One Train Later: A Memoir

by Andy Summers;The Edge (Introduction)

  This room is my universe, and it contains all the information I need. There is no view other than a slimy grey concrete wall and the steps up to Gunterstone Road, but in here I am happy as I listen to music, practice, and take in useless, arcane information. Sitting on the floor with the Three Pillars of Zen balanced on my knees and chopsticks flashing, I eat a bowl of brown rice and bonito flakes, Messiaen's "Colors of the Celestial City" clanging away in the background.

  But just beyond my front door everything is getting loony, and as an outer manifestation of the great interior change that we all imagine is happening, we dress like circus clowns. I wear shirts made of bright Indian fabrics, little bands of shell appear on my wrists, my hair grows to shoulder length, the bottoms of my trousers balloon to a full eighteen inches, and I become visible from about a mile away. I have a pair of purple velvet pants that I love, and over these I wear a long fringed brown suede jacket, with a scarlet neckerchief and handmade yellow boots-the overall effect being somewhere between a court jester and a Hobbit. I begin having expensive cloaks and trousers made in places like Thea Porter. One of my more memorable pieces is a stunning bell-sleeved wizard's coat in brilliant reds and greens with gold stitching around the cuffs. I play onstage with this beautiful coat, feeling like Merlin. We all want to feel like wizards now, have magical powers, transform and subvert people's minds. The coat helps.

  As I move through the scene I now hear conversations about ley lines, mushrooms, ancient stones, configurations in the night sky, magic, vernal equinoxes and summer solstices. In our country it seems natural. We are an island nation and see our green fields bouncing with fairies, wizards, and gnomes; in fact, we like to place ceramic gnomes in our front gardens. We have a heritage of arcadian thought, or at least an English fondness for mind-altering substances as demonstrated in the work of de Quincey, Coleridge, Tolkien, Blake, Lewis Carroll, and the Arthurian legends. I nod groovily at all of these things, as if acknowledging the reality beneath the everyday surface. Like everyone else, I nod in acknowledgment of all of these things but somehow I also hang on to a parallel mind-set and my own little stack of books about Zen and the practice of music that seems the opposite of a ley line or belief in an Arthurian legend. I'm still drawn to Kerouac's equation of hipness, jazz, and the open road.

  In my desire to make the sound of the guitar more accurately echo the images currently strobing across our new consciousness, I begin opening up the chords of the songs. I never play a chord as a straight triadic harmony but always add another note or two-a suspension or a minor or major second because it gives the chords an expressionistic and mystical power. A soundtrack to the Himalayas, the sound of deep contemplative solitude combined with the ecstasy of sucking on a pebble and gazing out over the Annapurnas-this is what we are looking for in our music. The standard barre chord of so much pop or rock guitar playing now appears dead to me, lacking even the slightest hint of ambiguity; the barre chord is the sound of a room with all the doors and windows shut. I want harmonies that burst like star clusters, intervals that whip cometlike across the corpus callosum, dissonant open-string clusters that make minor seconds beat against sevenths and ninths and elevenths to create a trembling beauty. ("Beauty is nothing if not convulsive," said Debussy.) Some of these combinations are enough to give a cat a heart attack or make a dog howl. But I find them strangely soothing, and I try to get a mix of koto meets sitar, never playing an E chord as a straight E chord but rather as a cluster of notes, G#, bb, b natural, and whatever else I fancy at the moment-after all, it's all beautiful and this makes the sound of the guitar pungent and strange, like a dish being served with exotic spices. It's not to everyone's taste. Pat Donaldson, our bass player, complains about my playing too many chords with open strings, as if these configurations represent beginner's guitar rather than the expressionistic little beauties they are. I see them as arrows to the edge, an escape from the guitar's imitation of the piano that has dominated since the forties. We are acid rockers, cosmic beings, avatars of the light-and this is our music.

