Eyes Wide Open

by Andy Powell

  Around this time I acquired a nickname: ‘Snap’. I think it speaks of my general impatience, since I was often disparaging and eager to get going. I know it was the same for the other guys. I just probably voiced my frustration more, making off-hand comments or snappy comebacks to suggestions by Miles or some of the others.

  Things did get better, though, thanks to a concerted focus on the job at hand. When you have five guys totally focused on making something happen, you are bound to get results, although there were a few setbacks. Miles used his wiles in a couple of ways, capitalising on each and every little contact or connection along the way. The French dates were helped along by a couple of Miles’s old school buddies and their connections in Paris. One friend had the equally preposterous name of Tulliver Brooks, and yet another invited us to his parents’ very upmarket apartment on the Left Bank where—over a formal dinner complete with the family’s butler waiting on us at the table—I inadvertently tipped a silver tureen full of soup over a beautiful inlaid Louis XV dining table. What can I say? The handle had been loose …

  The reality was that we were all staying in a one-room pensione near St Germain called L’Hôtel des Balcones, at 3 Rue Casimir Delavigne, which I can still remember to this day. It smelled of coffee, furniture polish, and bad French plumbing. We met up with some jolie French girls and one came back to the room with young Ted. I remember us all trying to get some sleep while he was sharing a bed with this sweet young thing—Chantelle, perhaps, was her name. She was saying softly, in broken English, ‘I am not ze groupie.’ Of course we ribbed him mercilessly about that, while being secretly jealous that he was able to get her into his bed.

  We played venues like the Rock & Roll Circus, which seemed quite a decadent place, and later a place called Le Golf-Drouot. The DJ’s name was Jaques Chabiron, I remember. It was all very exciting, and we felt like an anomaly in the trés cool environs of Paris. I particularly enjoyed tasting the different foods and checking out the clothes shops. Steve did the driving, if I recall, navigating our trusty yellow Transit van around the Arc de Triomphe, being quite shocked at the pace and intensity of Paris traffic.

  In May 1970 we supported Deep Purple at The Civic Hall in Dunstable. During the summer we played festivals in Bath and at the Plumpton Racecourse, and in August we secured our first BBC session on Bob Harris’s Sounds Of The Seventies followed by our first TV slot on BBC2’s Disco 2 that December.

  Barring those initial French gigs we were playing exclusively and exhaustively in Britain that year—something like 100 to 200 shows in and around London and up and down the motorways. At one point it felt as if we were the house band at the Speakeasy, the musicians’ hangout in London, given the number of times we played or partied there.

  One night Keith Moon got up and jammed with us. I remember it clearly because Steve had just taken delivery of a brand new pink Slingerland sparkle-finish drum set. Keith got behind it, pretty drunk by then but intent on playing to his group of hangers-on. I think we played Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’, Keith giving it the whole bug-eyed ludicrous rock drummer caricature, grinning and posing for all he was worth. It was hilarious. At the end, amid much cheering, Keith got up, and instead of walking around the drum kit he walked right through it, kicking parts of it nonchalantly out of the way and off into the crowd. Steve was mortified. I can still see his look of chagrin. It all worked out and came good a few months later, however, when we were lucky enough to be supporting The Who on a tour of the States. Keith gave Steve a bottle of Courvoisier cognac and took him under his wing. It was a case of ‘Who cares’ both times!

  * * *

  The first British Invasion of America involved 1964, The Beatles, Ed Sullivan, and anyone else who managed to grab the coat tails and surf the biggest wave in pop music. The Dave Clark Five and Herman’s Hermits, as a result, meant a great deal more in the USA than they did back home. Even Freddie & The Dreamers had a US number 1. Weirdly, rock acts like The Who and Jimi Hendrix would often be opening for acts like these, waiting for the market to catch up with them.

