She would be one of the fortunate few who got to hear Five Leaves Left in the moment. Like The Madcap Laughs, Arthur and David Bowie – all of which appeared in, and disappeared from, the shops in the closing months of that tumultuous decade – Five Leaves Left was destined to be viewed initially as something of a commercial curio, and only in the fullness of time as a prescient way of announcing darker days. So, which way to blue?
3. 1970–71: There’s More Out Than In
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
– G.K. Chesterton, 1908
I’d rather stay here with all the madmen,
Than perish with the sad men roaming free . . .
’Cause I’m quite content they’re all as sane as me.
– David Bowie, 1970
The performance that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that reaches into the realms of insanity.
– Mick Jagger as ‘Turner’, Performance, 1970
By the summer of 1969, London had no shortage of casualties returned from the unknown regions with their minds destroyed. Vince Taylor, whose attempted 1967 ‘comeback’ had proven not so much messianic as plain messy, was back in London. According to the latterday Bowie, he was here befriended by the boy from Brixton, a case of the has-been meets the wannabe:
David Bowie: [He had] these strange plans showing where there was money buried, that he was going to get together; he was going to create this new Atlantis at one time. And he dragged out this map of the world, just outside Tottenham Court Road tube station . . . and he laid it on the pavement . . . [] . . . in rush hour traffic, and us kneeling and looking, and he was showing me where all the space ships were going to land . . . [with] all these commuters going backwards and forwards over our map! [1990/2000]
Although I’m not fully convinced Bowie ever enjoyed such an experience with his very own ‘leper messiah’, in 1969–70 he hardly needed to look hard to find a role model for a megalomaniacal rock star whose mind had turned to mush with all that adulation and imbibing of ill-advised substances. In the post-Altamont soundscape, figures who had previously been basking in the iridescent light of a warm sun were melting visibly as their own starlight turned up the heat inside their heads. Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green and former Floyd frontman Syd Barrett were two actual models for Ziggy who were about to find that fame was a dish that quickly grew cold. And another well-respected, contemporary English rock artist, surely known to Bowie, spent almost as much time behind four enclosed walls at this time as Bowie’s half-brother, Terry.
As one loco Vince was fast disappearing into the hinterland, culturally and psychologically, another Vince was returning from a spell in the local asylum with a half-share of all the royalties accrued from the classic 1968 number-one single ‘Fire’. Classically trained organist Vincent Crane – prophetically named after Van Gogh by his arty parents – had just returned from a four-month spell in the Banstead mental institution, after a cataclysmic breakdown on the first Crazy World of Arthur Brown US tour; only to find himself heading back to the States for another make-or-break tour in the winter of 1969 on the back of the band’s chart-bound debut album.
The Crazy World was literally teeming with borderline basket cases – Brown had himself taken the psychedelic tag of the band a tad literally while the band’s original drummer, Drachen Theaker, found a unique way of handing in his resignation: walking out to sea with a guitar above his head. And while the band was in the States for a second time, replacement drummer Carl Palmer discovered: ‘Arthur had gone off with his wife to live in some commune in New Jersey. We did manage to locate him but he just wouldn’t pick up the phone . . . Arthur at that stage had really lost the plot.’ Stuck in a New York hotel on salary, Palmer and Crane began cooking up ideas for a band of their own, a powerhouse trio that would comprise just organ, bass and drums (an idea Palmer would take to Emerson Lake & Palmer). The name of the band came courtesy of a lady to whom Palmer had brought Crane, hoping to get him off LSD:
Carl Palmer: One evening in New York we went out together, with Vincent’s girlfriend at the time, to this girl’s apartment. Now, Vincent’s problems . . . stemmed from him taking too much acid and the reason we took him down to this apartment was to see this girl . . . She was going to explain how bad it was and that he should stop taking it, basically. The person she chose to talk about was the bass player in this group called Rhinoceros [who had] taken a lot of chemical substances and started calling himself ‘the atomic rooster’ . . . When we got back to England I said to Vincent, ‘Why don’t we call our band the Atomic Rooster?’
