Dispatches From a Dilettante (21 page)

How many people reading this can say that they have fun every day at work, that they buy into the ethos of the organisation they work for, that their ideas are listened to no matter what their position in the hierarchy is, that every day brings real challenge, that more is expected of them in a positive way than they thought they could ever achieve, and that they work in a flat organisation with a vibrant and diverse workforce? Suddenly thirteen years had flown by and I, formerly a drifting, angry and energetic outsider, believed all those things about what had by stealth, undergone a metamorphosis, and become a career. It was perfectly clear to me that there was now only one course of action, and that was to retire as soon as possible while it was all going well.

15.
ROCK AND ROLL - BOSTON 1972

In any sphere of life it is rare to see someone just before they achieve indisputable legendary status. My abiding love of music was fully kick started in Ilkley. On a Sunday night there in March 1967 I saw Jimi Hendrix at the Troutbeck Hotel. Not only did I see him but we sat chatting for twenty minutes which was the first conversation I’d ever had with a black American.

Prior to this my first brush with live music was the memorable evening I snuck into the Leeds Mecca to see Edwin Starr when I was fifteen. We were so naive that we started cheering when a black guy came onstage who we assumed must be him. It turned out to be the drummer in Edwin Starr’s band who sang a few numbers to warm the crowd up.

At home we had a university student as a lodger. Fortuitously, he was not into music or drinking and so gave me his student union card on Saturday nights. This enabled me to get into gigs at Leeds University. I often tell people that I saw The Who at Leeds and they assume that it was when the famous ‘Live at Leeds’ was recorded. Sadly it was two months before that performance and I watched three members of the band mooch disconsolately around the stage waiting for Pete Townsend, who never showed, before sloping out and catching the bus home.

Cream regularly played at Leeds. On one occasion Ginger Baker pulled up in front of the queue by the Union building and scrunched his Rover to a halt on the gravel, before abandoning it and sauntering in. A flunkie appeared from nowhere to park it properly. The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band were unforgettably good there, which is why I would still travel miles to see Neil Innes.

Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band were touring at this time and I failed to get into three of their gigs. Owen Gray and the Groovies were the first reggae band I saw way before Bob Marley softened his sound for the white middle classes.

In 1967 though, nothing could compare to that night in Ilkley. I had gone with a friend of mine and his girlfriend and we drove from Leeds in my mother’s Morris Minor. The conservative and respectable Troutbeck Hotel, which exists today as a nursing home, rented out a downstairs room named the Gyro Club, which is where Hendrix played. He had only been in London a few weeks and their manager Chas Chandler had sent the band on a northern tour to hone their act. They got paid just sixty pounds for their Ilkley gig. We knew none of this at the time but had heard ‘Hey Joe’ on constant radio rotation for the last couple of weeks and would have walked to Ilkley to see him. The result was, having been booked as a complete unknown, two weeks of radio play had attracted a big crowd and there was quite a bit of ‘push and shove’ to get in.

The place was heaving and I do remember being slightly uneasy in the crush. On the plus side I was right at the front when Hendrix came on. I don’t remember them being introduced but the shock of seeing and hearing The Jimi Hendrix Experience was instant and memorable. It may not actually be a perfect memory because, on doing a little research on t’internet, some say the first number was ‘Killing Floor’ although I recall ‘Foxy Lady’. What I am crystal clear about, as I was stone cold sober having been unable to get to the bar in the crush and never having smoked a joint at this point of my life, is what happened during ‘Stone Free’ - his second number.

Already there was an atmosphere in the packed tiny club that, even now, is hard to explain. I knew I was experiencing something exotic and special and I knew that music had never affected me in the way this was doing. It was too loud and visceral to indulge in introspection but then suddenly it ended in mid song. The sound died and then a solitary policeman, still with his hat on, got up onto the stage.

“Boys and Girls” he began to hoots of derision which I joined in with, mainly because I was there illegally as a seventeen year old. Compounding his error he continued to say that the concert, as he called it, “would have to be abandoned for the safety of all involved”. What happened next has been described as a riot but was far from that. Somebody mentioned that the first out would be allowed back in until the fire limit numbers had been reached and then Hendrix would start again. That ridiculous rumour caused a stamped for the exits and as people rushed along the carpeted corridors pictures got knocked off walls and some damage done.

