Transcript: Eddie Huggins

Content warning. Some of the language used is from the 1960s and may cause offense. Also mentions of drugs, drinking alcohol and white people's view of 1960s Black music.

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[00:00] Well, I'm Eddie Huggins, aged nearly 85. I was in my early 20s playing essentially jazz, but also rhythm and blues music. I was one of the very, very few keyboard players that could play the piano, organ, and very early versions of the electric piano. They weren't synthesizers as we know them today then. I'd been classically trained. I'd been studying at art school, I’d graduated, I was working as an illustrator designer during the day, and a semi-professional musician at night and weekends on the scene in, essentially, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. 

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[00:36] Well, I was classically trained, and I started out playing the trumpet in jazz bands and in my father's dance band, because I tried very hard to play the trumpet, and I was reasonably good, but everyone told me, “Eddie, you play the piano so much better than trumpet”. So I began to fall back on playing the trumpet… errr…the piano. And I was interested in jazz, which was… there were very few jazz piano players, modern jazz, piano players in East Anglia at the time, and I actually developed quite quickly.

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[01:06] But the jazz music scene was very limited, very limited in the early 60s, and there was little or no money in it. So it was much more easy for me to commercialise myself and play, arguably, pop music, but I didn't really like that, because it was the music that white people played, and it was rather trite. And I was… being a jazz musician, of course, I loved the music of the Black singers, the rhythm and blues, the soul, and so it was much more easy for me to gravitate towards playing that kind of music. And I knew all the songs and covers from James Brown and Bobby Bland, who were big in those days, particularly James Brown.

[01:47] I don't know. Word got out about me and somehow landed in the US bases where I got sought out. What I never did ever understand, Elma [name of the person interviewing Eddie], is why didn't the guys that I worked with from the bases find their own musicians from the cohort of predominantly, well, white and Black airmen that were on the base. But somehow, I don't know what it was, they couldn't seem to find musicians within their own ranks. They looked outside and sat... I mean, there's a network - people knew about me because of… I was on to something. There wasn't any internet like that but word spreads and they say, “Hey, do you know Eddie Huggins? He plays this kind of music. Why don’t you call him?” You know? So they sought me out, and that's how it got started. 

[02:36] They [white bands] weren't really white soul that's a… almost oxymoron. They were white, and they did sing some covers of rock and roll music, like Little Red Rooster and the early… the early Rolling Stones stuff. But I never, I never… I just thought it was a pastiche. I wanted to do the real thing. So when I got guys call me and we met up and hung out, particularly at the famous Cellar Club in Norwich, which was a hotbed of airmen coming over and playing in the evenings, including jazz players as well, like and so yeah. So once I got the call, I was in there - Bentwaters, Alconbury and Lakenheath. Yes, because they were… Yeah, because look at the location, Suffolk, on the Cambridgeshire border, Norfolk. There were other, of course, there were other RAF… RAF bases as well that were operational, but it was primarily Alconbury, which is the furthest out, Mildenhall and Lakenheath, which were the nearest. Yeah.

[03:46] Yeah, yeah. I played King’s Lynn - all around those areas. The King’s Lynn gigs where I did the gig with P. J. Proby, where his pants bust. That's legend. Now, P. J. Proby is still singing, a white singer, but he did a concert there and we were in the backing band. Yeah, I played all around those places, as far as South as Ipswich and into East Midlands sometimes.

[04:09] We'd go where the gigs were, you know, but there were some gigs on the bases as well, you see? Of course, sound systems those days weren't like they are today. I mean, a 50 watt amplifier was really big! Today it's hundreds of watts. I mean, my… my electric piano only had a 50 watt amplifier, and the Hammond organ I played had what they call a big Leslie speaker, which is a speaker and a rotary cabinet, and that was about 50 watts too. But of course, it sounded loud and it was big echoey hangers. It was pretty good, oh yeah. And it was very well popular. I mean, the place was full, and some of the gigs were mixed audiences. Some of them were just Black.

[04:50] And, of course, there was always food. Well, there was whiskey, primary, Jack Daniels, bourbon, beers, of course. The food, oh, you know, red beans and rice, fried chicken, kidney stew, wow! And, of course, to… to us, me, it was… it was all part of it, you know? And a lot of it revolved around food, you know, we would hang out, eat, drink, play, come back, hang out, eat, drink, play. And the food was the kind of catalyst for us sitting around together and… and just chilling, you know? Oh yeah. Lovely food, totally different to the kind of traditional food one would eat in the 1960s in Norfolk and Suffolk. 

[05:29] And it all formed, it all formed part of the vibe, you know? And that's when you'd hang out and talk. And the talk never strayed into politics or segregation or the USAF, really. It talked about mainly music and musicians. I think on one of the gigs I did, Wilson Pickett was there or… and his backing band, and they weren't playing. They were just hanging out with friends who were in the military. But you see, he was hanging he was… he was gigging in the area, doing a concert tour, and he knew people on the base, and they invited him up, not necessarily to play because his agent hadn't booked him to play, you know, but he was just hanging out, and because I knew he was there and his band was there, but to me, he was just another musician. I didn't see him… I didn't treat him with awe because he got bigger later in the mid 60s, late 60s, of course, but at the time, he was just another guy I was hanging out with, and I didn't have any sense of wow, you know, he was… It was so… everyone’s so easy and relaxed. There was no kind of class pedigree, like, ‘oh, he is, you know, he's the man, you know, wow’, you know? It just he is, he's here, you know?

