MY STINT AS MELODY MAKER’S MAN IN AMERICA, PART 14 – New York, December 1973-October 1974

 

Newly installed in the apartment on E 78^th Street, the first thing I did was to buy a stereo on which to play the LPs that kept arriving. I was still using the Olivetti portable typewriter I’d brought back from LA, the one that Christine had borrowed, and it worked just fine on the chunky farmhouse-style wooden table. No sooner had I finished writing up my story about Greg Allman and the trip to Macon on it than I was invited to Nashville, another first, to attend Columbia Records’ annual sales convention. I flew down with Mike O’Mahoney, the company’s PR whom I knew because he used to work for CBS – as Columbia was known in the UK – in London.

         We stayed at Roger Miller’s ‘King Of The Road’ Motor Inn, named after his 1965 hit song, and it was crammed with country music cowboys. What I remember most about the hotel was its weird system of room service whereby a dozen or more large tubes extended from the basement right up to the top floor, running through the rooms, on which orders were delivered. You placed your order and 15 minutes’ later it appeared on this cockeyed dumb-waiter system. I later learned that it fell down when guests realised they could help themselves to food and drink on its way to floors above them and no one could figure out who’d put the snatch on it.

Mike Mahoney was blessed with the traditional Irish gift of eloquence and in the evening I found myself dining with Goddard Lieberson, the President of Columbia, and other executives, in a private dining room. At the other end of the table was David Essex, newly signed to the label, who spoke with an exaggerated Cockney accent that I thought was wildly affected and made him sound like a prize prat. Offered the opportunity to interview Essex, I declined. I hadn’t come to America to write about second division British pop singers like him.

A far better prospect reared its head the next day when, much to my surprise, Mike somehow wangled it that we could borrow the Columbia executive jet for a few hours, an even better plane than the one I flew in two weeks ago from Chicago to St Louis with Black Sabbath. So here I was, with just Mike for company, in this light aircraft, the nearest thing to a spaceship that I'd ever flown in. Up we went, heading east over the Blue Ridge mountains to the nearby state of Virginia to see two shows by an act for whom the label had very high hopes, another in the parade of ‘New Dylans’ as it happened. The pilot dropped us off in Richmond and headed straight back to Nashville. Only the top brass could tell him to wait.

The Mosque, in Richmond, and the Chrysler Theater in Norfolk, where we went the next day, were small old-fashioned venues and both are still operating today, though The Mosque is now called The Landmark. I don’t think either was sold out on January 25 and 26, 1974, when I was there for the first and only time.

 “He stands there looking like a cross between Elvis Presley and a reject from Sha Na Na with faint Dylanesque overtones,” I wrote in MM after seeing the shows. “A battered Fender Telecaster hangs low enough for him to qualify for a place in The Ventures. His hair is short and curly and there’s a wispy beard that never seems to grow any longer. On his nose rests a pair of square shades which stay in place all the time during his shows, which make him look more like Dylan of 1965 than Dylan of 1974. He wears jeans and a red vest and maybe a denim jacket, all of which make him look a bit like James Dean too, only smaller, skinnier and more vulnerable.

         “And he clicks his fingers now and then like Presley’s supposed to do and like Tom Jones does. He shakes his Fender back and forth and twists his hips around, looking as if he means business. He conducts the band with his fretboard, sometimes grinning and sometimes looking perplexed, like he’s not quite sure what’s happening next. And then he’ll surprise you by discarding the guitar and playing a tender love song at the piano. He dismisses the group, who return later with a change of instruments and take up a stance at the front with the regular bassist playing a tuba and the keyboard man strapped behind an accordion. The tuba makes a strange deep noise that reminded me of a colliery silver band from South Yorkshire.

         “After all that seriousness he’ll start rocking again, the big black cat on the saxophone coming on as a bass vocalist for an old rock and roll number. If you’re lucky he’ll finish his set with a rendering of ‘Twist And Shout’ complete with the ascending build up between verses that sounds just like John Lennon was standing beside him, crouched over a Rickenbacker and yelling his loudest to drown out the screams.”

It was, of course, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, whom I was seeing for the first, but certainly not the last, time. Bruce had already attracted the attention of Melody Maker, my colleague Michael Watts having written about him extensively. I took pleasure in relieving him of the baton.

Mike, Bruce and CC, Norfolk,Va, January 26, 1974

Mike and I stayed in the same hotel as the band and I chatted with Bruce in the coffee shop on the morning after the first show. He was eating a burger and fries washed down with coke, and wasn’t very talkative, shy almost, maybe a bit tongue-tied. He was thin then, quite unlike the muscular hunk he is today, with that wispy beard, and intense, like he had a lot on his mind. He wasn’t up for a real interview so I didn’t press him, just told him how much I’d enjoyed the show the night before, and he was grateful for the compliment. He was humble, courteous, like I imagine the young Elvis would have been in his Sun Records days.

         As it happened, Norfolk, Virginia, had a particular resonance for me. During the Second World War my dad served as a gunner on troop and supply ships criss-crossing the Atlantic between British ports and the American naval base here.

         Dad once told me that, off duty one summer’s afternoon in 1940, he took a bus to the beach, and an elderly black lady carrying several parcels of shopping got onto his bus and remained standing. A good-hearted Yorkshireman brought up to mind his manners where ladies were concerned, dad offered her his seat. The lady explained that because of the colour of her skin she was not permitted to sit in his seat, only at the back of the bus where all the seats were occupied. My dad, utterly ignorant of local custom, was appalled, so he made a point of standing for the remainder of his journey even though the seat on which he had been sitting remained vacant, and when the lady got off the bus he helped her with her packages. “May I help you madam,” he said to the astonished lady. “Thank you, kind sir,” she replied, so dad recalled. “I will remember this for a long time.”

