My British Invasion

by Harold Bronson

  On Saturday I took Mark down the King’s Road. The Hare Krishnas were still there. I bought a cheap, unlined, purple satin jacket with large lapels in the style of Marc Bolan. When we returned, we walked a few blocks down the Old Kent Road and knocked on the door to Manfred Mann’s studio. No one answered. If I had realized that it was so close to our rooms, I would have called him earlier in the week.

  That evening we took in a screening of Performance at the Odeon Elephant & Castle. It starred Mick Jagger in an offbeat gangster story, and had only had a limited run in the States. The film had been made in 1968, but not released until two years later. Normally we would have seen the film in Los Angeles, but viewing it in London gave us a strange feeling. The London we saw in the movie theater looked just like the London when we exited the theater. It had rained and the cobblestones were wet.

  On our last Sunday in town, September 24, Mark and I went to Abbey Road to see where The Beatles had taken the photos used on the last album they recorded together, three years earlier. The front of the album cover showed them walking in a crosswalk, or “zebra crossing,” as the locals referred to it. The back cover featured a close-up of a tiled Abbey Road sign with “The Beatles” spelled out in similar tile above on a brick wall. Riding the Tube to St. John’s Wood, we joked that there would be lines of Beatles’ fans waiting to take their pictures in front of these landmarks. When we arrived on the street, we were surprised that there was no one else there. The zebra crossing didn’t look quite right. Maybe the lines had been reconfigured. We walked a few blocks along the road and noticed that there were few of the regular, tin Abbey Road signs. We learned that fans had stolen them. We never found the tiled one depicted on the back cover.

  We visited the Tate Gallery, which I loved, particularly the peerless pop art collection. Stimulated by an afternoon of enthralling art, we almost floated to the Tube when a skinhead spat “cunts!” in our direction as he marched passed. I didn’t feel threatened, but was mildly shocked as I hadn’t experienced anything like that on the trip. At the same time, it was so outlandish it seemed almost humorous.

  That evening we saw The Everly Brothers, who were headlining the Palladium, the most prestigious theater in London. Although there was tension between the brothers, and they were soon to dissolve the act for a number of years, they were very professional. They looked great, their harmonies were spot on, and they performed a crowd-pleasing set of their hits.

  Equally thrilling were the second-billed Searchers, who had never played in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, their newish drummer showcased his hair in a natural, hippie fro, rather than conforming to the more restrained look of his bandmates. Their act was more cabaret, similar to a slick Las Vegas lounge act catering to adults, rather than a rock band, but they still performed their hits in a fine fashion.

  It was time to leave London. Mark was going off to the University of Birmingham. Incoming students would soon be occupying the bungalows. And I’d had enough of the cold weather. I took a commercial flight back to the States, to New York, to join my mother, who was visiting her brothers in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There weren’t that many passengers, so I had three seats to myself toward the back. As I transcribed the interview with The Troggs for my Phonograph Record Magazine article, I thought of how open and candid my interview subjects had been. Afterward, I read Apple to the Core, a revealing book about the difficulties The Beatles experienced in bringing utopian values to running their record company.

  Status Quo Go to Disneyland

  “What’s Fantasyland like? Is it young girls showing their

  knickers and stockings?”

  —Francis Rossi

  The Whiskey a Go-Go. February 6, 1974. The British rock quartet Status Quo take the stage and kick their set off with a cover of B. B. King’s “Rock Me Baby.” The guys look so skinny, and so young. Guitarist Francis Rossi, singing at the mic, has the same sophomoric quality of Ozzy Osbourne. Rick Parfitt crouches intensely, playing guitar in the corner like a high school kid doing his homework. Bassist Alan Lancaster’s heavy guttural vocals, evocative of Steppenwolf’s John Kay, are twisted from his skimpy, studded-black-leather frame. Straight-faced drummer John Coghlan hides in the back, content to bash out a noisy rhythm.

  Together they bob up and down, shake their hair out to dry, and chase each other around the stage, momentarily grouping in various spots before dispersing. All the while the incessant, infectious, 4/4-rhythm machine boogies on. Rossi plays note-bending leads, and he and Parfitt join for some impressive parallel runs, and during “Roll Over Lay Down,” Parfitt channels Arab-flavored melodies. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Rory Gallagher, and Manfred Mann’s Earthband have all graced the Whisky this opening night. It was devastating, unremitting boogie all the way.