Not that Palmer ever thought Crane’s problems ended with acid. Even he realized that, ‘It wasn’t entirely to do with drugs with Vincent – he was mentally ill.’ Before they could pursue their common musical goals, Crane again returned to Banstead for a short stay, while Palmer lined up a manager (the mighty Robert Stigwood) and a record deal (with the not so mighty B&C Records). By 29 August 1968 the new power-trio and a recuperated Crane were ready to take over the recently disbanded Cream’s mantle, headlining a triple Lyceum bill on the back of the Arthur Brown association, above the Mk. 2 version of Deep Purple, themselves just nine gigs old and destined for greater things. (Purple’s latest composition, ‘Child in Time’, a breakthrough in every sense, could almost have been penned with Crane in mind: ‘Sweet child in time, you’ll see the line / The line that’s drawn between good and bad . . .’)
Atomic Rooster’s set that night and in the months preceding the February 1970 release of their meticulously assembled first LP largely comprised Crane’s meditations on his still-intermittent madness, penned while the experience of another confinement remained freshly raw. Of the seven originals that constituted that doom-laden debut, the overbearingly powerful ‘Banstead’, a coruscating plea to ‘take me out of this place / I’ll swear you’ll never see me here again / . . . though I know this life is driving me insane’, was the least ambiguous. Not that there was a lot of shade elsewhere. Just darker shades of black. ‘Friday the 13th’, the album-opener and single, was a voyeuristic voyage into the interior of a split personality (‘Someone please, please save me / No one will save you, they won’t try / Someone please, please help me / Everyone’s lonely when they die’). Then there was ‘Winter’, which made Nick Drake’s musings on the passing of the seasons seem positively bucolic:
Summer’s dead – winter’s coming on.
All of my hopes for the future now are gone.
All of my battles are lost, for Time has won . . .
What is the point of going on, and on, and on, and on?
The album had another, attendant theme – the unreality of fame. In the orchestrated hard-rock number, ‘Decline and Fall’, Crane describes seeing ‘the crowd as they pack the hall’, then the same crowd ‘as they turn away’, all the while wondering aloud, ‘Who will catch me as I fall?’ Elsewhere he chides one particular face in the crowd who craves some sexual connection with the rock God. The sarcastic ‘And So to Bed’ – one of a number of ‘groupie’ songs penned at this time by English rock bands (following The Rolling Stones’ expansive lead) – seeks to make her change her view, if not her ways: ‘You think that up here I’m so special / But put in a crowd I would be just like you / You think to be with me would make a change in you . . .’
But this was just a tangent to the overarching theme underlying Crane’s compositions now and forever: the loneliness of the long-suffering head case. Even in the period August 1969 through May 1970, as an audience rapidly grew for this unique trio, Crane felt that the band really needed a different point of view. The recruitment of guitarist John McCann gave Rooster a much-needed second songwriter. But despite the chart success brought by McCann’s more pop-oriented songs (‘Tomorrow Night’ and ‘Devil’s Answer’), Crane sensed a dilution of purpose and changed his mind again, unable to stomach a subsidiary role in his own band.
In
the summer of 1971, after Rooster’s second album, Death Walks Behind You (with its memorable cover, replicating William Blake’s stark image of the mad king Nebuchadnezzar), had consolidated their initial success, Crane disbanded the second incarnation of Atomic Rooster; and though there would be three more Rooster albums in name, he would never again recapture the unity of purpose that the original band enjoyed in the brief time when he and Carl Palmer – ELP bound by May 1970 – adhered to their original brief: heavy soul music used as a form of exorcism for all-too-real inner demons.
