I was still standing around the control room with George Martin and Brian drinking whisky when we were told we were on the air, forty seconds early. We stuffed the bottle and glasses under the mixing desk and rushed into position. Mick sat on the floor near Paul and puffed on a massive reefer, in front of 200 million people—and he was due in court the next morning. Eric Clapton had his hair permed specially in an Afro, the latest thing, like a Hendrix. The more narcissistic ones wanted to sit at John’s feet because as the song’s vocalist the cameras would be on him the most. He was so wired and speeding that all the way through he chewed gum incessantly. But everyone took a few mood elevators, and I appeared dancing and ringing bells, wearing a sandwich board which at one time probably used to read, THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH. This night it had LOVE LOVE LOVE.
After that, I was on a roll. I put myself in the “Penny Lane” video as a waiter, and waited for the calls, but unlike Mr. Moon, they didn’t come.
16
Shortly before Jimi Hendrix formed his band, the Experience, I often used to bump into him and his manager, Brian “Chas” Chandler, former bass player for the Animals. Jimi loved Chas, really loved him. They would play some rock and roll, and some blues. This was before all the “Hey Joe” stuff. Chas was a wonderful, happy man, a bundle of fun, right from the time the Animals made their first sortie down to London, from Newcastle, knocked out “House of the Rising Sun” in twenty minutes and went for a pint. He was just so big and funny, unlike Eric Burdon, who wished he could sing like Ray Charles. I remember I had a girlfriend at the time and Chas really fancied her. Every time I turned around, Chas was there. He would phone up at the oddest times, trying to catch me “not there.”
He had discovered Jimi playing in some obscure Greenwich Village dive and took control of his life and career. They were together twenty-four hours a day. He brought Jimi back to England and introduced him to people, getting him gigs by taking him around to all the clubs, from the Bag O’Nails and the Cromwellian, to the Speak. Whenever he found an opportunity, Chas would have Jimi on stage to jam so he could impress people and spread the news by word of mouth. And Jimi was very impressive. He would do his guitar histrionics, playing guitar behind his back and with his teeth. When he would finally set fire to it, the crowd would be almost baying for blood. Later, as is always the case, the histrionics were demanded. It became style over content. It got so that if Jimi didn’t wreck his guitar and otherwise create havoc, the fans booed him off stage. Trying to keep up with the madness, and always feeling the expectations of violence and anarchy from the fans, was to have a profound effect on Jimi. He lost the plot and, eventually, his life.
Like John Lennon, Jimi was another absolute original. He never talked about anything but music and sometimes the army, where he had been a paratrooper. He had been in the famous 101st Airborne Division, the Screamin’ Eagles, based at Fort Campbell on the Tennessee/Kentucky border. It was a wild, frontier-town atmosphere of blues, beer, bourbon and barroom brawls. That’s where Jimi cut his teeth on the blues making forays down into Nashville and Memphis, picking and playing backup on all kinds of rock and roll revues, blues and soul shows.
I went out of my way to see him whenever he was on. He was so fantastic that I took Brian to the Bag to see him, sure that Brian would agree with me. He did. He was blown away and at once said, “I think I’ll put him on at the Saville. He deserves his own show.”
Brian kept his word, as he always did. He was proud of the Saville. We had proper lighting and everything. Not many acts then were used to playing in actual theaters where the sound was already acoustically good. They were more apt to be playing bars and pubs and basements and such, cranking up the amps and letting it rip. Jimi always tried to play as loud as he could to get the best sound that he had on his brain. In those days, the PA systems were adequate—except in stadiums, where they were hopeless—but they still couldn’t cope with Jimi Hendrix. The whole industry, from recording to playing to marketing, was finding its feet, still so basic that it is almost unrecognizable by today’s standards.
