Eight
BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983
I pick up the Telecaster and play through the chords of "The House of the Rising Sun," then get out of bed and cross to the window. Tentatively I pull back the curtain; the sea-washed light floods into the room, almost blinding me-like the light of California when I first landed, L.A.'s bright incandescent light promising everything.
As the plane touches down on the runway at LAX, the California sun streams through the window and I feel a surge of optimism. A few minutes later as I walk toward the baggage claim, I am greeted by Terry McVey, a craggy bloke from Newcastle whom I have met a few times in London. An old mate of Eric Burdon's-he's the roadie, the voice of sanity, the anchorhe's been with the Animals since they started. As we drive toward Hollywood and Laurel Canyon, he tells me in a thick northern accent that Eric has finally divorced Angie. The marriage is over. Eric had the same problems as I did, and finally he got rid of her for the price of a plane ticket. I stare out at the endless stretch of sun-drenched streets and feel a sudden chill of alienation and am glad to be with someone British.
Eric's house is a hotbed of activity. Girls, bikers, actors, and dope dealers pass through the door at all hours. The party never ends and it's a radical change from where I have been, and I see how quickly you might lose yourself in a scene like this. I have a room that looks out onto the pool below and across the canyon to the hills on the other side, and I take refuge there when I need to. I am still wrapped up in Zen and related subjects and I like to practice, meditate, and study. I cut carrots on the diagonal-macrobiotic stylesaute them in olive oil, add them to short-grain rice and sardines, and then stand on my head. This is the life, I say to myself, observing Laurel Canyon through the window from an upside-down position and then intoning the word Om.
With its hot sun, dirt, fulminating nature, and warm spontaneous girls, L.A. is seductive. The life of the senses, like a powerful aroma in the head, is fully present. The word is out that there is a new guy in the band and I get checked out by the girls already in attendance to the Animals and receive a couple of letters with requests to be my girlfriend. I am a job to be applied for.
At this time in California the groupies are beautiful butterflies who take time and pride with their looks. With laced-up boots, fluttering sleeves, and brown thighs, they appear like contemporary pre-Raphaelites and more exotic than the girls in London; it's easy to fall under their spell. Girls like this will exist for only a few years and then will evanesce like summer pollen, to be replaced by chicks in leather and lurid makeup who talk tough. But for a while is seems as if there is a code between them, a way of dressing and being, with a knowledge of music that makes them the courtesans of rock.
This new scene is the perfect antidote to my cerebral but disenchanting time with the Soft Machine, and with the scent of oleander and night-blooming jasmine filling my head, a guitar in my hands, and a long-haired girl in my bed, I see my future beckoning with a bejeweled finger.
Sun and lovingness float over us, and mental meltdown occurs almost without noticing. You quickly drift into a lotus-eating state of dyspepsia. Mental rigor is left to bake in the solar rays, and language is reduced to simple utterances of "yeah, man," accompanied by meaningful nods as the babble of utopia and heightened awareness permeate the nooks and crannies of everyday living. California is looser, more open, less claustrophobic than London. Here the revolution is a natural event that envelopes and coddles everyone in a tribe like warmth, a euphoric physicality. It's a wonderful feeling of fraternity, but blinded by the light of good vibes, we don't see the creeping shadow.
Most nights Eric and I climb into his electric-blue Sting Ray and scream down the canyon and up the Strip, past Dino's to the Whiskey. Leaning back in the convertible with a joint between my lips and the warm night air blowing across my face California dream-style, London seems like a far-off greyness. We sit in the back of the club among a bevy of giggling females and listen to Buffalo Springfield, Love, the Byrds, Iron Butterfly, and Canned Heat, and we know that this is it-the heart of the scene, where we are supposed to be. At the end of the night, if not going on to another party, we drive back through the canyon to Eric's house. I'm in the Animals, a world-famous band; we're surrounded by beautiful young girls; most days start with a marijuana joint; most nights begin with a substance called THC that is washed down with alcohol. The drugs make you love everyone and everything: you reach out to strangers ... You spout little hits of spiritual wisdom and knowingly smile at one another ... this is the sixties ... this is our time ... the lights from the Whiskey swirl across our faces and I feel happy-blissful, stoned. I pull a young girl closer, and Eric turns to me with a scared look on his face and says, "Help me, man, I forgot who I am-you gotta help me." We go outside and sit in the Sting Ray for an hour as I guide him back down from the narcoticized altitude that he is cruising in: no face, no name. We drive back up through the canyon to Eric's house and the dark velvet hills with their soft star-clustered lights, and the houses on stilts with beautiful people exhaling blue clouds and all reach toward me.
