Queen Unseen (10 page)

‘Yes, madam, how observant of you,’ was my clipped reply.

‘Oh, well, I guess you don’t know too much about this stuff.’

We then drove straight back to the test centre and she passed me with 80 points!

If I’d failed, I could have just joined the back of the queue, paid the $30 and tried again.

I then had my mandatory mug-shot photo taken, but, as the machine only took a single shot of you, I had just one chance of looking like a criminal, moron, child molester or grinning buffoon. I went for the look that incorporated all four, with a touch of Keith Richards on a bad day thrown in. The finished photo had the startled look of somebody who has just woken up in LA, thinking the rigours of the night before has made them feel wobbly on their feet – when in fact it was just another minor tremor – an earthquake! Something I experienced on a few occasions, but I was never sure which was which.

LA is home to many Rock Beasts: women who savour rock 
’n’ roll and the lure of its attendant trappings. These girls held the records for squeezing the most flesh into the least amount of spandex, the biggest back-combed hairstyles, the most nasal accents and the supreme honour of fitting more sequins and studs per square inch on black leather or vinyl than anybody in the known world. The Rock Beast held a craving for drugs, specifically the soporific types such as Quaaludes, that gave them their permanent grin and
rubber-limbed
movements. The den of the Beast tended to be a scruffy apartment in West Hollywood where the large refrigerators in their kitchens would be covered with ‘scalps’: stick-on backstage passes from every band that had ever been through town. They were indeed very social animals and by remarkable coincidence knew all my friends who worked for other bands.

I once met such a girl in The Rainbow, called Bamm-Bamm. Her nickname was apparently derived from the baby in
The Flintstones
cartoon show, but I had heard it as ‘bang bang’, which seemed pretty accurate to me. We had spent some
quality
time together and one bright, late morning she asked me to drop her off at work. After staggering into the rental car, we screeched out of the underground parking lot like they do on TV cop shows, and she instructed me to drive west on Sunset towards Beverly Hills and Bel Air. As we entered an exclusively wealthy area, she asked me to pull over left into the next driveway. I stopped the car in front of a pair of imposing metal gates and was told to lean out of the window and talk into the rock? I looked over and saw a piece of fake stone with a small pattern of holes in it. Talk into a rock? What would I say? What’s the protocol for conversation with
bits of geology? However, I didn’t need to speak, as we had already been spotted by the cameras mounted on the entrance and a voice crackled through the rock politely asking how they could help. Bamm-Bamm leaned over me and shouted into the rock who she was and who she had come to see. The gates magically opened and I was then instructed to drive slowly up the drive to the front of the house and not to leave my vehicle. I asked her what this was all about and she casually told me that this was Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion! She got out and disappeared through a large wooden door of the mock castle. If doors could talk… I was spellbound. Instructed by the men in black with
walkie-talkies
to keep driving, I followed the route down the other side of the estate, and soon I was driving out of another set of automatic gates and back on to the street. I was a bit taken aback – I had just been in the legendary domain of Playboy parties and felt as if I had just been to a drive-thru McDonald’s. I don’t know what Bamm-Bamm did at the mansion, and I never asked, but I presume she had not been invited for her flower-arranging skills.

Beverly Hills, Sunset, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Laurel Canyon, Venice Beach: LA place names sounded glamorous to an English boy more used to Factory Road or Abattoir Avenue. One exotic street name was Cahuenga, which was apparently the name of an American Indian princess. Cahuenga was the location of one of the many film and TV facilities that were available in Tinsel Town, and Queen were booked into one of the large sound stages to do rehearsals for the summer 1980
Game
tour. On the adjacent stage to us, a car photographer was shooting pick-up truck ads. During
one rehearsal break, I walked out of our sound stage into the Californian sunshine – BANG! Something hit me in the head and I went down. Had I been shot? This was America…

Dazed and spinning, I looked up to see the car photographer and his team leaning over me, showing great concern – I had been floored by a frisbee! My eye was already swelling and changing colour as I went back to our stage to sit down. ‘Here, man, take a few hits on this,’ said Doug the photographer. ‘It should chill you out.’

