One moment determined the fate of our appearances in Romania. We were to play two concerts in a gigantic sports arena in Bucharest. There was a dramatic point in our show when the lights were dimmed and Dick Halligan played a dark, almost Phantom of the Opera Hindemith-style organ solo all by himself in a single spotlight. At the end of his solo he would play a long crescendo reminiscent of the mangled chord at the end of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” As the chord rose to its climax, I would stride across the stage with a large gong and throw it into the air. It would sail across the stage, and when it struck the floor the band would explode into the opening of “Smiling Phases.” At the first show, when I threw the gong, the audience of 12,000 people went crazy. They rose to their feet screaming, “Peace USA, peace USA.” They loved the complete freedom and anarchy of that gesture. It was pretty tame stuff, really, next to bands like The Who, who totally destroyed the stage at the end of their shows. But it was great fun, rock & roll theatre, and the audience loved it. The concert that night was sensational. The Ceauşescu government, however, was not amused.
The next day we were rousted out of bed in the morning and were escorted by uniformed Party officials to the Communist Party headquarters. We were taken to a large, heavily fortified grey stone building, where we sat for several hours on hard wooden benches in a hallway while the Politburo decided what action would be taken. Apparently my flinging the gong across the stage had struck a raw nerve with the Communist Party. In Romania such spontaneity was not allowed or tolerated. Many of the New Yorkers in the band were Jewish, and this was a frightening moment for them. Anti-Semitism was still very present in Eastern Europe, and to be sitting for hours in this cold stone hallway under the expressionless gaze of armed soldiers, completely at the mercy of a mindless bureaucracy, was terrifying. This is how it must have been for their parents and grandparents, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. Finally the government’s decision was handed down. I would be allowed to strike the gong as long as it stayed mounted on a stand, but flinging it across the stage was absolutely forbidden. We thought this was hilarious. The Romanian government had deliberated all day over a fuckin’ gong. The tension lifted and we laughed all the way back to the hotel. Surely they weren’t serious! We were naïve. We had no idea just how serious they were.
We had a day off, then we were to play a second concert at the same venue. The gong had become a national issue. A photo of me with the infamous gong was all over the newspapers. Press people thronged around the hotel clamouring for interviews with the outrageous rocker who had thrown a gong across the stage. Would he throw it again tonight? became the big question. The gong had become a symbol of their yearning for freedom. Young people would come up to me in the street with tears in their eyes, begging me not to cave in to this government tyranny. “Please throw the gong tonight,” they would plead. “Please. Please.” We had a band meeting and came to a mutual agreement. They were not going to tell us how to run our show. This government interference with our music ran counter to everything we freedom-loving Westerners believed in, and the fans desperately wanted me to defy this bureaucratic stupidity. The Jewish guys in the band were particularly defiant. Evidence of anti-Semitism was everywhere in Romania, from the empty, boarded-up synagogues to the frightened look on the faces of people we would meet on the street. They’d pull a Star of David from their shirt and whisper, “Juden?” their eyes darting around looking for informers. There was no “official” government policy regarding Jews; that wouldn’t look good in the international court of public opinion. No, they were too devious for that. Jews were simply not given any meaningful employment by the regime and were consigned to the most poverty-stricken ghettos in Bucharest. At the band meeting, when he was asked to voice his opinion, the usually upbeat, wisecracking Lew Soloff had a look in his eyes I had never seen before. “Fuck ’em,” he muttered quietly. “Fuckin’ Nazis.”
Backstage on the second night we were mobbed by media and fans. They were concerned with just with one question: “Will you comply with the Communist Party’s edict or will you throw the gong for freedom?” When Halligan began his organ solo, a deathly silence fell over the arena. Will he do it, or will the Communists prevail? That was the issue on everyone’s mind. I had no idea what I was going to do, but when the moment arrived and I was to strike the gong, everyone in that 12,000-seat arena held their breath. I looked out over the crowd of desperately unhappy young people, some with their hands clasped in prayer, their eyes pleading with me not to give in. I looked back at Lew Soloff, mouthed silently, “Fuck ’em,” and tossed the gong across the stage. The place exploded with joy. The entire audience came to their feet and began cheering, “Peace USA, peace USA.” Then all hell broke loose. The military government was ready for this. Doors slammed shut all around the arena, trapping the people inside. Suddenly, club-swinging police in riot gear were everywhere. Vicious attack dogs were unleashed on the audience. The power to the stage was cut and the concert ended in chaos. Dozens of young people were injured and maybe even killed—I may never know. I sat huddled on a bench backstage, devastated, crying for the havoc I had naïvely unleashed, crying for the young people of Romania. Jim Fielder threw his arms around me and hugged me tight with tears streaming down his face. “It’s all right, David,” he cried, “it’s all right.”
We were filming the tour for a feature film. National General Pictures and a crew of British cameramen were travelling with us. They filmed everything—the brutality, the attack dogs, the kids being beaten mercilessly by the police. The Romanian government wanted the film. They tried to intimidate the film crew, saying they had audiotapes of the crew in their hotel rooms with local women and threatened to expose them. The British crew laughed at them. “Go ahead,” they said. “Can I get a copy?”
