White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  Dope was another area of cultural surprise. The nail-thin American single-paper grass joints were uncommon in Britain. I watched the construction of a five-paper British hash-and-tobacco spliff in wonder: the search for cardboard to be rolled into a mouthpiece; the ritual burning of the hashish block; the careful licking of papers; the LP cover on the knees for assemblage. Most liner notes I saw were dotted with hashish burns.

  When I started meeting musicians, I noticed other differences between the cultures. Some British art students would form a group, then learn how to play their instruments well enough to perform the songs written by the group’s strongest personality. The results might be technically unsophisticated but were often more original than those of their American counterparts, who were too close to our musical forms to do much more than accurately re-create them. Dylan, always the exception, was almost British in his unconcern with vocal grace or instrumental fluency.

  I read an interview with Keith Richards once explaining how he and Mick Jagger had a single blues record between them when they first met. It was one I knew well: a Stateside four-track EP licensed from the Excello label, with Slim Harpo on one side and Lazy Lester on the other. They played it until it was so worn they could barely hear the music through the scratches. One way of looking at the Stones’ sound is as a South-East London adaptation of the Excello style. If they had owned more records, their music might have been less distinctive.

  By the mid-sixties, America was experiencing the ‘generation gap’. Parents whose kids returned from school or college with long hair and a rebellious attitude often went into shock. Children were disowned, ‘grounded’, locked up, beaten, shorn, lectured, or sent to psychiatrists, military school or mental institutions. In Britain I visited pubs where earringed boys with long hair stood drinking a Sunday pint next to their dads in cloth caps. Neither seemed the least bit concerned. Americans were so unsure of their often newly won status that they could not comprehend the next generation rejecting what they had worked so hard to achieve. The British seemed to feel that little was going to change, no matter how long their child’s hair grew. My egalitarian American impulses were unnerved when comedians or pundits referred to some working-class parents’ reluctance for their kids to be educated ‘above their station’, yet much of British society seemed happy and content compared to status-anxious America.

  But the defining revelation for me was the audiences. The crowds that filled Club 47 in the early sixties were not too different from those that came to the Newport Folk Festival: middle-class college kids. And there weren’t that many of them until the Dylan stone dropped in the pond. Black music of most kinds was a minority taste in white America. I took a group of friends to a gospel concert in South Boston in 1962. The audience was welcoming but amazed at our presence: white faces were virtually unknown at black venues.

  In June 1964, I stood by the apron of the Hammersmith Odeon stage in London. The show that day starred the Animals with the Nashville Teens, the Swinging Blue Jeans and special guests Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins. Berry was a legend, but jail terms for statutory rape and tax evasion had placed him outside the boundaries of a mainstream American music business that was determined to be respectable and, if possible, white.

  I had met the house manager during the Caravan tour and he gave me permission to take my camera to the front of the beautiful art deco auditorium and snap away. When Berry started his duck walk, kids rushed the stage and I found myself crushed between dozens of teenage girls and the orchestra pit. This was middle America’s worst nightmare: white teenage girls screaming ecstatically at Chuck Berry.

  I noticed a familiar silhouette in the wings, wearing his trademark hat. I had read in Melody Maker that he was about to start a club tour, so I blurted out, ‘Hey, that’s John Lee Hooker.’ The girls around me started yelling, ‘John Lee? John Lee? Where? Where?’ I pointed towards the wings. They started chanting, ‘We want John Lee, we want John Lee’ and were quickly joined by half the hall – hundreds of kids. Berry looked annoyed, then resigned, beckoning him out to take a bow. People stood on chairs and yelled and cheered as Hooker gave us a wave before turning the stage back over to Berry.

  In that moment, I decided I would live in England and produce music for this audience. America seemed a desert in comparison. These weren’t the privileged elite, they were just kids, Animals fans. And they knew who John Lee Hooker was! No white person in America in 1964 – with the exception of me and my friends, of course – knew who John Lee Hooker was.

