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Authors: Pamela Des Barres

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BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon
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March of ‘69 found Syd back in the studio due to the determination of Malcolm Jones, the youthful boss of EMI’s progressive Harvest label. Jones was ecstatic with the first session, in which Syd completed six guitar and vocal tracks. The drummer on
The Madcap Laughs
sessions was Jerry Shirley. “Syd had a terrible habit of looking at you and laughing in a way that made you feel really stupid,” he recalled. “He gave the impression he knew something you didn’t.” The sessions proved to be maddening and tedious for the musicians. Soft Machine were brought in for overdubs and soon realized the tracks they thought were rehearsal tapes were actually the final takes. Said Robert Wyatt, “We’d say, ‘What key is that in, Syd?’ and he would simply reply, ‘Yeah!’ or ‘That’s funny!’” David Gilmour, who always took a concerned interest in Syd’s life, came in to finish the record. (Guilt, perhaps?) But by the time the final session took place, Syd’s deterioration was blatant and shocking. Accompanied by the sound of his lyric pages being turned, Syd stops and starts, singing in an agonized, strangled voice. It hurts to listen to it.
Melody Maker
described
The Madcap Laughs
as “the mayhem and madness representing the Barrett mind unleashed.”
Record sales were respectable, which prompted Gilmour to produce Syd’s second album,
Barrett,
released in November 1970. Though Syd’s looming madness was laced with touches of former magic, especially on “Baby Lemonade” and “Gigolo Aunt,” the sessions were torture. Syd’s directions came out of faraway left field: “Perhaps we could make the middle darker and maybe the end a bit middle afternoonish,” he’d tell the confused musicians. “At the moment it’s too windy and icy.” The lyrics told of a desolate place where Syd was spending most of his time: “Cold iron hands clap the party of clowns outside,” and even more revealing, “Inside me I feel so alone and unreal.” The Madcap wept.
Syd was still surrounded by doting groupie girls, hangers-on, and drug dealers who haunted his London flat, soaking up the Piper’s sad/mad sheen. He continued to paint, locking himself in his room, slowly becoming even more reclusive and incommunicative. In the summer of 1970 Floyd’s Roger Waters saw Syd carrying two large bags in Harrods department store, but when Syd spotted Roger, he dropped the bags and ran crazily from the store. Curious, Roger peeked into the abandoned Harrods bags and found several pounds of candy.
Somehow Syd managed an on-again, off—again schizophrenic relationship with a Cambridge girl, Gayla Pinion, and when he tired of London’s mayhem, dragged her back to his mother’s house in Cambridge with promises of marriage. The release of his second solo album held no interest for Syd, who told friends that he was going back to school to become a doctor. Needless to say, the good Doctor Barrett never materialized.
During a celebratory family meal for Syd and Gayla’s engagement, Syd had a coughing fit at the table, disappeared upstairs, and came back with all of his hair chopped off. “No one batted an eyelid,” said Gayla. “They just carried on with the meal as if nothing had happened—didn’t say a word. I thought, Are they mad, or is it me?” The couple’s brief engagement was shattered by Syd’s increasing violent jealousy, and Gayla had to give up on life with the Madcap, leaving him alone in his mother’s cellar.
In 1971 another
Rolling Stone
writer and huge Barrett fan, Mick Rock, hunted Syd down, reporting that he looked “hollow-cheeked and pale … his eyes reflect a permanent state of shock. He has a ghostly beauty which one normally associates with the poets of old.” Syd told the reporter that he walked a lot, painted, wasted time, and feared getting old. He said that he felt “full of dust and guitars.”
Cajoled out of his musical exile by a drummer called Twink (formerly with the Pink Fairies), Syd gave some appalling performances with a band called “Stars” before crawling back to the comfort of his dark cellar-world. An attempt at a third solo album was a pathetic misfortune. As Pink Floyd found massive success, their founder thrashed around in his cellar, tearing himself and the place apart—an incident that landed him in the hospital once again. But back in the real world, a cult was forming around Syd Barrett. A publication called
The Terrapin,
sponsored by the “Syd Barrett Appreciation Society,” brought together Syd freaks from all over the world. Even the pop weeklies reported “Syd sightings.” One such sighting had him trying on three different sizes of trousers at a trendy boutique, announcing that they all fit him perfectly.
