New York today is as safe as, if not safer than, most cities to visit but in 1969 it had a reputation for muggings and violence that was second to none. It would be asking for trouble, our agent warned, to run around Central Park in our underpants after midnight, waving fistfuls of $100 bills. Luckily, when the Scaffold arrived at La Guardia airport at 3 p.m. on 4 November it was a bitterly cold day and we sensed, to a man, that we’d have no difficulty keeping our clothes on and avoiding Central Park after dark. We had been booked to play for two weeks at the Bitter End, a folksy venue on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and, checking into the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, I felt like the young gun new in town, and the world was my holster. The macho sensation lasted all of twenty minutes, then I took a shower in room 1208, and roaches the size of castanets appeared out of nowhere and had me hopping about on the tiles like a nude flamenco dancer.
Each night after the gig I would lie in bed listening to the gurgle of the pipes and the ghostly tip-tapping of an old typewriter from somewhere down the corridor. Was it Dylan Thomas dying for a whiskey, starting a new poem he would never complete? Jack Kerouac up to his waist in a stream of consciousness? Tennessee Williams? Arthur Miller? They had all stayed here at some time, perhaps in this very room. Come to think of it, it was probably Archy, the cockroach with the soul of a poet, lower-casing eternal love letters to Mehitabel, his beloved alley cat.
Tom Rush was the headlining act with his nifty guitar playing and warm expressive voice, and although he didn’t invite us to accompany him on a tour of the States, he was a pleasant guy to get along with. If most of the audience came to see him, quite a number turned out to see us as well. Mainly to gawk at Paul McCartney’s brother in the flesh and try to make sense of what we were saying. If there was ever a case of culture divided by language this was it. Naïvely we had assumed that as long as we avoided the usual gaffes: pavement/sidewalk, suspenders/braces, rubber/eraser, the rhythms and images we conjured up on stage would be as accessible as they had been to the hen parties at the Stockton Fiesta and the sophisticates at Ronnie Scott’s. Wrong. The young crowd sipping sodas wished us well but were immune to puns and irony. Jokes came apart at the seams, punchlines dropped to their knees, poems curled up in embarrassment. But not every night, for we had our fans, and there is no one in the world who is quite as fanatical as an American fan. One lad from Hawaii who visited backstage could recite all the words of a Scaffold LP, Live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which meant not only knowing the poems off by heart but the sketches as well, which he reeled off parrot-fashion impersonating our voices. Clever, uncanny and decidedly spooky though this talent was, I did make a note of his telephone number in case we became too famous to appear in public, when he could be hired to tour as a one-man Scaffold.
After the show on the second night, three stunning girls came into the dressing room while we were ironing our puns and thought us so cute that: ‘Hey guys, why not let us show you around our beautiful city?’
We couldn’t believe our luck: ‘That would be great, thank you. We take it you enjoyed the show, then?’
‘We ain’t seen it yet, but when we heard that one of the Beatles’ brother’s group was in town, we just had to come and say hello.’
As good as their word, they collected us from the Chelsea next morning to offer our first bite at the Big Apple. The Empire State? The Lincoln Center? The Staten Island Ferry? Which would it be first? Our first stop was a dinky dress shop two doors down from the hotel, which John, Mike and I agreed was lovely. After lunch at the Love and Quiches, we were strolling through Washington Square on our way to a really trendy clothes store the girls insisted we’d go crazy for, when we paused to admire an exhibition of what we took to be pavement art. Life-size silhouettes of figures in various poses outlined in white paint. Six in all, arranged round the fountain as if they had fallen to earth from outer space. The girls must have thought that we’d fallen from outer space too when they explained that there was no artist involved, just a scene-of-crime officer doing his job after a brutal shooting the previous night. It was some relief to be hurried along to a clothes store two blocks away, where we admired the tops and skirts that the girls tried on.
‘Do you guys like fur coats? Wait until we see the stuff they’re selling right across the street from here.’
