peteraltongreen

You know when you get the impossible phone call,out of the blue,totally unexpected,and unbelievable. Well,a couple of years ago,I was home & the phone bell rang.'Hi,is that Pete?' 'Yeah,who's that?' 'It's Tommy Allsup' 'The guy who played with Buddy Holly ?' I asked. I went dumb,but fortunately Tommy said ' I'm playing over the river ( Humber) tonight & I'd like to meet you. We had a pleasant chat on the phone,& I rang a couple of pals. My good pal,Paul Downing was over from the States.Paul emigrated to the U.S. in the '60's,and has played with a stack of bands there.He's currently playing with the re formed 'Standells',who he worked with in the late sixties.Paul already knew Tommy,as he'd met him at a Cricket's gig in America.We had a whale of a night.Kevin Montgomery was the singer in the band.His father,Bob had also been associated with Buddy Holly.I have to report the phone call I got was a set up from my pal who plays pedal steel,and had supplied the P.A. for the gig.He got to sit in with the band.I just enjoyed the night.

Hi Guys ( and Gals,if there's any out there ! ) What I'm going to try to do in the blog is tell you what I'm doing (not much,these days ),and what I've done in the past. ( Plenty there ) I'll start with the revelation that on the 3rd May,1964,my then band (' Tony Martin & the Mods' )played the Palace Theatre,Manchester,U.K. Headlining the show were the Rolling Stones ( Honest ).The reason I start with this is not that it was our biggest gig,but I just found a poster from the show on line,and my band are not mentioned on it ! A real downer. We had to back a band called 'The Overlanders ',who we'd only seen once before at a local club.They went on to have a Number 1 hit in the U.K. with the Beatles song 'Michelle'.The girl singers we were supposed to back, 'The McKinlay Sisters',from Edinburgh never turned up.Back to the Overlanders.In those days,I detuned my Gretsch Tennessean to 'D',to get the open guitar key chords,so we borrowed another Fender Bass ( I was not required to play guitar ) to tune to concert for the Overlanders. Before we went on stage for our solo spot & 5 minutes of fame,we instructed the Overlanders to tune up the spare bass.Yes,you guessed it.They didn't.So everything they played in 'A',we backed them in 'G'. To my knowledge,only one person in the audience noticed.This was a guy we made a record with 3 years later ! To be fair,there was that much noise from the audience,it probably didn't matter anyway ! Other memories of that gig were to set up before.Our bass player had a wonderful piggy back,blonde Fender Bassman amp & cab that Bill Wyman took a fancy to.Because the Stones had a deal with Vox amps,that's what they had to use in public. Brian Jones begged a spare pick off me,and Mick Jagger was busy shouting at some girls who could just see him through a crack in the emergency exit door.The two performances were fantastic,never to be forgotten. More later . Peter Alton Green Just located the poster for the above gig. No,I'm still not there !