SLY STONE (1943-2025)

Oh Sly, you great big mixed up ball of confusion! I loved your records and only The Who could have followed your set at Woodstock, the defining moment of your chequered career. But what a mess you made of things along the way. 

        I have written about meeting Sly before but the death yesterday of this musical-genius-cum-provocateur-extraordinaire prompted me to re-read the three editions of Melody Maker in which I wrote about him and reproduce the second – an interview – pretty much verbatim for the first time. 

        The first time I saw Sly was in November 1973, a show at the Hollywood Palladium. “Will he? Won’t he?” I wrote in my review for MM’s Caught In The Act page. “Sly Stone’s reputation is too firmly etched for those questions not to be asked when he’s advertised to appear anywhere in the USA these days. His tantrums and failures to show for concerts are legendary to the extent that his contracts now contain a clause with a heavy penalty for non-appearance. Well, Sly did show at the Palladium but only just. The Palladium was sold out for the funky guy with the panama hat – but Sly made only a token appearance, leaving the stage after just over half an hour, apparently satisfied that the customers had had their seven dollars’ worth on entertainment. It was as big a rip off as I’ve witnessed since I started reporting on rock’n’roll three years ago.”

        I went on to report that while his band was stage for about an hour Sly was present for only half that time, offering his audience endless choruses of his two best-known songs, ’Dance To The Music’ and ‘I Want To Take You Higher’. “When the house lights went up everyone went home surprisingly peaceably. For what there as of it the music was tight and entertaining but other aspects of this show left me with a bitter taste in my mouth,” I concluded.

        Although I didn’t realise it at the time I caught Sly Stone on a relatively good day when I interviewed him in a basement apartment on New York’s West Side in June of 1974. It was his HQ in New York that week because, I was told by his publicist, he didn’t like hotels but after less than an hour in his company I figured it was more a case of hotels not liking him. Either way, bad days outnumbered good ones at this stage of his career, and would go on to do so for much of his troubled life.

As I recall in my Just Backdated memoir, Sly dressed for his Melody Maker interrogation as he would for the stage: a gleaming all-white leather outfit with tassels and rhinestones topped off with a huge afro, his eyes hidden behind outsized sunglasses. Sat next to him on a couch in this cramped, untidy apartment was his fiancée Kathy Silva whom he would soon marry on the stage at Madison Square Garden. She was decked out in a matching outfit save for the petite mini-skirt that exposed a generous amount of thigh, so much so that shortly after the interview began Sly enticed her into the adjoining bedroom for an intimate tête-à-tête, quite noisily too. In the meantime, the mortified publicist and I made small talk and twiddled our thumbs.

I’d been warned in advance that interviewing Sly Stone might be problematic but I’d come away unscathed from an awkward encounter with Lou Reed earlier that year and fancied my chances. Things got off to a bad start, however. It was scheduled for 3.30pm but when I arrived I was asked to return at 5pm because Sly was having a blood test, a legal requirement for his forthcoming marriage. I did as I was bid but there was no sign of him at 5pm, so I waited for a further hour during which his soon-to-be-released LP Small Talk was played for me. “It was only a rough mix but, again, it’s a departure from previous Sly material,” I reported. “All but the two opening songs on the first side feature a prominent violin and many of them are slow, almost waltz-time, pieces. Despite this, there’s still the pounding bass that has distinguished Sly’s recordings from the early days.” 

The new LP offered me a topic of conversation when Sly finally arrived but before we began I gave him a recent copy of MM that contained a feature on him in our Rock Giants series. This was a mistake as he promptly left the room to read it, evidently on the toilet as his return was accompanied by the sound of plumbing. I tried to sound friendly, smiling openly as I asked my first question, about the use of violins on his new album. 

        “It’s different. It’s unusual. That’s probably why I did it. The strings were around so I used them.”

Have you been wanting to do this for a long time?

“Probably. I don’t need to think about it at all to get it together.”

You seem to be forever changing.

“Time changes me, man.”

Will you be introducing strings on stage?

“I got a violin player in the group now. His name’s Sidney. He’s from Sausalito and I’ve known him just long enough for him to get into the group.”

Did you arrange the strings yourself?

“Part of them.”

There’s a lot of slower material on the album. Are you cutting down on the frantic Sly Stone material?

“There’s a lot of songs so I introduced slow songs also. There’s 11 songs. I don’t count which are slow.”

How big is your group at present?

“Nine people.”

It was at this point that Sly and Kathy retired to the bedroom. They were gone for about 15 minutes and returned together, Sly looking rather pleased with himself. I resumed my questioning as if nothing had happened. 

Tell me something about the bass player.

“That’s me. I play bass on all my records. I play most everything on all my records. I just overdub everything.”

[Later in the year I would interview Larry Graham, the bass player in the Family Stone, who refuted this.]

Wouldn’t the group like to be on the records with you?

“Sometimes they’re on the records also, but they feel good about it [not being on the records]. They like it this way and they’re pretty honest about what they like. I‘ve recorded like this ever since the Stand album, ever since ‘Dance To The Music’ I guess.”

Bass is such an important part of your sound. Have you ever felt like playing bass on stage yourself? 

“Sometimes I do.”

“It’s in his heart,” chipped in Kathy who by now had returned from the bedroom and re-joined Sly on the couch. He plays it so good that he’d like to play everything on stage if he could. He’s only one man but he has a million thoughts.” 

Do you get bored with always playing the very familiar material like ‘Dance’ and ‘Higher’?

“No, they like it and they keep on liking it and you gotta keep telling people you like it too. I love every period of my career.”

Where you do you write?

“My songs come from environments. I just go about my day an as things come to me, I write them down. I write on the toilet ‘cos no one bothers me there.”

Are you trying to change your image by getting married and releasing slower material? Is the image mellowing these days? 

“I’m not trying to. Vibes just leave me. I’m still as crazy as I always was, if crazy is the right word.”

Will you actually turn up for shows?

“I won’t ever be predictable.”

But there have been reports of you not turning up.

“It’s bad promoters, man.”

Your performance in the Woodstock movie helped you enormously in England.

“Sure. I enjoyed playing there. All my gigs are good.”

Are there other highlights of your career that you remember?

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t know about them.”

Because I was the wrong country?

“It’s not the country you’re, it’s the skin you’re in. And it’s not the colour at that. I enjoy myself best on the toilet and I wouldn’t invite you there.”

“This last remark brought the interview to an inevitable conclusion,” I wrote. “Sly’s PR showed me to the door while the man himself curled up on the soda with his fiancée. ‘You know something,’ said his PR girl. ‘He really opened up this afternoon. Usually he just grunts at writers. He’s done a few interviews this week and he’s said more this afternoon than he’s said all week’.”

A triumph, then.

A week later I reported on Sly’s nuptials at the Garden in my New York news column. “The ever-unpredictable Sly Stone married the mother of his nine-month-old son in front of 20,000 fans at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday evening,” I wrote. “Following a set by Eddie Kendricks, Sly’s mother came on to the stage to call for quiet. Then she introduced Sly’s 12-year-old niece who sang a gospel hymn like someone twice her age before the stage filled with friends and relations all dressed in gold costumes.

Sly & Kathy on the MSG stage as they were marred. 

        “A dozen girls holding palm leaves high in the air formed a backdrop as Sly himself loped out last, dressed all in gold with a gold cape. The preacher – brought in specially from San Francisco – called for hush and the service began. Appeals for the audience to keep silent because of the solemnity of the occasion were largely ignored, but the words of the marriage service were clearly audible through the PA system. When the words ‘Do you, Sly Sylvester Stewart, take this woman’ were uttered, a huge cheer went up. The service closed with the traditional ‘Let no man put asunder’ line which prompted the crowd to go crazy.

        “Then everyone trooped off. The whole affair was over in less than 15 minutes. There was another delay before the band came back on, followed by Sly who ripped into a long set, at least by his standards. 

