by Barry Miles
A contemporary review of Listening to Richard Brautigan. The allusion to contacting Richard on the phone evokes the final cover photographs.
I loved the lifestyle of San Francisco, which was very small-town friendly and a bit cutesy . . . There was a bohemian atmosphere and a general goodwill among the people, although I perceived a definite pecking order in action among the poets.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Golden State Recorders. None of the tracks recorded there were wasted, but the original album was never released as Miles and Ferlinghetti planned it. Ferlinghetti is also pictured on p. 151 outside the Royal Albert Hall heading to the press conference for the International Poetry Incarnation in 1965.
Chapter 11
The First Trip: SF – Ferlinghetti – McClure
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI WAS ONE of the Beat Generation poets I most admired. When I was at art college in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1961, we painted his long poem ‘Dog’ on the wall of the living-room of the medieval house that I and a group of artists lived in. It was taken from A Coney Island of the Mind, one of my favourite books. I met him in 1965 when he arrived in London to stay with Julie Felix, the American folk singer who was making a name for herself as Britain’s answer to Joan Baez – she had the same high clear voice and, for that matter, the same long straight hair, only lighter. I produced and released a spoken-word album, Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Better Books, of him reading his poems at the bookshop in the summer of 1965, which included a musical accompaniment by Julie Felix on one of the tracks, recorded at her apartment in Chelsea. He was one of the stars of the Royal Albert Hall poetry reading that summer; his poem ‘To Fuck Is to Love Again’ causing a commotion with the aged attendants, one of whom I overheard mutter to another, ‘He’s yelling “Fuck!” at them and they’re loving it!’ shaking his head in astonishment. Ferlinghetti’s poetry was written with public performance in mind, and he had in fact made an album of himself reading his poems to a jazz backing that was released on Fantasy back in 1957.
Allen Ginsberg had been staying with me in London during summer 1965, at the end of which visit he and Ferlinghetti left for Paris. But Lawrence had enjoyed himself so much in London that he decided to return for a final ten days and came to stay in the spare bed in my study that Allen had recently vacated. Lawrence was tall, casual, slow-moving and slow-talking, with intense blue eyes – the eyes of a poet – and an easy smile but a mouth that could at times look cruel. He had strong, fiercely defended values – for instance he was opposed to arts patronage by governments, thinking that it was certain to compromise artists’ freedom and integrity. He was an early environmentalist, a peace activist, an old-time anarchist and in every sense a bohemian. He owned and ran the City Lights bookshop on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco and was the publisher of City Lights Books, a small literary press specializing in modern poetry. In 1956 he published Howl and Other Poems, putting Allen Ginsberg, and City Lights, on the map by being prosecuted for obscenity. I liked Lawrence very much and knew that it would not take long to record an album with him because he had done so many poetry readings and knew just how to deliver his poems.
In San Francisco I met him at his famous bookshop, City Lights, at 261 Columbus Avenue. I had sent $2 away to this address in 1960 for copies of On the Road, The Dharma Bums and Howl, so it was a great pleasure finally to see the building. We also discussed the album at his house on Francisco Street. One of the pleasures of this kind of trip was to see people’s homes and get an inkling of how they lived.
I really enjoyed recording ‘Assassination Raga’ and the poem ‘Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow’, where Lawrence brought in a very accomplished guitarist, Jeffrey Chinn, to accompany him. Some of his works were written as songs, others were written to be funny, such as ‘I Asked Krishnamurti for His Autograph’ which we had to record over and over again because it kept getting too serious. Lawrence was a real pro.
