THE BRINSLEYS & THE BAND

In September 1974 The Band rehearsed for a Wembley Stadium show at the farmhouse in Beaconsfield owned by Brinsley Schwarz who had lived there together for almost three years. It was keyboard player Bob Andrews who set the wheels in motion, calling a publicist he knew to ask if he could meet The Band’s Garth Hudson. Sure, said the publicist, but do you know anywhere where the Band could rehearse while they’re in the UK. How about our farmhouse, replied Andrews. 

The story of how Brinsley Schwarz hosted their idols is told in Graham Parker’s Howlin Wind by Jay Nachman, published last year by Tangible Press, a copy of which the author mailed to me recently after I helped with his research into UK pub rock. 

“We were wildly excited, if you can be wildly excited and stoned at the same time,” Brinsley Schwarz told Nachman when he heard that The Band were on their way to Beaconsfield.

“The Brinsley Schwarz members were starstruck when their musical idols climbed out of their limo,” writes Nachman. “Using Brinsley Schwarz’s gear, The Band set up in the barn and began to play. The members of Brinsley Schwarz crammed together on the steps outside, and for approximately two hours they were treated to a private concert.”

“They sounded exactly like they did on the records, which is another quite extraordinary thing about them,” said Brinsley. “They sounded just like The Band.”

What’s more Hudson stayed behind after his four fellow Band members left and for about 20 minutes played “every genre under the sun on Andrews’ Lowie organ, from classical music to rock to Southern rock and more. The members of Brinsley Schwarz stood behind him in awe. “He would subtly change the sound he was laying,” said Schwarz. “And then he would change the playing to suit the sound. He would evoke Southern states’ music. He pulled up images of Virginia and the War of Independence and all of that stuff. He would just hold a note or two, he’d just change a few switches and things on the organ and suddenly you’d be into Mozart. It was mind-blowing. His mastery of the instrument was better than sensational.”

“At one point I said to Garth, ‘You’re the best keyboard player in the world’,” Andrews recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, time to go’. I blew it. It was the thrill of lifetime to be that close to somebody who you’d been admiring for years.”

“Schwarz, a devoted fan of The Band to this day, regards Robbie Robertson as a favourite guitarist,” writes Nachman. “After Hudson left, the Brinsleys wandered back into the barn to play ‘The Weight’, ‘The Shape I’m In’, ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ and other Band songs. Hoping to capture Robertson’s sound, Schwarz plugged his guitar into his amp, the same one Robertson had played through, using Robertson’s cable, which the guitarist had left behind. Out came nothing but a discouraging lesson.”

“I plugged into my amp,” said Brinsley, “I had a look at the settings, which were almost exactly like mine, and played and it sounded like me, very annoyingly, and not like him at all. I thought, ‘How does he sound so much like himself and I can’t even sound remotely like him?’ That is one of the things about guitar players who are always searching for this magical sound that they have in their heads.” 

Both Brinsley Schwarz and Bob Andrews subsequently joined The Rumour, Graham Parker’s backing band, whose story is told in Howlin’ Wind, alongside that of Parker who was interviewed at length for the book. Here’s a link: https://grahamparkershowlinwind.net/

MAGICAL HIGHS: ALVIN LEE & ME by Loraine Burgon

Around the middle of last year, through a friend of a friend, I was introduced by email to Loraine Burgon who asked me to help her with a book she had written about the decade she spent as the partner of Alvin Lee, guitar hero leader of Ten Years After. 

Loraine and Alvin met as teenagers in Nottingham, where they were both raised, and stayed together as TYA found fame and fortune, moving first to London and then to a country mansion near Henley. When it all became too much, the relationship fell apart. 

I edited Loraine’s book for her, reducing its length by about 30%, and helped her find a publisher. It is a very frank account of her time as the girlfriend of a guitar hero, 

        As it says on the cover, “MAGICAL HIGHS is a love story of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll… If you’ve ever wondered what it’s really like to be the partner of a rock superstar, MAGICAL HIGHS is the book for you.”

It was published last week and this extract details the night Loraine first met Graham Barnes, aka Alvin Lee.