  In America, Status Quo were known for “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” which climbed to number twelve on the Billboard chart. Replete with whooshing phasing effects and a catchy, stinging guitar pattern, the record’s psychedelic arrangement was passé for the summer of 1968, but the record was too good not to become a hit. Their subsequent singles failed to make the Top 40, but I bought their album anyway.

  On my first visit to England in the summer of 1972, checking out concerts for the coming week in Time Out magazine, I noticed that Status Quo were performing on Thursday, September 21, at Sundown Mile End. I wondered if it were the same group whose album I had. As they had yet to set foot in America, I was curious. I couldn’t have expected them to sound the same as on their psychedelic album of four years before, but I hadn’t heard any of their newer records. Considering the imagination they had displayed previously, I wasn’t prepared for their assault of chugging rhythms as throughout the previous year “boogie blues bands” had been made fun of throughout Los Angeles.

  It all started with Canned Heat. Inspired by John Lee Hooker, whose most known song after “Boom Boom” is “Boogie Chillen,” they popularized the boogie blues style. Boogie-woogie was a piano style that first gained popularity in the twenties. Rock groups adapted the groove to guitar, but many played with few chord changes making the songs monotonous to some ears. In 1968, Canned Heat made the Top 20 with an album titled Boogie With Canned Heat. This limited and repetitive style was so nearly omnipresent in the early seventies that it was derided from the concert stages in LA. Flo & Eddie satirized the form in an overlong and repetitive encore in which they inveighed, “You wanna boogie? We’ll give you boogie!”

  On that night in London, the band was tight but much too loud, and the singing lacked dynamics. I was bewildered by the enthusiastic response from the mostly male crowd.

  Seven months later I was visiting with Lee Cadorette, a publicist at A&M Records, Status Quo’s US label. The group was coming to town for a weeklong engagement at the Whisky. She said they planned on spending a day at Disneyland, and suggested I go with them to conduct my interview for Rock Magazine.

  On Monday, April 30, I met them at their motel, at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, a stone’s throw from the offices of A&M Records. Compared to the small rooms found in English hotels, this modest American one was roomy. When I entered, band members Alan Lancaster and Francis Rossi were engaged in a jocular wrestling match, tugging each other’s stomachs, with the bed standing in for the ring. Rossi then took a quick shower. He emerged with his limp hair tucked under a plastic shower cap, a small, gold earring gleaming from his left ear lobe, long fuzzy sideburns and a smooth leering grin, reminding me of a scheming pirate. “Bring on the dancing girls!” he hooted, as he bumped and grinded with hotel bath towel in front of the TV obscuring an old Robert Mitchum movie.

  Rick Parfitt, whose healthy looks recalled those of a seventeen-year-old high school surfer, bounced on his bed in his silky-red underwear, like Tarzan, or better still, like one of the castaways in Lord of the Flies. Later he was aghast on discovering he’d mistakenly brushed his teeth with Clearasil. “At least your teeth won’t get s
pots,” someone shouted. The deceptively handsome (because the facial hair hid his features) John Coghlan was sedate, but made his presence known nonetheless. Elsewhere, in various combinations, they swung badminton rackets through the air, or related cheerful jokes. Here’s one from Francis: “This geezer goes into a bake shop and says, ‘I’d like a loaf of bread.’ The shop keeper asks, ‘Will that be white or dark?’ He says, ‘It don’t matter, I’ve got my bike outside.’ Ahahahah…”

  Before departing for Disneyland, Francis gave me a quick history of the band’s early years: “The Status Quo have existed since 1962. I was twelve then and our staple was 1950s tunes. We were signed to a recording contract late in 1965 and made four singles the next two years as the Spectres and Traffic Jam. We dropped Traffic Jam when Steve Winwood started his band, and became the Status Quo. Our managers made me change my name from Francis to Mike because they thought Francis was a bit poofish. Our sound was a product of the time and our producer John Schroeder, who felt it necessary to contribute a third of the material, along with the publishers who had us do a third of their songs. If John didn’t like one of our songs, we couldn’t do it.

