by Greg Lake
That’s not to say that we did not have some tough times on the road. We were often short of money, so we had our own version of a chip butty where we would eat out the middle of a loaf, pack the hole with chips and then eat the whole lot. When we were playing up in Carlisle, I caught pneumonia. We had slept in the van during a freezing night – it was like sleeping in a metal icebox – and when I awoke I was blue. We had to drive 300 miles home and, when we finally got there, I just collapsed and passed out. My mother called the doctor and I was given oxygen and put on penicillin.
The Shame was the first band that I was in to have proper London-based management, Harvey Block Associates (Dru Harvey and Derek Block), who also managed the Walker Brothers. The move to London was always seen as being absolutely crucial as it was the centre of the recording industry and the place where all the major studios were located. Signing up with Dru Harvey was at least a step in the right direction, even if we were still based on the south coast.
I was already a great admirer of Jimi Hendrix, and ‘Hey Joe’ was a regular feature of our set list. Dru Harvey managed to get us on as the support band for headliners Jimi Hendrix and Ten Years After at a gig at Sussex University. We also played the famous Speakeasy in London in support of Procol Harum.
It was around then that my recording career began when the Shame cut a Janis Ian song called ‘Don’t Go Away Little Girl’, which came out on Poppy Records, a subsidiary of RCA, in 1967. The song was slightly Beatles-like and a bit psychedelic – very 1967 – but it was a decent track. We cut the record in Pye’s studios at Marble Arch in London. Even though it never became a big hit – it was apparently banned by the BBC because the advert for the single had a picture of me with a crown of thorns and a halo – for me the whole experience was a huge revelation and an insight into the world of recording and making records.
With the cutting of this record, my career as a musician had changed from one of being purely a performer to one of being a recording artist as well; perhaps the most important transition any professional musician can make.
After the release of ‘Don’t Go Away Little Girl’, the Shame had a stab at making a couple more recordings, but these really didn’t amount to much and eventually the band disintegrated when Malcolm and Billy went back to resume their former careers at art college.
Before long, I received a call from manager Dru Harvey, who told me that he was now looking after a band called the Gods and asked if I would be interested in joining. The Gods were one of those bands that were a bit like a musical roundabout, where it seemed that everyone who was anyone had been associated with them at one time or another. Mick Taylor was a member in his early years before joining the Rolling Stones in 1969, but we didn’t overlap. Ken Hensley and Lee Kerslake who later joined Uriah Heep were in the band – I knew Lee from when he was drumming in a local band in Bournemouth – but I didn’t really connect with anyone musically.
Nonetheless, here was an offer to join a professional band from London and for me at the time it was definitely a step in the right direction, so I really didn’t need much persuading. It was also very exciting because it was the first time that I had moved away from my parents and set out to live on my own or, actually in this case, with five other members of the Gods in a rundown flat in Chiswick in south-west London.
I particularly remember the day in 1968 when I left my parents’ house in Poole because, even though my mother was quite used to having me travel around the country, she knew that this time it was different: I would not be returning, at least not for a while, and I saw the tears in her eyes as I waved goodbye.
The London flat that was about to become my home was a far cry from our family house in Poole. I parked outside this big old Victorian house in Chiswick and walked up the stone stairs to the front door, and was bewildered by the sight of row after row of little white doorbells all with paper names stuck inside them. ‘Surely all these different people can’t be living in this one house?’ I thought.
Well, that was the first little clue I got regarding what I was about to walk into. Eventually, Lee came to the door and welcomed me in.
I walked down this long and rather dilapidated corridor and entered a large room right at the end. It was one of those large, old-style Victorian drawing rooms with a very high ceiling, save for the fact that this particular room had been divided up with hardboard walls to create four separate compartments.
There was no heating in the flat but each compartment had its own electric light bulb overhead that could also be adapted to plug in a small electric fire. You could either have the light on or the heating but not both, otherwise the fuses throughout the whole house would blow.
Weary from travelling and all the excitement of moving in to the new flat, I decided to retire to my little compartment and lie down on the mattress that was on the floor. After sleeping in the back of a van for so long, even this spartan set-up looked quite appealing to me – although it soon became obvious that it was a breeding ground for cockroaches. In any case, as things turned out it would not be too long before we all moved out into a far more comfortable house in nearby Dukes Avenue.
The Gods had a road manager called Lil (I never did find out his real name) who was also a guitar player and his overriding passion was for the blues. I will always remember walking in to the flat one day and seeing him kneeling on the floor playing his Fender Telecaster guitar, with his head stuck through a hole that had been cut out of the side of a very large cardboard box. Apparently, there was a Vox AC30 amplifier inside the box, a combination he always swore gave him the authentic sound of the blues. I simply took his word for it and said no more.
Lil was sweet and long-suffering, and his passion and enthusiasm for the music he loved, in his case the blues, was something that I always felt was missing from the Gods.
