One Train Later: A Memoir (16 page)

Meanwhile, free love has arrived and we cast off what we imagine to be the constrained moral restraints of our parents. To end up in bed with a stranger, locked in an embrace both chemical and physical, is considered normal behavior. We are the love generation. After yet another night of helpless rutting, I wake up in some dark recess of London and stare across the sheets at a face that I have seen only in the darkness of a club last night. Wondering what possessed me-and wishing that my brain was located in my head rather than the lowest chakra-I ease out of the sheets and cross a cold hallway to pee and decide not to flush because it might wake the unknown sleeping form that I have just left and then it would get complicated: sex and subterfuge. I close the bedroom door, silently pull up my pants in the freezing hallway, and then creep out of the house, trying not to bang my guitar case against the front door or trip over a milk bottle as I exit.

Spread-eagled on my vast orange bedspread, I read a heady mix of books: Alexandra David-Neel's Magic and Mystery in Tibet, Hindu mythology, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Koestler, Kerouac, Burroughs, Bowles, and books on macrobiotic cooking. I put them in a row on top of the small upright piano next to the bed and gloat over them like treasure. My LPs are stacked along the windowsill: Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, Hamza el Din, Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, Bach, Messiaen, the Beatles, Frank Zappa. Up on the wall I have some posters from the Fillmore in San Francisco announcing nights with the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

This room is my universe, and it contains all the information I need. There is no view other than a slimy grey concrete wall and the steps up to Gunterstone Road, but in here I am happy as I listen to music, practice, and take in useless, arcane information. Sitting on the floor with the Three Pillars of Zen balanced on my knees and chopsticks flashing, I eat a bowl of brown rice and bonito flakes, Messiaen's "Colors of the Celestial City" clanging away in the background.

But just beyond my front door everything is getting loony, and as an outer manifestation of the great interior change that we all imagine is happening, we dress like circus clowns. I wear shirts made of bright Indian fabrics, little bands of shell appear on my wrists, my hair grows to shoulder length, the bottoms of my trousers balloon to a full eighteen inches, and I become visible from about a mile away. I have a pair of purple velvet pants that I love, and over these I wear a long fringed brown suede jacket, with a scarlet neckerchief and handmade yellow boots-the overall effect being somewhere between a court jester and a Hobbit. I begin having expensive cloaks and trousers made in places like Thea Porter. One of my more memorable pieces is a stunning bell-sleeved wizard's coat in brilliant reds and greens with gold stitching around the cuffs. I play onstage with this beautiful coat, feeling like Merlin. We all want to feel like wizards now, have magical powers, transform and subvert people's minds. The coat helps.

As I move through the scene I now hear conversations about ley lines, mushrooms, ancient stones, configurations in the night sky, magic, vernal equinoxes and summer solstices. In our country it seems natural. We are an island nation and see our green fields bouncing with fairies, wizards, and gnomes; in fact, we like to place ceramic gnomes in our front gardens. We have a heritage of arcadian thought, or at least an English fondness for mind-altering substances as demonstrated in the work of de Quincey, Coleridge, Tolkien, Blake, Lewis Carroll, and the Arthurian legends. I nod groovily at all of these things, as if acknowledging the reality beneath the everyday surface. Like everyone else, I nod in acknowledgment of all of these things but somehow I also hang on to a parallel mind-set and my own little stack of books about Zen and the practice of music that seems the opposite of a ley line or belief in an Arthurian legend. I'm still drawn to Kerouac's equation of hipness, jazz, and the open road.

