White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  I assumed this to be little more than a precursor of fantasy football, but two days later Paul rang to say that everyone was set except for Ginger Baker, who would be replaced by Pete York from the Spencer Davis Group. My task was to get clearances for Winwood and York from Chris Blackwell of Island Records. Thus I made my first call to the man who would become a dominant figure in my professional life for the next thirty-five years. He was friendly and cooperative, subject to the proviso that we bill his prodigy ‘Stevie Anglo’.

  Paul chose ‘I Want To Know’ by Otis Rush as his showpiece, while Steve selected ‘Steppin’ Out’. Clapton did not yet consider himself a singer, so we met to choose something to spotlight his guitar chops. He had in mind ‘Crosscut Saw’, an Albert King track that had been a regular feature of his days with John Mayall, but I suggested we look at country blues for something that could be updated to the electric group sound. We shared many enthusiasms in this area, particularly Robert Johnson. I suggested ‘Standing At The Crossroads’; Eric countered with ‘Traveling Riverside Blues’. He came up with an arrangement that combined the lyrics of ‘Crossroads’ with a guitar lick from ‘Riverside’ and a modern classic was born.

  We rehearsed the group (now called Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse) one rainy afternoon in mid-January and scheduled the session for a week later at the old Olympic Studios in George Street. Winwood sounded great singing ‘Crossroads’, and everyone was excited to be playing together for the first time. Then Holzman announced he would be coming to London that week and would therefore supervise the session. Six years after my revelation on the baseball field, I was ready to produce my first recording session and the moment was being snatched from my grasp.

  When the day arrived, we all ignored Holzman and I ran things with the help of Keith Grant, the engineer who later recorded so many great Stones, Who and Zeppelin tracks. But Jac took the tapes back to New York to mix and the final result seemed somehow less interesting than what had gone down on tape. The ‘Electric Blues Project’ was released later that year as What’s Shakin’!

  Eric and I started meeting up to go to Marx Brothers movies. In those days he was more like a witty office colleague who liked to listen to blues than anyone’s fantasy of a guitar hero: he once frightened my girlfriend by opening his door in a gorilla suit. We talked about his plan to build a group around Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker and he claimed to like the idea of signing with Elektra. But Jac hadn’t been that impressed and said I could go ahead only if I didn’t spend more than £400 on production – a miserly sum even in 1966. Eric rang his new manager, Robert Stigwood, from my office and passed me the phone. I could tell after a brief exchange of pleasantries that a) Stigwood had no idea what an Elektra was and b) I was totally out of my depth trying to negotiate anything with him. I sadly wished Eric the best of luck – I would have to look elsewhere for my first British signing.

  Within six months, Rothchild would be in a Los Angeles studio with the Doors and I would be getting ready to record Pink Floyd in London. Neither had much to do with folk music, but in 1966 the world was changing by the week. Concepts like ‘folk-rock’ seemed quaint and far away.

  Chapter 14

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1966 I had a Tuesday evening ritual for dignitaries visiting London: Chinatown for dinner at Lee Ho Fook, then a walk up Wardour Street to the Marquee for the weekly residency of The Move. John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky, Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield, Jac Holzman, Phil Ochs and a few others got this treatment. And privileged they were, for The Move in their prime were a phenomenon few Americans had the privilege of seeing.

  I have fantasized about what might have happened had they made it to Monterey Pop or the Fillmore. I think American audiences would have been as astonished as they were by The Who or Hendrix. The Move were ambitious working-class kids from Birmingham with no desire to change the face of music, preach peace and love or promote altered consciousness; they just wanted to be rich and famous.

  Their lead singer was the virile-looking Carl Wayne, who would end up in panto and crooning on pier-ends. He was big voiced and willing: if his manager wanted him to wear a Soho tailor’s lurid fantasy of 1930s American gangster wear (and his manager did), he wore it. At the back of the stage was Bev Bevan, a working-man’s drummer and precursor of Midlands powerhouses like John Bonham. The DNA of heavy metal and power pop lurked in his wrists. Ace Kefford’s skeletal albino face protruded from the most outlandish of the psychedelic hoodlum outfits. He bore a curious resemblance to his San Francisco counterpart, Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane. They were both great bass players, but none of that Californian jazzy fluency for Kefford: Ace went straight for the most powerful nail-your-chakras-to- the-seat-of-your-pants bass lines.

