I Talk Too Much

by Francis Rossi

  He was a great road manager, which is what we needed, but more than that he was just a thoroughly good bloke, a few years older than us, enough for us to respect his greater experience but not enough to make him an outsider. So we pinched him. Prior to becoming a roadie, Bob had been in a group called the Attack and he could sing and play. In Basingstoke, where he came from, he’d run a blues and folk club where he also performed. It was one of those places where people got up and recited poetry. Bob was one of them. It meant he was also good at lyrics – an art I hadn’t quite mastered yet. Some people might say I still haven’t quite mastered it and when I’m feeling particularly down I might even agree with them. The reality is, though, that with Bob as my new songwriting partner I was about to come up with some of the biggest hits of the 1970s. Practice makes perfect is what they say and it’s as true of songwriting as it is anything else. Also, once you’ve written one hit, you’ve overcome that obstacle in your mind. You know you can do it again. It’s just a question of hanging on in there long enough to get the chance. Then, once you’ve had two, three, four … you don’t even question it any more. You just expect the goods to come to you every time you sit down with a guitar. They don’t, of course, but that’s another lesson you learn as you go through your career. Thankfully I hadn’t gotten to that hurdle yet.

  Quite soon, we had him up onstage with us playing harmonica. Next thing, he’s jamming with us while we are messing around trying to write songs. Him and Roy Lynes got on well. They were about the same age and Bob was good at putting words to some of the melodies Roy came up with on his keyboards. Alan Lancaster then jumped in. Between them they helped come up with four of the twelve tracks that would make up our second album, Spare Parts. Rick and I were also writing together but only three of our songs made it onto the album – which was fair enough as Alan and Bob were coming up with better stuff than us at that stage.

  The only thing none of us were able to come up with was another hit single. This led to us recording what was meant to be a sure-fire hit: a cover of a Goffin–King song called ‘You’re Just What I Was Looking for Today’. The Jerry Goffin–Carole King songwriting partnership had come up with some of the biggest hits of the sixties. The Everly Brothers had done a demo of the song a couple of years before but not released it for some reason and it was really up and catchy. Loving the Everlys as I did, I thought we were definitely onto a winner. But the version we did of it was so slow and painful it sounded like a funeral march – or a funeral crawl, to be more precise. We managed to turn a great soulful song into a dirge. Pye refused to release it as a single.

  Instead, we ended up recording a cover of a song the Everly Brothers had actually written, which had been a huge hit for them in 1965, called ‘The Price of Love’. Another version of the song by Bryan Ferry would also be a top 10 hit in 1976. Our version, though, was even more turgid than the Goffin–King monstrosity – and was decidedly not a hit. At which point, Pye went into full panic mode and, in an effort to try and make back some of the money they had spent on us since our last hit eighteen months before, stuck out a ‘greatest hits’ album called Status Quo-tations. This was basically some of the tracks from our two albums thrown together with our only two hit singles. It came out in time for Christmas as we slogged away on the road playing every ballroom, college, club and youth centre in Britain – and was also not a hit.

  The only bright spots were when we played some more shows in West Germany. Our records were still doing reasonably well there – even ‘Are You Growing Tired of My Love’ had reached the top 30. So we were able to get on the telly there and headline a few shows every other month. The rest of the time, though, it was sheer drudgery. For our first year as the Status Quo, following the success of ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’, we had been treated as pop stars. We had been dressed, our hair styled, our singles picked for us, our whole career mapped out for us by the record company. All we had to do was show up and smile. Now all that went out the window. We weren’t getting any new clothes and the Carnaby Street clobber was now out of date. Our hair was getting longer and nobody cared. It felt like maybe even John Schroeder and Pat Barlow were losing interest.

  It was during this very low time for us, though, that we slowly began to figure out our own path. Rick and I had gotten to know Colin Johnson, one of the main bookers for the NEMS agency, who was closer to our age, and always full of energy and knowhow. He had a charisma we liked. Nothing seemed to faze him, unlike poor Pat Barlow, who was struggling to know what to do with us now that our music and image was changing. It was nothing we had planned particularly but our evolution from pop group to rock band was now underway. Pat had been like a father to us but he would probably admit he had now taken us as far as he could, with his limited dealings in the music business back then. Colin was also very paternal in his attitude toward us but he had that confidence that comes from having worked with a lot of different bands in the business. He also made us laugh. We felt by going with Colin we would be in safe hands again. Colin just seemed to have his finger on the pulse of where music was going at the start of the seventies. I hated having to tell Pat, though. He’d driven us around when we were still kids at school. He’d fought for us to get our record deal. He’d been there when we had our first big hit. But he’d also been there while we were having our many misses.