I was offered a ‘Brain Dart’ – a small joint of Californian grass. This stuff took my head off and I had to go and sleep off the combined shock experiences inside Roger’s
foam-lined
gong case, before later trying to convince Queen that I had got the injury during a fight, rather than from a plastic flying saucer. Despite bending my face and my mind, Doug and I became firm friends and still remain so today.

When in LA it was not unusual to see other stars: Henry The Fonz Winkler, apparently a big fan of Queen, stood quietly in awe at the back wall of a sound stage watching the band rehearse, and The Rainbow Bar & Grill was always good for spotting rock people.

Stevie Nicks was stumbling around The Rainbow one evening, when Crystal called her over: ‘Hey, Stevie, you owe me $19.95.’

She came over to the booth, waving her arms and dumped herself down. She sprawled over us drawling: ‘Whaaaaat?’

Crystal replied, ‘I bought your last Fleetwood Mac live album – and it’s crap. Give us me money back!’

John Belushi was spotted there the evening he sadly died, and comedy actor Robin Williams also frequented The Rainbow in his wilder days.

Somewhere at the end of the rainbow is a crock of gold. But in LA it was usually a crock of shit. Los Angeles can really eat people up and spit them out without compassion or prejudice. This city is the fountain of youth – if you can afford it. The obsession with looking young can be aided by extreme exercise, dedication and behaviour that excludes any alcohol, tobacco, drugs and enjoyable food. It seems ridiculous to me that you make all these sacrifices, and yet still breathe the stifling, filthy, polluted air. No amount of colonic irrigation, crystal aura therapy, shiatsu, rebirthing analysis, acupuncture, rune reading or flotation tanks are enough to counter that. However, I understand you can have your birth sign legally changed by deed poll if your planets are not harmoniously aligned.

A very common LA way of retaining youth is via the chequebook and specialist doctors. Plastic surgery and remodelling is popular with residents of all ages, and it usually shows. There is a theory that all the plastic surgeons in southern California get together and pool all the bits they have chopped, snipped or lipo-sucked. From this cornucopia of fat, flesh and tissue, they then allegedly construct the faces of the hosts for daytime TV quiz shows. And for the rejects cable TV shopping channel presenters. Allegedly.

If you survive LA’s smog and medical bills, there is still the small matter of being shot, mugged, raped, knifed, robbed or sued to contend with. Sued is probably the worst, and the most common. Or counter-sued.

California is very strict on drink driving, and commendably so, as Queen’s upper-class English lawyer found out. Returning from one of the South America tours to Los Angeles for business, he was stopped in his convertible rental car on his way home one night in Hollywood, though he hadn’t had a drink. The legal eagle was not eagle-eyed but naturally slightly cross-eyed. To make matters worse, he had recently picked up an eye infection. The cops pulled him over and did their standard talk but the state of his eyes convinced them he must be over the limit. Then they hauled him out of the car and took him to jail, not buying his pompous explanation of: ‘Don’t you realise I have Venezuelan conjunctivitis!’ Whatever his condition was, he no doubt found a night among the dregs of society a sobering experience. Just like public school – allegedly.

Rock shows in LA are an exercise in circus.
The
place to play was The ‘Fabulous Forum’ – the LA Forum, a huge indoor arena and home of the LA Lakers basketball and the Kings ice hockey teams, located in Inglewood, about
half-
an-hour
drive south of Hollywood. The capacity was around 18,000 and most of them were on the guest list. If you played a three-night residency, probably only two of the concert’s tickets were actually paid for. OK – I’m exaggerating – two and a half. On the 1980
Game
tour, Queen played an unprecedented four nights at the venue – and could have sold more. The after-show parties were upstairs at the Forum Club and packed with major and minor celebrities, plus assorted pretenders, hangers-on and poseurs – a normal night out in LA.

I was approached by an allegedly important middle-aged 
woman who was full-on Californian – to the power of 10. She quizzed me: ‘HI! You work on stage with the band – right?’

‘Yeah, something like that.’

‘I just
love
the way you interact with Freddie, the understanding and synchronicity you guys have together is perfect – truly wonderful. Beautiful.’

