Eyes Wide Open

by Andy Powell

  Well, we got to the place after checking into the Inn at Carmel, a wonderful old-world-style hotel, and ordered a round of beers. It was nice enough and the ambience was relaxing. Suddenly the conversation level in the bar seemed to rise excitedly. We looked around and there, larger than life, accompanied by his equally large assistant, was Clint himself. He loped up to the bar—his bar—and hunched down, cowboy style, propping himself up on his elbows, looking like a feature in one of his famous westerns. We couldn’t believe it. The level of female excitement in the place could now hardly be contained but it was still pretty respectful.

  ‘I’m going to introduce myself to him,’ Andy said.

  We were like, ‘Nooooo, don’t blow it, Andy.’ But before we could contain him, he’s standing next to Clint, seemingly in deep conversation, and they are sharing a round of beers. After a while, Clint and his sidekick decide to leave, and Andy is walking out the door with them, his trusty Fender Precision bass guitar slung over his shoulder. We’re all agog at this point.

  The next morning as we rendezvoused at the tour bus, Andy was there, prompt as usual, bass and gig bag in place, looking right as rain. We eagerly asked him where he had gone with Clint. It turned out they’d all gone back to the homestead and sat up all night playing songs—British music-hall songs like ‘My Old Man Said Follow The Van’, ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’, and so on. Clint, a fair piano player himself, apparently knew all this stuff, and Andy happily accompanied him on bass. We asked how he’d managed to introduce himself to Clint and apparently he’d simply said, ‘Hello, my name is Andy Pyle and I come from Tring in England.’ To this, Clint had replied, ‘Well, I only know one other Pyle and that would be the TV character known as Gomer Pyle.’ After that, it was plain sailing, apparently, and now Andy has a unique story to tell of hanging out for an evening at home with one of Hollywood’s biggest actors and directors.

  The reunion boost had certainly begun to wane by now but there was still a lot of work in both the US and Europe. In a way, the will and momentum to carry on was buoyed by the fact that work was being offered. It’s the old thing: a tour comes in, you look at it and think, Mmm … These opportunities are strong motivators.

  In January 1992 we recorded The Ash Live In Chicago, which was, as it said on the tin, a live album recorded in Chicago. Well, actually the location was in the greater Chicago metropolitan area, in a place called something I no longer remember. Coincidentally, this would be Ted’s last album as a member of the band. It would be released by the cynically named Permanent Records in Britain and then released again and again and again by everyone and his dog—possibly the worst contract we ever signed. I’d naively presented it to the rest of the band members before really checking things out in detail. Other artists on the label, like Donovan, would be victims to the same practice. I’d known the owner as the guy who had promoted us at Hammersmith Odeon and now he had a record label. None of us got paid for the subsequent licensing of that disc and, even worse, the guys held me accountable for it. I was getting a taste of what Miles had gone through with the Star Truckin’ deal: being held accountable by the very guys I was trying to do something for. That was another big lesson. The worst thing about these kinds of lessons is that they involve music that goes on for all time, so you are reminded of the situation over and over again.

  Ted was living in Chicago, I was in Connecticut. I don’t think Ted was doing much music of his own volition, even though he had a recording setup that had been bought for him by a mutual friend, Fred Wornock, owner of the Beaumont Bar & Grill on Halstead in Chicago, where we were later to stage a fan club convention, US-style. By that time I was writing songs with Roger Filgate and we were meeting on a weekly basis—because we were neighbours and mates—in Connecticut. I introduced Roger to Ted. We both flew out to Chicago with the idea that we would put a studio album together. Roger had been doing a little bit of crewing for us on an American tour, once famously losing an entire rented drum set that had been poorly secured to the roof of a van. He was obviously not cut out for crewing. The idea started to evolve that Roger would become one of the writers, which was a much better use of his talents. It was not the case that Roger was going to be a third guitar player or anything like that. We had this one song, ‘On Your Own’, which later ended up on Illuminations, and Ted had these lyrics, ‘Hanging By My Fingernails’—which should have told us something.

  I think ‘On Your Own’ was the only thing we worked on as a trio, although Ted did come out to Connecticut to play with us under the joint assumed name Tossed Salad in the barn that was serving as our demo studio. It was on the occasion of a garden party hosted by the owner, local artist Don Messer. I think it was during this period that Ted stayed with Pauline and me at our Connecticut home and, weirdly, we got into chopping down trees on my property to expose the view of the valley. I remember Ted really going for that, and of course it was a great help. Shortly after that he sent me a letter saying that he was resigning from the band, and, by the way, he didn’t like the way that I was handling the finances …

  In retrospect, maybe I just wasn’t communicating enough about the band finances to Ted. I was doing a lot and he wasn’t, and the balance just wasn’t right for him. If we had had a third-party manager handling the business, the equilibrium might have been restored, but I think the geography, and probably the different approaches to life and to the band as a career, would have taken their natural toll in the end. I was, by now, not averse to using my own money to bankroll various travel arrangements and projects on behalf of the band—something I doubted anyone else was prepared to do.

