White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  ‘Get there? But you’re not going now!’ I told her if she had broken up the group thinking I would walk away from a signed contract, she had better re-form it pronto. She replied that it was too late, two of the band had signed on that morning for a long tour with Cat Stevens. She never forgave me for the confusion of verb tenses, but at least, I thought, she wouldn’t go bankrupt financing Fotheringay.

  There was a long list of issues that needed resolving about the integration of Witchseason into Island Records. A meeting was scheduled for my first day off from the studio in over a month. The night before, Suzie Watson-Taylor, Nigel Waymouth and I ended up around midnight at the Baghdad House, a Chelsea institution run by an enigmatic Iraqi and his red-haired Scottish girlfriend. The basement had alcoves perfectly designed for the discreet smoking of substances and long after-hours evenings of wine, song, flirtation and conspiracy. The music business and the criminal fraternities – often quite different people – adored it.

  We watched a madly dressed fiddler playing and dancing in the middle of the room, who then passed around a cup of ‘hot wassail’. Suzie wrinkled her nose and demurred. Nigel and I were suspicious of its contents, but each took a tiny sip, just to be polite. Soon we all went home to bed. Suddenly I was wide awake and the walls were dancing. Shit! I picked up the phone and rang Nigel. His wife told me yes, he had been tripping, but she had given him two Mandrax and now he was sleeping like a baby. I told her I would be right over for some of the same. I drove the half-mile to and from their flat at 10 mph, took the pills, got into bed and tried to read to take my mind off the hallucinations. The big meeting started the next morning at ten o’clock.

  Suddenly the phone rang. I picked it up with a start. Who could be ringing me in the middle of the night? It was Marian, my assistant. As she talked, asking me where I had been all day, I realized the light in the room involved more than just my bedside lamp. It was mid-afternoon and the phone beside me had been ringing for hours. I had slept through it all, my head cradled in the palm of my hand, the book still open to the right page. All the undone business had been sorted out without me. It was time to pack for LA.

  A week after my arrival, I was woken at dawn in the Chateau Marmont by a roar that shook the whole of creation. My immediate thought was that someone had dropped the Bomb. I was dead, but at least I had plenty of company. A few seconds of rational analysis altered the event to earthquake. In all my years in recording studios, I had never heard a sound so low. The vibrating object had to be unimaginably large to make such a noise. Like a wet dog, the earth was trying to shake us off.

  That day at the Music Bungalow on the Warner Brothers lot, I got to know my new staff. Malcolm Beelby had been working there for almost forty years. He asked whether I remembered the scene from Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933, with the circular staircase full of girls playing fluorescent violins. I did. That scene was shot during his first week at the studio, on the day of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. He remembered helping screaming girls off the tottering tower, the wired violins crackling and sparking as they fell. The peroxide blonde in the accounts department with the Cupid’s-bow lips had been one of the dancers.

  A few weeks into my new California life, I got the news that Richard Thompson had left Fairport. I was stunned: it was the last thing I would have predicted. I was even more astonished when I picked up a two-week-old copy of Melody Maker and read an interview in which he said, ‘It didn’t seem the same after Joe left.’ You could have knocked me over with a feather. Or flown me back to London with it.

  Next came a distressing telephone call from Molly Drake. Nick had returned to Tanworth, no longer able to handle living in London. They wanted him to see a psychiatrist, but he felt people would judge him crazy if he did. (Such attitudes were not unusual in England in 1971.) She asked me to tell him I thought it was a good idea, which of course I did. Nick sounded terrible on the phone. His hesitant manner had always seemed to shield an inner core about which he was certain, even if he had little ability to communicate it other than through his music. Now it felt as if both core and shield had been shattered. He sounded frightened.

  Settling into my new job, I discovered that the last thing film directors wanted was ‘creative input’ from a kid from the music business. They tended to score their films at the last minute and usually wanted John Williams or his ilk. When I persuaded the producers of Omega Man to let me and John Cale score a ten-minute sequence of the film on spec, they were horrified at the results. John and I thought it was perfect.