On November 5, 1962, my friend Johnnie Clifton introduced me to a slightly drunk young man on the steps outside of the Rainbow Rooms in Nottingham, our midweek rock’n’roll jiving venue. He asked me for a kiss, which I gave him with a smile. I already knew who he was. I had glimpsed him briefly in The American Bar at the Black Boy hotel. He was a local musician with a mysterious, slightly dangerous reputation. Later he offered me a lift home and that evening my future was sealed with more kisses. I had no idea where my heart was leading me. 

His name was Graham Barnes but the world would come to know him as Alvin Lee.  

“It definitely wasn’t love at first sight, nor even lust,” I wrote in the late seventies. “Not that he wasn’t a handsome young man, he most certainly was. Six-foot tall, lean, blond hair cut short and swept back from a clear, wide forehead. His eyes were green-grey, misty with a positive twinkle, though on this occasion pinkish around the edges due to alcohol, which was also causing him to grin somewhat foolishly and sway unnervingly, like a snake attempting to hyponotize its prey. The nose was perfect. I believe the word is Greek, straight and finely chiseled, the nostrils slightly flared. Set between two fine high cheekbones and above a beautifully shaped mouth, the lips not too full but certainly not thin, the teeth, which flashed at me through a constant grin, white and straight. The jaw was square and strong, not overly so but in exact balance with the rest of his face. The total image was classic Greek.”

I daresay I was grinning back at him, disarmed and taken by surprise by his direct request. It was a short and tender kiss, a real connection, a brief meeting of lips despite or perhaps because of him being a little drunk. We grinned at each other, something was said, and I left those two on the wide steps of the Rainbow Rooms to continue up the remaining steps into the music and the dancing. 

A DJ was playing rock’n’roll records in a modern hall on the front of the stage, long curtains closing off the stage behind. Low lighting lit a polished wooden dance floor, with a carpeted standing area by a bar to one side. I joined my friends and in the twinkling lights from the glitter ball, we jived and smiled and laughed. From the corner of my eye I saw Johnnie and Alvin arrive. I was being watched. Alvin was not a dancer but later in the evening, he came over. “Do you have a lift home?” he whispered in my ear. Smiling, I accepted his offer and he left me to dance until I was ready to leave. I was excited, nervous. I saw him smiling at me again from the sidelines. My heart was beating faster, and not just from the dancing.  

I had heard rumours about Alvin, that “maybe he took drugs” because a friend had seen him “collapse in his dressing room after a show” and that he “had lived with a girlfriend”. This was pretty outrageous in 1963 in Nottingham, where most teenagers, including me, drank alcohol and smoked cigarettes, but were pretty moderate in our habits except at weekend parties. So, I was a little nervous but already drawn to his disarming directness and exotic look. He stood out among the Italian pin-striped suits. His casual, suede-fronted, knitted jacket, blue jeans and black Cuban heeled boots gave him an air of confidence and intrigue. 

I wish I could remember us leaving the dance hall, walking together, talking, not talking, finding The Jaybirds’ Commer van, painted cream and decorated with red birds and “The Jaybirds” painted in large red letters. I do remember him struggling to engage the gears, which caused me to wonder if that was because of his drinking. He assured me it was only a mechanical fault. By this time, I didn’t care. I was both confused and entranced.

We parked in the side street outside The Newcastle [the pub where Loraine lived with her family] and kissed and kissed. Our feelings were overwhelming, our connection obvious and complete. “It’s in his kiss,” sang Betty Everett in ‘The Shoop Shoop Song’, a huge hit in March 1964. 

When I met him, Alvin Lee was only his stage name. He was Graham Anthony Barnes, 18 years old, and living at home with his parents, Sam and Doris, a few miles from my own home. His friends and family all called him Graham, not Gray or any nickname. For me he only became Alvin when we started living together in London in September 1966. So, he was Graham off-stage and Alvin on stage with The Jaybirds. Although I’d heard of them I had never seen them play. 

