The Living Years (18 page)

After the Italy debacle we decided that touring in hire cars was the way forward – it also meant that we could do all the sightseeing we wanted – but even that wasn’t foolproof. One of our roadies once left an Avis rental car in a car park in the wrong town somewhere in California and we only realized what he’d done six months later when the bill arrived.

The drive with Joe and Joe from the hotel to the venue was a little mountain to climb in every town, every day. All you could do was sit back and put your feet up, smoke some grass and drink Southern Comfort, and that would almost dull the agony.

* * *

For me, the States had lost none of their magic (even if we weren’t always in the bit of them that we should have been). I loved the way that every city you drove towards, you could see from a distance, with the skyscrapers coming over the horizon. But it was also impossible not to sense the other thing on the horizon: the raincloud that had been developing ever since Pete had temporarily left at Headley Grange. Even as we were setting off for America I thought, ‘We’ll do the tour and then see what happens . . .’ As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait that long.

We were in Cleveland, Ohio, when Pete told us he was leaving the band for good. We were six dates into a six-month long tour.

He explained things to us pretty simply. He was leaving but he’d honour all our touring commitments. And he also kindly agreed that he wouldn’t announce he was leaving until the dust had settled and we’d all thought about what we were going to do.

Because we’d had this moment before at Headley Grange, Pete’s news didn’t exactly come out of the blue, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a bombshell. It was a bright, sunny day when it happened and walking back from the meeting to my motel room felt weird, flat. I felt like it should have been grey and pouring with rain.

Over the next few days, when I was alone with Pete, he’d try and explain it a bit better. ‘I hope you understand what I’m doing,’ he’d say, and the thing was, I realized I did.

I’d known at the time that
The Lamb
couldn’t be a precedent for future albums. Not only had making a double album worn us down, having Pete write almost all the lyrics had made the whole thing less enjoyable. On the other hand, I could see why he wouldn’t want to go back to sharing them out between us: Tony and I were writing about aliens, Pete was writing things like ‘Fly on a Windshield’: ‘Lenny Bruce declares a truce and plays his other hand / Marshall McLuhan, casual viewin’, head buried in the sand.’ Pete was such a strong lyricist and loved the writing side so much that he would never have wanted to go back to our old way of working.

Pete often showed emotion in his face, in his eyes. When an idea started to take hold of him you’d see a small smile start to appear as he tried to convince you that he’d thought of a good idea – whether it was a song or a detour he wanted to take while you were driving. If you said no, he’d always take it with good humour but you knew the smile would creep back sooner or later – he wouldn’t give up.

Talking with him now he had his old, pained expression back: his worried schoolboy look, those furrowed eyebrows. I knew he was torn. He’d had chats with Smith long into the night and Tony had tried hard to persuade him to keep going: Pete was still his mate and they went so far back together. But it was different for me. I’ve always thought that if someone doesn’t want to be where they are, I wouldn’t want them to be there either. The worst thing is when someone doesn’t share your enthusiasm for what you’re doing anymore: the fun just goes out of it.

I remember Pete saying, ‘I think you should carry on.’ It probably just made him feel better to say it but I think we knew, however hard it’d be, we’d try anyway. In terms of what the way forward might look like, I had no idea but, now that we knew where we stood, I didn’t see the point in torturing myself about it. I react funnily to bad news: I worry about situations in advance but if something’s already happened and you can’t do much about it, I move on pretty fast.

None of which made me any less sad at losing Pete, obviously. We’d shared such wonderful times and, although we were all still friends, I knew we’d never be as close again. But we also still had two-thirds of a tour left and what were we going to do – be miserable for the next six months?

* * *

Regis Boff – not quite as good a name as Rivers Job but nearly – was like a big bear, only from Pittsburgh. He was our tour manager on
The Lamb
. He was however not the kind of guy you should play tricks on.

(Knock knock.)

Regis: Who’s there?

Me: Police. Open up.

Regis (furiously flushing toilet): I’m coming, sir! Wait a minute! (More toilet flushing.)