  Chapter 9

  AS A MODEST CONSUMER OF DRUGS, I rarely met proper dealers. Around Harvard Square, there was a dangerous-looking source named Rick who rode a Harley-Davidson and sneered at twerps like me. In later years in the East Village, in Laurel Canyon and in Bolinas north of San Francisco, I waited at friends’ pads for someone to turn up with what was billed as ‘out-of-sight dope’. The door would open and in would walk Rick. By Bolinas, I had become a vaguely important record producer and was therefore allowed to dine with Rick and hear his tales of adventure. He seemed a restless man who had travelled the world in search of the perfect high, recounting tales of meandering through India with a debauched Russian diplomat in a private train carriage, visits to tribal villages in Afghanistan and close calls with Los Angeles cops.

  There was less mystique about dope in England, perhaps because British police seemed less sinister, or maybe just because hashish is more compact and easier to stash than grass. When Hoppy drove me to the airport for my flight back to New York in November 1964, he handed me a joint ‘to smoke on the plane’. I forgot about it until we landed at the newly named Kennedy airport, where my parents were waiting to welcome me home. I considered throwing the joint away, but after sailing unmolested through border after border during the jazz tour, with musicians carrying God knows what in their horn cases, I dismissed the idea as craven and foolish. Besides, it would be nice to have a joint to smoke in the back yard in Princeton.

  Emerging from customs, I waved at the folks, then walked out of their sight towards the door. A crew-cut man in a brown suit flashed a badge and asked me to step into his office. He and a colleague started going through my bags. When they asked me to empty my pockets, I handed them the joint.

  The Feds turned me down as too small a fry so I was offered to the Queens police. A detective with the retrospectively ominous name of Giuliani showed up wearing a sharkskin suit and dancing pumps: he had been getting ready for a Latin dance contest. I asked whether someone would please inform my parents. ‘Parents?’ I got the feeling that if they had realized my family were meeting me I might not have been stopped. Giuliani gave my father directions to the police station in Forest Hills and drove me there via the slums of Bedford – Stuyvesant. He pointed out junkies nodding on street corners, saying, ‘You don’t want to end up like that, do you?’

  In a miraculous denouement, Giuliani and the assistant district attorney decided I was a good kid and contrived to get me off. After sitting through some ‘counselling sessions’ where I was assured by a pleasant man in a bow tie that whoever had given me the joint was ‘an agent of the international communist conspiracy’, I was brought before a judge who reviewed the documents and intoned that ‘it is not in the best interests of the People of the State of New York for this fine young man to have a police record. Case dismissed’.

  After the failure of the blues concert idea, I returned to England in March 1965. Staying in a flat near Baker Street, I got caught up in a bizarre web involving Nigel Waymouth, a friend I had met during the Caravan tour, his girlfriend Sheila and a friend of hers from San Francisco named Freddie, who was overstaying his visa and violating a court order by sleeping with an under-age heiress. One morning, when Nigel and Sheila were away, five plainclothes men from the Drugs Squad burst in on us. Ever resourceful when it came to dope, Freddie managed to hide our small stash in his mouth, then ate it in a police holding cell. The fact that they couldn’t have found anything – the ashtra
ys were scrupulously clean – didn’t stop us being remanded in custody for twelve days on a charge of ‘possession of dangerous drugs’.

  I hoped I would be able to deal with my fortnight in Brixton prison as one of those colourful events I could tell my grandchildren – or perhaps you, reader – about. The first few days didn’t quite feel that way. I had been denied a phone call as well as bail and had to wait a day before I could even send a letter telling someone where I was. F-wing looked like the set of a Terry-Thomas movie. There was a huge window at either end with the London skyline visible in the distance. Catwalks around each floor overlooked a central area bisected by metal steps, not unlike a New York tenement fire escape. As ‘untried prisoners’ we each had a cell to ourselves: a cot with a mattress, sheet, blanket and pillow; a small wooden table and chair; a window just above head height, barred; a slops bucket for a toilet. On the bed lay a booklet entitled Rules for Untried Prisoners which contained one encouraging sentence: ‘Untried prisoners shall have access to the Prison Library’. I relaxed, slightly; I would pass the time reading those classics I had skimmed at Harvard.