  I cleared rights to Leonard Cohen songs for McCabe and Mrs Miller and organized regular screenings of new releases for the LA music business community. I went to A&R meetings at the record company across the street and attempted to coordinate the activities of the two branches of the multinational now called Warner Communications. I tried to hire the great Cambridge banjo wizard Bill Keith to play the theme for John Boorman on Deliverance, but Bill was travelling in Europe and wanted to visit a girl in Ireland, so he suggested I get Eric Weissberg instead. I went to Atlanta with Eric and recorded ‘Duelling Banjos’ frontwards, backwards, fast, slow, upside down and sideways. Boorman was so delighted with the results he insisted it be released as a single. I took it to an A&R meeting and everyone laughed. We humoured him by pressing up 500 white-label promo copies to play on radio interviews he was doing around the country.

  The morning after his first interview in Minneapolis I got a call from someone in the warehouse, asking whether I knew anything about a mysteriously numbered single. It was ‘Duelling Banjos’, of course, and the Minneapolis branch had just ordered 5,000 copies. I had been so contemptuous of its merits as a single, I hadn’t even bothered to put my name on the label as producer. Within a few weeks, it became my only number one hit.

  Working with Stanley Kubrick was fascinating, but consisted of little more than taking orders. When I compressed the copy on the back of the soundtrack LP for Clockwork Orange by crediting ‘G. Rossini’ instead of ‘Gioacchino Rossini’, I was woken at 6 a.m. in LA by Kubrick insisting I stop the presses and restore the full spelling of the composer’s first name.

  My ties to England remained close. My Scottish girlfriend, Linda Peters, followed me to Los Angeles, went back to London, came out again. We broke up and got back together several times. Finally, she stayed in England, married Richard Thompson and became his singing partner.

  Chapter 30

  MY CONTACT IN THE Warner Brothers publicity department was Don Simpson, the man destined to become the symbol of ’80s Hollywood excess, producer of Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop and Flashdance and victim in 1996 of an overdose of prescription drugs. He was bright, well read (barring anything written before 1960 or in Europe) and very ambitious. The California self-improvement cults fascinated him, Scientology in particular. He had read of an experiment conducted at the Stanford University Research Laboratory cyclotron in which psychics were asked to bend the path of an accelerated electron. Ingo Swann, a Scientologist, was the most successful, and of the seven other ‘benders’, four were Scientologists. He was intrigued to hear about my experiences with the String Band.

  Don liked quoting a William Burroughs story about a man who ventures into the rainforest in search of a tribal ritual with extraordinary powers of spiritual transformation. When he reaches the jungle clearing and meets the witch doctor, he discovers that the experience involves ‘fucking the sacred crocodile’. Don and I made a pact: we would fuck the crocodile and find out what was so powerful about Scientology.

  Through the ISB, I knew the head of the ‘LA Org’ and got us special treatment at their optimistically entitled ‘Celebrity Center’: no proselytizing by mail or phone and we could skip the tedious introductory ‘Communications Course’. We started ‘auditing’, paying $30 an hour for sessions in which you sat opposite an ‘auditor’ holding a pair of tin cans wired to an ‘E-Meter’, a primitive lie detector that measures galvanic skin resistance. Commands are designed to elicit
memories that trigger ‘engrams: cellular records of incidents involving pain, loss, unconsciousness and a real or imagined threat to survival’. When a memory triggers an engram, the meter reacts. You go over the incident in your mind, without judgement, recalling its sights, smells, sounds and emotions until the needle ‘floats’, showing that the ‘charge’ has been erased through acceptance of the experience. The same incident can be called up a day later and provoke no reaction from the meter. The next command is ‘Recall an earlier similar incident’. You keep going in this vein until you can recall no ‘earlier similars’. I was surprised by how much I could remember from childhood years.

  The theory makes sense. If, at age two, you fell on your head in a room with pale blue walls, chicken soup on the stove and Haydn on the stereo, your mood might well decline for no apparent reason if thirty years later you should encounter those same sounds, smells and sights. A ‘Clear’ is someone who has completed the first course of auditing and is deemed ready to graduate to higher ‘OT’ (‘Operating Thetan’, Scientology-speak for free spirit) levels. Once ‘clear’, you become able – in theory, at least – to respond to the present unfettered by the charged unconscious memories that weighed you down. You should become lighter, happier, more effective. And following some auditing sessions both Don and I had moments when we felt elated and energized.

