CHAPTER 17

 

 

#84: LONNIE DONEGAN AND HIS SKIFFLE GROUP

"Gamblin' Man"

From the 78 rpm disc "Gamblin' Man/Puttin' On The Style"

Released: August 1957

 

 

The man is at the end of his tether. He has gambled everywhere he's been, which is pretty much everywhere. But he's run out of luck. Maybe he tried gaming the saloons and was lucky to escape with his limbs and life intact when caught out.

 

But then he meets this woman in Washington and she wants in, even though she, and more vocally her mother, know exactly what type of man he is. She doesn't care. She's attracted to the transient glamour. Farmers spend too much time in the rain, never wear a gold watch and chain. Train drivers? They always lie. The gambler's mien may be bullshit, but she appreciates and is attracted by it; see Jeanne Moreau and Claude Mann in the film La baie des anges. It is an adventure and, whatever becomes of her and her gambler, will never, ever be boring, which is what life should be constructed to avoid.

 

The singer begins his song rubato, patiently outlining his own impending doom, mourning his messed-up self. But there's a light at the end of this tunnel and it isn't the Rock Island Line train coming to mow him down. His voice moves from austere to enthused, the fast tempo comes into view, life is being restored to him with those expectant finger snaps and the excited, Christmas morning whisper of "many more weeks than three."

 

The song picks up like the most efficiently insolent of express trains. One by one the cancellation options present themselves only to be briskly ironed out of existence by the music's growing stampede - the accelerating snare drum, backing vocals that side of androgyny. The song's pace just keeps on gathering until the ecstasy of tongues transmutates into ejaculatory babble "HEY JIMMY!" roars the Glaswegian barely buried beneath the singer's smart suit and Cockney tones, and lead guitar, bass and drums form a battering ram ("HOW-A-BOUT-THAAAAAT?").

 

The piledriving increases until practically all that is left is practised incoherence. This song is erupting beyond the boundaries of politesse. There are no barriers left; the two of them have broken them all down. Little is now readily comprehensible in the song, with everyone rushing to batter down that wall of restraint and reason, other than a suddenly clear "STRAIGHT IN EVERY NERVE," as straight down the middle as Bing Crosby's golfing technique.

 

They have gotten away with it, these two, and are gloriously happy. The climactic "MA-AA-AA-AA-AN" gives birth to the future, and the musicians joyfully collide with this dimension before collapsing and reassembling in others. They will gamble, and therefore live, forever, and the audience you didn't hear before are firmly behind them. They cannot, and will not, die. They have won.

 

In childhood I didn't know Lonnie Donegan as anything other than a comedic light entertainer who came on peaktime or children's television to sing comic songs about dustmen and chewing gum. It wasn't until later that I realised what skiffle had been, and how immense an irruption into the achingly chuckling world of Alma Cogan and Dickie Valentine it proved. In 1957 his music must have felt like it was detonating the residue of war memorial clinging.

 

"Gamblin' Man" was a modified arrangement of a folk song by Woody Guthrie and was half of a double-sided disc recorded live at the London Palladium - at the heart of the fortress of reaction. The other side was a vaudevillian ditty called "Puttin' On The Style" which made affectionate fun of Kids These Days and perhaps outlined the path Donegan would eventually take. In fairness it probably got the bulk of radio airplay. But anyone who bought it would be faced with the Rosicrucian apocalypse of "Gamblin' Man" on the other side.

 

Although the record carries production credits for Alan A Freeman (an Australian producer, not to be confused with the Australian disc jockey Alan "Fluff" Freeman) and Michael Barclay, the real recording work was done by a rabid young engineer, sitting in the audience, crouching down over his equipment and watching dazed as the volume pointers stayed firmly in the red. So the sound is alternately focused and fuzzed. The young engineer's name was Joe Meek, someone who was already always there when something different needed doing.

 

And this record, this performance, was definitively and defyingly different. That final "MA-AA-AA-AA-AN," bleated like a newly-born lamb by a Glaswegian man who in hindsight looks like the father of Billy Bragg, gives birth to the voice of John Lydon, to the end of reserve. The lead guitarist was Jimmy Currie. The breathless backing vocals were by household middle-of-the-middle-of-the-road duo Miki and Griff. The whole experience is as if Donegan had decided to yell "I DOUBLE DARE YOU MOTHERFUCKING BRITAIN TO POP!" Pop as in, to protect other people, as well as to burst, or shine.