The concept behind the Gods always seemed to me to be more of a business arrangement than being a real band. We used to travel all over the country playing small gigs in local theatres and so on, but we never really developed any particular style or musical identity.
That is not to say that we did not have an amusing time, such as on the day we all went down to Carnaby Street in London to buy matching stage clothes. As well as playing keyboards, Ken Hensley looked after the band’s financial affairs at the time and he had struck up an arrangement with some entrepreneurial clothes baron cum fashion designer in Carnaby Street who thought it would be a good idea to dress us all in brightly coloured, frilly satin glam-rock shirts with matching satin pants. I shudder now to think what we must have looked like. As a matter of fact, I do believe that somewhere there still exists an old poster of the Gods dressed in these stomach-churning shirts.
I was only with the Gods for maybe six or eight months and left before we ever got to make any recordings together. I honestly can’t remember how it all came to an end, but I never really felt comfortable in the band. Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that I had been more or less ushered in to fill a void rather than forming a band with people I respected musically, as I had always done in the past. Being in the Gods had taught me the key to forming a great band: you simply have to respect the people you are working with and they need to respect you, because the moment this respect fails or is taken for granted, the whole structure just comes tumbling down.
CHAPTER 3
Court in Session
I received a call from Robert Fripp soon after I moved back to Dorset in 1968. To earn some money, I was working at Aish Technologies in Poole, and I was trying to figure out what my next move would be – I had enjoyed a taste of working as a professional musician but in the end it looked like it had all come to nothing.
Robert asked if I would like to be the lead singer for his new band. We had become close when we spent all that time practising together for Don Strike’s guitar lessons – and I knew he was a really good player – so the idea appealed to me immediately.
His band was originally called Giles, Giles a
nd Fripp and featured the brothers Michael and Peter Giles, who respectively played drums and bass and shared the singing duties, and Ian McDonald, who had just joined the band to play saxophone, clarinet and flute. They were signed to Decca Records but had just been told that unless they hired a proper lead singer and became commercially relevant, they would be dropped from the label. Around this time, Peter Giles left the band. During the call, I told Robert not to worry and assured him that, together, we could easily get things going in the right direction.
There was a brief silence on the phone. Then Robert said, in a slightly nervous tone and with a strong Dorset accent: ‘Gregory’ – he always used my full name when he wanted to persuade me to do something – ‘I wonder if as well as being the lead singer, you could possibly consider playing the bass instead of electric guitar?’
‘Why bass?’ I asked.
‘Well’, he said, ‘I’m already playing electric guitar and we don’t really need two guitarists, but if you played bass then we could keep the band down to being a four-piece.’
I thought about it for a moment. Four strings instead of six. How hard can it be? Plus they already had a record deal. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.’
Little did I know at that moment, but switching from guitar to bass would be a difficult transition to make. And I was about to be made acutely aware of this.
Robert changed the name of the band to King Crimson and I returned to London. Our first rehearsal took place in the front room of a small house in Kilburn where Giles, Giles and Fripp had been living. I went along with my newly acquired Fender Jazz bass and met Michael and Ian. Then I plugged in to some grubby old Marshall amplifier they had rented for me to play through.
After the first ten or twelve bars, Michael began to hit the snare drum hard and repeatedly in order to stop everyone playing. He slowly lifted his eyes towards me with a look of pity and mild resignation, and began politely to explain that the bass never, never, ever, ever plays on the off-beat when the snare drum is playing.
I must have looked to him like a rabbit caught in the headlights because I honestly had no idea what on earth he was talking about. He went on to explain one of the most fundamental and basic rules of bass playing: in order for the snare drum to cut through and give the music a powerful offbeat feel, there has to be a brief moment of silence as the snare beat falls and the bass is not playing. Otherwise there is no clarity and the sound is mushed. I felt dreadfully embarrassed. It sounded so obvious once Michael had spelled it out. However, this one little moment of education opened up a new world of awareness for me. The rest of the rehearsal went well and everyone was happy with my voice and our new line-up.
Michael proved to be a great drummer. He could play different time signatures with each hand and each foot simultaneously and then come back in on time.
I felt like I was in a band with proper, skilful musicians, and it was a bit of a step up from just being in a band because you could get the girls and the attention – King Crimson were trying to do something new with their music, and wanted to deliver it with care and subtlety as well as passion. I was something of a raw recruit, and I had to learn fast. I soon developed my own way of playing the bass. I used a guitar pick, rather than playing with my fingers, which meant that I could play fast. I was trying to develop a sound a little like the one you can get out of the bottom end of a Steinway.
A few days after our first rehearsal, Ian invited us round to a flat in West Kensington to meet a friend of his called Pete Sinfield. When I went to Pete’s flat for the first time, I noticed how thoughtfully it had been decorated with Moroccan pillows featuring little mirrors and Indian rugs, which he had hanging on the walls. The exotic atmosphere was accentuated by the smell of burning incense in the air, which blended with the hash that a number of us smoked at the time. (Neither Robert nor Michael smoked hash but they both used to roll their own cigarettes using Old Holborn, the pungent tobacco. I can still hear Michael’s voice explaining to me that putting a piece of orange peel in a tin of tobacco always helped to keep it fresh.)
