by Chris Adams
The request was accepted within the hour, and I then sent a longer message briefly outlining our Quest. Minutes later, he messaged me back:
Hi Chris, Trevor’s Tele was originally off white but was painted by Gilbert O’Sullivan (Ray Sullivan) in about ’65. Ray had studied art and design at uni, and Trevor wanted something different. It was a very “flower power” design as far as I can remember. I could have sent you a photo, but they were all stolen from my flat in Chelsea years ago. Do you have a photo you could send me? Martin.
Like Andy’s short message, Martin’s contained three strands of information, the first of which was the news about the “flower power” artist, Gilbert O’Sullivan. For those of you who weren’t around in the early seventies, I should explain that this eccentric character was then a big star in the UK, with a string of top-ten hits. Like Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdink before him, he was managed by the impresario, Gordon Mills, who seemed to have this knack of altering the career vector of his artists simply by changing their name. In Gilbert’s case, the image was also crucial, for clad in short trousers, tackety boots, and an Edwardian workingman’s cloth cap, he would sit at an upright piano delivering catchy McCartneyesque songs in what sounded to me like a flat northern English accent. The idea that he had once been a trendy art student was akin to being told that Mike Tyson was into embroidery. But then life, as they say, is full of surprises.
The second info strand was the crushing news that Martin’s photo of the psychedelic Telecaster had been stolen. Again, it was a case of so near, yet so far, but if photos of the band existed, then it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that some of the other members might still have their own copies. As for the third strand, that was a mixture of good news and bad, for though it was apparent that Martin was our first real source within the Lonely Ones, a red flag was waving over the date he had given for the flower power artwork, because as we’ve seen, the swap between Noel and Trevor didn’t take place until the summer of ’66. Backing this up, I had actually asked Roger Mayer what he remembered about the Tele that night in Olympic, and he’d simply said it was white. So already it looked as if Martin’s memory wasn’t incredibly accurate.
But before we move on to the story he told us, it’s worth considering the ramifications of this psychedelic makeover. I once read an in-depth interview with Richard Thompson, in which he described a strange phenomenon familiar to most guitarists, where if you lend your instrument to a better player, it seems to come back with a different feel, as though by osmosis their magic has somehow rubbed off on the fretboard. Now this could be all in the head, but Thompson is up there with the best, so he should know, and indeed, the moment I picked up the battered, old Tele in Sound City, I felt instinctively that some sort of wizardry had been weaved on it. But with this news about a psychedelic transformation, it’s tempting to suggest that the osmotic process may have gone slightly further than the rosewood fretboard.
Let’s recap. The guitar that had been lent to Hendrix to do overdubs on a song that would become synonymous with those acid-soaked times is now painted to look the way the track sounds. So am I allowing myself to indulge in flights of artistic fancy if I suggest that this is the perfect example of the phenomenon to which Thompson alluded? After all, if anyone could leave their imprint on a guitar, it was Jimi. Summoning the image of him caressing the frets of that Tele in the studio, take after take, through that long night in Olympic, I’m reminded of those engravings of medieval alchemists, alone in candlelit labs, furnace roaring, repeating the process again and again, and searching for the golden moment.
Of course, secularists might argue that the psychedelic makeover was just a case of fashion, purely an expression of the zeitgeist tide that was engulfing youth culture at that time, albeit a mystically driven one. After all, John Lennon did it to his White Roller; George Harrison, to his Strat. Even Jimi got in on the act, applying those de rigueur Day-Glo swirls to one of his black Flying Vs. So if the trendsetters were doing it, then why not Trevor? And of course, that’s the logical answer, but personally I prefer to believe Hendrix left something of himself in the overdub process, some invisible creative patina imprinted on the rosewood fretboard, like a spectrumal echo of that inimitable “Purple Haze” riff, which more than any other musical motif captures the feel of those times. But then, I guess I’m just an old mystic at heart, so either way, I’ll leave you to decide for yourself.
But staying on message, another aspect of psychedelia is also relevant, for a well-known side effect of acid is to produce in the user a degree of synesthesia, which is a state where the senses are mixed, so that you can taste colors, hear scents, or indeed, smell sounds. Seemingly, we’re all born in this “oceanic” state, but for most of us, the brain gradually becomes hardwired and the senses soon start to separate. There are some, however, who have lingering echoes of this syndrome, where for instance, days of the week have colors, or certain textures suggest sounds. Now interestingly, Roger Mayer says that Jimi talked about playing colors rather than notes, and he would constantly use that particular spectrum as a means of communicating the kind of effect he was trying to achieve. Mayer himself had become attracted to the abstract nature of the world of sounds while working in submarines, so there is a humorous little echo of that “oceanic” concept. However, on a more serious note, it could well be that the psychedelic swirls that suddenly began to appear on guitars, clothes, and cars in this period were really the synesthetic echo of the sounds that the acid gurus like Pink Floyd and Hendrix had begun to create whilst tripping.