We start rehearsing, and with Johnny Weider and I trading between guitar and bass, I quickly integrate into the group. Zoot and I resurrect some of the Dantalian's Chariot material Eric is interested in, and we start to sound like a band.
A few weeks after I take up residence in Laurel Canyon, the Soft Machine turn up at the stub end of the Hendrix tour. There is a concert with the two groups at the Hollywood Bowl. I go see them and am enthralled by Jimi but have mixed feelings about the Softs.
We get the word that Jimi will be recording in Hollywood at a studio called TTG, and we are invited to drop in. After eating at Ah Fongs at the bottom of Laurel Canyon and pondering the significance of a fortune cookie, I drive with Zoot over to the studio on Highland. Jimi is recording in studio A, the big room. We walk into the control room and are greeted by the amazing sight of Hendrix leaning sideways into the glass dividing window with a cigarette dangling from his lips, the hat with the Indian feather on his head, and the white Stratocaster in his arms roaring and snarling out of the speakers overhead. The impression of Jimi in this moment is one of shamanic power, a force of nature that is both sexual and spiritual. Hearing him is like having your guts turned inside out.
Jimi turns and sees us in the control room, and we wave shyly. He smiles, puts his guitar down, and comes into the control room to greet us in his softspoken manner. We talk for a few minutes and then I wander out into the studio, where Mitch is jamming with himself. I pick up a guitar that's lying there and start jamming along with Mitch. A few minutes later Jimi comes back out into the studio and picks up a bass and starts jamming along with us. Christ, I think, in a hallucinatory flash, Jimi Hendrix is playing bass with me. But I don't freak out or stop but just carry on playing. This might be (a) the greatest act of self-confidence of all time, (b) incredible arrogance, (c) my being medicated to the eyeballs, or (d) deafness, but we continue for about ten minutes and then Jimi says, "Hey, man, do you mind if I play guitar for a while?" "Sure," I say, trying to be cool as if this is an everyday occurrence-all musicians are in total awe of Hendrix at this point and I fight against breaking down into a sobbing heap.
We swap instruments and carry on jamming, with me now holding down the low-end chords and choking on the inside. After a number of variations and different directions, the jam turns to a warm glow, cools, and finally turns to ash, at which point we all nod and agree that it was cool, croak outa few "see you later, mart" style good-byes, and look for the exit. Zoot and I wander back out onto Highland, shaking our heads in disbelief, while inside Jimi carries on wielding his axe through a new frontier.
That night when I finally lie down, I know I have just passed through a seminal moment in my life. Jimi is having a huge influence on guitarists everywhere: people are mimicking his style, and little Jimis are springing up everywhere. The Hendrix style is very seductive, and at this moment in the world of rock guitar, it's h
ard to resist trying to get all his licks and aping his style. But I wrestle with it because from almost the first moment I began playing the guitar, the one precept that has consistently come at me, been hammered into my brain, held up as the sine qua non of playing music, is the idea that you must find your own voice, you must-in the words of countless musician interviews in the magazines I read as a teenager"have something to say." Jimi has something to say, but somehow through a combination of natural stubbornness, inborn musical instincts, and the long embrace of the "own voice" idea, the thought of being a Hendrix clone is anathema to me. I am in a position that many guitarists would covet, but inside I have a nagging feeling that it is temporary and that I have not yet found the environment in which I can be the most expressive. London and the Flamingo seem like a half-remembered dream; other guitarists I started out with-Clapton, Beck, Page, Albert Lee-are well on their way. Maybe I have been sticking to my own path too rigidly, maybe I should have taken a more obvious route like everyone else, or maybe my time hasn't come yet. But like anyone, I need the setting in which it can take root. At the moment the partners I am seeking are both still at school in England: one at Millwall in the English west country, the other at St. Cuthbert's grammar school in Newcastle.
