White Bicycles (22 page)
A side benefit of our larger size was the increased tithe paid to Release from our door takings. The bust-fund buckets passed in the spring had evolved into an organization. Michael X, always urging us to think about practicalities, called a meeting of interested parties, including an exotic-looking, dark-haired young woman who volunteered for the difficult jobs and accomplished them all impeccably. She had become active in protesting against arbitrary policing after plainclothes men stopped her Jamaican lover on the street and offered him a choice of felonies: a sack of ganja or burglars’ tools. Despite her efforts, he went down for three years. When I gave her a lift home after the second meeting, she showed me a painting she was working on: a phalanx of naked Amazons charging towards the viewer.
I recalled a visit to a friend a few months earlier. Over his fireplace, he proudly displayed his new acquisition: a pink-hued oil painting depicting pubic hair and moistly parted labia, viewed from below. He told me he had bought it from an artist who supported herself by nude modelling – including a
Mayfair
cover clad in nothing but gold paint. He had an option on her next work: his description of it matched what I saw on the easel. This was my introduction to Caroline Coon: artist, feminist, journalist and campaigner.
Caroline set up Release and ran it with an effectiveness that was out of step with most underground organizations. Of all the idealistic enterprises begun during year zero of our cultural revolution in West London, only Release and the Notting Hill Carnival still carry out their original functions. Many in the Underground were uncomfortable with her businesslike attitude, but sex and class played their parts as well. Caroline is the well-spoken rebel daughter of an upper-middle-class family. Her intelligence and determination unsettled many men in the theoretically progressive scene and her accent and manners bothered many of the radicals.
By the autumn, Release had a twenty-four-hour answering service for legal help and was supplying lawyers for busted dopers all over London. Caroline met with Home Office officials and demanded that young people be permitted their statutory phone call and be given legal aid forms. These approaches were far too straightforward and effective not to annoy our self-styled anarchists. A group led by Mick Farren stormed the Release offices and threw out Caroline and her staff, but the complexity of Release’s tasks so daunted the rabble that they abandoned their mission after a few days. Caroline calmly reclaimed the office and she and her staff carried on as before.
For UFO, September was a downward spiral of bad bookings, smaller and smaller crowds, higher and higher costs. At the end of the month I decided to quit while we were ahead. My only consolation was that enough money had been put aside so that Hoppy could escape to Morocco with his loyal girlfriend when he got out.
Weekends at the Roundhouse were quickly picked up by two rival promoters: Blackhill Enterprises (Floyd managers Jenner and King) and Middle Earth, run by the pleasant if slightly vague Dave Howson. They alternated while Centre 42 weighed up the virtues of granting one or the other a permanent franchise. Initially, both contributed to Release’s upkeep. Blackhill, however, was allied with Farren, and withdrew their support after the humiliation of the abortive coup. Release’s earnings from the Roundhouse door were halved and finances were precarious.
The following summer, the well-connected Blackhill were chosen to present the UK debut of The Doors and Jefferson Airplane on a Roundhouse double-bill. Whoever promoted this show was likely to generate enough cash and momentum to control the future of the Roundhouse. I pleaded with Jenner and King for an end to the feud that was starving Release of funds but they were unyielding.
What happened next gave me, I confess, immense pleasure. I called Paul Rothchild, who put me in touch with the Doors’ management, then rang Bill Graham’s office, who put in a word with the Airplane. If these groups wanted the cachet of an ‘underground’ appearance in London, they needed to learn about the local struggles in which they were pawns. Within days, the British agent summoned Granada TV (who were filming the Doors), Blackhill and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (friends of Blackhill’s who were providing ‘cultural’ cover for the work permits). As all watched in horror, the agent crossed Blackhill’s name off the contract and wrote Middle Earth’s in its place. Caroline and I took it over to the late-sleeping Howson and shook him gently awake with the news that he was promoting the Doors and the Airplane; we got him to up his Release donations from 5 to 10 per cent of the door as well. In the years to come, Middle Earth would be a cornerstone of support for Release. It was, I felt, my finest
éminence grise
moment.
