Hanging Tough
AT EAST LONDON’S VILLAGE UNDERGROUND on a rainy night in late 2014, Michael Chapman – self-styled “old white blues guy from Yorkshire” – is opening for the Ben Watt Trio. In the course of a sparkling half-hour set this craggy 73-year-old’s guitar-playing somehow calls to mind the fabled intricacy of Pentangle heavy-hitters John Renbourn and Bert Jansch, the muscular authority of Jimmy Page and the maverick edge of Roy Harper, without once compromising its own indisputably Chapman-esque character. Bernard Butler (one of the Trio) watches rapt but a little pale from the back of the room. “Good luck following that” observes one sardonic punter. “You’re not kidding,” Butler replies, before describing an intimidating dressing room exchange, wherein Chapman had dashed off a dazzling piece of improvised virtuosity and then handed young Bernard the guitar as if to say “now you have a go”. Putting the fear of God into headlining acts isn’t new to Michael Chapman. He was doing it to Emerson, Lake & Palmer in the early ’70s. Even that hefty 40-year stride back into the past gets us nowhere near the start of a story which – from late-’50s beginnings in the skiffle and trad jazz scenes; through the folk and blues booms of the ’60s; to giving a pre-Spiders From Mars Mick Ronson (then Hull’s most eligible council gardener) his big break playing on Chapman’s sec- ond studio LP, Fully Qualified Survivor, John Peel’s favourite album of 1970; to Chapman’s recent ascension to John Fahey’s throne as the Godfather of experimental rock guitar – would be hard to match in terms of artistic range and creative resilience against the odds. Thurston Moore insists that Sonic Youth “would not have existed” without the exploratory Big Apple street-sounds-channelling coda of New York Ladies, on Chapman’s stunning 1973 album Millstone Grit. Such recent impassioned alt-celeb advocacy has combined with the Light In The Attic’s label’s meticulous vinyl reissues of four superb but long-undervalued frazzled troubadour albums made for Harvest between 1969 and 1972, and Tompkins Square’s sublime 40-year span of guitar instrumentals, Trainsong, to bring Chapman’s music a new, admiring audience. Meeting Chapman for the first time, on a stormy night in the rugged but welcoming Northumbrian farmhouse he and his partner Andru have rented since 1972, his reputation for plain-speaking proves well-founded. As a splendid fire roars in the grate, he makes the following series of inflammatory statements, their subjects’ identity redacted for legal reasons: “I’ve gone off him a bit since four people told me he wouldn’t let Bert on the tourbus”; “They called the cops on her in the end – she can be a bit of a handful when she’s had a drink”; and, my personal favourite, “He was sending 16-year-old girls out to score dope for him in a communist dictatorship. If they’d got
Knocking down walls: Michael Chapman at his rented Northumbrian farmhouse, March 9, 1977.
caught they would have been executed and he didn’t give a shit.” Then Andru calls us through from the front room (decor features: a collection of cowboy boots, some rare ’60s blues festival posters rescued from a German promoter’s bin, a plethora of framed photographs of Andru in various degrees of nakedness) to the kitchen to enjoy the delicious vegetarian meal she has whipped up from her Ottolenghi cookbook. Dinner dispatched, the on-the-record section of the evening begins with Chapman’s traditional explanation of Leeds’ status as “a jazz town” – “because Leeds was, and is, a police state, the boys in blue wouldn’t allow rock’n’roll to be played in the same building as Tetley’s bitter was sold.” Although this fond slur will not be news to any close reader of the Fully Qualified Survivor reissue sleevenotes, Chapman’s recall of the two 1958 epiphanies which would shape his professional career is so vivid that it feels like they took place yesterday, rather than 60 years ago. Sitting in a newsreel cinema near Leeds train station, watching the Jazz On A Summer’s Day footage of The Jimmy Giuffre Trio playing The Train And The River at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, he remembers “The reflections on the water, and then that beautiful music… it changed my life completely,” while Chapman’s account of Muddy Waters’ appearance at the 1958 Leeds jazz festival is a musical education in itself. “First up,” he remembers, in a gruff but kindly Yorkshire burr, “was this very polite 18-piece Anglo-American jazz band, who were basically a waste of space. But when they went home, so did most of the audience. Then this little black guy – who we later realised was Otis Spann – came out. His blue suit looked like it was lit by electricity, and he gathered up all the microphones and dumped them in the grand piano. Then this other, larger black guy, who of course was Muddy Waters, appeared – same colour suit – pushing out what looked to me like a wardrobe. He brought on another, and another, and another, until there were four white Fender Showman amps on the stage. When Muddy Waters came back on and plugged in his white-on-white Fender Telecaster, it wasn’t just loud, it was the loudest thing ever heard in Leeds. He was playing at Chicago blues club levels to an English jazz festival! I remember thinking Christ, that’s loud… then he turned it up.Iwas rooted to the spot. The jazz audience –
