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Oct 15

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The Band: London to New York

The BandThe Band came to London for the first time in the early summer of 1971. At 2.30pm on Monday, May 17 a handful of us gathered at the Inn on the Park, near Hyde Park Corner, where EMI Records had booked the Hamilton Suite, rooms 206-210, for Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson to meet journalists. I talked to Robertson and Danko for a feature that appeared in the next week’s Melody Maker, a few days ahead of their two dates at the Albert Hall on June 2 and 3.

They were enjoyable interviews. Robbie talked about the early days with Ronnie Hawkins, and about their influences. Among the names he mentioned were those of Jimmy Reed, Charlie Rich, Sanford Clark and Billie Lee Riley, which reminded him of his first visit to London, along with Rick, Garth and Richard, for Bob Dylan’s Albert Hall shows in 1966, when they stayed at the Savoy.

“A bunch of people came by the hotel,” he said, “a bunch of rough-looking characters. I don’t know what you’d call them, but they were into pure rock ‘n’ roll. They didn’t like Bob’s music at all. They were into Ronnie Hawkins, and they were giving me this whole story about giving up this Bob Dylan shit and getting back to the real meat of things. They were very sincere, actually. What do you call them? Do you have a name for them?”

“Rockers,” I said.

“Rockers? I told Ronnie about them. I mean, they had people named after his songs, even.”

“Wild Little Willie?”

“Yeah, that was one of the guys. Are they still around?”

They were indeed, a bunch of superannuated Teddy Boys still trying to convince the world that any rock ‘n’ roll that sounded as though it had been made after Elvis went into the army wasn’t worth a teaspoon of oil for a Triumph Bonneville. I happened to know that Wild Little Willie was one of the leading members of their coterie, named after one of Hawkins’s best known songs.

Talking to Danko, I asked why their performance at Woodstock two years earlier hadn’t been included in the subsequent movie. “I just didn’t feel that their sound was together,” he said, “and I didn’t believe it was the sort of film that I’d want to look at myself in 20 years’ time, because I’m sure all that comes back, at one time or another. It was not our PA system. We were using other people’s facilities, which means that we didn’t have any control over it, and if you can’t control it then I don’t consider the people are getting their money’s worth. The Isle of Wight impressed me in 1969. The people there were very orderly. I thought it was like being in a giant high-school gymnasium. But it’s hard. We limit our PA system, like you do in a studio, which cleans it up for the people, so it sounds more like a record.”

They hadn’t brought their own system to Europe, relying instead on a system supplied by Charlie Watkins, the South London amplification expert and inventor of the great Copicat tape-echo unit. According to Danko, Watkins had been to see them in the US, examined their system, and promised to create something equally effective.

He was as good as his word, and those of us present at the Albert Hall still talk about the pin-sharp but very warm quality of the sound, and how they were the first rock band to master the acoustics of a venue that had been notoriously unfriendly to amplified music. As Danko promised, the sound was just like the records, allowing us to appreciate the astonishing quality of their playing. It was one of the great gigs, and three of the songs from the first night — “Strawberry Wine”, “Rockin’ Chair” and “Look Out, Cleveland” — were unearthed for A Musical History, the handsome boxed set released by Capitol in 2005. Which must mean that the rest of the concert is in the vault somewhere, and it would be nice to hear it all one day.

After finishing their European dates they spent the remainder of 1971 finishing and releasing their fourth album, Cahoots, and touring the US, winding up the year with four nights at the Academy of Music in New York, where they were augmented by a five-piece horn section under the direction of the New Orleans master Allen Toussaint. Those shows were initially commemorated in Rock of Ages, a vinyl double album released the following year. Now Robbie Robertson has gone back to the archive, unearthed the original master tapes, remixed and remastered them, and put together a new boxed set including three CDs and a DVD, plus a more modest two-CD package.

The latter, for which I opted, includes the Band’s full 25-song set — eight more than could be squeezed on to the two vinyl discs of the original release, and two more (“Smoke Signal” and “Strawberry Wine”) than appeared on the last CD version, plus four songs with Dylan — “Down in the Flood”, “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, “Don’t Ta Tell Henry” and “Like a Rolling Stone”, all of which appeared on the earlier expanded CD release.