Me: No, no, wait! Regis, it’s Mike! Don’t do that!

Regis: Just coming, sir! Wait a moment . . .

Me: No really, Regis, it’s me! It’s Mike! Stop!

Too late. Regis had flushed his stash. Even for a bear he managed to look extremely pissed off about it.

One of Regis’s duties was to carry a bottle of eye-drops with him which, when Phil and I had had a good evening, he’d use to get us looking a bit less bleary and red-eyed the next day.

This worked fine for the two of us but our lighting operator, Les Adey, was beyond hope. Les was like a character from a
Comic Strip
sketch: he was constantly stoned, his eyes like saucers in his head and, unfortunately for me, he was also now my roommate.

Rich had stepped down as our tour manager the previous year after realizing that we’d reached a stage where being managed by a mate wasn’t really practical. He was always very intuitive and I think he knew his time had been and gone, but we all missed his energy hugely. And obviously, I missed his late-night brown rice. Now, instead of Rich and his primus stove, I had Les Adey and his enormous spliffs. Every morning I would see him wake up, roll over and reach for a smoke, which got a bit much in the end.

Les functioned pretty well – just sometimes you’d see his hands shake when he went for a fader – and he also wrote and quoted poetry endlessly. He was a very bright guy, although he could talk himself silly. But there were also moments when he was so out of it that I would really wish he’d just get it together – for example, when we were about to be searched by border guards on the American-Canadian border.

Canada was very free and hippyish in 1974; America wasn’t. At the crossing in Toronto there were two small buildings that you drove into, doors would come down behind and then, once you were shut in, you’d be searched for hours.

Knowing what to expect from past experience I made sure to throw my hash out of the window well before we rolled up in our black limos but Les, who was in the same car as Regis and me, was so stoned he’d forgotten where he’d hidden his. Regis and I watched in horror as he started patting himself all over in a thoughtful way as the guards looked on. Pat pat pat. Pause. Other pocket. Pat pat pat. Pause. Regis’s face had no colour left in it at all when Les finally started beaming: he’d hit the jackpot.

Why the cops let us off I don’t know – entertainment value, probably – but it was all a bit different to my father’s experience of stepping freely back and forwards over the Canadian border twenty-four times in a minute.

Halifax in Canada was a place my father got to know well during the Second World War. His first trip there in September 1939 was on board a ship carrying one million pounds of gold bullion, and after that he joined the North Atlantic Escort Force, which provided escorts for mercantile and troop convoys.

He’d also enjoyed the Canadian hospitality: local hotels were dry but:

it was legal to book a room in which to consume our own liquor, the hotel providing glasses, crushed ice and ginger ale . . . if the dining room was raided, hard liquor on the table was unwise but the police would not probe too deeply a bottle coyly stashed round the ankles.

Our tour drinks for
The Lamb
were Southern Comfort and Blue Nun wine. At every hotel we stayed in, a bath would be filled with ice, the bottles put in, and then the lot steadily consumed with predictable consequences. The night I ended up drunk and blindfolded with no trousers on at 2 a.m. in Pittsburgh was one example, although I don’t remember what the blindfold was for. Anyway, I was still wearing it when a girl tried to shut the sliding bathroom door in my hotel room while my finger was in the way. She just couldn’t understand it: why wouldn’t it go? What was making it stick? Clearly the only thing for it was to slam it very hard.

Crack.

It was my left hand, second finger: my fretboard hand.

The party ground to a halt and Regis, who had been having just as much fun as me, managed to sober up enough to take me to the general hospital in Pittsburgh. Once there I also straightened up pretty quickly: the noise and commotion was deafening, with people shouting, heaving and screaming, and weirdos off the street vomiting. Having established that my finger was broken there was nothing much the doctors could do except splint and bandage it, which left me wondering how on earth I was going to play guitar the following day.

I managed it somehow – if you’re determined enough, you can find a way to do most things – but my abiding memory of the show was the way that, every time the UV lights came on, my huge, white-bandaged finger glowed like a beacon.

