White Bicycles (34 page)

I’ve just gone solo

Do you play solo?

Ain’t life a solo?

Solitude was something she was determined to avoid, throwing herself into relationships with needy urgency:

When the music’s playing

That’s when it changes

And no longer do we seem like total strangers

It’s all those words which always get in the way

Of what you want to say

When I wake up

In the morning

I think it only fair to give you warning

I probably won’t go away

I’ll more than likely stay.

After years of increasing problems with drink and occasional white powders, she became pregnant – possibly to save her crumbling marriage. But the birth of her daughter Georgia in 1977 failed to provide the cure, and when Trevor left for Australia with their child – ostensibly to show her to his parents – she despaired of seeing either of them again. The last of a series of bad falls – first at her home, then her parents’ house, finally at a friend’s flat in London – left her with a cerebral haemorrhage. She never regained consciousness and died on 21 April, 1978. Trevor remarried, moved back to Australia and died in his sleep eleven years later. Georgia was raised by Trevor’s second wife and still lives in Australia.

Sandy and Nick regarded each other with respect but from a distance. Sandy couldn’t relate to Nick, and Nick was as reticent towards her as he was towards most people. They were both English to the core, but what might seem a nuance of difference between suburban middle class and rural/colonial upper middle class is actually a chasm; it was easier for the working-class Bob Squire or Danny Thompson to communicate with either than for them to relate to each other.

Both benefited from an upbringing and education that steeped in them a sense of history. Sandy had a solid grounding in English literature and adored the relationship between the history she learned at school and the ancient ballads she taught Fairport. Nick grew up inhaling the air of an elite education: the Romantic and Elizabethan poets were omnipresent in his school years. Nick’s emulators rarely have the cultural context to grasp how remote their lyrics are from his.

Another gap between Nick and Sandy was drugs. She never liked cannabis much – it was too introspective. For her, drink was the way to relax, and when her life began to spiral downhill, cocaine briefly boosted her confidence. Nick never, to my knowledge, ventured much beyond hashish. But he shared with Sandy an instinctive rejection of moderation and his endless spliffs played a large part in his isolation.

I listened in the studio control room as musicians’ modes of consciousness-alteration proceeded from grass, hash and acid to heroin and cocaine by the 1970s. All but the latter could, on occasion, provide benefits, at least to the music. I never knew cocaine to improve anything. When the white lines came out, it was time to call it a night: the music could only get worse. If I joined in, the next day’s playback would provide clear evidence of the deterioration of both the performances and of my critical ability to judge them. I suspect that the surge in cocaine’s popularity explains – at least in part – why so many great sixties artists made such bad records in the following decade.

Psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were dismissed from Harvard for failing to maintain a professional distance: they used to trip along with the students. When I was at Harvard and a girlfriend started having a bad trip, I rang Alpert’s home at 3 a.m. and he calmly advised me to put her into a warm bath to relax her. By the time millions of kids were re-creating those Harvard experiments, Alpert had decided he wanted something else. He set off for India where he met a Californian hitch-hiker who seemed calmer than anyone he had ever met. He followed him to the remote cave where his guru lived on a diet of moss. The holy man recounted all Alpert’s dreams since he had met the hitchhiker and, among the aspirins, anti-diarrhoea pills and Valiums in Alpert’s pillbox, picked out the twelve tabs of Owsley acid. After swallowing them, he proceeded to discuss spiritual paths for the next eight hours as if nothing had happened. In that cave, Alpert was transformed into Baba Ram Dass and never took drugs again.

Is this one legacy of the sixties? That after flinging open the doors to a world previously known only at the margins of society, the pioneers would move on, leaving the masses to add drugs to the myriad forces pulling our society towards chaos and mediocrity? As to the sixties’ musical bequest, other generations will decide whether it proves more durable than that of the later decades of the century. I wouldn’t bet against it.

