, the underlying soul. Animus mundi.

A tragic moment occurs at the age of nine, when discarding Marvel’s blue cape, I move into a Lash LaRue phase. Lash is a popular Western hero and features in a popular comic I read from cover to cover every week. In every story he escapes dire situations through his incredible ability with a bullwhip or his lash—hence the moniker. An inspiring figure, Lash dresses in black from head to toe, with a black eye mask and a broad stiff-rimmed black hat. With his whip and mask, he is the perfect embodiment of some kind of homoerotic fantasy that I am too young to comprehend.

Close to our house there is an apple orchard that contains a working beehive. Clothed in anything black I can find, and with my whip in hand, I decide one afternoon to see if I can emulate my hero by snaring the hive and pulling it to the ground. I creep through the long sun-dappled grass to spy on my target. Hiding behind a tree full of Granny Smiths, I calculate carefully. And then, raising the whip over my head like a king cobra, I strike and yell in triumph as the whip coils itself into a tight circle around the buzzing cone. I give it a strong tug and it crashes down, releasing about fifty million venomous and pissed-off bees that rise like a thick black cloud. I drop the whip and run like a man on fire, but they are faster and I am stung, pierced, and penetrated in every available piece of exposed flesh and through my lash outfit until I reach home, sobbing and panting with a face like a swollen river. “Mum!” I scream. “I’ve been stung! I’ve been stung!”

Stuck at home, the only diversions being reading or listening to the radio, I become a fan of a show that thrills me and many of my friends at school. It’s called Journey into Space and has four protagonists: Jet, Lemmy, Mitch, and Doc. It’s a serial that’s on every Tuesday night at eight o’clock. Heralded by the dramatic fanfare of a rocket blasting into space, a masculine voice intones the program title and we pick up from where we left off last week. Usually the heroes are having a problem such as a control malfunction as they attempt to travel to the moon, and we crouch on the floor in front of the coal fire...

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Verlag
Thomas Dunne Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312359144
ISBN 13 
9780312359140
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
354
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Verantwortliche Person
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