  “It just got to be a very unhealthy scene with the business. We were playing gigs, getting screamed at for the fifteeen minutes we were on. Amen Corner was hitting the top of the charts selling only eighty thousand singles. It was a time when the music business started to change.”

  When the hits dried up, they found themselves booked in clubs for seventy pounds a night. The band’s psychedelic style was jettisoned after hearing The Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues”—which they covered on their January 1973 album Piledriver—and Fleetwood Mac’s blues rock when they opened for them on a UK tour. To coincide with the transformation, they changed their name from The Status Quo to Status Quo. The new direction clicked, and the band was on its way. Piledriver rose to number five in the UK.

  The members of Status Quo were jovial the morning we departed for Disneyland, the Magic Kingdom. Rick rode with me in my 1967 red Firebird convertible, the others in a station wagon. “Groucho Marx has got a pink Cadillac outside his house, and Hugh Hefner’s got this unbelievably huge estate with tennis courts, and outside of Elvis’ house all these girls have signed their names,” Rick highlighted his previous day’s excursion through the opulent homes of Beverly Hills as we cruised down the Santa Ana Freeway. Traffic was light on this Wednesday morning as we passed a billboard that read: “Thank the Lord for our Nation and our President.” “Is that a piss-take [a put-on]?” Rick asked. It wasn’t. “We’d never have anything like that in England.”

  As we neared the park, we saw the Matterhorn ride from the freeway. Rick leaned back and puffed on his Picadilly cigarette. “I’m into futuristic things,” he said. “I saw Fantastic Planet [sci-fi film], but it wasn’t any good. You know that spaceship to the moon they’ve got at Disneyland? I’ve gotta go on that.”

  We arrived and the members were fascinated with the cars in the vast parking lot. They were most impressed with the Porsches. Rick met a stumbling block when an official suggested he cover his exposed chest by buttoning his blue Levi’s jacket before entering the park. Rick must have been shook up, because he kept falling down after entering the Magic Kingdom. But he was OK, hopping about and racing around. For the most part it was all mouths agape, and shouts of “it’s amazing!” They didn’t have much to say, being too transfixed for speech. Even jester Rossi was silent. It was as though they were eight years old again.

  “Whooaaaaaaaaahh,” everyone roared as our boat descended into the murky depths of Pirates of the Caribbean, a glimpse of the pillaging, raping, looting pirates of old. It’s Disneyland’s most progressively animated, and best-realized attraction. Everyone loved it. “I could knock around here the rest of my life,” said Rick.

  It was a perfect day, the temperature in the mid-sixties. To top things off, as it was a weekday during the spring, most rides that would otherwise involve a forty-to-fifty minute wait required only ten. It was a relaxing afternoon. Everybody was busy snapping photos. I took ones of the band on the deck of Captain Hook’s Pirate Ship.

  To be sure, a good deal of Status Quo’s humor is engagingly bawdry, whistling slyly like a pack of high school punks at the beach. “Look at her jumpers!” exclaims manager Colin. “Look at ’er box, ah ya missed a good one,” observed someone from the back. “What’s Fantasyland like?” queried Francis. “Is it young girls showing their knickers and stockings?”

  While munching sandwiches in Bear Country’s Mile Long Bar—it’s done with facing mirrors—Rick poured a fourth packet of sugar into his tea and talked about the group’s new LP. “It will be a progression from our last one. We recorded tracks at A&M, but we couldn’t do more because of hassles with the musicians union. We’ll finish it at our regular studio at IBC on Portland Place. It’s a cellar and we feel comfortable there, but we record at full volume with all our stacks of amps, and there have been complaints from the people in nearby homes. We can record from ten a.m. to eleven p.m.” A listen later on at the motel to four cuts on a cassette revealed a natural progression from the standard boogie format, utilizing catchy riffs and a heavier and harder-edge sound, approaching Black Sabbath by half a step.

  The gift store offered many tantalizing items: John bought a Disneyland photo book, Alan gobbled up three View Master film packets, and Chas, the lovably dumpy roadie, bought a cowboy hat in which he recalled the character Hoss from the Bonanza TV show. Chas reeked of an indescribably moldy odor—like he’s worn the same clothes over a year, which he claims he has, “to break them in.” He, and the others, discovered that a root beer was not really beer with alcohol. All bemoaned that there was no place to secure a pint of ale in the park.