This was fun certainly, but any chance possibly of a landmark? A photo, perhaps, of the Scaffs standing in front of something recognisably Manhattanish?
‘Photographs? Of course, there’s a swell boutique on 42nd Street. Let’s take a cab.’
While John and I discussed the pros and cons of marrying leggy black chicks and settling down in the Village, and Mike took photographs of them modelling for us, their conversation took a decidedly pointed turn: ‘The Small Faces bought you a terrific dress here, didn’t they, honey?’
‘They sure did. And remember the fabulous coat Mick Jagger bought Dinah?’
‘Those English groups, my, they’re so so generous.’
Now that the penny had finally dropped, we had to come clean: ‘Sorry girls, we’re not really a group and we’re not really English, we’re Scousers.’
In the face of such heart-warming honesty, the girls laughed gaily and confessed that it was our company they sought, not our money, so we all went back to the Chelsea and had a six-up in room 1208.
Except, of course, that we didn’t.
In the face of such heart-warming honesty, the girls told us to piss off and long-legged it up 42nd Street.
It was in the Coffé Café on 42nd Street a few days later that I scribbled the following on the back of the bill. It’s a cut-up of items on the menu with a little local colour thrown in:
orange-juice scrambled
over easy followed by
New Jersey bred
duck-flavoured bacon
with a choice of either
coffee or unlimited abuse
Mike, always indecisive and unhurried when faced with a menu, would bring out the beast in waiters, and in particular those who served behind counters in busy cafeterias. ‘Excuse me, what’s mayo?’
‘Whadderya mean, what’s mayo?’
‘I mean, what is it?’
‘It’s fuckin mayo, dat’s what it is.’
‘Oh, then what’s the difference between pastrami and corned beef?’
‘Look, you wanna order, or you don’ wanna order. If you don’ wanna order, fuck off.’
‘There’s no need to get stroppy, young lady.’
Frinck and Summer with Monika had been published in the USA by Ballantine two years earlier, but I was so embarrassed by the cover and the blurb (‘McGough is cool, tender, angry, funny – the most exciting writer/performer since John Lennon’) that I kept quiet about it, but I had hoped that when we performed our material on nationwide television the country might take us to its heart. This was not to be, however, for although we guested with Diana Rigg and did a sketch or two on The David Frost Show while in New York, when we flew out to Cincinnati and Philadelphia to appear on networked afternoon chat shows, producers were interested only in Mike’s opinion of the ‘Paul is Dead’ rumour circulating at the time.
‘But you must admit, Mike, that Paul not wearing shoes on the cover of Abbey Road could mean that he’s dead?’
‘Rubbish, I spoke to him on the phone only this morning.’
‘Are you sure it was him, not the spirit of your dead brother?’
‘Bollocks!’
‘There’s no need to get stroppy, young man.’
We had an early-morning flight back to Manchester, and John and I were in the lounge of the Chelsea waiting for Mike as usual. If the train departed at 11.05, he would plan to arrive at the station at 11.04, and the same with planes. We had given up explaining about traffic hold-ups and queues at check-in; he always assumed they would hold up the plane/train for him (and dammit, if they didn’t on occasion). Eventually John and I went outside and hailed a yellow cab, put all the cases into the trunk and climbed in to await his nibs. We didn’t hear or see anything because the lid was up, but the driver must have felt a shift of weight at the back and with a yell jumped out of the cab. We did likewise in time to see a guy running up a deserted West 23rd Street with a case in each hand. We all gave chase until the trunk raider, torn for an instant between greed and common sense, dropped the swag and disappeared into the morning mist. As we retrieved the cases, both Mike’s as it turned out, he emerged from the hotel, not a hair out of place, python-skin coat draped over his shoulders, looking every inch the cultural ambassador for the Wirral he was destined to become: ‘Hurry up, lads, and get those cases in, we’ve got a plane to catch.’