All the Madmen

by Clinton Heylin

  Ginsberg was lucky, in one sense anyway. His was a surprisingly unintrusive kind of fame (as anyone who ever walked down a New York street with the man can confirm) – for his was the benign face of free-thinking – even if his fraught relationship with an increasingly disturbed Peter Orlovsky, troubled family relations and prodigious drug-taking suggested someone who never overcame the traumas he suffered as a child. For others, fame itself became the drug and the disease. And such a fate was not reserved solely for rock stars.

  By 1968, ‘anti-psychiatrist’ R. D. Laing was one such troubled soul, perhaps because he already lamented what the generally sympathetic Daniel Burston called ‘the decline in creative power that seemed to follow on his increasing infatuation with fame’. No matter how much Laing changed the angle of attack, he was forever fixed in mass-media eyes as this psychedelically charged, highly politicized psychiatrist who refused to call anyone plain mad. In fact, much like Ginsberg – and undoubtedly influenced by the man he shared a rostrum with at the Dialectics of Liberation – Laing consciously attempted to remove himself from the limelight, travelling to India in 1970 to spend eighteen months studying Buddhist meditation and Shiviite yoga. When he returned, he was a changed man, proclaiming that ‘a kind of gentle, Buddhist austerity [was] the best path to liberation’.

  But by that time Laing’s cherished Philadelphia Association, the umbrella organization he hoped would set up Kingsley Hall-type establishments around the world, had been hijacked by people who had little time for his endlessly shifting theories. Burston has described how Laing returned to find that ‘many former colleagues [had] left the organization, like David Cooper, Aaron Esterson, Morton Schatzman and Joseph Berke, ha[ving] published books and acquired followings of their own. Moreover, many old allies on the left who were wounded or puzzled by his retreat to Asian mysticism now turned on him. [While] in the mental health field . . . [the likes of] Peter Sedgwick, Joel Kovel, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari vigorously denounced him.’

  By the late 1970s Laing was largely an irrelevance in psychiatric circles, while remaining fixed in the wider public’s eyes to ideas he never really held (or at least not in the simplified terms that were increasingly assigned to him). As Burston, Laing’s most vociferous modern advocate, has written: ‘Mention Laing nowadays and most people can dimly conjure up a flamboyant rebel of the psychedelic era, a chum of Tim Leary, Ram Dass, and Allen Ginsberg . . . But press them to describe what he stood for, what he actually thought or said, and you’ll only elicit a trickle of platitudinous sound bites.’

  Being misunderstood was something else that was hardly the sole preserve of pop stars. For Laing, as for those whose world he ineluctably shaped, the 1980s proved to be hard work. Those cherished Buddhist beliefs seemed to have gone the way of some of his earlier, more controversial theories. In September 1984 he was arrested after throwing a bottle through the window of a Buddhist centre in London, and when searched was found with cannabis on him, the possession of which he was obliged to plead guilty to. The following year, in a radio interview with Anthony Clare, he admitted to bouts of severe depression and ‘occasional’ abuse of alcohol. In fact, he was now an alcoholic in all but name.

  Finally, in May 1987, as accusations of appearing drunk before patients hovered in the wings, he reluctantly agreed to let the General Medical Council remove his licence to practise medicine, in order to avoid what would have been a very public defrocking. He had published a self-justifying autobiography the previous year, appositely called Wisdom, Madness & Folly, in which he baldly asserts: ‘I have never idealized mental suffering, or romanticized despair, dissolution, torture or terror. I have never said that parents or families or society “cause” mental illness.’ Even as he grew increasingly selective about the parts of his very public past he would own up to, he gradually allowed the booze to take hold, and his mind to fritter itself away on labyrinthine schemes destined to come to naught. He died in 1989 – at the same age (sixty-one) as his most famous non-client, Syd Barrett.

  Whether the death of Laing registered with the reclusive Roger K. Barrett is never likely to be known. But his death completed some kind of circle, even as Barrett remained the one that got away. Drake was dead. Green’s sporadic re-emergences merely proved that he no longer had fire in his fingertips42. But while Barrett’s old friends from the Floyd had long ago removed themselves from Syd’s closed circle, he simply refused to articulate who he was, or whom he had been, only furthering an abiding sense of mystery. If Peter Green could still maintain a hands-length relationship with those who had witnessed him at the height of his acidic madness, Barrett couldn’t even manage that. And there was a reason. As his nephew Ian Barrett wrote in a 1996 internet posting, hoping to dissuade his uncle’s acolytes from confronting the poor man: ‘Without going into details, I [really] don’t think people are prepared to understand the true extent of Roger’s breakdown, or the pressures he was put under.’