  The second British Invasion started in the late 60s, with acts like The Who and Cream of course, but by the time Wishbone Ash arrived to conquer the US, in February 1971, a whole new touring infrastructure had been opened up and defined very largely by British bands over the previous two years. The likes of Led Zeppelin, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, and Fleetwood Mac criss-crossed America frequently and extensively from the beginning of 1969 onward. A typical tour could begin with two or three nights at the Fillmore East, a crumbling old cinema in New York, and stop off at legendary ‘underground’ clubs in Boston, Detroit, Anaheim, and Los Angeles, often on bills with domestic acts like The Doobie Brothers or The Allman Brothers, and, in between, meander around huge college gymnasiums and prototypical open-air festivals, state fairs, and hockey arenas, in the Midwest, the South, and everywhere else.

  Our second album, Pilgrimage, was released in the US during August, a good month before it appeared in Britain—one of the quirks of having a US record label, MCA. This was beneficial for us since we had our second US tour booked—or so we thought. Arriving once again on US soil we discovered there were no gigs. We found ourselves in Wildwood, New Jersey, a coastal resort town, where we hung around for about ten days killing time. I remember going crabbing, sunbathing, and celebrating Ted’s twenty-first birthday by jamming outside on the hotel deck. We had our British crew with us, Chris Runciman and Mark ‘The Hobbit’ Emery. It was fun but not what I’d had in mind.

  After we’d spent time kicking our heels, Miles eventually made contact with a guy called Ron Sunshine. I don’t know how Miles discovered him, but at this point in time Ron was booking dates for The Who. We had played a show with Steppenwolf; the good word had gone out and suddenly we were being offered five shows supporting The Who. What an opportunity! So we stopped bothering the local crustaceans and started work. We played shows in Cleveland, Dayton, Detroit, and Minneapolis and then, most memorably, the Mississippi River Festival in Edwardsville, Illinois. This was truly an eye- and ear-opener. The crowd was monstrous. I remember going up to the mic—I’d never heard my voice amplified like that before. I think the PA system was set up with delay towers to synchronise the sound coming from the stage and the back of the festival site.

  The whole touring experience was an induction into rock’n’roll mayhem. We were staying at the same hotels as The Who and their entourage, and they were all drinking and making merry, buzzing with the sheer joy of being young, successful, and having the time of their lives. The partying would be taking place backstage and then everyone would scramble into a bunch of waiting limos heading to the hotel; Daltrey in most cases would grab a bevy of the best looking women before speeding away. At the hotel one night—one of those two-storey Holiday Inn motel-style places—I can remember Townshend and Moon going into their Goons skits and the Americans in the room wondering what was going on. Remy Martin was consumed as if there was no tomorrow, and the odd TV would find itself hurled over the balcony into the swimming pool. John Entwistle was roaming about filming everything. Moon was blowing up toilets with cherry bombs and travelling with a caseload of guns—hopefully replicas. My wife Pauline was on the road with us at that time. At one point he burst into our room and aimed one of his weapons, a Thompson sub-machine gun, at us in the bed, shouting, ‘Your money or your wife!’ Another time he was heard yelling ‘Bring me sunshine.’ This was not so much a tribute to Morecambe & Wise, the much-loved comedy act of the day, as a warning for Ron Sunshine, the promoter that The Who had little regard for, to go hide in the nearest cupboard.

  We were also opening for bands like Steppenwolf and Three Dog Night—both great bands but not stadium-rock material at that time. They did not have their sound systems together, nor were they able to make the massive gestures that were needed in order to take control of a very large audience. Watching The Who was like being at the feet of the masters. As a Brit, it was easy to feel diminished by the
sheer scale of America at first, but seeing this glaring disconnect between what the audiences wanted and what US acts were not delivering was good for our morale. We had a fighting chance.