The atmosphere in which music flourished then had a lot to do with economics. It was a time of unprecedented prosperity. People are supposedly wealthier now, yet most feel they haven’t enough money and time is at an even greater premium. The prediction that our biggest dilemma in the new millennium would be how to use the endless hours of leisure time freed up by computers has proved to be futurology’s least amusing joke. In the sixties, we had surpluses of both money and time.

Friends of mine lived comfortably in Greenwich Village, Harvard Square, Bayswater, Santa Monica and on the Left Bank and were, by current standards, broke. Yet they survived easily on occasional coffee-house gigs or part-time work. Today, urbanites must feverishly maximize their economic potential just to maintain a small flat in Hoboken, Somerville, Hackney, Korea Town or Belleville. The economy of the sixties cut us a lot of slack, leaving time to travel, take drugs, write songs and rethink the universe. There was a feeling that nothing was nailed down, that an assumption held was one worth challenging. The meek regularly took on the mighty and often won – or at least drew. Debt-free students with time on their hands forced the Pentagon to stop using drafted American kids as cannon fodder and altered the political landscape of France.

The tightening of fiscal screws that began with the 1973 oil crisis may not have been a conspiracy to rein in this dangerous laxness, but it has certainly worked out to the advantage of the powerful. Ever since, prices have ratcheted upwards in relation to hours worked and the results of this squeeze can be seen everywhere. Protesters today seem like peasants outside the castle gates compared to the fiercely determined and unified crowds I joined in the sixties. Our confidence grew out of a feeling that large sections of the population – and the media – were with us and from what we saw as the inexorable power of our music and our convictions. In our glorious optimism, we believed that ‘when the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake’. And we achieved a great deal before the authorities figured out how to capitalize on our self-destructiveness. Right-wing commentators still spit with anger when they contemplate how fundamentally the sixties altered society. The environmental and human rights movements and the theoretical equality of races and sexes are only the tip of a huge iceberg. Ideals that remain our source of hope for the future took root in the sixties.

Part of our strength came from our sense of connection with the past. I remember feeling in my teens that the past was so close I could touch it. I heard my grandmother talk about Vienna at the turn of the century and play Brahms in a long-forgotten style as I sat next to her on the piano bench, watching her long veiny fingers. She told me that as a teenager she could rest the heel of her left hand on a pane of glass, raise her fourth finger, bring it down and crack the glass. I could hear the sound of that violent impact in my mind, a feat of undistracted discipline almost impossible to imagine, yet as close as her mesmerizing hands.

Sitting in Princeton listening to old records, we became obsessed with the past. We tried to pierce the veil of time and grasp what it sounded, felt, looked and smelled like. In Harvard Square and London I met many with similar preoccupations; they didn’t seem unusual at all. When old blues singers began to reappear, it delivered a rush of excitement and adrenalin. Meeting and travelling with Gary Davis and Lonnie Johnson – even Coleman Hawkins – armoured me against a host of disappointments.

History today seems more like a postmodern collage; we are surrounded by two-dimensional representations of our heritage. Access via amazon.com or iPod to all those boxed sets of old blues singers – or Nick Drake, for that matter – doesn’t equate with the sense of discovery and connection we experienced. The very existence of such a wealth of information creates an overload that can drown out vivid moments of revelation.

We fuelled ourselves with inspiration from our cultural heritage, and in so doing helped turn it into smoke. The roots of today’s digitized and sampled culture lie in those years of genuine enquiry and enthusiasm. Much of the sixties is mirrored in that Sunday night at Newport, when Dylan sent Pete Seeger fleeing into the night with the jubilant aggression of his music – music originally inspired by Seeger himself.

What followed in the wake of that night swept up most of the potential young fans of Thelonious Monk or Skip James, propelled them into the Fillmores and blew their minds with the simplistic sounds of the Grateful Dead. Few took time to mourn, as we did backstage at Newport, for what was so heedlessly tossed aside.