  When dad reached the beach, he wrote a postcard home to my mum, whom he had married – in uniform – earlier that same year. So it was that on my visit to Norfolk to see Bruce Springsteen for the first time I did exactly the same thing. I did some exploring and from a distance saw the naval base, then I bought a postcard and went to the beach where I wrote on it something like, “Dear dad, following in your footsteps 35 years later,” and mailed it off to the old home in Yorkshire that same day.

The naval base

The two Bruce Springsteen concerts blur together a bit 46 years later so I can’t actually remember which one it was (and it might have been both) where Bruce and his band played ‘Pretty Flamingo’, Manfred Mann’s greatest song and a 1966 UK chart topper, but what I remember as clear as day was Bruce’s long, witty and gloriously uplifting monologue that prefaced it. As it was my introduction to Bruce live, his monologues were quite new to me, surprising, captivating and unique.

The ‘Pretty Flamingo’ story began with Bruce telling us how he once lived on a street in Jersey down which a beautiful girl would walk every day after work at five o’clock, so he and his buddies from the block would gather there at a quarter to five every day just to watch her stroll by. While the band ticked over in the background, idling like a car in neutral, Bruce conjured up in a few pithy sentences the image of a shapely heartbreaker that he and his buddies, and by inference they included some of the band, were too afraid to approach. They were desperate to know her name but too shy to ask, even some crazy guy in Bruce’s gang who often did really brave stuff because he was far too crazy to care about the consequences. 

         And so it went on, with the girl walking by for weeks, maybe months, and Bruce and his buddies still watching her every day, and no-one knew what she was called. By this time we in the audience were all hopelessly in love with her too, just as Bruce and his pals obviously were, and they’d coined a nickname for her. “And then… like I moved away,” said Bruce, disappointment clouding his face. “We never found out what her name was. We used to call her something. What was it that we called her Clarence? Can you remember? What did we call her Steve? I remember. Should I tell ‘em?”

         Then, louder, repeated, his right arm raised. “Should I tell ‘em?”

         “Yeah,” called Steve and Clarence in unison. “Tell ‘em Bruce.”

         “Should I tell ‘em?” He was screaming now.

         “Yeah!”

         Bruce brought his arm down. A chord.

         “On our block all of the guys called her Flamingo.”

         Guitars and drums exploded. Perfect. Just fucking perfect. The incredible tension of the build-up was finally released and like a great tidal wave crashing through the theatre Bruce and his band launched deliriously into this great song. The crowd went nuts. But he wasn’t finished with us. Two, maybe three, minutes in, just after the first verse, after Flamingo had brightened up the neighbourhood like she just could, he brought the band down again, let them tick over again, and he had us captive again.

        “What can I do Clarence?” he asked, even more passionate than before. “I gotta find that girl. I’m gonna hire a detective, someone good, like Charlie Chan.”

He was laughing now, full of fun, and we were holding on to his every word. “And when I get her I know what I’m gonna tell her. I know what I’m gonna tell her. I’m gonna tell her I’m in a band. I’m in a band!”

         And off they went again, careering downhill like men possessed.

         “Some sweet day, I’ll make her mine, Pretty Flamingo.”

         That night I saw the rock star we all of us wanted to be in our dreams.

MY STINT AS MELODY MAKER’S MAN IN AMERICA, PART 13 – New York, December 1973-October 1974

That same January I travelled on Amtrak for the first time, catching a train from Penn Station, hidden beneath Madison Square Garden, to Philadelphia, a journey of about 250 miles. I enjoyed watching the real America flashing past me for the first time, the energy of the American heartlands, the towns and the factories, the buildings and the billboards on tall towers, the wide roads that sometimes ran alongside the railroad track, the places that rock writers don’t normally see. When you’re in the rock’n’roll trade and fly everywhere, as I did, you don’t see the Jonestown companies that Springsteen would one day sing about, but you get a sense of it from a train.

         I didn’t write about these impressions in Melody Maker, of course. Bruce had yet to find the river, and I thought it unlikely that our readers would be interested in my thoughts on the American landscape. The truth was that I was on my way to Philadelphia to see the Electric Light Orchestra, and in keeping with their name opted to review them for Melody Maker in the style of a classical music critic. ‘We are gathered together, ladies and gentlemen,’ I began solemnly, ‘for a recital by that promising young group of British musicians who call themselves the Electric Light Orchestra. Please take your seats quietly and refrain from rustling your programmes. Tonight’s recital will include works by Bach, Beethoven and Chopin as well as pieces written and scored by the Orchestra themselves.’

         I was probably one of the first writers to draw attention to similarities between their sound and that of The Beatles in their mid-to-late period psychedelic phase, the Magical Mystery Tour era, but I was amused – and pleased – to note that their repertoire included a couple of singles that I’d bought when I was a teenager and learned to play on my first guitar. Just like The Cougars and Nero & The Gladiators, ELO rocked up versions of Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky) and ‘Hall Of The Mountain King’ (Grieg).

         “We’re happier working in the States than anywhere else,” Jeff Lynne told me after the show. “We’ve been here for six weeks and have had favourable reactions everywhere we’ve played.”