  Climbing back to the top floor the next morning after the disgusting breakfast, I approached my Landing Officer. He was a dead ringer for the prison guard in A Clockwork Orange: small and neat, with a carefully trimmed moustache and a short-person-in-uniform’s domineering glint in his eyes.

  ‘I’d like to go to the library now, please, sir.’

  ‘You’d like to what?’

  ‘The library. It says in the rules that I can go to the library.’

  ‘I know what it says in the bloody RULES! It says you shall have ACCESS! It doesn’t say WHEN! It doesn’t say HOW! That is for ME to determine! Now get back in your cell!’

  An hour later, my disconsolate reverie – in which I pondered the logistics and physical demands of twelve days of thrice-daily masturbation – was interrupted by the opening of the cell door window.

  ‘You the one wanted the BOOKS?’ shouted the LO, peering in and frowning. He shoved about twenty volumes through the slot – paperbacks and hardbacks of all descriptions and conditions, including George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and an H. G. Wells novel called Tono Bungay.

  My relationship with the LO continued in this vein. One day the cell doors were opened and we were each given a bucket of soapy water and a hard-bristled brush and told to clean our tables. I was on my knees scrubbing away when a pair of shiny black shoes entered my field of vision. I looked up to see a scowling LO. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘Washing my table, sir, as ordered.’

  ‘Well, put some muscle into it!’ I redoubled my efforts, scrubbing faster and harder.

  ‘Oh, that’s absolutely useless, that is. Here, give me that brush.’

  The next thing I knew, the LO was down on his knees attacking my table, turning it over and digging the grime out of the corners. Finally, he tossed the brush into the bucket, got back on his feet and turned on his heel. ‘That’s the way to clean a table, son.’ I guess he had a crush on me.

  Cops and Robbers in 1965 England was still a kind of Ealing Comedy: crimes rarely involved firearms. The denizens of F-Wing were losers in a game they had been playing against the cops. In queues for exercise or food, the constant questions were ‘What you in for, mate?’, followed by ‘What you reckon you’ll get?’ When Freddie and I responded with ‘Suspicion of drug possession’ and ‘We’re innocent, we’ll get off’ they would burst into laughter, offering: ‘Listen, mate, they wouldn’t have you in here if they had any intention of letting you off. You’re living in dreamland, you are.’

  The only obvious hard men on view were a sullen group of Maltese pimps who never talked to anyone. The innocent mood was confirmed by an encounter I had one day with a trusty cleaning the walkway in front of my cell. After the ritual exchange of information, he added that he was the ‘Surrey Phantom’. Asked to enlarge on this, he recounted his tale.

  Married with a kid, he would commute daily to Farnham, a drive of 20 miles through the Surrey countryside. He got to know the route so well that he could tell when houses were unoccupied. One day he stopped at an isolated farm to have a look around. Finding an open window, he was off down the road with the TV and the silverware a few minutes later. A fence encouraged him to come back with more goods. Over the next two years, he quit his job (without telling the wife) and would spend his days plundering the countryside. The rash of burglaries with similar MOs sparked a local press outcry about a ‘Surrey Phantom’. He was finally stopped for speeding with an embarrassing number of other people’s appliances in his boot, covered with his by now familiar fingerprints.

  The night before being sent up to London for arraignment, he grew uneasy when his jailers refused him the supper they were dishing out to the other prisoners. His alarm increased when he was taken from his cell and frogmarched to a back room. There he was confronted not with truncheon-wielding uglies but an empty chair at the head of a crowded table. There was steak and two veg on his plate, a glass of wine and a dozen policemen from surrounding towns who wanted to meet the Phantom before he was swallowed by the criminal justice system.

  Another inmate was an American from St Augustine, Florida, organizer of orgies for the cross-dressers among that city’s police force and politicians. One night, with the head of the Vice Squad in a Merry Widow and high heels, they were raided by a rival police unit. He fled out the back window and was given get-out-of-town money by interested parties. He went first to New York and then to London, where his funds ran out, leaving him unable to meet his room service and taxi bills. He marvelled at the gentleness of his experience with British justice and seemed to be quite enjoying himself in F-Wing.