Had she been at the Crystallised Embalming Fluid? Did she mean me hiding behind speaker cabinets or crouching below the piano until it was time to hand or receive Fred’s microphone on a stick? She then went on to enthuse about the lights, and how they were: ‘
So
eighties.’

It was 1980.

LA is serious about its bullshit and I believe you can now major in it at college.

During one of these LA ‘pose shows’, we put firecrackers into a massive glass bowl of hot chilli dip that had large shrimp creatively arranged around the rim. After ignition, we beat a hasty retreat back to Hollywood as the mini explosions had redecorated the surrounding area. Little did we realise at the time that we had invented a new LA art form – Performance Catering.

I got my 15 seconds of fame in the very same Forum when Fred spontaneously and embarrassingly introduced me to the audience during the song change to ‘Crazy Little Thing’. After putting his guitar on him, I was tightening his mike which had slipped on its stand, in the full glare of a dozen or more spotlights.

To keep continuity with the audience during this unscheduled pause, Fred announced, ‘This is Ratty. His real name is Peter Hince and he has been with me for years – 
allow me to introduce you all to him. Come on – take a bow, dear.’

I scuttled off stage as quick as possible but was followed to my hiding place and illuminated by all the roving spotlights. I was suffering serious stage fright as Fred continued: ‘He’s not looking so good this evening – you haven’t washed your hair have you, dear?’

‘Just get on with the song, Fred.’ Thankfully he did.

‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was the only song in which Fred played guitar on stage – a 12-string Ovation acoustic – which was one of Brian’s back-up instruments. He had been persuaded by the rest of Queen and me to play guitar on stage after the song was released in 1979 – as it would add yet another dimension to the show, and give him another prop with which to communicate with the audience. However, Fred posing with an acoustic guitar never really cut it –macho guitar hero poses and the like required a different type of guitar.

So I said to him one day, ‘Fred – you look a bit poofy playing that acoustic guitar – it doesn’t work.’

‘Do you really think so, dear?’

‘Yeah – you do look poofy posing with the acoustic.’

‘Well, we can’t have that!’

‘No – so what about playing a Fender Telecaster, like Brian does in the solo during the song. The feel of the song is very ’50s – the era of the Telecaster. Brian plays a black one – and I know how much you like using white on stage – I’ll get you a white Telecaster.’

Fred nodded positively and pronounced: ‘Very good – arrange it then for me, Ratty.’

So I did. I bought a very nice maple-neck white Telecaster in New York, which he tried on the ’82
Hot Space
tour, but he didn’t get on with it – he said it felt far too heavy. It was a remarkably heavy-bodied Telecaster, more like a Les Paul in weight, so after a few tries we went back to the acoustic.

When we got back to London, I called the UK Fender office and they invited me to their warehouse where I inspected every white Telecaster guitar on the rows and rows of industrial grey shelving, until I found the lightest one. It was remarkable how they varied and the one I chose was only fractionally heavier than a large acoustic. Unfortunately, it was not a
great-sounding
guitar and the intonation and harmonics were poor – but it was light! I chose the string gauges as Fred, despite only using his fingers and never a guitar pick, could break strings with the force he played. He played with this guitar from
The Works
tour for every Queen show. The heavy guitar was kept as back-up…

In LA, we all needed some recreational back-up, and a haven of sanity from ‘loonyville’ was Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood, a down-to-earth bar and restaurant famous for its selection of world beers, homemade chilli and for featuring in
Colombo
, the TV detective show, where the dishevelled sleuth (rather like a roadie) would eat his beloved chilli dish in one of the booths. The management at Barney’s had produced a T-shirt that had printed on the front: ‘The Original Barney’s Beanery’ and on the back: ‘Faggots Stay Out Of Hollywood’. I wore one as a bet in the dressing-room area at a 1976 LA show at The Santa Monica Civic, as all the ‘luvvies’ minced about. It certainly got a reaction… Even the 
matchbooks at Barney’s were printed with ‘Faggots Stay Out’. It was a very different era.

Los Angeles is a magnet for all of the alternative lifestyles and religious cults. Some never made it out of the airport.