White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  I had to wait for a visit to Havana in 1995 to have as much fun in a studio as I had making The 5,000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion. Their new songs had strange lyrics and rich melodies and they kept coming up with off-the-wall ideas for harmonies and over-dubs; cramming all the ingenuity on to four tracks was our biggest problem. When we finished recording, I had my first experience of a sensation I came to relish in the coming years: I couldn’t wait to get the musicians out of the way so that the engineer and I could start mixing the multi-track tapes into a stereo master.

  Each track – which in those early days might include a combination of instruments or voices – could be positioned anywhere from right to left on the stereo spectrum by the proportion assigned to the two channels. The lead voice (and bass, if there was one) was always divided equally, meaning it went in the middle. Volume in relation to the other tracks was controllable by the fader on the mixing desk. Above each fader were the dials that added reverb (of which many varieties of length and texture were available) or subtly calibrated the high, low and middle frequencies. You were, in a sense, creating the ideal physical location for each instrument or voice: the violin in the Sistine Chapel, the singer in your mum’s shower stall and the bass drum in Alfred Jarry’s cork-lined bedroom. If a track sounded too quiet, one option was to simply turn it up. But if you changed the stereo positioning, that track might be more audible at the same volume. Or, by adding one decibel at a certain frequency, you could heighten its clarity or weight, making it appear louder, without making the others sound quieter. A glass can never be more than full: if you increase the level of one instrument, you reduce all the others.

  My grandmother’s studies with Leschititsky taught her the ‘singing right hand’: the melody line is made to ring out without being louder than the other notes. All the composer’s intentions are heard, the melody line is clear but without distorting the balance between the notes. Those early years sitting under her piano influenced me: the ideal for which I strove was to hear everything in balance with the melody singing out clearly.

  Mixing was an endlessly fascinating jigsaw puzzle with the reward of hearing a wonderful piece of music slowly emerging before you, like watching a print in the developing bath. But with sounds you could control the colour, the contrast and even the positioning. I found the prospect that my life would involve countless repetitions of this process very pleasing. Adding to the excitement was the conviction that a significant number of people would want to buy the music as soon as they heard what you had made of it. These feelings would often be delusional, of course, but in the case of The 5,000 Spirits, they were to be amply fulfilled.

  Chapter 16

  WHEN I RETURNED TO NEW YORK on holiday in the summer of 1966, George asked me to help him with an outdoor concert at Lewisohn Stadium in Washington Heights. It was a double bill: the Miles Davis Quintet and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. On a balmy night, 3,000 people were seated across the infield of the stadium.

  Ellington was viewed then as a little passé, but since it was a big band, dynamics dictated that Miles’s Quintet would open the show. Their level of fame in the mid-’60s was as great as any ever reached by modern jazz artists. (Black ones, anyway; Dave Brubeck made the cover of Time magazine.) Dressed in Ivy League clothes – snug Brooks Brothers blazers or tweed jackets, button-down shirts and ties, horn-rimmed glasses, slim grey flannel trousers and brown loafers – they embodied a confident new ethos in the black community. Their hair was short and ‘natural’. The girls who swirled around them backstage had either a ‘Seven Sisters’ (female Ivy League) look with gabardine skirts and hairbands or huge Afros, giant gold looped earrings and dashikis. Miles’s set was muted and perfect. Afterwards there were handshakes all around and possibly a few early sightings of a high-five, but no exuberance. Everyone was extremely cool.

  Backstage during their set, I would occasionally pass an older man in a rumpled suit and a head-rag whittling down a sax reed, or sorting through piles of sheet music. I would do a double-take and say to myself, ‘Isn’t that Harry Carney?’ or ‘Wow, that’s Johnny Hodges!’ The backstage hangers-on paid these men no attention whatsoever. When someone asked ‘Anybody seen Duke?’ the answer was that he was in the bus getting his hair fixed.