The other album I hoped to record in San Francisco was by Michael McClure, whose ‘Lion’ poem I had already remastered before heading out to America. Michael had been in London prior to my leaving for the opening of his play The Beard, and we had discussed his album. My original idea was to include some of his ‘Beast Language’; I am a great fan of ‘sound poetry’, like that of Schwitters and Ernst Jandl, and thought that Zapple buyers would enjoy this explosive, yet carefully nuanced new language. However, since McClure’s return to San Francisco, he had changed his mind about what he wanted to do and seemed to see the record as a chance to become a pop star on the Beatles’ label. Michael was still in his thirties, handsome, with a twinkle in his eye. He drove a Harley Davidson chopper and hung out with Hells Angels; he dressed in leather like his friend Jim Morrison. He knew Dylan and wrote Janis Joplin’s ‘Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz’ for her, recorded three days before she died. I once described him as ‘the Prince of San Francisco’, with his Byronic good looks, fine head of hair, his acclaimed poetry and plays and his easy way with women. In 1967 he published Freewheelin’ Frank, the biography of Frank Reynolds of the Hells Angels as dictated to him, and now he decided that he wanted to share the album with Frank.
This photograph was intended as the background for a ‘Blue Note’ style album sleeve for Ferlinghetti’s album with the name of the artist and title of the album to be superimposed on it in colour. The photograph shows a huge crowd gathered in Havana to celebrate winning the revolution.
Freewheelin’ Frank was a man of strong beliefs and great loyalty; you felt that he would be a good friend to have – and not just because of his colours. Michael wanted to make music with him, un-rehearsed, spontaneous music. ‘Let’s do some numbers!’ he said. ‘Why not?’ I replied, interested to see what would come out of it but worried about the cost. We recorded a lot of music, with Frank on harmonica and tambourine and Michael playing the autoharp, which had been given to him by Bob Dylan. We recorded a long loping tune called ‘The Allen Ginsberg for President Waltz’, in not quite waltz time, then Frank read some of his poetry: ‘Hymn to Lucifer’, during which Michael played a strange, scraping, Eastern instrument that no one knew the name of. Mike, the engineer, was not too happy about the way they kept wandering off microphone, but on playback those fades actually worked very well. The problem was that the album, as yet, had no focus. The studio staff were also somewhat upset by the fact that Frank insisted on parking his chopper right in the middle of the studio, instead of discreetly at the side out of the way. No one wanted to knock the thing over. I liked Frank, and he even gave me a signed copy of his poems, but I couldn’t see an album coming out of these sessions.
It looked as if we were wasting our time, so I took Michael for a walk and tried to explain that the studio was costing $3 a minute and that he should come back when we had discussed something more concrete and usable. We walked down to the bay and back, and Michael told me that this was the first time he had actually listened to anyone in years. He recognized that he was narcissistic and that his success had insulated him from much of everyday reality. He resolved to focus on the album and come back with some solid ideas, maybe just reading his poetry or acting one of his short plays. Fortunately there had been other things for Mike Vance to do in the studio while we were gone, otherwise it would have been an expensive walk.
He had strong, fiercely defended values . . . He was an early environmentalist, a peace activist, an old-time anarchist and in every sense a bohemian.
George Harrison photographed outside his home following the police raiding his house for drugs on the day of Paul McCartney’s wedding to Linda.
Chapter 12
Back in Blighty
EMBOLDENED BY HIS SUCCESS in busting John and Yoko, Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher, who had a personal vendetta against pop stars, now vindictively chose Paul McCartney’s wedding day, 12 March 1969, to raid George Harrison’s house. Pilcher, who was well known for planting evidence, ‘found’ a block of hash in a shoe, provoking George Harrison’s memorable comme
nt: ‘I’m a tidy person, I keep my socks in the sock drawer and my hash in the hash box. It’s not mine.’ George telephoned Release, the 24-hour emergency assistance service charity set up by Caroline Coon to help people arrested on drug charges. Release was probably the most important of all the underground, hippie organizations and finished up handling a third of all drug cases in Britain. Release quickly found him an appropriate lawyer who was able to help. As the outcome of George’s case was successful – George and Pattie were each fined £250 plus 10 guineas costs – Caroline asked Derek Taylor if it was possible to set up a meeting with George in the hope that he would make a contribution towards the enormous costs of their tremendous workload, the lawyers’ fees and court appearances. She wanted to submit a formal appeal for funds. Peter Asher and I attended the meeting in George’s office. It was friendly, with George in a happy mood, and culminated in George opening the drawer in his desk and producing his chequebook. He filled one in, folded it over and handed it to Caroline. She thanked him profusely, expecting something like £50, but was too polite to look and see how much it was until I had accompanied her to the front door. She was gob-smacked – it was for £5,000, enough for Release to buy the building next door to their office on Princedale Road and move from their cramped, rented rooms to something much more spacious. A photocopy of George’s cheque hung on the wall of Release for many years. I thought George was particularly generous and was very pleased with the outcome. As for Pilcher, he was eventually charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and, although he had cannily resigned from the police before his case came to court, his attempt to escape justice by emigrating to Australia failed. On arrival in Freemantle he was extradited straight back to Britain where, in September 1973, he was sentenced to four years in jail.