They sound better than ever, and they sounded pretty good in the first place. It reminds me of the extraordinary finesse and flexibility that became apparent during the Albert Hall concert, not least when — as you see them in the photograph above — Levon picked up a mandolin, Garth strapped on an accordion and Richard settled himself behind that beautiful old-fashioned drum kit. Back at his Lowrey organ, Garth played an astonishing extended solo introduction to “Chest Fever”, known as “The Genetic Method”; a friend of mine claims he played it on the Albert Hall’s mighty pipe organ, but that’s not my memory of it.

Everything about that concert was perfect, except for the interval, when I went for a drink and found myself accosted at the bar by Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager and a master of the art of intimidation, who approached me, with Jimmy Page lurking in his  shadow, and accused me of trying to break up his band. That’s another story, but it was a relief to get back to my seat and listen to some more from the greatest combo of their era, functioning at their peak.

* The photograph is taken from the insert to The Band: Live at the Academy of Music 1971. It is uncredited.

Sep 17

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Jackie Lomax: more than a footnote

Jackie LomaxJackie Lomax died on Monday, while visiting England from Southern California for the wedding of one of his daughters. He was 69, and my obituary for the Guardian is here. I suppose he’ll go down as a footnote in Beatle history, having made a handful of singles and an album for Apple; it’s a pity none of the solo records he made during a long career ever captured the public’s imagination.

I met him a few times at the end of the ’60s and the start of the ’70s, when the Apple relationship had just finished and he was involved with a band called Heavy Jelly, who had their origin in a hippie hoax.

It was in the autumn of 1968 that John Leaver, one of Tony Elliott’s early colleagues on the fledgling Time Out, published a favourable review of a wholly fictitious group, with the notion of seeing whether the freaks among the readership could be induced to flock to the record shops just on the basis of a magazine piece. He called the group Heavy Jelly — “originally an eight-piece soul band, now operating as an acid-rock quartet” — and accompanied his words with a specially taken Keith Morris photograph of the guitarist John Morsehead, formerly of the Pirates and Shotgun Express and then of Aynsley Dunbar’s Retaliation, accompanied by three anonymous long-haired mates (“a dope dealer, an antique dealer and a colour attacher,” according to Morris).

The spoof worked, to the extent that a buzz started and a group was hastily formed around Moreshead. They recorded a single, amusingly called “Time Out” and released in the spring of 1969 on Head Records, run by the promoter John Curd. Just to confuse matters, the Island label simultaneously took their group Skip Bifferty, rechristened them Heavy Jelly, and recorded a track that was promptly featured on one of their famous cheapo sampler albums. By this time, however, Curd owned the rights to the name and persuaded Island to desist. Meanwhile a couple of Island artists, Traffic’s Chris Wood and Jim Capaldi, briefly joined Moreshead in the “real” Heavy Jelly, only to make a swift withdrawal in favour of an offer to rejoin Steve Winwood. Next came Lomax, freed from his commitment to Apple, who joined the line-up and brought with him a bunch of new songs, eight of which were recorded for what was intended to be their debut album.

In the fashion of the day, various luminaries were called upon to assist in the studio, not least because Heavy Jelly had already begun to be afflicted by the personnel changes that would eventually kill them off. Mike Kellie of Spooky Tooth played drums on a couple of tracks, joined on one of them by Ric Grech on bass and Peter Bardens on keyboards; Jim Price and Bobby Keys added trumpet and tenor saxophone to one song; and harmonies were added to the final track by Pete Ham and Tommy Evans of Badfinger, Lomax’s erstwhile Apple labelmates.

It was while they were in the process of making the album that they played the Country Club in Belsize Park, and a couple of days later I interviewed Jackie for the Melody Maker. The gig had been good but he was a little downbeat, just as I had found him to be on our previous encounters; the consequent piece, published under the headline “Born Under a Bad Sign?”, pondered his seeming attraction to projects dogged by bad luck.

Heavy JellyA few months later Heavy Jelly completed their album. Curd pressed up some promotional copies with white labels and sent them to people in the media. I got one, played it, wasn’t greatly impressed, and filed it away. Such were the internal upheavals — musicians coming and going, including the Grease Band’s drummer Bruce Rowland and John Mayall’s bassist Steve Thompson — that the band simply fell apart, and the album never got beyond that white-label stage.

After that rather dispiriting experience Lomax spent a couple of weeks with Denny Laine, Trevor Burton and Alan White in a band called Balls before answering a call from John Simon, the Band’s producer, to make an album for Warner Brothers in the US.

