Fred Perry and Me

by Bart Bull

I don’t play a lot of tennis, frankly. Reflecting back, I seem to remember batting a tennis ball against a concrete block wall when I was, oh, I’m guessing nine or ten or so. Since then, with perhaps a slip or two, I’ve lived a spotlessly tennis-free life. And that meant that though I can say I lived through — and beyond, even — the whole entire horrifying Izod alligator demi-decade of the 1970s, it was without ever having indulged whatsoever.      Somewhere, no doubt, photos exist of me wearing things I might currently deny unto death until said photographic evidence should appear, but I swear on a stack of Cads (the thick perfect-bound print-version, the one with the rich inking that never smears nor fouls your fingers or foulards) that upon my breast no embroidered alligator ever lounged, lizard-like and green, regardless of shirt color. Especially those creepy pink ones. Nor did I indulge, late in those years, in any of the anti-alligatory remedies such as the unintentional anti-fashion statement of the tennis shirt given the Frenchified appellation “Le Tigre” by its maker — or anyway its commisionaire, Le Robuque-Sears. In fact, as regards tennis shirts, (or “polo shirts” as they came to be known, or “golf shirts” as social accuracy basically demanded they be called, given the American proportion of polo courses to golf grounds), I pretty much abstained. Except that one extraordinarily hot Arizona summer in about 1975 or 1976, but after that I cut my hair good and short and the tennis shirt or two of my wardrobe slithered off somewhere to die. (What brand could they have been? I cringe to think that one might even ave been yellow but that’s how successfullymemory serves us as we gracefully age and revise.)      (I had, in those years, the good sense and the aesthetic judgement and the geographic positioning necessary to carrying on a lifelong love affair with the western-tailored, pearl-snap-buttoned cowboy shirt, but I’m not certain that this is the right time nor place to spring this upon unsuspecting readers of The Cad, some of whom are already threatening to suspend subscription based on last month’s ultra-controversial 'The Tux Or The Tuck? Which Is It, Anyway, And Why?')      So let’s us ultra-rapidly photo-montage our way out of those Dark Days, skipping several small and minor and temporary fashion faux-pas I might or might not have committed but will not mention unless confronted by direct scene-of-the-crime photographic evidence, until we shoot forward into, not the present, but a period in the much of the 1990s when I was, for reasons still hazy to me, climbing on and off and under and around rock&roll tour buses on three or four continents (Thankfully, the Antarctica gig got cancelled, though that Finnish festival the agent —rest his soul — routed immediately after stayed intact.)      Maybe you’ve noticed, but everyone in rock&roll, decade in and decade out, wears black. Crew personnel (or what civilians call “roadies,” thus distinguishing themselves forever as civilians) will argue that the reason they do this is in order to keep from damaging The Act’s incredibly compelling stagecraft, maintaining an artful black camouflage that won’t gather extra attention when they come onstage to replace the lead singer’s Jack Daniels bottle once he has guzzled away all the peach-flavored ice tea out of it. (And now you know why those guys never want to share it around from the stage, because I can pretty much guarantee you it’s not the crowd’s random herpes-simplex virus they fear.) Well, that stage camouflage story makes a truly professional-sounding tale, but it’s a lie, flat out.      Everybody wears black because it hides the stains and the dirt and wear and tear and the pizza stains. Allegedly, anyway. And there’s an argument of sorts to be made for it, if not much of one. (The best argument is this: white.      I was on a tour once where an extraordinarily eccentric star demanded that everyone onstage wear all white. It turns out that it’s actually impossible to walk a pair of white pants across a typical rock club’s stage without almost automatically acquiring an entire Rorshach test’s worth of blots and blotches and things far gnarlier than either of those.)      But I digress. I was just on the verge of telling you about Fred Perry, wasn’t I? During those grueling years and grimy years, I discovered that it was possible to pack as lightly as everyone else and stay vaguely kempt, somewhat functional, ever-so-slightly formal, even if I merely packed the solitary suitcase that is standard on more tours than most, with a few long-sleeved Fred Perrys.      I emphasize the long sleeves because for me, even though it veered away from tradition, it made all the difference under a suit jacket, and in any kind of climate. I was doing a good deal of what is warmly referred to in the music trade as “business,” and it meant I could jump off the bus, onto a jet, and land somewhere wearing a shirt that managed to appear nowhere near as wrinkled as my soul was becoming. It meant a lot, if only to me.      It was Fred Perry that made this possible. Because even if there had been long-sleeved shirts with alligators or French tigers or such on them – there may well be by now; wouldn’t know, wouldn’t care – I wouldn’t have worn ‘em. Never. Wouldn’t, couldn’t happen. Because the whole Fred Perry ouevre was wrapped up in a somewhat evolved, involved cultural analysis. Because Fred Perrys had been magically transformed into the knitwear that was, among many other things, anti-racist.      How a simple piece of mass-manufactured mens-wear becomes a pure symbol, and how that symbolism moves back and forth in culture is either magical or marketing, and almost necessarily never both. These days, Fred Perry is ever so delicately marketing the hell out of itself, and making sure that any negative connotations are swirled away in a light mist of history and mystery. Which is pretty remarkable for what is, after all, merely a tennis shirt. That Fred Perry history, in its own high-speed photo-montaged version, goes a little like this: Fred Perry himself, heroic amateur athlete, wins Wimbledon, vaulting the net stylishly. Soon after, louche’ Mods lounge alongside polished Vespas, affecting what seems to at least some of them to be an Italianate languour. Jamaican immigrants Do The Ska while displaying what seems to at least some of them to be a utltra-British crispness. Skinheads, initially modeling their haircuts on American astronauts, Do The Ska too, exhibiting what at least some of them feel is Jamaican coolness. And verybody’s rocking a Fred Perry all the while.      And now the montage speeds up, roaring through Northern Soul and Two-Tone ska, through Mod revivals and and notable football hoons, through The Jam and The Specials and Madness and The Stone Roses and Oasis and Blur, through generation after generation of guys making an effort to look crisp and sharp, casual yet formal, sporting but styling. And for me, it was a simple thing, as fashion so often proves to be, with only just a mere small edge of slight casual elegance. It meant that in a world of uniform Dudes In Black T-Shirts, I was wearing a Fred Perry, a long-sleeved Fred Perry, no less, in Black, naturally, with Champagne trim. It’s not a look I much use nowadays, as I’m happily off the bus, no longer standing around the truckstop cursing the absence of celphone service in this part of-- where the hell are we again? But I have a photograph, in my mind at least, of those moments to add to our montage: there I am, standing alongside a bunch of other Dudes In Black, and one of us looks remarkably unrumpled under the circumstances. And resolutely non-racist. I have no idea what truckstop we’re parked at but I can tell you this: many of the crew-dudes will soon be wearing whatever brand of black socks they’re selling in there, possibly even embroidered with the truckstop’s own logo. Let that be a warning.