by Andy Powell
Pretty soon I had the opportunity to do something that would prove very crucial in getting Wishbone Ash established as a band on the global stage. We got the opportunity to open a show at Dunstable Civic in England for Deep Purple. I wasn’t particularly a fan of Purple; I’d found them a bit contrived when they’d appeared at the Windsor Jazz & Blues festival all wearing identical purple shirts with frills down the front. I mean, could anyone imagine Cream and Eric Clapton doing that, or being told to do that by a manager? Cream had a flamboyant style, but it was a style of their own. Purple did not. They had a bloody good guitar player and singer, though, and they had already had a US Top 10 hit with a great song, ‘Hush’.
Around four in the afternoon, Ritchie Blackmore was onstage, trying out his gear by himself. It’s the usual thing: a guitar player is making so much noise, checking this amp and that amp, that the rest of the band were staying out of earshot in the dressing room. He had one slot in the set that required him to dispense with the Marshalls and plug in to a Vox A.C.30 that would be wheeled onstage. During all this preparation, I slipped behind my gear and plugged in my SG Special. Ritchie would play a lick and then make an adjustment to the amp controls … except that he’d hear a version of his guitar lick coming back to him. Looking round, he’d see me there cheekily starting a musical conversation with him. Everyone says that Ritchie is a difficult man but all credit to him, he got into the game and we had a great time. I don’t know if he remembers it or not, but later in the evening he checked out our set and asked if we had a recording contract. I answered in the negative and he said he’d recommend us to their producer Derek Lawrence.
This was a huge deal. Miles followed up with Derek, who gave him the name of a certain Don Shane out on the West Coast. Don was the head of Decca Records. Miles made all the various overtures to him, and not too long afterwards we all got to meet Don in the States when he attended one of our shows. At any rate, we signed with the label. It was a very, very good deal for us. Unlike a lot of British bands who would sign in London to a subsidiary of an American label, or even a home-grown indie like Chrysalis, we were going right to the mountain—and the mountain came to us. Having an American manager at this point was golden. Miles talked the talk and walked the walk with these guys. We were in business.
* * *
Pretty soon we were touring the States. Endlessly. We were being exposed to all these great American acts and immersing ourselves in the wider culture, and our music was being played on the newly burgeoning FM radio stations. John Peel, an early champion of ours back in England on the BBC, knew all about this, since he’d done a long stint in Texas with his own radio show during the 60s before moving back home. The musical freedom was amazing. It was simply intoxicating. Youth culture ruled. We’d got off to a shaky start with the touring but pretty soon we’d be sharing bills with midwestern rockers like Bob Seger, REO Speedwagon, and Kansas. The Doobie Brothers thrilled me, and then we’d tour through the South and Texas, joining bands like The Allman Brothers, Wet Willie, Black Oak Arkansas, and of course ZZ Top, who at that time were like a college band with short, preppie haircuts, no stage presence but killer blues grooves. Their guitar player, Billy Gibbons, had a beautiful late-50s Les Paul. They’d open for us now but later on we’d be opening for them and the whole thing had changed. Nudie suits, rhinestones, ten-gallon hats—but no beards yet.
One act that opened for us was Grin, from Baltimore, fronted by a great guitar player by the name of Nils Lofgren. He had a great Stratocaster tone and his voice was cool; great songs, too. I immediately became a fan and bought his records. Nils was a former gymnast, and he’d have a small trampoline set up onstage and do these flips in the middle of playing a guitar solo. Beat that! These Americans certainly knew stagecraft. Later he was to join another act that opened for us, Bruce Springsteen. Yes: Bruce opened for Wishbone Ash. As I remember it, he and his E-Street crew just seemed like a gutsy bar band. Never in a million years would I have thought they’d have what it took to stand out from the crowd.