If a combination of the bright lights of fame and LSD’s flashing lights triggered something deeply disturbing inside Crane, another impressionable musical virtuoso was finding it equally hard to reconcile his public persona with his inner self. Peter Green, the baby-faced blues guitarist who had taken the Bluesbreakers template into the mainstream with Fleetwood Mac, was struggling to keep his own deep-rooted demons at bay. Mac had been formed in the summer of 1967 as a straight blues cover-band. At the time, Green actually poured scorn on Cream’s Eric Clapton, the man he replaced in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, because ‘he’s lost the feeling. He could get it back but he’s so easily influenced. He sees Hendrix and thinks, “I can do that.” . . . But I’ll always play the blues.’
Despite professing these purist intentions, though, Fleetwood Mac soon morphed into a vehicle for Green’s own musical meditations, a chord change first signalled in a June 1968 Melody Maker interview where Green announced, ‘In the past I’ve sung other people’s songs. But now I sing all my own songs on stage and the next album will be all our own songs.’ Four months earlier, he had recorded the song that shifted the band’s sensibility in this new direction, propelling them towards a Clapton-like superstardom for which Green himself was psychologically ill-prepared. The tom-tom voodoo of ‘Black Magic Woman’ was initially only a minor UK hit, but it showed that a talent as great as Green’s was never going to be content to let his band remain the Elmore James ‘cover’ combo that second guitarist Jeremy Spencer wanted them to be. Instead, the addition of Danny Kirwan in August 1968 gave Mac a three-guitar sound and a more playful foil for Green, sidelining Spencer and his James obsession.
Like so many others in these interesting times, Green’s burgeoning creativity as a songwriter was the direct result of a great deal of soul-searching and copious drug-taking. The results to begin with were a steady stream of wrenchingly powerful blues songs fully the equal of anything to come out of sweet home Chicago – although his was the blues of the wondering Jew, not the put-upon black man. During the first of his regular columns for Beat Instrumental, inserted in its September 1968 issue, he bared some of these personal concerns, singling out the song ‘Trying So Hard to Forget’, first recorded at a February session with Duster Bennett, as ‘probably the most meaningful of my own blues . . . [it] sums up my past life and present feelings in one very blue song’. He was already writing in terms that suggested the painful past was something that remained ever-present:
People, I’ve tried so hard to forget,
But I can’t stop my mind wandering,
Back to the days I was just a downtrodden kid . . .
This was clearly not someone who should have received any psychedelic substance, let alone LSD, but introduced he was by the dean of dosers himself, Augustus Owsley Stanley III. It was Owsley, a year on from dosing several thousand ‘free’ sandwiches at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, who spiked the soft drinks of the whole band backstage at San Francisco’s Fillmore West in January 1969. In fact, any immediate effect was more pronounced on Jeremy Spencer than it was on Green. As L.A. scenester Judy Wong has said of her then-house-guest: ‘Jeremy was literally two people. I didn’t expect some lunatic Englishman [who would] open my windows at four in the morning [to] shout obscenities . . . [at] the neighbours.’ (Owsley finally got his comeuppance when he spiked the water-fountain at a later Mac gig in New Orleans and a concert-goer returned home announcing he was Jesus. His parents called the cops, who went looking for Owsley but found his house band, the Grateful Dead, instead.)
According to Green, for whom the star-trip had already palled anyway, Owlsey’s rarefied acid initially had a cleansing effect: ‘Once I took LSD, that got rid of all that vanity.’ The cleansed Green was inspired to write a barrage of songs about loneliness and despair. Just as ‘Albatross’ was hitting the number one spot in the UK, Green and Mac were in a studio in New York cutting his most plaintive work to date, ‘Man of the World’, a song of unbearable sadness, which contrasted that public persona with the tortured soul inside (‘I guess I’ve got everything I need . . . but I just wish that I’d never been born’).
Green soon began to worry whether he had laid too much of himself on the line. By April 1969, he was insisting, ‘On the record it was a story of me . . . [but] it’s not true of me now.’ Meanwhile, ‘Man of the World’, rush-released by Fleetwood Mac to capitalize on ‘Albatross’ (and subsequently re-recorded by their manager Clifford Davis12), was storming the charts, peaking at number two. Two more companions pieces in both sentiment and chronology, ‘Before the Beginning’ and ‘Do You Give a Damn for Me’, were also recorded for the first time in January 1969. They showed any claim on Green’s part that he had passed beyond such feelings to be a scented smokescreen. The former, in particular, suggested someone determined to get back to some place that was there before the pain: ‘And how many times must I be the fool / Before I can make it, make it on home?’
