White Bicycles (8 page)
In Birmingham that night I saw a standard four-piece, with a lead singer who played keyboard and guitar. The repertoire mixed folk songs, blues, skiffle tunes and some West Indian material. The singer was about fifteen and had the most convincing white blues voice I had ever heard. This was child prodigy Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group and they were the first folk-rock band I ever heard. I left the pub resolved to put together a similar outfit in America.
When I arrived back in New York that autumn after the jazz tour, I sought out Paul Rothchild. Things had changed dramatically for him since the Jesse Fuller session a year earlier. Jac Holzman of Elektra, upset at falling behind Prestige and Vanguard in the ‘hip folk label’ stakes, lured Paul with a higher salary and bigger budgets. Now he had a corner office in Elektra’s mid-town headquarters and was wheeling and dealing, meeting Brill Building record pluggers and going to sales conventions to talk up the new records he was producing for his rapidly expanding employers. More significantly, he was also becoming a great producer. Paul’s productions with the Doors and Janis Joplin would stand among the best recordings of the era.
Over beers in an East Village bar, I recounted how teenage English girls had waited outside Muddy Waters’ dressing room for an autograph; about
Melody Maker
, the paper with articles about pop, folk, jazz and blues all mixed together; and about white blues singers of ambiguous sexuality queuing up to follow the Stones into the Top Ten. And I told him about the Spencer Davis Group.
His response was to lead me across the Village to the Night Owl Café on West Third Street. From the doorway we heard the sound of Richie Havens and a bongo player echoing out into the street. There weren’t many in the audience, but Paul told me that every night you could find singers there like Havens, Fred Neil or Jesse Colin Young, ‘folk’ artists with a pop sensibility and an electric bass or a percussionist.
Over the next few days we set about recruiting our ‘folk-rock super-group’. We started with Jerry Yester, a pleasant red-haired Californian with one good LP under his belt who could play electric bass, and the former Even Dozen Jug Band harmonica star John Sebastian. After adding Joe Butler, a drummer Yester and Sebastian knew, the final piece of the puzzle was Zal Yanovsky, a voluble Canadian who wrote, sang and played lead guitar. In a McDougal Street bar, I gave them a pep talk about what was happening in England. They looked dubious, but agreed to start rehearsing. After the meeting, Yanovsky and I eyed each other curiously. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere…?’ Out of context, it took a minute – he had grown a Beatle mop-top – but then it came back to me.
In the summer of 1962, Warwick, Geoff and I had gone to Chicago on a blues expedition. We travelled back around the top of Lakes Michigan and Huron and, fuelled by a bottle of my mother’s diet pills, drove straight through to Toronto. With nowhere to stay and almost no money, we put in a collect call to the well-travelled Tom Rush to find out about possible crash pads.
He gave us the address of Ian and Sylvia Tyson, a popular Canadian duo. Their place was dark, but the downstairs half of the duplex was buzzing with a party full of freaks. Geoff decided that Warwick and I were too square to lead the assault. ‘You guys have no idea how to mumble,’ he said, so we lurked in the shadows as he rang the doorbell, then conducted most of the ensuing conversation talking at his own left shoulder.
‘Yeah, man, like, you dig… Chicago, you dig… ahhh, no sleep… place to crash, you dig?’ all minimally articulated and barely audible. It worked. We were shown to a basement room filled with chrome and naugahide furniture pilfered from all-night laundromats. Our host spotted our new Big Joe Williams LP and insisted on hearing it. We were cross-examined about the Chicago blues scene and Club 47. By dawn, the Dexedrines had worn off and we were starving. Zal (for it was he) led us out into neighbouring streets where we confiscated freshly delivered bread, doughnuts and milk from front steps. The next day he took us to Yonge Street and taught us to play snooker. A few days later, when we had barely enough cash left for the two tanks of gas needed to get back to New Jersey, we popped some more pills and headed home. I thought Zal was just a hospitable freak; he never let on he was a musician.
The plan was that once they got some original material together, Paul would sign the group to Elektra, finance getting them on the road and transform them into stars. As Paul’s sidekick, I had his assurance that he would figure out a suitable reward. I never doubted he would deliver.