  Lead guitarist Roy Wood had not yet grown his Merlin hair and beard, but had already assumed the role of shaman-in-chief. With rimless glasses and distant stare, he led the absurdly complex arrangements with nods of the head and dips of the guitar neck. Trevor Burton, the rhythm guitarist, was the innocent-looking one. He would glance at the others onstage and occasionally at the audience with a shy smile, the barest hint of a desire to please. None of the others gave evidence of any such concern.

  They attacked the audience with volume and speed from the off. Their own songs, Motown B-sides, even ‘Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart’ were all delivered with power, turn-on-a-dime tempo changes and rich harmonies screamed in perfect pitch by four voices, two of them usually falsetto. There were no long Frisco-style jams: the intricate arrangements foreshadowed – and overshadowed – the grandiosity of later groups like Yes.

  Their music verged on psychedelia, but it was a beer-drinker’s psychedelia. Wood may have taken his share of acid in later years, but initially he just incorporated sounds coming up from the underground, magpie-like, into the Move’s music. They made a far superior fist of deconstructing soul tunes than did Vanilla Fudge a year later. And everything was always moving, faster and faster, more and more dazzling harmonies, arrangements and power. The confidence was overwhelming.

  The Move would finish off a set with an instrumental coda to an original – ‘I Can Hear The Grass Grow’ perhaps. One by one they would leave the stage, instruments leaning against amps, screaming feedback until only Bevan remained, pounding out a stentorian drum solo. He would fiddle with something behind the bass drum before joining the others in the wings. The empty stage roared at the crowd in the tiny club until Bev’s enormous firecracker exploded, the roadie yanked the master plug and the audience was left in smoky silence, staring dumbfounded at the stage. Mike Bloomfield and John Sebastian both told me it was the most amazing thing they had ever seen. As far as I know, there are no recordings of the original line-up’s live shows. As dressing-room visitors groped for superlatives, the group would murmur incomprehensible Brummie acknowledgements, tug their forelocks and saunter out to the van for the ride back to the Celestial City.

  I was desperate for them to join Butterfield, Love, the Doors and Tim Buckley in Elektra’s growing stable of rock artists and thought I was getting farther with their manager Tony Secunda and producer Denny Cordell than I had with Robert Stigwood. Looking back, it seems I was little more than a shill, a naïve American bidding up their value as Cordell manoeuvred for his label deal with EMI. Just before he sacked me, I took Holzman up to Birmingham to meet them in a last throw of the dice. I wish there was a tape recording of the post-gig conversation in the cramped dressing room of the Edgbaston Mecca Ballroom among the impressed but awkward Holzman, the very earnest me, the Fagin-like Secunda, and the monosyllabic Move. The man who persuaded Jim Morrison and Arthur Lee to sign with Elektra was too far from home to make any impression on the Move.

  The hits Cordell eventually produced with them were compact three-minute bits of pop with psychedelic spice tailored for the British singles market; an English producer still needed to keep his mind on the requirements of Radio Luxembourg and the BBC. In America, Country Joe & the Fish and the Grateful Dead
were beginning to imagine the kind of extended tracks that would transform the shape of rock recording, but there was no place for that in the British music scene until Pink Floyd redrew the map.

  Cordell and Secunda were an unlikely pair, but they enjoyed success after success from 1966 to 1968 with The Move, Procol Harum and Joe Cocker. Secunda came from South London and had knocked around the worlds of music and professional wrestling since the early sixties. He was a cartoon villain, a reptilian hustler who bragged of his time in prison but was possessed of a ready wit and sinister charm. Cordell was as dapper and cool as Secunda was fevered and scheming.

