by Andy Powell
Alongside virtual product like internet broadcasts, DVDs were growing in popularity. The first of several official Wishbone Ash releases in the new format would be our 30th Anniversary Concert, staged in London with guests like Laurie Wisefield and Claire Hamill in 2000 and released the following year. My eighteen-year-old son Aynsley joined the band on drums for the song ‘No Joke’. Tommy Vance was the master of ceremonies.
Embracing new possibilities like internet broadcasts never bothered me. I never got hung up about the technology. If the worst comes to the worst you can always put a guitar on and play to people. Everything else—podcasting, DVDs, putting dance grooves around your music, whatever it is—is just a medium between you and the listener. The rest is just work and the often not-so-simple execution of it.
The work ethic itself goes back to my teenage years. To this day I still play open-mic nights near where I live—two or three songs to see if I sink or swim. Sometimes I do sink but mostly I swim. It’s the same with the band. To me, a band is left with no credibility if it can’t ride with the waves and adapt to the times—and I’ve seen Wishbone Ash adapt so many times that one could say that this is probably one of our greatest attributes. There have been so many people pass through the band but, to me, it’s only ever had any validity if it could hold its own against anyone, and that’s what I’ve always tried to do with it. If you do a festival, you could be on there with Mahavishnu Orchestra or Bananarama—you walk onstage and you play ‘Phoenix’, however bizarre the bill is. We’d done that time and again, so why couldn’t we do a dance album? Why couldn’t I simultaneously be in a blues band? Why couldn’t we do live concert broadcasts? It’s all just music.
So why did Mark leave? It was partially the boot-camp fatigue again. I think I ground the band into the dust. I worked them like there was no tomorrow, on tours of America that would have made your hair turn white.
On one occasion I remember traveling overnight in an ice storm in Arkansas. We pulled over at one point and Ray got out of the vehicle and promptly slipped over on the half an inch coating of ice that was on the road surface, over which we had just been flying at 70mph. Later on, there’d be storms and tornadoes and all kinds of unhelpful weather situations that one might expect if one was foolhardy or bloody-minded enough to tour across a rugged continent in the middle of winter. The distances between dates were extreme, often entailing eight- or ten-hour drives. In and around all of that we’d be dashing across the Atlantic for a couple of European festivals somewhere and back again. It was like a military operation—all of the time!
But we were all just trying to survive, taking work and opportunities wherever we could. Certainly our date sheets became the envy of other bands in our position, although of course they did not see the extreme toll all this was taking on us and our families. On one tour, for example, I invited along a teenager by the name of Chris Boast. As a drummer himself, his parents had previously brought him along to a UK show of ours with a request that if there were any openings in the music business, could I please keep Chris in mind. Well, what better opportunity than a nationwide tour of the USA by van and trailer? After a couple of weeks on the road, Chris and I could be found under the van, high up a mountain pass in Oregon, during a massive snowstorm, attempting to attach snow chains in order to make it over the pass for our show that evening. This was touring the hard way, no doubt about it. Chris still credits me with opening his eyes to the world in some weird way and still, to this day, joins us on the odd European tour as driver and backline tech.
There was a bit of a parallel between Mark and Tony Kishman, both being single fathers of daughters. Mark needed to spend time with his daughter, Harriet, and was also planning to remarry. He couldn’t carry on being this itinerant musician, flying all over the place earning not very much money with his personal life going to hell. That’s often the case with musicians. Mark was getting really interested in computers and programming. I saw a real passion there. He wanted to invest himself in areas that were going to give him more stability—and he was quite right. For the work we were doing, I was OK: I was earning a little bit from royalties, I could get by. But to base your whole income on gigging was tough. So I didn’t hold it against Mark when he decided to cut his hair and leave the band.
Somehow, Wishbone Ash had managed to slip, largely unnoticed by the dinosaur hunters and tastemakers of the world, into the twenty-first century. We’d doffed our cap to the past with that anniversary concert in London and we’d trodden water well enough with an unplugged album of old songs in new clothes—a rather tight corset, if the cover art is to be believed.
Did we have anything new to say? And, more importantly, where was I going to find another guitar player?