* * *

I never found playing
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
particularly satisfying. I felt hemmed in at having to play songs from just one album, particularly when – like ‘Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist’ and ‘The Lamia’ – they never connected and would inevitably die a death. For the first time, too, I think we all felt that what Pete was trying to do with the presentation and his costumes was affecting the performance of some songs.

I’d always felt that Pete’s best costumes were the ones that tied in to what he was singing: that justified them in my mind. The fox’s head had come from the cover of
Foxtrot
, so that was fine by me, and the old man mask that he had for ‘Musical Box’ was obviously the character in the song. (While he was wearing it, Pete would make jerky, geriatric movements round the microphone and it would be incredibly eerie to watch.) But I felt Pete’s best costume was the black cloak and orange helmet that he wore for the ‘666’ section of ‘Supper’s Ready’. It was because it wasn’t overly defined – there was nothing that you could your finger on – that it worked: it was just dark and scary and bizarre. Real theatre.

When it came to
The Lamb
, I could just about defend Pete’s grotesque ‘The Colony of Slippermen’ outfit as it made sense in terms of the lyrics, but the reality was that he couldn’t get the microphone near his mouth when he had it on. And during ‘The Lamia’ he’d be standing in a spinning cone, and he’d get his microphone caught on the edge of the cone, or his costume would catch, or else the whole thing would be going the wrong way.

As far as the press was concerned, however, the costumes were a focal point and increasingly our reviews were focusing less on the music and more on Pete – which was something that bothered Phil most of all. I’m a realist: I could see that there are only so many ways a journalist could write about music. They could talk about the crashing drums, the pounding bass, the whining guitars and the lyrics, but after that, what else is there to say? Writing about costumes and sets is much easier. But Phil was a muso – the music was always the most important thing for him – and both he and Tony would often huff over the reviews.

And yet for all the undercurrents I don’t remember feeling that the tour suffered. Pete’s decision to leave was something that we could almost put to one side. When you’re on tour you can’t think beyond the end of it: there’s too much work to do in the present to worry what’s going to come next. There was sadness, yes, and disappointment, but not animosity. We even all went skiing together – although in retrospect it was a bit stupid to take Les Adey along, too. Pete could ski, Tony and I couldn’t and Les could barely stand in the best of circumstances. We all made it to the top of the mountain and then Pete turned round, gave us a wave – ‘Follow me down! Bye!’ – and buggered off. No tips, nothing. It must have taken me about half a day to get down that mountain but I still made it down before Les.

* * *

Tony Smith had been a bit unsure about
The Lamb
as an album. Nevertheless, when we were on the road, he fully embraced the production – which was just as well because Atlantic didn’t get it at all.

While we were touring the smaller American venues, Tony Smith would go back to New York to harangue them into spending money: we had enough of a cult following to keeping ticking over but Smith had to work quite hard to keep the whole thing afloat. We were still getting the occasional shout for ‘Boogie!’, too, which wasn’t great.

In Britain we got a better reaction, probably because by now there wasn’t a venue left in the country that we hadn’t played at least once.

The Lamb
was an incredibly ambitious production: as well as Pete’s costumes, we also had a backdrop of three screens on which were projected specially shot slides. They never worked properly, these screens – one was always broken or out-of-synch so that you’d end up with two-thirds of a vista and then somebody’s hand – but they were very striking. The whole production was unlike anything else any other band was attempting.

The truth, however, was that
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
was not a commercial success. It got to number 10 in the UK and number 41 in America but we were losing a lot of money on the production. Ironically, if we’d have broken up at this point, the largesse of The Bank of Charisma would have allowed us to walk away debt free.

Smith would always push us to tour more and he’d be clever about it, too. He’d always raise big decisions when there were just five minutes of a meeting to go and he knew we were fading and would say yes to anything just to get out of the room. But you also had to feel sorry for him: it wasn’t just that we were in financial difficulties, he’d also only been managing us for a year and we were already just about to be one man down.