  I felt terrible, we all did, and in the end we sat down and wrote him a letter. Bob Young actually helped us compose it. We rationalised it by saying if we wrote him a letter then we could put down our thoughts in black and white. Which was true. Except the real reason was we didn’t have the bottle to tell him to his face. So we wrote this letter and posted it. In the years to come, we would see more people come and go. I grew very philosophical about it. You can’t make people’s decisions for them, you can’t live their lives for them. It could have just as easily been me getting my marching orders in the early days, if I hadn’t kept up my end. When they brought Rick in that was my wake-up call. You just have to keep going.

  In the end, it turned out to be the right decision for the band. It wasn’t just Pat. We felt all the people in power we’d been dealing with up till then, including Arthur Howe’s booking agency, were now losing interest in us. Colin, meanwhile, was moving on to start his own company, Exclusive Artists, which looked after a load of chart bands like Manfred Mann, Middle of the Road and Edison Lighthouse. We decided that if Colin was interested we could do a lot worse than have him as our manager. In the end, Pat was probably glad to get shot of us. Even John Schroeder had to admit what we were doing wasn’t working and was open to new ideas.

  None of which would have made a blind bit of difference in the larger scheme of things if we hadn’t also begun to change as a band, musically. We were so sick by then of chasing a hit, of trying to look and sound like whatever the latest trend was, we’d even stopped playing ‘Pictures’ and ‘Ice in the Sun’ some nights. The audiences had changed too. Playing a college or ballroom in 1970, we were now confronted with full-on, dope-smoking hippies. We also noticed that the audiences often sat on the floor at gigs now. They would sit there with their heads bowed, listening intently, not watching or dancing. This meant they could also pass each other joints. When we really got going, though, they would bow their heads, their hair falling over their faces, and start nodding in time to the music. Rick was the first to pick up on it. Next thing, he’s also bowing his head down, wagging it, his hair covering his face. Then Alan and I started doing it and it became our thing. But all we were really doing was mirroring the audience. I don’t think I went to the hairdressers again for another ten years. Not having to live up to a fashionable image completely liberated us as a group and as people. That was when I knew I never wanted to be trendy again. The trouble with trends is they come and go so quickly. Somehow, without even trying, we had found a way to never go out of style – by never being in it in the first place. Freedom!

  At the same time, it just seemed to be the way all the bands we
re now thinking. Hit singles were no longer a big deal, or at least they were no longer the only things that mattered. Groups like Led Zeppelin didn’t even bother releasing singles. It was all about being ‘real’. Not manufactured. Which was fine by us, as we’d given all that up anyway. Rick and I were much more interested in album-oriented groups of the period like Chicken Shack, Fleetwood Mac, Steamhammer, Canned Heat … harder-edged rock bands with a strong blues influence. Touring Britain in early 1970 we just decided to do our own thing without overthinking it. In all honesty, the others cottoned on to it before I did, especially Alan, who always preferred the heavier end of things. Then in Germany one night Rick and I were listening to ‘Roadhouse Blues’ by the Doors blaring insanely loudly out of the speakers and it just blew the cobwebs away. Suddenly I could see clearly what we needed to be doing.

  It was with this new attitude in mind that we chose for our next single a song by another young Valley Music singer-songwriter named Carl Groszman, who’d been brought to our attention by Ronnie Scott. Carl had come up with this simple blues shuffle called ‘Down the Dustpipe’. It suited what we were now doing at our gigs perfectly. Simple but tight and upbeat with a heavy blues element. Bob Young would get up with us to play it, wailing away on his harmonica, and that also became a feature of the new Quo.