In the mid-seventies Syd moved back to London, where he spent the next eight years in two rooms at Chelsea Cloisters watching a TV suspended from the ceiling, drinking Guinness, and making constant treks to his refrigerator (fascinated with televisions, Syd once had half a dozen). Within a year the once-skinny pop star would weigh over two hundred pounds and shave himself bald—perhaps Syd’s way of remaining in exile.
Due to David Bowie’s cover of “See Emily Play” and the repackaging of Pink Floyd’s first two LPs, Syd had plenty of money and found assorted eccentric centric ways to rid himself of it. He bought things and threw them away, he bought things and
gave
them away—clothes, TVs, stereo equipment, guitars. He gave massive tips to porters and delivery people, inviting them in and offering more gifts, which they gladly carried away.
EMI repackaged
The Madcap Laughs
and
Barrett,
hoping to cash in on Syd’s cult legend, and Peter Jenner gave it one more try in the studio with Floyd’s founder. Syd
did
show up at the studio—with no strings on his guitar—and when somebody gave him some typed lyrics, Syd promptly bit the person’s hand, thinking he was being handed a bill. If Syd turned right upon leaving the studio, he would return; if he turned left, he was gone. Jenner gave up after three days, and Syd Barrett never recorded again.
On June 5, 1975, during one of Pink Floyd’s
Wish You Were Here sessions
, David Gilmour spotted a chubby fellow with a shaved head toddling around Abbey Road’s Studio Three wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt. When he wandered into the control room, nobody knew who he was. “We were all whispering, ‘Who the fuck’s this funny geezer?’” Gilmour recalled. “I think I was the first to recognize him.” Even though Syd said a few words, he wasn’t really there. He showed up for Gilmour’s wedding reception later that day, chuckling under his breath. No one in Pink Floyd has seen him since.
Disc jockey Nicky Horne turned up at Cloisters, hoping for a Syd Barrett interview, and was greeted by a huge, fat man with shaved eyebrows, wearing only pajama bottoms. “Syd can’t talk,” the fat man said and closed the door.
In 1988 EMI brought Syd’s solo efforts out on CD, which sell consistently. Numerous bootlegs are available. EMI also released a “new” Syd collection called
Opel
, and had hoped to include “Vegetable Man” and “Scream Thy Last Scream,” but Pink Floyd wouldn’t grant permission. We can only imagine how the Madcap Piper’s last scream might have sounded. In April 1992 Atlantic Records offered half a million dollars for any type of Syd Barrett recording. The family sent a polite refusal.
Syd Barrett is back in Cambridge in his own basement flat at the end of a dead-end street, by all accounts leading a normal life. His brother-in-law Paul Breen says Syd doesn’t play music anymore, prefers his own company to the company of others, likes good wine, has started to paint again (“surprisingly traditional, a country cottage, a vase of flowers”), watches a lot of television, and is a reasonably content man—despite rumors reported in
News of the World
that he has been heard “shrieking like a lunatic” and “barking like a dog.”
The haunted gaze of the madcap piper. (BARRY PLUMMER)
I met with journalist Mike Watkinson, who cowrote Syd’s biography, and he told me about his only encounter with the “increasingly insular” Syd. “The Syd Barrett of ‘69 is dead,” he insists. “I liken it to David Bowie burying Ziggy Stardust. It’s that dramatic. I knew what I was going to see but it still gave me a hell of a shock. We had a degree of cooperation with the family; it had been set up. We were driving in the outskirts of Cambridge, it was very tense in the car, and I happened to glance out the window and I saw this familiar figure walking by. One of his old friends had told me about Syd’s distinctive walk—limping on the front of his feet. He must have weighed fifteen stone [210 pounds]. He looked straight in my face. It was very disconcerting. I felt like a private detective and just froze. We set out after this retreating figure and he disappeared. I watched him walk down the street in a classic Charlie Chaplin fadeout. We went to the address, knocked on the door, I explained who we were and what we were doing, and a look of such incredible fear crossed his face. I can remember what he said, it was quite peculiar—‘No, I’m not Syd Barrett, I’m only staying here. I don’t live here.’”
It was once reported that Syd had “expired in a shop doorway,” but like the never-ending fascination surrounding him, Syd Barrett is very much alive behind the closed doors of his own madcap design.