  But there was more to Scientology than auditing. Founder L. Ron Hubbard (known to everyone as LRH) had rules for everything. If Clears followed them, their efforts must, by definition, produce ‘up stats’ – Scientology jargon for success. When I asked about cases where rules were followed, but ‘stats’ were not ‘up’, I discovered the notion of ‘Suppressive Personalities’ and the obsession with past lives. An ‘SP’ is a Thetan who has suffered such a painful death in a previous lifetime that nothing will deter them from an agenda of vengeful destruction in the current one. When an organization run according to the thoughts of Chairman Ron fails, the inevitable SP within it must be isolated and expelled – a textbook example of self-justifying paranoia, circular logic and scapegoating.

  When Clears spoke about ‘earlier similars’ taking them into past lives, they seemed always to have defied enormous odds by being Egyptians or princes or something colourful and romantic. An unsettling air of certainty pervaded the Celebrity Center: everyone had big plans – usually for show-business careers – and there was no possibility of failure. It sounded like a chapter from one of Hubbard’s bad sci-fi novels, but then it was easy to be sceptical in those pre-Tom Cruise and John Travolta days.

  One weekend I hurt my neck body-surfing. Auditing cannot take place if you are suffering pain or discomfort so they sent me to a chiropractor. The waiting room was full of literature from the far-right John Birch Society; I decided the place was too unpleasant and left without treatment. I was summoned to the ‘Guardian’s Office’ to explain myself. When I proposed letting time heal the injury, they asked whether I had been associating with ‘persons hostile to Scientology’. I said that most people I knew were hostile to Scientology and I had no intention of cutting myself off from my friends. Robot-like, they repeated admonitory phrases from Hubbard’s texts. I left the center and never went back. Don had a similar run-in soon afterwards.

  For recruits without our Hollywood salaries, hours spent hustling passers-by earned auditing credits. We met devotees who had been volunteering for years and had not yet earned as many hours as Don and I had purchased out of curiosity. The more time and effort invested, the less receptive people were to questions or doubts. I read Barefaced Messiah, which exposes Hubbard’s lies about his naval career and recounts his 1948 address to the Science Fiction Writers’ Convention in which he advises the delegates that if they really want to make money they should forget about science fiction and ‘start a religion’.

  After this failed experiment, meetings with Mike Heron and Suzie Watson-Taylor were strained, but I stayed in touch with Suzie after they – and the group – broke up in the late ’70s. Suzie is a delightfully positive upper-middle-class girl, who adored Mike and had done a great job in difficult circumstances as ISB’s manager. She was sad she and Mike had not had children; she had a good job at Warner Brothers Records but was finding it hard to meet men who could understand her experiences or tolerate her devotion to LRH. In the early ’80s she was offered two jobs: one a promotion at Warners, the other a post at the Sea Org – Hubbard’s Florida headquarters. I urged her to take the record company job but she dropped me a line to say goodbye, she was off to Clearwater (LRH chose the site of his HQ for the name). I haven’t seen her since.

  Chapter 31

  FREDDY WEINTRAUB’S OFFICE was my favourite stop on the executive floor at Warner Brothers Studios. Freddy is a New Yorker and, like me, was a refugee from the music business. His qualifications as production vice-president were two: he had brought the Woodstock film to Warner; and when Ted Ashley used to come to New York on business, Freddy got him laid. He had a full Isro, and sported the occasional dashiki. After my first Friday executive committee meeting, he invited me in for a chat. I was curious about John Calley, the erudite head of production. ‘Oh, he was a top producer,’ said Freddy, ‘he made Ice Station Zebra.’

  I had been reading up on the financial side of the film business. ‘Ice Station Zebra? Didn’t that lose more money than any film in history?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one!’ I didn’t get it. How did you go from producing an expensive flop to running a studio?

  ‘Joe, Joe, Joe! You have to understand Hollywood! Here, it’s not how much money you make, it’s how much money you handle!’

  Freddy and I saw a lot of each other. There was a large editing room next to the Music Bungalow filled with film cans. Soon after I arrived, the young Martin Scorsese began opening those endless rolls of film in an effort to rescue a project known around the lot as ‘Freddy’s Folly’.