  There were other pairings like this around Soho: the cockney Chris Stamp and the Bohemian aristocrat Kit Lambert managing The Who, for example. Soho that year was like the steppes in AD350, with Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals and Huns queuing up to pillage, destabilize and eventually take over the Roman Empire. Lambert, Stamp and The Who were set to follow in the westward footsteps of Andrew Oldham and the Stones and Brian Epstein’s Beatles; Stigwood was setting the stage for Clapton’s new Cream; expatriate Jimi Hendrix was preparing for his triumphant return home under the aegis of Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffreys; and Steve Winwood’s career was being masterminded by Chris Blackwell. In the coming year, the list would grow: Jethro Tull and Ten Years After with Chris Wright and Terry Ellis; Led Zeppelin with Peter Grant. The Move, in their failure to conquer America, were the exception.

  America had no equivalent of these managerial hustlers. The Brill Building types who built rock’n’roll empires had little notion of how to deal with an artist who wrote his own songs and took acid. Grossman knew, but was content to lie back in Woodstock, building a studio and a Chinese restaurant and muttering gnomic pronouncements to quaking agents and record company bosses via long-distance telephone. The new British managers were willing to put in the hard graft to take America and were determined to enjoy it. The working-class barrow boys took such pleasure in the sound of their own spiels that they made for highly entertaining company. The aristocrats among them had been bred to avoid ‘trade’, but if one couldn’t, at least it had to be amusing. Thugs like Grant and Don Arden resembled Lee Marvin in Point Blank: executives in plush offices couldn’t believe anyone would be that vicious and gave in to them just to have a peaceful life. The Yank who paid the most attention to all this, of course, was David Geffen.

  The brilliance of the British managers flowed from the same fount as their flaws. Like the Grade brothers who had ruled British show business since the war, they believed everyone needed a gimmick. Townshend smashing one guitar and Hendrix burning another on stage at Monterey made them overnight stars in America. Both gestures, like Bev’s firecracker, were part of a British tradition of artifice. New York would never have moulded Hendrix’s genius into as powerful a pop persona as London did.

  When it worked, it was brilliant, but when it didn’t, it could go very wrong. Secunda alienated The Move and cost them a fortune when he packaged one of their singles in a libellous cartoon about Harold Wilson. Mike Jeffreys never understood Hendrix the musician. He put him with an English rhythm section and thought that was the appeal: ‘two white guys with the flashy nigger in the middle’. When Hendrix wanted to work with his black peers Billy Cox and Buddy Miles, Jeffreys’ only response was to sabotage the new line-up, helping drive Jimi to the despair he was in when he died. Another ugly manifestation of the syndrome arrived a decade later with Malcolm McLaren’s leering insistence that the Sex Pistols were a talent-free quartet of losers he masterminded to the top of the charts with his punk gimmick: anyone with ears could tell that Johnny Rotten was a singer of genius.

  I never understood why Secunda didn’t send The Move to San Francisco on spec. For all his cleverness, he couldn’t grasp the changes that were transforming the American market. Cordell got it. He rode ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ and ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ into the sunset, settling in Los Angeles, forming Shelter Records and discovering Leon Russell and Tom Petty. In a melancholy footnote to their long-sundered partnership, Denny and Tony, both in their early fifties, died within days of each other in 1995: Denny in Ireland where he trained racehorses and Tony in Marin County where he published guidebooks to American national parks. They held a memorable Irish wake for Denny, full of devoted friends from all periods of his colourful life. I sometimes imagine Tony, the ex-wrestling promoter from Streatham, sitting in the Trident restaurant on the Sausalito waterfront, eating his organic salad, gazing at the sailing boats out on the bay and regretting The Move’s missed chance.

  Chapter 15

  IN MAY 1965, THE EVENING after the party in Edinburgh, George Brown took me to hear some musicians he thought I would like. We walked for a long time through cobbled streets where the only sound was our footsteps: everyone seemed quietly at home behind lace curtains. Arriving at a simple pub with sawdust on the floor and a few benches, we took our pints into an equally spartan back room where a crowd of about thirty was waiting for the music to start.

  Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer, both with shaggy blond hair and wearing heavy tweeds, put down their drinks and dragged chairs to the middle of the floor. Robin was graceful and relaxed while Clive had a limp and seemed old beyond his years. They performed Scots traditional music as if it had taken a journey to the Appalachians and back via Morocco and Bulgaria, complementing each other’s playing with skill and wit. Clive mostly picked the banjo while Robin sang in a soaring tenor and played violin or a guitar with its bridge lowered so the strings buzzed like a sitar.

  When George introduced us after the set, Robin conversed engagingly in a lilting, heavily elocuted, burred Scots accent. His manner was somewhere between a hippy and a nineteenth-century parlour bard and he glowed with self-assurance. I was convinced I had found a star.

  Six months later I was back in Britain with Holzman’s grudging agreement that I could ‘look around’ for artists to sign to Elektra. Robin and Clive had left Edinburgh, but I eventually tracked them down to a regular Saturday gig at Clive’s Incredible Folk Club in an old warehouse in downtown Glasgow. In early March ’66, I dodged the drunks and the pools of puke that were prominent features of Sauchiehall Street nights, arriving at the venue only to find the door locked and a crowd outside arguing with a policeman. Hamish Imlach, a singer I had met in London, told me the club had been closed as a fire hazard and gave me a phone number along with the news that Robin and Clive were now a trio called, in honour of the padlocked club, the Incredible String Band.

  The group photo on the cover of The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter gives an idea of the atmosphere at the cottage north of the city where I found them the following afternoon: kids and dope everywhere, flowered skirts and blouses, velvet cloaks, silk scarves and muddy shoes, all infused with the scent of patchouli. The new recruit was Mike Heron, formerly of the Edinburgh band Rock Bottom and the Deadbeats. He was short and solidly built with clumsy-seeming but effective movements, a contrast to Robin’s vague ethereal grace. He teased the other two constantly, laughing and slapping his knee at the slightest provocation.

  We drank tea and smoked joints for a while, then Robin and Mike played me the fruits of their new interest in composing. I was astounded: the songs were completely original, influenced by American folk and Scottish ballads, but full of flavours from the Balkans, ragtime, North Africa, music hall and William Blake. The combination of Mike’s Dylan-tinged vocals and Robin’s keening glissandos created harmonies both exotic and commercial. I had to have them. Fortunately, when Holzman heard an acetate of Robin’s ‘October Song’, he said, ‘Yeah, this is pretty good, go sign them.’ I then had to deliberately misunderstand his instructions and add £50 to the advance to beat out Nat Joseph at Transatlantic Records for their signature.

  We made the first LP one weekend in London. Clive, a true rebel who didn’t care a fig for my ambitions, left soon afterwards for Afghanistan and told Robin and Mike not to wait up. The record didn’t fit any obvious category but
got good reviews and was a surprise success in both Britain and the USA. By the time I left Elektra and was trying to figure out how to avoid going back to New York, they were almost ready to make a second. Mike and Robin’s agreement that I should manage them – along with the launch of UFO – enabled me to stay in London.

  In the studio that winter, two musicians sounded sparse after the varied textures produced by the trio. We were still using four-track tape machines in 1966, but the concept of multiple over-dubs was being explored and expanded by Denny Cordell, Mickie Most, George Martin and other British producers. Revolver had shown what was possible, so we set out to make the sound of two musicians comparable to the original three. The explosion in dope smoking and acid in 1966 also helped to alter recording practices: the stoned ear loves complexity and Robin and Mike were nothing if not drug culture pioneers.

  Edinburgh now has one of the highest heroin addiction rates in Europe, but the grim estates that provided the setting for Trainspotting in the 1990s were mostly on the booze in the sixties. Students and middle-class kids living in unheated flats in the beautiful Georgian buildings of the undeveloped city centre were leading the way in Britain’s exploration of altered consciousness. Mike and Robin were part of a milieu in which hashish and LSD were constant factors of sociable life. They had both read Koestler’s The Lotus and the Robot and Huxley’s Doors of Perception and Robin was an expert on Blake, the hippies’ favourite poet and painter. I found their approach to drugs comfortably familiar: it reminded me of the Cambridge folkniks. And in 1966, drugs could still be viewed as a benign phenomenon: thanks to the purity of the chemicals, bad trips were rare and acid casualties virtually unknown.