One Train Later: A Memoir (19 page)

We begin rehearsing and I fit my guitar into their music. In its best moments the music of the Soft Machine at this time is a swirling rush of dense, washy keyboards, repeated vocal lines, and drum patterns that fall outside any traditional song formats. In the vernacular of the moment, it would be called "trippy." I quickly realize that I am the better musician, something I sense Kevin Ayers, the bass player, comes to resent, and I begin to feel a slight undertow coming from his direction. Robert and Mike are both avid jazz fans, and the more we go in that direction, the more they like it, but this is a test of Kevin's bass playing, which is functional. Kevin has some very droll songs that he intones in a laconic manner and a deep voice a la Noel Coward with a hangover. There are no tours or gigs in sight; we are waiting for a tour of the United States with Jimi Hendrix, which is being handled by Mike Jeffries, so all we do for a few months is rehearse. I have a room upstairs in the front of the house, and here, if not rehearsing, I read, sleep, practice, and wonder if anything is going to happen with this band. Every few days there's a phone call about why a tour is not happening, and weeks turn into months. Despite the cordial company, I miss West London and I feel that I'm treading water. But Robert and I often jam together late at night after smoking hash. The improvisations go off into the weirdest possible tangents as Robert makes up Dadaist lyrics about butchers or the measurements of a room, and most of the time we end up on the floor choking with laughter and tears, unable to play.

In May we finally get the word that a tour of the United States has been arranged and that it will culminate with our joining up with Jimi on his tour. I am excited and relieved; finally I will get to do something with this group and get to America at the same time. Before we leave I attend the glittery wedding of Angela King and Eric Burden. Being a pop-star wedding, it's a huge media event and I stand in line with the other well-wishers. Feeling as light as air, I grin and shake hands with Eric as he passes with his bride and think, Good hack.

When I arrive in Manhattan late at night with Wyatt, Ayers, and Ratledge, the city hits me like a glittering glimpse of the future. I stare up into the black night and the corona of neon, mesmerized by its scale; flaring energy; dense jungle of jutting slabs, angles, and upward-thrusting concrete; the mute containers of power, history, and the American Dream. This is it: New York, USA.

Nothing in England compares with the adrenaline of this city. I lean back in the cab and laugh as the force enters my bloodstream, and the summer heat of the city slams us like a blast furnace.

We're dropped off at the office of Mike Jeffries in the upper Fifties. "Welcome to the Americas, gentlemen," he says, greeting us at the door. We stand around in his office for a while and look at pictures of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Animals on the wall. Mike suggests that we eat, and a short while later we drive down to Chinatown for a late dinner. In the confines of a blood-red booth, I wolf down a plate of chow mein and stare around like a Bushman. I am excited by everything: the Chinese waiter; the menu; the American accents; the thrum of people milling about in the smelly, overripe street; the stink of hot tarmac, garbage, and gasoline; the fact that I am here, alive and breathing in the Big Apple.

The next afternoon we return to Mike's office and he plays us some of Jimi's new record, Axis: Bold as Love. I sit cross-legged on the tasteful oatmeal carpet at the base of Mike's desk and let these raw otherworldly sounds enter my brain. Jimi seems so far ahead now, creating a new language by extracting sounds that have never been heard before out of his Strat. His touch and sound have the obliqueness of Picasso in the sense that he is setting a whole new approach to the electric guitar, as did the Spanish painter with cubism in the early years of the twentieth century. No one has heard this album yet. We are the first and we languish in that office in New York, murmuring words of admiration. The expressionistic use of the whammy bar, the amps, and the studio create a new model of rock music that will be followed for the next thirty years, and the only appropriate name for it is Hendrix.

I lean back in the plush office chair and wonder how he gets those sounds out of his Strat. The place that Jimi seems to live in is like a dreamscape where he reigns like a protean wizard. No doubt he is ingesting a fair amount of acid, but the music; comes through as a powerful new truth.