  Whatever the cause of the man’s debilitating depression, that 5 June 1975 studio sighting proved to be the madcap’s last, anywhere other than his own doorstep. From then until his death in 2006 of pancreatic cancer, Roger Barrett remained Syd’s silent spokesman. If he ever wondered what really happened to that former self, he never said. Instead, in later days he scribbled notes in his copy of The Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry and drew up a shortlist of other psychology books he maybe should get around to reading, including Charles Rycroft’s The Innocence of Dreams and Jonathan Glover’s anthology, The Philosophy of Mind. What was altogether absent was the slightest reference to the works of R. D. Laing. Those he had cut up a long time ago.

  NOTES

  [1] – Dave Gilmour joined Pink Floyd in January 1968, and for five gigs they were a five-piece. A photo does exist of this line-up, before Barrett was ousted by the others.

  [2] – Fellow writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Archibald MacLeish rushed to validate the court’s decision, to save the poet from a long jail term or even execution. Hemingway memorably concluded: ‘He ought to go to the loony bin, which he rates and you can pick out the parts in his Cantos at which he starts to rate it’, while MacLeish pithily agreed ‘that poor old Ezra is quite, quite barmy’. Pound, as a result, spent the next twelve years at St Elizabeth Federal Hospital for the Insane in Washington.

  [3] – ‘Thin Men’ is a reference to Dylan’s ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, which divides the world into ultra-straight Mr Joneses and outlaws.

  [4] – Neither song was ever attempted at the sessions for Syd Barrett’s solo album(s); although ‘Vegetable Man’ was listed as a possible track for the initial 1968 sessions, this was only after Pink Floyd had decided against using the track themselves.

  [5] – Flat Baroque should, of course, be pronounced ‘flat broke’, a little joke by Harper at his home town Manchester’s expense. Locals pronounce ‘broke’ with such a heavy emphasis on the ‘r’ that it really does sound like ‘baroque’.

  [6] –‘The Laughing Gnome’ was reissued as a single in September 1973, at the height of Ziggy mania, and astonishingly, peaked at number six in the charts.

  [7] – The inner-sleeve to the 2003 Tommy ‘Deluxe’ CD reissue includes an early, handwritten tracklisting for the album, which runs as follows: ‘It’s a Boy’, ‘Amazing Journey’, ‘Pinball Wizard’, ‘How Can He Be Saved?’, ‘Eyesight to the Blind’, ‘The Acid Queen’, ‘Dream Sequence Short’, ‘D’ya Think it’s Alright?’, ‘Fiddle About’, ‘Model Child’, ‘Cousin Song’, ‘Dream Sequence Long’, ‘Young Man Blues’, ‘Doctor Song’, ‘Tommy Can You Hear Me?’, ‘Smash the Mirror’, ‘Sensation’, ‘Sally Simpson’, ‘I’m Free’, ‘Tommy’s Holiday Camp’, ‘Welcome’, ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’.

  [8] – The unreleased 2001 Bowie album Toy has recently emerged in its fourteen-track entirety, and includes 21st-century re-recordings of a number of important ‘lost’ songs from the 1968–70 period, i.e. ‘Conversation Piece’, ‘Let Me Sleep Beside You’, ‘In the Heat of t
he Morning’ and ‘Shadow Man’. The first and last of these appear as bonus tracks on the two-CD reissue of Heathen.

  [9] – The sad story of Jackson Frank has now been told a number of times, most recently in Mojo #186. The sleevenotes to the 2003 Sanctuary edition of Frank’s recorded works, demos et al., Blues Run the Game, also provide a good deal of background.

  [10] – Trevor Dann dates the meeting of Hutchings and Drake to a show at the Roundhouse on 20 December, though he does not explain his reasoning (he just asserts it) – in fact, Fairport did not play on that night, nor is Drake billed on any night of that festival. The Brunel ‘benefit’ was on 20 January, which makes a lot more sense in terms of the timescale between Hutchings collecting his details and Drake’s first meeting with Boyd in the spring.

