Read Online One Train Later: A Memoir by Andy Summers - Free Book Online

cool and grown-up, but I would rather have a Coke. The trio comes on with a sort of worldweary resignation and begins the set. I'm stunned, it all flows so beautifully: Jimmy Gourley seems to melt from one pattern to another, swimming with consummate ease in the flux and whirl of drumming and chord changes. I watch his fingers and try to fathom some kind of logic-how does he know how to do that? He has a way of roaming all over the guitar neck that I just don't have yet. Of course, I have been playing only a couple of years and haven't yet grasped that there is a system of cliches, patterns, and scales you can learn and study that take you through all kinds of harmonic structure. But I can taste it, feel it. It's like an ache inside; I have to be able to do that. To improvise, to dance across the strings with eyes closed, lost in the river of time, to make music in the instant, to reflect like a mirror-this is the way to speak to the world, this is the spirit eternal. Seeing Jimmy Gourley at the Blue Note is my first exposure to a great jazz guitar improviser, and it cuts deep. After the show I wander out with my friends into the Paris night and thank them and then, scared and on fire, begin the long walk back to our room in the Latin Quarter.
    On my own and with my head back over a guitar rather than homework, I begin to feel that if I am going to be a contender, I will have to get a better instrument-and that means money, and that means work, and that means a newspaper route. This tedious labor begins just as the moon fades from the icy black sky and before the rooster crows. Unfortunately, I am in the pernicious habit of crouching over my rhubarb and custard Dansette copping licks until the wee hours. This would be fine if I could sleep until three the following afternoon, but my mum now gets the up at six A.M. Like a freak of nature I crawl out of bed, put my feet on an icy patch of linoleum, and struggle into my clothes while trying to gulp down a cup of Ovaltine. At this point-being exhausted-it would be nice to get back into bed, but instead I stagger out the front door, with my mum calling out not to be late for school. I cycle through flooded streets, treacherous ice, vicious dogs, and gale-force wind. With my hands seared to the handlebars and the sleety rain howling through my woolly balaclava, the heat of the Ovaltine rapidly disappearing from my stomach, I try to think about the guitar but realize it's a waste of time because no doubt, my hands, thanks to the blackening frostbite that's now creeping over them, will have to be hacked off at the wrists. There is not one day in which the weather is not ripping me to shreds as if I were undergoing some preprogrammed extreme conditions test to ascertain whether or not I am worthy of the prize. In Down Beat magazine in America, they'd call this paying your dues.
    Some mornings my mum remembers to give me "something to keep you going till breakfast," as she calls it, and on a good day will slip into my pocket a Mars bar or a Munchy Crunch Bolero. On a bad day it will be a Farley's Rusk or a few Peek Freans cheeselets, which I throw to the first Doberman that attacks. When I arrive home numb and shaking, she has breakfast ready: could be Scott's Oats porridge-always stored on the shelf next to the Omo-or Welgar shredded wheat with a slice of apple and just a hint of Windowlene. This handsome repast is usually washed down with lemon barley water, and then it's either back on the bike or the long trudge to school through the dark wood of waving willies. But the sum and reward of this mental and physical torture is the guitar that hangs like a bright flag in an impossible future.

Three
    BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983
    I look down at the guitar in my hands, this battered old Fender Telecaster with most of its paint scraped off and its hybrid character (due to a Gibson humbucker replacing the original Fender neck pickup). It is with this guitar, this mangled old thing I