It occurs to me now that the pattern of his career resembles that of Van Morrison: early days with a British-based R&B band before a solo career in America, first in Woodstock and then in California. Jackie made some pleasant records, and it will be interesting to see how the album he completed just before his death — his first in a dozen years — turned out, but he never had a “Brown Eyed Girl”, a “Madame George”, a “Moondance” or a “Domino”. In the end, that’s usually what makes the difference.

* The photograph of Jackie Lomax is from the insert to the 2010 reissue of his Apple album, Is This What You Want? It is uncredited.

Aug 31

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A voice to remember

Maybe you’ve heard the sad news that Linda Ronstadt will never sing again. She announced it a week or so ago, letting the world know that Parkinson’s disease has taken her voice. Today I read an interview with her, in the International Herald Tribune, in which she tells Sam Tanenhaus about her illness and the other problems that have dogged her life in recent years.

Things were pretty different when I interviewed her for the Melody Maker in January 1971. She’d had her first hit with the Stone Poneys’ great “Different Drum”, she was already making solo albums for Capitol Records (Hand Sown… Home Grown and Silk Purse), and she was starting to move in the right kind of circles. But she was still a few years away from the superstardom that arrived when Peter Asher took control for the run of hit albums that began with Heart Like a Wheel.

She was smart, funny, serious about serious things, and completely beguiling. She told me how she’d made the move from her home in Tucson, Arizona in 1965, when she was 18, after a friend called from Los Angeles, saying there was a band out there for her to sing with. “I jumped into a car with my boyfriend, who played steel guitar, and we drove straight there. I think the boy went straight back. I never saw him again.”

A free spirit, then and always, but she was fretful about one thing. “I’ve had trouble finding material,” she said. “I don’t write. I’ve never been able to write even a paragraph. And I can’t do songs that have been done well by the people who wrote them.”

That changed, with Asher’s help. She turned out to be a wonderful reinterpreter of the very finest material. I didn’t really follow her through the years in which she collaborated with Nelson Riddle on albums of standards and then delved back into her Mexican roots, but I loved the recordings she made with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. The YouTube clip above is of an exquisite song from their second album, Trio 2, called “High Sierra”. It features Linda. She composed it, too. So she could write a paragraph, after all.

Aug 22

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Where the Stones were fourth on the bill

Odeon, Nottingham

If you look carefully at the top of the building in the photograph, you’ll see the faintest shadow of the long-gone neon sign that read ODEON. I took the picture on a rainy day a couple of winters ago, while passing through Nottingham, my old home town. How many of the hundreds of people walking along this pavement every day know that it was here, in this cinema on Angel Row, a hundred yards or so up from the Old Market Square, that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones played, in 1963 and ’64? And now it’s finally vanished. The demolition crew have done their job and the construction workers are in, filling the space with a building apparently intended to provide housing for students.

Buddy Holly played the Odeon in 1958: three shows on the night of March 8, during his only UK tour. I missed that one, being only 10 at the time (although I’d already saved up to buy the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day” on 78), but three years later I saw Cliff Richard and the Shadows, just after Brian Bennett took over from Tony Meehan on drums — a source of some regret, since Meehan was my first drumming hero. The screaming meant that not much could be heard. But at least Hank Marvin gave me my first sight of a Fender Stratocaster in action, and they were still doing the famous Shadows walk, much copied by we schoolboys in front of bedroom mirrors.

OK, I’ll own up: I missed the Beatles there — three times, on the first occasion with Roy Orbison — and the Stones. Absence of cash, I expect. I wouldn’t have been able to hear them above the hysteria anyway, although I’ve always kicked myself for not making it to the Stones’ show in October 1963, since it also featured the Everly Brothers, Little Richard and Bo Diddley, all of them above the Stones on the bill when the tour started. My friend Phil Long remembers Little Richard’s set: “One of the best I’ve ever seen. He jumped off the stage, ran all the way round the theatre, then got back on the stage and started taking his clothes off and throwing them to the audience… there was a riot.”