  One of the tricks up our sleeve—one of the things that allowed us to make an impact—was that we always shipped our own equipment over to the States with us. We had powerful, clean-sounding Orange amps, cabinets fitted out with JBL speakers, and the amount of wattage coming off the stage before even being miked up was huge. We also had a gadget called an AMS—a professional studio-grade digital delay unit, which ironically enough was invented by Mark Crabtree, father of Joe Crabtree, the current drummer for Wishbone Ash. Simply put, we were able to do things with this digital technology that the Americans had yet to hear in a live context, such as to create what sounded like double-tracked guitars or double-tracked vocal effects. It enhanced our sound, making it both powerful and clear.

  More to the point, the sound was ours. Everywhere we went we astounded the sound companies who would hear us onstage and be intrigued to learn how we approached live sound. Shipping all this equipment came at great expense, of course, but it was money well spent. We had a tour manager, Mel Baister, who carried $100 bills with which to ease the way through the various freight issues we might encounter at airports on a daily basis as we flew from gig to gig, city to city. In this way, we went in a short period of time from being a supporting act to headlining our own shows.

  Toward the end of that second US Tour we played at the Satsop River Festival in Washington State to a massive number of people. Festivals back then were not the efficient events that they have become today. A large part of what went on was building a vibe by word of mouth and watching the event take on a life of its own. Consequently, organisers of such things were often adapting everything to accommodate more and more audience numbers as things went forward. This festival was no different. Eventually it became so unwieldy that the only way for the artists to get in or out of the stage area was by helicopter. We made a particularly strong impact on that show, which had a line-up featuring War, Steve Miller, Delaney & Bonnie, Billy Preston, and others. The estimated size of the audience was between 100,000 and 150,000!

  On reflection, this was the start of a three- or four-year period of intense touring, with us sometimes being away from home for eight or nine weeks at a time. It would prove to be the solid foundation on which the rest of my life as a touring musician was built.

  Some of my favourite places to play at that time were Pirates’ World in Miami, the Warehouse in New Orleans, the Agora Ballroom in Ohio, Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the Academy of Music in New York City. We played prestigious places like Carnegie Hall and also the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park, which was an early free event. The pace at which we travelled was intense. It was a crash course in American geography and regional culture. One minute you would be in the hustle and bustle of New York City and the next arriving into the crazy laid-back party atmosphere of the French Quarter in New Orleans, staying in a gentle old Southern hotel like the Marie Antoinette, its rooms filled with genuine French antiques. Texas was a whole other world, of course, and we had some of the best hospitality shown us, not least by our MCA promotions manager Henry Withers, whose family barbecued for us on their ranch. Our promoter Leon Tsilis’s family also showed us their Greek-American-style home cooking on one of our few precious off days in Washington, DC. It seemed in those days that if you were a British person in America, you could do no wrong. No wonder we fell in love with the place.

  At the end of the US tour we were to meet with one Allen Grubman, a New York lawyer who Miles had discovered. He was later to team up with partners Artie Indursky and Paul Schindler. Allen, soon to become the biggest music-business lawyer in America, was representing us and the rest of Miles’s stable of acts; later on he would represent Madonna, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen, to name but three. Between all of the groups Miles was managing, there was a lot of business to be done. After all, we were off to an amazing start with the MCA deal, which we’d signed for a cool quarter of a million dollars—probably several million dollars in today’s money. Of course, that label would own our music in perpetuity both on this planet and throughout the known universe. At that time we were still paying ourselves a monthly wage, which I believe had gone up to around £100 each.

  All the elements were now in place with which to do what every other act from the UK craved, and that was to crack the US market. We had a killer record deal, a direct signing with a US label, not with one of their European subsidiaries, so we had a global reach with our releases. We had a crack promotions team with people like Leon working all the regional outlets in connection with the live promoters, exposure on the expanding national network of FM radio stations, a great music lawyer fighting with us from our corner, a great road crew, a fresh new sound, a state of the art live presentation, and of course an expert booking agency to make it all happen on the road. Our dedicated booker at the Jerry Heller Agency was Richard Halem, and his diminutive co-booker, soon to become a giant in the music business, was Irving Azoff. These guys were our Jewish Mafia, and then we had the real Mafia in LA working the record. It was colourful to say the least, and a total eye-opener as to how things needed to be in order to crack the giant US market.