  When I started setting up the famous Ellington music stands, Carney or Hodges or Paul Gonzalves would come out to make sure their stand was just so, and to organize their sheet music. George, Father Norman O’Connor (the ‘Jazz Priest’) and Whitney Balliett from the New Yorker were just offstage talking to Miles when there was a murmur in the wings and someone hissed, ‘Here comes Duke.’ Parting the sea of flannel and tweed like a surreal Moses came Ellington in a suit of thick blue cloth. The jacket was ‘zoot’ length, almost to his knees, and his trousers broke fully on the tops of blue suede shoes. His shirt was a shade lighter than the suit while the third note in this triad cluster of blue, the broad tie, was darker than either. In his breast pocket was an impeccably folded bright orange handkerchief. From head to foot, Duke was clothed in Ivy League anti-matter.

  ‘Good evening, Miles. Good evening, George. Good evening, Father.’ As he made his way to the stage the beautiful hip girls, the tightly Brooks Brother’d men and even Miles seemed to evaporate. Duke just kept walking, took his seat at the piano, leaned into the microphone, and told the audience: ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I just want you to know that we do… love you madly.’ At a nod of his head, the orchestra tore into the opening bars of ‘Take The A-Train’.

  A few months later, I was on the phone to George, having lost my Elektra job: the conflicts between my desire to be a producer and Jac’s need for a marketing genius proved impossible to reconcile. A shortage of experienced tour managers and the impending start of Newport in Europe ’66 meant our need was mutual. I headed for Barcelona where one branch of the tour kicked off. My first trip to the Catalan capital two years earlier had been a stressful visit with Hawkins and Edison. This time I arrived a few days ahead of the musicians and explored the city. The concerts were being held in the Palacio, a beautiful art deco hall: Sonny Rollins and Max Roach on opening night, followed by Illinois Jacquet, then a sold-out show with Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto.

  The pairing of these two had a tortured history. I heard a version of it late one night in the hotel bar from Stan’s Swedish wife, Monica. The partnership was supposed to be between Stan and João Gilberto: Astrud was just the wife who could carry a tune on the demos they recorded. Monica claimed credit for persuading MGM to release Astrud’s version of ‘Girl From Ipanema’ as a single. The record shot up the charts, but Monica suffered blow-back when Astrud and Stan began an affair on the resulting tour. João and Astrud divorced and Monica soon put an end to the collaboration. But going back to being simply Stan Getz or Astrud Gilberto was something of a financial let-down and George’s offer had enticed them to work together again. Both arrived flanked by sexual bodyguards in the form of Astrud’s muscle-bound shtarker (as another tour manager referred to him) and Monica. You could cut the air with a knife. When Astrud passed by in the hotel restaurant on the first day, Monica said, ‘What a beautiful dress that is, Astrud.’ (Pause.) ‘Too bad it’s not your colour.’

  The pressure quickly got to the Getzes. Underwear and Swedish curses flew at Barcelona airport as bags were unpacked, divided and repacked in front of the check-in desk. If Stan expected Astrud to get rid of the boyfriend after Monica decamped to Copenhagen, he was mistaken. He took his revenge onstage: after agreeing ‘Shadow Of Your Smile’, he would whisper ‘Ipanema’ to the band and she would have a few beats to figure out which song they were playing. I was back to shuttle diplomacy in hotel corridors. In Rotterdam one evening, Stan told me that he never spent a night alone if he could possibly help it. I watched as he hit on girl after girl in a bar, eventually settling for a very plain waitress, the last to remain after everyone else had gone home.

  I imagined that a switch to ‘The Max Roach Quintet with special gues
t Sonny Rollins’ would make a refreshing change. But I met them on a November morning in fogbound Copenhagen airport awaiting a delayed flight to Vienna and it went downhill from there. Everyone else was on their way to Paris for a concert or a day off. The young guys in Max’s group – Freddie Hubbard (trumpet), James Spaulding (sax) and Ronnie Saunders (piano) – were disgruntled: everyone had a girl in Paris or knew where to find one. Their day off that week had been in Oslo.

  I had hung out with them a week earlier in Barcelona and Hubbard had inadvertently advanced my gastronomic evolution. George’s schooling had not addressed my shellfish aversion, but when I accidentally spooned up a mussel from a bowl of Catalan bullabesa in a Ramblas restaurant, Freddie looked at me and said, ‘Well, go on, man, suck the motherfucker!’ What choice did I have but to cut the final cord to the peanut-butter-and-jelly land of my boyhood?

