White Bicycles (28 page)
Bob could sense what was going on in the internal politics of Witchseason before I did. With Nick, he added to Danny Thompson’s aggressive cockney affection a gentle wisdom about human nature. Many people loved Nick, but Bob was able to express it in concrete terms that demanded nothing in return: hot tea, a welcoming chair, friendly and stimulating surroundings. I never saw Nick more relaxed than in Bob’s kitchen and few things seemed to give him more pleasure than winning a round of liar dice. When Tod Lloyd chafed at his lack of involvement in Witchseason, Bob took him under his wing. He introduced Tod to
spielers
– illegal card games – and he was soon going to croupier school. Tod later worked in Lake Tahoe as a blackjack dealer.
I took Bob and his wife June on holiday with me to Morocco in 1969. We had a great time, apart from June’s alarm at her first experience of a shower. Bob loved the markets there and was determined to return with a sword cane. He spotted an exquisite one in the souk in Marrakesh and started haggling. Bob made an offer far below that proposed by the dealer, who then came down a bit, made tea, wandered off to talk to another customer, returned with a slightly lower offer, made some more tea, changed the subject, suggested a cheaper cane, made a lower offer, etc. Bob never budged from his original price. Twice we left the shop; each time the trader tracked us down with yet a lower price. I asked Bob why he didn’t play the game and make a slightly higher bid. Bob was adamant: he knew the object’s worth and would get it at his price. Twenty minutes later, halfway across the market, the defeated trader, out of breath from running up and down alleyways looking for us, capitulated. Bob grinned but professed not to be surprised. I could never have matched his self-control.
Friends from Bob’s other worlds would drop by and play whatever game was going that evening. One regular was a neatly dressed man involved in ‘debt collection’. At the end of a particularly long and stoned evening, everyone started putting on their coats and finishing their tea. A hashish high often involves a fascination with the details of something without being clear about the big picture. I found myself intrigued with the movements of this man’s hands. He was doing something very specific, but I couldn’t quite grasp what it was. He was as stoned as I was, so it had the feeling of an obsessive, habitual action being repeated hypnotically. Finally, I got it: he was wiping his fingerprints off everything he had touched since he had entered the kitchen.
Jaded urbanites that we were, we would have scorned the idea that we were in need of family. Bob provided just that. When he and June moved to Worthing, I would go and visit, but something was lost for all of us; most of all, I think, for Nick.
CHRIS MCGREGOR WAS BORN IN rural Transkei, where his Scottish father was a missionary. Obsessed with Duke Ellington in his youth, he grew up to become South Africa’s most adventurous jazz pianist. In the early sixties, he formed the multi-racial Blue Notes and they defied the apartheid regime by performing from Cape Town to Pretoria. Their tours were often nightmares of police harassment, pass law restrictions, padlocked venues and township violence. Out of that forge of hatred, repression and indifference, McGregor and his group – Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza, Louis Moholo and Johnny Dyani – created music of extraordinary power and beauty.
When they were invited to the 1964 Antibes Jazz Festival, the South African authorities happily gave them passports in the hope they would never return. They stood out in Antibes both for the originality of their music and for their unrefined personalities. Unlike American jazzmen, they had no frame of reference for the sophistication of the European jazz milieu. They drew huge crowds playing every evening at the TamTam bar in Antibes, but despite numerous approaches there were no concrete offers. Promoters couldn’t categorize them and their drinking and shouting at each other in Xhosa made people nervous.
They finally secured a two-week stint at Ronnie Scott’s in London and got a great reception. But the British Musicians Union wouldn’t allow them membership until they had lived in Britain for a year and they couldn’t work until they were members. How were they to survive? Towards the end of their year of waiting, I came across them at the Old Place in Gerrard Street, where musicians earned only what was tossed into a bucket by the door. From the moment I heard their blend of Ellington, South African choral music and free jazz, I was a convert.
