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Something tells us we’re into something good
Published 6:22pm Sunday, May 16, 2010By JOHN EBY
Dowagiac Daily News
Even growing up in England, Peter Noone dreamed of a day he would surpass the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Dave Clark Five by playing Dowagiac.
It showed Saturday night when he could finally cross that long-awaited concert off his British re-Invasion bucket list.
And if you believe that, you probably also think Billy Sullivan with the exploding blond hair really is from Marcellus. Cleveland, actually.
But Noone is the consummate showman, not to mention a human jukebox – someone shouts “The Hollies” from the Dowagiac Middle School Performing Arts Center audience and, on command, this new band of Herman’s Hermits performs “Bus Stop.”
Noone has apparently wanted to play here for so long that he’s learned lots of country music in anticipation of the crowd he expects to find in tractor caps.
In a sort of tribute to the 1981 Cass County Fair, which featured the real Johnny Cash, Noone crooned “Ring of Fire” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” and for good measure straps on a blue guitar and plays a twangy tune customized to reference DMS.
Noone counsels young entertainers to make a monarch their own.
Herman’s Hermits had “I’m Henry VIII, I Am,” and the Sex Pistols had “God Save the Queen.”
Noone opened with “I’m Into Something Good,” seguing into “Wonderful World” as the final event of the 2010 Dogwood Fine Arts Festival.
Wolverine Mutual Insurance Co. sponsored his show.
Noone launches into a monologue about the hold Dowagiac has on his heart after appearing Friday night in Sand Point, Idaho.
“Nobody’s heard of Sand Point, Idaho,” he says, and when that draws a laugh, he adds with his renowned disarming wit, “People in Sand Point, Idaho, never heard of you, either.”
“Little did we know when we began that dream 20 or 30 years ago now, we had no idea that it was impossible to find Dowagiac,” Noone said, putting in peril their thousands of hours of practice leading to this moment.
“We didn’t know that flying into Chicago was not a good idea,” he said of the quest for Dowagiac and other small heartland towns scattered in corn fields and forests, “like Niles.”
“If you ask anybody at O’Hare airport, ‘Where is Dowagiac?’ they’ve never heard of you.”
Add to that the Hermits are an all-male band, so “we never ask directions,” Noone grinned. “It’s a wonderful thing because I was driving today and in this band you can make four right turns and nobody questions you – ‘Look, there’s that Holiday Express again.’ Then there’s toll roads, and if you’ve got no money, that’s really fun. The (gate arm) comes down, but it’s fragile.”
Noone noted every 60 miles or so is a gas station, Starbucks, “Daisy Queen – Dairy Queen, I mean” combination, so they relent and seek directions, only to learn, “There is no such place as Dowagiac.”
Now that he’s here, “Herman” can attest, “There’s not a whole lot going on in Dowagiac,” plus he’s mistaken for Nick Nolte.
He suddenly takes notice of a familiar white-bearded man from Indiana seated in the second row with his fan club, the Noonatics.
“It’s Santa Claus!” Noone exclaims, adding, “We had no idea when we set out on this voyage that it was going to be so beautiful. Well done. It’s a great little place you’ve got here.”
Music resumes with “Love Potion No. 9″ and the Hermits’ own “Dandy,” written for them by Ray Davies of the Kinks.
Noone, 62, peering into the house, says of their audience expectations, “We expected a lot of old people with hats with names of tractors.”
To youngsters he says, “When we were young we were forced to go to concerts with our parents, too. It changed our lives because we saw Perry Como.”
His mum’s supposed obsession with Davy Jones of the Monkees (“one morning she came down to breakfast with a staple stuck in her nose” from a pin-up poster; “I was scarred for life. We had to wean her off the Monkees”) leads into “Daydream Believer.”
Too many seasons removed from “Love Boat,” nobody seems to get Noone’s joke about Jack Jones being related to Davy so he changes the punchline to George Jones and loud laughter.
“They told me you’d know the country stuff,” he pauses. “On eight-track, not CDs.”
He also pokes a bit of fun at Taylor Swift with his twangy tune about being in “at Dowagiac Middle School in Dowagiac, Mich., tonight,” urging everyone to whistle along.
Noone announces that he called his mother, 86, in Liverpool from Dowagiac.
When he tells her where he is, “She just hung up” because “I thought it was that lizard trying to sell insurance” for Geiko.
The narrative about her birthday “past her eyes” milk bath eventually works its way around to “No Milk Today.”
Noone says today’s Hermits swapped their gray suits for black “because we think it makes us look slimmer.”
For “youngsters who’ve never heard of us,” Herman leaves the stage with a stack of CDs and gives them away as he circles the auditorium in search of “kids who listen to that guy from Detroit who shoots animals for fun” (avid hunter Ted Nugent).
He tells youths, “Just between you and me, in 25 years a lot of these people won’t still be around.”
A girl gives him a Milky Way bar he places on a speaker “to tempt the boys in the band.”
He also leans down to accept a bouquet of flowers that upon closer inspection are paper posies made from what looks like sheet music.