During these years, Release quietly gave George Harrison and Mick Jagger legal assistance on drug busts. In gratitude, Harrison summoned Caroline to the Apple offices in 1969, shook her hand and gave her an envelope which, when she ripped it open after leaving the office, was found to contain a cheque for £5,000. Thirty years later, Jonathon Green’s book about the sixties,
All Dressed Up
, asserted that both stars’ donations had been inspired by blow-jobs provided by employees of Release. The memory of the years of hard work by the mostly female staff and the tears of joy shed on the pavement outside Apple that day fuelled Caroline’s resolve. She sued Green and Random House, fired a solicitor who suggested an inadequate settlement, fought off foreclosure on her flat over legal bills, argued the case herself in the High Court and won a stunning victory that involved retraction, apology and substantial damages.
Beneath the surface, the progressive sixties hid all manner of unpleasantness: sexism, reaction, racism and factionalism. It wasn’t surprising, really. The idea that drugs, sex and music could transform the world was always a pretty naïve dream. As the counter-culture’s effect on the mainstream grew, its own values and aesthetics decayed. The political setbacks of the coming years grabbed the headlines while the dilution of ideals happened more quietly, but nonetheless vividly for those who noticed.
For me, the closure of UFO was sad but liberating. Pink Floyd were now a successful touring rock attraction, Arthur Brown was in the charts, the Soft Machine and The People Blues Band were touring America with Hendrix and ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ had become one of the biggest singles of all time. It was time to get down to business. Almost unnoticed among the support acts that summer, I had found Witchseason’s next group. While they wouldn’t make my fortune, they did provide the foundation for a great deal of my work over the next fifteen years. I thought I had seen the last of folk-rock but it came back to get me in the end.
ONE EVENING IN THE EVENTFUL month of June ’67, I went to hear Sandy Denny at Les Cousins in Soho. I still wasn’t convinced: she insisted on performing songs by her American ex-boyfriend Jackson C. Frank and other undistinguished singer-songwriters. Her voice often seemed more big than expressive. She was entertaining company, though; her laugh was the loudest thing in a room. She had a way of jerking her cigarette to her mouth so that the ash scattered everywhere and she was very adept at knocking over drinks. I once saw her upend three mugs on one trip to the kitchen to freshen up the teapot. When playing the guitar, she would stare at her left hand, keeping a wary eye out for the inevitable slip. It was only when she sat at the piano, her first instrument, that she became serene and graceful, the dignified lady she longed to be. She was clever and quick and a brutal punisher of fools, but she wore her neediness and her heart very much on her sleeve. The only redeeming feature of the
Bridget Jones’ Diary
film for me was Renée Zellweger’s uncanny replication of many of Sandy’s insecure gestures.
We talked music all that first night; dawn found us listening to a tape of Radio Luxembourg’s sneak preview of
Sgt Pepper
at her parents’ home in Wimbledon. The ferocious impact of the Beatles’ masterpiece was magnified by the hushed and surreptitious circumstances as we huddled by the speakers so as not to disturb the sleeping household. Sandy was tired of slogging around the folk clubs with her guitar: she wanted to sing in front of a band. ‘A Day In The Life’ and ‘Lucy In The Sky’ made solo folk singing seem a very limited palette. She had made an LP with the Strawbs, but wasn’t convinced they were the right band for her. When she gave me an advance copy, I was startled by how great her voice sounded on record. The best track was her own first stab at songwriting, ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’, which Judy Collins was about to make the title song of her new LP. (Composer royalties from this song would, over the years, prove to be the most reliable source of income she ever had.) I was impressed and fascinated, but when I found the perfect band for her, I failed to make the connection.
Fairport Convention made their UFO debut a month later. They were well-behaved middle-class kids from Muswell Hill whose taste in American singer-songwriters was better than Sandy’s, but not enough to keep them from performing hack-work like Eric Andersen’s ‘Thirsty Boots’. Towards the end of their set I winced as they took up the challenge of Butterfield’s ‘East-West’. But when Richard Thompson embarked on his version of the Bloomfield guitar solo, I was stunned. This seventeen-year-old was extraordinary! After their set, I stormed into the dressing room, Mike Jeffreys-like, and offered them a deal.
