Eyes Wide Open

by Andy Powell

  In the baggage hall, it seemed as if we were transported back in time, to Britain’s colonial past. The airport officials were dressed in khaki uniforms straight out of the 1920s, and they possibly were that old. It all seemed quite chaotic, yet there was a whimsical order to it all, with lots of form-filling and rubber-stamping. Outside, we were presented to our road crew, some of whom were wearing lungis—skirt-like affairs as an alternative to trousers—and they were all smiling broadly while hanging off an unusual looking three-wheeled truck whose open flatbed was draped with gaily coloured red-and-white gingham mattresses. This would be where our guitars and suchlike would be carefully laid together with the bits and pieces of scavenged backline equipment that our hosts had found for us to use on our shows.

  Our promoter was a tall, very amiable man with a moustache and dark curly hair by the name of Vikram Singh. Vikram was rumoured to be an aristocrat, quite wealthy no doubt, and somehow connected to the film industry. Our tour manager was known simply as Nareesh. He was fabulous, an older gentleman of exquisite taste. Immaculately dressed and groomed, Nareesh had a lighter and quite beautiful complexion, with perfectly cut silver-grey hair. He was completely charming but seemed to maintain an imperious control of everything around him. I’d later observe him closely while travelling with us. Each day, he’d emerge from his hotel room in a different magnificent outfit, but he never seemed to carry any luggage whatsoever. Later on, at train stations or airports, he’d simply walk into an empty space, clap his hands together, and half a dozen skinny, dark-skinned fellows would appear at his side out of nowhere, eager to do his bidding.

  The journey from the airport to our hotel was like nothing I’d ever experienced before in my life. Jaw-dropping can be the only description. Every aspect of life was being lived out on the streets as we cowered behind the closed windows of the two little vintage Austin cars provided for the journey. At traffic lights, tiny girls, hardly older than ten years of age, with babies on their hips, would knock on the windows, begging with their large imploring eyes trained intensely on you. Our hosts merely brushed them away. There were entire families literally living on the sidewalk, under lean-tos made of palm fronds, cardboard boxes, corrugated iron—anything that could be scavenged. Yet inside, one would see a TV flickering on and off. Dogs, cats, severely disabled people, policemen, entire families riding on one moped, oxen pulling carts of vegetables or hardware goods—it was a truly chaotic scene. And this was only just the beginning.

  We wondered what our hotel would be like, but it turned out to be something else entirely. It was off-the-scale luxury, which made it all the more shocking. We were greeted with much bowing and scraping and festooned by beautiful smiling ladies with garlands of woven jasmine and magnolia flowers. ‘Namaste, Namaste’—the traditional Hindu greeting with palms held together in front of the chest—and we were all anointed by our greeters with the universal bindi mark in the centre of the forehead between the two eyebrows. Hindus believe this is a major nerve point, we were to discover, and everywhere we went people would dab one of these marks on you. In talking to our hosts, I was immediately struck by how eloquent they were in our mother tongue—so much more so than us, using an almost quaint, gentrified kind of colonial/Victorian English. All the time their words were accompanied by exquisite manners and the typically Indian way of bobbing the head from side to side, so that you’d never seem to get a direct answer about anything. ‘Yes’ could be ‘no’, or it could be ‘maybe’. You never quite knew. That’s because, as we were to find out, nothing is quite a certainty in India. There is always that feeling that, no matter what we mortals may wish to happen, everything is in the hands of the gods.

  If I remember correctly, the hotel was on the beach, behind a high wall over which one could survey this vast mass of humanity that seemed to live out there permanently, by the ocean. We’d see people conducting their ablutions right there in the open, and it was up to you to look away, thereby affording them some sort of modesty. Everywhere around us, entertainers were vying for the coins in our pockets, with the most incredible circus of magic tricks, acrobatics, and musical performances. There were monkey trainers and snake charmers, and one chap was putting rocks between his teeth and super-heating them with what seemed like it was just his breath until they glowed bright red and sparks were flying off them.