It’s many decades ago now but I’m surprised I don’t recall the first time I saw The Jaybirds and saw Alvin play. It was definitely in the first week we met, as we were immediately inseparable. We just wanted to be together whenever possible. We just couldn’t stop kissing. I have a treasured black and white photo of us, standing, locked together kissing, taken by the official Locarno photographer, the second evening we were together. People are sitting watching us but we are lost to the world, lost in each other and never noticed the picture being taken. 

JETHRO SPLIT… OR NOT. A NEW DAY YESTERDAY by Mike Barnes, book extract.

In this extract from Mike Barnes’ new book A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & The 1970s, Mike reveals how the manager of Jethro Tull and editor of Melody Maker concocted a fake news story long before present day politicians.

         The 600-page book, published last week by Omnibus Press and edited by yours truly, examines the myths and misconceptions surrounding prog rock. Mike paints a vivid and at times amusing picture of the Seventies and the milieu which enabled prog to thrive and, in some cases, throw up groups like Pink Floyd and Genesis who went on to long-lasting international and commercial success.

         It is 1972 and Jethro Tull are smarting from criticism aimed at their album Thick As A Brick. However, whatever barbs caused the group to chafe over these reviews was nothing compared to what would happen when their next LP landed on reviewers’ desks.

The press were now primed for Jethro Tull’s increasing ambitions, and the overall critical view of the equally ambitious A Passion Play would be almost universally negative. And with hindsight this is much easier to understand.

         A Passion Play is basically a concept album about a recently deceased person (Ronnie Pilgrim) and his journey through the afterlife. This has come to light more recently, but at the time it came across like an ill thought out mystery film, where the audience is fed cryptic clues as if when they all fit together, but at the completion of the puzzle some pieces don’t quite fit and others seem to have become lost, leaving everyone scratching their heads.

         And, indeed, the album was intended to be made into a film, but that venture fell through, although video footage was shown during the group’s live shows. The album has its many champions and was again number one in the US and number 13 in the UK. It was also critically savaged.

         Lyrically, Thick As A Brick was at least partially comprehensible and poetically quite attractive. A Passion Play has some interesting imagery, but is less comprehensible. But all that could be forgiven if the music had been of better quality. There were times on Thick As A Brick when its complexity seemed a tad gratuitous. But that was nothing compared to its successor, where everything feels over ornamented in a way that both fails to serve the song-sections and produces a huge accretion of detail that quickly becomes wearisome. Some parts are impressive – the ‘Overseer Overture’ in particular – but if ever a Seventies progressive rock album warranted a panning for being over-wrought, this is the one.

         It includes a faux children’s tale, ‘The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles’. This was meant to serve as light relief – and its chamber ensemble backing is quite sweet – but the recitation, with its groan-inducing punch line “The hare had a spare pair” delivered by Jeffrey Hammond in a toe-curling, exaggerated comedy Northern accent, makes one so glad that it’s over that for a minute or two, it’s actually a relief to be plunged back into more of the brain-curdling bombast.

         But why was it all so indigestibly over-egged? Ian Anderson offers these views: “It’s a pain in the arse,” he admits. “There is just too much going on, but it was done with a cheerful innocence. Not only I, but members of the band, would come up with ideas of layering things and complex rhythms that were demanding on the ear. We all got carried away and as a record producer, I should have had more discipline and taken a bunch of stuff out of the arrangements.

         “But it was difficult to tell enthusiastic musicians in a band, to ‘just play 4/4 drums through this [section]’. You feel like you are hampering somebody and taking something away from them, because they want to be creative and do something interesting.

         “But I would be the first person to say – and I knew this pretty soon on as when we started playing it live on stage – there is too much stuff happening; it’s too incessant. There are sections where the music opens right out, and there are quiet and rather stark passages that are slower and more open but when the band come crashing in it does tend to get a bit daunting.” He also picks out his “bloody saxophones” as something the album could have done without.

         Anderson’s relationship with the music press always seemed uneasy, especially around this time, but now seems to have become rather ameliorated through the passing of time.

         “It wasn’t uneasy on my part,” he asserts. “It was just that people understandably couldn’t be supportive if they didn’t’ like something that you did or they felt that your time had come and gone, and they shouldn’t be in hock to your record company or you just because you were pals.

