Almost anticipating the imminent collapse of the psychedelic brotherhood, he beat his own retreat. As he told Melody Maker, in a song-by-song breakdown of VGPS, which briefly centred on the catchy ‘Animal Farm’: ‘That was just me thinking everybody else is mad . . . which is really the idea of the whole album.’ Already he felt chastened by the chart failure of The Kinks’ first two singles of the year, ‘Wonder Boy’ and ‘Days’. The former troubled the chart compilers not a jot, while the latter barely tiptoed into the Top Twenty. And Davies never entirely relinquished his belief that he had done the wrong thing foisting his new persona on the public (and the band), like it or not:
Ray Davies: ‘Village Green’ . . . was my ideal place, a protected place. It’s a fantasy world that I can retreat to, and the worst thing I did was inflict it on the public. I should have left it in my diary. [1984]
In truth, the released album was a fudge. What had begun life as two distinct albums – ‘an LP about manners and things’ solely for the US market, to be called Four More Respected Gentlemen, plus a twelve-track Village Green Preservation Society – became a single, jam-packed fifteen-track long-player instead. Despite sacrificing songs of the quality of ‘Days’, ‘Did You See His Name’ (Davies’ first song to address the subject of suicide directly), ‘Rosemary Rose’ and ‘Mr Songbird’ at the last minute, it was too much of a good thing.
The trio of songs he added to the album in October – each one a choice cut – helped kill the album conceptually, while suggesting he could not entirely suppress a more autobiographical view of the world. ‘Last of the Steam Powered Trains’, ‘Big Sky’ and ‘All of My Friends Were There’ were all major statements on Davies’ part, directly anticipating the next two concept albums but – big but – they sent the album some place that was more Muswell Hill than village green. The result was an album that ‘confused the record-buying public’.
All three of these songs continued the vein of songwriting he’d first established with ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’. ‘Big Sky’ was inspired by an evening at a pop junket in Cannes ‘with all these people doing deals . . . I watched the sun come up and I looked at them all down there, all going out to do their deals’. ‘Last of the Steam Powered Trains’, as he openly admitted, was ‘about not having anything in common with people . . . It’s about me being the last of the renegades. All my friends are middle class now . . . They’ve all made money and have happy faces.’ ‘All of My Friends Were There’, meanwhile, specifically addressed his 1966 breakdown, told as if the crack-up happened on stage, surrounded by bewildered friends – a disturbing presentiment of the next nervous breakdown he would suffer in 1973. Just months before that crack-up, he talked about ‘All of My Friends Were There’ in a way that suggested he remembered the feeling all too well: ‘I was feeling bad . . . I’d just been very ill, and I went over the edge as they say. It does happen. I was working very hard, I’d just finished a lot of work. I was very disturbed, and very unhappy because I had a lot of friends in the audience. I wanted to make them happy.’
The reconfigured VGPS was again mistimed. The original twelve-track version, reviewed by Keith Altham in a September 1968 NME, when it was scheduled for release, was cancelled when Davies decided he wanted to record the above songs – just as he had done with Something Else, delaying that LP’s appearance. The revised record came out the same day (22 November 1968) as The Beatles’ eagerly awaited, whiter-than-white double album. And though Davies would later claim, ‘[VGPS] was not heavy, and everything was heavy at the time, so it just got lost’, his brother’s take on the album’s fate was the more astute:
Dave Davies: There was a really good atmosphere on [Village Green] Preservation Society, through the whole summer . . . There was a great aura around everything at that time. [But] when it came out it was a big flop. I think it was because . . . at that time when everyone was buzzing about change and revolution, and we were about keeping things and respecting things . . . It was a bit out of time. [1978]
Ray felt the failure of VGPS keenly, though he was soon wistfully looking back on what he liked to call ‘the first genuinely constructed musical play by a rock band’; even if he preferred to ‘remember it for what it might have been, rather than what was eventually realized’. For the first time he was embracing his own past and its all-too-real ghosts across an entire LP. As he later told Uncut, ‘Village Green . . . is the youth that I thought I missed. The record’s about childhood really; lost childhood.’ At least some fellow English songwriters recognized its worth, Pete Townshend calling the album, ‘Ray’s masterwork . . . his Sgt. Pepper’. But its resounding commercial failure affirmed the fact that the ‘rock album’ audience had now tuned out The Kinks.