        “The new Family Stone included a violinist and there were several new songs in his repertoire as well as old favourites,” I informed MM’s readers. “‘Dance To The Music’ opened and closed the set. Musically, Sly was as good as ever, alternating between organ, guitar and harp. He seemed to rise to the occasion and actually addressed the audience between numbers instead of merely jumping from one number to the next to hurry the proceedings over as quickly as possible.”

Two years later Sky and Kathy separated. “He beat me, held me captive and wanted me to be in ménages à trois,” Kathy later told People magazine. 

A FEW WORDS ABOUT JOHN

This morning I learned from his wife Jane that another of my oldest friends, John Holmfield, died yesterday in my old home town of Skipton. Here we are aged about 18 playing our guitars together in my bedroom in my parents’ house there. So I wrote this for him.  

Teenage boys learning to play guitars somehow find one another. It’s a secret society with its own curious customs, a bit like Masons except much more fun. You’ll find a plectrum among the loose change in their pockets, they listen to records more carefully than most people and never, ever, pass by a shop with a guitar in its window without stopping and staring. 

        John and I found one another through our guitars. It was 1963, the year The Beatles released their first LP, perfect timing because one of the first songs we learned to play together was ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, the first track on side one. When we formed our group, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ was always the opening song at our shows. “One, two, three, f…,” and we were away.

        There were four of us, John, Bob, Terry and myself, four Skipton friends, and we called ourselves The Pandas. John and Bob knew one another because they sang in Skipton Parish Church choir. Bob, Terry and myself all lived up the Raikes, and Bob and I went to the same primary school. John lived across town on Regent Crescent and played bass but didn’t have a real bass, not that it mattered. Bob played drums and he, John and Terry all sang. I was tone deaf, but John especially sang well, though he was a bit withdrawn, never one to push himself forward. I realise now that he was the most musical of all of us, and certainly had the best voice. All we had at first were acoustic guitars and even when we turned electric our equipment wasn’t much good but it was all we had and we made the best of it. When John eventually bought a 30 watt amp, twice as powerful as mine, I was very envious. 

        We used to meet and make plans for our group on Friday nights in the bar at the Midland, the hotel opposite Skipton railway station, now called Herriots, where no one seemed to care that we were under age. John and I soon became drinking buddies around Skipton and grew particularly close after Bob and Terry went to Leeds, Bob to the university there, Terry commuting to work in insurance. John worked in Keighley, in a lab at a school, and I worked in Skipton, on the Craven Herald, the local paper. John and I would bring our guitars to each other’s houses and play together, teaching ourselves songs by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Searchers. Then the four of us would get to together so we could all learn them. 

        The lifetime of The Pandas was about three years and in all that time I doubt we played more than 25 shows. Bob kept a tally in an exercise book with an orange cover, long since sadly lost. We played regularly at the RAF Club by the old swimming pool up Shortbank Road and at Skipton Rugby Club at Sandylands where, one night, we carried on until two in the morning. Angry parents arrived in pyjamas to ferry us home. One night at Gargrave Village Hall we supported a far more competent group from Barrow-in-Furness who played Gibson and Fender guitars. John and I begged them to let us have a go on them, which we did, briefly. We played a few private parties, making a terrible racket in the living rooms of houses where our teenage friends danced while we played. Our biggest show was at Aireville School, with about 100 pupils watching us. Our only ambition was to have fun – and in that we succeeded. 

        In 1967 John and I holidayed together in Scarborough, travelling by coach from Skipton bus station and staying at the St Nicholas hotel. We brought our guitars and I remember us playing them on a grassy hillside that overlooked the beach and sea. No one mistook us for buskers. 

        By this time John and I had moved on from the Midland and discovered the New Ship, a small, cosy pub on Mill Bridge, seen above. I can still remember the first night we went inside. It was full of ramblers, very noisy and very smoky. The bar was tiny, like a kiosk, and there was a back room behind it where regulars gathered for afters. The Ship grew in popularity during the second half of the 1960s, becoming one of the busiest pubs in town, at least among the under 25s. From around 1965 we drank nowhere else in Skipton, though when I got a car John and I would drive up the Dales, to the Devonshire Arms in Cracoe and the Old Hall in Threshfield. We talked about girls and guitars and records, and spent a good deal of time assessing the quality of the beer. John was always partial to Youngers IPA. 

        I introduced John to Alison, his first wife. She worked as a secretary in the advertising department at the Craven Herald, and, in fact, I’d made a feeble attempt at courting her myself, soon abandoned when I realised we had little in common. I came up from London for their wedding at Threshfield and visited John and Alison at the house where they lived in Embsay. It saddened me that the marriage didn’t last but I was somehow relieved when John told me they’d parted on good terms and remained so. Later he married Jane and I visited them too. By this time John had a white Strat and I had a sunburst one, Fenders at last but no audience to listen to us. 

        John was the only Panda to remain in Skipton. Bob settled near Hull where he became a solicitor and Terry’s subsequent whereabouts would always be a bit of a mystery. I went to live in London, then America, then London again, and by this time our lives had taken very diverse paths. Nevertheless, whenever I came up to Skipton to see my dad I generally looked in on John. Then, after my dad died in 1997, these visits more or less ceased. 

        Nevertheless, when you become a member of a pop group, even a group as insignificant as The Pandas, there’s a bond that remains always. It’s got something to do with being up there on a stage together without a safety net, knowing that you’re relying on each other to reach the end of the song without making a mistake, all for one and one for all. It’s a bit like playing together on a sports team, or working together on a successful project, a memory that stays with you, warm, nostalgic and comforting. Unforgettable, unbreakable.  

        In 2014, when John and I were told by his wife Yvonne that cancer was overtaking Bob and he wouldn’t last more than a few months, we spent an evening at their house near Hull, playing together again one last time. The first song we played was ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. “One, two, three, f…” and it was 1963 again. RIP John and Bob.  

CC, Bob - now playing bass - and John, at Bob's house in 2014. 

MY FIRST WEEK ON MELODY MAKER – A REVISED ACCOUNT

 

Any Just Backdated readers who subscribe to Rock’s Back Pages, the online music press library, will find among this week’s new features my interview with jazz guitarist George Benson, published in Melody Maker dated 5 February, 1977. Normally this would not be cause for comment, as RBP often adds pieces by me to its website and now has no fewer than 324 in total, the vast majority from the seven years I spent in the service of MM. However, this particular interview might well be the very last piece I wrote for the paper as I had just handed in my notice, and still have in my possession the letter of acknowledgment I received from editor Ray Coleman, which is dated 27 January, 1977.

        “Thank you for your good work for the paper and best wishes for your future,” writes Ray, who interviewed me for the job on MM seven years earlier, in the spring of 1970. 

        By a strange coincidence, I very recently came across what might well be the first issue of Melody Maker that carried anything written by me. It is dated 27 June 1970, a bit later than I thought when I wrote in May of 2020 that I joined MM ‘on the first Monday in May, 1970, 50 years ago today’. Through a process of deduction, I now realise I was about six weeks out.  

        It’s nowadays possible to find scanned copies of MM on the internet and through this means I’ve discovered one dated 6 June, 1970, in which my name does not appear on the staff list, and another dated 27 June when it does. I cannot find the copies for June 13 and 20 on the internet but from all this I can glean that I joined between these dates, and one of those missing copies, albeit one for which I contributed next to nothing, must therefore represent the week I first landed on MM.

        Elsewhere on Just Backdated you can read an account of my first few days on MM in which I mention the first LP I was given to review. The 27 June MM contains this review, of Soft Machine’s Third, for which I solicited some help from a friend who knew their music better than I. “It is their most ambitious yet,” I – or should I say my mate Steve – wrote, demonstrating a knowledge I did not possess. After a bit of flannel gleaned from the credits “I” conclude: “A good set for the Soft’s fans and jazz enthusiasts too.” 

