by Zoe Howe
‘Room service, whatever, you could just put it all on the bill,’ adds Andrew Lauder. ‘Sparko in particular had not blown this chance. I don’t know how much good it did, it certainly didn’t do any harm.’
It did do some harm, namely to the plumbing system. Thoroughly smashed, Sparko proceeded to attack the toilets, destroying every single fixture. (Ironically, he was probably one of the few people there capable of fixing the place back up again too.) Fortunately the label representatives thought it was hilarious rock star behaviour and there would be none of the expected chastisements.
Another classic Sparko moment during this double-vision extravaganza came when he spotted a tall man in a smart red jacket approaching in the hotel corridor. Assuming him to be a porter, Sparko promptly asked him to take his bags to his room for him. The porter looked confused. This was because he wasn’t a porter. The man Sparko was preparing to tip (or not, seeing as he didn’t exactly snap to it) was Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham.
Once the hangovers had started to lift, there was time to drive, explore and do some shopping before heading north to set up camp in ‘Feelgood House LA’ – a 1940s timber cabin previously owned by Byrds/Flying Burrito Brothers star ‘Skip’ Battin. The house was way up in Laurel Canyon, the perfect Californian base, situated snugly in the secluded valley of the stars (famous neighbours included Joni Mitchell, various Mamas and Papas and all manner of frightful long-hairs).
Lee was in his element in LA, stocking up on albums from obscure blues labels, records he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to find. As happy as he was with how their American stay was unfolding so far, he was still a little crushed about what had happened to his guitar. It was an inexpensive Guild, but it had significant sentimental value – as a teenager he’d learned how to play slide along with Elmore James records, and he’d finally bought the Guild when the band were given their first record advance. Showco refused to have it fixed, presuming it to be a waste of time – they’d pronounced the instrument deceased.
Chris Fenwick knew what it meant to Lee and took it down to Arturo Valdez, a guitarmaker on Sunset Boulevard who had crafted guitars for Eric Clapton, John Lennon, José Feliciano and the Doors (and he is still working at the time of writing). Not only did Valdez fix the neck, he inlayed the name ‘Lee’ on the fretboard in luminescent mother of pearl. ‘Looks great,’ observed Worthington. ‘It ought to. Cost more than the guitar.’
It would be during this stay that the Feelgoods would see their blues hero John Lee Hooker play live at the legendary Starwood venue. Anticipation was, naturally, high, but the old warhorse was disgruntled and below par, leaving the boys feeling less than euphoric. The Feelgoods, legend has it, drowned their disappointment with a succession of White Russians – vodka, Kahlua and milk (I imagine you know where this is going) inspired by the ‘milk, cream and alcohol’ of Hooker’s ‘It Serves You Right To Suffer’ – before jumping in the hired car to head back to their digs. But Chris, behind the wheel, accidentally missed a red light. The police picked them up, hauled them out of the car and lined up these loaded limey reprobates at gunpoint on the sidewalk (just a tad over the top). ‘Up against the wall stuff,’ sniffed Lee to Smash Hits’ David Hepworth. ‘We didn’t realise you had to be a bit cool on the streets.’ The whole cocktail-fuelled evening would plant the seed for ‘Milk And Alcohol’, the song that would be their biggest hit. But this was all to come.
The Feelgoods still had some time before the start of their first US tour, and Nick insisted they use some of this hiatus to track down a Bay-area band called Clover, a country rock group based in Mill Valley, California. Clover were, in his opinion, every bit as great as The Band, although they didn’t have much in the way of status. The group were fronted by a young Huey Cregg – aka Huey Louis, later Huey Lewis, who would have considerably more success with his 1980s pop group Huey Lewis and the News.
It would be drummer Pete Thomas, formerly of Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers, who would bring them together. Thomas had moved out to Malibu after joining the John Stewart Band, and there was no question he was going to hook up with his old Naughty Rhythms tour mates while they were in LA. Clover hailed from further north, but Thomas had previously lived near them in Mill Valley, and they’d had a few jams together. Pete suggested they head to the Palomino in North Hollywood where he knew Clover were playing.