*
In this, The Kinks were hardly alone. This was a predicament facing a number of bands that had emerged in the wake of The Beatles, as the tricky transition from single– to album–band took its toll on many of the pre-psychedelic vanguard. It was a concern Pete Townshend himself voiced to Beat Instrumental as early as February 1969, while putting the finishing touches to his own gambit, the ‘concept album’ Tommy:
Pete Townshend: For a long time, we had a position somewhere behind The Beatles and The Stones and above all the rest of the English groups. It was a strange situation. We had a spell when all records made about number four without fail . . . We changed our attitude about the time The Kinks suddenly started to have flops; we were like them in a lot of ways, and it brought home the fact that we couldn’t afford to take it easy any more. You get in a ridiculous state when the hits come automatically. [1969]
Like Davies, Townshend had had his own epiphany in the middle of relentless touring; like Taylor, it was the result of a bad acid trip as opposed to the hectic pace of performing. Ironically, it came as he was savouring one of The Who’s greatest triumphs, their explosive set at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. The effects would prove just as profound. Townshend was boarding a plane leaving California when he was given what he thought was a tab of acid. He had, by his own admission, been experimenting with mind-expanding hallucinogenics for almost a year (and even now has a vivid memory of ‘being in the UFO club with my girlfriend, dancing under the effect of acid . . . I was just totally lost: she’s there going off into the world of Roger Waters and his impenetrable leer’). However, this post-Monterey trip was something completely different:
Pete Townshend: I took what I thought was acid, but turned out to be STP . . . It was after the Monterey Pop Festival, and I spent more time outside of my body looking inside myself than I’ve ever spent . . . I [had] to learn to listen to music all over again, and . . . how to write all over again. [1972]
Contrary to what Townshend had been led to believe by LSD evangelists, his consumption of acid coincided with major-writer’s block. As he later revealed in The Story of Tommy, ‘During the year I was taking acid I wrote hardly anything, probably the most revealing testimony to its uselessness I ever experienced.’ He had been faking it through most of 1967, and it was starting to show. First, a stop-gap single in support of the recently busted Stones saw The Who cover two Jagger-Richards classics. Then they were about to put out a studio version of their show-stopping cover of Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’ when West Coast proto-punks Blue Cheer beat them to it, causing Townshend to ruefully note, ‘We needed a chart hit at that point, but they came out with it [first].’ Even the song he had been holding back for such an eventuality the expertly bombastic ‘I Can See for Miles’, which he had demoed as early as 1966, barely bothered the Top Ten. It was ‘Days’ all over again.
Such was Townshend’s dearth of inspiration that at the beginning of 1968 The Who announced the intended follow-up to ‘I Can See for Miles’ would be their very own get-back-to-the-country track, the risible ‘Now I’m a Farmer’. Thankfully, it was shelved. Townshend came up with ‘Dogs’ instead; inspired, as it were, by a joint Who/Small Faces tour of Australia in January 1968, which ended with both bands being arre
sted for asking for a drink on an internal flight from Sydney to Melbourne. The song was, by Townshend’s own admission, ‘my response to The Small Faces’ ‘Lazy Sunday’ from Ogdens’. [Because] I wanted to be in their band, really.’
‘Lazy Sunday’, though, had been a number two single; while ‘Dogs’ did not even dent the Top Twenty. In desperation, Pete dusted off another old song, set to the diddley daddy of all Bo Diddley rip-off riffs, ‘Magic Bus’, and offered it up to the gods of chart success. Although it failed to do the trick in The Who’s homeland, stalling one place lower than ‘Dogs’ (#26), it proved their biggest hit in the US since ‘My Generation’. On the back of Monterey, and a relentless attempt to break the States by bringing auto-destruction to the clubs and theatres of America, The Who slowly began to carve out the niche they would make their own with Townshend’s next grandiloquent statement. But that was almost a year away. As he told NME at the end of 1968, as the UK pop world wondered where The ’Oo went:
Pete Townshend: I can no longer sit down with a straight face and write things like [‘My Generation’ and ‘Magic Bus’], although I was quite serious about them at the time . . . It’s very difficult to know just what is going to be a hit for us now, especially in America where we were not able to do those discs like ‘Happy Jack’, ‘Pictures of Lily’ and ‘I’m a Boy’, which were a novelty in England because they had the strange attraction of being ‘sweet songs’ by a violent group. In America we have to find instant hits, and that’s really what ‘Magic Bus’ is. [1968]
His solution was, on the face of it, simple: turn The Who into an album band. Townshend, though, was just as much at sea as Ray Davies when it came to the means of manufacturing such a transition. Even as the godfather of rock operas, as the man who as far back as 1966 gave the pop world the ten-minute ‘A Quick One, While He’s Away’, he had been slightly nonplussed by Sgt. Pepper, expressing amazement that The Beatles got away with such a ‘very loose concept’.