        Wisely, Richard Williams, the assistant editor, whose job it was to distribute LPs to MM staff to review, never gave me another Soft Machine album to write about. 

        Since the dates on the cover of MM were for the Saturday of the week of its publication, I can infer from all this that I must have turned up at MM’s Fleet Street offices for the first time on Monday, 15 June, 1970. My reasoning is that because it went to press the following day I wouldn’t have had time to write anything of substance for that week’s issue (20 June), but in the days that followed Ray Coleman set me to work with a vengeance, as the saying goes. 

        And I’m not kidding. On page 5 on the 27 June issue there’s my interview with Paul Rodgers, the first of many pieces I would write about Free; on page 7 there’s my (uncredited) interview with Don and Phil Everly, conducted in their suite at the Inn On The Park Hotel near Hyde Park Corner, where I recall sharing the elevator with Dustin Hoffman on leaving; and in a ‘Chartbuster Spotlight’ feature on page 13 you can find my phone interview with Cliff Richard to mark the arrival in the charts of the excruciating ’Goodbye Sam, Hello Samantha’, not an opinion I expressed to him or in my piece; and also my brief interview with ‘Mike’ Rossi – Francis must have come later – whose group Status Quo was switching styles from the psychedelia of ‘Pictures Of Matchstick Men’ to the down home and ultimately far more successful boogie of ‘Down The Dustpipe’, which was at number 18 in the charts that week.

        And talking of Status Quo, there’s also my review of their show at St Mary’s College, Twickenham, where they performed at the annual rag ball, one of two ‘Caught In The Acts’ I wrote that week. The other was on Pete Brown’s Piblokto at the Marquee, but Status Quo sticks in the mind because I was invited to review it by none other than the notorious PR Max Clifford who had fixed up the Rossi interview and promised to ‘bring a bird’ for me if I came to the show in Twickenham. No doubt the late publicist, who subsequently became the master of ‘kiss and tell’ and suffered an ignominious downfall, had clocked a new name on the MM staff list and decided he was ripe for placing in a compromising situation. (The full story can be found here: http://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2017/12/max-clifford-rip.html)

        All the work that landed in my in-tray that first week is perhaps explained by the fact that only three ‘staffmen’ appear in the staff list on that 27 June issue of MM: jazz expert Max Jones, old timer Chris Hayes, whose sole contribution in those days was the Any Questions column, and newcomer Charlesworth. (The 6 June issue lists only Max and Laurie.) Chris Welch, next to whom I sat, was the Features Editor and Laurie Henshaw, another old timer who, bless him, probably thought Free was something you didn't have to pay for, was News Editor. Within a month all that would change, and I would be joined by Michael Watts, Roy Hollingworth, Mark Plummer, Andrew Means and Neil Roberts. By then I’d superseded Laurie as Melody Maker’s News Editor, much to my surprise, as only six weeks earlier I was a staff reporter on the Slough Evening Mail, reporting not on Status Quo’s change of musical direction but the penalties imposed on miscreants at the local magistrate’s court. Onwards and upwards.  

MY STINT AS MM’S MAN IN AMERICA Part 27 – 1974 continued.

Almost three weeks after the Eric Clapton concert, on July 25, I was at the side of the stage for another huge gig before another huge crowd, this time Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at the Mile High Stadium in Denver. Unstable and prone to outbreaks of verbal squabbling between themselves, CSN&Y nevertheless set aside their differences to undertake a huge tour of the US in the summer of 1974, proving to one and all that they were unquestionably the most popular American band of the era. As with Eric, I can remember gazing out over a vast crowd though this time it was two wired up Americans, one cool Canadian and one delighted Englishman a few feet away from me. 

         Flown in from New York courtesy of Atlantic Records, I stayed in the same hotel as the group and in the afternoon interviewed Graham Nash. Stephen Stills had been quoted as saying that the first time CS&N went out on the road was for art, the second time for the girls and this, the third, for the dollars, but Graham took exception to this. “We’re doing it for the music, man, because all of us know that none of us can make as good music together as we can apart,” he told me. 

        Unlike Crosby and Stills, Nash was thin and wiry, and he spoke so passionately that I couldn’t help but believe him. Stills wandered into the room at one point, and was very friendly. Nash introduced us. “This is Chris, from Melody Maker in London.” “English, huh,” said Stills, thereafter that day calling me ‘English’, never Chris. I didn’t mind.

         Later in the afternoon I found myself in the lift with Neil Young, a pure coincidence, but was too overawed to speak. He was thin and wiry like Graham, and travelling separately from CS&N, in a home-on-wheels with his wife and dogs. “Each night he packs up his guitar, wife, baby son and dog and hits the road,” Crosby told me after the show.

         It was a warm night and watching the show from where I stood, gazing out over a crowd of 60,000 or more, was another of my unforgettable rock experiences. At 9 pm, three-quarters of an hour after The Beach Boys, CSN&Y appeared to a standing ovation, and for the next three hours they joyously celebrated their reunion alongside Tim Drummond on bass, Russ Kunkel on drums and Joe Lala on congas. The ovation washing over them, the four principals moved to the front, Stills to the left and Young to the right, with Crosby and Nash in the centre bobbing between mikes and occasionally sharing. They opened with Stills’ ‘Love The One You’re With’.

         The show was three hours long and divided into two halves with a 15-minute break. The first half, the longest, opened with an electric set and switched to acoustic, with the second half all electric, and different combinations of CSN&Y took songs in turn. Those numbers where all four played and sang together were undoubtedly the highlights.

         Crosby’s ‘Wooden Ships’, with Young at the grand piano, followed ‘Love The One’, then Nash went over to the keyboard for ‘Immigration Man’, Stills taking the guitar solo. A new Neil Young song, ‘Traces’, followed with Young playing a huge Gretsch White Falcon and trading guitar breaks with Stills. Crosby stepped up next for ‘Almost Cut My Hair’, screaming out the vocals above the combined backing. For this song, Nash moved over to the organ, but again it was Stills’ guitar that carried the weight. Young’s turn came next with ‘Cowgirl In The Sand’ and the first electric set ended with all four joining together for ‘Pre-Road Downs’.

         Five minutes later an assortment of acoustic guitars (about a dozen) were set up around two stools and four mikes. Firstly Young appeared alone to sing ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ and ‘Old Man’, then Crosby followed with a new song called ‘For Free’, and Nash followed with two songs at the piano, ‘Simple Man’ and ‘Prison Song’. For the latter he was joined by the whole band and they stayed in place for Young’s ‘Sugar Mountain’ which inspired a mass sing-along, rightly so as we were in the foothills of the Rockies.

         Stills offered ‘Change Partners’, sung by the whole band, and ‘Questions’ which he played alone. I’d have preferred ‘4 + 20’. The acoustic set closed with ‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’, all four tearing into this mythical song and, although some of the harmonies were occasionally a little off-pitch, they handled this long and difficult piece with the kind of assurance that comes only from those who’d created it.

As with Clapton, I found a bootleg of the CSN&Y show on the internet. 

         The second half opened with Crosby’s ‘Long Time Coming’, followed by Young on ‘Don’t Be Denied’ and Stills with a new song called ‘First Things First’ on which he played congas. Crosby offered ‘Déjà Vu’ before Young played two more new songs, ‘Revolution Blues’ and ‘Pushed It Over The End’, on which both he and Stills soloed at length. The concert ended with ‘Ohio’, a great crowd favourite, another sing-along, but they returned for one encore, a lengthy version of ‘Carry On’, which proved equally popular.

         The cheers were deafening but after a quick wave they left the stage fast, Young heading for his camper truck and the others to black limousines. On the way past me Stills stopped for a second. “Hey, English,” he shouted. “What da ya think?” I couldn’t think what to say so I just gave him a thumbs-up.