In my desire to make the sound of the guitar more accurately echo the images currently strobing across our new consciousness, I begin opening up the chords of the songs. I never play a chord as a straight triadic harmony but always add another note or two-a suspension or a minor or major second because it gives the chords an expressionistic and mystical power. A soundtrack to the Himalayas, the sound of deep contemplative solitude combined with the ecstasy of sucking on a pebble and gazing out over the Annapurnas-this is what we are looking for in our music. The standard barre chord of so much pop or rock guitar playing now appears dead to me, lacking even the slightest hint of ambiguity; the barre chord is the sound of a room with all the doors and windows shut. I want harmonies that burst like star clusters, intervals that whip cometlike across the corpus callosum, dissonant open-string clusters that make minor seconds beat against sevenths and ninths and elevenths to create a trembling beauty. ("Beauty is nothing if not convulsive," said Debussy.) Some of these combinations are enough to give a cat a heart attack or make a dog howl. But I find them strangely soothing, and I try to get a mix of koto meets sitar, never playing an E chord as a straight E chord but rather as a cluster of notes, G#, bb, b natural, and whatever else I fancy at the moment-after all, it's all beautiful and this makes the sound of the guitar pungent and strange, like a dish being served with exotic spices. It's not to everyone's taste. Pat Donaldson, our bass player, complains about my playing too many chords with open strings, as if these configurations represent beginner's guitar rather than the expressionistic little beauties they are. I see them as arrows to the edge, an escape from the guitar's imitation of the piano that has dominated since the forties. We are acid rockers, cosmic beings, avatars of the light-and this is our music.

But while I have a path, most guitarists in London are still following Eric down the road to blues heaven. I don't want to join the brown-eyed blues boys, instead, I make solos out of drones, playing one string against another, copying Vilayhat Khan's sitar solos and Indian raga-style phrasing. I have a path, but it will be a few more years before it leads to the right door.

We arrive on a Friday afternoon at Middle Earth to set up our gear and do the sound check for our midnight appearance. On the bill tonight with us is the Graham Bond Organization. Graham is a very talented jazz musician who principally plays organ but also plays alto saxophone and sings in a gravelly world-weary baritone. Graham is also noted for having put out a single of the song "Tammy," which can really be described only as the aural equivalent of kiddie porn as Graham is heard chanting the name Tammy over and over again in his whiskey-sodden voice to the skimpily clad young lass who is cavorting in the cottonwoods. It causes great hilarity in the musical fraternity when it's released. Graham is not the most becoming fellow to look at; fat, unshaven and with a Sicilian-style moustache, his appearance is slightly threatening, and with his raving style of organ playing, the picture is that of a human inferno.

We're doing our run-through and practicing a new piece of cosmic wisdom that we call "A-E-I-O-U" in which we intone the vowel sounds before completing the picture with further loaded imprecation. But as we finish up and climb down from the stage, we are summoned with a worried look from a beaten-looking roadie to Graham's dressing room. He sits cross-legged on a raised dais between two burning candles, his bulk casting a silhouette on the wall behind. "You can't sing that song," he whispers in a gravelly undertone. "It's written you will bring down evil, the dead. The Egyptian Book of the Dead-the instructions-they warn against intoning those sounds. What you're doing is an invocation, an invitation, don't do it." Well, we don't know whether to take him seriously or not. He's a long way into the occult and he might be on to something and he scares us just enough not to perform the song that night. We are not about to risk the wrath of evil spirits or the wrath of Bondy. We don't cross paths again with Graham after that but are saddened a few years later to hear that he has committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train in Brompton, and it's a great loss to the music world.

BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

Death is never more than a breath away from the act of playing music. Each note on the guitar represents a small curve: birth, life, and death-and then you start over. To play, to create, to attempt the extraordinary, pushes people to extremes. You go to the edge and stare over; some pull back, some keep going. You feel saddened but ultimately shrug as someone you once knew doesn't make it, and along the way there are many of them. The music remains, and this guitar-at this late point in the career of the Police-has survived through everything: near crashes, dangerous plane flights, subzero temperatures, extreme heat, high humidity, death, birth, and divorce. Although it appears to be a classic Fender Telecaster, it is in fact a half-breed sort of instrument. Someone has pointed out to me that the neck is actually from a Stratocaster, the front pickup is a Gibson humbucker rather than the Fender single coil, and it has been rewired with an overdrive unit inside the body. One-third Les Paul, one-third Stratocaster, and one-third Telecaster, its eclectic character works for me. I am able to produce fantastic tone from its weird pickup combination, and its body size and weight are comfortable.

Guitars begin as trees, float down rivers, get hauled into lumberyards, are sawed into planks, and then are dried, cured, and left to age. They arrive in the player's hand still with the memory of a tree, atoms and molecules reforming to become a guitar. A history begins; fate is determined; events take shape; someone builds his life around a specific guitar; luck changes, moves forward, or runs out.