  But while I have a path, most guitarists in London are still following Eric down the road to blues heaven. I don't want to join the brown-eyed blues boys, instead, I make solos out of drones, playing one string against another, copying Vilayhat Khan's sitar solos and Indian raga-style phrasing. I have a path, but it will be a few more years before it leads to the right door.

  We arrive on a Friday afternoon at Middle Earth to set up our gear and do the sound check for our midnight appearance. On the bill tonight with us is the Graham Bond Organization. Graham is a very talented jazz musician who principally plays organ but also plays alto saxophone and sings in a gravelly world-weary baritone. Graham is also noted for having put out a single of the song "Tammy," which can really be described only as the aural equivalent of kiddie porn as Graham is heard chanting the name Tammy over and over again in his whiskey-sodden voice to the skimpily clad young lass who is cavorting in the cottonwoods. It causes great hilarity in the musical fraternity when it's released. Graham is not the most becoming fellow to look at; fat, unshaven and with a Sicilian-style moustache, his appearance is slightly threatening, and with his raving style of organ playing, the picture is that of a human inferno.

  We're doing our run-through and practicing a new piece of cosmic wisdom that we call "A-E-I-O-U" in which we intone the vowel sounds before completing the picture with further loaded imprecation. But as we finish up and climb down from the stage, we are summoned with a worried look from a beaten-looking roadie to Graham's dressing room. He sits cross-legged on a raised dais between two burning candles, his bulk casting a silhouette on the wall behind. "You can't sing that song," he whispers in a gravelly undertone. "It's written you will bring down evil, the dead. The Egyptian Book of the Dead-the instructions-they warn against intoning those sounds. What you're doing is an invocation, an invitation, don't do it." Well, we don't know whether to take him seriously or not. He's a long way into the occult and he might be on to something and he scares us just enough not to perform the song that night. We are not about to risk the wrath of evil spirits or the wrath of Bondy. We don't cross paths again with Graham after that but are saddened a few years later to hear that he has committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train in Brompton, and it's a great loss to the music world.

  BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

  Death is never more than a breath away from the act of playing music. Each note on the guitar represents a small curve: birth, life, and death-and then you start over. To play, to create, to attempt the extraordinary, pushes people to extremes. You go to the edge and stare over; some pull back, some keep going. You feel saddened but ultimately shrug as someone you once knew doesn't make it, and along the way there are many of them. The music remains, and this guitar-at this late point in the career of the Police-has survived through everything: near crashes, dangerous plane flights, subzero temperatures, extreme heat, high humidity, death, birth, and divorce. Although it appears to be a classic Fender Telecaster, it is in fact a half-breed sort of instrument. Someone has pointed out to me that the neck is actually from a Stratocaster, the front pickup is a Gibson humbucker rather than the Fender single coil, and it has been rewired with an overdrive unit inside the body. One-third Les Paul, one-third Stratocaster, and one-third Telecaster, its eclectic character works for me. I am able to produce fantastic tone from its weird pickup combination, and its body size and weight are comfortable.

  Guitars begin as trees, float down rivers, get hauled into lumberyards, are sawed into planks, and then are dried, cured, and left to age. They arrive in the player's hand still with the memory of a tree, atoms and molecules reforming to become a guitar. A history begins; fate is determined; events take shape; someone builds his life around a specific guitar; luck changes, moves forward, or runs out.

  The guitar is an instrument that most players become obsessive about. That's the way it is with guitars. You have it in your hands and you restlessly fiddle, twiddle,
experiment, run your hands up and down its neck, find new combinations-new pathways. It dominates, rules, monopolizes, and grips your imagination to the point that you are in a lifelong wrestling match. You become bedeviled by thoughts that there is always a better guitar-it goes with the territory. I stare at my Police guitar lying on the white sheets: there is hardly any paint left of its original sunburst finish, raw wood now shows through its scarred surface, but I like the red and yellow solar flare that spreads as if from major to minor across the belly under the strings. Arriving at this guitar was a bit like having several relationships with the wrong women before finding the one you truly love and will spend the rest of your life with. And before it, to go along with our all-white stage show in Dantalian's Chariot, I purchased a white three-humbucker Gibson SG model, which I twirled in the prismatic fantasy of our light show at the club in Covent Garden named after Tolkein's novel.

