by Andy Powell
The bar, which we’d visit fairly frequently, was manned by a tough old guy, a former prize fighter. We had some pretty crazy evenings spent there with our producer and engineer. Tanqueray and tonic was our drink of choice, I remember, and one night even saw me swinging from a chandelier above the piano, which was being played by a venerable English gentleman resident who was taking great delight in taunting us scruffy rock’n’rollers about our idea of what ‘real music’ was. He’d play us an ancient tune and say, ‘Yes, your music is okay but can you do this?’ This was a real hoot to us, of course. It became such a catchphrase later, during overdubs, especially if Laurie or I made a mistake in our playing.
A hotel breakfast is a true indicator of how the day will pan out; as they say, breakfast is often the most important meal of the day—and often the only meal you’ll get that day while on tour. The German hotels, hands-down, have breakfast nailed. Freshly squeezed orange juice, smoked salmon, excellent breads, real eggs cooked perfectly, excellent coffee—to say nothing of those delightful little wieners or frankfurters that they squeeze onto a plate wherever possible.
Breakfast in America used to be truly the best and was one of the most memorable things about hotel life there back in the 70s. I’ll never forget my first night in a hotel in Washington, DC. In the breakfast room the next morning I was asked what I’d like for breakfast. ‘Eggs and bacon, please,’ I meekly answered. ‘Now, honey, how would you like those eggs—over, over-easy, sunny-side-up, shirred, poached, scrambled…?’ My mind was forever blown.
These days, all that service has gone. The rooms are clean and efficient enough but there are no budgets anymore for staff and only rarely for real breakfast. The receptionist will boast to you on check-in about the complimentary breakfast buffet, but there will be some sad reconstituted powdered egg omelette brought in on a truck the night before, along with the nitrogen-infused sausage patty and the disgustingly gooey waffle-making machine that the family of five have just destroyed. It’s all pretty bad. We often just skip the whole sad experience and find a Denny’s or—our favourite—Cracker Barrel restaurant en route to the next show, where breakfast and lunch will mutate into the all American brunch.
There have been some ridiculous and, then again, truly nightmarish hotel experiences, two of which I’ll relate here. Starting with the truly ridiculous. Our long-time friend, promotions manager, webmaster, and mentor, Leon Tsillis, was on tour with us in the USA—Milwaukee, to be precise. We were staying at the Park Hotel after a show at the renowned Shank Hall, named after the hotel in the movie This Is Spinal Tap. I know, I know—it should have been a sign that things could go wrong! We’d played a great show, and around 2:00am pandemonium broke out. Fire trucks were called out, guests evacuated, sprinkler systems activated. Amazingly, all four of us band members slept through all this, but what had happened was that a radiator valve had blown in Leon’s room, shooting hot water up to the ceiling and down onto his sleeping body. Talk about a rude awakening. That must have really been shocking for him.
Shocking? This one stays in my mind forever. I was nineteen or twenty, and we were playing this funky club, well known at the time in Frankfurt, Germany, called the Zoom Club. I remember seeing Arthur Brown there—it might have been the night before we played. An old bass player friend of mine, Phil Shutt, was with him at the time. Anyway, after our show, we were accommodated in a small, cramped doss-house of a hotel behind the club—it might have been part of the club—and I’m sleeping in a tiny single bed in this shoebox-sized room when I’m awoken by a blood-curdling wail in the corridor, probably not two feet from where my head was lying pressed up against the headboard of the bed.
This was bad. I was young and inexperienced. I just lay quaking in bed, fearing the worst. It was no ordinary wail, that’s for sure. I must admit, I did not dare to go out and investigate. The next morning, when I did venture out, it turned out that there had been a stabbing—an actual murder, on the floor where I’d been sleeping, literally just outside my room, and there were the blood stains on the carpet to prove it.