JAN BERRY
Jan Berry, young, brilliant, and beautiful—the sky was the limit. (THE JAN BERRY COLLECTION)
O
n a golden, sunny Southern California afternoon when I was fourteen years old, I got a ride to the beach where Jan and Dean were performing on some short-lived sun ‘n’ fun TV show. Glorious summer of ’62—way before Bob Dylan’s warnings and the war in Vietnam. I squeezed through the surfer dudes and beach bunnies to get a much closer look at the bronzed dolls steaming up the sand, and bouncing around in front of them, absolutely agog, I realized I was a worshiper of rock and roll and could never,
ever
be close enough. The handsome blonds were wearing matching silver sharkskin suits and little ties, miming the words to one of their massive hits, “Heart and Soul.” I had always thought of Dean as the goofy sidekick and Jan as the cute heartthrob, so I swooned into the cute one’s twinkly eyes, but he didn’t notice me. Bummer in the summer.
Not only was Jan the obvious object of teen passion, he was an original,
one of the main forces behind the “California sound”—composer, musician, producer, innovator, very cute hunk-of-stuff.
Jan began his career as half of the duo Jan and Arnie, two teenagers from L.A.’s University High who wanted to make a record. “It was 1958. I was working at Western Recorders,” Joe Lubin, one of rock’s forerunning producers, told me, “and I heard some music through these thick metal doors—four bars that kept playing over and over intrigued me. I knew the engineer, so I went in and saw two young kids, sixteen, seventeen, dressed in jeans and full of sand. They even had their surfboards with them!” The “kids” were making an acetate and Joe expressed a keen interest. He heard something special. “I asked where they recorded the song and Jan told me he did it at his house on an Ampex recorder that his dad bought him. It had some echo, and I said, ‘Great! Let’s go up there!’ I wanted to reproduce this sound all the way. There was some mad banging going on that I loved.”
Joe jumped into Jan’s convertible and was surprised to wind up in Bel Air. “That’s where the stories came along about recording in garages. I think we were the first ones,” he says modestly. “I’m sure we were. You never knew you were making history.” Jan played an old out-of-tune upright piano and he and Arnie (Ginsberg) sang. “I wanted to lay down the track of Jan singing and Arnie answering,” Joe continues enthusiastically, “but there was something missing—that metallic sound. How did they get that sound?” Neither Jan nor Arnie could remember how the “mad banging” came about, but when Jan’s mother came in with some snacks, she reminded the boys that Arnie had been hitting the top of an old metallic toy high chair, and it was retrieved from the back of the garage. “Arnie was hitting the piano stool like a backbeat of a drum, and the metallic chair gave it a raw sound. Along with the out-of-tune piano, to my stupid ear it was all wonderful.”
Joe’s ear was not so stupid after all. “I come into my office the next morning ,” Joe remembers with a smile. “My secretary tells me that the phone is going off the hook, they all want that song by those two kids!” Jan and Arnie had sneaked into Joe’s office, stolen the tape, and convinced a disc jockey at a local station to play “Jennie Lee”—lots of echo and overdubs, tons of “bomp-bomps,” and excessive amounts of teen joy. After quickly getting Jan and Arnie under contract, Joe got them a deal with Doris Day’s label, Arwin Records, “and the rest is history. People wanted to copy that sound, but nobody knew how we got the sound.” Joe laughs before getting serious. “The Beach Boys copied our sound. Jan and Dean were known as
the
West Coast sound. I got a call from Dick Clark saying, ‘I want those guys!’ They played the Hollywood Bowl in Bermuda shorts—sun—tanned, beautiful-looking guys. There was so much screaming you couldn’t even hear them, twenty thousand people standing up. It was uncontrolled.”
The single “Jennie Lee” (written about a local stripper of the same name—
the “bomp-bomps” were inspired by her bouncing breasts) went to number eight on the national charts, but after two more forty—fives, the pressure proved too much for Arnie. While Jan got in the swing of his newfound hotshot status—getting into trouble for drag-racing down Venice Boulevard, bringing booze to school in a plastic lemon-squeezer, sticking his cute bare ass out of car windows (he was arrested for indecent exposure three times), and cherry-bombing trash cans—Arnie quietly left the duo to pursue a career as an architect. Jan corraled former Uni High football buddy Dean Torrence into taking his place, and not a “bomp-bomp” was wasted. Jan and Arnie became Jan and Dean and cut another echo—filled record in Jan’s garage—“Baby Talk,” which jumped straight into the Top Ten. It was the bright and shining Hula-Hoop America of 1959.