  A German came up to us on the patio and offered us a toke on a large hash spliff. In the words of John Lennon, ‘I had a smoke and I went into a dream’—later finding that it had contained opiated hashish! The next thing I remember, in between the giggling from all of us, was that I was finding it increasingly difficult to sit up straight in my chair. Suddenly, and seemingly out of nowhere, there appeared above the wall, as if by magic, a tiny baby in the midst of us. It had obviously come from the beach below and was bobbing around on what looked like a stick. It took a little while for us to figure out that this child was actually tied to what looked like a thick bamboo pole. In its hand was a collection tin, again accompanied by that imploring expression. How was this strange image being achieved, we wondered? When we finally got over our shock and managed to peer down over the wall, we could see that a ten-foot pole was literally being balanced on the chin of the baby’s father, while he too held an imploring grin, with his hand stretched out. You could not make this up. That became forever known as the ‘baby on a stick’ incident. A small boy was standing next to him playing an improvised fiddle he’d made—quite expertly, I might add. I needed to lie down.

  The first show was in an open-air venue in front of about 5,000 eager music fans. While there were that many inside the venue, there must have been almost as many outside the place, too, just swarming around. With a population in excess of one billion, any kind of public affair in India is guaranteed to create large crowd numbers. John Sherry and I had our Super-8 movie cameras with us, desperately trying to capture it all. During the soundcheck, the musical equipment was pretty substandard, and the PA a little under-powered, but no matter, we were prepared to improvise, and Penny Gibbons, who was along to help out, was enlisted to run the lighting console. I say ‘console’, but really this consisted of a plywood panel at the side of the stage containing a number of very old switches that activated the stage lights. Essentially, lights were switched on and off along with the dynamics of the music, but each time she hit something it was accompanied by a spark and a yelp or scream from Miss Gibbons. In front of the stage there were crash barriers made of bamboo that were still being assembled as we stormed into the first song.

  Being accustomed to a rich tradition of instrumental music based on ragas, our blues-based, guitar-dominated riffing soon gained the approval of the crowd. As Laurie took a solo, the heads and arms would all move in his direction, accompanied by ‘ahs’ and ‘oohs’, and then over to me when it was my turn. It was pretty inspiring, actually, and big fun. We played two nights there.

  A few nights later we were to be found down south, in Madras, at the university. This would be an altogether more formal event, where the first few rows of the audience consisted of local dignitaries and faculty members dressed as if they were at the opera. The students were seated behind them. After a song or two the older people at the front realised that this was not their cup of tea and uncomfortably made their exit. The students immediately and eagerly filled their places. My guess is that the elders had been there to vet us, to see if we were going to be a corrupting influence on the students.

  * * *

  These two shows had been something of an exploratory mission for us on the Indian subcontinent, and we were eager to return. We got our wish a little over a year later, in February of 1983, and we were back in Bombay again. This time a more extensive tour was planned, with more cities on the schedule like Poona, Madras once more, and then Bangalore. Another act from New York was to be our touring companion. I was overjoyed to find out that Richie Havens, together with a couple of accompanists, would be on the whole tour with us.

  It was
an unlikely pairing in some ways: Wishbone with its electric folk-influenced British rock together with the kaftan-wearing unplugged hero of Woodstock. But pretty soon we became friends, and during downtimes I spent a lot of time just hanging with Richie, absorbing his take on life. He’d often come down to breakfast wearing a large hooded garment. I felt he wanted to be a little incognito. I joked with him that with his height and beard alone, that would be impossible. He must also have been about the only black person in India at the time. He was a free thinker, that’s for sure—a New Yorker, a philosopher, and a true troubadour with his history, and that very unorthodox way of singing and playing.

  Restaurants are actually few and far between in India but a very excellent place was found and a meal planned for our party. I’d requested to hear some Indian singing—I was fascinated by the traditional classical style, especially the high-pitched female singing I’d only heard in snatches being piped in to Indian restaurants in Westbourne Grove or somewhere else in London. We had a fantastic recital at dinner and then someone suggested to Richie that he get up and sing. Since he invariably carried his Guild acoustic guitar around with him, he proceeded to dive into his own version of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Landslide’. It was incredible. The force of his personality and amazingly personal guitar style grabbed everyone’s attention. This is going to be a fun tour, I thought, and so it was.

