White Bicycles (30 page)

In 1969, Witchseason’s booking agency landed a deal to arrange Frank Zappa’s European tour, and I joined the Mothers of Invention for their trip to Stockholm. I was thumbing through the racks in a local record store when my eye caught a familiar name: Lorey’s Hep-Star Benny Andersson in a duet album in Swedish with Björn Ulvaeus. The record was great, full of rich melodies and harmonies. When
Liege and Lief
started to sell in Scandinavia, I needed a local music publisher to collect the composers’ income and help promote my artists. In other territories I relied on colleagues’ recommendations about the best sub-publishers, but for Scandinavia I looked no further than the credits on the back of the Andersson/Ulvaeus LP.

I met Stig Anderson in the Polar Music offices in Stockholm in October 1970. He was bemused at being offered the publishing rights to artists he had barely heard of but brightened when I told him I didn’t want an advance, just a swap. I would give him Fairport, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny and John Martyn for Scandinavia and he would give me the English-language territories on Benny and Björn’s songs. He suggested I join them all for a drink at a downtown hotel that evening. After a friendly chat, Benny and Björn invited me to stick around: their girlfriends were starring in a turn-of-the-century revue in the hotel lounge, complete with top hats, high-kicking routines and old Swedish music hall songs.

After the show, the five of us (yes, the dancers were Agnetha and Frida) went back to Benny’s flat. We spent half the night talking, drinking and playing records, mostly by obscure American soul singers. I told them they should go back to writing in English. We joked about whether or not they could ever write a song as successful as ‘Daydream’.

Back in London, there were two pieces of paper on my desk. One was a letter from Stig Anderson confirming our reciprocal arrangement: he had checked on Fairport’s and Sandy Denny’s sales figures and was reasonably pleased with what he found. The other was a message to call Mo Ostin at the Dorchester Hotel.

Everyone in the music business knows Mo Ostin. Once Frank Sinatra’s accountant, the legendary boss of Warner/ Reprise Records presided over the greatest company in the most wildly successful years of the recording industry. His gentle demeanour, his willingness to delegate to the ‘good ears’ that worked for him and his loyalty are legendary. He is a short man, whose wide black-framed spectacles, bald patch and benign smile make him look a little like Sergeant Bilko. I had met him on an early visit to Los Angeles and we hit it off well. He hired me for the Geoff & Maria Muldaur project and picked up John & Beverley Martyn for North America. Whenever I was in Los Angeles, I would stop by his Burbank office to say hello.

Things got more complex when he started asking me questions about Chris Blackwell and Island Records. Warner had no European outlet then and were considering buying their way into the market. I waxed lyrical about what a great company Island was. Mo sent accountants to go over their books and when Chris balked at the first proposal, Mo went out on a limb with the Warner Brothers board and made a huge offer matching what Chris said he wanted. Blackwell’s response was ‘Let me think about it’.
Think
about it?
Mo was beside himself. Then an interview appeared in a British trade paper where Chris explained that Philips had first option on buying Island and anyway, he wasn’t in the mood to sell. Mo seethed with quiet fury. He had learned the business from Mickey Rudin, Sinatra’s fearsome attorney, and underneath the smiling exterior, Mo was not a man to take kindly to a slight.

It later occurred to me there was more to my Dorchester visit than his flattering offer to run the film music department in California. He gave me a schedule of upcoming projects that included
Clockwork Orange
and
Deliverance
and I asked for a few days to think it over. On the same trip he offered Chris Wright and Terry Ellis at Chrysalis their own label deal in the USA, and eventually – when Warner set up in Europe – in the UK as well. In one short visit he had removed two of Island’s sources of new artists and successful releases.

