The Story of John Nightly

by Tot Taylor

  Run down and pretty much dried out from a lack of optimism, self-belief and much-needed funds, the former shaker-makers were becoming just a little too mature in years to be able to continue with the lifestyle they had been privileged to lead. None too keen to step back through the glass into the reality of responsible adulthood and the new social clime, their retinas found it hard to adjust to twilight after years in the limelight.

  With Joe Meek (3. 2. 67) Brian Epstein (27. 8. 67) Brian Jones (3. 7. 69) Jimi Hendrix (18. 9. 70) Tubby Hayes (8. 6. 73) Gram Parsons (19. 8. 73) and Mama Cass (29. 7. 74) already gone, Graham Bond threw himself under a tube train at Finsbury Park, 8 May 74. Nick Drake overdosed on anti-depressants, 3 September the same year. Pete Ham was found hanged in his garage, 23 April 75. Tim Buckley mistook heroin for cocaine, 26 June 75. Paul Kossoff suffered a mid-flight heart attack 19 March 76. Phil Ochs hung himself in his sister’s house in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, 9 April 76. Keith Moon overdosed on the sedative Heminevrine, 7 September 78 (he was taking it to control his drinking), Terry Kath shot himself in the head with a pistol while demonstrating it was unloaded, 23 January 1978 and on the 14 May the same year Keith Relf was electrocuted while tuning his guitar at home. The Final Academy had been delivered back to its Maker.

  On the night of September 27, 1972, the same night John Nightly booked himself into the Sumha centre, Beatle employer and proto-rocker Rory Storm – the former Alan Caldwell – took an overdose of sleeping-pills in an alleged suicide pact with his mother Violet*, while mod guru Peter Meaden ran out of stories and committed suicide with pills on 5 August 1978.

  John Pond, in and out of rehabilitation centres and addiction groups through the early years of the ’70s was, by the time of his sudden demise, still making enough to keep himself institutionalised by exploiting what he could of the John Nightly catalogue, until a heroin speedball got the better of him in the VIP toilets of a Paris nightclub, when he also left without saying goodbye during the early hours of 10 October 1978.

  In keeping with common themes running through rock’n’roll’s back pages, it had seemed at the time of his death that Pond was about to re-enter the scene for the first time during the new era – in the field of TV production, where he’d been in discussion for a series of acoustic-only performances with ’60s legends/ has-beens, including Lee Hide’s old mucker from Berwick Street Market, Marc Feld, until Marc’s car was found wrapped around a horse-chestnut tree on Barnes Common on the morning of 16 September 1977.

  By 1980, the new world had arrived. The ’60s was now two generations away. The decade was not well thought of. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who were shunned. Sixties superstars being out of favour, in cotton wool, in cabaret, or dead. Peter Green was found running around a supermarket in South London giving away £5 notes to alarmed customers. The guitarist had grown his fingernails so long that he could no longer get his hands anywhere near his green Gibson Les Paul, which somehow ended up in a second-hand guitar shop in Richmond. Brian Wilson, burned out by his family, the record industry, LSD and his own unfathomable genius, retreated into his sandbox and spent the next six years in bed. John Lennon, too famous to go anywhere near a help centre, retreated to his Dakota white cell with his Japanese therapist, exiled in New York before being murdered after signing an autograph for his killer on 8 December 1980.

  Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, George Harrison and Robert Stigwood were all associated with the setting up of a clinic at Broadhurst Manor in Sussex by Dr Meg Patterson in order to promote her controversial Black Box treatment. The method somehow alleviated withdrawal symptoms from heroin by attaching electrodes to the ears. It was never claimed to be any kind of cure.

  At Coombe Springs in Kingston upon Thames, J. G. Bennett, follower of The Fourth Way, prince of psycho-seekers and former disciple of both Gurdjieff and Shivapuri Baba, founded a hippie monastery just outside Central London; while down the river at Richmond, close to the old mod hangout Eel Pie Island, Pete Townshend celebrated his own personal guru, Meher Baba1 by setting up the Oceanic, a temple on the upper floors of his private recording studio. Just as Tycho Brahe built his Uranienborg and Bernard Lovell built Jodrell Bank, Townsend built his Oceanic and Bennett built his Djameechoonatra2. All observatories of some kind, it remains for us to reflect as to what was actually being observed. In the US, Scientology chief L. Ron Hubbard got into the act by running the drug rehabilitation programme Narcannon while the Betty Ford Clinic catered for Sunset Boulevard’s most high-profile collapsed stars.