         “So for example Chris Welch of Melody Maker decided that he’d be supportive of us, but had to be seen to be an independent mind, dish out some bad reviews and not be tarnished with the idea that you were somehow a tame journalist.”

         Steven Rosen of American magazine Circus spoke to Anderson in 1975, by which time Jethro Tull had been generally accepted back into the critical fold. But it exemplifies the power of music journalists who could dish it out and then retreat back to their bunkers. Readers who sent letters into the Gasbag page in New Musical Express would almost inevitably end up slightly humiliated as the more articulate, older journalist editing the column would always have the last word. Anderson clearly found all this frustrating. One needs to recall that he was, at this time, only a young man thrust into the spotlight and trying to make sense of the dichotomy between huge sales and critical opprobrium.

         “If somebody says, ‘I think your music is shitty’, that’s like saying, ‘I think your wife’s a whore’,”, he told Rosen. “And I get very angry when people say that behind my back or via the unassailable media of the press. Because I’m not in a position to defend it and I won’t be brought out or taunted by public criticism into answering it back in the same medium. Because I can never win, I’m not a journalist, and I’m not in a position to see that my words remain undistorted or in the true context when they finally appear in print… I have a fairly low opinion of the press because I think it plays way below the average level of intelligence of the audience who reads it.”

         Record companies spent a considerable amount of money taking journalists on a press junkets in the hope of good reviews. Chris Welch recalls being flown to Tokyo in 1972 by Island Records to see Emerson, Lake & Palmer, where he saw the rivalry between Progressive rock’s rising stars at first hand:

         “We arrived at the Hilton Hotel in Tokyo and just as we walked in – Keith [Emerson], Carl [Palmer] and myself, and a photographer – through the other glass doors came Ian Anderson and Jethro Tull. They were playing a concert in Tokyo that night, and because we were at the Hilton, Ian Anderson took one look at them, said, ‘I’m not saying at the Hilton with ELP’, turned around and stormed out. They walked out and booked themselves into another hotel. It was exactly like Spinal Tap.”

         Welch’s album review of A Passion Play and assessment of Jethro Tull’s live show live show were both critical, but seem fair and considered. Speaking to the journalist now there is no sense that he suddenly felt obliged to mete out a panning. Fellow Melody Maker writer Chris Charlesworth offers a second opinion: “I sat next to Chris Welch during A Passion Play at the Empire Pool. We were both bored stiff. The audience was bored too, and were making paper darts out of the programme and flying them around.”  

         What happened next was the single most bizarre outcome of a clash between the music press and a group. Jethro Tull announced their retirement.

         Jethro Tull’s manager Terry Ellis told Rob Partridge, news editor at of Melody Maker, that his charges were retiring due to the “abuse” that they had received from critics

         “I say abuse and I mean abuse – it certainly wasn’t fair criticism. In a lot of cases critics have been taking advantage of their unassailable position to be abusive,” he told MM.

         “Ian Anderson is extremely brought down by it all. When he reads in the music papers ‘Passion Play is bad’ he feels terrible, his life is music. The abuse is psychologically wearing him down and he feels it’s not fair to perform under this pressure.”

         In their statement last week the band announced their retirement would be for an indefinite period. But how long is “indefinite?”

         “If I could say one month or even 10 years, it would be a definite period.”

         At the time fans didn’t know what to make of it. This hugely popular band suddenly seemed revealed as a bunch of cry-babies because some people had the temerity to point out to them that A Passion Play was such a towering folly.

         “This gave the impression that the band had broken up and I was somehow responsible,” Welch explains. “The MM ran a ‘shock’ front page news story about the decision. It wasn’t until some years later I learned that the story had been the result of deal between MM editor Ray Coleman and Tull manager Terry Ellis, without reference to me. As it turned out JT came back with a new album War Child a year later in 1974 and announced a long world tour to promote it. My feelings about it all? Well, I was surprised the editor felt greater loyalty to the music biz than to his staff but at least I hadn’t upset Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin and caused them to ’break up.’ That could have been rather more awkward.”