  [11] – The five songs Drake performed at that concert were as follows: ‘Time of No Reply’, ‘I Was Made to Love Magic’, ‘The Thoughts of Mary Jane’, ‘Day is Done’, ‘My Love Left With the Rain’.

  [12] – Clifford Davis, Fleetwood Mac’s manager, recorded his own single in mid-July 1969, comprising two Peter Green songs, ‘Before the Beginning’ and ‘Man of the World’, both of which Green plays on. The single was released on Reprise in October, to general disinterest.

  [13] – Bown told Mojo that on one occasion he not only had to take Barrett to the toilet, but had also had to unzip the man’s fly. I find it hard to believe that anyone that catatonic could have been making music.

  [14] – According to Barrett’s most reliable biographer, he and Fields moved into the flat they shared towards the end of 1969.

  [15] – The tracklisting for this session, a tape of which has recently emerged and been purchased by the Drake estate, confirms that there were, in fact, five songs, not the previously reported four.

  [16] – Ralph McTell says he recalls a show at Ewell Technical College, Surrey, in June 1970, during which Drake walked off halfway through ‘Fruit Tree’, never to return.

  [17] – Drake’s use of the expression ‘blow your horn on high’ shows that he had immersed himself in some arcane aspects of folk song, perhaps from the English-literature angle. The line appears in ‘The Elfin Knight’, a medieval Child Ballad as an incantation from the lovelorn lass, summoning the outlandish knight of her romantic imagination.

  [18] – The release dates of the UK and US versions of The Man Who Sold the World were approximately three months apart. The reproduction of the ’American sleeve’ in a January 1970 Disc interview rather suggests that at this juncture it was still the intended UK sleeve.

  [19] – The 45 version of ‘Strange Kind of Woman’ clocks in at four minutes. Live versions in the band’s 1971–72 heyday sometimes almost hit the quarter-of-an-hour mark.

  [20] – The live performances of Tommy were significantly shorter than the album, usually averaging between fifty and fifty-five minutes. All three of the officially available versions, all 1970 shows at Leeds, Hull and the Isle of Wight, are around fifty-four minutes.

  [21] – If the Lifehouse Chronicles boxed-set can be taken at face value, the following latterday The Who songs all began life as vestiges of the project: ‘Put the Money Down’, ‘Relay’, ‘Join Together’, ‘Slip Kid’, ‘Who Are You?’, ‘Music Must Change’.

  [22] – According to legend, Richard Thompson’s masterful Henry the Human Fly still remains the worst-selling album of all time for Warners in the US, which the scarcity of ‘stock’ copies (as opposed to promos) rather seems to confirm. At least one copy was sold in Cleveland, though, because as early as 1973, Pere Ubu co-founder Peter Laughner was performing ‘The Angels Took My Racehorse Away’.

  [23] – The line Bowie is referencing in ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ is as follows: ‘I look out my window and what do I see? / A crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me’. His visual reference-point was more likely William Blake, not Carl Jung.

  [24] – ‘Ride’ and ‘Free Ride’ appear to be interchangeable titles. The former is used on Pink Moon itself, but on the 1986 Fruit Tree set it is listed as ‘Free Ride’.

  [25] – The ‘attempted suicide’ is first mentioned in Trevor Dann’s biography, though he dates it to 1973. However, other sources date it to the period immediately after Pink Moon’s release.

  [26] – The first night of the tour was the Brighton Dome (20 January), the night before Portsmouth, but the performance of Eclipse was famously abandoned that night during ‘Money’, when the backing-tapes broke down. Therefore, the first live performance of ‘Brain Damage’ was at the Guildhall. A bootleg CD of both Brighton and Portsmouth performances of Eclipse, called Eclipse of the Dark Side, is drawn from first-generation copies of the audience tapes of both shows made by the same taper.

  [27] – The line is later changed from ‘out of tune’ to ‘different tune’.

  [28] – According to Mark Blake, in Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd (2008), ‘Barrett contained his anger until he was back at Hills Road . . . [but] once down there, he began smashing his head repeatedly against the ceiling.’ He cites no source, but given its clear similarity to an incident cited in Nick Kent’s 1974 article, dated to later in 1972 and unconnected to the Starz show, he may have just transposed the story for ‘maximum effect’.