Blackwell was away looking after Steve Winwood on Traffic’s first American tour. I found him on a snowy November morning in a hotel room in Northampton, Massachusetts, far from the headquarters of his growing empire, adding up petty cash receipts. Chris had never forgotten Millie Small and was determined to take good care of his prodigy. If he sensed what lay behind Mo’s offer, he never let on. I had to do it, he said, it was the chance of a lifetime. Never mind that it left him with a stable of artists in turmoil, all poised at crucial points in their careers. Suffering studio burn-out and terrified by the mounting bills, I was in no state to judge the situation clearly. The Incredible String Band’s devotion to Scientology and refusal to listen to my advice, coupled with my arguments with Sandy, the growing recalcitrance of Fairport and Nick’s simple concept for his next album all combined to make me feel that everyone might be happier with me out of the way. And the only certain way to balance Witchseason’s books was to sell it to Island: at least that way I could make sure everyone got paid.

I flew to Burbank to meet Ted Ashley and John Calley, the heads of the film company. I was dazzled by the studio and the rich possibilities that seemed to open up and I buzzed with ideas about using John Cale for film scores and getting Nick to write title songs. I had
done
records; it was time to move on to a bigger game on a larger playing field. The contract with Stig Anderson lay unsigned on my desk; Island Music would buy my publishing company and they had their own relationships in Scandinavia. What was a deal for a few songs by some Swedish songwriters that might never be written compared with the new world beckoning in California?

Back in London, I started arriving at Sound Techniques at ten every morning and leaving after midnight. The Fairport schism had left me another group to produce while Mike Heron’s prodigious output of songs led to a solo album, and the chance to record him with John Cale, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Steve Winwood and Dudu Pukwana. And there were now another two female artists: not only had I taken on Nico, but a singer I had pursued in 1966 suddenly re-appeared.

Early in my Elektra year I attended a poetry reading at the old Institute of Contemporary Arts in Dover Street. Singers were scattered through the declamatory line-up and one intrigued me. Her voice was small and delicate but the quieter she sang the more attentively the audience listened. She disappeared before I could speak to her and when I finally tracked Vashti Bunyan down, she had just signed with Andrew Oldham’s
Immediate
label as ‘the new Marianne Faithfull’.

Oldham’s recordings were overproduced flops, so Vashti had headed north in a horse-drawn caravan with a man she and her previous boyfriend picked up hitch-hiking one night. She started writing songs again and remembered my interest from four years earlier. I visited their winter-quarters somewhere near Lancaster and was smitten once again with her and her music. Her new ultra-rural life and impending motherhood made her an even trickier commercial proposition than Nick Drake, but I couldn’t imagine saying no. With new Chris McGregor configurations, John and Beverley Martyn and Dr Strangely Strange, Ireland’s quirky answer to the ISB, my 1970 productions came to 16 LPs. All needed to be mixed and mastered before my January departure for LA.

One night in December working on the second Fotheringay LP, I lost my temper after the fortieth unsuccessful take of
John The Gun
. Sandy and I went out and got drunk. She asked if I would stay if she broke up the group and made a solo album. I said I would take time off to produce it and if there was anything that would have tempted me to turn Warner Brothers down, it was that. The next morning Sandy rang to say she had disbanded Fotheringay: when could we start work on her new record? I said I would have to discuss it with Warner Brothers once I got there.

‘Get there? But you’re not going now!’ I told her if she had broken up the group thinking I would walk away from a signed contract, she had better re-form it pronto. She replied that it was too late, two of the band had signed on that morning for a long tour with Cat Stevens. She never forgave me for the confusion of verb tenses, but at least, I thought, she wouldn’t go bankrupt financing Fotheringay.

There was a long list of issues that needed resolving about the integration of Witchseason into Island Records. A meeting was scheduled for my first day off from the studio in over a month. The night before, Suzie Watson-Taylor, Nigel Waymouth and I ended up around midnight at the Baghdad House, a Chelsea institution run by an enigmatic Iraqi and his red-haired Scottish girlfriend. The basement had alcoves perfectly designed for the discreet smoking of substances and long after-hours evenings of wine, song, flirtation and conspiracy. The music business and the criminal fraternities – often quite different people – adored it.