In Pepper’s wake, his own band promptly set about producing an album with an even more tenuous thread, The Who Sell Out. By May 1968, though, Townshend was openly admitting the radio-station format on that set had been something ‘we thought we needed . . . throughout the album to make it stand up within the terms of other albums coming out today . . . Having a form for an album seems to be what is happening.’ Try as he might he could not turn ‘concept’ songs such as ‘Rael’, an edited version of which appeared on Sell Out, and ‘Glow Girl’ (a song about reincarnation after a plane crash, probably inspired by his post-Monterey experience) into a grander conceit. In fact, at one stage in 1967 it seemed that The Who’s underused ‘other’ songwriter, bassist John Entwistle, might produce his own concept album before Townshend came up with one of his own:
John Entwistle: ‘Silas Stingy’ and ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ were meant to go on a kids’ rock album. Young kids love[d] ‘Boris the Spider’. So we were gonna release a children’s album with all these snakes and spiders and creepy things, a project Kit Lambert dreamed up. But they all ended up being used as B-sides. [And] I ended up with this black image. [1995]
Entwistle tapping into childhood themes was not, however, the same as Townshend tapping into them. Deliciously macabre as the above songs are, they still inhabited a more conventional world than the likes of ‘Happy Jack’ (about an adult with a child’s IQ), ‘I’m a Boy’ (enforced transvestism) and ‘Pictures of Lily’ (teenage masturbation), the three 45s Townshend issued in 1966 to show how the world could be a cruel place. It was to this place he now needed to return, preferably with a few post-LSD insights, if he was going to turn an idea he had for an album about a deaf, dumb and blind boy subjected to repeated, systematic abuse into a worldwide chart-topper.
*
Meanwhile, if Entwistle’s fledgling ‘children’s collection’ was being wasted on B-sides and the odd album cut, another English eccentric was using leftover ideas from a set of ‘adult fairy stories’ to mount a serious assault on the UK single charts. Through 1967 and into 1968, Roy Wood – via his band of fellow Brummies, The Move – dispensed a series of singles detailing some very damaged individuals: in toto, ‘Disturbance’ (the B-side to debut 45, ‘Night of Fear’, and actually Wood’s preferred choice for the A-side); ‘I Can Hear the Grass Grow’ (‘I didn’t particularly write it with psychedelia in mind – I thought more of some sorta mad person’); ‘Cherry Blossom Clinic’ (scheduled to be The Move’s third single, until their label decided Wood was poking fun at mental patients); ‘Flowers in the Rain’ and its even loopier B-side, ‘(Here We Go Round) The Lemon Tree’; and finally, ‘Fire Brigade’, about a particularly determined female pyromaniac. According to Wood, all these songs had a common inspiration:
Roy Wood: ‘Cherry Blossom Clinic’ was about a nuthouse, basically, but a nice one. That was one of my early songs. When I left art-school it was one of my ambitions to write a children’s book for adults – fairy stories with strange twists to them. I had a lot of ideas written down and I used them in my songs. [1978]
It was with this lexicon of lunacy that The Move now challenged The Who’s vaunted position in Popdom. All the things that had marked out The Who’s territory in the pre-psychedelic era – ‘Pop-art music, Union Jack jackets, all my kind of auto-destruction, post-art college ideas’, to quote Townshend – were appropriated and refined by the Brummies. In the case of auto-destruction, The Move took Townshend literally, and started destroying cars on stage. And through 1967 and well into 1968, the strategy seemed to be paying dividends. While The Who’s current bagatelle of hits – ‘Pictures of Lily’ through ‘Magic Bus’ – went to #4, #44, #10, #25 and #26 respectively, The Move’s first five 45s – ‘Night of Fear’ through ‘Blackberry Way’ – charted at #2, #5, #2, #3 and #1. Townshend was rightly worried. (He subsequently suggested, ‘I don’t think I moved away from pop. I think it moved away from me. Maybe psychedelia did it’.)