         Anderson had been cited as being part of the perpetrators of this story, but he puts the blame squarely on Ellis and Coleman and opines now that the whole scam was “ridiculous”.

TOMMY AT 50 Extract

This is the first of two extracts that will appear on Just Backdated from Tommy At 50, a 176-page large format book with illustrations throughout, co-written by Mike McInnerney and myself, which will be published in mid-May.

        The book is divided into four sections, The Mood (by Mike), The Music (me), The Look (Mike) and The Legacy (me), together with a Foreword by Pete Townshend, an intro by me and, at the back, notes, bibliography, index and acknowledgements. There are also 15 two- or four-page features throughout on subjects like The Detours, Meher Baba, Kit Lambert, Pete’s home demos, Woodstock, Karen Townshend, concept albums, Ken Russell and many more, and the illustrations include previously unseen material from Mike’s original Tommy artwork, dozens of photos of The Who and other images linked to the boy who was unable to hear, speak and see.

In many ways, The Who’s recording career up to Tommy can be seen as a template for their magnum opus. Indeed, a case can be made that the protagonist of their very first single as The Who was the prototype for the deaf, dumb and blind boy.

       The narrator of ‘I Can’t Explain’, recorded in November 1964 and released midway through the following January, is a frustrated teenager unable to express himself, not just to the girl of his dreams but also to the world at large, and although he’s unencumbered by Tommy’s sensory handicaps, there’s more than a hint of the angst that Tommy Walker will endure.

       ‘I Can’t Explain’ appeared after The Beatles and Rolling Stones had emerged as the twin forerunners of the sixties beat boom. The Who – who in the fullness of time would occupy a sort of bronze-medal position behind them – were not just slow off the starting blocks but approached their calling from a different angle. The first eleven singles released by The Beatles were love songs or songs that related in some way to relationships with the opposite sex, as were seven of the first eight released by the Stones. In contrast, it’s hard to find a trace of romance in any of The Who’s singles that followed ‘I Can’t Explain’. Pete Townshend’s mind was thereafter focused on higher things: the generation gap, the plight of teenagers, communication or lack thereof, the futility of conformity, cross-dressing, sexual frustration, illusions and disillusionment. Much of this was seen through the prism of mod, the youth cult to which The Who had attached themselves during the brief period in 1964 when they were known as The High Numbers, and which clung to them throughout 1965 and ’66.

       Fortunately, Townshend had a knack of framing his rather lofty themes within a punchy three-minute pop song, so those for whom the lyrics went in one ear and out the other, or who simply didn’t get what Roger Daltrey was singing about, could still appreciate the rush of a Who single, especially when Townshend’s distorted guitar and Keith Moon’s tireless drums played key roles.

       More specifically, the musical seeds of Tommy can be traced back to The Who’s second album, released in December 1966, side two of which is dominated by the closing track, ‘A Quick One’ (also the album’s title in Britain). Included largely because Daltrey and Moon had failed to come up their quota of songs as per an agreement with the group’s music publishers, “A Quick One” was in part Kit Lambert’s solution for filling up the LP, but also a means to encourage Townshend to write an extended piece of music, thus fulfilling Kit’s ambition to emulate in some way his illustrious composer father, Constant Lambert. Goaded by his manager, Townshend wrote a “mini-opera” that lasted just over nine minutes and sped through six connected sections, all with different melodies of their own, ranging from rather camp country and western to lush harmonies and all-out power-pop, with a touch of ribald English music hall in between. There was also a rousing power-chord climax, soon to become a distinctive Who trait, with quite stunning vocal harmonies that benefited from John Entwistle’s ability to sing falsetto.

       Once recorded, ‘A Quick One’ soon became part of the group’s stage act, debuted at London’s Saville Theatre on January 29, 1967 – a propitious occasion, with Jimi Hendrix also on the bill and John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the audience. “The Who were as wild and unpredictable as ever,” wrote Chris Welch in the following week’s Melody Maker, before going on to comment on the potential for rivalry between The Who and Hendrix. “It was a close battle . . . and fans will be arguing about the winners. Either way, two of Britain’s most exciting groups thrilled the crowds with hard-hitting sights and sounds.”