One really amazing tour we played was opening for Alice Cooper. He had two pretty good guitar players, Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter. Alice (or Vince, as we called him) was super nice to us, a real gentleman. His show was amazing and we lapped it up each night. He had total control of these huge arenas. Sure, we’d known acts like Screaming Lord Sutch in the UK with his macabre antics, and then there was dear old Arthur Brown, the first real heavy metal singer, whose 1968 hit ‘Fire’ was a presage of what was to come. But Alice took it all and simply put it on steroids, with lighting effects, big stage props, and a great band. Pretty soon, we noticed more twin-lead guitar ideas coming into their music. That was cool, too.
When we hit the West Coast, we’d be booked at the Fillmore West. Just walking into that place was amazing. There was so much weed being smoked that you could not see through it across the audience, and pretty soon you’d be stoned on it all yourself. Acts like Harvey Mandel, Poco, and the Siegel-Schwall Band opened for us. When we hit the stage with ‘Blind Eye’ it was as if the whole crowd received an electric shock. Our form of dynamic rock, with all its light and shade, really woke the hippies up. It was great.
During the summers we often played state fairs and often, just like today, there would be blues bands on the bills. We got to see many of them close up because blues was not really mainstream at this time and again, like heavy metal and theatrical rock, you could not have predicted how big it would become again. Albert Collins, BB King, and John Lee Hooker were all there for the watching and learning. We were getting a great further education in music.
* * *
Back in London, between tours we were doing a lot of socialising. Miles’s middle brother, Ian, had left the army after his stint in Vietnam and was in London partying like there was no tomorrow, while working up a position for himself in the booking agency Miles and John Sherry had formed called Pytheon Productions/JSA. Pretty soon, Ian took over from Ed Bicknell as chief booker. Ed had really discovered us and later had Dire Straits dumped in his lap after no one really knew what to do with them. He became their manager, and the rest is history. He’d been the only actual representative from the agency who’d come to hear us at Miles’s basement rehearsal space at his home in Marlborough Place, St John’s Wood.
Ian moved into this amazing house in Hampstead, London, which was shaped like an ocean liner sitting on a hill. Also sharing the apartment was Al Stewart’s manager, Luke O’Reilly. Living in the flat below were Errol Brown and some of the guys from Hot Chocolate. Pauline and I were often there. Ian was a toker and knew how to throw the most amazing parties. The music was always key to it all. Great sounds. It was through Ian that I discovered The Isley Brothers and studied James Brown in depth.
One night Robert Palmer called by. I think he’d just been to New Orleans, recording with this band he told me about called Little Feat. We’d met Robert before when he was in Vinegar Joe with Elkie Brooks, touring with us in the States. This Little Feat music completely took hold of me. I wanted more of their swampy groove. Pretty soon, Allen Toussaint was in the picture, and Dr John, The Night Tripper, but Robert had sussed it out before anyone in London, and he’d actually got the Feat to back him up on his solo debut, Sneaking Sally Through The Alley. I was a paying customer when Little Feat played their legendary show at Hammersmith Odeon, our favourite London venue, and I became a fan for life. I loved everything about them—the drums of Richie Hayward, Bill Payne’s keyboards, Lowell George’s slide playing, and most of all his songwriting. This was the real deal.
Years earlier, we’d had a Scottish Band called Glencoe open for us on an early UK tour. They were great. They’d be part of the London scene and Ted, in particular, was friends with them. I believe they were stablemates at the booking agency. In fact, their keyboard player, Graham Maitland, now sadly deceased, was to join us on Fender Rhodes on American tours, which a lot of British fans are unaware of. Wishbone Ash with keyboards: who knew? I sold Onnie McInt
yre of The Average White Band a great black Telecaster that I believe his bandmate Hamish Stewart later acquired. He still plays it to this day, or at least he did when I saw him in Paul McCartney’s band years later.
During the latter half of the 70s, a lot of the acts I’ve just mentioned were really getting into their stride, cutting great deals with the labels, and we’d once again be joining them on shows. One such band was Aerosmith, who were getting hit singles and had really ratcheted up their stagecraft. Steven Tyler, who had been a sulky lead singer in the early days, had transformed himself into a frontman par excellence, as had Bruce Springsteen; ZZ Top, in particular, had their presentation down like no one else. We joined one of their tours in Texas at that point and were amazed to see this whole travelling menagerie backstage, including a buffalo and a bald eagle.