The next day we were escorted to the airport by armed soldiers and were unceremoniously kicked out of Romania. It wasn’t funny anymore. The Ceauşescu regime was deadly serious about any demonstration of freedom in that desperately imprisoned country. They X-rayed the film cans at the airport. The National General guys raised a huge commotion. The cameramen were yelling at the impassive border guards, “You’re destroying a million-dollar film!” It was a diversion. The guards X-rayed the film cans, but the Brits had already outfoxed them: they had switched the film. The real footage was already on the plane, loaded in earlier that day with their gear and labelled as blank film stock. They got the film out of Romania, but it disappeared after that and hasn’t been seen since. I’ve often wondered where that film is. I guess someone thought it would be an embarrassment to the Nixon administration, who came up with this idea in the first place. A bloody riot was not what they had in mind when they appointed us “cultural ambassadors,” so they buried it. Years later, when the people of Romania dragged the body of Ceauşescu through streets of Bucharest, I felt a moment of satisfaction.
On to Warsaw and one last show in a historic old concert hall. Poland was already hungry for freedom and democracy, and you could feel the Iron Curtain beginning to disintegrate years before the Berlin Wall began to crumble. Polish youth wanted blue jeans and rock & roll. Word of my defiant gesture in Bucharest had already reached Warsaw and I was welcomed like a hero. The audience that night was wonderful and we all reached down deep to deliver one last memorable concert. I have been to Poland several times since and that concert is still indelibly etched in the national consciousness. On the flight home I saw a look in the eyes of the band that reminded me of men returning from battle, an empty, dull look. We were done. We had seen too much and we were numb. It was a brutal, exhausting experience and the band arrived home emotionally drained.
Our next album, Blood Sweat & Tears 3, had just been released. It was already a certified million-seller and we had two more hit singles on the charts—another of my songs, “Lucretia MacEvil,” and Carole King’s “Hi De Ho.” Columbia wanted visibility for their hit-making machine and our management felt we needed to overcome the bad press gene
rated by the State Department tour, so instead of giving us a few weeks to recover and allowing the political smoke to clear, they took us straight into Madison Square Garden for a sold-out moratorium concert protesting the Vietnam War. For the most part the audience was supportive, but the concert was marred by Abbie Hoffman and a handful of followers carrying signs calling us “CIA pigs.” They marched to the front of the arena and began pelting the stage with dog shit. They were immediately hustled out of the Garden, but of course pictures of the Abbie Hoffman incident made the news. Not the standing ovations and the encores from 15,000 fans, but this clown and his little band of radicals with their hands full of dog shit. Maybe it wasn’t cool to be patriotic in the sixties, but after what we’d seen in Romania, we were so happy to be back home in the USA that we wanted to get down and kiss the ground. CIA pigs? It sounds almost comical today, but that’s how it was in the radicalized America of the time.
The band had by now completely lost its underground status. The press hammered us and it hurt. The band that couldn’t do anything wrong in ’69 couldn’t seem to do anything right in ’71. The band that had won three consecutive DownBeat Jazz Awards was now derided by the critics as a jazz pretender. The band that had won an unprecedented five Grammy Awards was now ridiculed by Rolling Stone magazine as “commercial crap.” The band that had revolutionized the music industry in 1969 was solidly mainstream. Now, just like Rolling Stone magazine, we were a multi-million-dollar tax-paying business corporation. The jazz-rock band from Greenwich Village and the little underground music magazine from San Francisco had both crossed over into mainstream America.
Steve Katz may have been right about alienating the underground press, but he was dead wrong in assessing its effect. The kids out in middle America didn’t give a damn about the underground press. In fact, all the publicity we were getting just brought them out to concerts in greater numbers. They were drawn by the controversy, saw a great band and went home to buy even more records. An entire generation may have been united in their opposition to the war, but the vast majority of young people were still proud Americans and regarded characters like Abbie Hoffman as left-wing nuts. In any event, our concerts were still selling out and our records were still topping the charts.
With the Vietnam War drawing to a close, the radical underground in Greenwich Village lost its focus and drifted aimlessly into the drug-riddled club scene uptown. It wasn’t about the “cause” anymore. It all morphed into one big drugged-out dance party. Studio 54 and mind-numbing disco music replaced the Cafe Au Go Go and the socially conscious music of the sixties. The music industry itself was undergoing cataclysmic changes. The record companies that had cashed in on the anti-war movement sold out to giant multinational media conglomerates and moved their headquarters to LA. The big business corporations that were so despised by the flower children of the sixties had spread their corporate tentacles across America, and now they owned the music business.