  If it seems that I was taking on all the weight of keeping the good ship Wishbone afloat, it was not without the help of certain individuals who, while not directly investing, were acting as mentors and guiding me in a solid direction forward. Chief among them was Leon Tsilis, our one-time promotions man at MCA. We’d always kept in touch through the years, since he was personally invested in many of our releases at the label, having been with us in the studio during recording and then later galvanising his team in the field to promote the band. He had, like us, also logged a lot of road miles.

  Leon was becoming enthralled with the idea of the internet and the new possibilities it offered the music business and, being a keen programmer, was about to give the band the greatest gift of all: our own website. This debuted in 1994, making us one of the first bands to have one, and it was to be a game-changer, acting as a one-stop information source for everything to do with our long career, as well as a key place to find out about new events soon to take place.

  As Leon ramped up his new activities as a programmer and web designer, my oldest son, Richard, was doing the same, having been born into the Nintendo generation and gaining his inspiration from the new digital world that way. He was always nagging us to buy our first Apple Mac, back in the day. Now he set about revamping the site, working alongside Leon for a while until his own business started to really take off. These days, Joe Crabtree and I make small updates to our website, but the original format has served us extremely well.

  In the meantime, our last gig had been in Vienna on December 20 1993. A whole year and more would pass before any entity known as Wishbone Ash would once more grace a stage anywhere in the world. I stared out of a window in Connecticut and pondered the chances of the phoenix ever rising again.

  INTERLUDE

  OTHER PEOPLE’S MUSIC

  People are always asking me, ‘Was life on the road and recording in all these interesting and sometimes exotic places in the 70s quite as rock’n’roll as one would have you believe?’ If it’s an open-minded person asking the question, I’ll usually answer, ‘Actually, yes, it was.’

  When you’re wrapped up in your own thing, criss-crossing continents with a load of ambition, you don’t always have time to see everything else that’s going on in the music world around you. The party is the thing. That was certainly the case in the 70s. Aside from shared bills and festival
s, I didn’t always get a chance to hear what my peers were up to. Even with the Melody Maker poll-winners concert at the Oval in 1971, where we received an award for having the Top British Album, we arrived late and missed the ceremony. Jack Bruce was there; Rod Stewart was there in a beautiful Lamborghini car. Oh, the glamour of it all! And where were we? Getting dazed and confused, courtesy of our tour manager Rod Lynton, who himself was stoned out of his box, lost on the streets of London. We missed our presentation and were thereby perceived to have snubbed the press and bitten the hand that was feeding us.

  The truth is, fans and collectors of 70s rock, then and now, sometimes have a fuller picture of that world than I do, and I was there—physically, at least. But having said that, I’ve always tried to be a keen listener to other people’s music. Sometimes your own thing becomes all-consuming, or you lose the ‘fan’ side of interest in music. Thankfully I’ve always had it: I’m still a fan. I can get really excited about a new artist or new music if it is brave and individualistic.

  Even in the frenzy of Wishbone Ash activity in the 70s, I still managed to see and hear a lot of other artists. Some amazing future stars opened for us along the way, and now and again I got a chance to see someone else’s show as a paying customer as well. The funny thing is, if people ask me today, ‘Do you remember playing Bristol in 1972?’ I might, with the best will in the world, have to disappoint them. But at the same time, I could tell them all about seeing, say, Little Feat at the Hammersmith Odeon in London around that time. The memories of being a fan and a performer are stashed in two different compartments in the mind.

  Thinking back to the bands that had an impact on me, whether musically or in terms of what I could learn from them in a performing sense, these are some of my most memorable gigs from the past six decades, both as a punter in the audience or from the side of the stage as an onlooker. As you run through the names of all these amazing artists, there’s something to learn from all of them. If you wanted to hear the best guitar playing in the world, there was Hendrix, Clapton, Peter Green. If vocal harmonies were your bag, try The Hollies. Hammond Organ? It doesn’t get any better than Keith Emerson. Songwriting? Try Paul McCartney. Stagecraft? The Who, KISS, Alice Cooper. My generation was satiated—we had it all as audiences, and I still have to pinch myself because I was living it too, often in the eye of the musical storm. It was thrilling.

  * * *

  In 1959, I was standing at my cousin’s wedding as a nine-year-old, watching the guitarist in the wedding band. He was playing a giant red guitar. It was a Gibson, I believe: a semi-acoustic model, double cutaway. It was the colour and the shininess that got me. These things were meant to be noticed. We take all this flashiness for granted these days. Everything is like that in rock’n’roll now, but when I saw this musical instrument up close at that time it was like an artefact from another planet. I was captivated. Vox amplifiers, the twang and the volume: it hit me like a revelation.

  In the 60s, as a young musician learning the craft I can vividly recall Geno Washington, The Small Faces, The Birds, The Creation, The Action, Steampacket, Graham Bond, Amen Corner, Alexis Korner, Gary Farr & The T-Bones, The High Numbers, and Spencer Davis.