         I wished him luck and caught the train back to New York where my next assignment, a bit of a shift in cultural perception, was reviewing Liza Minelli at the Winter Gardens. ‘Having never seen her perform before, I enjoyed it a lot,’ I wrote. ‘Could it be that it made a welcome change from rock and roll for a few hours for me, or could it be that I found her rather cute, like a loveable puppy? She’s short, very dark and pert; full of fun, very natural and almost a little overawed at herself. When the audience claps, she claps too: a sure sign she’s subconsciously thrilled at having pleased her audience – and herself.’

         Whatever enjoyment I felt was tempered by the cost of the seats; not that this kind of thing ever impacted personally on a freeloader like me but I often felt the need to put myself in the position of the paying punter. ‘Despite an outstanding ovation, she didn’t sing an encore,’ I wrote. ‘The show commenced shortly after eight and finished before ten. With almost half an hour’s interval, that made it rather short by my standards. My seat would have cost me $12,50 and whether it was value for money is certainly debateable.’

Towards the middle of January I flew down to Macon in Georgia, my first trip south of the Mason-Dixon line. This was arranged by Capricorn Records whose owner Phil Walden had managed Otis Redding, so he was worth an interview in himself, and in the three days I was there I also interviewed the Marshall Tucker Band, Wet Willie, Allman Brothers Band keyboard player Chuck Leavell, nowadays The Rolling Stones’ first choice keyboard player, and Gregg Allman himself.

         The highlight of the trip was spending an afternoon at his ranch-style house with Greg who played guitar and sang for me, talked about his late brother Duane and discussed musicians he loved, among them Steve Winwood, Van Morrison and, perhaps surprisingly, Cat Stevens. All in all I wrote almost 4,000 words about Gregg, one of my longest interviews ever. ‘Gregg Allman picked up an old Gibson acoustic guitar and allowed his nimble fingers to slide over the six new strings,’ I wrote. ‘He tuned it and cursed and tuned it again. It was a 1920 model that had once belonged to his brother. Soon he picked notes as crisp and clear as the Georgia countryside surrounding his small estate. He played “Come And Go Blues” from Brothers And Sisters, the Allman Brothers Band’s album. Then he tuned it a little more and his picking became familiar again. He played and sang Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” perfectly. “That McCartney... shee-it!” he said.

‘He swopped guitars, choosing a 1942 blond Martin. More tuning and into the chords for “Long Black Veil”, the tear-jerking song about a man hung for a killing he didn’t do, loath to attest his alibi lest it shame his lover, his best friend’s wife. A brief pause, another tuning adjustment and Gregg played “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”, the song the Brothers sang at Duane Allman’s funeral two years ago.

‘It was like sharing a moment of reflection,’ I continued, ‘a very private moment I had no right to. I wondered what exactly he was thinking, but I never really found out, even after speaking with him for over an hour. I don’t think anyone in the world knows what’s going on inside Gregg Allman’s head. He gives out his music and keeps the rest to himself.’

         Gregg’s long blonde hair habitually got in the way of the guitar’s fretboard. He spoke in a deep Southern drawl that was at times difficult for me to understand, but he was hospitable to a tee. “Help yourself to the cocaine,” he said at one point, indicating a bowl full to the brim with white power on the coffee table. I had thought it was sugar. I’d never seen so much cocaine in one vessel in my life. Throughout the interview we sipped Dom Perignon champagne which he referred to as “a little white wine from Fraynse”. His fridge, a walk-in affair, was jam packed with it.

Greg and Janis

When the interview was over we shook hands and as I was leaving he stood in the doorway of his luxury bungalow, one arm around Janice, the second of his seven wives, the other waving goodbye. “Mind y’all come back soon now,” he said in the way that Southerners always do.

In the evenings in Macon – pronounced Maykin as I discovered – I was entertained by the staff from Capricorn’s press office, among them a Southern Belle I tried to impress by giving her a coveted Alice Cooper medallion given to me by Shep Gordon. She accepted the gift graciously and we were bill and cooing in the darkest corner of a bar when she suddenly went cold on me.

         “What’s wrong?” I asked,

         “Wayyell, Chris,” she said, stretching her vowels like Elly May in the Beverly Hillbillies, “Butch Trucks from the Brothers Bayyaaaand has just walked in.”

         “Well?”

         “I think he fayyaancies me.”

         “I don’t blame him.”

         “The thing is Chris, he won’t take kaiiindly to me being with you.”

“So?”

“Well, he has a temper on him and he usually carries a gun.”
I withdrew.

Back in New York I scoured the pages of the Village Voice looking for somewhere better to live than the poky little flat on Lexington Avenue. I needed somewhere where I could work as well as live and my budget, controlled by my Squadron Leader, was $400 a month. Two ‘serviced’ flats I saw were unsuitable because they were far too small, but I hit third time lucky when I found the apartment on East 78^th Street. It was well-nigh perfect, a dining area on a raised level as you entered, then a step or two down into a large living area, with a nice table I could use for a desk, a big bedroom off to the left, a separate – and, I would find, chronically underused – kitchen with a massive fridge. It was fitted out with deep pile shag carpets, comfortable for sleeping on if I didn’t make it to the bedroom but I soon learned that the best feature was actually the bathroom. The tub was tiny but the water from the shower was steaming hot, so much so that if you left it on for five minutes it was like a sauna in there, especially if you closed the window and stood on the loo seat where the extra height had a Turkish bath effect that sweated off hangovers.

51 East 78th Street, taken by a friend around 2012. 
My flat was three floors up, the one with the air conditioners poking out of the windows. 