In those days, when Miles would travel with us, there would be all kinds of practical jokes and pranks played between the management and the band. Short-sheeting the bed was a classic. The bed sheets would be folded halfway in the bed, and tucked under the mattress very tightly while the occupant—Miles—was out of the room. After a long day of travelling, a raucous show and the inevitable partying, the poor recipient would be driven to distraction trying to figure why he could not fulfil the act of slipping blissfully into his waiting bed.
One time, Miles got back at Ted Turner and me for the constant harassment by beckoning us down to one of the hotel rooms on the floor we were all staying on. He said there was a surprise waiting there. Being naturally inquisitive we could not hold back and as he held the door open, ushering us into this Holiday Inn room, there on the bed in all her glory was an obviously naked young lady—for our enjoyment, one assumes. What was not immediately apparent as we edged up to the bed was that she had one leg encased in a plaster cast. This was all too much for me. I left, but from memory I believe Ted dallied a little. Miles thought this was a huge hoot and dined out on it all for months.
Once, as a celebration for completing one of the recordings we’d made in Miami, Pauline and I found ourselves on the island of St Thomas. We were staying on the beach in one of those small two-storey vacation-style hotels. We were in a deep, blissful sleep. It was hot and perhaps 3:00am. We’d left the sliding doors from the balcony to our room open for some air. All of a sudden we were woken by a very large person literally right there in our room. It wasn’t Keith Moon this time. The guy was stumbling about and chuckling to himself in the dark. I could see he looked to be a native of the island. We’re both naked in bed; I’m rendered speechless, Pauline is helpless under the covers. I’m wildly gesticulating for him to leave the way he’d come in. I’m shouting at him but nothing is coming out of my mouth. He’s obviously drunk, huge, and disorientated. I’m wondering if he’s wielding a machete. He did exit the room eventually, and later I figured out he had obviously decided to spend the night in what he’d thought was an empty hotel room, having spied our open sliding door from the beach. You just never know with hotels.
On another occasion, not so long ago, we’d been travelling out of Nashville and decided to use this hotel not far from the Grand Ole Opry. It was 2:00am and the nice Hispanic lady on reception got us six rooms on the ground floor. We were so tired. There had been a couple of guys cleaning the floors in the reception area, eyeing us suspiciously, it seemed to me. It struck me as strange that my sliding door was slightly open when I got to my room. I closed it and the next morning I found out that everyone’s sliding door had been open. It was a set up. When our drummer, Ray Weston, awoke, he was missing his wallet and all his tour proceeds with it. It was a few thousand dollars. Needless to say we called the police but nothing was ever resolved. This kind of thing can be heartbreaking after putting in weeks of work as a musician, with bills at home to pay. One false move and it’s all gone. On another occasion, I lost a few thousand dollars myself by foolishly leaving a belt pack containing the proceeds of a show on the hood of our vehicle and driving off, after being distracted by a call on my mobile phone—from Ray, as it happened. I went back an hour later, but of course it was gone.
These lessons constantly show you that touring is a risk business. If it’s not money, rip-offs, cancelled shows, groupies, dodgy promoters pulling guns on you (it happened to me in Italy), it could be food poisoning and fires, or traffic accidents and nights in the emergency room of some hospital somewhere, far from home, watching as gunshot victims are wheeled in or worse. But at the very least, like in the song, whatever catastrophe occurs, you can always ‘check out any time of day …’. Truly, though, there’s no place like home.
CHAPTER 4
NEW ENGLAND
AND BACK AGAIN
(1975–79)
We were advised, as a lot
of bands were in the mid-70s, to go overseas because of the huge amount of income tax we were paying: 83 percent on our gross earnings, I believe. Although we didn’t really feel that we were earning any money, because we weren’t actually seeing much of it, somebody was—and they were advising us to go abroad. There was a lot of naivety, although we all got the idea that our time in the sun, financially speaking, might be limited.