       Crucially, playing ‘A Quick One’ enabled The Who to come to terms with the complexities of performing a conjoined medley of several songs, albeit fairly short ones, moving from one to the next with effortless precision regardless of tempo changes or shifts in ambience. All of this would stand them in good stead when it came time to take their next, far longer and more ambitious, rock opera on the road.

       The Who’s 1967 album, The Who Sell Out, contains precursors to Tommy that are even more unequivocal. There are hints of the opera’s mood in ‘Odorono’, a spoof deodorant commercial, and Entwistle’s ‘Silas Stingy’ seems like a blueprint for the “nasty” songs that Townshend requested he write for Tommy. Even more explicit is the coda to a lengthy and fairly enigmatic song called ‘Rael’, which offers an early introduction to the melodic themes of ‘Sparks’ and ‘Underture’ – both key instrumental motifs of the opera.

       An even bigger clue to what was going on in Townshend’s mind, albeit hidden from public view at the time, was a song called ‘Glow Girl’, which he wrote around this time, and which was recorded shortly after Sell Out was released. Though ‘Glow Girl’ would not appear on record until 1974, on the outtakes LP Odds and Sods (and later as a bonus track on the 1995 reissue of Sell Out), it seems in hindsight to be the very first lyrically identifiable germ of Tommy. Ostensibly a song about a plane crash in which the protagonist sifts through the contents of her handbag as the aircraft descends, toward the end it includes the line, “It’s a girl, Mrs Walker, it’s a girl.” With a gender change, these are among the opening lines to Tommy.

       “[‘Glow Girl’] is rich in both melody and ideas and was to have influential repercussions,” writes John Atkins in The Who on Record. “A great deal happens in a short duration . . . and the song encompasses Townshend’s patent ringing guitar chords on the intro and an up-tempo verse pattern with a sure beat from Moon before a simulated plane crash effect gives way to a more placid coda in which the victim is reborn.”

       Tommy Walker, of course, would himself be reborn once he was cured of those annoying sensory impediments.

THE STARSHIP

The more famous rock stars become the less inclined they are to fly on commercial airlines unless, of course, it’s a long-haul flight in planes with a restricted first-class cabin where they can avoid contact with the public. Nowadays the top acts of the day lease small private jets with less than a dozen seats to whisk them from city to city but back in the 1970s such planes weren’t as widespread as they are today and, in any case, this was an era when extravagance was rampant. A brash display of opulence was the measure of one’s stature in the hierarchy in the rock world, and the ultimate in grandeur in private planes was the Starship, the celebrated customised Boeing 720 that many rock bands – most notably Led Zeppelin – leased during the first half of the 1970s. 

The Starship, the first Boeing 720 ever built, was delivered to United Airlines in October 1960, then purchased for $750,000 in 1973 by Contemporary Entertainment, a company owned by teen-idol singer Bobby Sherman and his manager Ward Sylvester who spent $200,000 customising it in ways they thought might appeal to luxury-seeking rock bands. This involved reducing the seating capacity to 42, installing a fully-stocked bar in the main cabin as well as armchairs, swivel seats and tables, and a 30-foot couch that, facing aft, ran along the right-hand side opposite the bar, on the end of which was an electric organ. Wall-mounted TV sets showed an endless supply of videos, some of them pornographic. Towards the rear of the plane was what today would be called a chill-out room, with pillows on which to recline, and behind that a bedroom with a double bed and shower. A couple of attractive stewardesses were thrown in for good measure and to appeal to the vanity of its passengers the owners took to painting their name on the side of the fuselage. 

Led Zeppelin became the Starship’s first and most celebrated customers, the upshot of an uncomfortable flight between San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1973 when to their horror turbulence tossed their small private jet around in the sky. Manager Peter Grant decided to hire the far more sturdy Starship instead, and did so for the group’s 10-week 1975 US tour as well. One advantage of the Starship – or any private plane – was that it enabled the group to base themselves in one large US city from which they could fly out to shows within a 300-mile area and return the same night, thus avoiding the need to check in and out of a different hotel every day. Another was that they could bring along whoever they liked without having to obtain tickets for them, so Led Zeppelin’s friends – many of them from the fairer sex – could hop on board and off at their whim.

