One Train Later: A Memoir (15 page)

One day we have a session booked at Pye Studios near Edgeware Road, where we are halfway through making an album. The session is booked for two o'clock. Zoot and I have been on an all-night acid binge and are about as much use as a chocolate fireplace. A recording session at two in the afternoon is what we probably think of now as some old form of game playing. But we turn up late and find the rest of the band waiting for us. It's hard to take anything seriously, as we are still on the way down from God knows what cosmic peak we've been perched on during the night. But we get to work trying to teach the others a song we have recently written called "I Really Learned How to Cry." With suspicious looks from the rest of the band, it's assuming direction-although slowly because the two of us are hungover and indecisive and break into giggling fits. Somehow we get into putting the song down on tape with an incredible amount of guitar distortion. No one's playing with this amount of fuzz, not even Eric, so I don't know if it's a premonitory look at the future of the guitar or I am just too out of it to make much sense of the studio, but at three o'clock in the afternoon it seems inhumanly brutal and vulgar and the studio engineer, screwing up his face at my guitar, which sounds like a mosquito on steroids, looks at us through the control-room window as if we need straitjackets.

After hearing the playback and feeling somewhat disconsolate, we wander out of the control room and into the corridor. A recording engineer we know is standing there and asks us if we would like to hear a song that the Beatles have just recorded; no one has heard it, as they had been in these studios just a few days before. He ushers Zoot and me into a tiny playback room and rolls the tape. A sound of heaven fills the room; it's them singing "She's Leaving Home." We listen, stunned at the absolute pop perfection of it; to our acidsoaked ears, it sounds like running honey-sweet, poignant, perfect-and, boy, would we like to have done it ourselves. After staring at the carpet and murmuring things like "Christ" and "fuck," we wander back out. But it has the odd effect of inspiring us, and we go back and listen to the track we've just recorded and I find myself digging the distorted guitar. It isn't the Beatles, but with its nasty snarl and bracing headwind, it is something alright.

A few months later we're due to play a BBC show called the Saturday Club with Brian Matthews. The night before we have again taken off into the inner realm again with a substantial dose of something called white lightning, and Zoot has lain on his bed without moving for something like fourteen hours. We arrive at the BBC and somehow perform the songs that we are up for, and then it's time for Zoot to be interviewed by Brian. At this time there is a lot of news and bad publicity about LSD in the papers. Once he has got a few of the usual boring questions out of the way, Brian starts asking Zoot his opinion of all these young people who are now illegally taking LSD. The rest of the band is sitting up in the balcony, giggling away like schoolgirls, as Zoot-still coming down from the night before-manages to croak out some righteous and politically correct response to Brian's probe.

But this cannot last and the band begins splitting apart. It comes to a head one night after we've played a show at the A-Go-Go in Newcastle. In the dressing room I have a conversation with Zoot in which I express my views with considerable intensity. I think we are doomed if we carry on in the way we have; something else is happening in music, and we are getting left behind. I believe we should get rid of the saxophones and start writing our own songs, maybe get a light show and be a part of the wave.

The combination of the times, the drugs, and the urge to write our own songs stretches the skin of our band to the breaking point. Within a fairly short time we finish up whatever gigs we have booked and then make the announcement that the Big Roll Band is over. There is a gasp of disbelief in the musical community; people think we are insane, the band is loved, we are in demand, promoters would still book us. It's not a popular move; in fact, you can almost hear the booing, but we do it. Maybe Zoot recognizes some of this, or not; but I will forever feel responsible for the breakup of the Big Roll Band. I pushed for it and it happened. Zoot and I are caught in the fever of psychedelics and maybe we're not thinking straight, but they are a major influence in the decision to move on. We have seen the other side, and it's calling to us. Nick Newall gets a gig elsewhere, Johnny Almond forms his own very successful band with Jon Mark, and Paul Williams goes on to considerable success with his own band Juicy Lucy. Zoot, Colin, and I stay together and, with a new bass player by the name of Pat Donaldson, turn our faces toward the cosmic future.

BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

Lying flat on my back, I close my eyes and concentrate on my breathing. As if in meditation, I sense the breath rise and fall. As I lie between the sheets, the words "every breath you take" echo out like a mantra across the country. Songwriting is the lifeblood of a band, the scaffolding on which you hang your skills, show them to advantage. Sting is a naturally gifted songwriter. The songs he writes become the catalyst for the Police's instrumental energy. Before the Beatles very few people wrote their own songs, but the Beatles opened the door and set us all on the songwriting path. This idea took hold and developed until the mark of a group became not only how good the songs they play are but how good are the songs they write.

Our new band begins with Zoot and I sitting around late at night on the floor of the flat with two acoustic guitars, trying to write our own songs. Sometimes we read through the daily newspaper, trying to find some incident that will provoke our imagination. After a while we have a fair number of songs under our belt, enough to make a record and enough to go out on the road: "High Flying Bird," "Four Firemen," "Fourpenny Bus Ride," "World War Three!" and our own psychedelic anthem, "Madman Running Through the Fields," which for the next thirty years will remain on the list of all-time great psychedelic pop songs. Eventually the song will be released on Columbia as our first single, becoming an underground hit.

Replete with a track of backward hi-hat cymbal a la "Strawberry Fields Forever," a ringing eleventh chord over the hi-hat in the middle (to rise again to great triumph many years later as the intro to "Walking on the Moon"), and a sweet "c" section that can only be characterized as Bambi tripping through the woods, the song features a breathy flute to conjure up the sylvan setting. Over this-the sylvan bit-the title of the song is breathily intoned by Zoot. The lyrics craftily point to the idea that the madman running through the fields is in fact the individual who is truly free and wise, while we, the slaves of conventional society, are the ones who are truly insane and in chains and yet have the temerity to deem this fellow the one who is mad.