I got them a deal with Polydor (jacket design by Danny Halperin) and my agency took on the task of booking them. It seemed clear to me that they were playing music more vital than anything else in the British jazz scene, but that turned out to be part of the problem. In South Africa they had dreamed of an England where protests against apartheid were regular occurrences and racial equality reigned. They imagined meeting, jamming and exchanging ideas with American and British musicians. But the British, once they realized this was no two-week splash of colour that would soon return to Africa, felt threatened. Like British jazzmen, the Blue Notes had studied the classic American canon but that didn’t stop them throwing their South African culture uninhibitedly into their music and in so doing making most British jazz of the period sound derivative. (Danny Thompson was the only British musician imagining a Morris dance/jazz fusion and he was keeping very quiet about it.) Visiting Americans weren’t much better; most refused requests to jam – except of course the Ayler Brothers, who hung out with them for weeks.
The desperate sorrow of being such a long way from home manifested itself in behaviour that made things harder: they drank, they were late, they shouted at promoters. In the polite British scene, impatience and intemperance were not rewarded. There was no going back to South Africa: the apartheid laws had been tightened, making the touring they had done in the early sixties impossible. Chris started working as a soloist and with his multinational big band, the Brotherhood of Breath. Johnny moved to Copenhagen and took up heroin. Then Mongezi came down with tuberculosis: modern medicine is supposed to be able to treat it but couldn’t cure the scrawny Monks and he died.
In the early years of the Blue Notes, Dudu Pukwana’s sax playing was the show-stopper. As Chris combined the spirit of Ellington with gospel piano, Bartok, Monk and the anarchy of Cecil Taylor, so Dudu mixed township jive with Johnny Hodges and Albert Ayler. Both made music steeped in their Transkei roots. I spent evenings at Dudu’s flat near King’s Cross listening to his
mbaqanga
and
kwela
records; he had all of Spokes Mashyane’s hits. We plotted a fusion of township jive and rock that would have pre-empted
Graceland
by fifteen years. He taught Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol to play the Zulu guitar rhythms and we recruited exiled South African stars the Manhattan Brothers for the vocals. It didn’t always work, but we were getting somewhere. We decided to take the record as it was to Johannesburg. I could hear some of the music up close, he could catch up on new developments and maybe I could sell the South African rights.
South Africa in 1970 lived up to its billing. I saw white truck drivers at red lights spit on black pedestrians crossing in front of them. When I went to a movie, black passengers waiting for a bus to Soweto were still there when I came out while empty ‘white’ buses passed constantly. The movie was
Hurry Sundown
, about poor whites and blacks joining forces in the American South. The liberal audience hooted at the clumsy excision of an embrace between Jane Fonda and Diahann Caroll and cheered the feel-good racial-harmony ending – then sailed past the beggars outside with hardly a glance.
I couldn’t get a permit to visit Soweto, but Dudu and I met every day at Dorkay House, the Black Musicians’ Union headquarters, and I played snooker and ping-pong at the Bantu Men’s Club next door. The suppression of the theatre and music scenes meant the club was full of unemployed actors and musicians. I will never forget being approached by men dressed in rags who would ask me whether I had seen the new Harold Pinter play at the Royal Court or heard the new Miles Davis LP.
I licensed Dudu’s record to a man at Trutone Records who lectured me about Miriam Makeba, the ‘traitor’ who had libelled her homeland and who, one day, would ‘crawl back on her knees’. The minute I had the cheque, I rented a car, picked up some friends from Dorkay House and headed for Swaziland. I couldn’t take any more of Johannesburg.
Dudu and I never completed the project. In the countdown to my departure for California, I had a lot of records to finish and time was tight. He was drinking a lot and spent an evening in the studio playing the worst solos I had ever heard from him. The unfinished tapes are still lying in a vault.
Chris and his wife Maxine moved to a mill in Gascony where they raised their kids and Chris found a more welcoming atmosphere in the French jazz world. Dudu persevered in London with a
kwela
–jazz fusion group, achieving small triumphs, growing fatter and drinking more. Johnny Dyani overdosed in 1986 in Denmark. In 1988, I helped Chris make
Country Cooking
, a wonderful recording of the re-formed Brotherhood of Breath for Virgin. He fell sick soon after and the doctors found cancer throughout his body. He flew home to the Valley of the Lot and lay in his bed, surrounded by family, friends and candlelight, and died within days. Two years later, Dudu succumbed to a heart attack.
Chris was a remarkable man, with his rural Transkei accent, his sophisticated musical skills, his wry sense of humour and his mix of African and European clothes and mannerisms. He never got to America, but at least the French loved his music, and a generation of European and African jazz musicians revere him.