  My letters eventually produced a visit from a solicitor. Freddie grew resigned and fatalistic; he knew they were determined to convict him. When the trial was postponed to allow one of the detectives to give evidence elsewhere, my solicitor got me out on bail. No such joy for Freddie: with his expired visa, he had no right to be in England at all.

  It was a gorgeous April day when I emerged from Marlborough Street magistrates’ court. On Regent Street, a bus marked ‘Highgate’ caught my eye and I thought of Tono Bungay. The lead character in Wells’s tale repairs to the famous cemetery when he gets depressed, sits on a knoll and gazes down the hill where the gravestones blur in the fog with the chimneys of Kentish Town. My first act of liberty would be to try to locate that spot.

  Sure enough, there was a grassy rise near the entrance beside an oak tree. Looking down the hill through the now (since the smokeless fuel regulations of the 1940s) fog-free air of London, I could just about conjure up a blurred line between gravestones and chimneys. I lay there for a while, looking at the sky and revelling in my fragile freedom. As I rose to leave, I noticed the row of gravestones in front of me, all from the 1890s, just before Wells had written the book. The names on the middle two stones, with first and last transposed, were those of the two main characters in Tono Bungay. I caught the downhill bus feeling revived and reconnected to the world.

  When the case came to trial it was the judge this time who seemed impressed with my Harvard background and gentlemanly demeanour. The Crown tried their best to convict, producing a ruddy-faced, sweating (through his lies) chemist from Scotland Yard who claimed the bowl where Freddie kept his loose tobacco contained two grams of cannabis resin. They were out to get Freddie and they did: three months in Brixton followed by deportation. In my case, the prosecution produced an unposted letter to a girlfriend with references to ‘getting high’ and to my bust at Kennedy. I stoutly insisted that in America ‘high’ referred to alcohol and the judge suppressed mention of my US case on the grounds that it was hearsay evidence. Charges dismissed; two blunders and still no police record. My freedom of movement remained intact through sheer luck and the kindness of strangers.

  Not long after, three bobbies approached a car on a back street near Shep
herd’s Bush. When they asked the driver for identification, his companion pulled out a shotgun and killed all three. The criminal fraternity were as horrified as the police: the desperate gunmen could find no shelter. One surrendered quickly, the other was found weeks later, starving in rugged Derbyshire woodlands. As both villains and police feared, this event signalled the end of Terry-Thomas time in Britain. Crime became progressively more violent, criminals and police harsher and more aggressive with each other. No more steak and wine for the Phantom.

  A middle-class kid dabbling in drugs today stands about as much chance of getting busted as he does of flying to the moon. The drug laws of Britain and America are enforced almost exclusively against the underclasses. In the sixties, the authorities were genuinely rattled by ‘respectable’ kids using drugs: it seemed to represent the end of civilization as they knew it. Now that stockbrokers snort coke, millions of kids take ecstasy every weekend and society continues to function ‘normally’, they can concentrate on the ever dangerous poor, using drug laws as another means of intimidation and retribution.

  The shift from grass, hash and acid to coke, smack, crack and crystal meth has brought in a hard and dangerous world with huge amounts of money at stake both for the dealers and for the gigantic drug squads. Turning policemen away at the doors of UFO was our own Ealing Comedy. Reality on the narcotics front line today is more like something directed by Paul Verhoeven.

  Chapter 10

  WHY DOES ENGLAND HATE its own folk music? Fashionable girls at Madrid discotheques squeal with delight when the DJ puts on a Sevillanas at midnight and they dance it with grace and enthusiasm. Irishmen sit happily for hours in a country pub listening to fiddlers and accordion players. A sophisticated Roman won’t turn up his nose at a tarantella. Abba’s Benny Andersson appears at Swedish folk festivals with his accordion and has produced recordings of traditional polskas. In England, the mere thought of a morris dance team or an unaccompanied ballad singer sends most natives running for cover.