INTERLUDE
GUITARS
Collecting musical instruments, specifically guitars, is an addiction as intense as any other. Walking into a music store is like walking into a candy store as a kid, with all the brightly coloured jars of sugary sweets. It’s that same thrill that you might have experienced as a child, seeing all these incredible shapes and colours—metal flake, exotic woods, flamed maple, sunbursts … every hue under the sun, in fact. For the record, I was an addict but I’m cured now—although, as every former addict well knows, one is always in recovery. I have an incurable sweet tooth as well, by the way, and have not been able to curb that addiction.
Keeping a small number of essential instruments for my craft, that’s a different thing. Each of those has a specific job to do other than indulging my covetousness.
I first got the bug as a nine-year-old while attending my cousin Carol’s wedding in Dagenham. She had always been my conduit to rock’n’roll, ever since I first heard the hiccupping vocals of Buddy Holly on her Dansette record player. Finally she left her teenage pursuits behind and her wedding to Jack Rivers, a rock’n’roll name if ever there was one, was announced. On the big day there was a beat group at the reception, all in sharp suits, and the guitarist, as mentioned earlier, had a blood-red semi-acoustic Gibson strapped across his body. Even today I can remember just standing there in awe, watching as this incredibly exotic musical instrument from what seemed like another planet shone in the lights, while my eardrums were being assaulted by the twang and thump of the sounds coming out of his Vox amplifier. This was very powerful mojo.
Later, I’d pore over music catalogues and make little trips to local music stores just to ogle the admittedly poorer British versions of American instruments, which were streets ahead in style and design of what was coming out of the UK at that time. That was until a salmon pink Fender Stratocaster appeared in the window of our local music shop. It was an impossibly fantastical amalgam of sensuous curves and colour. I marvelled at how the wood of the body could be carved into those body-hugging contours, at the mechanics of the new-fangled tremolo system and the scrolled headstock with tuners aligned on one side for ease of operation. Even the way the amplifier cord jack plug entered the body was sexy.
There was no way in hell I’d ever be able to afford to own one, and it was the same for my mates who were also getting the bug. A neighbour of mine, Bob Moreton, decided to build a copy of a white Strat, and very fine it turned out to be. We were both good artists and adept with our hands and it was he who inspired me to have a go at making my own. I must have been about twelve years old. The new grammar school I was attending had a woodworking studio, and I’d love those classes—the smell of wood dust, the feel of the shavings—as I got to grips with using a plane and spoke shave while building a table lamp and, later on, a coffee table. Guitar building was not going to be accepted here, though. We were concentrating on things that were deemed useful to society. I had other plans.
My uncle Jim managed a timber suppliers and wood yard in Brentwood, and it was he who obtained for me some fabulous maple wood to build a guitar neck. He was supplying builders of bowling alleys—another American idea—and the lanes were constructed from planks of strong American maple wood, perfect for carvi
ng into a guitar neck. We also found a great lump of mahogany for the body of the guitar. I set about mapping out the design for that as best as I could, basing my ideas on that Fender Stratocaster, working out the shape from memory. The wood was rough-hewn into shape out in our tiny shed, while the rest of the work was actually done on the dining room table. The dust and mess must have been unbelievable, and I can’t believe now that my mother let me do this, but that’s where my first guitar was built. She was a mother of boys, though, and she also really liked the modern rock’n’roll music, just like me and my younger brother. Dad helped with some of the brass metalwork, which he had chromium-plated at work, and I was in business. I later built a Les Paul-shaped guitar and learned a lot about how the different constructions of these two key instrument styles affected tone and playability. To this day, these two basic types of guitar construction rule the rock world: either guitars with bolt-on necks, like Fender instruments, or the more traditional construction featuring glued-on necks, as featured in the Gibson range of instruments, which harked back to an earlier era of jazz and dance bands.