We leave the next day for Texas to begin our six-week tour. Arriving late in the afternoon, we are met by a friendly Texan in a large hat (which he's wearing not to complete our boyhood ideas of Texans but because of the heat and humidity, which are enough to knock a man to the ground), and even this I find wonderful. We drive toward Houston, and Kevin and I nudge each other as the skyline creeps up over the horizon like something we have seen in a movie, something incomparably glamorous. Despite horrendous CIA activity around the world, the United States still has a fairly untarnished image. We have grown up in an era in which everything we aspire to comes from here, and I stare out at the rippling heat, dirt, sand, and cactus and love it. In the backseat Mike Ratledge moans about being stuck in this godforsaken country again and buries his face in Remembrance of Things Past. In Vietnam the Ter Offensive gets under way.

Our first show is at a club called the Cave, a sweatbox on the outskirts of Houston. We perform our set and are greeted with enthusiastic howls by the young Texans, who like us because we are English and weird and therefore cool. But the music of the Soft Machine is more demanding than the average rock bands. In the middle of the set we perform a piece called "We Did It Again," a song that consists of repeating the chant "we did it again" to the rhythm of "You Really Got Me" on two chords for thirty to forty-five minutes' duration. At this time the idea of repetition and transformation of consciousness through music is being performed by people in the avant-garde such as Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich, who have adapted the idea from Indian and African music, but it's not yet being heard in the rock world. The Frug, the Watusi, the Twist, the Mashed Potato, the Monkey, and the Slop are impossible with our fucked-up beat. After the first five minutes people become confused and then angry and start booing, and then something else begins to take place. The rhythm begins to take hold, the chant infiltrates the neural pathways, and the mood rises into a sort of ecstatic trance state. This is the intention at least, and some of the time it works. This song marks the Softs as being different from other groups, but it takes balls to play it in front of an audience who just want to frug.

When we come offstage we are surrounded by Bob, Dave, Ricky, Rob, Karen, Carly, Shannon, and Julietta, who bathe us in light, sweet remarks. Dressed in T-shirts, varsity sweaters, white pants, and sneakers, they seem innocent, fresh-faced, and ten years behind London. But they are fascinated by what we are doing, maybe in the sense of a beautiful woman wanting to have sex with an ugly dwarf-but interest is justified because we're English. "Gee, you guys really go places. Man, where does that music come from? Like wow." There are several attractive girls in the crowd who almost as a dare from their friends are ready to accompany us wherever we want to go, and not wishing to appear churlish, we grab as many as possible.

We have a couple of days off, and our new friends take us to the Gulf of Mexico to swim and hang out on the beach. I bathe in the warm waters of the gulf, float on my back, and stare mindlessly up at the blue skies above while a nubile Texan languorously waits for me on the sand. Everything is perfect until some one yells "Shark!" and I fly to shore like Donald Campbell on the salt flats of Utah. From the beach, with my heart pounding, I stare back at the ocean. Dark sleek forms cruise through the water like bats with black fins breaking the waves. A school of hammerhead sharks is paying a casual visit. "Christ," I choke, "nothing like that in Bournemouth." "Don't worry," says a laconic Texan voice, "they're harmless." I make the sign of the cross and imagine a bloody stump dangling over the strings of my guitar.

In Columbus, Ohio, we take a walk down Main Street. I wear a purple cloak, orange corduroy pants, yellow boots, and the hair of the Savior. By the current sartorial standards of Columbus, we appear alien and threatening, a parade from the cackle house. As we walk along the street we are hissed at and told to go home, along with charming epithets like "limey motherfucker." We enter a store that looks interesting; it turns out to be- lawdy lawd-a sex shop with all the magazines behind little iron-barred windows and only viewable by request. This is amusing, and we wander about, making droll comments about the merchandise. "Ooh, what a lovely dildo." "I've always wanted one of those ring things." "Nice piece of latex." The proprietor behind the counter cannot stand our being in his shop and is visibly twitching with rage, our Gypsy appearance turning him purple. He is a respectable vendor of porn, and we are seriously compromising his position, undermining the standards of the establishment. Nevertheless, we calmly just stand there eyeing the merchandise and quietly remark on the quality of rubber and leather. After ten minutes the poor freak can't take it anymore and hisses at us to get out of his store immediately or he will call the police. We wish him well and leave. Maybe we should be dressed in raincoats or something, and how can you call the police if what you are selling is illegal?