“The Starship was only $14,000 more [than the small private jet],” said Peter Grant, “because Boeing wanted the publicity and that kind of thing – and we thought, ‘Well why not? We’ll have a 720!’ The first day, in Chicago, they parked it next to Hugh Hefner’s plane. All the press were there, and somebody said to me. ‘Well how to you think it compares to Mr Hefner’s plane’. I said, ‘It makes his look a Dinkey toy.’”

Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant has gone on record as saying that his favourite memory of the plane was ‘oral sex during turbulence’ and Zeppelin PR Danny Goldberg recalls that Grant would disappear into the bedroom with girls and not reappear until the plane was coming into land. 

Another less well-known benefit was that the pilots were happy to allow passengers to sit alongside them in the cockpit and even demonstrate the workings of the controls. “Bonzo [John Bonham] once flew us all the way from New York to Los Angeles,” Peter Grant told me during Led Zeppelin’s 1975 tour when I flew with the group aboard the Starship from Chicago to Los Angeles, and on to Greensboro two days later, then back to New York on it the same night. Zeppelin’s tour manager Richard Cole called the Starship a ‘flying gin palace’, and he wasn’t wrong: drink flowed, sumptuous food was served and at once point on my trip we all gathered around the organ while John Paul Jones played a selection of the English Music Hall songs favoured by Grant.

Led Zeppelin were famously photographed by Bob Gruen standing alongside the plane at a private airfield near New York but they were by no means the Starship’s only clients. My first trip on it was with the Alice Cooper Band whose tour manager Dave Libert handed out a plastic bag of vitamins to the passengers each morning. I was also on board in 1974 with Elton John for a trip around the Midwest and recall that Elton rejected the haute cuisine on offer and requested instead that the stewardesses pick up a plentiful supply of Kentucky Fried Chicken, several buckets worth in fact. The more sophisticated Elton of today no doubt cringes at the memory. 

Other Starship clients included Deep Purple, Bob Dylan & The Band, The Allman Brothers, Frank Sinatra and Peter Frampton who, in 1976, was the last rock act to charter it. “It was definitely a show of where you were in your career,” said Frampton. “It was a statement of how well you were doing. ‘Whoopee! We must be big – we’ve got the Starship’. It was pretty much a party plane.”

In the end the Starship was a victim of the fuel shortage that gripped America in the mid-seventies, its four greedy engines bringing the Starship era to a close after only four years. “The fact that there was a fuel shortage and we were flying this plane, we thought was a cool thing. It fit in with Alice’s extravagant image,” says Dave Libert. 

“It was headed for the scrap heap,” adds Frampton. 

The Starship went through several changes in ownership between 1977 and 1979, eventually ending its life in storage at Luton Airport, a rather prosaic ending for the career of this most iconic of rock chariots. It was broken up for parts in 1982 and today lingers on only in the memory of the few – probably not much more than 200 of us – passengers fortunate enough to have experienced its dubious charms.

MY BOOK OF GENESIS by Richard Macphail

Tonight sees the official launch of Richard Macphail’s memoir My Book Of Genesis at an independent book shop in West London. I am credited as a ‘with’ on the cover, an entitlement that results from my having spent hours interviewing Richard last year, then setting it all down on a computer for him to browse through, re-arrange and agonise over the naughty bits.

Richard was a school friend, aide-de-camp and tour manager of Genesis in their formative years. He bowed out in early 1977 and after a period of ruminating on the meaning of life received a call from Peter Gabriel who was in need of a support mechanism to get him back on the road as a solo artist. “In many ways the job of tour managing Peter ought to have been easier after all my experience with Genesis but the truth is Peter became more and more demanding as time went on,” writes Richard. “It’s important also to realise that Peter was on his own now. Whereas before he was one of five, with responsibilities split amongst them all, the buck now stopped at him, and this certainly made him become more and more exacting.”

