Free One Train Later: A Memoir by Andy Summers Page B

repertoire of Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, the MJQ, Miles Davis, and Monk, my confusion about whether it is beat and hip to play music fly out the window. The music is so inventive and bursting with joy that it wipes out all concerns about being cool-this is what I want. This is it.
    Although I am still in the early stages, I can improvise my way through standard chord changes, more by a visual interpretation than with full harmonic knowledge. I begin going to the club every weekend, and with pretty girls in the crowd and the surging solos, it becomes the high point of the week. I pluck up the courage one night to ask their sax player if I can sit in with them. Alan, the group leader, is pleasant but sarcastic and I think rather amazed that one so young could have the balls to propose such a thing. He kindly demurs but asks if I would like to play during their intermission.
    I begin a long series of appearances in which I try out all number of trios, duos, and whatever I can cobble together for Friday night. All through the week I wait tremulously for the moment when I will get up and play during the break. This moment will be preceded throughout the evening by Alan Melly's mock solemn announcements that a living legend is to appear later in the evening, to be followed by a fan club meeting afterward in the telephone kiosk across the road. This is usually greeted by a fair amount of hilarity, but the result is that I become a pet feature of the club and taste very minor celebrity. Gradually, instead of heading straight to the bar, people begin stopping to see what I will do this week. As this goes on, Alan takes to including my name in the local ads for the club, and each week it is different: "Tonight Andy Summers plays West Coast blues" or "From New York City-the Andy Summers onetet" or, most winningly, "Andy Summers plays the Mao Tse-tung Songbook."
    Every week I am forced to put together whatever musicians I can find to pull off this cliff-hanging twenty-five minutes, usually a trio of guitar, bass, and drums, but a couple of times it's just me and a trombonist, which puts an unintended avant-garde edge to the proceedings; I notice some people are on the floor splitting their sides with laughter. The highlight of all this comes one night when Alan suggests that I sit in with them for one song, and what would I like to play? I suggest an old standard called "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" and wait for the moment, trembling like Bambi in a forest glade.
    A grandiloquent announcement is made and I get up onto the stage, plug in and look nervously over at Alan, who raises an eyebrow and, grinning, says, "Count us in, then." With a feeling on the inside of a stained-glass window shattering, I count the bastards in. I start playing and state the theme before I take off on a double-chorus solo that is about as good as I have ever played. I pass through it as if in a dream, locked into the notes, the frets, the strings, and no sense of anything other than the accompanying piano chords, the drums behind me, and maybe a far-off voice whispering as if through clouds, "This is what it is really like." I finish my solo and there is wild applause, which is probably the sound of an audience even more relieved than I am that I haven't blown it.
    But I am sixteen years old; everyone here knows me, and it's possible that there's a lot of love in the room (even if laced with pity). The club swims in front of my eyes and I come very close to fainting but manage to stand there and keep a grip. I have just been chucked into the deep end. I don't sleep that night-or that week, for that matter-but just keep recycling the solo over and over again in my head. Somehow I have crossed a line, as if I have been shot full of junk.
    I realize that my sense of self is in fact defined by the guitar, and that's that, which I suppose makes me a guitarist. I begin to feel worthy or unworthy according to the merit of the last solo I have