Yester and Butler’s interest soon waned. Rehearsals would peter out into Sebastian, Rothchild and I getting high, listening to the latest English imports and fantasizing about having a Top Forty hit. Capitol Records had signed Fred Neil and Richie Havens was making a record for MGM. The big boys were moving into the scene and we were getting left behind.
I was still working for George. I liked the idea of being involved in the Newport Festivals the following summer, to say nothing of having a regular pay check, and I wanted to sell packages like the Blues and Gospel Caravan to colleges and concert halls. A bookers’ convention was taking place in La Crosse, Wisconsin, early in January, and George decided I should go. I would stop in Chicago, visit Muddy to get him on board and try to get the idea off the ground. It was made clear to me that without some bookings my job was unlikely to last through the spring.
A couple of nights before my departure (by Greyhound bus – George’s budgets were always tight) I took a seat at the Kettle of Fish on McDougal Street for the New York debut of Son House, the latest blues legend to emerge from the mists of history. I joined a table that included Sam Charters, a hero of mine for writing
The Country Blues
, about the early days of blues recording. When I told him I was going to Chicago, he said, ‘Well, there’s a band there you have to hear.’
‘Come on, Sam, I know all about Magic Sam, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush and Junior Wells,’ naming the then obscure South Side band leaders I assumed he was talking about.
‘No, it’s none of those. There’s a band with white kids and black guys, led by a harmonica player called Paul Butterfield. You should make a point to hear them,’ and he named a North Side bar where they appeared a few nights a week.
I rang Rothchild the next morning and recounted my conversation with Charters. ‘I’ll meet you there,’ he said immediately. Someone in California had told him about a kid named Butterfield who was an amazing harmonica player. By the time I arrived at the club straight from the bus station, it was eleven o’clock and one set was already over. Paul, who had flown, was sitting in a booth with Butterfield and guitarist Elvin Bishop talking contract terms.
Listening to the second set, it was clear their music was unlike anything in Boston, New York or London. The combination of South Side veterans Sam Lay and Jerome Arnold with Bishop on guitar and Butterfield on harmonica and lead vocals was completely original. It was Chicago blues, hard edged and raw with nothing ‘folk’ or ‘pop’ about it.
I told Paul I could see only one problem. Elvin Bishop was a good rhythm player, a decent singer, a nice guy, a close friend of Butter’s and a key to the group’s conception and sound. But as a lead guitarist he was just not…
heroic
. I had been telling Paul about the charismatic role a young guitar player for John Mayall’s Blues Breakers named Eric Clapton had in the mythology of English blues bands. To be
perfect
, the band needed a guitar hero.
I mentioned the white kid who had sat in with Muddy Waters:
he
seemed pretty intense and heroic. I hadn’t been that knocked out with his playing, but in this context… I had first met Mike Bloomfield in the basement of Bob Koester’s Jazz Record Mart during the Dexedrine-propelled summer trip to Chicago. Geoff, Warwick and I were rifling through Koester’s collection of 78s one afternoon, taping the best ones on to my primitive Wollensak recorder, and Bloomfield sat with us for a while, chatting about blues and playing a few things on an acoustic guitar.
After the show, Paul and I took Butter down the street for a drink. We told him of our concerns about Elvin and the need for a strong lead guitarist as a foil to his harmonica solos. There was no talk of replacing Elvin, just adding another element. I asked whether he knew Bloomfield. ‘Sure, I know Mike,’ he said, ‘he has a regular gig at a bar in Evanston. I think he’s there tomorrow night.’
We picked Butterfield up the following evening in my rented car and he guided us north along Lake Shore Drive to a rowdy club with a stage behind the bar. Bloomfield was in mid-set, but during a pause Butter motioned to his harmonica and Mike beckoned him on to the stage. As they started jamming on a Freddy King instrumental, Paul and I exchanged looks. This was the magic dialectic, Butterfield and Bloomfield. It sounded like a firm of accountants but we were convinced it was the key to fame and fortune for the band and for us.
When the set ended, Mike joined us in the booth. He was a cheerful, open-faced, big-boned kid who had devoted his young life to the blues. Rothchild laid out the deal: join the Butterfield Band, sign a contract with Elektra, come to New York, make a record, be a star. Bloomfield hesitated for about ten seconds before nodding his agreement. Paul headed back to New York to draw up the contracts and I went north to try and peddle some Muddy Waters concerts.