  [29] – A commemorative CD EP in Syd Barrett’s memory by Dave Gilmour, issued shortly after Syd’s death in 2006, features a live version of ‘Arnold Layne’ sung by Bowie, from Gilmour’s May 2006 Royal Albert Hall residency.

  [30] – Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in April 1968 led many to think he saw himself as a right-wing leader, though he was nothing of the sort. Bowie was evidently guilty of just such a misunderstanding.

  [31] – A live version of ‘Tired of Waiting for You’ appears on the 1998 remaster of Everybody’s in Showbiz, though it is not listed in Doug Hinman’s generally reliable tracklisting for these shows.

  [32] – The set-list for the Drury Lane concert, discounting the half-a-dozen obvious crowd-pleasers with which Davies opened the show, was as follows: ‘Have a Cuppa Tea’, ‘Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues’, ‘Cricket’, ‘Mr Wonderful’, ‘Alcohol’, ‘Village Green’ (instr.), ‘Where Are They Now?’, ‘You Really Got Me’/‘All Day and All of the Night’, ‘Picture Book’, ‘People Take Pictures of Each Other’, ‘Time Song’, ‘Salvation Road’, ‘Village Green Preservation Society’, ‘Celluloid Heroes’, ‘Here Comes Yet Another Day’.

  [33] – Neil Young attended one of The Who’s Manchester 1973 shows, and there is video footage of him sitting with the band backstage.

  [34] – The 1975–76 shows would only reinforce this sense of nostalgia, with the band generally performing just two songs from their latest LP, The Who by Numbers, and never more than three. This marks quite a change from the shows from 1969 through 1973, which concentrated heavily on ‘new’ material.

  [35] – The information about the February and July 1974 sessions given on the 1986 Time of No Reply CD and the 2004 Made to Love Magic CD remain contradictory. According to the former, all four 1974 songs were recorded in February. The latter attributes only ‘Black Eyed Dog’ to February, and the other four tracks to the July sessions, plural. The circulating backing-tracks for ‘Black Eyed Dog’, ‘Tow the Line’, ‘Hanging on a Star’ and ‘Rider on a Wheel’ rather suggests that only guitar-tracks, probably of just the first two songs, were cut in February, although the ‘Black Eyed Dog’ vocal may well date from July, when Boyd was back at the helm.

  [36] – According to David Parker’s inestimable Random Precision, a tape compilation made on 13 August 1974 had the following tracks: ‘Milky Way’, ‘Wouldnt You Miss Me?’, ‘Silas Lang’ (2 mixes), ‘Opel’, ‘Word Song’, ‘Birdy Hop’, ‘Scream Thy Last Scream’, ‘Vegetable Man’. Here are all the key tracks that will eventually appear on 1988’s Opel plus the two fabled Floyd rarities; but at just eight tracks, it clearly needs at least two or three ‘new’ tracks more to make up an album – hence presumably the scrappin
g of the project after the 1974 sessions proved a bust.

  [37] – A Polaroid snap of Barrett at the June 1975 EMI session included on page 211 of Nick Mason’s Inside Out confirms the various descriptions of his outlandish appearance to be wholly accurate.’

  [38] – The Sigma Sound versions of ‘Can Your Hear Me?’, ‘It’s Gonna Be Me’ and ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’ are all available on the 2007 remaster of Young Americans, as well as the 1991 Rykodisc CD (though they’re absent from the 1999 EMI remaster!).

  [39] – The original Shoot Out the Lights comprised ten tracks – six of which were re-recorded for the Hannibal version released in 1982. The other four cuts were ‘The Wrong Heartbeat’, ‘For Shame of Doing Wrong’, ‘I’m a Dreamer’ and ‘Modern Woman’, the first three of which feature Linda on lead vocals. The album has been widely bootlegged.

  [40] – A DVD of one of the Wembley concerts is commercially available, and shows how carefully Townshend explicated the original storyline at the 1996 shows.

  [41] – He’s at it again. In a recent internet posting our friend Cally was claiming, ‘Nick’s notes show that [the 1974 material] was side one of his next album. He had ticked five songs off and there was another side of songs that weren’t ticked.’ I don’t believe you.

  [42] – Since 1996, there has been a plethora of new Peter Green releases, most with Splinter Group, but there has been a dispiriting absence of new, original songs. Blues covers, instead, are the order of the day.