The most memorable concert I did manage to attend at the Odeon was on May 12, 1964, the fourth date of a 22-night package tour headlined by Chuck Berry, with support from Carl Perkins, the Animals, the Nashville Teens and King Size Taylor and the Dominos. It was great merely to see Chuck, who provided so many of us with the inspiration for our own bands, but he gave a pretty uninterested performance. He was accompanied by King Size Taylor’s excellent band, and I seem to remember that about half the set consisted of throwaway instrumentals; has any great songwriter ever taken a less obvious pride in his achievements? But it was enough to hear those guitar intros ringing out, and to witness his perfunctory demonstration of the duck walk.

Carl Perkins was not exactly spectacular, either, in his very short set. And so, curiously, the musical highlights were provided by two English bands. The Animals, of course, were excellent. “Baby Let Me Take You Home”, copied from “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” on Bob Dylan’s first album, was nudging the Top 20, and their act still had the R&B edge honed in Newcastle’s Club A Go-Go. But they also played their epic four and a half minute version of another song from Dylan’s debut: “House of the Rising Sun”. It hadn’t yet been released, or heard on the radio, and its arrangement — featuring Hilton Valentine’s arpeggiated guitar, Alan Price’s wailing Vox Continental organ and Eric Burdon’s baleful vocal — was nothing short of stunning. Five weeks later it would enter the charts, on its way to No 1.

It was the same with the Nashville Teens, whose set included John D Loudermilk’s “Tobacco Road”: another dramatic song, its structure and mood inspired by the compositions Willie Dixon provided for Muddy Waters and other blues stars. The group, from the Surrey stockbroker belt, did an enthusiastic job of impersonating the sound of the Chicago stockyards, and by July they were on their way to the UK Top 10. By August “The House of the Rising Sun” was on its way to No 1 in Billboard‘s Hot 100, while “Tobacco Road” topped out at No 14 in the US a month later. Heard for the first time in live performance, both made an immediate impression.

And now the Odeon has disappeared. I suppose it’s not exactly like losing the Cavern or the Marquee. But it would be nice, when they finished its replacement, if someone thought it worth putting up a plaque to remind passers-by of former glories. Buddy Holly, The Beatles. The Rolling Stones. The Everly Brothers. Little Richard. Bo Diddley. Chuck Berry. Not bad, eh?

Apr 15

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Terry Adams on the cello

When I went in to see A Late Quartet, a new film by Yaron Silberman that includes a wonderful performance by Christopher Walken as an ageing cellist, I was already thinking about string quartets, and cellists in particular. A friend had just sent me a link to the YouTube clip of an event that took place 40 years ago this summer and which represented probably the first successful introduction of a string quartet into rock music: the 1973 tour by Van Morrison’s Caledonia Soul Orchestra.

That tour was commemorated in the classic double-album It’s Too Late to Stop Now, some of which was taped at the Rainbow Theatre in North London. I was there that July night, along with just about everyone I knew. It was the gig of the year, not least because Morrison was returning to the UK for the first time since his days with Them, and it was no surprise to me when it turned out to be an absolutely perfect night because I’d seen them a week or so earlier, at Birmingham City Hall, and that had been spectacular enough. In the meantime I’d talked to Van and some of the musicians in order to write a combined review/interview/preview of the London shows for the Melody Maker (the piece is archived, if you’re interested, at the subscription-based library http://www.rocksbackpages.com).

At that point Morrison had been living in Northern California for a couple of years, and to the regular line-up of his excellent six-piece band he’d added two violins, viola and cello. Playing arrangements written by the keyboard player Jeff Labes, the string quartet added depth and texture to favourites such as “Into the Mystic” and “Listen to the Lion”. As the concert neared its end, they were featured at length on a magnificent version of “Caravan”, in a passage representing a wonderful moment of baroque and roll.

But I know exactly why my friend sent me the clip of that performance of “Caravan”. It was to remind me that this was the night we all fell in love with the blonde cellist.

When those who were at the Rainbow that night gather to reminisce, the name of Terry Adams invariably finds its way into the conversation, accompanied by swooning gestures. It’s like the face you glimpse through the window of a bus and never forget.

Along with Nate Rubin and Tim Kovatch (violins) and Nancy Ellis (viola), she was a member of the Oakland Symphony Orchestra. Forty years later she is still active in the Bay Area, playing in  musicals in San Francisco theatres and performing with the recording orchestra at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch film studio. She also runs something called the Nob Hill String Ensemble: “Whatever you’re planning — a wedding and reception, private party, or company convention — Terry will work with you personally to help create a mix of elegant classical, light-classical and popular music to help brighten your special event.” When Morrison put together the band to play Astral Weeks live in 2009, she and Nancy Ellis were recalled; they can be heard on the album recorded at the Hollywood Bowl concert.