          I lingered for a while as the crowd was leaving, taking in what I’d seen. As with Clapton, I’d found myself it a position to watch a gigantic crowd from the performer’s standpoint, seeing them react to songs, the waves of delight, the ovations, the sheer pleasure of experiencing all this on a warm night in Colorado amidst the Rocky Mountains. What a great fuckin’ job I had. 

I watched the crowd disperse then knelt down next to a monitor and scribbled away in a notepad, anxious not to forget what I’d just seen. After a while I put my notepad away and spotted a blonde girl in jeans and a yellow top on her own, down at the front, gazing up at the crew clearing the stage. I shouted to her, asking if she’d enjoyed the show. “It was great,” she yelled back. “What are you doing later?” I asked. She shrugged. “Come to the party at the hotel,” I shouted and lobbed my hotel room keys down to her. She caught them and laughed so I just hoped for the best.  

         There was a party in the hotel, in a reception room high up on the top floor. Stills kept calling me ‘English’ and Crosby didn’t stint on the wine. I’d taken my pocket tape recorder along. Where’s Neil, I asked David. “He’s two miles out of town by now and so high on the show that nothing can touch him,” he replied. “He’s out there so happy. He came and did what he had to do for three hours and knows he did it well. Nothing can make a man happier than that.”

         Crosby and Nash seemed the most enthused by the show, Nash especially. In fact, Graham seemed as high as a kite, rushing here and there and refusing to stop talking to anyone who’d listen. “It was a dramatic want to play music together again. A real need, man,” he replied when I asked point blank what motivated them to reunite. “I think we realised about a year ago that we had a really fucking hot band if we wanted and we could really make this hot music. We missed each other, y’know. We missed that bounce off. When there’s four of yer up there and there’s Stephen at one side and Neil at the other and me and David in the middle. Just watching them converse with each other. That’s it, y’know. That’s it. Like tonight, when we did ‘Sugar Mountain’, we stopped playing and heard 60,000 people sing back at us. Do you know what a rush that is?”

         Of course I knew. I was about 20 feet away from him for the whole show. 

         I stayed at the party for a couple of hours hoping my friend with the room key would show up but she didn’t. It was the only disappointment of a fabulously memorable night.

MY STINT AS MM’S MAN IN AMERICA Part 26 – 1974 continued.

Among other acts hitherto unmentioned that I interviewed during the first half of 1974 were Dr Hook, Rick Derringer, Loggins & Messina, Buffy St Marie, Harry Chapin and Gary Puckett whose ‘Young Girl’, a 1968 hit with his band The Union Gap, had mysteriously re-entered the UK charts in June. Editor Ray Coleman was always asking me to chase up oddities like this and, as it happened, Gary was in the Philippines shooting a movie so I spoke to him on the phone since no one offered to fly me there.  

    I went to see Dr Hook at a club in New Jersey, driven there in a limousine courtesy of Columbia Records. I chatted with Ray Sawyer who wore an eye patch, the result of a car crash, and Dennis Lacorriere, their singer, in a cramped dressing room and watched a lively show afterwards. They were a light-hearted lot who reminded me a bit of Lindisfarne but what I remember most about Dr Hook is that someone with a gun took a shot at the limousine as we were about to leave. We sped off down the road and after a couple of minutes the driver got out to take a look. Sure enough there was a scratch where the bullet ricocheted off the bodywork at the rear. I have no idea why this happened. Perhaps our rifleman simply didn’t like limousines.

        I liked Harry Chapin a lot. He reminded me of a schoolteacher but his heart was in the right place and that was where his songs came from. After a career in which philanthropy played a key role, in 1981 he was tragically killed in a motor accident aged just 39. 

        My mid-summer highlights, however, were seeing Eric Clapton at Three River Stadium in Pittsburgh, PA, on July 5, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, at Denver in Colorado two weeks later, about which I’ll post tomorrow. 

        Clapton was on with The Band, friends of his from Big Pink days who’d steered him away from the excesses of Cream, but their music, Americana at its very best, was lost on the massive crowd eager to see their guitar hero. I was looking forward to seeing him too as I’d been sent an advance copy of 461 Ocean Boulevard which I liked a lot. What I remember most about this trip, however, was meeting Pattie Harrison, who arrived at the side of the stage midway through Eric’s set. 

        With their affair yet to become public knowledge I was ignorant of the whole business until I saw her being ushered in by Robert Stigwood, Clapton’s manager. I recognised her, of course, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out why she was here. Before long, however, the affectionate glances between her and the chap in the middle with the Fender Strat around his neck led me to the obvious conclusion. 

“Chris, do you know Pattie?” asked Stigwood as the two of them assumed a position close to where I was standing. 

“Er, no,” I stammered. “Pleasure to meet you.”

As we shook hands I could see where the attraction lay. Pattie Harrison was indeed lovely; slim of figure in tight-waisted bell-bottom jeans and a pale blue silky top, angelic of features with soft blonde hair that tumbled down around her shoulders, the slight gap in the top row of her teeth giving her a childlike innocence that was enormously becoming. None other than Keith Moon had once declared his admiration for her to me at his house in Chertsey when I interviewed him there three years past, but Moon, though a model of indiscretion in most respects, was far too deferential towards The Beatles to proposition one of their wives, as Pattie then was and, for that matter, still was, at least on paper. Clapton was evidently more determined – or more infatuated. 

In hindsight, I have reason to believe that Pattie’s arrival was engineered by Stigwood in the hope that she might curb his client’s consumption of alcohol. In the event he was wrong, for July 5 happened to be the 31st birthday of Robbie Robertson, the leading figure in The Band. To be honest, though, Clapton didn’t need a reason to find strength from the whisky bottle in those days, being pretty much pissed as a newt most of the time. Before the show he was staggering around backstage trying to discover the whereabouts of The Band, then elsewhere in the vastness of Three Rivers Stadium. Each time he asked someone they’d reply something along the lines of, “right here, Eric.”

        “Not my band, THE Band,” he’d say, exasperated. “It’s Robbie’s birthday today and... there’s gonna be some bovver tonight.”

Remarkably, Clapton’s inebriated state made not one iota of difference to the vigour of his performance. Perhaps facing 42,000 fans – the biggest crowd ever at Three Rivers – had a sobering effect, but when he walked on stage, acoustic in hand, followed by his group and preceded by Legs Larry Smith, the English country joker, late of the Bonzos, acting as compere, he seemed completely in control. 

        Legs Larry had been hired to play down the superstar angle that Clapton wanted to shake off, as had Yvonne Elliman, the easy-on-the-eye Hawaiian singer whose main contribution to the set came early on, during the acoustic songs. Clapton, wearing a floppy hat and shabby dungarees, opened the show with ‘Smile’, the old standard written, oddly enough, by Charlie Chaplin that came as something as a surprise at first but seemed more and more apt after continued hearings. It sent out a message of good vibes from the start – “Smile, when your heart is achin’” – and quietened down an audience eager for hi-powered rock. ‘Smile’ moved into ‘Let It Grow’, another easy-going acoustic song with Clapton and Elliman singing harmoniously together, then ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’, Steve Winwood’s Blind Faith song. Slotted hurriedly between them at Pittsburgh was a spontaneous ‘Happy Birthday’ for Robertson who was now standing at the opposite side of the stage to where I was. Its significance was lost on the crowd.

I found this bootleg from the show I saw advertised on the internet. 

        With the acoustic exchanged for a Stratocaster we were into the main course. During ‘Blues Power’, the first electric number, Clapton was hit hard on the side of the face by a well-aimed missile that turned out to be a New Testament, wrapped in a small chain with a message from the local Jesus freaks. Not knowing what had hit him, he fumed for a bar or two, picked up the tempo again and bellowed his disapproval down the microphone. Then Pattie arrived, soothing the situation as the set progressed, Clapton for the most part delivering songs from the forthcoming 461 Ocean Boulevard, with ‘Motherless Children’ and ‘Mainline Florida’ offering ample opportunities for everyone to stretch out. 