In the midsixties, the light show became as important as the music. Psychedelic lighting was paramount and matched the whole psychedelic craze, from magic mushrooms to lurid and bizarre fashions. Bands like Pink Floyd evolved more out of their light show than their “music,” not the other way around. In a way, Jimi Hendrix seemed inspired by lighting. He suffered a great deal of pain from a back injury acquired after a bad parachute drop, and took handfuls of painkillers. We joked that he was getting high on Valderma, the antiseptic cream he used to rub into his face all the time to take care of his bad complexion. He also loved magic mushrooms, and on that combination, painkillers and mushrooms and a few lines of Charlie, snorted before the bright mirrors in his dressing room, Jimi seemed to fly to the stars and beyond when he was on stage. I always thought he could see colors far beyond the spectrum. His eyes would get an “I’m seeing forever, and what I can see is what I’m gonna play” expression in them as he stood on stage during rehearsals, encircled within the lighting effects I devised, swirling orbs of magenta and lilac, acid green and gold.
Jimi was easy to work with, and very trusting. Anything went as long it enhanced his performance. Since I was relatively new to the lighting game, I was willing to experiment, to try anything from strobes to electric wheels. Jimi would try anything I suggested, from a swirling multicolored circular effect, to zigzags and vertical flashes. I remember him being pleased with that effect. “Hey man! It’s like purple rain!” And that was all he had to say. He also loved the blue electric strobes that flashed on and off like lightning. They seemed to power him, as if he were actually plugged into the mains. His performances were incendiary.
The Saville was packed. The Lord Chancellor had ordained that people were not allowed to stand up in theaters, so everyone cheered wildly and stamped the ground while still seated. It was only in the Beatles’ shows, where there was a more juvenile crowd, that kids ran wild. The Saville was more adult, more interested in listening to the music.
There were two forty-five-minute shows a night. Jimi sang “Purple Haze,” “The Wind Cries Mary” and “All Along the Watchtower.” He sang some blues, some Cream, some tracks off his album Are You Experienced. Most of the time he wore a silk shirt, velvet pants and Beatle boots, and on stage, an army jacket from a shop oddly named: I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. Another favorite way of dressing was in a powder-blue antique Hussars jacket with lashing of gold braid that he picked up at Granny Takes a Trip, a junk shop in the King’s Road. Underneath, he wore army pants. It was an interesting look that became his trademark.
We put Jimi on three or four times at the Saville, and after that his career was off and running. He was always out there on his own and could already blow most guitar players off the planet. However, there was something about the Saville that seemed to move him into another league. Jimi Hendrix might have stayed just another guitar player had he remained in America. I think he had to come to Europe for his star to shine. It was just the right time and his progress was meteoric, from crowded, smoky, noisy little venues like the Speakeasy and the Bag O’Nails, to those bigger public performances and historic stage settings.
17
During the first few months of 1967 I often bumped into Paul on his own around town. At the time Jane was in the U.S. with the Old Vic Rep on a three-month tour of Shakespeare’s plays and Paul had started going to experimental concerts, lectures and exhibitions, absorbing new ideas. He was rapidly becoming the most inventive and creative Beatle. In April, while John emerged from a haze long enough to commission The Fool, a Dutch design collective, to come up with designs for his Rolls to be decorated all over with bright psychedelic swirls and cartouches of flowers on a yellow background, Paul was jetting from L.A. to Denver in a Lear jet the Beatles’ New York lawyer, Nat Weiss, had borrowed from Frank Sinatra. He had made up his mind to pay Jane a surprise visit for her twenty-first birthday. They spent only one day t
ogether, enjoying the scenery of the Rockies, before Jane had to return to work, and Paul went to Las Vegas to see some friends.
A few days later, somewhere in midair on his return journey home, his active mind dreamed up another wildly innovative concept: “A Magical Mystery Tour,” complete with John-type sketches. Their pace of life was so hectic, so immediate, that within days, the Beatles would be at Abbey Road, starting the first recording sessions of the new album, with a film to follow.
The Beatles didn’t take acid when they were in the studio, but earlier that year John had managed to take some accidentally. Perhaps influenced by Pink Floyd, who were making their first intergalactic pop album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in the next studio (with Norman Smith producing them), John spent the night perched on the roof of Abbey Road tripping, staring at the frosty stars and waiting for the dawn. Eventually, Paul and George went up to get him down before he fell off. Paul took him home and, to help John out, he also dropped some acid to get on the same plane and stayed up all night, keeping him company.