But on a more mundane level, the news of this flower power makeover tended to throw the furry feline into the proverbial winged rats, for there were no obvious signs of mine having ever been repainted. Was it technically possible that such psychedelic artwork could have been totally removed without leaving some trace behind? Personally I doubted this, but flying in the face of empirical logic, Eric clung on to his belief, saying that between ’69 and ’73, someone could well have given the Tele a total refinish. Obviously he was right, for by the early seventies, psychedelia was no longer in vogue, and there’s nothing as out of date as yesterday’s peak of fashion, as photos of bands with bell-bottoms will attest. Either way, we were agreed upon one thing, and not for the first time, he chinked my glass and summed it up thus: “The Quest must go on!”
Chapter 10
Travels with the Grail Guitar
Over the next few weeks, I would get to know Martin Vinson well. He was now living in Brittany and had lots of time on his hands, so what started out with e-mails soon became long phone conversations as we gradually pieced together the Lonely Ones story. At the time he joined them in ’66, Andy Andrews had just hooked up with an agent called Tony Burfield, who signed them to Galaxy Entertainments, then owned by Don Arden and a man called Ron King, who was cut from very much the same type of cloth. Galaxy was then operating out of offices in Soho’s Denmark Street, and Martin remembered their first meeting vividly, for when the band was ushered into King’s presence, sitting on his massive desk was a shapely blonde, a very large black dildo and a .45 Colt revolver. Message understood, as the saying goes.
Billed as “avant garde soul,” they spent the next few months permanently on the road, staying at friends’ flats when they had a gig in London. One such crash pad in Notting Hill was shared by two buddies of Rick Davies from Swindon, art students Bob Hook and the reported Tele transformer, Ray Sullivan. This was a period of “paying dues,” learning their craft, and putting up with poverty and discomfort. All of them were in it together for the music and what Martin referred to as fun and crumpet (women); this was the lineup that played Blaises that night in February ’67, when their old buddy Noel Redding turned up with the urgent loan request. I asked Martin why Trevor Williams hadn’t accompanied Noel to Olympic to see Jimi Hendrix in action, but back then, such a request might have been regarded as “uncool.” If you weren’t invited, you just didn’t ask.
On May 1
, almost three months to the day after the “Purple Haze” session, the Lonely Ones set off for a two-week residency at the Titan Club in Rome. They had actually played Geneva’s Griffin Club that March, a gig booked by Galaxy Entertainments, but by this time relations with the scary Mr. King were rather shaky, so it was Andy who came up with this gig through a contact in Blaises. Any European jaunt was seen as an adventure in those days, but reality intruded when the van broke down outside Reims and they had to wire Galaxy for an advance to rent another. Then when they got to Rome, it was snowing, but according to Martin, both the gigs and the young ladies at the Titan Club turned out to be hot.
At this point, Trevor was playing his psychedelic Tele through a Marshall Twin Combo once owned by Pete Townshend, a tonal combination that sounds as if it would be guaranteed to cut through any musical lineup, but just days into the residency, something occurred that would cast a dark shadow over proceedings. At the start of the set, while holding the neck of the Tele in his left hand, Trevor walked over to the mic, and as you do, wrapped his right hand round it. But for some unknown reason, that night the microphone was live, and as the muscles in his fingers contracted, his grip involuntarily tightened, preventing him from pulling free, and the result was a loop of current that ran straight through his heart.
Now eerily, the same thing had happened to me in ’62 rehearsing with my first band, the Witnesses. At this time I had a Burns bass, but I still lacked proper amplification so both it and the mic were plugged into a Grundig reel-to-reel recorder, and like Trevor I had my hand round the guitar neck when I grasped the mic stand. What happened next is as real to me now as it was then. A juddering convulsion gripped my body, like some mix of concrete and molten metal coursing through my veins. In less than a minute, the heart will give out, but while our two guitarists sat laughing at my impromptu impersonation of a gyrating Little Richard, our drummer Suds realized what was happening and kicked the mic stand away. I was badly shaken up, and the fourth string on my bass had melted, but luckily for me, there was no lasting damage.
In Trevor’s case, it was Martin Vinson who saved his life, so I’ll let him tell the story in his own words:
When Trevor got hold of the mic stand, he earthed the whole band. He went down shaking and actually smoking. I screamed at the boys not to touch him, then I grabbed the mains lead and wrenched it out of the wall. The whole thing exploded. We actually got a huge round of applause because the audience thought it was all part of the act!
So just as with me, most people were blissfully unaware of the seriousness of the situation, while others, like Suds and Martin, were alert to what was happening. Thankfully, though, the current had been broken.
But Trevor was unconscious. I thought he was dead. Our roadie slung him over his shoulder, grabbed the nearest Italian and shouted ‘Hospital’!! They got him there, revived him, and treated his burns. The doctor said if the plug hadn’t been pulled he would have been dead in two or three more seconds. The injuries were really bad. The guitar strings had melted into his left hand and the mic stand into his right.