          The closing song of the set proper was Chuck Berry’s ‘Little Queenie’, enlivened by a re-appearance of Legs Larry who smashed a plastic ukulele a la Townshend, hurling the debris out into the crowd. As encores, after much cheering, there followed ‘Tell The Truth’ and a lengthy, turbo-charged ‘Crossroads’ that generated the most inspired soloing of the night.

For those who experience it only occasionally, there is something positively awe-inspiring about standing on a stage a few feet from a rock superstar playing to an audience in excess of 40,000; the vast sea of faces stretching out into the distance, the waves of adulation they release, the deafening on-stage volume of the music, the whole experience amplified for me this night by the freshly realised knowledge that the superstar’s mistress, the wife of a Beatle no less, was standing right next to me. Surreal is a much-overused expression, but it certainly applied here. We were both ‘half dancing’, as you do in situations where restricted space precludes a full twirl, and she was smiling towards the man with the guitar, and every so often, as ‘Crossroads’ surged like a tsunami, he would glance across as he played and smile back at her. 

        Back at the hotel Clapton found The Band, or they found him, and even Pattie was unable to curb the carousing that went on well into the night. Robertson, a man of fairly sober habits next to his team mates, retired early but Rick Danko and Richard Manuel kept the party going in Danko’s room until dawn broke, by which time Pattie had dragged Eric back to their suite. I recall seeing him reeling down a corridor, the slight figure of his inamorata steadying him as they lurched along. As it happened, that night I befriended Danko who a year later would try to put the make on my sister after a Band concert in New York – but that’s another story.

MY STINT AS MM’S MAN IN AMERICA Part 24 – 1974 continued.

I never felt closer to The Who, my all-time favourite group, than I did in New York during second week of June, 1974, and this includes the periods, between 1993 and 2000, when I worked on and off for them on their box set and back catalogue reissues. A ‘them and us’ relationship between the music press and the top groups of the day emerged with the arrival of punk in the UK, but it never affected my relationship with The Who. I tried to maintain my neutrality with them but I admired them so much, both as a group and as individuals, that becoming close to them was somehow important to me and, of course, it helped me get the hot Who scoops for Melody Maker.

        On June 10 The Who opened an unprecedented four-concert run at Madison Square Garden, shows that sold out on the strength of one radio announcement, all 80,000 seats. No other act had played the Garden four times in one week before and to say I was anticipating these shows eagerly would be an understatement. I was at every one, either in a good seat or at the side of the stage, and in their dressing room. 

It therefore pained me to report that The Who weren’t at their best in New York this time around. Equipment glitches were partly to blame but an exacerbating factor was a fan down at the front on the opening night who yelled “Jump Pete, jump” to Townshend, which shocked him enormously. For the first time, he said later, he felt he was parodying himself, even resembling a circus act. Furthermore, he found he needed to force his uniquely athletic stage style, which had previously come naturally to him and was so much a part of the excitement of The Who’s stage shows. 

        In the short term this contributed to an unsatisfactory run of concerts, at least by the absurdly high standards The Who had set in the past. In the long term, what he experienced at the Garden had a profound effect on his attitude towards the group. Most fans loved them regardless, of course, and their blind faith depressed Pete still further.

      From where I was sat on the first night I couldn’t see the fans up front but I could tell something wasn’t right. I put it down to sound problems, as was so often the case when they hadn’t played for a while. The Who were like elite athletes who needed regular training to obtain optimum results. When they took on a lengthy tour the first few shows might have been slightly under par but when they hit their stride, Olympic fitness as it were, they were supreme, untouchable. When they played the odd show here and there, as they did in 1974, they suffered through being out of condition – and sometimes it showed. 

        This was the first time they’d played the Garden so the acoustics were new to them. I thought they’d iron out the problems after the first night but they didn’t, not really. It was only later that I realised the real problem ran far deeper, and I suspect that the band used the dodgy sound as an excuse when they, or at least Pete, knew the problems lay deeper too. They hadn’t recorded any new material since the previous year’s Quadrophenia, so the set they played was a run-through of their past, a kind of greatest hits selection. The only real surprise was that for the first time since the Tommy era they re-introduced ‘Tattoo’ into the set which the fans (and I) loved but which somehow contributed to a slightly unsettling feeling of nostalgia that had hit me earlier when I saw High Numbers t-shirts on sale outside the Garden. Pete always wanted to progress but the others were content with the way things were, and this was also part of the problem. It was a problem that would never go away, not while Keith was alive anyway. 

        “A huge roar greeted the arrival of The Who and the first half hour of Monday’s show was quite electric,” I wrote in MM. “But from then on it slid into a murky mess of badly mixed sound, flared tempers and general untogetherness. Things went wrong from ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ onwards. Daltrey had difficulty pitching the ‘See Me, Feel Me’ lines and at one stage he kicked over a monitor speaker in a fit of rage. Townshend could be seen shouting at the sound men and the taped synthesiser backing tracks were too loud. Towards the end the sound did improve but by this time it was too late to count. Townshend even apologised but it didn’t seem to matter. They still got a standing ovation, but it was a hollow victory for the band.”

The backstage passes at the Garden were these four 'face' badges, one for each night. 

I still have mine. 

        My friend Pete Rudge, who handled The Who’s US affairs in those days, had given me passes for all four nights and backstage I overheard a terrible row after this opening concert. The Who were screaming at each other behind a locked dressing room door. Their co-manager Kit Lambert, who wasn’t often seen at Who concerts by 1974, had turned up unexpectedly, drunk as a lord, and was demanding to mix the on-stage PA the following night, a ludicrous suggestion that exacerbated an already fraught situation. Long serving soundman Bobby Pridden ran out of the dressing room shouting that he was through with The Who, and I took him aside into another room and spent about 20 minutes beseeching him not to quit, and of course he didn’t. Poor loyal Bob, the real fifth member of The Who. He caught it in the neck so many times but he loved them far too much to ever quit. 

        Eventually things calmed down and Rudge asked me to do everyone a favour by quietly steering Lambert away from the scene which I somehow managed to do. On our way back uptown to the Navarro Hotel I asked Kit if he could ask his limousine driver to stop so I could buy a pack of cigarettes. We stopped and Kit rushed into a liquor store and came back with two cartons of Marlboro for me – 20 packets!

      The concerts improved as the week went by but The Who never really fired on all four cylinders that week. Tuesday was much better than Monday, though, and after this show I took Pete, John and Keith downtown to Club 82 where Television were playing. Pete had mentioned to me that he wanted to see some young New York bands, and I thought Television’s spiky, unsettling minimalism might be his cup of tea. He liked them but John, ever the traditionalist, hated them. I don’t know what Keith thought as he disappeared once we got inside the club, no doubt in search of female company. I don’t think he realised that Club 82 was a drag club that often featured female impersonators and ran by lesbians who dressed as men. 

      Wednesday was a night off and I did an interview with Pete in his hotel room during the afternoon. He seemed in a bad way, stressed out through working on the Tommy film soundtrack, drinking too much brandy and torn between the wishes of the fans, the band and what he wanted to do himself. I think he felt a great responsibility to everyone: the other three, the fans, the film producers and, of course, his young family. Everybody wanted a piece of him, even me interviewing him for MM, but he needed a break from everything. It was telling that when I knocked on his hotel room door he took a long time to answer. I might even have woken him up, and I’m pretty sure he was hung over. 

        “We were acting,” Pete told me as we discussed whatever it was that afflicted the group on the opening night. “We’ve been able to act and look as if everything’s OK for a while now but we can’t keep it up if the sound doesn’t get better. It didn’t and we couldn’t act for the whole show.” 

        He seemed grimly aware of the expectations of his audience. “These fans feel that they own The Who. They were there in the front row at the Murray the K Shows [in 1967] and now that The Who have reached this stage they feel that as they’ve been so loyal they have a prior claim to what numbers we’re going to play and things like that. New York to us is like what the Goldhawk Club is like to us in England.