  John McLaughlin abandoned his Mahavishnu Orchestra3 – the album The Inner Mounting Flame was a Nightly-band favourite of the period – but continued his devotion to Sri Chinmoy along with other followers Carlos ‘Devadip’ Santana, Larry Coryell and Wardour Street organmeister Brian Auger. If Chinmoy was the ‘jazz-rock guru’ then there was also a Rolls-Royce guru in the shape of tantric master Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who was said to have acquired more than 100 Rolls-Royce saloons in his quest for knowledge.

  It seemed that every survivor suddenly had their own personal holy man, leading to a veritable glut of gurus, Sufis, swamis and yogis. A cult of personality grew up around such masters of wisdom as Chinmoy follower Frederick Lenz (Zen Master Rama), former cable-TV executive J. Z. Knight (Ramtha, the Enlightened One), Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass) and American ‘televangelists’ Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

  Cat Stevens retired from music and took up the Muslim faith, becoming Yusuf Islam (this conversion taking place after he was overcome by a wave while swimming off the shores of Malibu), while George Harrison continued to fund Krishna Consciousness with his support for the Radha Krishna Temple and (much later) its ‘political wing’, the Natural Law Party. All a very long way from Methodism.

  For the old establishment, shaken by the almost-revolution of the 1960s and impatient to reclaim their mind territory, it seemed only a short stroll from the Community to the Cult – Maharishi to Manson to Koresh. But Rishikesh to Waco had been a 30-year trek. Manson and Altamont were the seventh seal of the ’60s. As the ’70s dawned, so the mood and the methods changed and, for some, a pill or a rope seemed the only way out. R. D. Laing4 and his Politics of Experience – ‘no one can begin to think, feel or act now except from the starting-point of his or her own alienation’ – from almost two decades earlier seemed more prescient than ever.

  When David ‘Lord’ Sutch, the loony in leopardskin beaming out from every By-Election Special, hanged himself in his garage in South Harrow on 16 June 1999, another link with the pre-Beatle world was severed. The hapless Sutch contributed nothing whatsoever to the fraying string ends of rock but his Monster Raving Loony Party surely embodied the true spirit of both England and the ’60s; the obstinate, absurdist, irascible and whimsical outlook of the characters who inhabit the worlds of Wonderland, Woodhouse and Monty Python. The knowledge that anyone with a £500 deposit to lose could found their very own political party spawned thousands of other one-man start-ups, decried in the press but often fighting for worthy, mainly localised causes. Political satire still came cheap.

  Suddenly there were loonies everywhere, courtesy of MRLP rivals the Rainbow Alliance. Green loonies, eco-loonies and Euro-loonies provided easy final-item fodder for TV news editors, with loonydom reaching its PR peak when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, waiting for the returning officer at the Finchley count on the night of the 1987 general election was filmed deep in conversation with a man with a bucket on his head – the venerable Lord Buckethead, of the Gremloids Party5.

  But now, in the new, New Age, another species of guru sprung up, one which illustrated how far things had regressed in the opposite direction, away from the counter-culture and agit-pop revolt, the good, ‘good old days’ of yore. The early ’80s saw the birth of the financial guru. Mark McCormack’s Things They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School (Bantam Dell, 1984), was a compendium of negotiation tips by the ‘street smart’ sports promoter and f
ounder of International Management Group (IMG). Others followed, with lifestyle gurus, diet gurus, fitness gurus, dating gurus and, for the first time since Einstein, a popular scientific guru when cosmologist and self-anointed genius Dr Stephen Hawking published A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1988), achieving a worldwide sale of 9 million copies for the apparently unreadable tome. Hawking appeared on TV chat shows and performed his own ‘gigs’ at the Royal Albert Hall, even turning up on Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell6 as ABHOT famously became known as the book that ‘everyone bought but no one actually read’.