The guitar is an instrument that most players become obsessive about. That's the way it is with guitars. You have it in your hands and you restlessly fiddle, twiddle, experiment, run your hands up and down its neck, find new combinations-new pathways. It dominates, rules, monopolizes, and grips your imagination to the point that you are in a lifelong wrestling match. You become bedeviled by thoughts that there is always a better guitar-it goes with the territory. I stare at my Police guitar lying on the white sheets: there is hardly any paint left of its original sunburst finish, raw wood now shows through its scarred surface, but I like the red and yellow solar flare that spreads as if from major to minor across the belly under the strings. Arriving at this guitar was a bit like having several relationships with the wrong women before finding the one you truly love and will spend the rest of your life with. And before it, to go along with our all-white stage show in Dantalian's Chariot, I purchased a white three-humbucker Gibson SG model, which I twirled in the prismatic fantasy of our light show at the club in Covent Garden named after Tolkein's novel.

At the Middle Earth after we've played one night, I'm down on the floor of the club grooving around when I notice a petite, dark-haired, and attractive girl staring at me. Somehow we get into a conversation. Her name is Jenny and she's working in the ticket office of the club; she asks me if I would like to go to a fashion show with her on Monday night, which is a cool way of setting up a trial date without anything obvious-so, yes. She says she will call me with the details, and I give her my phone number. Monday night arrives and we trot off to the show in South Kensington. Afterward we return to her flat in Queens Gardens in Bayswater. We hit it off, and the conversation flows easily. Being a spirit in the material world, I lay my advanced mystical ideas on her, to which she responds with educated skepticism and humor. We smoke some hash and go to bed, where things also go nicely, and it seems that I have found a new girlfriend.

Over the next few weeks I gradually became more immersed in Jenny Fabian's life. In her early twenties, she has two young daughters from an Italian husband she has already divorced. Her flat is a scene of constant comings and goings, and we share the same hairdresser, Gavin at Leonard of London. Jenny astutely remarks that it's a sign of the times when opposite genders meet and find out that they are getting their hair done by the same person.

I continue on playing around the country, trying to cause a cosmic revolution with Dantalian's Chariot, and most nights get dropped off at Jenny's on our way back through London. We talk a lot about the times we are living through, drugs, fashion, books, culture, various wars, countries we would like to visit, our dreams, fantasies. Jenny is clear-eyed and intelligent, not cynical but healthily questioning of the acid-inspired optimism that is surging through the streets of London.

Most of these conversations will be regurgitated a couple of years later when Jenny writes a novel called Groupie, which makes her an international literary star for a while. By the time she writes it I am living in California and have a different life altogether, but I am amazed on reading the book because it seems a straightforward account of the time we spent together. She has reproduced our conversations exactly and even a letter I had written to her is unashamedly reproduced. In the book I am given the name Davy, Dantalian's Chariot is renamed the Transfer Project, so on and so forth.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I get a call from Chas Chandler, the bass player for the Animals. He tells me that he's bringing to London an incredible guitarist he found in New York who is going to sit in next week at Blazes with the Brian Auger Trio. I have never heard of this guitarist, but Chas raves about him and I say I'll be there. A few nights later I walk into the darkness of the club and see an amazing sight. Up on the stage is a black man with a white guitar in his mouth. Sporting an Afro about a foot wide and wearing a buckskin suit with fifteen-inch fringes, he holds a white Stratocaster up to his face and plays it with his teeth. I lean against the back wall and stand there transfixed.

It's shocking, an alien encounter. This is a whole new bag, this is no white boy playing the blues, this is music from another planet. It connects with the gut as if emerging from a deep recess of the African psyche and simultaneously from outer space; it comes through this guitarist as if it knows that he is the vehicle through which it will come to Earth. Standing in the dark among the small tables, the clink of glasses, and inane chatter and faced with this primal noise, I feel very white and inadequate. How does he get that sound, that alpha thing, that siren call, the sound of a fuck? We all have guitars, but ours whisper; his screams. I know I am witnessing the birth of a new animal that will shake the music world to its roots and change the sound of the electric guitar forever. I lean over and ask someone, "Who is this guy?" through a mouthful of rattling ice cubes. I get the answer-Jimi Hendrix.