Marty Robbins, the first country and western star to make my acquaintance and the first recording artist who ever physically hit me.
He hit you?
Playfully. It was a playful tap but still quite hard. I bruised, but then one does bruise rather easily, it’s the pale skin and a circulation issue.
But he hit you?
Oh yes, in a very jovial, country and western way. He was recording a song and I rather got the wrong end of a stick I’m sorry to say.
Which song?
Big Iron. It’s a song about a cowboy chap, although if I recall correctly every song on that album was a song about a cowboy chap. It was something of a theme. Be that as it may, Big Iron discussed a particular rustler, or varmint or whatever the correct rustic terminology is, who arrived into town with a Big Iron on his hip. It’s a gun you see, it’s slang for gun, but I didn’t know that at the time. I thought he was talking about an actual iron, the sort of iron that one uses to press shirts, trousers, kerchiefs and other laundry items prone to creasing.
Well, I can see how you made the mistake.
Thank you, it’s nice to receive some vindication even if it is six decades after the event. I said to Mr Robbins something along the line of “So is the gentlemen carrying the iron a sort of travelling laundry attendant who presses shirts and perhaps starches collars and attends to light staining?” And he looked at me for a time and then concluded that because I was British I must have been making a joke of some kind so he punched me. Just there. On the arm. Not viciously, but in a friendly, cowboy sort of way you understand. One imagines that if I too had been raised on a prairie I would have shrugged it off with a laugh and a smile but I was raised in a manor house so I fell over. Which he assumed was just a further example of British japery so he left laughing and I sported a large purple bruise for several days.
Did anyone else ever hit you?
…not deliberately. Not that I recall. Phil Spector shot at me once but then he shot at almost everyone, that was just an occupational hazard when working with Spector. And one of the members of Bananarama once hit me in the back of the head with a shoe, but I wasn’t the target of the assault, I just happened to be in the path of an item of footwear hurled in frustration. She apologised afterwards. At least her lawyer did while I was signing away my right to pursue legal action for damages.
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