all these people who thought they were intellectuals – fled in horror, but they should’ve stayed, because it was perfect.” After paying his way through Leeds art college with his guitar – in skiffle bands, Soho strip clubs or as “the only white guitarist in the jazz clubs of Chapeltown” – Chapman forsook live music for a few years to teach photography at Bolton art college. But summer 1966 found him resurfacing as a stalwart of a then-thriving Cornish folk scene alongside Wizz Jones and Ralph McTell. Live At Folk Cottage, Cornwall 1967 – a double LP set released for the first time in 2014 – captures Chapman just a few months into this new incarnation, playing with now familiar dynamism and aplomb but singing in a barely recognisable mid-Atlantic accent. How he evolved from this respectful blues and folk performer to the downbeat visionary of 1969’s debut LP proper Rainmaker in a little less than 18 months is still something of a mystery. Perhaps the arguments about jazz he had with Philip Larkin while living in Hull – Andru had got into the art school there – had something to do with it. “He thought Sidney Bechet was the death of God,” Chapman remembers, “so me raving about Charlie Parker was never going to go down too well.” Or maybe it was the time Jimi Hendrix dropped by all-night Soho folk haunt Les Cousins and played three songs on Chapman’s Martin D-18 guitar while the Yorkshireman was eating a sandwich in the car outside. Either way, initially signed by EMI’s “deranged hippy” offshoot Harvest to be their “Davy Graham guitar guy”, Chapman persuaded producer Gus Dudgeon to let him go his own way. Anyone hearing Light In The Attic’s reissues for the first time who thinks Jim O’Rourke was the first to combine classic rock song structures, world-weary vocals, rich orchestration, American Primitive-tinged guitar instrumentals and avant-garde noise interludes is in for a shock. If Jansch, Renbourn and Harper were the Three Musketeers of British guitar, Chapman was – and still is – the D’Artagnan; able to mix it with the others, but just as likely to go his own way. Yet it’s to the still more mercurial Davy Graham that Chapman feels the greatest debt is owed. “Davy was the first,” he says. “If he hadn’t done what he did, there’s no way of knowing if that whole huge acoustic scene would have come out of the woodwork.” As to why Graham never quite capitalised on his pre-eminent status, Chapman says, “I played with him a couple of times, but you never quite felt like you’d actually met Davy, ’cos in a way he wasn’t really there. He went to Morocco and came back with all these great ideas, but something which happened out there bent his brain, and it never quite came back the same way.” Chapman, by contrast, seems to have come through his own mind-bending journeys more or less unscathed, although the Washington date of his first American tour in August 1971, on a bill with hard-bop saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, still sounds pretty hairy. “Capitol Records didn’t know what to do with me,” explains Chapman, “and it was around the time Miles Davis was playing at the Fillmore with the Grateful Dead… kind of made sense.” Chapman found himself opening the show to a volatile crowd on the night news broke of George Jackson’s death at the hands of a San Quentin prison guard. Bass-player Rick Parry having prudently done a runner, Chapman played the gig solo to an audience whose eagerness to see a white guy playing an acoustic guitar would’ve been hard to under-estimate. “I remember every second of it,” he says, his relief at surviving still palpable. “Especially being backstage when Nancy Wilson – who was a gorgeous Las Vegas jazz singer – turned up: she was wearing battle-dress from head to toe, but it was Pierre Cardin… One of the proudest moments of my career was after the gig when Cannon said to me, ‘Michael, you ain’t chicken.’ I might not’ve been chicken, but I was certainly scared shitless.” Chapman’s preference for “jazzers” over “folkies” is a topic to which he often returns.“The folk process is theft,” he observes, with a roguish twinkle, “but the jazz process is… ingenuity.” It strikes me that his remarkable Indian summer of the last decade and a half or so has been partly sustained by an ability to treat his own repertoire with the creative irreverence of the great jazz players (check out the way Chapman’s version of Tom Rush’s instrumental corker Rockport Sunday has evolved into Stockport Monday on 2015’s Fish LP). “Exactly,” he exclaims. “How many different ways did Miles play My Funny Valentine? Obviously I’m never going to be Miles Davis, but why shouldn’t I approach my own music in the same spirit as the people I most admire?” Maybe rock’n’rollers are supposed to die before they get old, but Yorkshire jazzmen are in it for the long haul. By the time I’ve persuaded him to play me a few tracks from some of the “four and a half ” new albums he’s recorded in the past year (including a split release with Hiss Golden Messenger, an album of collaborations with Israeli rock star Ehud Banai, a jazz quartet, and an LP of instrumental guitar homages to heroes and friends including Jim Hall, Glenn Jones and Jack Rose), Michael Chapman’s grateful contention that he is currently playing “better than ever” is hard to refute. “We are not athletes,” he grins, pouring himself another glass of red wine, “we don’t burn out at 30.”