Before the turn of the century – the nineteenth century, that is – there was an underground craze that swept through black America. Someone came up with a catchy AAB twelve-bar structure with melancholy melodic intervals which provided the perfect frame on which to hang lyrics about heartbreak, natural disasters, evil white bosses and every other aspect of life at the end of a century that had falsely promised a road to freedom. Blues itself was an innovative craze that swept away decades – perhaps centuries – of folk traditions. We hear echoes of what disappeared in the recordings of Henry Thomas and Charlie Patton, but it is like trying to reconstruct a Cherokee city from a few arrowheads and beads unearthed at a construction site in downtown Atlanta. The destructiveness that comes with innovation is a process as old as history.

The England that awaited me when I moved to London a few months after Newport was only just emerging from a long class-ridden slumber. In the ’80s, when I developed a film project with screenwriter Michael Thomas about Christine Keeler, Stephen Ward and the Profumo affair, I learned just how momentous had been the upheaval in the year prior to my arrival. Released as
Scandal
in 1988, our film helped England rewrite a bit of its own history: the movie’s success placed Ward and Keeler in the roles of victims of the Establishment rather than the irresponsible upstarts the press had made them out to be at the time. The story helped explain the sense of adventure and excitement I found in so many people in 1964; it was as if a great weight had been lifted off their shoulders. But the sense of delight at new possibilities lasted only a few years before the return of Conservative government and 1973’s three-day week put an end to it. But like the rest of the world, Britain would never return to its pre-sixties assumptions about life and society.

At the height of the decade, we remained optimistic in a way that today – as we watch our world being consumed from under us – is impossible to imagine. For me, the contrast between spring and autumn ’67 in London planted the first doubts. The violence at Altamont eroded optimism for many; Charles Manson and the descent of Haight–Ashbury into squalor relieved us of a lot more. The discovery – thanks to Michael Herr’s
Dispatches
– that American fighter pilots could machine-gun Vietnamese farmers for sport while listening to Dylan and Hendrix on cockpit headphones finished off what remained for me. As my time at Warner Brothers drew to a close, I stood on a hilltop in Laurel Canyon watching the smoke on the southern horizon as members of the Symbionese Liberation Army were incinerated by an LA SWAT team. By then, the ideals of the sixties were visible mostly in fun-house-mirror form. Today, when the mode of music changes, the walls of the city are covered in corporate ads sponsoring superficially subversive artists.

I limit my regrets to friends and peers whose lives were consumed by the intensity of the times. I think of Nick and Sandy, of Martin Lamble and Jeannie Taylor, of Bob Squire (who broke his own rule against heroin and died of it). I mourn Chris McGregor, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza and Johnny Dyani, who, lured by the false promise of our rhetoric, died so young and so far from home.

I think of Jimi Hendrix, whom I knew only on film but about whom I learned so much, a man whose dreams led him into a life surrounded by pressures and people who meant him little good. Devon Wilson haunts me: her charisma and intelligence flashed so brightly in the course of one taxi ride that I couldn’t forget her. Sentimentally, I wished he had made it back to her; perhaps they could have saved each other.

Roy Guest, who died a sad and lonely death in the ’90s, was, like Stephen Ward, someone for whom the sixties came too late to undo the damage inflicted by aristocratic snobbery and cruelty.

I mourn Don Simpson; the man I knew bore little resemblance to the bloated cartoon character found dead beside his pool in 1996, still pursuing the Hollywood dreams we shared for a time.

I miss the pre-Scientology Mike Heron and Robin Williamson and wish I had never left them alone with David Simon or let them duck for cover out of the Woodstock rain.

I wonder what might have happened had I stayed in London in 1971.

Tony Howard and Paul Rothchild were not casualties of the era but died far too soon, and I miss them; where would I have been without them? I think also of Hoppy, who, though he shines today as brightly as ever, left behind him in prison the optimism and confidence that were a beacon for so many of us.

But I think happily of those friends who continue to perform with the same spirit that delighted me when first I heard them more than thirty years ago – Norma Waterson, Richard Thompson, Geoff Muldaur and Danny Thompson foremost among them.

And as for me, I cheated. I never got too stoned. I became the
éminence grise
I aspired to be, and disproved at least one sixties myth: I
was
there, and I
do
remember.