It gets great reviews, one saying it's worth all twenty-three shillings and the best thing we've done. We are rather proud of it, and thinking it a superior piece of pop-that we have captured something rather special-gives some relief about breaking up the Big Roll Band.

In the 1980s it's the kind of music that Spinal Tap will take the piss out of while I lay on the floor of the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village howling with laughter. But many of our songs are along these lines, a hopeless mix of misguided sixties idealism and the effects of regularly imbibed hallucinogenics. Love is always in the lyrics, not really personal love of the boy-meets-girl variety or the bitter truths of failed relationships, but rather a love of the universal kind or universal mind, if you prefer-a love that will reach and touch mankind everywhere, bring an end to war, and begin a golden era of world peace. Without a trace of cynicism in sight, this is what we believe. Possibly people our age are undergoing a mass acid psychosis, but a shift in the collective unconscious is happening and we aren't alone with these thoughts, although it's possible that those of us who have undertaken the inner journey are more so.

The Beatles have spearheaded the way, and like the children of Hamelin, we-and just about everyone we know-follow. "All you need is love," we chant. "Love is all you need," we bleat. It feels as though we are surfing the wave of cosmic change and that the future has arrived. Now we make music and write lyrics that are striving for, yearning for, a great spiritual freedom.

Our music becomes open to other influences, and I feel that all the exotic sounds boiling in my head now get a chance to fly. The guitar solos become long and searching, the chord progressions are reduced to modal drones, and the music starts to have an organic feeling as we jam in a manner that might be described as "free" many years before the idea of a jam band is thought of. This is an era of conceptual unities: painting, music, dance, religion, and science converge or reconvene the way they did in the twenties. Jackson Pollock in the United States has already set the art world on its head with his breakthrough into drip paintings; Coltrane has abandoned the use of chord progressions, replacing conventional solos with incredible sheets of sound over drones and quartral harmonies; Ornette Coleman has come up with free jazz; and the Beatles have arrived writing their own songs, with LSD bubbling to the surface as the chemical key to the spiritual highway.

This is the new zeitgeist, but we don't know what to call ourselves and grope around trying names like Tibet, Karma, Reincarnation, Lord Vishnu's Magic Bus, and Mountains of the Moon, but it all feels vaguely daft. And then we meet Jim Bramble. Jim is working as a publicist in the West End and agrees to help us out, and he comes up with the ludicrous name Dantalian's Chariot. It turns out that Jim, like many people right now, has a fascination with the occult, and from somewhere in his dark and mystical library he finds a reference to Dantalian, lord of the seventh seal or some such hocus- pocus, and in our benumbed state we agree to it.

So we become Dantalian's Chariot, which we quickly refer to as the Dandelion Charabang and always pronounce in a thick Yorkshire accent as if entering a pub on the moors from a night of heavy rain. Maybe we actually get the daftness of our enterprise because trenchant humor never deserts us, but we are inspired and sail on regardless.

To complete the full psychedelic truth we are about to bring to the people, we take a few more radical steps as well as a few more drugs. We paint all our equipment white so that it will fully reveal every nuance of the glorious color we are about to project onto it, the stage, and ourselves; to complement this extravaganza, we wear all-white clothing. With our extended raga-style jams and heady rainbow-hued light show, we are ready to descend to Earth below.

People are interested to see what Zoot is up to with his new band. There has been publicity about the demise of the BRB, and despite the furor, we get bookings. But we hit a wall; apparently, the prevailing spirit has not yet passed the upper reaches of Barnet to the north or Croydon to the south. Although we get gigs and travel around the country, the reception is not always great and, in fact, more often than not we are greeted by stunned silence. We are delivering an amazing light show and playing what we think is mind-blowing music, but it seems as if we are too far ahead of the audiences outside of London; East Grinstead is not Haight-Ashbury. They want the old Zoot and the pounding R&B of Otis Redding and James Brown. Maybe we have fucked up, but there's no turning back. We have seen the light and, propelled by the new inner truth, carry on spreading the word. Maybe the difference is that we have taken acid, but the audience still thinks that to be some type of coruscating cleaning agent. Their blank expressions reveal that they are not as one with us. In London at this time, the real marker-the sign of the real man-is he who has tripped or taken acid, has been there; but even with this acid spirituality, there is a subtle hierarchy. Those who have, know; and those who have not, play out the old games, the old life roles....

In the Roundhouse, the UFO, and the Middle Earth Club in London everyone seems to get it, and it's as if we are all in on the same joke. Our music expresses the release, the dropping of old conventions, the newly found freedom-and to play old-style R&B in these places would be distinctly uncool. Going onstage at the Middle Earth at midnight or two A.M. and playing in a sea of swirling organic color to a crowd of stoned-out faces covered in trippy makeup is the moment of truth, the place where it all comes together. In the flow of this seething moment, announcements are abandoned as we join the songs together in one long reaching set to take the audience on a ride through the outer reaches of the cosmos. Rather than merely playing, we now soar. In my guitar solos-rather than the deft and to-the-point sixteen-bar break in the middle of a pop song-I reach for the spirit and try to get the Coltrane thing going. Solos that move with the inner mounting flame are extended indefinitely until the statement is complete, the circle drawn. Beginning with a ruminative phrase or two, they move into a sentence, a paragraph, and on into a soaring cosmic hymn. After two or three spins around the godhead, the improvisation slowly spirals back toward terra firma on wings of burnished gold. Members of the band nod their heads wisely, and one has the feeling of great spirituality.