After the Madison Square Garden incident and the Patty debacles, I wanted out of New York as quickly as possible, but Patty had one last card to play. She was pregnant and filed a paternity suit against me. Of course, for the right amount of money it could all go away. I honestly didn’t know if I was the father or not, but I refused to be blackmailed. If I acknowledged the paternity I would have “the groupie from hell” in my life forever. I hired a high-priced lawyer and prepared to fight the suit. More bad press. By the time a hearing had been arranged, the lawyers had uncovered some facts. The timeline was shaky at best. When Patty got pregnant she was no longer living with me and there were plenty of other musicians around the Village who admitted to having sex with her during that time, so the case fell apart. It was thrown out of court and Patty was at last out of my life. I wish I had listened to Bobby and never got involved with her in the first place, but what’s done is done. Thank God it was finally over.
There were two more paternity suits that year, both from women I’d never met. As word leaked out about my prison record, it attracted opportunists who smelled deep pockets and would trump up charges against me for anything, knowing that on a cross-country tour we couldn’t come back to Podunk to fight a court case so we’d probably just pay it off. It’s the cost of doing business in the big-money world of rock & roll. Even some of the guys in the band got hit by fallacious lawsuits. Of course, there was always a price to make it all go away. I was especially vulnerable. Anyone who goes into court with a criminal record has two strikes against him already, and the bottom-feeders knew it. It’s not just a prison record that makes you vulnerable—any well-known person has to be careful. There are hustlers out there who will take any opportunity to get them into a compromising situation. We had a full-time lawyer to deal only with nuisance suits. Sometimes it’s cheaper to just pay a few thousand dollars and avoid the publicity and expense.
Nothing in my life so far could have prepared me for the treachery and deceit that big money brings. In jail I knew who my enemies were. Now it was my friends I had to worry about. They could inflict the most damage and I’d never see it coming. I had all sorts of new friends. They told me that I was a musical genius and that I had to surround myself with people who understood how special I was. I knew it was all bullshit, but sometimes when you are buried in bullshit you can start to believe it, and in show business there are people who have bullshit down to a fine art. I was quickly learning that the trials and tribulations of my youth were nothing next to the complexities I was now facing. It was confusing and frightening, but there was no time to be afraid. I had to suck it up every night, step out on that stage and be a rock star. I bluffed my way through it with alcohol and the cocky bravado that had helped me survive in prison, but deep inside I was scared. Everything was spiralling out of control. I felt like a feather in a hurricane. I really didn’t understand what was going on around me, and I had no idea how to handle it.
In a few short months I had gone from penniless musician to millionaire pop star, from a little club in Greenwich Village to Lincoln Center. I had been presented with Grammy Awards and lawsuits. I had been honoured in Washington, DC, and arrested in New York City. I had been tossed out of Romania as a threat to national security and welcomed as a national hero in Poland. I had performed for hundreds of thousands of people at the largest concert in history and I’d had dog shit thrown at me at another. Our music had been called “groundbreaking” by some and “commercial crap” by others. I had experienced triumph and tragedy. I had been praised and reviled, both totally out of proportion to who I was as a person. Trying to stay balanced in this storm of contradictory opinions was next to impossible. I knew instinctively that believing your own press was the road to disaster, but my image had become such a large part of who I was that it was all I had. I was desperate for some peace and solitude. I needed to make some sense of all this, but when you’re caught in the follow spot of fame, there’s no place to hide.
Last Chance
Come on, mama, let’s get out of here, I know a place put a smile on your face
Days are lazy and the nights are clear and you won’t find a prettier place
Sweet mama, come and take my hand, I think I’m ready to get out of the race
Let me take you to another land where the people live an easier pace
Headlines, deadlines, hard times
Don’t mean nothin’ down there
Slow dance, romance, last chance
Let’s get out of here
Now it’s a real peculiarity the way the sun puts a smile on your face
I just need a little clarity and everybody to get out of my face
Sweet mama, don’t you be concerned about the world and the nuclear race
Here I am with all my bridges burned and a goofy lookin’ grin on my face
I been thinkin’ ‘bout the life round here, it’s about to come apart at the seams
Every year becomes another year, it’s getting harder to remember my dreams
Sweet mama, come awa
y with me, there’s another world awaitin’ out there
And we’ll go sailin’ on Brazilian seas with the sun and the wind in our hair
Lyrics by David Clayton-Thomas. Copyright © Clayton-Thomas Music Publishing Inc., 2007.
14
SAN FRANCISCO
Ifell in love with San Francisco the first time we went there to play Bill Graham’s Fillmore West. The city had an almost mystical quality to it, quite the opposite of the gritty reality of New York. I had visited Janis Joplin at her home in Marin County, and San Francisco seemed like a refuge where the New York press couldn’t touch me. Janis and I had been pals since the first time we met at a Columbia Records convention in Puerto Rico. We were both on Columbia around the same time, played many of the same gigs and had a mutual respect for each other. I liked Janis. She was a hard-living, hard-drinking blues singer, but she was honest and plain-spoken and had come up from the same rowdy bar scene in Texas that I had graduated from in Toronto. We were kindred spirits and we both loved the blues. We were both a little rough around the edges but we understood each other.
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