I had long since lost sight of my friends and was in a tight throng forcing their way along a corridor to the exits. Pushed against a half open door I was a thrown into a room which contained Jimi Hendrix, a couple of fans and, I think Noel Redding his bass player – although I would not have known his name at the time.

In March 1967 I had just resigned from my first proper, and terminally, boring job as an insurance clerk and now sitting three feet away and chatting with me was quite possibly the coolest human being on the planet. It would be lovely to report that there was an instant and empathetic bonding and that we went on to be lifelong friends, but although that didn’t happen it is worth repeating the only meaningful conversation I had with the world’s greatest guitar player.

Nervously I said “Are you going to play again later?” I do remember him smiling and politely replying “ Yeah man…we’re going to try and do two shows so everyone can get in”. That is, word for word, exactly what James Marshall Hendrix said to me on the 12
^th
March 1967. How you might ask could I be so certain that those were his exact words, when I have a different view, as to his first number he played on stage, than others who were there. I am one hundred per cent certain because in my seventeen years and seven months of existence no one had ever called me ‘man’ and it felt great.

So great in fact that for the further fifteen minutes that I was in his presence I sat in awe filled silence and observed the small talk before he, and his modest entourage, left. Self evidently there was never going to be another show and after milling around outside for a while, and reconnecting with my friends, we drove home secure in the knowledge that we were cool. Years later for my fortieth birthday a friend gave me a surprise present. It was a T-Shirt with the words ‘I saw Jimi Hendrix live in Ilkley’ on the front. On the back it said ‘Honest!’

Newspaper headlines reported it in the lingua franca of the day. The Yorkshire Post ran with ‘700 uproar at beat club as police stop the show’. It is always reassuring to see that the fourth estate were as cavalier with the facts then, as they are now. The Club held two hundred and fifty legally, and probably had in four to five hundred at the very most that evening - and I never saw more than one policeman. The Yorkshire Evening Post breathlessly reported ‘Fans of Jimi Hendrix, the American pop star who’s gimmick is to play the guitar with his teeth, last night caused a riot in an Ilkley hotel’. That was another plus for me when recounting the evening to friends. A riot was something that didn’t happen in Ilkley, and the fact that it never happened that night didn’t detract from the story. If the Yorkshire Evening Post said it was a riot then it was fine by me and I was proud to have played a part in it.

Woodstock was a different kettle of fish altogether. It was scarcely believable, after my seminal rock experience in Ilkley, to see the great man play the definitive version of the American national anthem at Woodstock. Tragically I was watching it on DVD forty years later but I was at the festival in 1969. Or to be strictly accurate I was on the outer reaches of the outer reaches of the farm grounds in upstate New York. In the days before video screens I might have well have been in Manhattan for all I could actually see or hear. If you have got this far you may recall my fabulous soccer skills thrilling crowds in the Catskills during the summer of sixty nine. That took place quite near to where Woodstock happened which actually was at a place called White Lake. Late in the day residents of Walkhill which was the planned venue, had wisely forced the promoters to go further afield which they did in every sense - to Max Yasgur’s farm.

If you’ve seen the film you’ll know that somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million people trekked to the festival, forcing the site to be declared a disaster area. It rained heavily and although there was a lot of peace and free love around none of it reached the small group I was with, who were soaked and grumpy. The crowds thrilled to the likes of Santana, Crosby Stills and Nash, The Who, Richie Havens and Joe Cocker but we missed them all. The only musical recollection that I have is being told that the muzzy sound emanating from the stage about half a mile away was Ten Years After. We beat a retreat through the sludge, pausing only momentarily to gawp at three naked men too stoned to stand up straight.

By the time I landed in Boston in 1972 these musical experiences had been parked in some dark and dusty recess of my brain, because the most pressing issue was to get somewhere to stay and then a means of supporting myself. After several false starts and a great deal of pounding the streets I eventually got floor space in a house in Cambridge across the river.