That warm July night in 1973, anyway, Teressa “Terry” Adams took her place in rock and roll history. In the clip, you’ll see her responding to Van’s introduction with a smile that some of us swear we can still see hanging in the sky above Finsbury Park.

http://youtu.be/xeCV8LsrR5o

Apr 11

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Session man

Hugh McCracken

Hugh McCracken, the great New York session guitarist who contributed to recordings by Paul Simon, Steely Dan, Laura Nyro, Aretha Franklin, the Monkees and countless others, including all four Beatles, died on March 28, aged 70. Most of the obituaries, including this one in the New York Times, carried the anecdote about John Lennon meeting McCracken for the first time at the “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” session in October 1971 and, on learning that he’d played on Paul McCartney’s Ram earlier that year, telling him: “You know that was just an audition to get to play with me.”

The quote came directly from an interview with McCracken himself, but he didn’t get it exactly right. What happened that evening at the Record Plant was that Lennon was introduced to the group of guitarists who, playing acoustic instruments, were going to lay down the basic track for the song, according to the formula required by Phil Spector. All but one of them were young and inexperienced.

He asked them for their names. “Chris.” “Stu.” “Teddy.” “Hugh.” Lennon turned to Yoko Ono and said, “Hey, Yoko, doesn’t Hugh look just like Ivan?” Yoko didn’t respond. “Hugh, you look just like a mate of mine from school. A cross between him and Paul.”

He was referring to Ivan Vaughan, the friend who played bass guitar with the Quarrymen and introduced Lennon to McCartney at Woolton village fete that famous July day in 1957. Vaughan had known Lennon since childhood and had gone to school with McCartney, with whom he shared a birthdate. He studied classics at university, became a teacher, and was later engaged by the Beatles to develop an education project on Apple’s behalf. He was diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson’s disease in 1977 and died in 1993.

A little later, during a break, someone told Lennon about McCracken’s impressive record as a session man, including his contribution to McCartney’s second solo album a few months earlier.

“Oh,” Lennon responded. “So you were just auditioning on Ram, were you?”

If you think I’m splitting hairs here, you’re probably correct. But we might as well get the verbatim right for posterity’s benefit, if there’s going to be a posterity.

McCracken was a first-choice session man who could nevertheless often be found playing the less glamorous rhythm parts behind guitarists with bigger reputations. But if I had to pick a highlight from his career in the studio, it would probably be Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen”, a track from Gaucho (1980), to which he contributes a startling intro and a discreet but beautifully shaped short solo.

* The photograph of McCracken is taken from http://www.jimmyvivino.com — the website of the guitarist who leads the house band on Conan O’Brien’s late-night chat show on TBS, the US cable channel.

Apr 5

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Double exposure

Television 1By the time Brian Eno and I pitched up in New York to make a set of demos with Television in mid-December 1974, Richard Hell was on his way out of the band. I didn’t know that at the time, although it was apparent from his demeanour that he was already somewhat semi-detached from the other three. And perhaps I should have recognised the significance of the fact that none of the five songs we recorded during a three-day stay was written by Richard. They were all the work of Tom Verlaine, which meant no room for “Blank Generation” or “Love Comes in Spurts”, two of the Hell-composed songs that had been performed when I saw the band a couple of months earlier and would become, after Richard had moved on to the Heartbreakers and the Voidoids, anthems of the New Wave.

I suppose that if anyone is entitled to boast of having invented the punk movement of the late 1970s, it’s him. And he does make that claim, quietly but firmly, at various points throughout his new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp. Published in the US by Ecco, it tells the story of his life from his birth in 1949 up to the point at which he abandoned his career in music, in 1984. Since then Richard has become a novelist (Go Now, Hot and Cold, Godlike, etc), so he knows how to write and his book is an entertaining, informative and mostly unvarnished — although inevitably subjective — story of sex and drugs, garnished with a little rock and roll. Set mostly in the streets of the Lower East Side, its cast of characters includes Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Dee Dee Ramone, the poet-turned-agent Andrew Wylie, Malcolm McLaren, Seymour Stein, a number of drug dealers and many girlfriends, including the wife of the artist Claes Oldenburg, immortalised in a picture caption that sums up the book’s tone: “At the beginning, she was just a funny rich chick who liked my company and took good care of me and loved having sex.” And, of course, Tom Verlaine, with whom Richard ran away from school in Delaware (they were called Tom Miller and Richard Meyer then) and with whom he was reunited as they created their new identities in New York City in the late Sixties.

