Early Life and Career
He was born James George Tomkins, in Uxbridge Hospital, Middlesex, England, and went to Woodfield Secondary School in Cranford, Middlesex. At the age of 14, he began learning the guitar, and within two years had turned professional.
In 1959, at The 2i's Coffee Bar, he met Marty Wilde and was invited to become a member of his backing group, the Wildcats, who were the warm up act on the television series, Oh, Boy!, produced by Jack Good. The Wildcats backed Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent on their tour of Britain in 1960, during which Cochran died. Wilde bought Sullivan a Gibson Les Paul guitar, reputedly the first to be played in Britain, which he had bought from Sister Rosetta Tharpe. He later played a cherry-red Gibson 345 guitar.
Read more about this topic: Big Jim Sullivan
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“... the hey-day of a woman’s life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)