A lot of bands had a ‘tax year’ around that time. Jethro Tull did it in the glare of great disapproving publicity, and it lasted about three weeks, until they decided, What are we doing? We’re British! The Rolling Stones hung out in the South of France and got Exile On Main Street out of the experience. A couple of years later, Rick Parfitt from Status Quo endured twelve months of tedium on Jersey—a notably sedate British Territory located in the English Channel but not part of the UK or its tax regime. He managed to get a hit single out of it, ‘Living On An Island’. We didn’t do any of that—neither the real monetary benefit nor the smash hits, but we did get something more valuable as I see it now: a true immigrant experience in a country that we initially believed to be much like the UK but, as we later found out, was something entirely different.
I believe that part of the reason I took to America like a duck to water was because my own family had uprooted from London when I was a kid, and I felt fairly disconnected from my close-knit East End relatives. Perhaps the cord was severed then. Even though our family would go back to visit at Christmas and so on, we were living a different, suburban reality. Don’t get me wrong, I had a good childhood, but I was living in a new town, and in our neighbourhood there were Irish people, Scottish people, Welsh people, Londoners—the point being that I wasn’t terribly connected to my roots. Consequently, for me, it was easy to become an expatriate. It wasn’t so easy for one or two of the others, but in general some very positive things came out of the emigration adventure.
It was a huge period for the band—a bit of a sink-or-swim experience. Shortly after we went to the States and began the process of being residents in a new country, we went back to Europe and took part in Miles’s latest wheeze, a traveling festival called Star Truckin’ ’75, which was both fantastic and farcical. So at the same time as we were moving to America we were breaking Europe, headlining this colossal rolling festival—the first of its kind—an evolving and revolving cast of the great and the good. It would occupy the whole of August 1975, starting from an airfield near Southend and taking in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, plus a whole day of that year’s Reading Festival in England. What could possibly go wrong?
Miles had come up with the idea with a Dutch accountant and promoter called Cyril van den Hemel, who I think had previously booked some individual shows with us. Miles was becoming well known as an entrepreneur in the music business by then and his contacts and reputation were now obvious enough to give a veneer of credence to what was really an ambitious scheme. Given the logistics involved, the potential for failure was huge. But, being a ‘bigger picture’ kind of guy, Miles was thinking that there was a big market for rock festivals, and that this would basically be a one-stop shop on that score for promoters across Europe. He was offering an entire festival full of contracted acts available in a town near you. All the local promoter had to do was to find the location, sort out the local regulations, and plug into the concept. It just needed someone in each city to say, ‘You’re offering us a day with Caravan, Soft Machine, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Wishbone Ash, and Lou Reed? Yes indeed, we’ll sign on for that!’
I’m sure the diary took very little time to fill once the acts had been confirmed. The trouble is, no one had told Lou Reed. He was meant to be headlining, his presence being a big deal in Europe at that point. But apparently he was stuck in New York somewhere, having just fired his manager, and seemed to know nothing about any tour. Thus it was that Wishbone Ash, by default, became the headline act. Climax Blues Band and Caravan, in addition to Wishbone Ash, were in Miles’s ‘stable’ of artists. Another of his acts, Renaissance, had been scheduled in as well, but Annie Haslam was unwell at the time. The Renaissance-shaped hole in the tour wasn’t as detrimental as Lou Reed’s absence, but it did mean the bill needed to be bulked out even more every night.
I don’t really remember much of the background in terms of what Miles was telling us, although the business about Lou professing ignorance of the whole venture was in the British music papers on the eve of the tour. We were in Connecticut, trying to get a handle on a new way of life, and whatever Miles told us when he presented the tour to us, after flying over from London, needed a lot of consideration. He was our manager, first and foremost; that was the way we looked at it, but the poor financial climate and the fact that Miles was personally in financial trouble himself was making us very wary of taking such a chance. In hindsight I’m glad that we did sign on for the tour because it was phenomenal. When I look at the posters now and look at the line-up, it was incredible—it’s hard to believe it really happened. It’s absolutely why I’m still able to tour Europe to this day.
With Lou opting to stay in New York and Wishbone becoming the de facto headliner, a series of other great artists would fill the breach for a night or two in the glaring absence of the man from The Velvet Underground. In Belgium and Holland we added Steve Harley’s Cockney Rebel, simply because he was a name artist with that all-important hit single and had the necessary carnets in place to do it. But possibly the oddest act, given the rest of the Anglo-centric bill, was Ike & Tina Turner. They lasted two or three shows and were a lesson in American professionalism, sensuality, and sheer performance once they hit the stage.