“Jan and I stayed in school,” Dean Torrence tells me as we chat in his Huntington Beach home while he keeps a daddy’s eye on five-year-old Katie, who is busy with her Legos. “I kept two jobs, and I heard ‘Baby Talk’ on the radio by the pool at my lifeguard job. A little light went on and I said, ‘Maybe I won’t have to do this lifeguard thing anymore, even though it’s kinda fun.’ Dean is in his mid—fifties—tanned, blond, and tousled. Youthful in his demeanor, he punctuates his stories with wry laughter. Like Arnie, Dean was planning to be an architect and Jan a surgeon when pop success struck. “We” didn’t let the business rule us, we kind of ruled the business!” he says with intensity. “We” thought about the consequences a lot more than those who were completely dominated by their record company. We had something else to fall back on. Jan would get out his pathology book and say, ‘Oh, I gotta read another five hundred pages anyway. I don’t care, I’m gonna be a surgeon. I’m not even gonna know you guys!’ We just didn’t get intimidated.’”
I can sense in Dean a real admiration for Jan. Since Jan had been the driving force and always spoke his mind, did Dean ever feel jealous or envious of his partner? “Jan was
allowed
to speak his mind,” he says adamantly. “He was light-years ahead of the rest of us. Even at eighteen or nineteen, Jan would tell almost anybody what to do. Some people considered him obnoxious, but he was just knowledgeable. Arrogant? Yeah, he might have been. But I don’t think I was jealous—as long as I was benefiting from it.” Dean laughs. “If I had just been a classmate, an observer, and hadn’t gotten anything out of it, I might have been jealous. But again, he was so far beyond the rest of us, so bright, so full of vision and ambition and so much drive. The way I looked at it, he deserved it. He had a God-given talent, a huge IQ, and he put it all together. Jan would love to sit and take notes,” Dean reminisces. “He wrote music, so he would take the first four bars on take thirteen, the second six bars of take two—he was down to the notes. On ‘Baby Talk’ there was one ‘bomp’ that he loved. It had a certain resonance to it, and he moved it to another take. When I’d come back in a day or two, the tape would be solid white splicing on the back.”
Thirty-five years later Dean still seems amazed. I’ve heard that Jan was a genious in the studio. Does Dean think so? “Oh yeah! Unlike when you call Brian Wilson or Lennon/McCartney geniuses. Maybe they’re brilliant makers of music—they can’t figure out how to keep their checkbook straight—but in this one arena they’re very talented. Jan was literally a genius, his 170 IQ proved it. His major was biology and his minor was music. Most other guys minored in something that had to do with their studies, but Jan got grades for producing Jan and Dean records.” A lot of
gold
Jan and Dean records.
Since the boys were in school, rock-and-roll road trips took place on weekends, Christmas vacation, and all summer long. Big fans of Laurel and Hardy, the duo interspersed goofy repartee into their stage antics and pulled mischievous pranks on touring companions. (Jan and Dean got to know Stan Laurel and spent time with him before his death.) My friend Dick St. John (from the pop duo Dick and Dee Dee) recalls Jan as quite a ladies’ man, often turning up on the bus with last night’s nylons proudly wrapped around his neck. “Spastic jokes were popular,” Dick says, then goes on to tell me how Jan or Dean would fake seizures in roadside restaurants to shock Midwestern patrons. They once conned Dick into faking one of his own, then scurried from the restaurant , leaving a mortified Dick alone on the floor. “Jan took my fold-up suitcase somewhere in Wisconsin,” Dick recalls, shaking his head. “I look over and see Jan going down the mountain on a surfboard or something, and I realize, ‘Oh my God! That’s my suitcase he’s opened up!’ It was destroyed.”