No band can exist for long with two leaders, which is how Television started. Especially not when their ambitions are so divergent, as Hell’s and Verlaine’s became. Both were poets, and they collaborated happily on a small poetry magazine during their early years in New York, but only one of them was really interested in music per se. When I talked to Verlaine, our conversations ranged from Booker T and the MGs (later he sent me a copy of their rare Christmas album that he’d found, still shrink-wrapped, in a Chicago thrift shop) to Eric Dolphy and Booker Little, and the way he played and wanted the band to sound reflected his obsessions. Hell was far more interested in what music could achieve on a social plane: not just as a way of getting girls into bed, although that was clearly the priority, but as a vehicle for what became the DIY philosophy of punk. His dandyish deployment of ripped and safety-pinned clothes and his spiky hair certainly made him a pioneer, and there is a certain disdain in his attitude to the way the English new wave appropriated his notions (although he admired McLaren and approved of the Sex Pistols). Not that Verlaine was unaware of the aesthetic dimension: no one ever brought the fugitive-poet look to rock and roll more effectively.

It was in 1972 that Verlaine found a second-hand Danelectro bass guitar for $50 and told Hell that he could teach him enough technique for the kind of music they were going to make together with a drummer, Billy Ficca, in a trio calling itself the Neon Boys. Verlaine himself was on his way to become an expert and highly original guitarist, and a couple of years later he found a fourth member, Richard Lloyd, to help him create the intricate two-guitar filigree that was in his head. Now they were called Television, a name chosen by Hell and approved by Verlaine (“Much later I noticed that ‘TV’ was his initials,” Hell notes drily).

Television 3That was the line-up when I was taken by my friends Richard and Lisa Robinson to see them at the Truck and Warehouse Theatre on East 4th Street (now the home of the New York Theatre Workshop) in October 1974. The newly formed Blondie opened the show, replacing the Ramones at short notice and performing a set that, beyond Debbie’s looks, betrayed little of their potential. Television’s set was tense, sometimes rickety, but spellbinding even when a song like the never-recorded ballad “Bluebirds” threatened to fall apart. The one that really made an impact had an unforgettable chorus: “I fell… (Did you feel low?) Not at all.. (Huh?) I fell… right into the arms… of Venus de Milo.” And Verlaine’s stage presence, with its sense of suppressed anguish, was as compelling as his laconic, sidelong delivery. Hell sang “Blank Generation” and “Love Comes in Spurts”, but I’m afraid he and his songs didn’t make much of an impression. I took away a poster for the band’s forthcoming appearances at Club 82, Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, with approving quotes from from David Bowie, Nick Ray, Lenny Kaye and Patti Smith, plus a list of the 30-odd songs in their repertoire scribbled by Hell in ballpoint pen on the reverse side.

I was running the A&R department at Island Records in London then, and looking for something new, preferably something that wasn’t wearing denim, and when I got home I made arrangements to return as soon as possible and make demos with Television. They were keen, and no other company was interested at the time. I contacted Eno, who readily agreed to help out at the sessions; his presence, I felt, might help to influence my bosses at Island, and he might even get his management company, EG, interested in taking them on.

The studio we used, Good Vibrations at 1440 Broadway, a 25-story office building a block down from Times Square, was not an obvious choice. I booked it because I’d been doing some work with Fania Records, the salsa label, whose records Island released in the UK, and that was where they recorded Ray Barretto, Johnny Pacheco and the rest of their stable, so I’d get a good rate and the use of an experienced engineer, Jon Fausty. And it was only going to be a demo session, so we didn’t really need Electric Lady or the Record Plant.

The five tracks we recorded over the course of two days, and mixed down on the third, have been endlessly bootlegged, often with inaccurate information attached. The tracks were “Prove It”, “Venus de Milo”, “Marquee Moon”, “Friction” and “Double Exposure” — the last of those being the only one that didn’t make it on to their debut album when they finally signed with Elektra two years later. The piano on “Marquee Moon” was played by Tom. Eno played no keyboards and did not sing on the tracks. And the location was not “Fairland Studios, Hollywood”.