        “Most of these kids, the ones I’ve met, seem to have a similar attitude to life. The ones you saw freaking out at the front are the fanatics and they all seem to be deeply intellectual people who are very worried about life. They find The Who to be a kind of gut release which is what I get from The Who, too. They’re people from the dead suburbia of New York who need a release from everyday life.

        “The trouble with all of us in this group is that we have such incredibly defined traditional ways of playing that we tend to be bogged down by them in some senses, but I like to go out and do a solo on single notes instead of the usual routine.

        “Without becoming alarmist about it I guess that I don’t get as much out of performing on the stage as I used to. I don’t have the same lust for gut feedback that I used to and more and more I want to get feedback from pure music.

        “I think The Who are going to have to allow themselves time to breathe without allowing their sense of identity to dissipate. I don’t want The Who to end up on stage playing because they have to but playing because they want to. If it turns out they don’t want to play together, then I don’t think they should, but at the moment we don’t play that often and when we do it’s because we want to. I can’t wait to get back on stage tonight.”

        During their stay in New York, Pete stayed in a different hotel – The Sherry Netherland – to the rest of the band who took suites at the Navarro on Central Park South which over the years had become the band’s regular New York berth. It was the first time that the whole group hadn’t stayed together in the same hotel, which I thought was revealing, but Pete stayed in touch with developments at the Navarro by using a rudimentary cordless mobile phone, probably one of the earliest of its type, that had been assembled by the group’s sound crew.

At Thursday’s show ‘My Generation’ morphed into Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’, a rather disjointed stab at The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’, sung by John, and ended with ‘Big Boss Man’, a Jimmy Reed blues staple from their early days. It seemed to me they were loosening up, finding a semblance of form at last, but try as they might the shows somehow never reached the peaks of the touring that followed the release of Who’s Next, or the closing shows on the Quadrophenia tour for that matter.

        After that show Keith, his assistant Dougal Butler and I visited John Lennon at the luxurious Pierre Hotel, where he was living with May Pang. The Pierre was a swanky hotel on Fifth Avenue at the south east corner of Central Park and Keith, Dougal and myself rode there in a limousine from the Garden, then headed up to John’s suite in the elevator. John seemed pleased to see Keith. They’d been pals back in London in the sixties and had been hanging out together in LA earlier in the year. In truth, Keith was a Beatles groupie, eternally in awe of them, and also a good pal of Ringo whose son Zak – who now drums with the 21st Century Who – was the recipient of at least one Moon cast-off drum kit.

      Keith, being Keith, suggested to John that we all have a drink, assuming, wrongly as it turned out, that John would have a huge bar stocked with booze. In the event, all he had was one bottle of extremely expensive red wine, a fine vintage red, given to him by former Beatles’ manager Allen Klein. John said he thought the bottle cost $1,000 but was a bit spooked by this and mentioned that he was, at present, involved in a lawsuit with Klein who might therefore have good reason to poison him. John suggested that someone in our company should taste the wine before everyone else took a drink.

      Looking around he said something like, “Well Keith, you can’t taste it because you’re the drummer with The Who so you can’t die, and you need your assistant Dougal. I’m John Lennon, the famous Beatle, and I can’t die either. May Pang is my companion at the moment and I don’t want her to die, therefore the only one of us left to taste the wine is you Chris... so here you are.”

      The bottle was duly opened, John poured some wine into my glass and I sampled it as the others all stared at me. There was a moment’s silence while they waited to see whether I would keel over on the spot, and I was half tempted to clutch my throat and make a gargling sound – but to this day, that was the finest glass of wine I’ve ever drank in my entire life, so rich, full-bodied, bursting with flavour. “It’s absolutely beautiful,” I said. It was duly shared out, but once the wine had gone Keith was eager to move on, so we left.

      As we were waiting for the elevator Keith decided he wanted to take a pee but was reluctant to return to John’s suite and disturb him. So he peed down the Pierre Hotel laundry shaft instead.

        On Friday, the final night of The Who’s week of shows at the Garden, Pete smashed three of his Gibson Les Pauls and Keith joined in, chucking his drum kit everywhere and smashing the fourth and only remaining guitar. I was told that Bob Pridden had taken delivery of around a dozen Les Pauls from Mannie’s, the music shop on West 48th Street, and would return the unused ones at the end of the week. 

        My date at this final concert was Debbie Harry, and we sat together on John’s side, a few rows up from the stage. No doubt keenly aware how Chris Stein had saved up for his guitars, she was appalled by the destruction. Backstage in the dressing room after the show Roger tried to put the make on her – “Fuckin’ ‘ell Chris, that bird looks just like fuckin’ Marilyn Monroe” – as did Keith, equally unsubtly. She didn’t respond to either of their advances, I’m happy to report, which didn’t please Roger whose strike rate in this department was always very high. 

Debbie H & CC at the after-show party. 

Note the 'John' backstage pass badge on her lapel.  

        Debbie spent the rest of the evening with me, taking in an after-show party at a roller-dome where we danced a lot and Bob Gruen, ever on my trail, took more photographs, including several of us together. It was a lavish affair where 1,500 guests, among them Elton and assorted Beach Boys, were entertained by Ronnie Spector & The Ronettes. 

        The Who wouldn’t perform again for 15 months. 

MY STINT AS MM’S MAN IN AMERICA Part 23 – 1974 continued.

Later in May I was in the company of Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, then pretty much an unknown quantity in America. In the UK Roxy had been fast-tracked to success on the strength of their inventive records, positive press coverage and the way they dressed but none of this cut much ice in a country the size of the USA where the accepted wisdom was that success came only to an act that toured extensively. As a result, Bryan, on a promotional tour of the US, was exhausted. 

        “Not much lounging for the lounge lizard this week,” I wrote in MM. “All go. Up at dawn to another city. Another round of interviews. Another airplane. Another late night. Another early call. Six days on end. Somehow his black hair maintains its usual crisp quiff even if his eyes blink a lot and need a good rub to prevent the lids from clamping together. A cup of tea. An untidy suite. A television with picture and no sound. An album set containing 72 of Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits, a prized possession indeed.

        “In the past five days he’s flown from London to New York, spent a day in Cleveland, a day in Detroit and a day in Chicago, and also visited Philadelphia and Boston. Each day was crammed with press and radio interviews, and each evening was spent discovering the delights of America. ‘The first American tour was a terrible bring down really,’ Bryan told me. ‘It was the only time we’ve ever been... er, not appreciated. It was sandwiched between two English tours which were rave tours and to come here and be totally unknown was obviously a bit of a downer. People I spoke to on that tour who had the first album never even knew we were due to play in the town on that day. What we should have done was to play in small halls rather than support big bands in the big arenas. This is what we’ll do next time.’”

        Like other acts that targeted a more sophisticated audience than American-style ‘boogie all night long’ rock fans, Roxy found themselves more appreciated in the big cities on the coasts than in the great hinterland in between. A party was thrown for Bryan at a loft in downtown New York where trendy taste-makers from among the Andy Warhol crowd gathered to inspect this rock star who looked and dressed more like a ’fifties crooner than Robert Plant or Roger Daltrey. 

        This was the first time I’d ever been inside a New York loft. Unlike what we in the UK call the space beneath gable roofs of houses, in New York lofts are apartments originally designed as workshops, most often found downtown where small industries like textiles and bespoke furniture once flourished. As a result, they are vast open spaces, without interior walls, like XXL studios I suppose. Bryan was the centre of attention at the party, and enjoying it, but I managed to corner him for another chat, sitting on beanbags as a I recall, not the most elegant lounging position for this most elegant of loungers. 

        “We were very fortunate to be successful from the first record onwards in England, maybe because of the mechanics of the English system,” he continued. “There isn’t a huge rock press over here, and in England we were always written about from the very beginning so people were aware of us before even the first album came out. Here people are more influenced by FM radio and they’re more unadventurous in their outlook. There seems to be a dreadful musical snobbery between AM and FM radio and Roxy doesn’t seem to fall into either of these accepted categories. We’re too weird for AM, and considered too flash and too image conscious for some of the FM stations.