         The neighbourhood was tidy. The building was between Madison and Park Avenues and directly opposite was Finch College, an up-market private girls school whose alumni included Tricia Nixon and Grace Slick. Less than a block away on Madison I found a shop that stocked day-old British newspapers, a Baskin & Robins that sold the best ice cream I’d ever tasted and a Greek coffee shop where I ate scrambled eggs and home fries most mornings for breakfast, washed down with freshly squeezed orange juice and coffee. There was a Jewish deli on the corner where, one day, an elderly waitress queried my age – I was 26 – when I ordered a beer, and a small supermarket next door. Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were a couple of blocks away, and close by was a small lake where old men sailed lovingly tended model boats.

         IPC must have been remarkably efficient when it came to paying my phone bills, which were always massive. In LA I’d ran up enormous bills calling the UK and when I called the phone company in New York and ordered a couple of phones for the apartment they came round with two brand-new white push-button jobs and hooked me up within a couple of hours. Ma Bell recognised a good customer when she found one.

         Answering machines not yet having been invented, I contracted an answering service so that my phone was answered – on the third ring I think – by someone somewhere who took down messages and relayed them back to me when I called and gave my personal code. Since I was out a lot the girls who answered my phone were the nearest thing I ever had to a PA in New York, and although I spoke to them all the time I never met any of them, ever.

         In hindsight I think I ought to have found an apartment downtown, perhaps in Greenwich Village, but I soon got the hang of the subway system which took me downtown and back again remarkably quickly on the local and express trains, a system unlike the London Underground but which was far more efficient, for only 50 cents. Although the subway was dirty and incredibly noisy and the carriages were covered in graffiti, it was a taste of New York’s underbelly that contrasted sharply with my rather bourgeoise rock’n’roll lifestyle. But I didn’t mind. Whenever I took the subway downtown I dressed the part, scruffy, looking like I only had a few cents in my pocket. And since when I got to where I was going it didn’t matter what I looked like and everything for me was usually free, that’s pretty much all I ever needed anyway.  

MY STINT AS MELODY MAKER’S MAN IN AMERICA, PART 12 – New York, December 1973-October 1974

When Christine flew back to LA and Barrie to London I was on my own in New York and had to fend for myself. As I did in LA, I called up all the record and PR companies to inform them of my presence here and, sure enough, the promo LPs started to arrive again, along with tickets for gigs and invitations to interview all and sundry. This time I at least had a record player on which to play LPs, albeit one belonging to her whose flat I now occupied.

         Like Roy Hollingworth and Michael Watts before me, I presented myself at the offices of IPC, Melody Maker’s parent company, several flights up in the Chrysler Building at 205 East 42^nd Street. With its stunning art deco spire, it is still the most elegant of all New York’s many skyscrapers. Here I became acquainted with the man who ran IPC America, a plump old Squadron Leader type of chap, complete with bushy moustache, who suggested I find myself somewhere to live in Yonkers, wherever that may have been. I had other ideas. I wanted to live in Manhattan, where the action was, and decided to ignore his housing advice. He introduced me to a pleasant Italian girl called Gina who would occasionally retype my stories on a ticker tape machine, this being the fastest way to relay text from New York to London in those days. Gina would also call me with occasional ticker tape messages or cables from London.

         ‘Mr Coleman wants you to interview someone called Lou Reed.’

         ‘OK. Thanks Gina.’

         ‘Who is he?’ she would ask. ‘Is he famous?’

         Once established, each Thursday afternoon for the next three years I would leave my package of typed pages and photographs at these offices, from where a courier picked them up for delivery on Friday mornings to MM’s HQ in London’s Fleet Street. I would also collect my weekly cheque for $150 to cover my ‘living expenses’ and on the way home deposit it at a nearby branch of Hanover Trust, the bank where I had opened an account. The rent on my flat, the phone bills, gas and electric were all paid by my Squadron Leader.

New York in January was bitterly cold but, as in LA, I was warmly welcomed into the rock fraternity. I was invited to dinner at the home of Lisa and Richard Robinson who had the biggest private record collection I’d ever seen, and they showed me all their American Beatles LPs, thus satisfying my curiosity on that score. I was astonished by a double LP set that featured The Beatles on one disc and The Four Seasons on the other. Lisa published her own magazine, Rock Scene, and wrote a New York column for New Musical Express, while Richard was the record producer largely responsible for Lou Reed’s re-emergence after the Velvets called it a day. Their friend Lenny Kaye, another writer, joined us there and he invited me to check our Bleecker Bob’s Golden Oldies record store where he worked part time, which I did a day or two later.

         I was also invited to a party at the midtown apartment that Newsday rock critic and Rolling Stone columnist Dave Marsh shared with his partner Barbara Carr, who worked in the press office at Atlantic and before long would go into partnership with writer Jon Landau in the management of Bruce Springsteen. They had a hell of a lot of records too. Dave and I bonded over a deep love of The Who and at his place I met fellow rock critics Bob Christgau of the Village Voice, John Rockwell of the New York Times, and Paul Nelson who wrote for Rolling Stone and, while working for Mercury Records, signed the New York Dolls which cost him his job at the label.

         I was already moving in the right circles but at the same time noting how earnestly all these writers viewed the jobs they were doing, always seeking a deeper meaning in the rock music they wrote about, a bit like Townshend I suppose, which is why they all loved The Who but looked askance at Led Zeppelin who for all their skills lacked intellectual depth, at least as far as they were concerned. I think some of them looked askance at me too, a fairly happy-go-lucky Brit whose domestic circumstances were cushioned by the big selling music paper for which I worked – perhaps a source of envy – but it seemed to me that my MM brothers and I had far more fun writing about rock music than they did. No matter, I have always subscribed to the notion that rock’n’roll’s basic function was to provide fun, and I still do. 