It was around that time in London that music was beginning to move away from the conventional three-minute pop song and towards conceptual albums – with hugely influential and inspiring albums such as Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles. Ian and Pete mentioned that they too had written a conceptual song, which they wanted try it out with the band. It was called ‘The Court of the Crimson King’.
Robert and I decided to move into a flat together in a large Victorian house in Leinster Square in Bayswater, west London. Neither of us were domesticated and it quickly became like the flat in the film Withnail and I. No one dared venture into the kitchen for fear of being attacked by the sink monsters that lurked in the pile of unwashed dishes.
Leinster Square was only a couple of blocks from Portobello Road, where we would often go to hear the latest music being played in the ‘head shops’. These were little hole-in-the-wall operations that sold the latest cool music releases and also supplied drug paraphernalia such as rolling machines, cigarette papers and hash pipes. They were a one-stop shop for hippies.
Robert would ask me for advice about how the band should look on stage so we would go to down to the Portobello antiques shops and junk stalls for inspiration. Unlike Robert, I had been in a number of different bands previously and had learned a bit about stagecraft, experimented with clobber and got a bit of a stage look. Robert was still wearing the maroon V-neck pullover and plaid shirt he had been wearing since college.
We tried out various styles for him back at our flat but it was no good dressing him up in frilly shirts, which were the fashion at the time, or anything like that. Then I remembered that he had always been intrigued by the violinist Niccolò Paganini, who looked like a Satan worshipper. He would stand between two black candles and play the most difficult violin pieces imaginable at extraordinary speeds. Then he would challenge other violinists to public duels to see who could play the fastest. He would even taunt his rivals by ripping off two strings from his violin and playing the piece in exactly the same way and at the same pace. No one could match him.
I suggested to Robert that we could perhaps build up something around the black magic image of Paganini and maybe dress him in a cloak or something dark and austere. Robert loved the idea, so off we went down Portobello Road again to visit the antique shops and junk stalls. The first thing we saw was a black top hat. Perfect – just the thing. Next we found a black cape, black shirt and black shoes. The look was complete. Robert’s rather strange stage persona began to develop out of that look. Later on came all the other antics such as him playing with his back to the audience or hidden behind the speakers.
That evening, I went to the Marquee Club in Soho to watch a band called Spooky Tooth. When I returned home to Leinster Square, I pressed the light switch but the lights didn’t come on. Sometimes the bulbs blew and everyone in the building was too lazy to change them so I just accepted it and walked up the stairs in the dark. I noticed that there was a dim light flickering at the top of the staircase. As I drew a little closer, I suddenly saw this horrific white face complete with crooked teeth and a black top hat. The face belonged to a stooped figure, which was standing there dressed in a black cloak like Jack the Ripper and holding a candle up to its face. The face was glaring at me with menacing intent. My heart nearly stopped.
‘You bastard!’ I shouted.
Yes, after pulling the light bulb out of its socket, Robert had sat up all night, wearing that costume and a set of false teeth, waiting for me to come home just so that he could scare the shit out of me. It must have taken the best part of ten minutes for me to calm down. I’m sure it gave Robert an immense amount of pleasure.
In the early weeks of King Crimson, we met up with David Enthoven and John Gaydon of E.G. Management and they soon started to look after the band. David and John were both former public school boys. John ha
d gone to Eton and David had attended Harrow, where he had struck up a friendship with Chris Blackwell of Island Records. We had cut ties with Decca and Chris was interested in signing us. We were taken to see him and knew straight away that Chris was different from most label heads. He had a strange and wonderful work ethic. When we went to any other record company, we would be taken to the president’s office and have to sit awkwardly on old leather-clad seats. Chris never even had his own office. He sat with all the staff, usually perching on someone’s desk.
King Crimson were looking for a record deal that would allow us to make an album in the way that we had envisioned, without interference or compromise.
‘We want to make the record we want to make, not the one you want us to make,’ we told Chris.
Incredibly, Chris insisted that he wouldn’t have it any other way. So we signed the deal with Island and prepared to make our first record.
The early rehearsals for the album took place in a basement underneath a little Greek café on the Fulham Palace Road. We were an unusual group of people, with a strange blend of different personalities, and none of us seemed to want to follow the rules. I realised quite early on that the result of this was that we could make music that was dangerous, innovative and passionate.
At first, we discussed using a producer and, because our reputation had spread so quickly, our name came to the attention of the Moody Blues’ producer Tony Clarke. Tony arranged to come down and meet the band and listen to the music. When he arrived, he rang the doorbell to the basement and our road manager Dick Frazer went up to let him in. As he walked down the stairs we noticed that behind him were four or five other people. They were the Moody Blues.