  We played a great show in Bombay, at the same venue as before, and afterward our hosts suggested we do a little night-time stroll around the red-light district, after we had enquired if there were one. The idea being that there would be no partaking but, as in London’s Soho, some colourful sights to be seen. I had no idea that such a thing might exist in India, but we were all game to simply view it from a distance. Our entourage, including Richie and his band and our tour guides, parked our cars and entered the area known as Kamathipura, which at that time housed upwards of 50,000 of what today we call sex workers, and yes, no doubt, traffickers.

  By now it was late so there were not too many regular folks on the brightly lit main street, with its garishly painted houses and hovels, which were two and three stories high. What was shocking was that there were women and girls of every age group, every size, every ethnicity literally hanging out of the windows and lounging in the doorways with that guileless stare and lack of self-consciousness that you often get in India. The lights, the colours … it was wall-to-wall women and girls, some decorated in the most elaborate, sexual, and exotic ways with crazy-coloured saris, bells, makeup, silver nose-chains, piercings, hennaed hair; you name it. And they were all now staring suspiciously, it seemed, at our group, as we nervously walked not on the sidewalk but down the middle of the street. Richie had his hood over his head. He and his band, of course, were familiar with Times Square, New York’s den of iniquity, as it had been in the 70s, as were we with Soho, of course. We also knew the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. These were the places where the rock clubs and theatres were to be found. But nothing could prepare us for this overwhelming display of truly scary wantonness.

  There was a level of murmuring and low conversation as we ran the gauntlet, and then an eerie kind of high-pitched warbling started to emanate from the collective throats of the hookers. Now we were truly scared. They were mocking us, laughing at our pathetic presence on their turf. This was female energy on a massive scale. The shrieking and warbling got louder until at one point, a wretched, toothless old hag of a woman, at least seventy or eighty years of age, dressed in a filthy sari, scurried out alone to meet us, reaching out to grab one of our party and hustle him back with her into one of the hovels, no doubt. The poor victim she was about to select was the cutest and prettiest of us all, Laurie Wisefield. Shock horror.

  By now the cacophonous crescendo had reached fever pitch. These women were all laughing at us now—literally hundreds of them. What to do? Run away. Yes, that’s what we had to do. There was nothing else for it. A riot was about to ensue. Laurie was not about to have engaged with any of it, of that I’m sure, and if we had stood our ground there would have been an onslaught. This was a truly medieval scene and one of the freakiest things I’d ever seen. You didn’t need to be high on hash to get the full impact of it all. Even ‘Streets Of Shame’, the song we subsequently wrote about the experience, couldn’t capture this. It was something else.

  * * *

  After Bombay we moved on to Poona by road. This was hardcore driving on narrow uneven roads up into the hill area, taking around six hours in tiny cars with vintage 40s suspension. That is to say, leaf springs. It was exhausting and very hot. We stopped after an hour or two at a kind of shack by the roadside—there were no service stations as we knew them at home in the USA or England, obviously, but as we entered there was the sound of music playing on a record player. It was Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’. This was too much. Had someone planned it? Either way, the moment was perfect.

  We slaked our thirst with something called Limca—a nationally popular lemon-flavoured soda—and carried on our way. Every so often we’d see the remains of accidents and broken down trucks or cars by the roadside. There was no real system of vehicle recovery, and in truly fatalistic Indian style, the survivors of these wrecks would simply camp out by their vehicle and put their faith in the gods that someone would stop and help them. Some truck drivers, fearful of having their loads looted, looked to me to have been stranded like this for days. Where were they going to go anyway—walk out of there? In fact, we all stopped at one point and helped pull a man from his overturned truck.