  The crowd was composed of mostly old ladies who slowly strolled the streets with sloppy lipstick smiles and impenetrable sunglasses. The rest consisted of families, a few scattered teens, and tourists. Rick seemed puzzled why so many American women were obese. He speculated that it must be over-consumption because the food was so plentiful and cheap. “Yeah, you sure get more food here, but in England I bet you get more vitamins.” Status Quo, gaily strolling about in a public place, would have been mobbed back home, but here they received only casual glances. As we exited the Swiss Family Tree House, a couple asked if they were in a rock group. “Led Zeppelin,” Francis told them.

  “I’ve never been to the moon before. I want to drive,” said Rick, as our space rocket proceeded to countdown. From there it was an afternoon of viewing the lost city of Atlantis in a nuclear submarine, cruising down the headhunter-infested waters of the Zambezi, and excessively shrinking to view the nucleus of the atom. “This would be a great place to take the wife on vacation,” John smacked, only to be disappointed later when the last raft to Tom Sawyer’s Island had left only seconds before we arrived at the dock.

  It was a tiring day for all. Rick’s energy dissipated as his consumption of champagne and other alcoholic treats the night before took their toll. Driving back to Hollywood, we listened to and sang along with The Who’s hits from Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy.

  And, as the early evening faded into night, Rick, Francis, Alan, and John were sprawled out on beds, trying to summon enough energy to trek off to dinner. John had the last word: “I’d like to go on the Universal Movie Studios tour tomorrow.”

  London 1973

  Flush with the money I’d saved from a four-month appointment as a US Passport Agent—to handle the seasonal influx of applications—I flew to London on September 21 for another bite at Big Ben. To ensure that I made a good start, Barbara DeWitt, a United Artists Records’ publicist, convinced Andrew Lauder at the UK company to spring for two nights at the chic Portobello Hotel.

  Converted from a mansion, the hotel was only two years old. It was located in Notting Hill, close to many antique shops, but as they didn’t specialize in 1960s, I wasn’t interested. I had a well-appointed room—it even
included a shower and toilet—but it was the smallest I’d ever seen. It recalled the joke that the room was so small, I had to step into the hall to change my mind. There wasn’t enough room to stretch out on the floor and perform a push up. For such a posh hotel, the complimentary breakfast was a disappointment. I learned then that a Continental breakfast was merely a fancy name for nothing more than a roll, juice, and tea or coffee.

  I liked being there, but didn’t feel comfortable enough to test my jet lag and budget to hang out at the bar waiting to see if any rock stars would show up that I would be too shy to approach anyway. I did see somebody whom I knew, John Mendelsohn, my first editor at the UCLA Daily Bruin. As I walked down a hallway, there he was, sitting next to his girlfriend, publicist Patti Wright. Neither John nor Patti looked in my direction as I approached, or I would have said, “Hello.” They weren’t chatting, just sitting, looking down. I didn’t know where I stood with John. He could be warm and gracious, but also cold and alienating. I believe I was on the outs with him because I gave his band, Christopher Milk, a bad review two summers ago when they played an impromptu set at a UCLA dormitory recreation room. I found out later the couple was waiting to be picked up by David Bowie.

  Mendelsohn was a champion of The Move, and so was Jim Bickhart who turned me onto their Shazam LP in Februaray 1970. It became one of my most-played albums throughout the year. Imagine discovering that there was a British group making records almost as good as The Beatles or The Who. The Move, who were from Birmingham in the Midlands, had had nine big hits. None of the eight singles A&M released on their behalf made the Billboard Hot 100. None even skirted the Bubbling Under category, which extended to number 135. Or as Bev Bevan put it in respect of Shazam, it “brought us from total obscurity in America to merely relative obscurity.”

  Roy Wood, their guitarist and sometime lead vocalist, wrote all of the group’s hits. He became enamored by how The Beatles incorporated classical backing during their psychedelic phase, most appealingly in “I Am the Walrus.” He took The Move in that direction as the Electric Light Orchestra (aka ELO), but with the members of the band playing the classical instruments rather than a hired orchestra. Curiously, the group’s debut album had different titles in the UK and US, respectively, The Electric Light Orchestra and No Answer. Roy explained that when the US company called the band’s UK management office to get the title, no one answered the phone, so the executive assistant wrote “No Answer” on the message.