        “Americans aren’t so preoccupied with style as the English are, but it could be changing. When I was in Detroit, I got a phone call from Canada during a radio interview and this kid said that he cut out photographs of me and took them along to his hairdressers so that he could imitate my hairstyle. I was very flattered.”

Bryan Ferry, Amanda Lear and David Bowie at the loft party. That looks a bit like Lou Reed hovering in the background, as was I somewhere. I found this picture, which looks like a scan from a magazine, on the internet, photographer unknown. 

        The promotional visit previewed Roxy’s June 2 concert at the Academy of Music, following which the artist Larry Rivers threw an after-show party in his East Village loft studio that was attended by David Bowie. On his arm was Amanda Lear, the cover model from Roxy’s For Your Pleasure LP. “Roxy’s image has attracted a clique following of film stars, artists and general Warhol-type personalities and they turned up in droves for the after-show party,” I reported in my weekly MM NY news column. 

Two days later I found myself face to face with Sly Stone who proved even more difficult to interview than Lou Reed. The encounter took place in a small apartment on New York’s Westside that adjoined his manager’s offices. I was told he didn’t like hotels. I suspect it was more a case of hotels not liking him but thought it best not to air this opinion. By his side during the interview was his fiancée, Kathy Silva, whom he would marry on stage at Madison Square Garden on June 5, the first American wedding to which I was invited, though probably not a typical Stateside tying of the knot. 

        They made a handsome couple. Sly had dressed for our interview as he would for a concert; a gleaming all-white leather outfit with tassels and rhinestones, topped off with his huge afro. Silver sunglasses hid his eyes. Kathy was wearing a matching ensemble except for her mini-skirt which was provocative to say the least. This might have inspired what occurred midway through our chat when she and Sly decamped to the adjoining bedroom to do what comes naturally to men and women in bedrooms, quite noisily too. In the meantime, I was left in the company of his publicist, a long-suffering girl who tried to make small talk in the temporary absence of her client. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, albeit quite funny in hindsight. 

The interview got off to a bad start. “He extended a hand but looked elsewhere,” I reported. “Who could tell where his eyes focused beneath those silver shades? He gripped and I felt a pain through the middle finger on my right hand. He grinned and disappeared. About half an hour later I found out what had caused the pain. On his two little fingers were a couple of matching rings. Spelled out in diamonds were the words ‘Sly’ (right hand) and ‘Stone’ (left).

        “Meeting Sly is like coming face to face with an ugly cop. He isn’t social. He isn’t friendly. He resents intrusions on his privacy. He doesn’t like to talk. He’s a star and he acts like a star ought. Moody, mean and magnificent.”

        What actually happened was that when Sly arrived, preceded by a white personal assistant, he breezed into the adjoining office and disappeared almost immediately, allowing me just a glimpse of him. After ten minutes he re-appeared, taking us through to the apartment which was tiny by rock-star standards. I offered him a copy of Melody Maker, pointing out that it contained an article on him, a retrospective in our ‘Rock Giants’ series, which prompted him to retire to his toilet to read it. He was gone for another ten minutes.

        While waiting, we were joined by Kathy. Then Sly re-emerged to the sound of plumbing and sat on a couch, still reading the MM. Thereafter the interview spluttered on with Sly answering my questions, largely in monosyllables, and Kathy chipping in here and there to offer support. Their decision to retire to the bedroom after about ten minutes seemed motivated on his part by a need to prove his macho credentials in the face of a white man with a British accent with whom he had little in common.  

        “Do you get bored with always playing the very familiar material like ‘Dance To The Music’ and ‘I Want To Take You Higher’?” I asked when he returned. “No,” he replied. “They like it and they keep on liking it and you gotta keep telling people you like it, too. I love every period of my career.”

        I asked about who played on his records and he told me he played every instrument, implying that it was disrespectful of me to suggest otherwise. “I just overdub everything,” he said. 

        “Where do you write?” I asked. “I write on the toilet ‘cos no one bothers me there. I enjoy myself best on the toilet and I wouldn’t invite you there.”

        This last remark brought the interview to an inevitable conclusion. Sly’s assistant showed me to the door while the man himself curled up on the sofa with his fiancée. “You know something,” said the PR girl. “He really opened up this afternoon. Usually he just grunts at writers. He’s done a few interviews this week and he said more this afternoon than he’s said all week.”

On June 5, I was at the Garden to report on Sly’s marriage to Kathy. “The ever-unpredictable Sly Stone married the mother of his nine-month-old son in front of 20,000 fans at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday evening,” I wrote in MM. “Following a set by Eddie Kendricks, Sly’s mother came on to the stage to call for quiet. Then she introduced Sly’s 12-year-old niece who sang a gospel hymn like someone twice her age before the stage filled with friends and relations all dressed in gold costumes.

Sly & Kathy tie the knot. 

        “A dozen girls holding palm leaves high in the air formed a backdrop as Sly himself loped out last, dressed all in gold with a gold cape. The preacher – brought in specially from San Francisco – called for hush and the service began. Appeals for the audience to keep silent because of the solemnity of the occasion were largely ignored, but the words of the marriage service were clearly audible through the PA system. When the words ‘Do you, Sly Sylvester Stewart, take this woman’ were uttered, a huge cheer went up. The service closed with the traditional ‘Let no man put asunder’ line which prompted the crowd to go crazy.

        Then everyone trooped off. The whole affair was over in less than 15 minutes. There was another delay before the band came back on, followed by Sly who ripped into a long set, at least by his standards. 

        “The new Family Stone included a violinist and there were several new songs in his repertoire as well as old favourites,” I informed MM’s readers. “‘Dance To The Music’ opened and closed the set. Musically, Sly was as good as ever, alternating between organ, guitar and harp. He seemed to rise to the occasion and actually addressed the audience between numbers instead of merely jumping from one number to the next to hurry the proceedings over as quickly as possible.”

Two years later Sky and Kathy separated. “He beat me, held me captive and wanted me to be in ménages à trois,” Kathy later told People magazine. 

MY STINT AS MM’S MAN IN AMERICA Part 22 – 1974 continued.

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone on the music press who didn’t like The Byrds. The first time I saw them was at the Bath Festival in the summer of 1970 when wet weather forced them to play an acoustic set, and I saw them again at the Fairfield Hall in Croydon on Thursday May 6, 1971, for which Clarence White wore the snazziest Nudie jacket I’d ever seen. 

        I had always wanted to meet Roger McGuinn, the chief Byrd, and my friend Peter Philbin, now the head press honcho at Columbia International, obliged by driving me out to Roslyn in Long Island to finally meet him in early May of 1974. Afterwards we took in his show at My Father’s Place, a great club nearby that held about 400, and where entry was just two dollars and beer less than 50 cents a glass, cheap by New York standards. 

        “It’s a far cry from the Byrds’ flights across America in their heyday when they could be expected to fill the massive basketball arenas,” I wrote in MM. “McGuinn isn’t even carrying his own PA system, preferring to rely on that provided by the club rather than pay expensive air freight charges for his own gear. He’s just got a couple of guitars, a banjo, a Pignose amp and some electronic gadgetry that makes one guitar sound like three.”

        Dressed in denim with his long, straggly hair parted in the centre, Roger turned out to be a quiet, thoughtful and dignified fellow, friendly enough and happy to discuss the demise of the group he had led since 1964, the year they recorded their magnificent electrified version of Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. “McGuinn’s strange vocal inflections, that distinctive Rickenbacker chime and the sumptuous harmonies all contributed to a record that sounded unlike anything I had ever heard before,” wrote my friend Johnny Rogan in his definitive biography of the group. “It was almost as powerful as hearing ‘Heartbreak’ when I was about four years old.”

