Starting At Zero (12 page)

As long as the equipment holds up, we’re fine. We have so much trouble with amplifiers. We have to get them overhauled after every trip. We’re always playing out of the shadows and
ashes of the last gig we did. We’ve just come off a tour, and I think we went through about four Marshalls. This is about the fifth set, and they’ve really had it. They’ve been
screwed properly. I’ve got about four speakers left and about three more valve tubes. And Mitch Haze is on his third pair of arms!

It really brings me down when the amps don’t work, and it makes me twice as mad when a road manager tries to tell me, just because they’re fucked up, that they’re overworking
too much. I’m not an amp repair man, but if they begin to buzz or give us any trouble, we do an instant repair job – we kick them in!

I really like my old Marshall tube amps because when it’s working properly there’s nothing can beat it, nothing in the whole world. It looks like two refrigerators hooked together.
When I was in Greenwich Village I had a Fender amp and an old extension loudspeaker, and it made the weirdest sounds. That’s when I first

The way I play lead is a raw type of way, and it just comes to you naturally. But the most essential thing to learn is the time, the rhythm. They got millions of beautiful solo guitarists in the
world now, playing really beautiful greasy solos, but some of them are forgetting their rhythm section, and it’s getting really monotonous to hear. Eric Clapton is a great guitarist and we
think along the same lines, but I’m not sure he’s playing exactly what he wants to. I was jamming with Eric the other day and it was pretty nice, but I wanted to hear him bring out some
chords!

I only heard one record by Jeff Beck,
Shapes Of Things
. I really dug it, but I wasn’t really influenced by it. I listen to everybody, but I don’t try to copy anybody. Cats I
like now are Albert King and Elmore James, but if you try to copy them note for note your mind starts wandering. Therefore, you dig them, and then do your own thing. Other musicians are doing so
much in their own way. There’s one cat I’m still trying to get across to people. His name is Albert Collins. He’s buried in a road band somewhere. He’s good, really good,
but he’s a family cat and doesn’t want to go too far from home. Ain’t that always the way?

I’ve never tried to establish one sound as a guitarist. You always knew it was Chuck Berry or Duane Eddy or Bo Diddley when they played. But I’m trying to get new things all the
time. Whatever you do, you have to have an open mind. Anybody who’s hungry, who’s young and wants to get into music, has got so much to be influenced by, so many different things in the
world. But some cats want to be helped every inch of the way. If you want to get there the work must come from you, even though another guy can maybe give you a bit of help or some good advice. You
can get started on somebody else’s back, but you end up having to go your own way.

I like the guitar best. It’s part of me now. But it’s not necessarily guitar that I’m interested in. It’s my music I’m trying to get across. Music is very serious
to me. It’s my way of saying what I want to say. I hear sounds, and if I don’t get them together, nobody else will.

{VOTED “WORLD’S TOP MUSICIAN” IN
MELODY MAKER
POLL.}

Me, the world’s greatest!? That’s silly.

Now, I appreciate them saying that, but it’s pretty hard to say who the greatest is. I still can’t figure it all out yet, because I’ve only been playing in Britain a year. I
consider myself lucky I had a chance to be heard. There are so many good groups who haven’t had a chance to be heard.

I don’t care about what the critics say. I really don’t give a damn about my future or career, I just want to make sure I can get out what I want. Soon I’ll be going into
another bag with a new sound, a new record, a new experience. We’ll go exactly the way we feel. Nothing will be intentional. It’ll just happen. We’re not going to try and keep up
with the trends, because we’ve got a chance to be our own trend.

I feel really respected to do something like this, but I’m still a bit worried. I think everyone should open their minds a bit to the fact that there are three of us in the group. There
are two other cats working just as hard as I am. If it weren’t for Mitch and Noel, I couldn’t do my thing. Mitch particularly has so much to contribute. Primarily we are a group, and
our new album,
Axis: Bold As Love,
is designed to show what else we do besides my guitar playing.

{DECEMBER 1, 1967,
AXIS: BOLD AS LOVE
RELEASED IN THE U.K.}

T
HE ALBUM WAS MADE over a period of sixteen days, which I’m very sad about. But we had to get it out to put in all the kiddies’
stockings for Christmas. We were really deep into it, and all the songs on it are exactly the way we felt right then, so it really is us. We all helped in producing it with Chas Chandler, and I
mixed it with him as well. It was mixed beautifully, but then we lost the original so we had to re-mix it the next morning within eleven hours, and it’s very hard to do that. It could have
been so much better. The songs could have been better too. As soon as you finish you get a hundred completely new ideas.

