White Bicycles (16 page)
I managed to get them onstage only a few minutes late, but it just got worse. The audience initially regarded bugle-calls from Freddie, birdsong from James and dissonant chords from Ronnie as interesting and avant-garde. But as Freddie staggered around the stage, they could be fooled no more and began to hiss. He responded by going to the microphone and suggesting that ‘All you white mother-fuckers can kiss my black ass’.
I had to talk fast to convince the promoter not to stop the concert, refund the tickets and have the three of them arrested by the fierce-looking police who had suddenly appeared backstage. Having negotiated a five-minute reprieve, I signalled Max to play a stage-clearing drum solo. I succeeded in getting the three of them off and Sonny on, joining Max and the equally sober bass player in the scheduled second-half trio. We got half the fee and Sonny played well but towards the end one of the inebriated trio started throwing furniture out of the window of the locked dressing room. More police arrived and took them away in handcuffs.
Max, Sonny and I cruised Graz in a taxi until 2 a.m. trying to find out where they were being held. I would go into police stations and say ‘
Schwarzers?
’ and get a shake of the head until we finally found them in the medieval castle that overlooks the city. Early the next morning I sprang them with a $300 fine for violating an Austrian statute against ‘insulting the public’ and we headed for the airport and Paris. They were exhausted and Freddie’s wrist was swollen from the cuffs. Someone asked him whether it had been worth it. ‘No, man,’ he said. ‘But almost.’
It is risky to treat the incident as emblematic, but it seemed in synch with other developments that year. The Civil Rights movement was not over, but the energy of the early sixties had dissipated. Young white activists had moved on to other things: the war in Vietnam, drugs, free speech. With the turning away of white liberals from the black cause came a rejection of the music. The biggest-selling jazz artist of the late sixties ended up being Charles Lloyd, a moderately gifted sax player who tapped into a melodic, oriental vibe that struck a chord with kids at the Fillmore. Coltrane died, and listening to Monk and Rollins began to seem like hard work. Theirs was heroin and alcohol music and kids were now into acid and grass.
In Paris the night after Graz I heard the rawest edge of black anger translated into music: the Ayler Brothers. Their recordings on the ESP label had startled a jazz world that thought it was ready for anything. Don Ayler played trumpet with a clear, vibrato-free tone, like a street musician from New Orleans, while Albert’s sax playing was rich and fruity, like an R&B player’s. They would start with a familiar melody, but the cohesion would erode with each repeat of the theme. Strict time from the drummer would judder into syncopations, returning to the four-four beat only to veer off again even more obliquely. Albert and Don would play the melody in unison at first, then start to edge away from each other, finding quarter tones either side of the tune. Eventually, the theme would disappear into a cacophony in which the original source was barely recognizable. For their theme that evening, they chose ‘La Marseillaise’.
The fury that greeted Serge Gainsbourg’s reggae version twelve years later gives some idea of what happened that night. People shouted and threw things at the stage; fist fights broke out as listeners tried to silence the objectors. Don Ayler looked like a bomb-making anarchist in his rimless glasses: strict, ascetic and aloof. No matter what happened around him, he continued to play the melody a demented quarter-tone sharp and always with that beautiful pure tone. It was great that people fought about music in those days.
The Aylers came to bad ends: addictions, mental institutions and suicide. It was more and more difficult for them to get work as the sixties wore on. They represented the musical branch of the shift in black consciousness as the gratitude towards white Civil Rights workers of the early sixties evolved into the fury of the Black Panthers in the later years of the decade.
I read about most of these developments from the calm distance of London. There was a measure of political engagement for us there – the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam demonstration, for example – but it seemed tame beside the struggles that were going on in the States.
In the spring of 1968, I flew from London to San Francisco for a meeting with Bill Graham about the Incredible String Band and found myself with some time to kill. A cinema near the Fillmore was showing
The Battle of
Algiers
. The opening credits were rolling as I entered; the kasbah scenes were dark and my eyes hadn’t adjusted from the California haze. I groped for a seat and kept finding bodies. That seemed odd; I had expected a weekday matinée at an art house to be pretty empty. A hand grabbed my sleeve and a hissed whisper guided me into an empty chair. The vivid scenes of urban guerrilla warfare quickly made me forget where I was.