         Meanwhile, a friend I’d made in LA, Peter Philbin, had moved to New York to take up a position as press officer at CRI – Columbia Records International – with special responsibility for looking after visiting foreign press. Since I was the only foreign music press guy on a semi-permanent visit to the city, that meant he was mainly looking after me. Very opportune, I thought, as every single Columbia LP release, from rock and pop to country, jazz and classical, as well as spoken word like How To Speak Spanish, came winging my way.

On January 2 I was invited to see my pals Slade in St Louis, Missouri. Noddy, Jim, Dave and Don were playing the sold-out Ambassador Theatre, capacity 3,000, and I soon realised this was an unusual state of affairs as far as Slade were concerned. Because a local DJ took a liking to them and played their records a lot on his radio station, St Louis was one of few American cities where Slade were massively popular, and later in the year they would sell out the 10,000-seater Kiel Auditorium there, again with me on hand as a prejudiced observer.

         We stayed at Stouffer’s Riverfront Hotel, a tall circular tower that overlooked the Mississippi, by far the widest river I’d ever seen, which inspired Noddy to write the lyrics for ‘Far Far Away’. The hotel was next to the Gateway Arch, the world’s tallest arch and at over 600 foot the tallest man-made monument in the western hemisphere, and the Riverfront had a revolving restaurant on the top floor.

Stouffer’s Riverfront is the tower to the left of the arch

The concert was a riot of fun, just like Slade shows in the UK. This was the first time I’d seen Slade headline in the US and I was surprised Noddy didn’t tone down his exuberant patter for American audiences who were traditionally less inclined towards getting their boots off, getting down and getting with it. Here in St Louis, I thought, I might as well have been in Wolverhampton. Unlike in LA, where I saw them support J Geils, the unique Slade rapport hit bullseye.

Afterwards the usual gaggle of fans, mostly female, found their way back to Slade’s hotel and in the bar I befriended a blonde heiress called Debbie who told me she was a model, and from the look of her and the way she dressed I wasn’t about to argue. We hung out together for a while and a couple of weeks later she came to stay with me in New York where I took her out to dinner with Peter Gabriel and his manager Gail Coulson. Gabriel, who always had a keen eye for the female form, seemed quite taken with her. Debbie and I hooked up on my subsequent visits to St Louis and in the spring, immediately after my first visit back to the UK since the previous August, we took a week’s holiday together in New Orleans, of which more later.

As it happened, it wasn’t long before I was back in St Louis. On February 11 I made my second trip to Chicago to watch Black Sabbath in the same shed where I’d seen ELP in December. The following day I flew with them to St Louis in a small plane, a 12-seater I think, my first ever flight in this type of aircraft, and saw a second Sabbath show at Kiel Auditorium. Their manager Pat Meehan was gobsmacked when Debbie was waiting for me in the lobby of the Riverfront – all the bands stayed there apparently – when we arrived to check in. I’d told her I was coming, of course, but only rock stars were supposed to have a glamorous girl in every city. Debbie and I watched the show at Kiel from side of the stage and afterwards, back at the hotel, Meehan did his absolute best to move in on her, without success I’m pleased to say.

Black Sabbath’s brand of what soon become universally known as heavy metal wasn’t really to my taste but, as with ELP, there was no denying the enthusiasm of their fans who loved Tony Iommi’s doomy solos, Ozzie Osbourne’s peace-sign posturing and the relentless, machine-like pounding of their rhythm section.

Backstage in their dressing room I was surprised to see the cheap luggage in which they transported their unwashed and rather grubby stage clothing, a sharp contrast to the five-star valeting practices employed by acts like The Who, Led Zeppelin and Elton. Pete Townshend always mounted the stage in newly dry-cleaned and sparkling white clothes, Jimmy Page’s embroidered stage suits were lovingly maintained and Elton’s many outfits were shuttled from place to place in state-of-the-art portable wardrobes and tended by an on-tour seamstress. Ozzie’s fringed tops looked soiled and shabby to me, however. They’re not being looked after properly this lot, I thought to myself. I was right too, and in ways that went far beyond their laundry. 

MY STINT AS MELODY MAKER’S MAN IN AMERICA, PART 11 – New York, December 1973-October 1974

When I arrived in New York I checked into the Gorham Hotel – now renamed The Blakely – which was a dump. Tucked around the back of Carnegie Hall on West 55^th Street, it was the hotel from which The Who were evicted in April, 1968, after Keith Moon is alleged to have walked out on to a ledge several floors up and chucked cherry bombs down on police below. Like the Gramercy Park at the bottom end of Lexington Avenue, it was much used by English musicians unable to afford the more expensive Drake or Essex House, let alone the St Regis, Waldorf Astoria or Plaza.

I hated it and had to find somewhere else to live. A friend who worked for Columbia Records came to my rescue, finding me a one-bedroom apartment above a deli on Lexington Avenue between 55^th and 56^th Streets. It belonged to a friend of his, a girl who’d gone off to live with her boyfriend, quite hurriedly it seemed as she’d left all her possessions behind: books, records, furniture, kitchen stuff and a closet and drawers full of her clothes too. 

She didn’t have many records but among them was her copy of Revolver which I scrutinised closely. It seemed to be lacking three tracks, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing ’and ‘Doctor Robert’, and at first I couldn’t figure out why. This was the first indication I’d had that American Beatles albums were different from the UK ones, something I’d never realised until now.

         After three months I moved from Lexington Avenue into apartment 3D at 51 East 78^th Street, my home away from home for the next three years, of which more later.

