Music history: The Maryland Club

Brilliant Corners Jazzwise staggers down memory lane
The Maryland Club, Glasgow (April 2007)
"It's like Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night in here!" was the cry of many a Scottish parent as the neighbourhood kids came tumbling unscheduled through the house. Sauchiehall Street is at the hub of Glasgow's nightlife. From the banks of the River Clyde, you can walk uptown past the main railway stations and the fancy shops, increasingly uphill until Sauchiehall Street crosses your path. Head west along that famous thoroughfare towards Charing Cross - gateway to the more bohemian West End - and on your right look out for Scott Street. Scott Street hauls itself steeply up Garnethill, and to reach the Maryland, you had to do the same. Back in the 1960s music fans in Scotland looking for something outside the mainstream would find their way, sooner or later, to the Maryland.

The Maryland site today



Local band Sky Cabin in the Maryland café

Owned by Bob Gardiner and fronted by Willie Cuthbertson, both now sadly deceased, the club caught the tail end of the Trad jazz boom with visitors such as Acker Bilk and his band. Local heroes included the Clyde Valley Stompers and the George Penman Jazzband. The Cool era followed with, for instance, tenorist Jimmy Skidmore who also appeared with his son Alan, as 'Skid, and Skid's Kid'. The gradual inroads made by soul music into jazz in the mid-60s resulted in the clientele becoming seriously Mod and one local soul band appearing at this time was The Dream Police, featuring the young Hamish Stuart, later of The Average White Band.

When the Blues came to town around 1967/68, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and Champion Jack Dupree were regulars. Moothie* player extraordinaire Frazer Speirs - a suitably big lad - was on the door. Occasional precious nights included blues legends such as Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, while Muddy Waters made a rare UK appearance here, coming onstage on crutches after an accident of some months before - this gig went on so late that Willie Cuthbertson let the folks who had travelled specially from the other side of Scotland kip on the floor of the club for the night! And there were two jam-packed nights with Tony Williams' Lifetime, a booking Bob Gardiner remembered with particular fondness. Jon Hiseman's Coliseum (with and without Chris Farlowe), Mogul Thrash, Kevin Ayres and The Whole World and the Edgar Broughton Band also played here; Cream were booked to play early in their career but a week or two before the date, their appearance on Top of the Pops moved the goalposts and they had to play at the nearby Locarno Ballroom. Support for that gig was Long John Baldry and his band featuring Elton Dean on sax and Reg Dwight on keyboards. Pink Floyd made their first Glasgow appearance at the Maryland having been banned by the City Corporation from playing elsewhere. Around this time local blues band Crusade, featuring probably Glasgow's first bona fidé guitar hero, Shug Barr, set up home at the Maryland along with several lesser groups including the psychedelicly inclined Mechanical Bride.
Although the club expanded beyond blues and rock to heavy metal with bands like Uriah Heap, it never lost contact with its jazz roots, always the place for rival musicians to check each other out, and good for making contacts. Pete Brown spotted Jim Mullen here and took him off south to join Piblokto (or more accurately Piblokto!).
The ambience of the club changed with the times, and only messrs Gardiner and Cuthbertson could have revealed how this miniature Amsterdam flourished in the centre of uptight, Presbyterian Glasgow - although their budget didn’t extend to arranging a drinks licence. Then one April night in 1971 a smouldering fag-end in the dressing room opened the roof and let out all the memories.



-Thanks to Craig Lockhart for lots of extra input here...............

*Glaswegian for harmonica
Morning-after photo by Jim Waugh (mural by Cliff Hanley)