A Fairy Tale of New York

Please welcome celebrity Guest Blogger, Nick  Ullett, with an amazing story …

The Amazing Story Of How I Was Responsible For The Return Of Sturgeon To The Hudson River.

When I arrived in New York City, in 1964, the Hudson River
was a mass of floating toxicity.

I, a boy born and bred in London with its River Thames,
insisted on calling it the River Hudson. Whatever you called it, it
was a poor excuse for a river. What few fish existed in it at all were
disgusting trash fish or strange mutant creatures, the result of
chemical infusions from the constant pollutants that flowed into the
river. All that has changed. For the past forty years, at the least,
guys fishing off the Tappan Zee Bridge have been catching sturgeon, a fish not seen for over fifty years in the Hudson. What caused this
amazing turnaround?

You’re ahead of me, and you’re right, of course. It was me.

It all came about because of two songs. One was a rock and
roll parody version of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”. The other was “Those Were the Days”.

In the summer of 1963, I graduated from Cambridge and formed
a comedy team with another lad, Tony Hendra. Our first professional
booking was for three weeks in a nightclub called the Blue Angel off
Berkley Square. We were the opening act for a cabaret singer known as Hutch. His real name was Edward Hutchinson and he was a wonderful saloon singer. Among his other achievements, he was the only man who has ever made me believe the words to “Begin the Beguine”.

The MC in the place was Noel Harrison and he introduced us
with the following words:

“The Blue Angel is proud to present a new generation of
wit… Ullett and Hendra!”

And our working lives began. Part of that “new generation of
wit” consisted of “Daffodils”, an inane musical parody set to a rock
and roll beat, and consisting of the text of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”
and a lot of falsetto screaming from Tony and I.

One night towards the end of our run, Noel Harrison came back
to our dressing room after a show to say that Paul McCartney and his
girl-friend of the time, Jane Asher, would like to buy us a drink. The
Beatles were number one on the hit parade in England, but were still
basically homegrown. I had seen them perform when I was up at
Cambridge. They were the opening act in a touring rock and roll show and I had become a real fan. I was thrilled to have a drink with them.

We all drank wine. Paul said that he particularly liked
“Daffodils”. I was flattered and one thing led to another. We spent
the rest of that night together including going back to our small flat
in Holland Park. I sang him my songs, he sang me his songs.

He sang the song, “World without Love”, that was to become a
hit for Jane Asher’s brother, Peter and his partner Gordon. He sang a
song that he claimed he wrote only for Jane and that would never be
recorded. What a great romantic gesture, I thought. It began, “I give
her all my love, that’s all I do…” A year later it turned up in “A
Hard Day’s Night”. So much for great romantic statements.

During the next few weeks we hung out a couple of times at
Jane Asher’s place but once McCartney went back to shooting “A Hard
Day’s Night” with Richard Lester, we went our separate ways.

For the next few months we wandered from nightclub to
nightclub making a living. At the end of that summer, we were booked back into the Blue Angel, this time with two American folksingers called “Gene and Francesca”. They were married and almost as old as our parents, but they were great fun. They were part of that folk singing movement along with the Weavers and Theodore Bikel. They took folk music seriously and were always picking up catchy little numbers in Urdu or children’s songs from Ecuador.

Gene Raskin was a professor of architecture at Columbia
University in New York, so it was only after the academic year ended
that he would tour with his wife during the long summer vacation. Genehad written a song called “Those Were the Days” and they performed it as part of their show. It was so catchy that often the whole audience would be singing along by the last chorus.

Once again, Paul McCartney and Jane Asher turned up to see
us. “What about Daffodils?” Paul would shout from the back. They
started coming often. Ringo showed up. They arranged for us to go and see their special “Beatles Christmas Show” at the Finsbury Park
Empire. They were the closest I had ever come to real fame and I was
smitten. Paul told us that they were going to perform in America. We
told him that we’d been thinking of going there, too.

On February 7th, 1964, the Beatles arrived in New York and
became superstars overnight, I never saw McCartney again.

On March 23rd, 1964 I arrived in New York and started on the
path to becoming the man I am today. Paul McCartney never saw me
again, either.

I became very close to Gene and Francesca Raskin. Without
ever spelling it out, they acted in loco parentis. And they carried
that parental role throughout the rest of their lives, through my
marriages, my children, through feast and famine.

In my first years in New York, I would go every Sunday to
their apartment on the upper west side for an extended brunch. It was as close to a salon as you could get. All sorts of people would come to sing and argue and carry on. In their house I met Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Stella Adler, Carlos Jobim, whomsoever was in town would show up.

Towards the end of the sixties Gene was diagnosed with throat
cancer. The prognosis was not good. They cut out part of his larynx
and rebuilt his mouth. He could barely talk and they gave him a couple of years at the most, probably less.

The Raskins had put a down payment on a house in Pollensa on
the island of Mallorca in Spain. It was to be a summer retreat. Gene
and Francesca went over there at the end of June, ’68, so that Gene
could spend what would probably be his last summer in their new house. In August he received a telegram from his publisher in New York. It read: Congratulations. You’re number one.

He had no idea what they were talking about. The same day,
after he came in from his walk, Francesca told him that the English
newspaper, The Daily Express, had called and wanted to interview him. They wanted to know how Paul McCartney had discovered him.

What had occurred was that McCartney had decided to do
something outside the area of the Beatles. He wanted to produce a
record. He found a young singer named Mary Hopkin and he remembered a song that he thought would be perfect for her. It apparently took a while, but they managed to find the song that Gene and Francesca sang at the Blue Angel. The song was “Those Were the Days.”

The single was not only a hit in England and America, but all
around the world and it went on to be recorded by several hundred
different singers. The original recording by Mary Hopkin sold over
seven and a half million copies. It made Gene and Francesca
comfortable for the rest of their lives and it restored Gene’s spirit.
He never looked back, continuing to write and sing and play until his
death in 2004.

An inspirational story, you may say, but when do the sturgeon get here?

Here it comes.

The singer Pete Seeger spent his life as an activist. In the
early sixties, horrified at what was happening to the Hudson River, he started organizing protests against the major polluters but he soon
came to realize that what he needed to do was to rally the support of
all the people who lived beside the Hudson. He decided to raise enough money to buy a boat. It was to be called the Clearwater and it would function as a floating information center. It would go from town to town. Pete would give riverside concerts and arouse the river settlers to the dangers of a polluted Hudson. The Clearwater was to be a floating crusade.

The only problem was that to get this show on the road
required a lot of money.

Now, it turns out that regardless of which side of a hit
single is the hit, the writers of each song get exactly the same
amount of money. “Those Were The Days” sold seven and a half million copies. On the flip side of the record was “Turn Turn Turn”, written by Pete Seeger.

He made a bundle and with that money he got the Clearwater
into the water and his efforts and campaign turned around the state of the Hudson River so that today you can find sturgeon swimming in its waters.

And none of this would have happened if I hadn’t written some
really silly music to Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”.

Those sturgeon owe me.