  John Nightly read it. A Brief History of Time was a critical text, one of the few to trouble his addled brain cells during his first ten years – the ’80s Me Decade – at Trewin, interrupting the constant flow of manuals and free sheets. It was impossible for a kid like Mawgan Hall, enlightened son of enlightened parentage, to understand how society at large had shifted from the cliff-edge of universality far inland to the safety of the old material world. The Kid could find little mystique in his own present day, only the hard wall of science. The prevailing strand being ‘science law’, the factual high watermark against which all things that cannot be explained and therefore do not exist must be measured. ‘If you can’t see it, it’s not there’ was the establishment diktat of Thatcher, Reagan, Major, Clinton, Putin, Blair, Bush and Brown, imagination not being one of the prevailing assets of our political masters. As John Nightly once commented to his young companion, ‘You can’t see music; sometimes you can’t physically hear it, Mawgan… but it’s always there, isn’t it? If you’re there.’

  * * *

  * After disbanding the Hurricanes, Rory Storm worked as a DJ at the Silver Blades ice rink in Liverpool and in Benidorm where he was also a water-skiing instructor. Having returned to Liverpool to be with his mother following his father’s death, he developed a chest infection and took sleeping pills. On 28 September 1972 Storm and his mother were both found dead at their home ‘Stormsville’. The post-mortem reported that Storm had alcohol and sleeping pills in his blood, but not enough to cause death. It is thought his mother may have committed suicide after finding her son’s body.

  The Hurricanes released just two singles, the second of which, ‘America’ from West Side Story, was produced by Brian Epstein – who also sang backing vocals on it.

  1 Meher Baba (1894-1969) took a vow of silence and was said not to have spoken at all from January 1922 to his death, preferring to use ‘alphabet boards’ to deliver his Universal Message.

  2 John Godolphin Bennett (1897–1974) was an English mathematician, scientist, militaryintelligence agent and philosopher. His magnum opus was the constantly written and rewritten The Dramatic Universe (1956–1966). The Djameechoonatra was a ‘Western tekke’ built of nine sides and orientated towards Gurdjieff's grave. The voices of both J. G. Bennett and Shivapuri Baba featured on Robert Fripp’s 1979 album Exposure (EG Records, EG101).

  3 Mahavishnu is an aspect of Vishnu meaning ‘Great Creation’.

  4 Laing recorded an album, Life After Death (Charisma CAS 1141), 1978, for the famous Charisma label, the record company of both Genesis and the Nice, under the direction of pop Svengalis Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, songwriters for the Herd and the Tremeloes. Michael Tippett’s 1970 opera The Knot Garden was inspired by Laing’s book of poetry Knots (Tavistock) 1969. Celandine Films produced a mime-based film (1975) with Edward Petherbridge.

  5 Other notable loonies were Tarquin Biscuit-Barrel (Cambridge Raving Looney) and Johan Sebastian La-Di-Da Bark (Knighthoods Free With Corn Flakes) Party.

  6 Hawking’s synthesized voice promoting the benefits of ‘talking’ on the Cambridge band’s 1994 album (EMI TCEMD1055) which reduced Dave Gilmour to tears when he first heard it, was sampled from a British Telecom TV commercial.

  Trewin Farm, Porthcreek, Carn Point, Cornwall. Sunday, 10 September 2006.

  ‘Russ Conway’s died.’

  Endy was lost in her Daily Mail. John looked up from the West Briton.

  ‘… didn’t know he was still alive.’

  ‘It says he was living in Eastbourne… “suffered from alcoholism and had gone bankrupt”. They all do that, don’t they?’

  ‘… what?’

  ‘Go bankrupt and “suffer from alcoholism”.’ Endy could barely read the fine newsprint even with her new glasses. ‘Oh… I am sorry…’ The housekeeper managed a look of embarrassment for all of two seconds. ‘Lovely pianist, he was.’ She held the newspaper away from her eyes so it caught the light from the open window, allowing her to admire the photograph of Russ in his heyday at the BBC Steinway. John lifted his head from the bric-a-brac ads and removed his glasses in preparation for further detail.

  ‘Only record we had at home,’ Endy continued. “My Concerto for You.” Lovely, that was…’

  John cleared his throat.

  ‘It says he used to go hunting elephants in Africa to get ivory for his piano keys.’ The housekeeper picked up her teacup and turned to the boss for a response. John got up from his chair.