George Harrison’s and John’s and Yoko’s albums were still to be released on 9 May – but by now everyone was dragging their feet about the other releases. The first one being the Ken Kesey album. Recriminations flew around the building; questions were asked about who commissioned it in the first place. It certainly wasn’t me; Kesey was never on my list. It probably came up in a conversation between Paul McCartney and Derek Taylor, with some mention made of the role that Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their psychedelic bus had in the origins of the Magical Mystery Tour film. The problem was that Kesey was now associated with the Hells Angels and the trouble Apple had in getting rid of them. He was, as they say, ‘on the elbow list’.
My office at Apple was at the top, next to Peter Asher’s, but as Ken Kesey had absconded with my Revox I couldn’t do any actual editing there, although I did borrow a machine for basic playbacks. However, I was able to prepare both the Brautigan and Ferlinghetti albums for release as there was no further editing to do on them; all I needed were the sleeve illustrations and the cover copy. I did a rough edit of the McClure album, taking out all the false starts and fluffs and reducing it to the basic material we would use. I made further contact with Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen, both of whom were interested in releasing albums. By then we had also come up with a plan for a set of signed limited editions of the albums, with sleeves on thicker cardboard and with inserts which would not appear on the regular issues containing unpublished poems or texts as well as a signature. This would give extra money to the artists and help pay for the Zapple series. My studio costs alone were already more than $4,000.
In his wonderful autobiography, The Longest Cocktail Party, Richard DiLello often sums up the state of affairs at Apple at the time with fictitious, but authentic, passages of dialogue, quoting conversations between two unnamed protagonists which frequently sound like him and Derek Taylor. In a section set at the end of April 1969, he comments that Peter Asher says that the Richard Brautigan album is all ready to go; he adds that nothing can happen until the contract has been finalized and that the pressings and the printing of the sleeve were not getting the go-ahead until that had happened. ‘I’ve got a feeling that that one is going to be on ice now that the new regime has begun. It’s probably going to die a slow death and Richard Brautigan will never walk through that white door downstairs.’1 This sounds like Derek, and the new regime, of course, referred to the fact that on 21 March 1969 Allen Klein was appointed business manager of Apple.
The Brautigan sleeve was indeed done and ready to go. It featured two photographs: one of Richard holding a telephone and another of Valerie, outside her place on Kearney, also holding a telephone. All of Richard’s previous books had shown him with his latest girlfriend. The use of two pictures was perhaps symbolic of the growing rift between them. The release date was set for 23 May 1969.
Richard DiLello also comments in this part of his book that Paul’s original design for the series will not now be used and that both George and John and Yoko had done their own sleeves for their albums. Paul’s original idea, to unite the whole series of Zapple albums and make them more collectable, was to have an outer sleeve with a large apple cut out of it, so that the actual album sleeve showed through. This, however, was deemed unacceptable to record retailers who knew that the cut-out would get damaged and torn, leading to many returns, so it was rejected.