        Now the architect of that remarkable record was sat opposite me on a double bed in an unremarkable Holiday Inn hotel room, telling me all about the group’s demise and defending his decision to perform Byrds classics as a solo performer. “I feel just as qualified to sing the Byrds’ songs as anyone else,” he said. “I was one of the writers on ‘Eight Miles High’ and I feel the same about the Dylan songs. I changed the timing on them and it was my idea for the Byrds to do their versions of them in the first place.”

        It had been McGuinn’s decision to finally disband the group the previous year. At this time the original Byrds had got back together to make the album for Elektra/Asylum, and he didn’t want two sets of Byrds on the market – the originals and the newest variation. “It would have been ludicrous to have two Byrds with two albums out at the same time, so I thought it would be best to have the original group and nothing else. There was talk of the original band going out but it wasn’t warranted by the number of album sales on that record. It didn’t sell well at all. I was unhappy about that but in retrospect I can see why the general public didn’t like it.

        “It was a bit of an anti-climax, and the last version of the Byrds was the same. Some combinations of musician that made up the Byrds were OK and some weren’t. The last band wasn’t to my liking. Clarence [White] and I fired each other as a joke, but nobody had the right to fire me as I was the leader and I’d fired everybody else by that time anyway.

        “The very last dates we did were with Clarence and I, and Chris Hillman and Joe Lala for one weird weekend. The last gig under the Byrds name was with this line-up at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, so we really fizzled out. It was terrible, musically. Chris thought he knew how to do all those old songs, but I’d changed them a lot by this time so the result was awful.”

        McGuinn had lost count of the number of different line-ups the Byrds went through. To his mind the best performing band was the version with Clarence White, Skip Battin and Gene Parsons, and the best recording band the original line-up with himself, Hillman, David Crosby, Gene Clark and Michael Clarke, which he hopes will record another album sooner or later.

        “Maybe that’ll be an anti-anti-climax. It couldn’t be worse than the last one. That one came out on the Asylum label because David [Crosby] was on Asylum and he was calling the shots and had the most power. Asylum were prepared to give us more money than Columbia, too, so it didn’t make any sense not to go with Asylum.”

        Although Roger had told me that his solo act was a cross between new material and old songs that were associated with the Byrds, in actual fact his show that night was 90 per cent Byrds material, with only three new songs. First he played acoustic guitar, then banjo for one number, and then turned to the electric Rickenbacker 12-string that was his trademark in earlier days. With the aid of his electronic gadgets, he produced a whining, droning guitar sound that managed to cover up for the sparse instrumentation.

        “It was, however, rather a patchy performance,” I wrote. “The material made up for this – everyone likes hearing those old Byrds hits – and one and all, myself included, had a whale of an evening. Surprisingly, he attempted a solo version of ‘Eight Miles High’, perhaps most electric of Byrds songs. And there were a host of others – ‘Tambourine Man’, ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’, ‘Easy Rider’, ‘Wasn’t Born To Follow’, ‘Fifth Dimension’, ‘Chestnut Mare’, ‘My Back Pages’, ‘So You Wanna Be A Rock and Roll Star’ and ‘Mr. Spaceman’.

        “McGuinn was seated for the performance and offered deadpan introductions. The polite claps turned to cheers and he wound up doing around four encores; it was the atmosphere that the grand old Byrd created, rather than the musical output, that made the evening such a success.

        “Inevitably it was the old songs that the crowd were rooting for, and they got what they wanted,” I wrote. “At the end he seemed genuinely moved by the ovation which was surely intended as an appreciation of his career as much as for the evening’s performance.” 

Earlier in the year, back in the UK, the ruggedly-handsome country singer Charlie Rich had enjoyed hits with ‘’The Most Beautiful Girl’ and ‘Behind Closed Doors’ and this prompted MM’s editor Ray Coleman to request I interview him. Like McGuinn, he was on Columbia and their ever-obliging press department informed me he was playing at Disney World in Florida. Did I fancy a trip a trip to the Sunshine State and a couple of nights in the hotel on the resort complex? Of course I did.

My companion this time was Mike O’Mahoney, the same CBS PR who’d introduced me to Bruce Springsteen earlier in the year, and when we arrived at the Century Hotel he asked for a suite which was duly served up: two huge bedrooms with en suite bathrooms linked by a vast lounge, dining, bar and kitchen area, the sort of hotel room you could settle in for a year. It was, in fact, the best accommodation in the entire hotel and Charlie was not best pleased when he dropped by for our interview. Evidently, he had a slightly smaller suite on the floor below.

        “At 41, he’s a distinguished-looking man,” I wrote. “His silver hair – natural, by the way – and his large physique reminded me of that great cowboy Hopalong Cassidy. He has a lived-in look, a face that’s seen much in the last twenty years, and retained I all. He looks tough, but is really a gentle giant. His appeal lies as a father figure but teenage girls actually screamed at him during his performance.

Charlie was happy to run through his career for the benefit of MM’s readers, recall a few anecdotes of working at Sun Records which, like Elvis, he left for RCA. Then came Epic, part of Columbia, and success after well over a decade’s worth of effort. During that time, of course, he had changed his style a lot, beginning as a rock’n’roller but gradually moving over to country simply because he prefers it.

        Three hours after our chat, a 5,000-strong audience was gathered around Cinderella’s castle in the heart of Disney World awaiting Charlie’s arrival on stage. Over the weekend he was contracted to play six shows, three each afternoon at 2.30, 4.00 and 6.30, but it turned out his throat was bad, so he did one on the Saturday and two on the Sunday instead. 

        There were two ways to enter Disney World. One was through the main gate and the other, more exclusive, method was to make your way around the back, walk through a series of tunnels beneath the complex and rise up in an elevator to your chosen area. We chose the latter, which afforded an insight into how Disney World operates. Beneath the Magic Kingdom was a vast complex of air ducts, machines generating power, replacement pieces, a giant strong room where the cash was kept and, oddly, costumed staff taking their meal breaks. I resisted the temptation to sit down and have a sandwich with Snow White. 

        As there was no backstage area, no dressing rooms or similar facilities, Disney security people formed a tunnel for our party from Cinderella’s Castle to the stage. When the show started, it was completely surrounded by fans pressed tight against the front and a host of amateur photographers had their Instamatics ready.

        Charlie used a four-piece backing band – two guitars, bass and drums – augmented by four brass and three coloured girl singers called The Treasures, while he played a huge grand piano at the front of the stage. They struck up the opening notes of ‘Most Beautiful Girl’, a few fans shrieked but most clapped, and a local country station D.J. introduced “The Silver Fox, Mr Charlie Rich”, who surprised no one by getting straight into the music, following their cue on ‘Most Beautiful Girl’. A good percentage of the crowd sang along.

        Charlie wore shades and a sensible hot weather safari-type outfit with a gold chain and medallion dangling from his neck. With his silver hair blowing in the slight breeze, he had the air of an aging film star, as if  Gary Grant had turned to singing in his twilight years. He looked classy, the kind of celebrity who’s seen vaulting between Rolls Royces with stunning blondes on either arm. Still, he’s a rocker at heart and ‘Lonely Weekends’ was essayed as a forceful rock number. He hit the piano keys like Jerry Lee as armed reached out from the front to touch him. At the close he shook a few and drank from a cup of water that more eager arms reached out to grab.

        The show lasted about 45 minutes and was very tightly arranged. At one point Charlie left the stage to allow guitarist David Mayfield, a young blonde riff rider, to lead the band in some out and out rock. Then The Treasures got a chance to sing a song on their own. Charlie returned with ‘A Very Special Love Song’, then warmed up through his “evolution medley” – a segued selection from his past – to ‘Behind Closed Doors’. This led to more squealing from the girls in front. At the end he left abruptly, declining to encore.

        When he’d gone two girls got into a fight over the beaker from which he was drinking.