There’s nothing better than learning how to actually make or build the instrument that you will eventually play, as our son Aynsley later learned. He was already a very skilled drummer, having started playing at age six. He found out about making drums, African-style, when, as a student at Berklee School of Music in Boston, he enrolled in a month-long course in Ghana to study African drumming. The kids there are selected by the tribe to have the privilege and honour of being trained as drummers at around the same age Aynsley was when he started playing. The history of the tribe is somehow told through drumming. Those boys must first kill the animal and skin its hide, then cure and dry it before stretching it across the carved tree trunk that they have already cut down and hollowed out. It is only once they’ve done all of this that they will begin their lifelong journey to become accomplished drummers.
With my homemade guitars I felt that I’d paid some of my dues. I did not acquire my first actual Gibson guitar until I’d been in Wishbone Ash for a number of months. It was an all-mahogany SG Special, finished in a faded burgundy, with a fixed tailpiece and two P90 single-coil pickups. Up until that point I’d played my homemade ‘Les Powell,’ the second guitar that I made. I began to feel that I needed a guitar with a little more output. I’d play the SG strapped high up on my chest and it had a rather unstable neck that you could bend to create vibrato effects when chording. Without using any pedals the guitar was powerful enough to overdrive amplifiers like the Laney sixty-watt thing that I’d bought on credit.
There is so much information about guitar technology out there these days but, essentially, nothing that much has changed in that area in fifty or sixty years. Guitars and amps are basically the same now as back then. I was finding things out first-hand by getting out on the road and developing a style based on whatever I could get my hands on at the time. Not long after, in America, I obtained two vintage Fender Concert combo amps, which I used exclusively in the studio for their clear, warm tone, both perfectly complementing the Gibson. I also picked up a vintage 1959 tweed-covered Fender Bassman combo, which I still use to this day, though mostly in the studio. The circuitry of the Bassman amplifier, incidentally, was what British amp manufacturer Jim Marshall based his original Marshall Plexi fifty-watt amp head on.
It would be a year or two before we arrived in the States and started combing the pawnshops for the instruments that we could only have dreamed of as kids, and to our surprise we’d often find them at knock-down prices, the rock’n’roll fad having faded from the next American generation’s consciousness. Even as late as 1974, when Laurie Wisefield mentioned to me that he too would like to go on one of these pawnshop excursions, we found him an incredible 1954 Fender Stratocaster—an even earlier prototype model of the salmon-pink one that had arrived like an alien presence in my local shop in Hemel Hempstead around 1960—for a mere $300! I myself also picked up a mint ’54 Strat for around the same amount, and later we each found a vintage Telecaster.
These instruments had serious mojo—they were genuine mid-century artefacts of American ingenuity, perfectly embodying the flavour and spirit of the times. They were early mass-produced instruments, finished by hand and exhibiting real playability. Now we literally were kids in a candy shop. Those instruments began to make their presence felt on our recordings, on songs like ‘Lorelei’ and ‘Come In From The Rain’. They were simply begging to be played rather than languishing in dusty pawnshops. This fact, that we were actually getting these instruments on our recordings, made the whole collecting obsession even more exciting and even more meaningful.
Ted and I, before Laurie’s arrival in the band, had already made connections with a group of young enthusiasts and dealers on the first tours. These guys—Paul Hamer and Jol Dantzig in Chicago, together with Pete Alenov in St Paul, Ed Seelig in St Louis, and Robert Johnson in Memphis—would turn up at our soundchecks, driving big old American V8 clunkers their cars of choice. You could stash, out of sight, securely, half a dozen primo axes in the trunks of these monsters, and we’d have our choice of them to try out later in the show or backstage.
Often, if I purchased a nice Flying V model or Ted picked up a Les Paul, Ed or Paul Hamer would throw in a vintage Gibson mandolin or lap-steel guitar at a giveaway price, as an incentive. It appeared that you couldn’t give these things away sometimes. I still have my circa-1919 Gibson A4 mandolin that Paul found for me in this way. Ed started the Silver Strings music store in St Louis on the back of all this trading, supplying guys like Johnny Winter. Paul Hamer with Jol Dantzig started building guitars at the new Hamer Guitar Company, making custom models for us and Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick. We were all learning about the almost-forgotten techniques that Gibson and Fender had pioneered. The companies themselves certainly were not aware of this underground boom in guitar collecting, still believing that they should forge ahead with new—and, we thought, substandard—models. There were no widely used Gibson or Fender Custom Shops—that all came later, inspired from the ground up by enthusiasts like these guys and musicians like us.