It was a half hippy squat where two of the seven inhabitants had work. Dan, the younger of two brothers living there, was one of them. It was a rather loose interpretation of the word ‘work’ as it involved Dan leaving the house at about mid day and returning at two in the morning with his pupils dilated and slurring incoherently. One morning before departure he expanded on the nature of this ‘work’. He also let me know that there were vacancies which meant that I too could come home slurring and incoherent if I so desired. Only he didn’t quite put it like that.

Don Law was, and still is, a music impresario in the Boston area. In 1972 he used to promote rock concerts at the Orpheum Theatre. Things were going so well there that one of his minions took on casual labour for sell out concerts, of which there were plenty. I was just two joints away from being in the rock music business. That is how long it took Dan to finish telling me about his ‘work’ and offering to take me along to see if I would be allowed to mix with rock music’s elite.

It was a brutally cold day and we were glad to get inside the empty and quite dark theatre. It was just after noon and roadies were wheeling in the (quite modest compared to today’s mega tour equipment) amps and the mixing desk was being positioned at the back of the ground floor. Oh the glamour of it all. I had quite forgotten to ask how much, if anything, I would be paid for my efforts because for the first time in my life I was, after the briefest of quizzings, given a backstage pass.

It was rather arty, even ostentatious compared to the functional plastic neck tags that you get at Glastonbury these days – not that I’ve ever had one. Made of green silk it bore the words ‘Savoy Brown – Orpheum Theatre – Backstage Pass’ and I kept it stuck inside my wallet for thirty two years until I was relieved of it and the wallet while strolling through Serrekunda market in The Gambia.

Dan then gave me a detailed description of what the job involved. His first task was usually to go to the backstage toilets and roll a fat one (joint not roadie). This he did and we shared it before wandering around with what we tried to convey as a sense of purpose. Try as I may I cannot recall the name of the opening band that night although they were English and there were a lot of them. Second on were ‘Malo’, who I was rather self importantly informed by one of their roadies, contained Carlos Santana’s brother. Rock Music, like any other business, has a hierarchy and even at the bottom there were gradations of importance and seniority among the roadies.

Dan and I were miles away from reaching up to anywhere near the bottom but were quite content to smoke joints, lift the occasional amplifier into place and listen to the music. Quite soon I had, like Dan, mastered the art of arriving just as the heavy lifting of amplifiers had been completed. This gave me time to have meaningful stoner conversations with all and sundry. Third on the bill, that first night, was Long John Baldry and his band. I was chatting to one of his roadies who informed me in a world weary and serious tone “It’s been hard man and we don’t finish for another week man. I’m going back to Philadelphia man. I met this chick there man and she really sorted my head out man. I’ve got to see her again man, it’s freaking me out here man.” Now when you have been called ‘Man’ by Jimi Hendrix in person, this affectation from a Brummie roadie cut no ice. I nodded empathetically while mentally noting that his ‘head’ would need a great deal more sorting out than the ‘chick’ would probably ever be able to offer him.

The headline act was Savoy Brown who I had seen at the British Embassy in London getting visas and at the Boston Tea Party weeks after Woodstock. In the lead up to the evening’s concert all I can remember about their road crew was that one of them would not move more than a foot away from Kin Simmonds’ guitars which he had been charged to look after. At about five o’clock the bands did a peremptory sound check on a very crowded stage. About the only time we did any real work was later in the evening when we quickly lugged equipment off stage after each act had finished.

We were dispatched to get food for the band as the roadies were left to fend for themselves. On subsequent evenings there were bands who, according to their (often self perceived) status, would have ridiculously self aggrandising ‘riders’ in their contracts about specific and exotic drinks, and on one occasion a Persian rug in the dressing room. However tonight’s lot had not, apart of course, from requesting copious amounts of wine and beer. Dan and I made it a religious duty to tour the empty dressing rooms as soon as the bands went on stage in order to top up with drinks. We usually weren’t hungry having pilfered as much of the hot food, often Chinese, as we could manage after collecting it earlier in the evening.