  There were no such high spirits in Copenhagen, just gloom about the delay and the destination with duty-free Scotch for solace. The three of them were drunk by noon in the airport and snoring on the plane to Vienna. On the bus to Graz in southern Austria the promoter had thoughtfully provided a case of beer that they eagerly attacked. Nondrinkers Sonny and Max sat up front ignoring the storm brewing in the rear. First it was the Beatles, who had ‘ripped off black culture and made a fortune’, then George Wein, ‘the Jew who was sending us off to play for a bunch of Nazis’ (Freddie had read that Hitler came from Graz). When we arrived at the beautiful opera house, the crowd was calmly seated, dressed very formally and glancing at their watches: the three musicians were raving and out of control.

  I managed to get them onstage only a few minutes late, but it just got worse. The audience initially regarded bugle-calls from Freddie, birdsong from James and dissonant chords from Ronnie as interesting and avant-garde. But as Freddie staggered around the stage, they could be fooled no more and began to hiss. He responded by going to the microphone and suggesting that ‘All you white mother-fuckers can kiss my black ass’.

  I had to talk fast to convince the promoter not to stop the concert, refund the tickets and have the three of them arrested by the fierce-looking police who had suddenly appeared backstage. Having negotiated a five-minute reprieve, I signalled Max to play a stage-clearing drum solo. I succeeded in getting the three of them off and Sonny on, joining Max and the equally sober bass player in the scheduled second-half trio. We got half the fee and Sonny played well but towards the end one of the inebriated trio started throwing furniture out of the window of the locked dressing room. More police arrived and took them away in handcuffs.

  Max, Sonny and I cruised Graz in a taxi until 2 a.m. trying to find out where they were being held. I would go into police stations and say ‘Schwarzers?’ and get a shake of the head until we finally found them in the medieval castle that overlooks the city. Early the next morning I sprang them with a $300 fine for violating an Austrian statute against ‘insulting the public’ and we headed for the airport and Paris. They were exhausted and Freddie’s wrist was swollen from the cuffs. Someone asked him whether it had been worth it. ‘No, man,’ he said. ‘But almost.’

  It is risky to treat the incident as emblematic, but it seemed in synch with other developments that year. The Civil Rights movement was not over, but the energy of the early sixties had dissipated. Young white activists had moved on to other things: the war in Vietnam, drugs, free speech. With the turning away of white liberals from the black cause came a rejection of the music. The biggest-selling jazz artist of the late sixties ended up being Charles Lloyd, a moderately gifted sax player who tapped into a melodic, oriental vibe that struck a chord with kids at the Fillmore. Coltrane died, and listening to Monk and Rollins began to seem like hard work. Theirs was heroin and alcohol music and kids were now into acid and grass.

  In Paris the night after Graz I heard the rawest edge of black anger translated into music: the Ayler Brothers. Their recordings on the ESP label had startled a jazz world that thought it was ready for anything. Don Ayler played trumpet with a clear, vibrato-free tone, like a street musician from New Orleans, while Albert’s sax playing was rich and fruity, like an R&B player’s. They would start with a familiar melody, but the cohesion would erode with each repeat of the theme. Strict time from the drummer would judder into syncopations, returning to the four-four beat only to veer off again even more obliquely. Albert and Don would play the melody in unison at first, then start to edge away from each other, finding quarter tones either side of the tune. Eventually, the theme would disappear into a cacophony in which the original source was barely recognizable. For their theme that evening, they chose ‘La Marseillaise’.

  The fury that greeted Serge Gainsbourg’s reggae version twelve years later gives some idea of what happened that night. People shouted and threw things at the stage; fist fights broke out as listeners tried to silence the objectors. Don Ayler looked like a bomb-making anarchist in his rimless glasses: strict, ascetic and aloof. No matter what happened around him, he continued to play the melody a demented quarter-tone sharp and always with that beautiful pure tone. It was great that people fought about music in those days.

  The Aylers came to bad ends: addictions, mental institutions and suicide. It was more and more difficult for them to get work as the sixties wore on. They represented the musical branch of the shift in black consciousness as the gratitude towards white Civil Rights workers of the early sixties evolved into the fury of the Black Panthers in the later years of the decade.