There was a curious inevitability about it. Here was a group of well-educated kids approaching rock’n’roll as if they were doing a doctoral thesis. They idolized the Kweskin Jug Band, listened to Django Reinhardt and Duke Ellington and played the kind of American folk-rock I had dreamed of creating three years earlier with Sebastian and Yanovsky. I had reached for the glamour of The Move and Pink Floyd and ended up with an English version of myself.
Richard was the key. He can imitate almost any style, and often does, but is instantly identifiable. In his playing you can hear his evocation of the Scottish piper’s drone and the melody of the chanter as well as echoes of Barney Kessel’s and James Burton’s guitars and Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano. But no blues clichés: like Bix Beiderbecke or Django Reinhardt, he is unapologetic about his whiteness.
Fairport already had a girl singer. Her name was Judy Dyble and her voice was tentative, but she was Thompson’s girlfriend and bullying them into sacking her didn’t seem like the right way to start off a relationship. Moreover, although Fairport came from the same kind of suburban grammar-school background as Sandy, their temperaments could not have been more different. It wasn’t that Fairport never drank, for example; they just never seemed to get drunk. Hard as it was to keep Sandy quiet, it was sometimes difficult to get them to say anything at all. You heard more four-letter words in a five-minute conversation with her than in a month of Fairport rehearsals. Sandy and Richard, two of the greatest talents I ever worked with, made their way slowly towards each other without any help from me.
We addressed Fairport’s vocal weaknesses by adding Ian Matthews, a former professional footballer from Scunthorpe with a pop tenor voice. He and Judy shared vocal duties on the eponymous first LP, which included a couple of unreleased Joni Mitchell songs. When Richard and Judy Dyble split up, I thought of proposing a change, but was afraid Sandy would eat them for breakfast and spit them out for lunch.
In the end, they approached her while I was in New York. I rushed round to a rehearsal the minute I got back to find Sandy as docile as could be. She was in awe of Richard and overjoyed to have a great band behind her. Inspired by her, Richard started writing songs. The second LP,
What We
Did On Our Holidays,
was streets ahead of the first. Sandy’s voice used to overwhelm her guitar but it fitted perfectly with what was becoming a powerful band. Simon Nicol evolved into the most solid, sympathetic rhythm guitarist I ever worked with. Ashley Hutchings, always an elegant bass player, developed a style that would influence legions of taste-free heavy-metal musicians. Martin Lamble was a fluid, jazzy drummer who gave Fairport a distinctive swing. He was also the fashion plate of the group, turning out in velvet jackets and a knotted scarf when the rest seemed sewn into their jeans.
By the time we began work on
Unhalfbricking
, they bore little resemblance to the group I had heard at UFO. The songs Sandy and Richard were writing no longer suited Ian’s vocal style, so the tradition was established: no two consecutive Fairport Convention records have ever featured the same line-up. Ian had always been somewhat of an outsider, bemused by the enthusiasms of the others for jazz, blues and folk music. I imagined many post-Fairport futures for him but never the one he created for himself: making consistently high-quality recordings for more than thirty years in a folk-rock style, and having a bigger hit with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ than anything Fairport ever managed.
As the album took shape, I got more and more excited. Sandy’s ‘Autopsy’ and Richard’s ‘Genesis Hall’ were mature compositions that showed they could fulfil all the ambitions I had for them. During a break in recording, they summoned me to a gig in Bristol to hear two new songs. First a French version of Dylan’s ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’ performed Cajun-style, then a traditional ballad Sandy had taught them called ‘A Sailor’s Life’. The first became their only hit single, the second turned English folk music on its head. The implications of their version of this old ballad have reverberated far and wide. A member of Los Lobos told a friend of mine that they had been just another rock band from East LA until ‘A Sailor’s Life’ challenged them to find in their own Mexican traditions something as rich as Fairport had found in their English ones. Many bands around the world have begun to look to their own culture when they come up against the limitations of the Anglo-American ‘rock’ model. The map for such journeys leads back to that night in Bristol. And when Fairport were themselves in need of inspiration at a time of trauma and tragedy, they would find it in the same place.