  What I loved about ‘Down the Dustpipe’, which I had only just cottoned on to, was that it incorporated that fabulous Italian shuffle, only amped up and given a bit more whizz-bang. It just came so naturally to me – that perfect marriage of pop and blues – and to the rest of the band. At the time, there was a question mark over whether Pye would pay for us to make another album, but they were happy for us to record ‘Down the Dustpipe’ as a one-off single. I’m guessing the thinking was probably, well, if this isn’t a hit we’ll just drop the band from the label. There was certainly no over-egging the pudding in the studio. We just went in and played it as we would live, more or less, with John Schroeder pushing the buttons.

  It could have been the end of us. Instead, it became a hit. It took about six months to do it, mind you, very slowly creeping up the charts. But that in itself gave us six months more of life while the record company waited to see how high it would eventually get to. At first Radio 1 ignored it. In a telling comment that prefigured the sort of cheap comments the band would start to get in the seventies, Tony Blackburn, the Radio 1 breakfast show host, said something on air like: ‘I don’t know about “Down the Dustpipe”, I think that one should go down the dustbin.’ Charming. Nevertheless, eventually ‘Down the Dustpipe’ climbed to number 12 in the UK charts. I don’t think we even did Top of the Pops, though we did do a live session playing the song on a Granada TV show called Doing Their Thing. That was the first time we went on in our new sort of look. In fact, if you have a peek at the video on YouTube what you will see is the band in transition, halfway between the flower-power look and the double-denim look we were about to become famous for. Alan is wearing a waistcoat – as are Bob and I. But Alan is still in a flowery shirt, I’m in what appear to be green trousers and Rick is in T-shirt and jeans – with his head bowed, face hidden beneath curtains of long blond hair. John is in what look like brown trousers and a long-sleeved T-shirt. It’s pretty obvious no one has been ‘advising’ us on our clothes and that we must have got dressed in the dark. But it’s definitely more us than those cheesy old clips of us miming to ‘Pictures’ from two years before. (I remember we also performed the song on a show called The Golden Shot, which was presented by Bob Monkhouse and was enormously popular at the time. We were told to stand around a JCB Digger. ‘Dustpipe’ – digger? If you say so, mate.)

  How you dressed onstage in the seventies became quite an issue, in fact. With Bowie came glam, which meant every would-be star band in the land adopting something from David’s wardrobe, from Slade and the Sweet to Rod Stewart and Elton John. Then came punk and then the New Romantics and then whatever next after that. How you dressed defined your place in the pantheon, at least in Britain. Staying outside that bubble, Quo became impervious to fashion. It’s not much different these days. If anything, it appears the business has gone backward, in that even the coolest groups have been ‘helped’ with their wardrobe by a team of stylists and make-up experts, even if it’s only to dress down. I say: wear what you like. Have whatever haircut you like. As long as the music is good. That’s all that people really remember.

  With ‘Dustpipe’ giving us our third hit, Pye let us make another album, which we called Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon, a reference to the types of places we found ourselves eating in while we were on the road, which we were constantly in those days. Those places all seemed to be run by the same stone-faced middle-aged woman with a cigarette butt dangling from her lips, hence the ‘greasy’ sepia picture on the front of the album sleeve. I’m not sure if we meant this, but looking at the picture now it’s also quite a good metaphor for the music evolution we were undergoing – from pop dandies to down-and-dirty blues-rockers. (This only really works though if you pretend not to notice the fact that her cigarette isn’t actually alight.)

  The success of ‘Down the Dustpipe’ really put the wind back in our sails. Immediately we all set about writing our own songs in that vein. Bob and I also started writing together for the first time, coming up with our own take on the ‘Dustpipe’ shuffle-blues-boogie with songs like ‘Spinning Wheel Blues’. By now Bob was more than just a tour manager, he was a friend. Rick and I would often even travel with Bob in the equipment van rather than with the others. It gave us a breather from Alan laying down the law or John throwing a wobbler.

  Alan also weighed in with his own take on our new direction, especially a nine-minute piece he’d worked up based on two songs played back-to-back, ‘Is It Really Me’/‘Gotta Go Home’. This, along with our version of ‘Junior’s Wailing’, which was a Steamhammer original, with Alan doing lead vocals, began to dominate our live sets. When people trot out the old heads-down-no-nonsense boogie shtick, it’s material like this that comes to my mind. We would perfect it and come up with our own original material, especially later things like ‘Forty Five Hundred Times’, which could go on forever when we played it live. But it all started back in 1970 when we threw all our preconceived ideas out the window and just went for it, for good or ill. Plus the audience smoked so much dope at concerts back then they were happy to sit in a smoky fog all night listening to the same boogie beat.