He tries one of the higher seats and informs his band, “You guys look really nice from back here,” but bounds back into his appointed round “before I fall asleep.”
Peter encounters fans from England and tosses out some T-shirts before launching into “It’s Not Unusual” sounding like Tom Jones – the idol of his mum’s affections since dumping Davy.
This showman’s full name is Peter Blair Denis Bernard Noone.
He said his green card gave his birthday, Nov. 5, 1947, height (5-foot-6) and weight (112 pounds) “so when I grew those other five inches, they weighed 70 pounds. A lot of people when they see me, they wonder why I don’t look fat.”
He borrows a Herman’s Hermits album from down front – “this is what CDs used to look like” – and holds his baby face over his still-youthful visage.
“I’m keeping my jacket on,” he says of a copper-colored sport coat over a black shirt and tie that at certain angles of light looks orange enough to be Dowagiac Chieftain colors.
Noone, to a snatch of blues that sounds like “Blue Collar,” is riffing about the ravages of age after 40.
“This is not fat,” the trim man who wore 28-inch jeans insists, but “my ass,” which he claims grows an inch a year up his back until he will eventually become one of those men in shorts who can fish his wallet out reaching over his shoulder. “You know if you were on Southwest Airlines that day, you would be sitting next to him,” Noone said.
No amount of exercise will reverse this inevitable aging process, he said – especially if they succumb to Dunkin’ Donuts in airports while traveling and rationalize, “We’ve burned so many calories by being awake for so many hours.”
Noone springs from fat jokes to telling his “skinny” father that through their diligent practice they were going to channel their noise which made him ask, “What the bloody hell is that?” into “huge superstardom. Who knows? With God’s luck and love, we may one day get to play in Dowagiac,” which he pronounces with a fourth syllable, Do-wag-i-ac.
Like his narrative of his mother throwing underwear at Tom Jones, Noone has his dad deciding to become a rock star himself playing rhythm and blues.
Like any man his age, he must hike his pants up, revealing white socks between the cuff and Beatle boots and – voila! – Peter has transformed into Mick Jagger strutting like a rooster and singing “Start Me Up.”
Of course, running off with the Rolling Stones left Mrs. Noone languishing in a milk bath until she looked as wrinkled as Keith Richards.
“My favorite songs are coming now” because all hit No. 1 on the charts, Noone telegraphs the home stretch of his show where “you’ll know all the words as well as ‘Ring of Fire.’ ”
The Noonatics are conditioned that when the show appears over to clamor, “More, more!” until the adulation spreads the “Liza Minnelli look” across his face.
Wheezing into a harmonica for train effect, Noone polishes off the last bit of Cash “penitentiary” music.
Noone, who has been at this since achieving international fame at 15, has sold more than 60 million records – 14 gold singles and seven gold albums – and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The Hermits twice won Cashbox’s “Entertainer of the Year” and played lunchtimes at the Cavern Club with the Beatles.
Noone, who in the ’80s starred on Broadway and in London as Frederic in “The Pirates of Penzance,” has also acted on such television series as “Married with Children” and “Dave’s World,” the sitcom inspired by 1996 Dowagiac visitor Dave Barry.
“We were friends with the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five and the Rolling Stones,” he said. “The Beatles came out first with their movie, ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ where they ran around with girls chasing them. Then (DC5) with ‘Catch Us If You Can.’ Herman’s Hermits slowed down for the healthy ones. In the picture we’ve got Shelley Fabares and Connie Francis.
“Mike Smith, who was the singer of the Dave Clark Five, died after an accident. My fan club the Noonatics, a lot of whom are here this evening, raised money for a wheel chair and a van so he could drive around England. We want to remember the Dave Clark Five because they’re not on the radio anymore,” so the Hermits covered “Because,” with Herman adding, “When we do their songs, Mike Smith hears us in heaven.”
He starred in three films for MGM: Mrs Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter (about dog racing), Hold On! and When the Boys Meet the Girls.
Glow sticks everyone in the audience seems to have, thanks to the Noonatics, snap to life like colorful windshield wipers slapping time for “Silhouettes.” It’s a little bit like “Rocky Horror Picture Show” that everyone seems to know what to do and when to do it.
He’s reelin’ off hits now: “Listen People,” “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” the WHOO!-filled “Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat” and “I’m Henry VIII, I Am.”
Noone turns its famous “second verse, same as the first,” into a 7 3/4-minute master class kicked off with a few of the Ramones’ “Hey! Ho! Let’s go!”
Noone pits one section of seats against another shouting out H-E-N-R-Y like a pep rally (that widow next door “wouldn’t have a Willie or a Sam”).
In one rendition he warbles “Sound of Music” over the top in a voice more Mrs. Miller than Julie Andrews.
As he assured the Daily News in an April 26 interview, “I didn’t want to be a musician. I wanted to be an entertainer. I wanted to be the leader. The Lawrence Welk of rock.”
Any regrets?
“I wish I’d written a second verse in 1965,” Noone admits. “We could have gone for another 25 years.”