London was now buzzing with psychedelic sounds and dopes. “Strawberry Fields Forever” was being played to death, along with Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and “Paper Sun” by Traffic. To show the schizophrenic rift in taste and opinion between the generations, England’s old guard bought “Roses of Picardy” by Vince Hill and wrote to the papers, complaining about the youth of today. But on the front line where it was all happening, studio work began to imitate Sgt. Pepper, including Pink Floyd’s hit, “See Emily Play.” Norman had to fight Floyd to be more melodic as well as psychedelic and he was right: it worked. Eventually, their main man, Syd Barret, became an acid casualty, a great pity because, as Norman told me when we heard the news, “Syd could write like John Lennon.”
At the end of April I went to the first major psychedelic event in Europe, which took place in the massive space of Alexandra Palace—known to Londoners as Ally Pally—perched atop Muswell Hill in North London. Incongruously televised on BBC2, who normally only showed very highbrow programs, it was the precursor and model for all pop festivals that followed. It was billed as a benefit for the International Times’ legal defense fund. The advertisements in the Melody Maker said it was “giant benefit against fuzz”—the fuzz being the cops who were attempting to close them down. In hippiedom it became known as the Fourteen-Hour Technicolor Dream. I knew most of the bands because I’d booked them all at the Saville.
Two large stages were set up and a smaller central stage for happenings, jugglers, fire-eaters and the like. Nobody expected ten thousand happy hippies to trek there, but they did. In one corner, from a plastic igloo, Suzy Creamcheese doled out yellow banana-skin joints, which were supposed to give you a blast, but since they were just banana skins, probably didn’t—although Donovan sang that electrical bananas were apparently going to be one of the next big things. Pink Floyd headlined, and in addition there were seventy bands of every persuasion; light shows illuminating the massive walls and dancing.
I saw John come in with Dunbar and a couple of others, wearing an Afghan-embroidered skin coat and looking very stoned. I drifted across to speak to him. He said they had been watching TV down in Weybridge when they saw the concert on air. They jumped into the Rolls and came on up to London. As we were chatting—though not much could be heard above the music—John’s attention was caught by Yoko, who was giving a Fluxus performance with stepladders and scissors center stage, beneath the acrobats and jugglers swinging from the soaring cast-iron gothic pillars. He watched, seemingly mesmerized.
In all that radiating joy and love, suddenly something strangely unpleasant happened around her. The dangerous amplified sound of the cutting scissors sawing through her clothing turned a few spectators nasty and they started to tear and drag at her, ripping off her pants, like dogs attacking a hare. She lay there, her features impassive and let them do it, as if it were some kind of experiment. When she was entirely naked, her little art groupies led her away to the side and surrounded her while she dressed in fresh clothes. Yoko might have lost her pants to a baying mob, but that night she found John, or at least, she gained his attention. Was it the kinky S & M–type happening he observed that fascinated him? Whatever it was, he became turned on. It was obvious in his face. And as I watched him, knowing John as I did, I sensed this would lead to trouble. Bizarrely, Yoko’s husband, Tony Cox, had filmed the entire thing and at times, seemed to be urging on the mob. When he caught John’s fixed expression, I saw a very knowing look flicker through Tony’s eyes.
The most magical moment came at dawn. As the sky turned pink and sunlight flooded in, Pink Floyd took to the stage, for the first time wearing velvet flares and tight satin shirts. John was so overwhelmed that in a stoned way he had a vision of his future idyllic life. He came over and said, “I’m taking Cyn away. We’re gonna live in Paradise.” He was referring to the island he had bought by auction in remote Clew Bay the previous month, but hadn’t yet seen.