Flashiness and stage antics had always been a part of the blues but these bands took it to new heights of swagger, spectacle, and wit. Laurie and I took it all on board. While we’d dabbled in spectacle on our Number The Brave tour, with its giant set, props, staircases, and raised walkways, the Americans were beating us at our own game. Only The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band On Earth, Britain’s Rolling Stones, did it better.
ZZ’s take on the blues definitely had a musical impact on our album Twin Barrels Burning. You can hear their influence on songs like ‘Engine Overheat’. Not much English Pastoral in that one. That album, along with Raw To The Bone featuring Mervyn Spence on bass and vocals, revealed a much more muscular, heavy side of Wishbone Ash. It was all a long way from the feel of Argus, which I still felt was our true direction, and so did the fans. But a new generation of rock fans were coming of age, and they did not want any ambiguity or subtlety.
Around this time Cliff Williams, Laurie’s mate from his first band, Home, had gone to auditions in London. He’d wanted to be in a country-rock act but now had to settle with being offered a job in a heavy rock band with a couple of diminutive Australian brothers in a band called AC/DC. They would also soon be taking the rock spectacle to new heights. All of this was feeding into the mix of what we were doing at this time. It was the zeitgeist, but somehow I didn’t feel all that comfortable with it. We were behind the curve, whereas during the early 70s we’d been ahead of the curve, influencing bands like Thin Lizzy, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden—yet to come of age but soon to be at the forefront of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
* * *
Wishbone’s line-up changed around quite a bit during the 80s. Music itself was becoming self-conscious and reconstituting itself. On the one hand, you had all these new young rock acts wanting to outdo the guitar-based bands that had influenced them, and then you had the hipper outfits like The Fixx, Level 42, Nik Kershaw—all still rock but with a sheen of sophistication about them, not least in the new digital technology that they were harnessing on record and using to present their live shows. I don’t think we fitted into either camp at this time, despite dabbling with metal and playing shows with acts like Ted Nugent and Metallica. We were out of step with the times, and the albums we produced reflected this.
It was a blessing in a way that the original band did reform and produce those three albums on IRS Records because it gave me breathing space—a chance to live a little and to think about the bigger picture. There’s nothing like having an on-going recording contract. Throughout history, artists have benefitted from patronage, and we had that for a while before we imploded again.
Of late, as I’ve entered my mature years, my taste in rock music has erred firmly toward song-based material, often by bands working the Americana seam. Much of this stems from when I’m at home. There are few really good rock radio stations in the North East and those that do play rock tend to be so hopelessly stuck in the past that I simply can’t tune in. (If I hear one more Zeppelin tune on the radio I’ll go crazy.) So I tune in to college radio stations. Most of the hipper jocks who used to be on FM stations now work for WFUV out of New York and their blend is distinctly white alt.rock and Americana, plus the occasional track by older artists like John Hiatt and Neil Young.
This all tends to frame my tastes when I’m home and don’t wish to search too hard on the internet. I also listen to radio stations from Canada, as I find the French vocal approach very soothing. I’m looking to be soothed, I guess. Bands like Arcade Fire have recently kicked me out of my stupor, and we went to see them perform last summer in Bridgeport, Connecticut. My son Aynsley, who lives in Brooklyn, turns me on to new music, including his friends in bands like MGMT and Lucius.
Some of this white-bread, music-college spawn can bland you out, though, and before long I’m straight back to the blues. I always come back to Little Feat or Frank Zappa or something. I know it’s the same for the other members of the band. When it comes to rock, it’s hard to top what went down back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
CHAPTER 7
HARD TIMES
(1994–99)
The end of 1993 marked a point in time where the band consisted of me, a co-writer, and a creed of positivity with which to sustain us. All the other members had left, sometimes with unfinished work in progress and personal commitments, both financial and creative, discarded in the name of self-preservation. One could be forgiven for conjuring up an image of me standing like a captain on the bridge of a sinking ship, watching as even the rats were scurrying off into the swirling seas of anonymity.