Rothchild swung into action immediately, bringing Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman to Chicago to see the group and planning the recording. Things happened very fast in 1965. When Dylan released
Bringing It All Back
Home
that spring, it raised the stakes for everyone. As for the Blues and Gospel Caravan, American college bookers proved as cold as the frozen wastes of northern Wisconsin in January. George told me to take the spring off and come back in June to get ready for the Newport Festivals.
AFTER A WEEK HITCH-HIKING through the Scottish Highlands in the spring of 1965, I took a train from Loch Lomond into Glasgow. The grime of the city was astounding. Sooty black buildings loomed over me as I emerged from the station and the air was pungent with that peculiarly Scottish odour of coal smoke and granite. I noticed a small poster advertising the Kelvin Museum and thought consoling my eyes with some art seemed a nice idea for a damp Sunday afternoon. The Kelvin has recently won an award for forward thinking in museum management, but that Sunday I saw a stuffed bear looming over a model of the original Glasgow regional railway and some Charles Rennie Mackintosh chairs sharing space with Salvador Dali’s
St John’s Vision of Christ on the Cross
. It was dizzying in its amateur wackiness.
When the five o’clock bell rang, evicting the stragglers onto the shabby grass of Kelvin Park, I fell in alongside an arty-looking blonde and made a casual remark. She turned, smiled and proceeded to make friendly chat as we walked across the park. I nodded, agreeing with everything she said while in truth I couldn’t understand a word. It was a good few minutes before my ears were sufficiently attuned to her Glaswegian dialect to have a coherent conversation.
The weirdness of the Kelvin Museum and the incomprehensibility of the natives delighted me. I loved the feeling that I was in a foreign place, and the more alien the better. Shuttling back and forth between Britain and America in the sixties provided endless opportunities for comparison and contrast. For a start, the British didn’t seem to own anything. The most poverty-stricken folk singer in Cambridge or Greenwich Village had at least a record player and a refrigerator and many drove cars. In England, pilgrimages would be made with a newly purchased LP to the flat of someone with the means to play it. Milk bottles on the window ledge brought hurriedly inside on winter mornings were a reminder that kitchen appliances – and central heating – were rare luxuries. My purchase of a used 250cc BMW motorcycle in the spring of 1964 transformed our options. Friends would jump on ‘Tamla Mobike’ and we would head for Cambridge or Oxford, or venture to gigs in previously inaccessible corners of Greater London.
Dope was another area of cultural surprise. The nail-thin American single-paper grass joints were uncommon in Britain. I watched the construction of a five-paper British hash-and-tobacco spliff in wonder: the search for cardboard to be rolled into a mouthpiece; the ritual burning of the hashish block; the careful licking of papers; the LP cover on the knees for assemblage. Most liner notes I saw were dotted with hashish burns.
When I started meeting musicians, I noticed other differences between the cultures. Some British art students would form a group, then learn how to play their instruments well enough to perform the songs written by the group’s strongest personality. The results might be technically unsophisticated but were often more original than those of their American counterparts, who were too close to our musical forms to do much more than accurately re-create them. Dylan, always the exception, was almost British in his unconcern with vocal grace or instrumental fluency.
I read an interview with Keith Richards once explaining how he and Mick Jagger had a single blues record between them when they first met. It was one I knew well: a Stateside four-track EP licensed from the Excello label, with Slim Harpo on one side and Lazy Lester on the other. They played it until it was so worn they could barely hear the music through the scratches. One way of looking at the Stones’ sound is as a South-East London adaptation of the Excello style. If they had owned more records, their music might have been less distinctive.
By the mid-sixties, America was experiencing the ‘generation gap’. Parents whose kids returned from school or college with long hair and a rebellious attitude often went into shock. Children were disowned, ‘grounded’, locked up, beaten, shorn, lectured, or sent to psychiatrists, military school or mental institutions. In Britain I visited pubs where earringed boys with long hair stood drinking a Sunday pint next to their dads in cloth caps. Neither seemed the least bit concerned. Americans were so unsure of their often newly won status that they could not comprehend the next generation rejecting what they had worked so hard to achieve. The British seemed to feel that little was going to change, no matter how long their child’s hair grew. My egalitarian American impulses were unnerved when comedians or pundits referred to some working-class parents’ reluctance for their kids to be educated ‘above their station’, yet much of British society seemed happy and content compared to status-anxious America.