This evening would mark something of a meeting of minds, and Clover quickly took the Feelgoods under their wing, insisting they drive in convoy to San Francisco, showing them around before their next show at River City in Fairfax. The Feelgoods, hurtling up the highway in a rented Lincoln, checked in to a smart Japanese hotel before checking straight back out again (‘It was obvious the staff didn’t like us one bit,’ noted Cal, this just one of many proprietor-versus-Feelgood incidents). They settled in to a Howard Johnson’s motel instead before joining Clover for the gig.
One of the people attending the show was a hip, vivacious young woman called Shirley Alford, known to all as ‘Suds’.26 Shirley had been studying drama in Marin County but eventually dropped the course (‘I had an aversion to getting up in the morning’), she loved rock’n’roll and, being a regular gig-goer, she’d become friends with Clover manager George Daly.
Clover were ‘always a big draw’, says Shirley, and everyone knew they were in for a good night. What they didn’t know was that they would be blown off the stage by not just one of their new pals, but the ‘quietest’ one. To be fair, they hadn’t yet seen the Feelgoods play, and they weren’t convinced whether someone as understated as Lee could cut it on stage. The suit just compounded matters – to them it screamed (or mumbled) ‘conservative’.
Lee wasn’t expecting to be invited onstage. When Huey called him up during the show, Lee was quite happy occupying himself at the bar and actually needed some prodding to respond, only adding weight to Clover’s impression of him being, perhaps, a little too self-effacing to rock. Eventually he was persuaded, and, with his trusty gob-iron in his jacket pocket, weaved his way through the crowd to the stage. After some brief conferring, it was decided they would play the standard ‘Checkin’ Up On My Baby’, a mutual favourite with both Feelgood and Clover. Cal Worthington was among those watching and, unlike most people in the club that night, he knew to expect something explosive, but the crowd’s reaction was almost as entertaining as Lee’s performance.
‘Fuck me, I just wish I’d had a camera to catch their faces,’ he wrote. ‘As soon as the music started, Mr Modesty became a wild animal, sinews and veins are sticking out over his sweating, contorted, snarling face … the band cannot believe it. They can NOT believe it! People are clustering around the stage to take full stock of this madman. They’ve never seen anything like it in Palo Alto.’
Shirley was one of the many people dazzled by Lee that night. ‘The whole place was like, “Woah, who is that?” Short hair, suit jacket. I just thought, wow! That is radical! And everything that I saw in his face … it was just like this personal energy that he had going on, and he always had it, right up to the end, he had it.’
At one point, Brilleaux swung round to the drummer and barked, ‘Come on, you fucker! Give it a bit of fucking stick!’ ‘The drummer,’ reported Cal, ‘totally unprepared for such an outburst, just snaps into gear … The partygoers went berserk and Clover fell in love with Lee after that – they were all over him. The song ended and Lee reverted to Mr Modesty. “Er, thanks a lot, fellers.”’
The following night, Clover were booked to play a private cowboy-themed birthday party in San Jose, and the Feelgoods, now very much the heroes of the hour, were urged to join them as guests. As was ‘Suds’. George had introduced her to Nick Lowe, and the subject of the party had come up in conversation. They arranged to meet her at the hotel the following evening and drive up to the party from there.
Shirley recalls: ‘The next day I went to the bar at Howard Johnson’s to meet Nick, and Lee was there. He stood at the bar next to where we were sitting
. Nick looked over my shoulder as we were talking and said, “Oh, there’s Lee! Hey, Lee.” I turned around, he looked down and my first impression of him was just of the most intense person I had ever seen. I was like, “Woah, hey, er … nice to meet you.” He bought a drink, slammed it back and then walked out of the room.’
Shirley had driven up to the hotel in her MG, so she and Nick rode to the party together. ‘It was a crazy private party with about forty to fifty people attending, lots of food and booze and everything, everybody was having a good time.’