  The truth is, we had no more clear idea of what we were doing in 1970 than we had before. The big difference was we were playing stuff we enjoyed and just hoping for the best, rather than have a definite plan in mind. Where we missed a trick was in not including ‘Down the Dustpipe’ on the album. Putting singles on albums was frowned on at the time. The Beatles didn’t do it. The Rolling Stones didn’t do it. So we didn’t do it. But the result of that was that – huge sigh of relief – Ma Kelly’s Greasy Spoon actually got us back into the UK albums chart.

  The upshot was that Pye allowed us to go in and record a new single, after the album had come out, which we did, taking our lives in our hands and recording a new song Bob and I had come up with called ‘In My Chair’. Again, very much styled on the same narcotic shuffle beat of ‘Down the Dustpipe’, only much slower and moodier, and very much the template for all the future hits Bob and I would write for Status Quo. (As part of our ongoing reinvention we had dropped the ‘The’ from our name.)

  ‘In My Chair’ took even longer to catch on than ‘Down the Dustpipe’ had but eventually – one step at a time – it insinuated itself into the charts, reaching a towering peak of, um, number

  21. (Worth pointing out here, perhaps, for younger readers, that we actually sold about three times as many copies of that single than the average number 1 song sells now.) We didn’t care. We felt completely vindicated. It was just a case now of building up our audience. That meant staying on the road. And I mean: Staying. On. The. Bloody. Road. I get weak at the knees now when I look back on the tour date
s list from those years. Between 1968 and 1971 we basically didn’t stop – except for recording dates here and there. In fact, the only space I can see is a couple of weeks in March 1971 – when I’m fairly sure we were recording more songs. After which we went back on the road and stayed there until about 1979. I am only slightly exaggerating when I say that.

  We were also starting to make some money again. At the time ‘Matchstick Men’ was a hit, as well as the equipment van, the band had a big American Pontiac Parisienne – this huge beautiful deluxe car with a long-legged bonnet and big smiley-face grille. We would travel to gigs in this thing, making out we were big stars. No money but a nice flash set of wheels. Once we started having chart records again in the early seventies though, I would come home from some runs of shows with about a thousand pounds in cash in my bag. We all did. Most of my money would go to the family, paying the mortgage and bills for Jean and Simon. It was a similar story for Alan, who had recently gotten married to his long-term girlfriend, Patricia. John still lived at home with his parents.

  Rick, who wasn’t married yet and was always the most flash among us, bought this huge maroon Bentley. Followed by a black and silver Bentley. Followed by a Merc. That’s if I remember correctly. Rick was always getting a new car. I think he just used whatever money he had in the bank at that moment and splashed out on it. This was to be something Rick would do throughout his career – right up to the end. A flash car was always more important to Rick than having money. Who’s to say he wasn’t right? He certainly enjoyed himself. There was a certain member of Deep Purple, who were one of the biggest groups in the world at the time, who always used to walk around with a huge wad of cash tucked into the belt of his jeans, so that it flopped down over the belt. He would stand at the bar, flicking through this bundle on his belt, going, ‘Who wants a drink?’ Everyone in the pub would be thinking: flash git! Well, Rick wasn’t quite that bad but he was from the same school, shall we say. Rick believed a rock star should look and behave like a rock star. Fair enough, but have a day off now and again, surely? Not Rick. Rolls-Royces, Porsches, Bentleys, Jags, Jeeps … you name it. And a long list of very attractive blonde girls to sit next to him in them. I wasn’t built that way. I still remember with a smile how he tried to persuade me to buy a Bentley as well. He had this thing in his head where it would be great if we both turned up for engagements driving a Bentley each. He couldn’t understand why I pulled such a face when he suggested it. I’m not saying I wasn’t quite envious at times. But I was always more the dope smoker, curled up in his smoky den with his books and records, passing judgement on the world through his window. Well, most of the time anyway. I could also be a rock star arsehole when I wanted to be, particularly when alcohol came into my life in a big way as the seventies really took off for us. I just wasn’t quite as unashamed about it as Rick. He lived for the attention, thrived on it. Needed it.