  I read about most of these developments from the calm distance of London. There was a measure of political engagement for us there – the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam demonstration, for example – but it seemed tame beside the struggles that were going on in the States.

  In the spring of 1968, I flew from London to San Francisco for a meeting with Bill Graham about the Incredible String Band and found myself with some time to kill. A cinema near the Fillmore was showing The Battle of Algiers. The opening credits were rolling as I entered; the kasbah scenes were dark and my eyes hadn’t adjusted from the California haze. I groped for a seat and kept finding bodies. That seemed odd; I had expected a weekday matinée at an art house to be pretty empty. A hand grabbed my sleeve and a hissed whisper guided me into an empty chair. The vivid scenes of urban guerrilla warfare quickly made me forget where I was.

  When the film ended, the lights came up to reveal a packed house. Mine was the only white face in the audience. The men were wearing black berets, the women dashikis and they were all carrying notebooks.

  Chapter 17

  A SUB-PLOT RUNNING THROUGH the Elektra year was my growing involvement with the so-called Underground. In 1966, it was worthy of the name: few outsiders were even aware of its existence. When it flourished in the spring of 1967, it was seen as a sub-culture of drugs, radical politics and music built around the International Times, Indica bookshop, Oz magazine, UFO, the London Free School, Release, Granny Takes a Trip, the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream and the Arts Lab. To me, the expression referred primarily to the fruits of the energy of one man: John Hopkins.

  I first met Hoppy in 1964 when, in his photographer guise, he shot the musicians from the Caravan tour for Melody Maker. He looked like the mad ex-scientist he was: wire-thin build, intense brown eyes, unruly dark hair, well-worn jeans and an all-encompassing grin. I got him some tickets for one of our London shows and sealed the friendship by introducing him to a folk club promoter selling a block of very good hashish. Waiting to get back on George Wein’s payroll that summer, I took up residence on Hoppy’s sofa. There I learned about his Cambridge physics degree, his past as a security-cleared technician at the Harwell Atomic Energy lab, his commitment to nuclear disarmament (and the resulting forfeiture of his security clearance), his discovery of Sandoz LSD, and his recent break-up with Gala, London’s most beautiful and wayward model. Hoppy always seemed in a process of discovery, treating the city as his research laboratory and uttering a delighted ‘Wow!’ whenever he came across someth
ing that pleased or interested him. He taught me how to develop film in his darkroom, directed me to the best artery-clogging breakfasts and the cheapest curries in West London, showed me the back doubles to avoid traffic lights and introduced me to a rogue’s gallery of visionaries. In his purple Mini he dashed from one end of the city to the other, dropping off film, convening conspiratorial meetings, joining girls for afternoon assignations, scoring dope and bestowing favours.

  In November 1965, shortly after I arrived to take up my Elektra post, Hoppy invited me to the first meeting of the London Free School. In retrospect, the founding principles sound heartbreakingly naïve: we planned to offer free classes to the poor and under-educated of Notting Hill Gate, mostly West Indian, Irish and Polish immigrants. The area was still recovering from years of Peter Rachman’s slumlordship and the race riots of 1958. The side streets off Westbourne Park Road, later home to ‘trustafarians’, media types, artists, musicians and the odd record producer (and more recently colonized by stockbrokers), were full of after-hour shebeens and ganja dens, the kind of places Stephen Ward had taken Christine Keeler to meet Lucky Gordon a few years earlier.

  Hoppy and his friends proposed courses in photography, French and politics. We leafleted the area and got a modest turn-out of suspicious locals for the introductory meeting in a now-demolished church near the Harrow Road. John Michell, the world’s leading expert on the relationship between flying saucers and ley lines, offered us his basement in Powis Square. Peter Jenner and Andrew King, soon to become Pink Floyd’s managers, were pioneering LFSers, as were Ron Atkins, for many years the Guardian’s jazz critic, and Barry ‘Miles’ Miles, founder of Indica Books, author of biographies on Ginsberg and Burroughs and numerous other books on the sixties.