Evidently by the end of the evening – a cornucopia of cocktails and cowboy boots – Lee had become quite attached to ‘Suds’, because by the time she and Nick Lowe headed out to the parking lot to leave, they found Lee, in his cups, installed in the back of her tiny car, ‘wedged behind the front seat’. Shirley laughs. ‘I mean, it’s a two-seater, maybe there’s space where you can fit a small suitcase, or a body, but he was contorted behind the seats. “I’m going to ride back with you guys, OK?” Nick said, “Lee, get out of the car. Go and ride with the band.” It was amusing.’
One person was notably absent from many of these jolly-ups: Wilko. ‘There was a rift within the band that I suspect had been there prior to them going to the US,’ says Shirley. ‘Wilko really wasn’t around in San Francisco on that first trip.’ The separation – at least partly due to a disparity in social habits – was becoming more pronounced, and inevitably the more separate Lee and Wilko were from each other, the deeper the resentment became.
‘It was a shame because we had a brilliant friendship,’ muses Wilko. ‘Certainly at first. But deep animosity was going on. We couldn’t stand each other. I was getting isolated from the whole of the band. When we went to America it really started to go wrong – things were getting big. It was worrying for me because I’m the songwriter and I’ve got to come up with another album, and I’m freaking out and taking loads of amphetamine. I’m up in my room writing songs and they’re down in the bar drinking and talking about … well, me, probably.
‘There were times when Lee would be on stage and he would be drunk, and it really diminishes your performance. You’re kind of flatfooted. He would sing the same verse three times over. “Bloody hell, I wrote that!” If I felt that that was happening, I would complain. I said, “I don’t care what anybody does as long as they can do their thing.” Sometimes Lee was past that point and that used to make me angry, and I would sulk, and that used to make them angry.’
Lee, on the other hand, was heard to mutter, ‘He’s speeding again,’ on seeing Wilko one morning, just because the guitarist had given him a rare smile. But Lee could probably be forgiven for assuming Wilko’s beam was chemically induced, being as he was more used to Wilko brooding wordlessly and, as a result, creating something of an atmosphere.
‘We were on the road and they were having a go at me for something or other and Lee said, “It’s just these fucking silences!” Maybe there’s some justification in that, but he didn’t like these silences, and I thought, yeah, you never sit there in silence, thinking about things … I remember when I was in these silences that Lee found so … [infuriating] sitting there thinking, you don’t understand. There’s some lack of communication here, I could see myself being spiteful and sneering but I didn’t want to do that. I was doing it in reaction. I thought they were misunderstanding me, although I probably didn’t realise at the time that I was misunderstanding them as well.’
Geoff Shaw admits the roadies didn’t take too much interest in the friction between Wilko and Lee, although after America ‘there were lots of bad vibes; that never really happened before, it was just normal bitching that you get between four human beings. They were all difficult at some time, with the exception of Sparko. Wilko would go completely quiet, and Lee probably didn’t understand. If Lee was in a bad mood, he would be more likely to say something sharp. You’d know about it instantly, there wasn’t any blockage in that department, he’d just let you have it. But at some point a wall went up.’
Lee did see that Wilko’s ‘misery’ was at least in part due to the fact that he was often homesick and lonely while he, on the other hand, was a single man, smitten with life on the road to a far greater extent than anybody else. There would be elements of the experience that wound him up, of course; the Feelgoods were still learning how the majors worked, hyping up the band sometimes to the point of total falsity. There weren’t many places to escape to.
‘Sometimes when you’re out on the road, record companies say things about you which are not true, and sometimes you say similar things which you really believe at the time,’ said Lee. ‘Come the night of the gig, you’re fucked up, it’s your fourteenth day on the road, I haven’t had a break. I’m away from home, I’ve got all these record company people around me, I couldn’t give a fucking Empress of India, I’m going back to my hotel room …’
While some might initially have thought the Feelgoods were bringing the proverbial coals to Newcastle in steaming over and blasting audiences with 1960s R&B, spat out in an American accent (with the exception of Lee’s very Estuarine between-songs shout, ‘Thangyewverymuchladeez’n’gennuhmen!’ Or sometimes just an abrupt ‘TA!’) what they were really doing was ‘very English’, says Andrew Lauder. ‘There was no tradition most people there could relate to because they’d never heard of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. We always knew it would be difficult but that a few people would get it and some critics would champion it, and that the live show would do the rest as long as you could get it in front of an audience.’