Pilcher, who was well known for planting evidence, ‘found’ a block of hash in a shoe, provoking George Harrison’s memorable comment: ‘ I’m a tidy person, I keep my socks in the sock drawer and my hash in the hash box. It’s not mine.’
John and Yoko performing at Lady Mitchell Hall; John is sitting cross-legged on the stage with his back to the audience. This performance became side one of Life with the Lions.
Chapter 13
Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions
WE RELEASED ZAPPLE 01, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions, on 9 May 1969. It certainly lived up to Zapple’s claim to release unusual experimental sounds, although the public had been prepared for it by the release of Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, the year before and all the unfavourable critical attention that was heaped on it. Life with the Lions was just as uncompromising. The title was a play on words, similar to the old Beatles titles, like Revolver (something which revolves, also a gun) or Rubber Soul (white soul music or the sole of a tennis shoe or sneaker). In this instance it was a play on the name of a BBC radio and (later) television domestic sitcom Life with the Lyons that ran from 1950 to 1951 on radio and then for five seasons, from 1955 to 1960, on television. It featured a real American family, actor Ben Lyon and his wife, the actress Bebe Daniels (who had moved to London during the war, where they featured in the BBC radio series Hi Gang! with Vic Oliver that ran from 1940 to 1949). Life with the Lyons also starred their children, Richard and Barbara Lyon, and was hugely popular for its naturalism; it was scripted, but it reflected and expanded upon real events of the time. Lennon would have grown up with it.
Lennon described Unfinished Music as ‘It is saying whatever you want it to say. It is just us expressing ourselves like a child does, you know, however he feels like then. What we’re saying is make your own music. This is Unfinished Music.’1
Side one was taken up by one long track: ‘Cambridge 1969’. On a quiet Sunday afternoon on 2 March 1969, at Cambridge University’s Lady Mitchell Hall, Yoko Ono, accompanied by John Lennon, performed as part of a concert of experimental music before an audience of five hundred students. She had been invited some time before in her position as a Fluxus artist who had appeared with John Cage, Ornette Coleman and other new music composers and performers. The organizers did not know that she and Lennon were together, and his appearance was not expected. The organizer, Anthony Barnett, asked her if she was going to bring a band or accompaniment. Yoko asked John what he thought and he told her, ‘Well, I’m the band, but don’t tell them, you know. I’ll be the band.’ So she told him, ‘Yes, I’ll bring a band with me.’
Lennon had very ambivalent feelings about anything avant-garde and had come up with the memorable phrase ‘Avant-garde is French for bullshit’. He was deeply suspicious of anything that he co
uldn’t understand or that was above his head intellectually and put it down mercilessly in interviews and conversation. He told Andy Peebles in a BBC radio interview:
John: We arrived in Cambridge, it was supposed to be an avant-garde – that word again – jazz thing, right. And there was a guy called John Tchicai who was apparently a famous avant-garde sax guy or jazz sax guy – I didn’t know any of them. A few people that I don’t remember the names of; they were there too. And I turned up as her band, you know. And the people were looking and saying, ‘Is it? Is it?’ You know. I just had a guitar and an amp and that was the first time I’d played that style, just pure feedback and whatever it is on that track. And the audience were very weird, because they were all these sort of intellectual artsy-fartsies from Cambridge, you know, and they were uptight because the rock-’n’-roll guy was there, even though I wasn’t doing any rhythm. If you hear it, it’s just pure sound. Because what else can you do when a woman’s howling, you know, you just go along with it, right?
Yoko: They were totally solid, you know, very polite.
John: They were totally solid. Well, the reaction I got from the ‘quotes, unquotes’ avant-garde group – not only in Cambridge – it was the same reaction that she got from the rock-’n’-roll people, like, ‘What’s she doing here?’ Well, when I was doing the stuff with her, this little tight-knit avant-garde scene would be saying, ‘What the hell . . . who the hell is he? He’s one of those pop . . .’ So we’re both getting schtick for not being in the right bag.