        In this second extract from the book we are on the road with Peter Gabriel in the spring of 1978, his second tour as a solo artist, and Richard is in charge of a show that features a level on inventiveness on Peter’s part that sometimes places unusually comic demands on his long-suffering tour manager.

‘Big One’ featured a long blues guitar solo in the middle, after the second verse, at which point Peter would come off stage, disappear for a few minutes and reappear somewhere in the theatre, usually on the balcony. He and I had prearranged this whole stunt: I’d meet him in the wings, we’d go out of the stage door, walk up the side of the theatre, re-enter at the front where a guy who worked for the promoter would be ready with the doors to let us in, and then Peter would go up the stairs to the balcony, the verse would start again and off he’d go, singing into a radio mike. The spotlights would be on him, somewhere in the audience, and they loved it, absolutely went bonkers some nights.

It was all Peter’s idea of course. He always was very imaginative in this way, always looking to be different, to do something dramatic that audiences wouldn’t expect. By now he’d graduated from the grey track suit into a pair of leather trousers and one of those white judo tops, so he stood out under the spotlight. So he’d be up there, and the audience is all of a flutter, and before they’d quite realised what was going on, we’d scooted off back downstairs where the spots would be on him again, and he’d walk down the aisle, still singing, and the closer we got to the stage the greater the rough and tumble as fans got out of their seats to touch him. I was right next to him throughout all this, and we’d usually get a couple of the promoter’s guys and a couple of guys from our crew who’d make their way towards us, so there’d be four or five of us around him to protect him. No one would want to hurt him, they were only people getting a bit over enthusiastic, but the judo shirt was usually ripped open before we could hoist him up on to the stage to a huge cheer, and then we’d disappear. It was a great stunt and although a few others tried something similar, Peter was definitely the first to do it like that. 

I always thought it was especially brave of Peter considering that all those years ago at Aylesbury he made the mistake of jumping feet first into a crowd that backed away and he broke his ankle as a result. This made him realise that what you needed to do was to fall back flat, and later, when he sang a song called ‘Lay Your Hands On Me’, he would stand at the front and fall backwards, trusting his fans to catch him. It was the most unbelievable thing to do, especially for someone who’s actually jumped off the stage and broken their ankles doing that. But he did it and they would pass him around. Lots of rock stars pay lip service to the idea of ‘getting down with the fans’ or ‘breaking down the barriers’ or whatever they choose to call it, but Peter put his money where his mouth was, if that’s the right metaphor.

It was inevitable, however, that it would go wrong sooner or later. On one night – I think it was Pittsburgh – Peter and I headed out of the stage door and into the street, which was always a bit weird with all these buses and taxis everywhere and Peter in his white top with a radio mike. As usual the promoter’s guy was waiting for us at the front of the theatre but this particular theatre had two rows of glass doors, both of which could only be opened from the inside.

Unfortunately, being a couple of light bulbs short of a chandelier, this guy pushed the inner door open and forgot that it would shut automatically behind him. He let us in through the front doors and they shut as well so we were trapped between the two banks of doors; no way in, no way out. Peter and I actually saw what was going to happen before it did. ‘Don’t let it shut,’ I screamed. But I was too late. It was fortunate this wasn’t picked up by Peter’s radio mike.

Of course, there was no one in the lobby as they were all inside listening to the show, and there was Peter and me and this bloke locked out. We could hear the band, just, and Peter started singing when he heard his cue. Luckily there was a loo in the lobby, and two guys walked out and saw us. We’re going, ‘Let us in’ and of course they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. ‘What the fuck… Peter Gabriel’s supposed to be on stage… what the fuck’s he doing here.’ They hesitated and then let us in. We didn’t do the upstairs bit that night, just the walk down the aisle, and the audience – apart from the two blokes who’d been in the loo – was none the wiser. The band knew something was up as they could hear him singing, all the while thinking, ‘Where the hell is he?’

We did that stunt every night on that whole tour, US and Europe, and it never went wrong again but I included the double-door eventuality in my preparations from then on, always checking the front of the house before the show started. To this day, I’ll never forget seeing that bloody door shut behind us.