One way of doing that, of course, would be with a plum support slot. A well-timed opportunity to tour ten major cities in the central and Southern states had arisen that spring, Lee recalled, ‘supporting KISS, of all people’. Incongruous as this was, they had the chance to play stadiums in some cases and they weren’t going to pass that up. They flew in to Mobile, Alabama, for the first gig of the tour to find there were just two dressing rooms, ‘occupied, needless to say, by the members of KISS,’ recalled Lee. ‘They needed them for their make-up and costumes, all that shit.’ KISS’s road crew barred the Feelgoods’ way before they could get any further. ‘They said that no one was allowed backstage,’ Lee continued. ‘Kiss couldn’t be seen without make-up.’ This was laughable, but the situation soon stopped being funny when the Feelgoods, laden down with their guitars and cases, were then informed they could ‘go and change in the toilets front of house’.
‘We dropped everything and looked at each other,’ said Lee. ‘We told them no. The management told us to fuck off. So we said, “OK, we won’t play.” We’d previously asked them to provide a caravan. They said it was too late. We didn’t want to change in the bogs with people pissing next to us.
‘Wilko threw a complete wobbler, refused to go on and stormed back to the hotel. We were sacked from the tour and returned to base in Laurel Canyon. Wilko sulked there for a week while Chris went to New York and got a massive carpeting from the president of CBS. We never even met KISS. The record company started to get the hump because they’d spent a lot of money on promoting us and then found the band didn’t seem to be co-operating. So really,’ Lee concluded, ‘we had a good chance to give it a go in the States but it was a chance we let slip. The Feelgoods missed their opportunity in America.’
Lee would largely blame the crumbling of their American dream on how the situation with KISS was handled. They were treated disrespectfully, but the ultimate reaction from Wilko – who, to the KISS camp, was simply a mouthy member of a support group they didn’t know or care about – obviously upset the wrong people at a crucial point. There would still be shows to play in the States, but it would, in the main, be on too small a scale for them to catch fire in a significant way. Worse still, the resulting resentment would make for an uncertain future for the Feelgoods as a group. Lee’s mother Joan remembers her fuming son (‘Wonderful boy, he’d ring me from wherever he was in the world’) telling her he’d been ‘racking his brains as
to whether they had capital punishment in the state they were performing in, because he thought he’d come off stage and kill him’.
‘Wilko was very unhappy [in America],’ said Lee. ‘We had arguments all the time instead of having fun … In the end it just got so bad. Looking back on it, poor old Wilko must have been very miserable and depressed. That episode sort of marred what should have been a wonderful period of our career,’ he told Blues Bag. ‘We never really got a fair crack of the whip because Wilko didn’t enjoy being in the States. Being far from his family … it’s difficult to live in those conditions. Personally, it suits me perfectly.’
Lee Brilleaux Talks Touring Pressure
(using a gloriously Southend metaphor): We’ve all got our faults. If some bloke puts an excessive amount of salt on his chips, and he does that every day for three weeks, you start thinking to yourself, ‘That cunt puts too much salt on his chips.’ But you have to learn to live with it. It’s up to him. It’s his chips. If he wants to ruin them with salt … They’re the sort of things that get to you.’ (as told to Roy Carr, NME)
Lee Brilleaux (in his beloved sheepskin coat) takes on New York.
10.FROM LEW LEWIS TO LOUISIANA, WITH LOVE
Rock’n’roll isn’t about satin trousers and limousines and massive banks of amplifiers and thousands of roadies everywhere. It’s about people. They’re important.