  That whole journey was like a movie. You take for granted in the West just how easy it is to move around a continent by car, but this was travel on a completely different scale. We played the show there, and then got to do the whole journey back again the next day in order to make a pre-arranged flight out to Madras, the hotter-than-hell city in southern India. Upon our arrival there, a day of sightseeing was planned, and we were to view some amazing Hindu shrines consisting of giant boulders with multiple and intricate carvings all over them. The place had a strong atmosphere that seemed quite otherworldly, having been developed in the seventh century. On the way back to our hotel we stopped at a crocodile farm, where we were allowed to witness feeding time. It looked like parts of wild pigs were the food of choice. At the end of all this, while the smaller crocs were absorbed, the keepers suddenly changed the calls they were making and this incredible giant beast lumbered out of the mud. I’d never seen a crocodile so large. It was perhaps fifteen or possibly twenty feet in length. The entire hind quarters of a pig was heaved over the wall to where the croc arrived below us. It opened its jaws and gulped down the butt end of this pig in one go, as if it were merely a light snack.

  The city itself was quite different from Bombay, more low-rise and spread out. The streets were dusty and had a far more rural feeling than Bombay, which I always think of as the New York of India, it being very urban, congested, intense. On the way to our hotel, the car in which we were travelling had to swerve sideways as an ox pulling a cartload of vegetables pulled out in front of us. Our car made contact with the cart in a glancing blow, narrowly missing the animal and driver. The cart’s contents were spilled all over the road. Our driver did not stop—why would he? This was, it seemed, all quite normal. Any drive in India is an adventure. You never know what you will encounter.

  In the cities, everything is sold out in the open, directly on the streets. You might pass through an area where only dried fish are sold, out there in the baking sun, right on the pavement. Then there might be a region for obtaining coal. Little boys guard their giant piles of coal, black with dust because they literally live and sleep on these piles. Down by the river will be the laundry: hundreds of women scrubbing all kinds of clothing, linen from the hotels, men’s shirts, and then all of it laid out on the rocks to dry. I was later to ponder why the ‘white’ bed linen in the hotels had a grey look to it.

  I remember one time speeding through a city by taxi. I believe it was Calcutta, whe
re large parts of the city had no electricity at all at the time. That’s scary enough, but at one point my driver simply turned off the lights of the car.

  ‘Whoa, what are you doing, sir?’ I screamed.

  With that diffident Indian wobble of the head, he turned to me and smiled, ‘I do this to save electricity in the car, sahib!’

  ‘Save electricity?’ I said, in a high voice. ‘But the car makes its own. It has an alternator!!!’ No matter, we drove on like that in the shadows until he was satisfied that we could switch the lights on again.

  The show in Madras was great—an open-air affair again, with the audience swaying back and forth to the music and particularly loving the guitar solos. This was a true inspiration for Laurie and me, to know that our work was being paid such close attention. Next on the agenda was a trip to Bangalore. This very sedate city with lots of Victorian architecture, multiple statues of the venerable former British monarch, all set in beautiful park spaces, had a calming effect on us. It transpired that the police chief there was a big fan of Wishbone Ash and insisted, together with his men, on personally escorting us to the concert, which was thronged by the usual chaotic mass of people outside. I noticed that our policemen carried these stout, six-foot-long poles or staves. As we walked into the venue, anyone who was in the way would receive a strategically placed clout on the backside or back, or even a whack on the head. I immediately asked our chief to stop this. It was quite upsetting. The police really knew how to wield those things. He smiled obligingly as if to say, ‘What’s up with you? English pussy.’ Everything would be fine as long as I introduced him onstage during our performance, which of course I duly did.

  There was one very interesting incident backstage in Madras. Other than the fact that it was my birthday, a couple of visiting Americans got word to us that they’d like to meet with the band. We said it would be OK and that we would see them backstage, and that they would be welcome at our hotel. They were nice guys, very clean-cut and respectful. They had an amazing story, too. They’d been set ashore from a ship owned by the Children of God—the very same religious group that Jeremy Spencer had gone off with after quitting Fleetwood Mac in Hollywood all those years ago, only two weeks before we lost Ted Turner to an LSD-fuelled weekend in the desert at Joshua Tree. These young Americans had been living and working alongside Jeremy, which totally fascinated me as a decade or so had passed since I’d heard anything of his whereabouts. The mission these guys had been on was to broadcast God’s word from the ship’s radio transmitter to anyone in India, I guess, who would listen.