I met another music fan and player around this time who was making a name for himself in the pickup-manufacturing business. Larry DiMarzio was our gracious host on Staten Island, where he lived not far from the renowned Mandolin Brothers, one of the few pro vintage-instrument dealers in America at that time, along perhaps with Nashville’s George Gruhn. Larry, a 1959 Les Paul Standard owner himself, had studied the genius of the humbucking pickup design that Gibson’s Seth Lover is credited with inventing. He was manufacturing a beefier version of the same idea in a tiny workshop on the island. He showed us around the unassuming place and then casually mentioned that the odd guitar would come through his hands that he would trade or sell. After showing me his Les Paul, he pulled out a 1952 Fender Telecaster that he had purchased from Roy Buchanan, the virtuoso from Arkansas and later Virginia who could do things with this clunky guitar that no one else was doing at the time. My eyes widened on seeing it, because I knew that this was from the first years of manufacture. Larry let me have that one for $300, which seemed to be the magical figure for Fenders at that time. No one really wanted them.
Ted had certainly scored several models of Les Paul, by now his favourite guitar, having graduated from the single-pickup, double-cutaway Les Paul Junior he’d first played. You can really hear the P90 pickups to great effect on our early recordings: tone for days. He was also obtaining vintage 50s Stratocasters, and the Fender sound made its presence felt on our recordings of songs like ‘Blowin’ Free’ and ‘The Pilgrim’. Ted—like myself, I like to think—could always coax out of those two very different guitars the very essence of what they were built for. (Much later on, I too was to acquire a Les Paul, and one of my greatest treasures is Les’s own signature on the scratch plate, which I obtained from him at the end of one of his legendary shows at the Iridium Club in New York. He was in his nineties at that point but still pl
aying great.)
Around the spring of 1972 I got word that the Orange shop in London had a couple of mid-60s Gibson Flying Vs for sale. They had come over from the USA, still in their Gibson cardboard packing cases, brand new, unplayed, but already five years old. Seemingly no one in the States was interested so Cliff Cooper, the owner of the store, imported them to the UK. I immediately set off from my flat in Sumatra Road, West Hampstead, determined to take a look at these two rarities. I’d never set eyes on an actual Flying V until now.
We had started to use Orange equipment at Ted’s suggestion, since our idols Fleetwood Mac were using it too, so we were familiar with Orange. Sitting in the shop I tried first one guitar and then the other. I tried them acoustically. They both had a very resonant sound even before being plugged into an amplifier, but one seemed to have the edge in tone and sustain over the other. After plugging it into one of the OR100 amps, I was sold. The thing sounded amazing. I immediately felt I’d found my instrument. We bonded. The guitar had a cool Vibrola system and the whammy bar fell naturally into the palm of my hand. There was no question; I had to have it. Somehow the magical figure of £300 was found, and I carried my new instrument home on the Tube to my tiny bedsit. I lay on the single bed of my miserable little room that night, staring at the guitar I’d lovingly propped up on a chair in order to get the best view of it, marvelling at how I’d been able to obtain such a thing. It was the beginning of a relationship with something made of wood and steel that I’d wear on my shoulder for the next forty-plus years, and that would be my weapon of choice as I’d start to stride the world’s stages.
The Orange backline came along not long after this. We bought a selection of 100-watt heads and even 200-watt heads, together with separate reverb units. The German designer, Walter Mathias, actually had a factory in Huddersfield, Yorkshire. The cabinets we used would, in time, be upgraded with JBL K120 speakers, making our rigs the cleanest-sounding units around. They were also unbelievably heavy. It required a lot of accuracy in the playing because there was not much distortion in the sound—which, as a lot of guitar players will know, can mask mistakes. When I think back on our poor road crew, the Hobbit and Chris Runciman, having to lug this stuff across stages all over the world, on and off trucks, I feel for them. None of us were big guys, including the crew, but they bulked up pretty quickly.