  At the Middle Earth after we've played one night, I'm down on the floor of the club grooving around when I notice a petite, dark-haired, and attractive girl staring at me. Somehow we get into a conversation. Her name is Jenny and she's working in the ticket office of the club; she asks me if I would like to go to a fashion show with her on Monday night, which is a cool way of setting up a trial date without anything obvious-so, yes. She says she will call me with the details, and I give her my phone number. Monday night arrives and we trot off to the show in South Kensington. Afterward we return to her flat in Queens Gardens in Bayswater. We hit it off, and the conversation flows easily. Being a spirit in the material world, I lay my advanced mystical ideas on her, to which she responds with educated skepticism and humor. We smoke some hash and go to bed, where things also go nicely, and it seems that I have found a new girlfriend.

  Over the next few weeks I gradually became more immersed in Jenny Fabian's life. In her early twenties, she has two young daughters from an Italian husband she has already divorced. Her flat is a scene of constant comings and goings, and we share the same hairdresser, Gavin at Leonard of London. Jenny astutely remarks that it's a sign of the times when opposite genders meet and find out that they are getting their hair done by the same person.

  I continue on playing around the country, trying to cause a cosmic revolution with Dantalian's Chariot, and most nights get dropped off at Jenny's on our way back through London. We talk a lot about the times we are living through, drugs, fashion, books, culture, various wars, countries we would like to visit, our dreams, fantasies. Jenny is clear-eyed and intelligent, not cynical but healthily questioning of the acid-inspired optimism that is surging through the streets of London.

  Most of these conversations will be regurgitated a couple of years later when Jenny writes a novel called Groupie, which makes her an international literary star for a while. By the time she writes it I am living in California and have a different life altogether, but I am amazed on reading the book because it seems a straightforward account of the time we spent together. She has reproduced our conversations exactly and even a letter I had written to her is unashamedly reproduced. In the book I am given the name Davy, Dantalian's Chariot is renamed the Transfer Project, so on and so forth.

  Somewhere in the middle of all of this I get a call from Chas Chandler, the bass player for the Animals. He tells me that he's bringing to London an incredible guitarist he found in New York who is going to sit in next week at Blazes with the Brian Auger Trio. I have never heard of this guitarist, but Chas raves about him and I say I'll be there. A few nights later I walk into the darkness of the club and see an amazing sight. Up on the stage is a black man with a white guitar in his mouth. Sporting an Afro about a foot wide and wearing a buckskin suit with fifteen-inch fringes, he holds a white Stratocaster up to his face and plays it with his teeth. I lean against the back wall and stand there transfixed.

  It's shocking, an alien encounter. This is a whole new bag, this is no white boy playing the blues, this is music from another planet. It connects with the gut as if emerging from a deep recess of the African psyche and simultaneously from outer space; it comes through this guitarist as if it knows that he is the vehicle through which it will come to Earth. Standing in the dark among the small tables, the clink of glasses, and inane chatter and faced with this primal noise, I feel very white and inadequate. How does he get that sound, that alpha thing, that siren call, the sound of a fuck? We all have guitars, but ours whisper; his screams. I know I am witnessing the birth of a new animal that will shake the music world to its roots and change the sound of the electric guitar forever. I lean over and ask someone, "Who is this guy?" through a mouthful of rattling ice cubes. I get the answer-Jimi Hendrix.

  We are introduced in the dark. He's soft-spoken and shy: the music is something else. Chas quickly forms a band around Jimi consisting of Mitch Mitchell, a very good drummer but an unusual choice with his jazzy style, and Noel Redding, who is essentially chosen for his hair. Within a very short time everyone is talking about Jimi, and the word spreads. He puts out his first single and gets a hit, and the world embraces him.