On paper—especially if that piece of paper contains a Wishbone Ash gig list—it might seem as if nothing much happened during 1994. Had I given up the ghost? Not at all. Over the next couple of years the rebirth of Wishbone Ash was certainly a work in progress, but simultaneously lots of stuff was happening in my home life.
It was a period of flux and transition. Even the idea of the ‘90s’ sounded futuristic if you were born in the 50s. It was coming up to the end of a millennium. There was a feeling in the air that anything could happen, and there was a need to get it together. For me it was extremely liberating, because at that point I was in my mid forties: I was still young but I could see I was getting older. I saw a great bumper sticker at the time that said ‘Jesus Is Coming—Get Busy’ and I just thought, ‘Wow—yes!’
To me, the old Wishbone Ash was a distant memory, whereas I was still feeling creative, I still wanted to play guitar—I needed to be doing it. The fan base needed us to be doing it, and I would receive numerous requests and encouragement from those quarters. Where I live, we have a famous local venue called the Georgetown Saloon. Back in the 50s and 60s it had been a country & western bar. Living around Westport and Weston in the 70s we’d sometimes come out to this place, which really was out in the boondocks. Local musicians other than myself would stop by and play—guys like Ritchie Blackmore, José Feliciano, even Keith Richards, who would leave his Weston lair in the appropriately named Devil’s Den and pop into the club. So in the 90s I was doing open-mic stuff there, keeping my hand in.
One day, I got chatting about music with my insurance agent, Mike Mindel. He said he was a keyboard player and that he was putting a blues band together to be called The Sure Thing. Oh God, I thought, that’s so hokey, but nonetheless I started going down to his place in Fishkill, New York, once a week to rehearse with what turned out to be a great blues band. I met some exciting players there, and there was a whole scene going on there that I hadn’t plugged into before.
Having taken on so much of the management of Wishbone Ash in recent years, it was fun to just be a musician again—turning up with my guitar, playing, going home. I made it clear right from the start that the now-renamed Blue Law was to be a side project for me, and that my life with Wishbone Ash would always take precedence. They completely understood this since they, in common with all musicians, had day jobs, other bands, and so on. Our singer Jon Moorehead, for example, worked for an advertising firm, and our bass player, Al Payson, was a studio engineer by day.
I love being in bands and realised that I was missing the whole camaraderie, male-bonding aspect
of it, and the music didn’t hurt either. It was the same for all of us. Initially, they hit me with thirty-six songs to learn. What? I thought This is work! After a while there were a couple of gigs a week and then even more, in clubs all up and down the Hudson River. We played three sets a night. I thought I was a road warrior after twenty-five years in a global rock band, but three sets a night? What is this? It was hardcore—and at the end of it I’d even get the ‘pleasure’ of driving home at one o’clock in the morning.
I made a good friend in Al who, these days, plays bass with José Feliciano. As a side note, Al even stood in for Bob Skeat occasionally at Wishbone festival dates. Back in those days, Al managed a studio for a well-known veteran jazz vibes player, Don Elliott. There had been a whole artistic scene in Westport in the 50s and 60s, centred around the actor Paul Newman. I started to meet local musicians and to play gigs in their world. Blue Law was a seven-piece band with horns, with Mike Mindel on a doubtless comprehensively insured organ, and it was great fun, great camaraderie. I loved the music, plus I was playing my old ’52 Telecaster every night. It really was back to basics: guitar, amp, back of the car, off to the gig. Most importantly, if this was to be something of a wilderness moment for the good ship Wishbone, I was keeping my chops up.
At the same time, life was getting very busy at home. Pauline and I decided to sell Ivy Lane Farm and buy the house we’d been renting in Connecticut. We had already decided that Pauline, a teacher by profession, would stay at home during the boys’ early years. This was especially important now as they all entered the American school system, which we were both unfamiliar with. However, with a growing interest in New England, the area where we were now living, Pauline sought and was offered a part-time position at New Pond Farm, a rural-studies educational facility in our town.