Tom didn’t like the way things turned out, and later he blamed Eno. “The whole thing sounded like the Ventures,” he told Viv Goldman in a Sounds interview. “It sounded so bad. I kept on saying, why does it sound so bad? And he’d say, ‘Whaddya mean? It sounds pretty good to me.'” Tom might equally have blamed me or Fausty, but he and Eno didn’t get on, although there was no overt falling out. That still seems a shame. I didn’t realise at the time what a perfectionist Tom was, and that he wanted perfection even on his demos. But did we make those songs sound like the Ventures? I don’t think so. If you know the bootlegs, you judge.

Anyway, I took the tapes home with me and played them to my bosses, crossing my fingers that they’d get the point. Sadly, no one else was greatly impressed, and at the time Island’s success as a small independent label was based on the whole company getting enthusiastic about an artist or a band. In retrospect it would have been good to try and bring them to London, so that people could see them, but it might have been a year or two too early even for that. Tom was disappointed, I was disappointed, and gradually we lost touch. Before long he had squeezed Hell out of the band — they were also divided by their attitude to heroin — and brought in Fred Smith to play bass on their debut single, “Little Johnny Jewel”, released on a label set up by their manager/chief fan Terry Ork, and eventually on Marquee Moon, which deservedly became a classic.

Hell and Verlaine didn’t speak for a long time. “Tom was highly protected, well defended,” Richard writes in a shrewd but hardly impartial assessment of his erstwhile partner’s temperament. “There are good things and bad things about that. It gave him a certain kind of integrity — he wasn’t going to be blown around by fashion, he was discreet and reliable, but it made him really difficult to work with or be friends with. He was afraid of infection and robbery, so he lived in this high, remote, walled-in place, which enabled him to look down on everybody else… I respected his abilities and valued his friendship, but his coldness and egotism came more and more to the fore as he began to get more public attention. He was a lot easier to get along with before strangers started admiring him.”

Maybe Hell saw me as one of those strangers. I didn’t keep up with him because his side of the new wave didn’t interest me greatly, but I listen to everything Verlaine does in order to see if he’s still trying to get closer to the ideal version of what Hell calls his “crystal-clear crisp sweet-guitar suites”. In my view he came nearest to such perfection in Television’s 1992 reunion album, in great songs such as “Shane, She Wrote This”, “1880 or So”, “No Glamour for Willi” and “Call Mr Lee”. So here’s the promo video for “Call Mr Lee”, with wonderful lead work from Richard Lloyd:

and a TV performance of “1880 Or So”:

and, on the basis of equal time, here’s Hell with the Voidoids (including Robert Quine on guitar) in 1979 doing one of his contributions to the  early Television repertoire, “Love Comes in Spurts”:

Finally, here’s “Blank Generation”, also filmed at CBGBs the same year, making me think that it’s a pretty good song, after all:

http://youtu.be/alR3OBBMPKs

Apr 3

9 Comments

The Memphis blues, again

boz scaggs

A new Boz Scaggs album is always a welcome arrival in this quarter. Whether it’s a collection of R&B warhorses, a set of jazz standards or — best of all — a clutch of new original songs, there’s a better than even chance that it will throw up an enduring personal favourite like “Loan Me a Dime” (from the first solo album he  made after leaving the Steve Miller Band in 1969), “Runnin’ Blue” (from 1971’s Boz Scaggs and Band), “We Were Always Sweethearts” and “Near You” (Moments, also 1971), “Breakdown Dead Ahead” (Middle Man, 1980), the sublime “Sierra” (Some Change, 1994), “Ask Me ‘Bout Nothin’ (But the Blues)” (Come On Home, 1997), and “King of El Paso” and “Thanks to You” (Dig, 2001).

I’ve interviewed him a couple of times, first in 1971, when he was spending time in London (and played a memorable gig at the old Country Club on Haverstock Hill with the fine band from his second album), and then in 1994, on a plane from San Francisco to Los Angeles, when Some Change had just come out, ending a long silence caused by his decision to stay at his Bay Area home in order to be close to his growing sons, following the end of his first marriage. I liked him a lot. He seemed to be a man who had the whole thing in perspective. By pacing his career carefully and not getting too carried away when “Lowdown” and “Lido Shuffle” turned him into a white-suited pop star in the late 1970s, and by holding on to his enthusiasm for music, he’s managed to maintain a consistency so impressive that there’s virtually no one of his generation whose releases I look forward to more, even though I know they’re not going to be pushing back any boundaries.