  ‘…well, I don’t suppose he could do it in Eastbourne…’

  item: Monthly Cultural Notes: October

  There is still work to do in the garden even though the heat has gone. Move geraniums, fuchsias, camellias and cinerarias onto the patio or into sheltered corners. Clip and deadhead all shrubs, removing any yellowing or diseased leaves. Bring in azaleas and begonias for winter bloom. Tender specimens may need protection outside with newspaper or straw. Complete all trimming of evergreen hedges. Wait for frosts to hit dahlias, cannas and other tubers before lifting. Use stored or recycled rainwater wherever possible. Wrap aeoniums and phormiums in acrylic sheets for overall protection.

  The Continental Hyatt House Hotel, 8401 Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, Los Angeles, Room 313, 10th Floor, 11 May 1972.

  ‘That’s correct, sir, patient is out on the floor.

  [pause]

  I have done that, sir, and we are awaiting paramedics.

  [pause]

  I don’t believe there has been drug use. But I’m informed by persons in the room that there is history.

  [longer pause]

  Yes, I will.

  [longer pause]

  No, not that one, sir – the big concert tomorrow night.

  [pause]

  I will wait for them, yes. Thank you.’

  The thing was a mess. How can it be told simply? Without giving entirely the wrong impression about the level of unhindered panic, unremitting fear and sheer, lashing terror that had come upon John Nightly with such a mighty blow – crash, bang, wallop – right in the centre of his skull that, well… [pause] Let’s try…

  The singer and his associates were at the Continental Hyatt House. Fourteen rooms – half of the tenth floor – taken up by band and entourage. More or less a small travelling village, in the manner of a medieval hamlet, with all the skills and services on board to serve, nourish and sustain its people. Two long, five-star-studded corridors, six security guards, seven housekeepers and a goods lift separated the group from the regular residents and other bands – the Who, Barclay James Harvest, the Mothers of Invention, Colosseum and the touring cast of Godspell – were also staying at the Hyatt, the famed ‘Riot House’, that weekend.

  Travelling with the community, but in much less expensive accommodation, were their colleagues and workmates. Seventy other Mink Bungalow regulars: orchestra, chorus, sound and lighting crews, dancers, girlfriends, groupies, roadies, humpers, record-promotion men and retail reps along with another 50 or so technical people, tekkies, most of them specialist construction engineers more used to working on North Sea oil platforms. The company even included a team of quantity surveyors from the East Anglian Water Board.

  The tekkies were waiting to begin placement and assembly of a unique wave-based energy triangle out in the bay, some twelve miles south-west of Malibu Beach, set at a precise 32-degree angle facing in towards Westward Beach. The location scouted and decided upon twelve months
earlier, on the occasion of the Nightly band’s previous visit during the second leg of the tour to promote Ape Box Metal. At that point, a team led by Jean-Claude Marx had taken a ’copter high above Malibu, specifically the area around Point Dume; a location renowned for its powerful waves as well as for being something of a container, or soup crater, of energy.

  Accompanied by local engineers and a federal-government advisor they surveyed the area from Zuma right up to Surfrider Beach, alongside the pier. The pinpoint location determined that afternoon, 17 August 1971, when an application for a temporary hub as an experiment in more environmentally friendly sources of power than oil and gas was received by the office of the Governor of California.

  The Zuma hub was to involve more or less the same construction, with slight modification, as used just a few weeks before in Akiro Bay, Japan; buried deep within the microcosmic paradise of the Fujiyama reef, for the historic Kyoto eco-concert. The get-go for Zuma being received by JCE in London at the end of October that year at which point construction began on the heavy engineering of the triangle itself in the Wallsend shipyards of G. & W. Woodbye & Sons that mid-December.

  So, here they were. The team from the Water Board, all chips and beer, ready and waiting to supervise a gang of local good ol’ boys in the erecting and positioning of the resultant sea-powered generator into two homemade (in Sheffield) mounts. The exercise involving close co-operation between the British team and several local marine-crane operators. A further group, AFL-unionised metal-workers, pipe-layers and arc-welders, waited alongside for the go-ahead from the harbourmaster to install this basic construction, originally designed by John Nightly himself using Meccano parts, a red and yellow maquette having been presented to Jean-Claude to replicate into the real thing.