[06:38]  Part of my sort of growing up, as it were, musically, and I was hungry for anything that could feed my interest in music. And if I happened to be chatting to some guy and he talked about this and that, well, it was all part of it. It was all very informal, by the way. You know, there's nothing formal… nothing formal about it. I played with  Rod Stewart in his very early days when he was a solo artist. A guy called Long John Baldry, who was a blue singer, very tall guy, a white player called Graham Bond, the Graham Bond Organisation, Jack Bruce, these white players, they tour with P. J. Proby, Zoot Money and the Big Roll Band. 

[07:20] They were… they were… these. ..these names come from the early 60s, and many of them faded away by the end of the 60s, assuming they were still alive. But in those days, drug addiction, as we know it today, wasn't at all prevalent. I mean, if there were drugs, it was Benzadrine, just to keep you awake to do a long gig. It wasn't necessarily... They were stimulants. It was marijuana, of course, we called it pot, but there was no hard drugs. I never came across heroin or… heroin or cocaine, and of course, the methamphetamines, the synthetic drugs that are used today, they just weren't there. So it's just part and a few pills, and the pills weren't taking… to feed a habit, the pills were actually taking to keep you going.

[08:08] And pills like Benzedrine were very, very commonly found on the bases because, in some cases, they were prescribed to airmen on long duty, or they were commonly available, and they were much easier to get on the base, than you could in the High Street in Norwich. 

[08:22] Well, a lot of the people I saw were white - Rolling Stones. Well, I could go to London a lot, of course. But in East Anglia, when they toured, yes, they'd come. I don't remember any of the big name players, like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones playing on bases, on airforce bases. They were all in concert halls or dance halls, or large village halls or schools where they had a big assembly room, where you'd have a stage and you'd play. I mean, a lot of the gigs I did with Lucas [Bruce Mcpherson] and Milton [Ingram] were on sort of college environments - in the school hall, big school hall, there weren't clubs, as we know them, apart from the Cellar Club and one or two pubs. I mean, there were no things you know, like discotheques or clubs as we know them today. They would… they would… any large venue that had a cinema or the stage, you know? Erm…

[09:14] Years ago, of course, cinemas were big. It would hold 2000 people, and many of the touring bands would play in cinemas. So in Norwich, they'd play at the Region or the Odeon or the ABC, of course all those cinemas have gone now and pulled down or converted into bingo halls. Anywhere where there was a large auditorium and a stage, people would play. Kind of concert… the venues that you have today, like Glastonbury and Latitude and all the big… Stevenage - all those big outdoor venues with stages and huge marquees, none of that existed until we got to the 60s with Jimi Hendrix coming to the Isle of Wight in 67. Again, 67 was before the period I'm talking. I never saw or played with Jimi Hendrix. Though, I'll say that.

[10:00] In the early 60s, people who were focused on rhythm and blues and soul were not the average record buying, pop goer, pop… pop enthusiast. It was a more select, well, select, maybe not the right… and I wouldn't say niche. I'd call it a big niche audience, but not a massive audience who had flocked to the bases, which meant a long drive for some people, and if they were allowed permission on the base and all that stuff, and in the concert halls, they were eclipsed by the big white bands that were coming along, like Rolling Stones, et cetera.

[10:39] And I'm saying that their influence was kind of limited to the way they influenced other musicians, as distinct from influencing communities. As to the wider community, where you may have issues of Black or white, and white was favoured, so the music of James Brown was considered rather salacious. I wouldn't say naughty, but you know Black, it was earthy, it was real, it was sexy. I think, I think I'm saying again to you that the influence they could have had potentially to the wider community, I'm…I…I have to say, didn't radiate out much, only to people who were in the know, acolytes, fans, followers. And it did. It did happen. It did happen. And a lot of the marriages worked out very, very well in… in most cases, the white girls went back to the States with their husbands and lived very

happily.

[11:34] In Ipswich, particularly, to Norwich in the less extent, but in Ipswich there was already existing a very large cohort of Black ex World War Two guys that had moved out of the forces and were living and working bus drivers, you know, in Ipswich. A very large proportion of Black people in, say, 1958-59, were ex World War Two veterans that stayed on. That's why there was probably more Black ex GIs around. They obviously welcomed the arrival of some of the newer, younger, blues musicians coming into the bases and particularly in Mildenhall and that. 

[12:50] So there was.. it’s… there was a… It was known. It was all… Ipswich was always known as having sometimes unfavorably, spoken of, a large cohort of ex World War Two, Black ex GIs that didn't go back to the States, that had either married other Black ladies or white ladies, and that were living and working in Ipswich. Now how much they form part of the Black music community when things started to happen and people like, you know, Geno [Washington] started to play more regularly. I suspect they would have come to the to the gigs, yeah, but they would have been older. They would have been in their... You see, if you're in World War Two, and it's 20 years after World War Two, you know, these guys would have been in their 40s. Yeah, they wouldn't be youngsters. They wouldn't be young, Black guys, yeah? No, I'm just simply saying that they helped to form a cohort of a collective people embracing currently serving servicemen and retired servicemen, of invariably all USAF, there was no real… there was no Black army presence in East Anglia. It was all airmen. 

[13:32] I probably haven't mentioned the… probably the West Indian contingent, Trinidad, Tobago, Jamaica, who brought reggae music - ska as it was later called. That… that indigenous reggae music, which I know was always there, never really featured much in my experience. I mean, I didn't see any… much evidence of reggae musicians in the environment I was in. They must… they must have been there, but I didn't… I wasn't aware of it. 

[14:08] I know the Old Dot. The Old Dot used to be called the Dorothy [venue in Cambridge]. It’s a dance hall, but I can definitely confirm that… that hub of Black prevalence in Ipswich, based on the guys that had been there 20 years since the war, and the guys that were coming in. Yeah, it was definitely… you're right that happened, and I can confirm it.

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[15:09] Finish