Before we could enjoy all this, though, the flight out of Britain was an interesting experience in itself. We imagined there would be a Boeing 747 involved, but when we arrived at the airfield in Southend, along with all of the other bands, our jaws dropped. There was this dumpy-looking little freight aircraft nicknamed ‘The Guppy’ because it looked like the fish of the same name. Being primarily a cargo carrier it barely got off the ground with all this gear and twenty or thirty musicians on board. There was real and genuine fear that we weren’t going to be able to leave the runway. I’m sure I can’t have been the only person thinking, Hmm, this doesn’t portend well. In fact, later on in the tour alternative arrangements had to be made, because with the extra acts and their extra gear, the transport was simply inadequate.
This set the tone for the transport situation every day. Haphazard would be the word. It wasn’t like a modern rolling festival: it was a loosely stitched-together bunch of ad hoc arrangements involving various local taxi firms, buses, airports, hotels, local promoters, and whatever else. All in the days before email and mobile telephony. How on earth did we do it? Everything about the touring machinery was ramshackle, and yet the shows themselves, when everyone got there and the hassles of the day were set aside, worked really, really well. In several of the places that the festival visited, Star Truckin’ provided that city—or even that country—its first experience of a major rock festival, and it must have had a tremendous galvanising effect on some of the local music scenes.
It was a big rock’n’roll circus every night. It was an opportunity for us to watch our peers onstage. I’m sure it was the same for them. I made a few friends on that tour, particularly the late Pete Haycock from Climax Blues Band. He was a kindred spirit. He could easily have been a guitarist in Wishbone Ash—he had finesse, a real feeling for the blues, and he was an easy guy to get on with. I remember Ralphe Armstrong—bass player with the Mahavishnu Orchestra and a larger-than-life figure. I liked him a lot; he was very warm, very easy to get on with, as was their drummer, Michael Walden. I can’t say I made friends with the guys from Soft Machine but they were certainly very amiable. I remember talking to Steve Harley quite a bit, and I thought he was quite a character. I can remember him ripping the head off Charles Shaar Murray, the NME writer, one night—maybe he’d given him a bad review or something, bu
t there was certainly a screaming match going on backstage.
In terms of making it a memorable show for the punters, everyone on the tour very much rose to the occasion, giving, I’m sure, some of the best performances of their careers. Acts like Soft Machine went down well in France, which always had a soft spot for music at the esoteric, arty end of rock. Just ask Pink Floyd. The more Anglo-Saxon-oriented rock audiences—in Germany, for example—would have favoured Wishbone Ash. But festivals then, in general, were always really eclectic in their bills—as they’ve become now, once again—so in general there was a very open mind to the variety of music on offer. They were interesting times.
I saw a little bit of Ike Turner’s reputation at close hand. There were a couple of nights where Ike and Tina didn’t come onstage on time; one night in particular, they were an hour and a half late. They had a caravan out back, and there were some nasty sounds coming out of that caravan. We were all standing around, people walking back and forth, furrowing their brows. When the Ikettes did emerge, it was obvious there’d been some physical interaction, shall we say. But it was part of their way of being, I think. They had this old showbiz mentality whereby whatever had happened backstage, everyone went onstage and did their act, Tina shaking her booty and rocking it like nothing else. The backstage abuse and then covering it up with this total frenzied professionalism was probably the sort of thing that had gone on for years—it was clearly part of what ‘Ike & Tina Turner’ was. They bailed out before Spain because they’d been offered a TV show in Germany—just one example of how loose the tour was and how rock’n’roll the whole business in those days. These days, you’d have lawyer’s letters for breach of contract, promoters obliged to offer refunds. In addition, I believe that today there would be a horde of health & safety people with clipboards trying to close you down every night—and very probably succeeding.