The new one is called Memphis, because that’s where it was recorded. In Willie Mitchell’s Royal Recording Studios, in fact, with a basic band of Scaggs himself and Ray Parker Jr on guitars, Willie Weeks on bass and Steve Jordan on drums, plus guests including Charles Hodges on organ, Spooner Oldham on various keyboards, Keb’ Mo’ and Eddie Willis on guitars, Charlie Musselwhite on harmonica, the crack horn section of Ben Cauley (trumpet), Jack Hale (trombone), Lannie McMillan (tenor) and Jim Horn (baritone), and a small string section arranged by Mitchell and Lester Snell.

Many of the songs will be familiar to fans of rock ‘n’ soul, among them Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia”, the Moments’ “Love on a Two Way Street”, Tyrone Davis’s “Can I Change My Mind”, Jimmy Reed’s ‘You Got Me Cryin'”, Al Green’s “So Good to Be Here” and — the biggest surprise — Steely Dan’s “Pearl of the Quarter”. They’re done in the way you’d expect from Boz, which is to say with taste and finesse and respect. Too much of all those qualities for some people, probably, but it doesn’t bother me, although I’m not as bowled over by his gentle version of “Corrina, Corrina” as others seem to be: I’m happy to stick with the reading of this lovely song included 50 years ago in The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. “Rainy Night in Georgia”, “Can I Change My Mind” and Moon Martin’s “Cadillac Walk” are also a little on the underwhelming side. An immaculately sharp treatment of Willy DeVille’s “Mixed Up, Shook Up Girl” (nothing to do with Patty and the Emblems’ girl-group classic of the same name) is the track I’m going to take away from this album, along with the opener, a slinky Scaggs original called “Gone Baby Gone” in which he taps into the real Memphis vibe. And that’ll do for me.

Mar 22

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The home of the hits

RW & Ornette

Since everybody else seems to have shared their memories of Television Centre, the home of most of the BBC’s visual output for the past half-century, which the corporation finally abandoned to the developers today, I might as well join in. It was from that distinctive building in Shepherds Bush that the first series of The Old Grey Whistle Test, which I presented, was broadcast live on Tuesday nights in 1971-72, and here is a photograph (by Robert Ellis) of Ornette Coleman being interviewed by me on the programme in 1972.

Ornette was not your typical OGWT guest. He was in London to record his symphonic work, Skies of America, at Abbey Road with the LSO, and I had to plead a bit with the producer, Mike Appleton, to get him on the show. It was one of my happiest moments of the series, along with the appearances of Curtis Mayfield and John Martyn, and the night Dr John came into the studio and, in the guise of Mac Rebennack, sat down at an upright piano and spent a mesmerising 10 minutes working his way through the history of New Orleans keyboard styles. And who would not have cherished the night Captain Beefheart arrived to present his paintings to the world? They were strikingly excellent, and gave an indication of the direction he would take when he re-adopted the identity of Don Van Vliet a few years later.

A lot of the series wasn’t so much fun for me, particularly some of interviews (notably those with a near-psychotic Jerry Lee Lewis, a sneery Mick Jagger and a sarky Randy Newman — each one no doubt a justified response to my indifferent interrogational technique). That’s why I called it quits at the end of the first series and returned to the typewriter. I thought the programme needed someone more extrovert to front it. Mike, however, chose to hand the baton to Whispering Bob, who was even quieter than me. It wasn’t for a couple of decades that Jools Holland and his producer Mark Cooper came along with Later, which in its early days was almost exactly the kind of programme I’d have liked the OGWT to be: musicians playing live, without many restrictions.

That first series was broadcast from a studio called Presentation B, which measured 32ft by 22ft and had been designed for reading the news. Somehow bands managed to crowd into it, along with a couple of big old 1950s-style cameras, while the production staff occupied a control room the size of a phone box. And Curtis Mayfield’s wonderful band turned their amps all the way down to 1 but managed to make their short set sound and feel like the best gig happening anywhere in the world that night.

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