A friend of mine, Les Harvey of Stone the Crows, died in exactly these circumstances at a gig in Wales. In his case, there is no report of anyone trying to break the circuit as happened with me and Trevor, so having someone on the scene alert enough to realize what’s happening was crucial. In both our cases the whole incident must have taken just a few seconds, but with the current running through me, it felt like an eternity, and even though I emerged physically unscathed, the fear of another shock stayed with me, and I never again grasped a mic stand openhanded, always testing it first with the knuckles. But back to Martin’s account.
That was the end of us being able to work, so things got really difficult. No money and no chance of getting out of Rome. We didn’t even have a van ’cause the one we’d hired had to be given back to the hire company. Thanks to some friends we made, we were fed and housed, but there were times we starved.
This is the kind of experience that bonds a group of young men, so no matter where life takes them, they will always remain in some way a band of brothers.
After a while the club owner, Masimo, gave us some gigs so we could earn enough money to hire a van. Trevor’s injuries were healing, but very slowly, so we had to continue playing without him. When he did start playing again, his fingers would bleed, but they started hardening up again the more he played.
When the band finally made it out of Rome, their destination was Geneva, for Andy had managed to make contact with Bernard Grobet, owner of the Griffin Club, where they had played earlier that same year. On hearing what had befallen them, he was happy to invite them down, but even then, things did not go smoothly:
I had met an American girl who was at university in Rome, and I told her I was worried about the long drive so she gave me these pills that she would use to keep herself awake while she was studying. So I said to the others, “I’ll drive ’cause I’ve got something to keep me awake.” How wrong I was!! Coming up through the St. Bernard Pass I fell asleep at the wheel! Luckily, Trevor was awake and screamed at me. I woke up just in time and looked out the window. It was a pretty frightening sight. We were on the edge of the mountain looking down into the valley below, a sheer drop of about two miles and no guardrails!!
So it seems that Trevor managed to repay Martin in kind for saving his life, just a few short weeks after that traumatic night in the Titan Club.
Once in Geneva, the Lonely Ones briefly became a seven piece when club owner Bernard Grobet insisted they needed a brass section and put his money where his mouth was by taking an ad in Melody Maker and paying for Andy and Trevor to fly to London to audition the hopefuls. The chosen sax players were Ian Aitchison and Steve Joliffe, the latter of whom proved easy for us to find on the Internet as he is still an active musician with his own site. Frustratingly, he couldn’t recall what guitar Trevor was playing at the time, but he remembered getting right into rehearsals for the residency at the Griffin, which at that time was a very upmarket venue with a clientele as disparate as the shah of Persia and Bernie Cornfeld, the infamous financial fraudster. What these people had in common, of course, was money and lots of it, for Switzerland’s banks are extremely tight lipped when it comes to details of its wealthy account holders.
So the lads were playing to high rollers, and it was in this context that the unexpected arrived one evening when a group of Swiss movie people happened to turn up. Among the party were the documentary maker Guido Franco and his musical director, the classically trained Welsh composer, David Llewelyn, then in his early thirties. According to Martin, David exuded gravitas and a mischievous charm in equal measures, but nothing in his background would have suggested he might play a pivotal role in the lives of the young rockers who now appeared on the bandstand. As an ex-public-school boy who had studied music and theology, the world of “avant garde soul” was hardly part of his ambit, but as fate would have it, he had just been given a commission to provide music for a short documentary called What’s Happening? currently being shot by Franco on location at the magnificent Chateau d’Echandens in Geneva.
As it transpired, Guido was also making an arty documentary about the Geneva-based particle accelerator CERN, and it seems he was using the chateau’s facilities for his commercial project. In contrast to the mind-boggling physics of CERN, What’s Happening? was a typical sixties short with teenagers in pop-art outfits cavorting around in open-topped sports cars, but crucially, it featured a scene with a beat group playing in a cellar bar, which is why he and David were currently scouring Geneva for a band that might fit the bill visually and musically. So when they walked into the Griffin that night and saw the trendy young English outfit start to rock, it was the answer to their combined prayers.
Having received this info from Martin, we set about trying to trace David Llewelyn, and in no time at all, Eric Barnett found a documentary featuring the Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky who had premiered one of the Welshman’s compo
sitions in Munich. The film showed them routining the piece in David’s flat, and we got an insight into Llewelyn’s character when the young virtuoso complemented him on the quality of the music, only to be told that it would sound even better when it was played right! David was now in his seventies, distinguished and bespectacled and with loads of the gravitas that Martin had mentioned, but the documentary dated from 2006, and I couldn’t help notice that he walked with the aid of a stick. This was obviously down to a major smoking habit, as there was hardly a frame in the film in which he wasn’t puffing merrily away, so the question now was, in the intervening years, had advancing age and the dreaded effects of tobacco overuse taken their inevitable toll?