  Its official title was Medicine Ball Caravan, a ‘high-concept’ documentary by French film-maker François Reichenbach, winner of an Oscar for a film about pianist Artur Rubinstein. He had been dazzled by Easy Rider and thrilled by Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Out of the conjunction of these facts came a project: to film the Grateful Dead in Ken Kesey’s Merry Prankster bus ‘Further’ driving across America and putting on concerts in out-ofthe-way places for the awestruck locals. If luck was on Reichenbach’s side, someone resembling one of the drooling killers in Deliverance would attempt to murder Jerry Garcia and Reichenbach would be there to film it. Freddy and Ted Ashley, in their wisdom, decided this would be the perfect sequel to Woodstock.

  No sooner was the project green-lighted than problems began. Kesey wanted no part of it, and no, they couldn’t use his bus. The Grateful Dead were signed to Warner Brothers Records so they pretended to take it seriously for a while until – just as logistics and contracts were being finalized – they revealed how ludicrous they found the whole idea. In desperation, a yellow school bus was daubed with psychedelic designs and filled with a minor San Francisco band called Stoneground plus their girlfriends, hangers-on and dope dealers and they all set off to explore ‘fly-over land’, followed at a safe distance by the all-French crew. Joni Mitchell, the Youngbloods, BB King and Alice Cooper were booked to perform with Stoneground at such glamorous points in the American landscape as Gallup, New Mexico, Sioux City, Iowa, and Moline, Illinois, to give the film some star power.

  The Caravan’s first night in the wilderness found everyone seated round a campfire in the Sierra Nevadas. The French cameramen were so beguiled by the hippy girls that they consumed whatever beverages they were offered. Soon they were all having their first LSD trips.

  Warner Brothers had set ways of doing things. Each day, every foot of film shot for a Warner-financed film anywhere in the world was flown back to Burbank, developed, printed and screened for senior studio executives. When the first Caravan dailies arrived, heads were scratched and anxious (pre-mobile phone) messages left at hotel desks.

&
nbsp; Much of the early footage consisted of lingering shots of leaves, children playing in mud, clouds drifting by and occasionally a face. Sound was rarely synched to film. Every time they turned around – breakfast eggs, a canteen of water on a hot day, cocoa before bedtime, the American beer they found so insipid – the Frenchmen were being dosed. The project started to come unglued. Freddy flew frantically back and forth from LA to obscure destinations in Nevada and Utah. He sent the Frenchmen packing and hired a more savvy American crew. Medicine Ball Caravan turned into a mundane rock concert film with some barely watchable cinéma vérité of hippies daubing face-paint on each other. Assaults by outraged Bible-thumpers failed to materialize.

  Scorsese, who had met Weintraub in New York while working as an editor on Woodstock, struggled heroically to rescue the useless film, but to little effect. A sign of desperation was how important one synchronization licence became. Jesse Colin Young had written alternative lyrics to Merle Haggard’s classic ‘Okie From Muskogee’, a patriotic anti-hippy anthem. The Youngblood version was called ‘Hippy From Olema’ and mocked everything Merle felt was good and true and Umerkin. It fell to me to obtain permission for putting Haggard’s classic to this nefarious use.

  The rights were controlled by the king of Bakersfield country music, Buck Owens. Buck is a genial huckster and a great singer who built an empire around Hee-Haw, a syndicated TV programme celebrating Okie culture and mocking Nashville’s Grand Ol’ Opry. Bakersfield C&W was jauntier and more ‘manly’ than the Nashville variety and much beloved of truck drivers. I had a pretty good collection of Buck Owens recordings at home myself and was ambivalent about my mission to hustle him. When I got him on the phone, I started off formally: ‘Hello, Mr Owens, this is Joe Boyd from Warner Brothers Films.’

  ‘Mr Owens’s ma daddy! Buck’s m’name,’ he bellowed back. The good ol’ boy routine was non-stop and quite charming. Nothing would give him greater pleasure, it seemed, than to accommodate the great Warner Brothers. And would I give his best regards to Mo Ostin, while I was at it? When he eventually decided not to grant the licence, he was discretion itself as he explained how he had no problem with it, but Merle’s mother would not be happy.