In the meantime, life became even more hectic on the rock front in New York than it was in LA. My first assignment was a quick trip to Chicago where, with MM photographer Barrie Wentzell for company, I caught up with Emerson, Lake & Palmer, reviewing a show at the International Amphitheatre on December 3. I think Barrie had been asked by ELP’s management to take some live shots of them for promotional use and he’d checked into the Gorham on the same floor as me, which meant I had a drinking partner in New York, for a few days anyway. Roy Carr, the NME writer, had come over to do a story on ELP too.

         ELP were not really to my taste and I was a bit surprised that their brand of bombastic pseudo-classical rock found such an enthusiastic audience in a Chicago shed. Although they closed their shows with a vigorous stab at ‘Nut Rocker’, a much-loved variation on Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker’ first released in 1962 by a studio group called B. Bumble & The Stingers, ELP’s music was in sharp contrast to the perennially popular US-style non-stop boogie. They were big on special effects and showmanship, not least Keith Emerson abusing his Hammond organ with knives, and I figured this was what probably won over US audiences.

         After the show Barrie and I copped a ride back to the hotel in the same stretch limo as Keith. I’d known him since he was in The Nice, when he and his Danish wife Elinor used to drink in La Chasse, a private members club catering to the music biz on Soho’s Wardour Street. He was always a friendly, down-to-earth fellow, quietly spoken and quite different off stage to the knife-throwing extrovert his audiences thought they knew. We were chatting away about mutual friends in the back of the limo when the driver turned around and informed us we were being followed. Then he drove like a madman, skipping lights, making quick unsignalled turns and alternately slowing down and accelerating really fast. Keith, Barrie and I grabbed on to straps, hanging on for dear life. “We’ve lost him,” he announced after about ten minutes.

         This was the first of many visits I would make to Chicago and O’Hare Airport, the world’s busiest. Each and every time I passed through it I was accosted by ingratiatingly subservient young women in smock tops, ankle-length skirts and sandals with flowers in their long straight hair, promoting religious cults, all smiles and platitudes but chillingly persistent. “Thank you but I’m not interested,” I would say politely, mindful of what happened to Jeremy Spencer of Fleetwood Mac, and walk away. Then they’d follow me and try again. After a while I realised that the only way to get rid of them was to be filthy rude. “Fancy a fuck?” usually did the trick. Worked with Moonies too.

My next assignment from New York occurred just over a week later, on December 11 & 12, when I found myself witnessing Alice Cooper in action in Madison, Wisconsin, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, flying from La Guardia with his shrewdly clever manager Shep Gordon. There was snow everywhere and it was unbelievably cold. The exquisitely fragrant actress Cybill Shepherd was also accompanying Alice, covering the tour for some up-market woman’s magazine. We interviewed Alice together in his hotel suite, and for a moment I thought Cybill and Alice were an item but they weren’t. Of course, I found it difficult to purge the image of her stripping naked on the diving board in the famous swimming pool scene from The Last Picture Show. Most unsettling it was.

        At this time Alice Cooper was the name of the group, not just their lead singer who subsequently took the name for himself and replaced the band with hired hands. But the writing was on the wall as during the concerts there was a hidden guitarist called Mick Mashbir playing the tricky parts in the wings where the audience couldn’t see him. No-one tried to hide this from me. It was regarded as perfectly normal but I remember thinking how outrageous it would be if, say, The Who or Led Zeppelin had a guitarist in the wings covering for Townshend or Page – unheard of! And the Cooper band was aspiring to the same level.

        My connection with the Cooper crowd was eased by a solid friendship with Ashley Pandel, his publicist who worked for the Cooper set-up, Alive Enterprises, which was run by Shep. Ashley, whom I’d already met in London, would go on to form his own PR company in New York, the Image Group, with Alice as a star client, along with Lou Reed, The New York Dolls, Todd Rundgren and a few others. My ex-MM colleague Roy Hollingworth, now living in New York, went to work for him as a copywriter and on Friday nights a gang of us – Ashley and his girlfriend Nancy, Roy and his girlfriend Iris, Mandi Newall, who also worked for Ash – would head up First Avenue to an Australian bar called Waltzing Matildas and play darts. That December, when we were joined by Barrie, Roy Carr and music writer Lorraine Alterman, Mandi took a few pictures of us all in the bar, and I’ve attached them below. They’re only contact sheets so a bit small but every time I look at them I'm reminded of this period of my life, how nights like this, out with friends, made my first December away from home not so bad after all. 

At the top we find Barrie with Nancy, then Barrie with Iris, followed by Lorraine, Nancy and Iris; next row, Ashley, Barrie and Lorraine, then Ashley, Barrie, me and Lorraine; next row, Roy, then Roy Carr with Barrie; and we’re all somewhere or other in the big contact sheet.

        It was during my first year in New York that Alice’s tall blond drummer Neal Smith married another statuesque blonde, a model by the name of Babette, followed by a reception on board a boat that circled Manhattan, to which I was invited. Because police intervention could come only from another boat that would be seen approaching, parties held off shore like this offered opportunities for extreme debauchery, and this was no exception. Gallons of booze, shitloads of cocaine, fragrant cigarettes made from Old Nick’s navy cut, casino-style gambling and private cabins for intimate liaisons – you name it. It was well after dawn when the boat docked and its dishevelled, bleary-eyed passengers disembarked.

It being close to that time of the year, back in New York I wrote up my Alice Cooper story as a spoof whodunit in the style of a Sherlock Holmes Christmas story, in which I became the great detective on the hunt for Alice and his gang, solving the mystery of the distinction between the identities of Alice and Vince Furnier, his real name.