The Move, however, had their own problems, including at least one increasingly unstable band-member. Not Wood, but their bassist Ace Kefford, who by the end of 1967 was, by his own admission (to Alan Clayson), ‘having a mental breakdown [from] dropping acid every day . . . I was cracking up, just like Syd Barrett was’. The departure of Kefford in the New Year would effectively stop The Move dead in their tracks. It would take Wood eight months to come up with his first non-adult fairy-story single, ‘Blackberry Way’, and even that seemed to be a return-to-childhood song. Another irresistible hook took it to number one, but it would be April 1970 before they enjoyed another Top Ten single.
By the time The Move took to the stage of the Kensington Olympia on 22 December 1967, for what was billed as a Christmas pop extravaganza, they were – at least temporarily – a spent creative force. In fact, the bill that night – and one could make a pretty good case for it being the greatest package bill ever, even without The Who, replaced by Traffic after Townshend injured his hand – was full to the rafters of bands who had transformed British pop in the past year. But several bands that night were now imploding from within as band-members surrendered their minds to a lysergic night of the soul.
If Kefford was the main Move casualty, Olympia headliner Jimi Hendrix was doing a good job hiding behind wah-wah pedals and pyrotechnics, hoping to disguise the toll drugs were taking on his creative juices even as he completed his second album of 1967, the trenchantly trippy Axis: Bold as Love. But amongst these Olympians it was the UK’s leading psychedelic combo, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, that were the first to reach the end of the line – less than a year after they startled the pop world with their astonishing debut 45, the gender-bending ‘Arnold Layne’. Psychedelic Psyd had been taking his, and everyone else’s, medicine. Now, six months after ‘See Emily Play’ and the equally challenging Piper at the Gates of Dawn suggested a new heavyweight had entered the pop arena, frontman Barrett was by all reports unravelling before unknowing eyes. And some contemporaries were not greatly surprised:
Pete Townshend: Syd was so
meone with psychotic tendencies who by using too much LSD pushed himself over the edge. Remember that LSD was developed for use in psychiatry in clinical circumstances. I only used acid a few times . . . [but] I [also] have certain psychotic tendencies and found it extremely dangerous. [1991]
There have been no shortage of eyewitnesses who have characterized Barrett’s behaviour in his last couple of months in the Floyd as out to lunch, tea and dinner. Kefford, while admitting he was ‘cracking up’ himself, depicted Barrett on tour as someone who ‘never spoke to anyone. He could hardly move sometimes. He was on another planet.’ Floyd bassist Roger Waters remembers the autumn 1967 Syd as someone ‘way out there . . . he’d get into the car in drag’ (in Waters’ ultra-straight world, a sure sign of insanity). A week before the Olympia Extravaganza, Floyd’s co-manager Peter Jenner was obligingly penning a letter to Melody Maker explaining that ‘the Pink Floyd [in concert] are largely unpredictable both to the audience and to themselves. They can be sublime. They can be awful’ – a brave attempt to counteract negative reports coming from the month-long tour they had just completed with Hendrix and The Move.
Yet Barrett’s own memory of the tour, expressed during his last-ever interview in December 1971, was that it was Hendrix who was ‘very self-conscious about his consciousness. He’d lock himself in the dressing-room with a TV and wouldn’t let anyone in.’ And objective evidence for the mental collapse that precipitated Syd’s removal from the Floyd (rather than vice-versa) is thin on the ground. His ‘catatonic’ performance on American Bandstand the first week in November – according to co-manager Andrew King, ‘Syd wasn’t into moving his lips that day’ – subsequently surfaced, and is nothing of the sort. Indeed, Syd seemed to be making a better job of miming ‘Apples and Oranges’ than the other members of the band. Another appearance on BBC’s Tomorrow’s World, recorded just days before Syd’s departure – jamming on a blues instrumental while Mike Leonard showed off some of his light designs – again presented a perfectly together Barrett.
All the Madmen Page 4