Jan hired Lou Adler and Herb Alpert as the duo’s managers after meeting them with Sam Cooke, and the boys’ garage tracks were arranged and overdubbed in a two-track studio. Instead of using the same overused studio musicians as a backup band, Jan pulled together an incredible lineup including Glen Campbell, Leon Russell, and Hal Blaine. In 1962 Jan and Dean played a teen hop with a new group, the Beach Boys, and Jan started writing songs with Brian Wilson, which resulted in Jan and Dean’s first number—one record, “Surf City,” about a young man’s fantasy spot where there are two girls for every boy. “Honolulu Lulu” followed, then came the car songs—“Dead Man’s Curve,” “Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” “Drag City”—and then “Sidewalk Surfin’,” which capitalized on (created?) the skateboard craze. Now in a real live studio, Jan produced and arranged (and mostly wrote) everything. He wanted the sound to be hard and filled out, and was the first to use dual drums. Some say he was hardheaded, bossy, and belligerent, but according to Dean, he deserved to be that way.
I ask Dean if they had many fans or groupies following them around. “We had ‘steadies’ then.” He smiles wryly. “It was early for groupies. There was no birth control, an innocent time. They’d come around but would giggle and drool, put your name on their school notebook.” Jan had a steady, Jill Gibson, on and off for years, but still managed to date a bevy of Hollywood debs, including Ann-Margret and Yvette Mimieux. Jill finally left Jan when she woke
up one morning and found him frolicking in the raw with two girls he had picked up on the beach. (Just an innocent frolic, mind you.)
Naturals in front of the camera, Jan and Dean got signed to Paramount, but on the first day of shooting on their first film, during the first take of a train wreck sequence, Jan was badly injured, breaking his leg. Already in his second year at UCLA Medical School, he fashioned a makeshift tourniquet, dragged himself a quarter of a mile to the highway, and was taken by a passing car to the closest hospital. His leg was saved and he recovered. The next time he wouldn’t be so lucky.
In late 1965 Jan and Dean were offered their own weekly TV series, “Jan and Dean on the Road,” sort of a Route 66 rock-and-roll travelogue. “There would have been a bit of music onstage, then we’d get in our Corvette and go get in trouble!” Dean tells me, grinning. “Two blond guys in their car who really
did
have hit records!” During the taping of the zany pilot, Jan studied medicine as well as his script, cramming his photographic memory full of medical data in between madcap takes and tunes. Finals were coming up and he had to think about an internship, but the pilot was very well received and the series was a go. How could Jan do both?
“I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge after a gig with Jan,” Dean says quietly. “I was trying to bring up a picture of where Jan would be in a couple of years, but I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see him dealing with the music on a long-term basis because he was real stubborn and would eventually come to loggerheads with the record company. And we would have to make that choice between school, our degrees—he would have to think about internship. You can’t do that part-time. I could kind of figure me out a little bit, but I couldn’t get a picture of what was going to happen to him, and it just didn’t feel right. I kept thinking, Something bad is gonna happen. I didn’t see it happening to me. I just couldn’t see any future for Jan. I looked out and saw Alcatraz, and I felt it was something like that—like jail, something that would confine him so he wouldn’t be able to fulfill his promise. I didn’t see him dead, but I knew he wouldn’t be able to fulfill all those dreams he had. He’s always been so stubborn and so antiestablishment, and I thought, The system is going to catch up with him and take care of him in one way or another.”
Having just completed the TV pilot, Jan was back in the studio recording half the night and taking finals all day. Hopped up with ambition, he pushed himself insanely, always trying to cram too many things into twenty-four hours.
“He was always in a hurry,” declares Dean. “He had lots of stuff to do, lots of things on his mind. He liked to do the driving, he wanted that control. He’d get an idea, he’d want to write a piece of music and he’d say, ‘Hand me a pencil!’ I’d steer the car and he’d be working on our charts from the night before. I actually got good driving with my left hand. He always had so many things going on in his mind. He could work on bunches of things, and that’s
eventually what got him in trouble. He was driving down this side street that we’d driven many, many times before, and the way he drove was just
flat out.
There are signs up all over this street that runs from Sunset to Wilshire, saying ‘Twenty—five Miles an Hour,’ and you get within a couple of blocks from the school and it’s five miles an hour!” Dean remarks with horror. “The way Jan thought was, ‘That doesn’t apply to me. I’m in a hurry. That applies to other people who don’t have a Corvette, who don’t have an IQ of 170.’ I don’t know why he hit that truck, he shouldn’t have hit it. The bottom line is, if he had been going the speed limit, a little bit of rubbing compound would have fixed it. But his car was totaled. It looked like it was dropped out of an airplane.”
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