We watched a madly dressed fiddler playing and dancing in the middle of the room, who then passed around a cup of ‘hot wassail’. Suzie wrinkled her nose and demurred. Nigel and I were suspicious of its contents, but each took a tiny sip, just to be polite. Soon we all went home to bed. Suddenly I was wide awake and the walls were dancing.
Shit!
I picked up the phone and rang Nigel. His wife told me yes, he had been tripping, but she had given him two Mandrax and now he was sleeping like a baby. I told her I would be right over for some of the same. I drove the half-mile to and from their flat at 10 mph, took the pills, got into bed and tried to read to take my mind off the hallucinations. The big meeting started the next morning at ten o’clock.

Suddenly the phone rang. I picked it up with a start. Who could be ringing me in the middle of the night? It was Marian, my assistant. As she talked, asking me where I had been all day, I realized the light in the room involved more than just my bedside lamp. It was mid-afternoon and the phone beside me had been ringing for hours. I had slept through it all, my head cradled in the palm of my hand, the book still open to the right page. All the undone business had been sorted out without me. It was time to pack for LA.

A week after my arrival, I was woken at dawn in the Chateau Marmont by a roar that shook the whole of creation. My immediate thought was that someone had dropped the Bomb. I was dead, but at least I had plenty of company. A few seconds of rational analysis altered the event to earthquake. In all my years in recording studios, I had never heard a sound so low. The vibrating object had to be unimaginably large to make such a noise. Like a wet dog, the earth was trying to shake us off.

That day at the Music Bungalow on the Warner Brothers lot, I got to know my new staff. Malcolm Beelby had been working there for almost forty years. He asked whether I remembered the scene from Busby Berkeley’s
Gold Diggers of 1933
, with the circular staircase full of girls playing fluorescent violins. I did. That scene was shot during his first week at the studio, on the day of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. He remembered helping screaming girls off the tottering tower, the wired violins crackling and sparking as they fell. The peroxide blonde in the accounts department with the Cupid’s-bow lips had been one of the dancers.

A few weeks into my new California life, I got the news that Richard Thompson had left Fairport. I was stunned: it was the last thing I would have predicted. I was even more astonished when I picked up a two-week-old copy of
Melody
Maker
and read an interview in which he said, ‘It didn’t seem the same after Joe left.’ You could have knocked me over with a feather. Or flown me back to London with it.

Next came a distressing telephone call from Molly Drake. Nick had returned to Tanworth, no longer able to handle living in London. They wanted him to see a psychiatrist, but he felt people would judge him crazy if he did. (Such attitudes were not unusual in England in 1971.) She asked me to tell him I thought it was a good idea, which of course I did. Nick sounded terrible on the phone. His hesitant manner had always seemed to shield an inner core about which he was certain, even if he had little ability to communicate it other than through his music. Now it felt as if both core and shield had been shattered. He sounded frightened.

Settling into my new job, I discovered that the last thing film directors wanted was ‘creative input’ from a kid from the music business. They tended to score their films at the last minute and usually wanted John Williams or his ilk. When I persuaded the producers of
Omega Man
to let me and John Cale score a ten-minute sequence of the film on spec, they were horrified at the results. John and I thought it was perfect.

I cleared rights to Leonard Cohen songs for
McCabe
and Mrs Miller
and organized regular screenings of new releases for the LA music business community. I went to A&R meetings at the record company across the street and attempted to coordinate the activities of the two branches of the multinational now called Warner Communications. I tried to hire the great Cambridge banjo wizard Bill Keith to play the theme for John Boorman on
Deliverance
, but Bill was travelling in Europe and wanted to visit a girl in Ireland, so he suggested I get Eric Weissberg instead. I went to Atlanta with Eric and recorded ‘Duelling Banjos’ frontwards, backwards, fast, slow, upside down and sideways. Boorman was so delighted with the results he insisted it be released as a single. I took it to an A&R meeting and everyone laughed. We humoured him by pressing up 500 white-label promo copies to play on radio interviews he was doing around the country.

The morning after his first interview in Minneapolis I got a call from someone in the warehouse, asking whether I knew anything about a mysteriously numbered single. It was ‘Duelling Banjos’, of course, and the Minneapolis branch had just ordered 5,000 copies. I had been so contemptuous of its merits as a single, I hadn’t even bothered to put my name on the label as producer. Within a few weeks, it became my only number one hit.