  I see him from time to time for a couple of different reasons. My girlfriend at the time is best friends with Kathy Etchingham, who is Jimi's girlfriend, and there are moments when we end up in a club together because of the women. On a few occasions I end the night in Mike Jeffries's flat, where Jimi lives, and I sit on the bed with hirn as he speaks softly and gently strums the Strat, which never seems to be out of his hands.

  One night Dantalian's Chariot has a show at the Speakeasy, a very popular club in the West End. Generally the crowd at the Speakeasy are hard-core musicians and music-biz types. The club is small and crowded, with a stage about the size of a dog kennel. We are announced and emerge from the dressing room to blow away these music-biz types. Sitting right in front of me, literally no more than four or five feet away, is Jimi with a couple of girls. By now he is probably the most legendary guitarist in the world and I have to perform the entire concert with him right there under my nose, staring at me. It's unnerving, to say the least, and consequently it's probably not the most career-building playing I will ever do. We finish and I run into him a few minutes later in the men's room, where we stand side by side relieving ourselves. "Yeah, man, cool," he says as he pisses away the last three scotch and Cokes.

  Providing our oil-slide light show are Mick and a wild man named Phil. Mick is tall and very thin and has borrowed the money from his father to provide the equipment. Phil is the artist and the one who does the actual projection. Phil dresses in whatever comes to hand, has a wild and shaggy appearance, speaks with a BBC voice, and has an enormous appetite for drugs. He swallows hallucinogenics and other substances by the handful, washes them down with great gulps of alcohol, and then takes off on hinges of three or four days' duration without sleeping. What would have killed most people doesn't seem to affect him. A Herculean character, Phil is also very entertaining, and sometimes it seems that he is the one who should be onstage rather than us.

  We are eventually able to put his unconstrained personality to use when we arrive at the port of Copenhagen for a Scandinavian tour. To get publicity and create some static, we have decided beforehand that as we arrive, we will have Phil, dressed only in a bearskin, on the end of a steel collar and chain being led by Mick, who will be wearing a white safari outfit complete with pith helmet. Naturally enough, Phil rises to the occasion; in fact, he rather overdoes it. As we pull into the port, drifting past the Little Mermaid with the strains of "Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen" filling my ears, Phil smashes his chain into the plank and begins leaping and cavorting about the deck. He rolls across the steerage to the feet of lady passengers with an intimidating leer on his face and then, howling like a wolf, leaps into the lifeboat to perform apelike challenges to the crew by showing them his ass. He rounds this off nicely by dry-humping the mast and simulating orgasm until it becomes quite doubtful as to whether we will be let into Denmark. Later Phil just grins innocently, asking if he went too far, and then swallows so
mething purple.

  Our theatrical efforts have, however, interested a gentleman by the name of Sean Murphy. Sean has apparently worked at the National Theatre, done Shakespeare, and comes with a prestigious theater pedigree. We come together because he is supposed to put on a show in Paris that involves pretty much anything of a psychedelic nature. The performance concept is that two groups will play onstage together at the same time to create a duel-a clash of bands. The lucky bands chosen for this visionary idea are us and the Yardbirds, and we have an initial meeting with Sean at our mangy flat. A charming and polished middle-class chap, he describes his ideas to us in a very theatrical way. He talks about prisms, arcs, curves, and sweeping forms, and from this moment on he will be known forever to us as Sweeping Forms Murphy. This is usually expressed with a grandiloquent Shakespearean gesture and a long drawn out "daahling." Now we take great delight in pointing out sweeping forms to one another, noting that in fact the universe is alive with them and may be seen even in something as mundane as a dog turd lying in the street.

  Jimmy Page turns up one day to discuss the possible musical interaction between us and his group, the Yardbirds. He is gentle and intelligent, and I remember how he let me borrow his Les Paul Black Beauty to sit in at the Marquee. We hang out in my basement bedroom and he admires my collection of books on Zen and various mystical philosophies. He too has an interest in this area and later starts his own occult bookstore in W8.