Of the original quintet, only Louis Moholo survives: he now runs drum clinics in the new South Africa. None of the others lived to see Mandela walk out of prison and into the President’s Palace. Whatever the cause of death on the certificate, homesickness and exile were their true afflictions, and the potential cure of being welcomed by their adopted British homeland was never really on offer.
THE FIRST INKLING I HAD of what took place after I left the Paradox Restaurant came when the Incredible String Band’s US agent telephoned me in LA. Rather than send the tour proceeds to our London bank as agreed, they wanted it all paid in cash. I got through to Licorice, who told me they needed it to pay for Scientology courses. I knew little about the cult, but what I had heard wasn’t good. When I arrived back in New York I was confronted with a strangely unified foursome: they wanted the money and they wanted to give it to the Church of Scientology.
Before vacating my seat at the Paradox, I couldn’t have set Simon’s sales pitch up any better. The group had all been intrigued by my account of his transformation – due entirely, he said, to Scientology. He invited them to the ‘Celebrity Center’ the next day and they quickly signed up. Back in London, they spent weeks being ‘audited’. They told me about ‘going clear’ as the auditing process reaches its first plateau of accomplishment. I hated the jargon, but began to notice interesting changes in their personalities. They had always avoided discussions about money; now they eagerly convened meetings about group finances. Touring schedules and recording plans were sorted out quickly and efficiently and they even took time to thank me for the job I was doing (previously unheard of). Internal jealousies seemed to evaporate overnight. They stopped taking drugs or alcohol. Everything I’d read or heard about Scientology seemed horribly obscure, self-important and dubious. But the results appeared to be a happier, saner group of people who had become a pleasure to deal with. They were coming up with good new songs and the recordings were proceeding smoothly. To my surprise, they never attempted to convert me.
I was also intrigued by their sexual evolution. Mike and Rose remained close and shared a cottage in the Row (a group of eight cottages on the Tennant estate in Scotland where they all now lived) but they seemed to sail effortlessly through other liaisons: Rose with David Crosby during a visit to San Francisco; Mike with various girls that Rose just laughed about; a brief affair between Rose and myself; and a more serious one between Mike and Suzie Watson-Taylor, the woman I had hired to deal with their day-to-day management.
But soon the new compositions began to lose their wild melodic beauty. In the studio, there were fewer moments of surprise and inspiration. Was this a natural decline after years of original output, or was it Scientology? I resisted the thought that creativity might be linked to unhappiness or neurosis.
Mysterious practices surfaced one evening in Amsterdam. A midnight show at the Concertgebouw paired them with Fairport Convention. The crowd was full of flower-bedecked girls and gaudily dressed men, led by the poet Simon Vinkenoog in a lemon-yellow linen suit: the counter-culture seemed to be in charge in Holland. Onstage, clunky chromium microphones for the Dutch radio broadcast stood alongside the modern ones from the PA system. As Mike set down his electric guitar after the first song, he brushed his leg against an ungrounded radio mic. There was a crackling sound and he levitated, hovering a few feet above the stage for what seemed an age, then landing with a thud, his guitar and the mic stand glued to his chest, humming. I ran onto the stage and flung the stand into the orchestra pit. Mike had turned a pale green.
They carried him to the dressing room and locked the door, barring the house doctor; they would take care of him using Scientology methods. After a hurriedly summoned Fairport finished their set, the ISB made a triumphant return. The crowd roared as Mike, still looking pale, played and sang as well as I ever heard him. Licorice told me they had treated him with ‘touch assists’.
Album sales and tour income, meanwhile, continued to grow. Next up was the Woodstock Festival where they – along with Joan Baez and John Sebastian – were topping the bill on Friday night. That morning in New York, reports started coming in about the crowds thronging to the site. By the time we landed at Monticello airport, the access roads had turned into parking lots. They used an old army helicopter with a permanently open door to take us to the site, the six of us (including Walter Gundy, the tour manager) strapped in, staring down hundreds of feet at a Catskill countryside filled with traffic jams, tents and small colourful armies marching across the fields. When we reached the site, it was almost too much to take in: a city had formed around the stage. As we banked and turned over the sea of people, the small landing strip behind the stage appeared to be the only unpopulated area for miles around.