  Between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, my weekends were all about working hard and then going to hear and experience the music of the day while learning how to carry myself among my peers. You were allowed to work all hours at age fourteen and for me, after that on a Saturday night it was a trip by train or bus to Watford, where our stomping ground was the Watford Trade Hall. There were all these great acts: the cream of British R&B during the 60s played there. People danced or moved to the music, everyone smoked. The atmosphere was electric and we soaked it all in. The beatnik Graham Bond Organisation and the odd spectacle of Graham with his black clothes and slicked down hair and Fu Man Chu moustache, backed by Ginger Baker, Dick Heckstall-Smith, and Jack Bruce. Who knew he would, years later, fall in front of a tube train on the London Underground? Mind the gap, indeed.

  I recall the young prodigy Steve Winwood in The Spencer Davis Group. He was no older than we were, yet had a voice from the Delta. How could he sing that way, like a black man? Was he possessed? We didn’t know. We just raved to ‘Gimme Some Lovin’’ and ‘Keep On Running’. Having a rave-up was genuinely how we described our musical adventures, particularly if it involved dancing. There were pills around and beer, of course. The girls drank rum and blackcurrant and that was about it. There was often a menace in the air. Mod violence spawned by jealousy, if someone had a particularly nice suit or a particularly attractive girl on an arm. Where did they get the money? A frequently used phrase was ‘Who are you screwing?’—meaning not who were you having sex with but who are you staring at. You kept your eyes averted unless you wanted to challenge. I once made the mistake of staring and was taken outside the dance hall and threatened with a knife. These were the kinds of chaps who would take great pleasure in stubbing their cigarettes out on your forehead if you displeased them.

  My mates and I spent all the money we made in our weekend jobs on sharp clothes. We were all desperately trying to look and act older than we were. You had to have attitude, a furrowed brow, a slight sneer. That was really your protection. Later on, I became a big fan of more foppish bands like The Birds (the English Birds), a heavier act with a young Ron Wood playing bass, along with The Creation and their song ‘Makin’ Time’. Things were getting musically heavier, while the image portrayed from the stage was becoming more fey and flamboyant. A particular favourite of mine was The Action. All these London bands—including, of course, The High Numbers—were driven by heavy rhythm guitar. I loved that. The power chord ruled, though it was not known as such in those days.

  * * *

  Nineteen sixty-seven was a particularly important year. It was the Summer of Love, after all. It was going full force in San Francisco, of course, and elements of it all were filtering across the Atlantic. I spent the summer going to rock festivals, culminating in the Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival. Undoubtedly this was the fullest musical awakening for me. It was pretty clear to me that music was the game I wanted to be in. How could anything stack up to the euphoria created by these bands in the audiences that I was a part of? Only one answer: my own band, or least one that I was an equal part of.

  I was in the audience at Cream’s first gig. I remember Eric Clapton striding through the audience, wearing beads, Indian clothes, and a wild Afro. He did indeed look like a god—as the graffiti around London was proclaiming at the time. When Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac finished their set in the tent stage at the same festival I was in the front row and, at the tender age of seventeen, defied the security to leap up onstage and personally drag him back on for an encore. He was laughing in the euphoria, and they did exactly that. What a band! It was the same with The Nice. Keith Emerson was stabbing knives into his Hammond organ, manhandling it all over the stage while playing their magnum opus, ‘America’. It was amazing stuff—all this new music being played by virtuosos, the best that their generation of white musicians had to offer, and it was all right here in our backyard for our exclusive enjoyment.

  I was lucky enough to see Jimi Hendrix live on two occasions: once at an open air concert at Woburn Abbey, one of Britain’s venerable stately homes, and the other time at London’s Royal Festival Hall. On that occasion, I remember Hendrix had all his Marshall cabinets laid down on their backs, pointing up at the ceiling. This was obviously to help with the sound separation in the venue, which is more attuned to classical recitals. It was a strange atmosphere of youth culture meeting ‘the Establishment’, and there was Jimi at the centre of it all, in all his finery.

  I remember at one point a young female audience member got up out of her seat to go the ladies’ room or something. Jimi stopped the band and using his wah-wah pedal created a soundtrack to her shimmying down the stairs. It was funny and endearing, and it broke the tension—a spontaneous inspiration which was pure Jimi. He very definitely responded t
o whatever was going on around him, like the time he ditched his planned song selection on the Happening For Lulu TV show, jumping straight into ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ by Cream instead.

  * * *

  In the UK, we were finagling ourselves onto bills with Yes, Fleetwood Mac, Deep Purple, and Colosseum, as well as having other acts doing the same with us, like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Skid Row, the latter featuring a wild young guitar player, Gary Moore. The mentality if you were a guitar player then was much like it is now: a kind of gunslinger mentality. You needed balls and a lot of front if you were going to stand out from the large number of great players that were appearing on the scene. Very quickly I realised that trial by fire was the only way to get noticed—after all, I’d been playing since I was eleven years of age, for God’s sake, so why not put myself to the test at any opportunity? That’s how I approached playing live with Wishbone Ash: it was do or die. I’m sure we all felt like this. My solos were starting to gain attention on our early records and, most importantly, I had my own sound, the vibrato and the ecstatic way of playing. I had mojo. I felt it. I couldn’t control it. It was my soul, my voice coming to the fore.