Kevin Ayers and I fancy ourselves macrobiotic, and rather than ingesting nasty American hamburgers and french fries, we cook our own little dishes of rice and fish on a small primus stove on the bedroom floor of whichever Holiday Inn we're stuck in. This often causes trouble, as the maids turn up and see a fire burning with two hippies sitting cross-legged on the floor. Our very being-like a strange new virus-seems to constitute a threat. In the American heartland long hair and nonmilitary clothes intimidate, and we are constantly asked to leave. The soundtrack to this sad picture would be the chorus of boos as we leave the stage. The droning forty-five-minute performance of "We Did It Again" pisses off most of the promoters, as well as the audience. Herman's Hermits we're not.

Despite the booing, I am thrilled to be going around the United States and fill the role of a clear-eyed Candide. Being in the Deep South, playing avant-garde rock, and meeting nubile American girls are a heady combination, and I can't think of a better place to be. We complete three weeks of gigs and then head back to New York to take a brief pause before joining the Hendrix tour. We arrive in the city and hole up at the Chelsea Hotel, where I share a room with Robert. This is when the hotel is its most infamous, housing writers, artists, musicians, emigres, and philosophers, as well as hustlers, drug pushers, hookers, ex-cons, and several thousand cockroaches.

Shortly after we arrive, Robert tells me with great apology that I will not be continuing on with the group, the reason being that Kevin does not want either me or a guitar in the band. The Soft Machine as he sees it is a trio, and either I go or he does. As Kevin is an original member, the course is clear. I have felt this undercurrent for a while, but still I am pissed off-wounded. My playing was pushing the band in a direction that didn't suit Kevin, and he simply could not keep up with it. The truth is, we never had much more than an uneasy alliance. Although invited, I remained an interloper in Kevin's eyes.

Having finally made it to the States, I don't feel like going back to England with my tail between my legs, so I stay on at the Chelsea Hotel, scraping by on the last few dollars I have, in the hope that something will turn up. But I don't know anyone or how to connect, and nothing much happens except that I get to know the city. I wander around aimlessly, go the Museum of Modern Art, try to meet girls in Central Park, see movies, visit record stores in the Village, and in the late-afternoon heat sit on my bed and practice on an unamplified guitar that I can't hear because of the roaring ancient air conditioner.

In the room next to me is an Eastern European by the name of Piotr. He is a violinist and has escaped Hungary to try his luck in New York, but he too is running out of time and is close to pawning his fiddle and getting some sort of day job. He talks about a dry cleaner's in the East Village, and there is a girl there he likes but he's worried that she's using heroin and he doesn't want trouble. I hear him sometimes at night when the windows are open as he works his way through a repertoire of Strauss waltzes and Bartok. He's good and should be working, but there's a problem with the union.

I spend six weeks at the Chelsea hoping to seize a chance, but nothing comes my way and I begin to think about returning to England. As a final effort I contact Zoot, who is now in Los Angeles playing with the Animals. My call coincides with the band's firing guitarist Vic Briggs. It isn't working out; would I like to join the band? The timing is perfect, California, the Animals. I go west.

Eight

BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

I pick up the Telecaster and play through the chords of "The House of the Rising Sun," then get out of bed and cross to the window. Tentatively I pull back the curtain; the sea-washed light floods into the room, almost blinding me-like the light of California when I first landed, L.A.'s bright incandescent light promising everything.

As the plane touches down on the runway at LAX, the California sun streams through the window and I feel a surge of optimism. A few minutes later as I walk toward the baggage claim, I am greeted by Terry McVey, a craggy bloke from Newcastle whom I have met a few times in London. An old mate of Eric Burdon's-he's the roadie, the voice of sanity, the anchorhe's been with the Animals since they started. As we drive toward Hollywood and Laurel Canyon, he tells me in a thick northern accent that Eric has finally divorced Angie. The marriage is over. Eric had the same problems as I did, and finally he got rid of her for the price of a plane ticket. I stare out at the endless stretch of sun-drenched streets and feel a sudden chill of alienation and am glad to be with someone British.