Jack Green obituary, rock guitarist who was ‘big in Canada’
He was not on the list.
“Big in Japan” has become an ironic euphemism in rock’n’roll to describe acts that struggle to fill the local pub at home but enjoy unexpected success in some far-flung market overseas.
In Jack Green’s case it was Canada rather than the land of the rising sun and there was nothing ironic about his claim to be not only big but absolutely huge in Alberta.
The record that made him the prince of the Canadian prairies was Humanesque, his first solo album, released in 1980. Played endlessly by an Edmonton radio station until the grooves had almost worn out, the record spawned the hit singles Babe, Murder and Factory Girl and was soon picked up by other stations all over western Canada.
It was easy enough to hear why. Green’s infectious songs rocked mellifluously and he had a fine voice; in another life he might have been Tom Petty. Quite why his success in Canada was not repeated elsewhere is a mystery.
Some of his fans blamed his record label for failing to capitalise. Green himself blamed nobody and didn’t seem too bothered. “If you want to be a ‘star’ you’ve got to take yourself seriously,” he said. “I could never do this for any length of time.
“I found the rock star thing laughable and couldn’t take those types seriously. If I had, I would probably have got further but because of my upbringing, my feet were planted far too firmly on the ground.”
Jack Green was born in 1951 in the gritty and grounded environs of postwar Glasgow, the son of Sylvia and Maurice Green, a businessman who sold fire extinguishers.
Before he had reached his teens, rock’n’roll was his passion, thanks to an aunt who owned a famous Glasgow record shop called Gloria’s Record Bar, which provided ready access to all the best music of the day.
He was further influenced by a cousin who was in a band that played the clubs in Hamburg at the same time as the Beatles; Green recalled him “coming back from Germany and telling everyone he’d seen the most amazing band from Liverpool”.
Green later got to hang out with Paul McCartney when recording with his band Sunshine at Olympic Studios in London in 1973. The former Beatle was working on the Wings’ album Red Rose Speedway in the same studio complex and one evening found himself locked out.
“It was late at night and the doorbell kept ringing,” Green recalled. “After about 20 minutes I got really annoyed and ran down to open it myself.”
It was McCartney and his wife, Linda. “We started to see him
every day and would linger around his session and watch him warm up on the
piano. He was so nice, so professional. He’d say hello to everybody he saw and
ask them how they were.”
By the time he was 13 Green had his own band playing in local youth clubs and was soon writing songs with a classmate at Woodfarm school. It eventually led to a contract with a London-based music publisher and at 18 he was cast in the part of Woof in the rock musical Hair.
He also appeared in Jesus Christ Superstar before forming Sunshine. Signed by Warner Bros in 1972, they broke up a year later after recording a solitary album.
Penniless and without a gig, he lived on a sack of potatoes for three months with occasional forays to restaurants from which he would do a runner without paying the bill until Marc Bolan threw him a lifeline and asked him to play guitar with T. Rex.
Green played on the band’s 1974 album Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow and spent a year touring North America, Japan and Australia with Bolan.
When they returned home and played in Glasgow, Bolan introduced him to the screaming fans as a native son who had made good. “Big cheers, I wave,” Green remembered. Then without warning and to his horror Bolan invited him to address the crowd. “He had a cruel sense of humour and was always trying to make me lose it on stage. I almost died — and he thought it was hilarious.”
He went on to play with the Pretty Things, appearing on the albums Silk Torpedo (1974) and Savage Eye (1976) and was then briefly a member of Rainbow, formed by the former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, before with some reluctance he launched a solo career.
After recording four solo albums he moved in 1983 to Ibiza with his wife, Jackie, who survives him. He stayed a dozen years before returning to Britain and settling in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, where he became a guitar teacher and set up a small film production company, making corporate videos and training films.
He continued making music but his distaste for the trappings of stardom never left him.
No comments:
Post a Comment