Despite the band originally being conceived as an electric blues outfit, pure and uncut, Green was becoming increasingly ambitious with his musical ideas. ‘Albatross’ had been the first time he had used the spatial potential of stereo (Mick Fleetwood’s tom-toms being panned left and right), overdubbed guitar and cymbals accentuating the positives his original idea contained. It was also the first Mac single made without Spencer on hand. Even as he continued democratically dividing up the songs on each Fleetwood Mac album, allowing Spencer and Kirwan to flex their more limited musical muscle, every time a new single was needed it was Green who decided what it would be. And with good cause. In the space of two years, each of five Green-composed A-sides – ‘Black Magic Woman’, ‘Albatross’, ‘Man of the World’, ‘Oh Well’ and ‘Green Manalishi’ – not only represented a clear advance on its predecessor but, after the minor hiccup that was ‘Black Magic Woman’, all would go Top Ten in the UK.
The follow-up to ‘Man of the World’ was Green’s most ambitious musical excursion to date. ‘Oh Well’, according to Green, was an attempt to ‘represent my two extremes – as wild as I can be and [also] my first sort of semi-classical attempt’. It was too ambitious to be contained by a single side of seven-inch vinyl, and was spread across both sides of the disc, the B-side being a five-minute-forty departure from the basic musical idea that saw Green play acoustic and electric guitars, timpani and cello, while Spencer – the only other band-member on hand – tiptoed around on the piano.
More worryingly, the terse lyrics appeared to include a partial transcription of Green’s first conversation with God: ‘Now, when I talked to God I knew he’d understand / He said, “Stick by my side and I’ll be your guiding hand.”’ And this was no metaphysical discourse, à la ‘Highway 61 Revisited’; Green really had started to believe he had a direct line to the Man Upstairs, a source of real concern to his then-girlfriend, Sandra:
‘That summer Peter was really excited by all the possibilities that were presenting themselves. This correlated with . . . [us] both for quite some time [being] very spiritually connected and searching . . . [It was] then I made the robes – one white and one red velvet. For Peter, they were nothing to do with any Christian faith. I think psychologically it was definitely a move into psychosis, or perhaps a precursor to it – he was getting stuck into identification with God! Because of all the adoration people were giving him, he was finding it very hard to differentiate between that exalted state and mere mortality – albeit with a God-given talent.�
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The rest of the band were now just as nonplussed by Green’s state of mind as by their new musical direction. Mick Fleetwood and John McVie had both bet Green that ‘Oh Well’ would not chart – a bet they roundly lost; and with that loss, they perhaps lost their old friend for good. Their openly agnostic attitude to his new interest in Jesus certainly did not sit well with him. The song ‘Closing My Eyes’, on Green’s last album with Mac, Then Play On, was one lyrical diatribe he admitted the following year had been ‘written around the time I had such a great faith in Jesus that I felt I was walking and talking with God. I wanted to tell people about it, but they turned it round and tried to shatter my dreams. This was written after they had broken my faith.’ The ‘they’ go unnamed, but it is clear that as far as Green was concerned, the Us that was once Fleetwood Mac was fast becoming Them.
At least the critical and commercial reception accorded ‘Oh Well’ convinced the remainder of Mac that Green still knew where they should be heading musically; and they gamely went along with him, even as the songs became elongated explorations of space, time and rhyme. ‘Rattlesnake Shake’ – provisionally ear-marked as the follow-up to ‘Oh Well’ until somebody realized what would happen if the Beeb ever found out the song was about jerking off – became in concert a prelude to twenty-five-minute jams that tended to wander the gamut of Green’s imagination in search of the lost chord.
All the Madmen Page 11