I push my head into the pillow; sleep will help. But just as I lower my head into the downy softness, the bedroom door bursts open and in charge two girls and a bolt of lightning known as Keith Moon. "Christ!" I yell, and sit bolt-upright in bed with a thumping heart, trying to look casual. "Sorry, man, were you sleeping?" "I was just about-" "Heard you were herewanna go out somewhere?" It's approaching five A.M. "No, man, that's alright." But we talk for a few minutes; Mooney is obviously still in high party mode and wants company. He finally explodes out of the room and I collapse back into the pillow. Where was I? Hendrix, guitar heroes ...
The Animals eventually get into a studio and make a recording, which in the spirit of the times is called Love Is. I never get paid for playing on this record but I do get to play one of the longest guitar solos ever recorded until this point. On our version of Traffic's "Colored Rain" I take it all the way with a soaring "hymn to ecstasy" style solo that is so long that I find it impossible to play in a full trance state and still come out at the right place, so Zoot stands in the studio, counting the whole way, and at bar 189 he gives me the cue out. Although I don't hear much at the time, the solo does get a slight legendary reputation and gets mentioned in interviews twenty years later.
We tour across the United States, and even Mexico, with two high points being shows at the New York and San Francisco Fillmores. In New York we top a bill that also features Sly and the Family Stone. They go on before us and are incredible, with eight of them in a row at the front of the stage, thrusting and grinding to a deep funk rhythm that conducts your pulse, drenches you in the sweat and smell of Africa, and feels like a direct message from the Congo. It's an impossible act for five little white boys to follow, particularly as one of their songs is actually called "I'm an Animal," but we clang away on our electric guitars, whip through the catchy hooks of the Animals hits, and just about manage to avoid public humiliation by ending with "The House of the Rising Sun."
Afterward in the dressing room as we bathe in the cool glow of a Pyrrhic victory, the door suddenly bursts open and fifteen or twenty huge blackleathered and shaggy then stomp in. Hells Angels. An odor of sweat, beer, motor oil, leather assails the room, accompanied by a visual display of muscles tattooed with swastikas, skulls, and the word mother, and the only response is to grunt, nod in a macho way, and say "fuck" a lot. Although it's not actually articulated, it appears that what they want is to get up-close to an English rock group and see what they're about-like dogs sniffing each other's arses. After about ten minutes there is some grunting and they shove off. The door shuts and we look at one another, grinning like frightened schoolboys. "F-u-u-u-u--ck, that was heavy," someone says in a soprano voice.
The next stop is San Francisco to play the Fillmore. This is the city where the freak flag is raised to its highest point, and I am excited finally to be in what is considered the (lead center of it all. Before the hippie movement the city has been a witness to the fifties beat scene and the lights of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Ken Kesey. With its black, white, and Chinese mix, it is a natural fulcrum for alternative culture, and the step from beatnik to hippie is just one of degree. The beat culture of coffeehouses, bebop, poetry, beards, and leftist thinkers has morphed into a tribe of dropouts and acid takers. A crowd that now eschews politics, believing the system to be corrupt, prefers to engage in activity that has no inherent meaning other than being a way of surrendering to the spirit. A great deal of this new agenda is spurred on by Owsley, the rebel chemist who locally manufactures acid hits by the millions. LSD acquires several street names: White Lightning, Sunshine, Mr. Natural, Orange Wedge, Purple Haze, Window Pane.
We visit different parts of the city-North Beach, Berkeley, Golden Gate Park, and Haight-Ashbury. I wander about the Haight but find it disappointing after the huge buildup. Apart from the coffee shops and naturalfood restaurants, it's seedy and run-down, with teenage kids on the street looking hungry and homeless. There seems a disparity between the legendary love generation and the street reality, as if the dream is already fading.
The local record-company publicist takes us to the house of a young journalist by the name of Jann Wenner. He shows us some copies of a new music magazine that he's just starting. It's to be called Rolling Stone. What do we think about it, do we like the name? We all nod wisely and murmur words like cool and groovy and wander back out into the Haight.