This was my first Christmas out of the UK, and – as I related at the conclusion of my last batch of memoirs – I invited Christine, my English ex-girlfriend from Los Angeles, to spend it with me, even offering to buy her flight ticket. To my surprise and delight she accepted and we agreed that from now on our relationship would be platonic. On Christmas morning I took her for a ride around Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage and later in the day had Christmas dinner with my friend Peter Rudge, his wife Frankie and their two kids. Pete had set up in business in New York to manage The Who’s American affairs and supervise the Rolling Stones’ touring worldwide. Knowing how much he loved sport I bought him a grid football outfit, complete with ball, helmet and the shoulder padding that US footballers use. I can still remember the look of delight on his face as he ran off to his bedroom to try it on. He returned to where we all were in the living room, looking something like this.

BEATLES SPLIT – SHOCK!

Here, there and everywhere this week I am reminded that it is the 50^th anniversary of The Beatles ceasing to be, at least if you observe the logic that their dissolution dates from April 10, 1970, the day Paul issued the notorious press release promoting his first solo LP. This document famously contained the first public statement that he no longer envisaged working with the other three again, or reactivating what was actually a long dormant writing partnership with John.

         Taking the form of a questionnaire between Paul and Apple executive Peter Brown, it was enclosed within advance promo copies of his album, thus guaranteeing its widespread distribution and readership, and, although Paul has subsequently revealed that it was not his intention to split The Beatles by this action, he must surely have foreseen its consequences. I’d have been amazed – maybe – if he hadn’t.

         This unhappy circumstance, which attracted headlines throughout the world, occurred precisely three weeks before I joined the staff of Melody Maker, so I narrowly missed out on being able to report the biggest pop music news story of the decade in the biggest weekly pop paper. At the time, of course, it came as a shock. In those days no one really knew what was going on behind the scenes in the world of The Beatles; that the break-up had been on the cards for a while and that Ringo, John and George – in that order – had all quit before Paul made his announcement but had been persuaded by the others to either change their minds or keep schtum, largely for business reasons. John, of course, was mightily miffed that Paul had let the cat out of the bag, not least because he had formed the group in the first place and believed quite strongly that this gave him, and only him, the exclusive right to terminate it.

         Nowadays we know – or think we know – so much about what was going on behind the scenes in the word of The Beatles that we don’t know who or what to believe any more. But not many serious books about The Beatles had been published by 1970 and even the best of them, Hunter Davies’ 1968 authorised biography, steered well clear of suggesting anything was ever amiss between the four individuals. Fifty years and hundreds of books – I own a modest 35 – later we are in a world of information overload but at the time it was greeted with disbelief and worldwide sorrow.

         But does it matter? Of course not. What matters is the ongoing love and respect for The Beatles and the music they made, and the enjoyment it continues to give to succeeding generations. I’ll never forget how my son, born in 1995, loved Yellow Submarine as a youngster, nor how seriously my daughter, born in 1992, coloured in a picture of George to leave among the tributes at Abbey Road when he left us in 2001.

         The mere fact that this 50^th anniversary is being celebrated – if that’s the right word – is surely as profound a symbol as any of the affection in which they are and always will be held. The Beatles remain the yardstick by which success in the music industry is measured, no matter that many of their accomplishments have been statistically surpassed simply because the business they did so much to create has grown so much bigger in their absence. Still, can you imagine the dissolution of any other music group ever being noted in the way this anniversary is? And still more, can you imagine the discovery of a hitherto unseen photograph of any other group besides John, Paul and George as teenagers, playing their guitars, making the news as the one below did last week?

         So here’s hoping that those worthy Scouse Knights of the Realm, Paul, now 77, and Ringo, 79, survive the hardships of 2020 and, along with Yoko, who’s all of 87 now, are still here, there and everywhere in 2021.

THE WHO – THE 1966 BUST UP IN NEWBURY

 Keith with Bruce Johnson and RSG’s Cathy McGowan on the night of the bust-up

Regular get-togethers with a group of my old Melody Maker colleagues enable me to catch up with former Who drummer Geoff Brown, who was the MM’s sub-editor for several years during my time on the paper and is now an Associate Editor at Mojo.

Former Who drummer Geoff Brown, you might ask. Never heard of him!

Well, while Keith Moon, Kenney Jones and, nowadays, Zak Starkey have all held down The Who’s drum stool on what at the time seemed like a permanent basis, there is a secondary group of drummers who for one reason or another have occasionally sat behind Pete, Roger (and John) and done their best to supply the beat. Detours drummer Doug Sandom springs to mind, of course, as does Simon Phillips who held down the drum spot alongside Jodie Linscott on extra percussion during the 1989-90 bells and whistles Tommy tour. A session drummer or two came between Doug and Keith and the past decade or two has seen drummers from other bands occasionally take over when Zak was elsewhere, not least playing for Oasis. And who can forget Scott Halpin who took over in San Francisco in November 1973 when Keith’s backstage tipple was spiked with animal tranquiliser? But where does Geoff Brown come in?

On Friday May 20, 1966, at the Ricky Tick Club in the Corn Exchange, Newbury, The Who were supported by the Jimmie Brown Sound, for whom Geoff played drums. “Moon and Entwistle didn’t turn up,” Geoff once told me. “Well, they were very late. Daltrey and Townshend were furious, really angry. We were a soul band so they asked me and our bass player [Colin Standring] if we’d stand in for them. We did ‘Heatwave’ and then ‘Ooh Poo Pah Doo’, the Jessie Hill song. Then Moon and Entwistle showed up with Bruce Johnston of The Beach Boys, and they were pissed. Of course they took over but the atmosphere was really heated.”