The only people that’s on it is us three, except on one song,
You Got Me Floatin’
, one of the Move sang the background with Noel and Mitch. And that’s our
manager’s big feet on the fade-out of
If Six Was Nine
. That was a complete jam session, and then we put the words on afterwards. Gary Leeds and Graham Nash did some foot stomping, and
that’s me on the flute. That’s what you call a great feeling of blues, how you feel at a particular time.

I adore
If Six Was Nine
. It means that it really doesn’t matter if everything is upside down as long as it doesn’t bother you and you can cope with it. It doesn’t say
nothing bad about nobody. It just says let them go on and screw up theirs, just as long as they don’t mess with me.

On
Spanish Castle Magic
Noel uses an eight-string bass. I was playing the same thing on the guitar in unison with the bass. It didn’t come out as clear as we wanted it to, but it
was a hint of what we were trying to do. It’s a place you wouldn’t put your grandmother, and it’s dedicated to the plainclothes police and other goofballs.

On
Up From The Skies
it’s thanks to Mitch for the jazz. It’s the story of a guy who’s been on earth before but on a different turning of the axis. Now he’s come
back to find this scene happening, like people laying up in gray buildings and so forth, dusting away. And people run around shouting, “Oh love the world, love the world!” eating rodent
seeds and so forth. People must respect other people’s ideas, as long as they’re not hurting anybody. They must respect the time sequence. Why keep living in the past?

Personally, I like to write songs like
Castles Made Of Sand
. A lot of times you might get an idea from something you have seen, and then you write it down the way you might have wanted it
to happen or the way it could have happened. It’s like these buildings ain’t going to be here for all that long. When it’s time for a change, by all means put that thing into
operation. I dig writing slow songs because I find it’s easier to get more blues and feeling into them.

Little Wing
is based on a very, very simple American Indian style. I got the idea when I was in Monterey, and I just happened to be looking at everything around. So I figured that
I’d take everything I’d seen and put it, maybe, in the form of a girl and call it
Little Wing
. It’ll just fly away. Everybody was flyin’ and in a nice mood, like the
police and everybody were really groovy out there. So I just took all these things and just put them in one very, very small little matchbox. Keep it just like that.
It’s
very simple. I like it though.
It’s one of the very few I like.

In
Little Wing
we put the guitar through the Leslie speaker of an organ, and it sounds like jellybread. And we’ve got a gadget called the Octavia that we use on a song called
One
Rainy Wish
. It comes through a whole octave higher so that when playing high notes it sometimes sounds like a whistle or a flute.

We’ve tried to get most of the freaky tracks right into another dimension, so you get that sky effect like they’re coming down out of the heavens. Like on
Bold As Love
, we do
something called phasing. It makes it sound like planes going through your membranes and chromosomes. A cat got that together accidentally, and he turned us onto it. It was a special sound, and we
didn’t want to use tapes of airplanes. We wanted to have the music itself warped.

But the secret of my sound is largely the electronic genius of our tame boffin, who is known to us as Roger the Valve [Roger Mayer]. He is an electronics man working in a government department,
and he would probably lose his job if it was known he was working with a pop group. Whatever incredible sounds we think up, he manages to create them.

He has rewired my guitars in a special way to produce an individual sound, and he has made me a fantastic fuzz tone. I love different sounds as long as they’re related to what we’re
trying to say or if they touch me in any way. I don’t like to be gimmicky or different just for the sake of being different.
Don’t forget about the music. We
don’t.

Some people have told me that the first album sounded the same all the way through, but there wasn’t time. It was a first one, a quick one, you understand, for a new group. In Axis there
are more gentle things, more things for people to think about if they want to. It’s quieter as far as guitar is concerned, but then we’re emphasizing the words. I think we’re
getting less rebellious, if you know what I mean. To people who are not listening very much,
Axis
will put them to sleep right away.

A
NGER
,
HE SMILES
,

H
ER FIERY GREEN GOWN SNEERS AT THE GRASSY GROUND
.

B
LUE ARE THE LIFE-GIVING WATERS TAKING FOR GRANTED
,

H
E FLASHES TROPHIES OF WAR AND RIBBONS OF EUPHORIA
.

M
Y YELLOW IN THIS CASE IS NOT SO MELLOW
.

I
N FACT
, I’
M TRYING TO SAY THAT IT
’
S FRIGHTENED
,

LIKE ME.