  INTERLUDE

  PAULINE

  ‘Rock Wife’ is a term my wife Pauline would absolutely detest, since it conjures up an image of some American reality show like Mob Wives or Basketball Wives—in many respects something cheap and tabloid-y. But based on the idea that behind every successful man there is a great woman, Pauline is the supreme Rock Wife. In using the term ‘successful’, I’m thinking more of being productive and fruitful rather than simple monetary success.

  She’s seen it all, of course, having travelled with me on the road right from the beginning, in broken-down tour vans as teenagers, when I played in homespun soul outfits and beat groups at village halls, to the huge stadiums where we played with some of the biggest bands of our era. She’s been there for me through it all, indulging my passions and artistic tantrums, as well as calmly getting on with being a wife to the supreme boy who refused to grow up, and mother to our three sons. She is the voice of reason and good sense. Coming from a largely female family, she found change and challenge in our all-male nuclear family, but I can happily say we now have a balance in our lives, with two daughters-in-law and two beautiful granddaughters.

  Pauline and I were married on January 1 1972 at the Priory Church in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. It was a day when she took on two marriages: one to me and the other to the music business. Even on New Year’s Eve, the night before our wedding, with me being flush with our early success, the music intruded. Wishbone Ash had a show at London’s famous Marquee Club in Wardour Street. It was some night, with Pauline being dragged onto the stage at the end of the evening and both of us being presented with cake and champagne by Jack Barry, the club’s manager. She always says she gatecrashed my stag night, but it is a night we both will never forget. The rag-tag gang of hungover rock’n’rollers that somehow made it to the church and reception the next day only added to the memories and colour of our big day.

  It was no easy task, though, to strike out from the clannish Boy’s Own culture of Wishbone Ash. When I first declared to our manager, Miles Copeland, that she and I were getting married, he for one was horrified, fearing that all the work he and we had put into the band might be destroyed by something so bourgeois as a marriage. Of course, it had happened that way for many bands, not least of all The Beatles, when Yoko incurred the wrath of the fans and John’s fellow band members alike. So Miles sat Miss Langston down and gave her a stern talking to. He told her in very specific terms that she was in no way going to be permitted to upset the apple cart by making wifely demands that might focus my attention away from anything other than the band and its upward trajectory. She in turn told him what was what and we all moved on from there. Happily, Pauline and Miles sha
red a good relationship, and there was never any tension about her interfering with any of the band’s plans.

  Pauline had been on numerous tours with us but was quite determined to have her own life as well as participating in the fun of a touring rock band. It was somewhat surprising to me when she chose teaching as a profession, given the healthy disdain she had always shown to the teachers in the school where we had met. She was always having to write and rewrite the ‘Codes of Conduct’ for some misdemeanour or other. I, of course, loved this feistiness of hers right from the beginning. The ability she has to not suffer fools gladly has been a lifelong boon to me because, as most people can imagine, the music business definitely attracts its fair share of fools, charlatans, and naïfs. I’d occasionally suffer them but she never would, and she will not to this day.

  She is not remotely materialistic; I’m much more so. Always, the life and colourful journey that the music business has offered our family has been the paramount thing. I’ve rarely had to compensate for time spent away from the family with expensive gifts and demands. She’s been the most pragmatic and patient of people, which is all to the good because the life has been very taxing on her at times, I’m sure, though you would never know it. Again, having the confidence of her own career as a teacher has been extremely rewarding. The long summer holidays always afforded us the time to travel together as a family. Our sons have often teased us that they have been into just about every cathedral and art gallery in Europe, although we did the obligatory Disneyworld trip as well—fun as well as ‘culture’. I consider us one of the fortunate few couples to have been able to weather the storms that this crazy business throws at a family.