When the film ended, the lights came up to reveal a packed house. Mine was the only white face in the audience. The men were wearing black berets, the women dashikis and they were all carrying notebooks.
A SUB-PLOT RUNNING THROUGH the Elektra year was my growing involvement with the so-called Underground. In 1966, it was worthy of the name: few outsiders were even aware of its existence. When it flourished in the spring of 1967, it was seen as a sub-culture of drugs, radical politics and music built around the
International Times
, Indica bookshop,
Oz
magazine, UFO, the London Free School, Release, Granny Takes a Trip, the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream and the Arts Lab. To me, the expression referred primarily to the fruits of the energy of one man: John Hopkins.
I first met Hoppy in 1964 when, in his photographer guise, he shot the musicians from the Caravan tour for
Melody Maker
. He looked like the mad ex-scientist he was: wire-thin build, intense brown eyes, unruly dark hair, well-worn jeans and an all-encompassing grin. I got him some tickets for one of our London shows and sealed the friendship by introducing him to a folk club promoter selling a block of very good hashish. Waiting to get back on George Wein’s payroll that summer, I took up residence on Hoppy’s sofa. There I learned about his Cambridge physics degree, his past as a security-cleared technician at the Harwell Atomic Energy lab, his commitment to nuclear disarmament (and the resulting forfeiture of his security clearance), his discovery of Sandoz LSD, and his recent break-up with Gala, London’s most beautiful and wayward model. Hoppy always seemed in a process of discovery, treating the city as his research laboratory and uttering a delighted ‘Wow!’ whenever he came across something that pleased or interested him. He taught me how to develop film in his darkroom, directed me to the best artery-clogging breakfasts and the cheapest curries in West London, showed me the back doubles to avoid traffic lights and introduced me to a rogue’s gallery of visionaries. In his purple Mini he dashed from one end of the city to the other, dropping off film, convening conspiratorial meetings, joining girls for afternoon assignations, scoring dope and bestowing favours.
In November 1965, shortly after I arrived to take up my Elektra post, Hoppy invited me to the first meeting of the London Free School. In retrospect, the founding principles sound heartbreakingly naïve: we planned to offer free classes to the poor and under-educated of Notting Hill Gate, mostly West Indian, Irish and Polish immigrants. The area was still recovering from years of Peter Rachman’s slumlordship and the race riots of 1958. The side streets off Westbourne Park Road, later home to ‘trustafarians’, media types, artists, musicians and the odd record producer (and more recently colonized by stockbrokers), were full of after-hour shebeens and ganja dens, the kind of places Stephen Ward had taken Christine Keeler to meet Lucky Gordon a few years earlier.
Hoppy and his friends proposed courses in photography, French and politics. We leafleted the area and got a modest turn-out of suspicious locals for the introductory meeting in a now-demolished church near the Harrow Road. John Michell, the world’s leading expert on the relationship between flying saucers and ley lines, offered us his basement in Powis Square. Peter Jenner and Andrew King, soon to become Pink Floyd’s managers, were pioneering LFSers, as were Ron Atkins, for many years the
Guardian
’s jazz critic, and Barry ‘Miles’ Miles, founder of Indica Books, author of biographies on Ginsberg and Burroughs and numerous other books on the sixties.
The feathers of some local authorities were successfully ruffled: LFS advice helped people challenge the criminal justice system and claim unpaid benefits. But the Free School’s enduring legacy is the Notting Hill Carnival. A Trinidadian activist friend of Hoppy’s named Michael de Freitas (later Michael X) suggested moving an indoor celebration of Trinidadian culture on to the streets around Portobello Road during the August bank holiday. It was colourful and subversive, bringing together West Indians and freaks – the police’s worst nightmare. Thirty-nine years later, over a million and a half people danced through the streets of Notting Hill on that same summer weekend.