The next day, John, Dunbar and Magic Alex flew to Dublin and got into a large black limousine that was waiting for them at the airport, and drove to the lonely West Coast. A local boatman took them from the mainland to John’s island. He strode out the few hundred yards of damp heather and spiky sea grass he owned, before huddling out of the wind in the lee of a rock, to make a handful of nonsensical sketches of his future home, with an eye that saw only fantastic psychedelic visions. He wanted a place where he, Cynthia and Julian would find themselves, be happy and where there would be no deeply intense woman like Yoko to possess his mind. A place from which he would emerge occasionally to make a record or attend other psychedelic happenings. It was a dream that the exposed outlook and the cold winds from the sea blew away. The three intrepid adventurers returned to the madness of London and the island went back to sleep.
In a year that went down in folklore as the Summer of Love, Paul met Linda Eastman—the woman who was to be the love of his life—on May 15, 1967. At the time, Linda was making a name for herself in New York. She had quickly gone from being a sixty-five-dollar-a-week receptionist at Town and Country Magazine, to a photographer, earning one thousand dollars per page on Life. She had achieved this by using an exclusive invitation sent to the magazine to attend one of the Rolling Stones’ functions on the SS Sea Panther, moored on the Hudson. (The Stones were using this yacht as temporary headquarters, having been banned by every good hotel in New York.) Through fate and a little enterprise, Linda ended up being the only photographer invited on board. Subsequently, her pictures were the only ones available to the media, which quickly established her as a leading rock ’n’ roll photographer. It was on the yacht that she first met the Stones’ manager, Allen Klein, and also Peter Brown who was in New York on business.
Linda came to London to take photographs for a book to be entitled, Rock and Other Four-Letter Words, commissioned by Bantam Books. Her modest thousand-dollar advance had largely been used up on travel expenses and film, so Linda was staying with friends she had met in New York, such as the Animals, to save money on hotels. Georgie Fame was doing a gig at the Bag O’Nails when I dropped in with Paul and a small party. Linda was seated at a table some yards away near the front. I could see that someone had taken Paul’s attention. I glanced in the direction he was looking. The girl he was looking at, Linda, wasn’t cast in the usual mold of rock chicks with their generic pert features. She was striking, like a Veronica Lake, with angular features and strawberry-blonde hair, cut to swing over one cheek. When she walked back to go to the ladies’ room, she moved like a forties star, with that kind of graceful stride. Paul “accidentally” stood up as she passed our table, blocking her path.
“Hi, I’m Paul McCartney. How’re you doing?” he said.
Linda didn’t gush, as many girls would have done when confronted by a Beatle. She introduced herself and they stood chatting. She told Paul what she was doing in London. Soon they were flirting and laughing, so it was no surprise when Paul said we were all going o
n to the Speakeasy to see Procol Harum, a new band—and would Linda like to tag along?
“Sure, love to,” she said. “Let me ask the others.”
Quick off the mark, Paul suggested that Linda travel with us, leaving the Animals to follow in their car. When we got to the Speakeasy we discovered that the obscurely named Procol Harum were in fact the Paramounts from Southend. Under a new name, cool new outfits and new music, they were tripping the light fandango and doing a sensational job, too. When they hit their stride with “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” I immediately booked them for the Saville. That night we stayed on at the Speakeasy, but Linda left with the Animals when they went. This was another unusual thing about her. Most girls would have hung on to the bitter end, hoping that Paul would invite them back to his place.
The launch party for Sgt. Pepper was four days later at Brian’s house, an exclusive affair for just a dozen journalists and photographers. Linda dropped by the NEMS office with her portfolio. Paul wasn’t there, and the girl at reception buzzed me. Linda pointed to her portfolio.
“I met Peter Brown in New York and told him I’d drop by with my portfolio.”
We chatted some more, then I took her up to Peter’s office and left her with him. Linda asked Peter to show her work to Brian, to see if she could shoot some snaps of the Beatles for her book. Brian loved Linda’s portfolio and asked if he could buy some pictures—Linda declined politely—but she did get an invitation to the Sgt. Pepper launch. Brian himself almost didn’t make the party. He had just spent a couple of days in a coma at the Priory.
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