The next day we go out to Stinson Beach and spend a euphoric day climbing the rocks, diving into the Pacific, and sleeping in the grass. Stretching out on the sun-warmed rocks, I think about Kerouac's book The Dharma Bums, with its phrases out of Buddhism and Zen and how it all seems to blend so effortlessly into this California landscape. No doubt the itinerant monkish life would be easier out here. It's a beguiling thought and I imagine wandering off down some dusty trail free of possessions and reciting the Diamond Sutra just like Japhy Ryder. We gaze down onto the lapping sea, our heads filled with the scent of pine and marjoram, the sun arcing across the sky like yellow lead and the heavy air working its somnolent spell on us.
Later in the afternoon we return to the city, reviving with coffee on the way. Tonight is our gig at the Fillmore, and we are in a mood of high anticipation. Before the show we are taken to a party somewhere in the city where we're going to meet Chet Helms. Helms, a counterculture guru, is a wellknown figure in San Francisco and leader of the Diggers. We arrive at the party and are greeted by numerous people, all strangers but superfriendly, as people are in these times, for it's an implicit acknowledgment of the fraternity we share-and after all, we are the Animals, groovy English musicians.
Eventually Chet Helms arrives. He enters the room like Jesus, dressed in flowing white robes with a radiant smile on his face. There's a buzz around him, an energy field that may be self-importance or the expectation his followers project. I can't tell because at this point I'm out of my head on a substance called THC. I can no longer feel my feet on the floor, and as a fat girl near nie says, "M-a-a-a-n, you are glow-ing," I can't wipe the Buddha smile off my face. I am intensely happy and feel as if I have the universe in the palm of my hand. When I speak, my voice comes out like warm and oily sunshine.
We are introduced to Chet and he offers us a few words of beneficence as even we have our place in the scheme of things. A small thought passes through my mind along the lines of Oh yeah, and what do you know that I don't know, Mr. Guru?'T'his is known as a "negative vibe." I see it and drop it like a hot potato and carry on grinning like a Cheshire cat and eventually, after realizing that I am staring at an empty space where Chet once was, float off with the other groovers.
We pile into taxis and head across town to the Fillmore. Even the taxi ride seems cosmic: San Francisco! The Golden Gate Bridge! It's
all such a groove! In the confines of the filthy taxi I remark on what a beautiful thing it is. "Beautiful cab," I say, and run my hands lovingly over a frayed Marlboro ad pasted on the back of the driver's seat, my voice fuzzy and sonorous with alkaloids and godpower--I am really gone.
We arrive at the Fillmore and it's packed wall-to-wall with heaving bodies. Maybe that's why it is called the Fillmore, I giggle to myself. We can't get to the dressing rooms or the stage from the back of the building because somebody has locked the backstage entrance, and despite heavy pounding and more giggling, no one hears us. This leaves us with the ominous prospect of making our way through the crowd to get to the stage. The girl at the entrance actually recognizes us and lets us through, staring at me-the supposed lead guitarist who is being pulled into the steaming crowd like a man with two broken legs. But with a person on either side of me I am shuffledragged across the floor, with me smiling beatifically at all, until we get to the dressing-room area and are told that we are due onstage in about fifteen minutes. The Chambers Brothers are already up there and doing a fine job of warming up the crowd for the big act-us.
Someone hands me a wooden thing with bits of wire attached to it and tells me it's a guitar, it's my guitar, a cream-colored Les Paul Junior. I stare at it, fascinated. Black coffee is poured down my throat and I am perambulated around the room like a helpless geriatric and then it's showtime. "Let's do it!" someone yells. What? I croak-smile through a haze of caffeine and cannabis residue and then fall on the floor in a giggling fit, amazed by my own deep humor. A few moments later we hit the stage-or in my case, crawl out from the wings-to a Fillmore roar. Miraculously, instinct and nineteen cups of coffee kick in and I get through the show, the whole thing flickering before me like a dream. A small voice somewhere tells me not to look at my fingers, because if I do, I will get hung up on them-so I don't, and the digits make the connections while my brain drifts over vast cosmic spaces.
One Train Later: A Memoir Page 15