The 1966 carnival was an auspicious beginning but it didn’t raise any money, so we scheduled a series of concerts in All Saints Hall, Powis Square. Jenner and King booked a group they knew from Cambridge who were looking for some London exposure. Pink Floyd had started out as a blues band, but after being asked for an experimental score by a film-making artist – and after Syd Barrett began his explorations of psychedelics – their music had veered off in more original directions. From the first LFS benefit in September 1966 until their departure for an American tour in November 1967, the Floyd’s music was the soundtrack for the Underground. The film score influenced more than just their music: they liked playing in front of moving lights so much they made it a central feature of their shows. The most enduring images of the Free School events, the
International Times
launch party, UFO and the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream at Alexandra Palace are of the four Floyds bent over their instruments in concentration while purple and turquoise bubbles of light play over them.
In the murky glow, it was hard to pick out personalities, but if there was a centre of attention, it was Syd Barrett, with his impish girl-magnet looks, the screams of his slide guitar and the offhand way he sang his oddly melodic songs. Roger Waters also stood out for me. He is extremely tall and played a very large electric bass, often with his mouth wide open. His prominent nose and big oval head were sometimes the only human features perceptible in the gloom of the light show. Roger anchored the operatic chords, giving the group a foundation like no other. When Syd and his songs were long gone, the sound that would sweep the world was their classical harmonies underpinned by Roger’s bass, decorated by Rick Wright’s artfully cheesy organ and Nick Mason’s elaborate drumming and crowned by Dave Gilmour’s spacey blues guitar. Syd may be the most famous individual Floyd, but his songs have been heard by only a fraction of the millions who have bought Pink Floyd records.
Peter and Andrew didn’t know anyone in the music business but me. I played a Floyd demo tape to Holzman a month or so before my departure but it didn’t do anything for him. Once I was a free agent, I set out to find a deal for them – and for myself as producer. Through the jazz tours I knew a man named Alan Bates who worked at Polydor Records, so I invited him to Powis Square.
Polydor was the joker in the British deck in 1966. EMI and Decca had dominated the business for decades with only desultory competition. Warner Brothers had not yet ventured out of California, Dutch Philips was beginning a challenge and CBS had just opened a London office (the
Beatles and the Stones having demonstrated that any self-respecting major company needed a British A&R presence). Polydor, the pop subsidiary of Deutsche Grammophon, sent a man with the unlikely name of Horst Schmolzi to open up the British market for them. Initially, the biggest weapon in his arsenal was James Last, a kind of teutonic Lawrence Welk popular with middle-aged British listeners anxious to insulate themselves from the unsettling new sounds now dominating
Top of the Pops
.
Horst was a garrulous blond man in his early thirties who quickly became a fixture at the late-night hang-outs of London’s pop fraternity. Within a year he had prised The Who away from Decca by giving Lambert and Stamp their own Track Records label. His deal with Robert Stigwood secured not only Clapton’s Cream but the Bee Gees as well. When I met him, he had just signed an unknown American named Jimi Hendrix. It was a remarkable start for someone who came at the English with all the subtlety of a Porsche overtaking a Morris Minor in the inside lane. (Polydor executives were not known for diplomacy: the man sent to open their American office startled the crowd at the New York press launch by telling them he had wanted to live in the city ever since he had seen its skyline from Long Island Sound through the periscope of his U-boat in 1943.)
EMI and Decca executives would have had cardiac arrests at the royalty rates and independence of Horst’s deals, which is why the wiliest managers went to him. The majors’ policy then was always to use their own studios and their own producers. The fact that staff man George Martin was so monumentally successful with the Beatles in EMI’s Abbey Road blinded them to the limitations of the formula.
Horst was a cartoon German – vulgar, loud and monumentally pleased with himself – but I liked him: he was genuinely enthusiastic about the music and fearless in his tastes. When he heard the Floyd, he got it immediately and we proceeded to draw up a contract signing them to Polydor through my new company, Witchseason Productions.
I had been stumped for a name when Donovan released a song called ‘Season Of The Witch’:
Beatniks out to make it rich
Must be the season of the witch.
I liked the image, and by the time I thought to wince at having a company named after a Donovan song, it was too late.