         Tempers remained heated during the remainder of The Who’s set, however, and flared up at the end. “Moon kicked over his drums and a cymbal caught Townshend so he just threw his guitar at Moon,” remembers Geoff. “It caught him a really heavy glancing blow on the forehead and knocked him right back. Then there was a flare up in the dressing room and Moon and Entwistle left in their own car. It was obvious there’d been a real fight.”

         Keith received a black eye and badly bruised face and also required three stitches in his leg, and he and Entwistle announced their intention to leave the band. The next day Pete went to Keith’s house in Wembley to apologise but Keith refused to open the door. In the event it took a week before Keith decided to rejoin the fold, and in the meantime the other three used drummers from the support acts.

         After the incident Geoff continued drumming for another 18 months before turning to journalism in 1968. He still has his Rogers kit though.

READY STEADY GO! THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE. The Definitive Story Of The Show That Changed Pop TV – by Andy Neill

I can date with some certainty the occasion when I first discovered what The Who looked like when they were performing. It was July 2, 1965, a Friday, just after the pubs had shut, and they were appearing on Ready Steady Go!, on Granada TV, playing their new single ‘Anyway Anywhere Anyhow’, live too, and I’d never seen anything like it in my life before.

         The singer looked like he didn’t want to be there, as if the other three were people he wanted to avoid, and he didn’t so much sing as spit out the words to what sounded to me like a song of thuggish defiance; the bass player stood stock still and looked bored, plucking his strings with his fingers in an upward motion, not something I’d seen until now; the drummer was completely crazy, bouncing up and down on his stool and randomly hitting everything in sight, grinning into the camera like an idiot; and the guitarist, the most remarkable of them all, looked surly, ugly even, raising his arm above his head to slash down across the strings of his instrument, then using the volume control to create a stuttering effect, like Morse code, and deliberately inducing feedback from his amplifier, something I always thought guitarists tried hard to avoid at all costs. When the song reached its climax the camera zoomed in and out of the group as if the guy behind it was drunk or had fallen over, taking his camera with him. As the singer pointed out, they certainly didn’t follow the lines that had been laid before.

         I was reminded of this last week when my son and I watched two hour-long programmes devoted to RSG! on BBC4. The first was a ‘story of’ documentary, the second a ‘best of’, and both featured that performance by The Who as the climax to each. Were it not for CV-19 these shows would have coincided with the release of Andy Neill’s 272-page, large format book about RSG!, the text of which I read last year when Andy asked me give it an editorial once over. That slight conflict of interest aside, I can state, hand on heart, that it’s the best book about the best ever pop TV show you’re ever likely to read.

         It’s difficult to emphasise how influential RSG! was in terms of pop TV. Like pirate radio, mini-skirts and everything else that seemed to have been conjured up by The Beatles and Rolling Stones, the show epitomised the wholesale upheaval that turned our staid United Kingdom into a wonderful place to live during the first half of the sixties. “Ready, Steady, Go! was a pivotal part of the cultural development in the UK in the post-war years,” writes Pete Townshend in the book. “If that is rather a sociological beginning I should quickly add that it reflected the colour and vivacity of the times better than almost any other medium.”  

         The Who were clear favourites of RSG!’s production team and for a while ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’ was used as the show’s theme tune. “I tried to make the camera more of a participant, like another member of the band,” RSG! director Michael Lindsay-Hogg tells Andy of the appearance I watched. “When we did ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’, the bit where it takes off with feedback and things in the middle, the camera is shaking, and I didn’t care if it was out of focus or just coming into focus because in a funny way the music itself was so alive you wanted the camera to be alive, to be part of the music, you didn’t want it to be static.”

         While RSG! certainly offered the best possible showcase for The Who, just about every other act of note, British and international, was featured on a show that, at times, became magically chaotic as group, audience and technicians all mingled together on a dance floor at the studios in London’s Kingsway and, later, at Wembley. “Studio 9 at Kingsway was a marvellous place to do the show because it was like a rather sleazy nightclub in a basement studio,” says presenter Keith Fordyce. “It was very tight and cramped for the amount we got in there. The cameramen had a fairly difficult time because they were more or less busking it really. They’d line up what their shots might be but they couldn’t be quite sure they were going to get them, it was so cramped.”

         A list of those who appeared on the show, always within touching distance of the fans, is headed by The Beatles and Rolling Stones, and a regular was Dusty Springfield who briefly filled in the presenter’s role before mod heroine and fashion leader Cathy McGowan was hired. Dusty, along with her friend Vicki Wickham, the show’s then assistant editor, was instrumental in getting several black acts on the show, thus giving them their first TV exposure in the UK.

         All of this and more is detailed in Andy’s book which traces RSG!’s inception from its launch in August of 1963 to its final show almost three years later. Fully illustrated with special features on various performers, it includes contributions from Mick Jagger, Ray Davies, Chris Stamp, Eric Burdon and, naturally, Pete Townshend. Vicki Wickham and Michael Lindsay-Hogg have contributed forewords and are interviewed throughout.

         Adds Pete: “… Vicki, bounding from the control room to the studio, beaming, laughing and enthusiastic, tall and beautiful, but a little scruffy with it, like a highland pony, and Michael, who always seemed as though he was attached to an electric generator, his hair falling over his face, handsome, with the pout of a mischievous teenager but with a cigar clenched in his teeth – they both conveyed the sense that we were, all of us, breaking every rule of television. I felt they were breaking societal rules as well, and of course that is now a given.”

         The book is now likely to be published in the late summer.