I Talk Too Much

by Francis Rossi

  As if to mark the corner we had turned, in terms of becoming masters of our own fate, musically, at least, Piledriver became the first Quo album where I was listed as ‘Francis’ Rossi. Up to then, I had still been listed as ‘Mike’. My hair was now longer than a girl’s but the blurring of sexual identity, at least in music, was in full sway by 1972. If you could have ‘Alice’ Cooper you could certainly have ‘Francis’ Rossi. Besides, as I kept telling people, unlike Alice or Elton or Bowie, it’s my real bloody name!

  I even loved the cover of the Piledriver album, which was the three-man frontline of Quo – me, Rick and Alan – all pictured together with our heads down, hair falling over our guitars. John may have been miffed not to get his picture on the cover but that wasn’t really the point. Drummers are like goalkeepers, it’s always their lot to be considered last. None of us got our faces on there, though. It was just this brilliant image that completely summed up what Status Quo had become and what the music on that album signified. You can call it heads-down-no-nonsense-mindless-boogie but that is to wilfully misinterpret what that image really said, not just about us as a band, but our fans as a people – that we were all united as one, in service to this music that really moved us all. You know something is really good when it takes on a life of its own and from the moment we finished making Piledriver, that’s what happened to Status Quo. The whole thing just took off – and we’re still waiting nearly half a century later for it to come down again.

  It was as simple as that. ‘Paper Plane’ came out as a single in November 1972 – our first release of any kind for over eighteen months – and immediately became a hit, reaching number 8 in the charts that Christmas. It’s still one of our fans’ favourites. It began life as one of Bob’s poems, which we turned into the lyrics of the song. (That ‘three grand Deutsche car’ it famously mentions in the verses refers to the very real Mercedes 600 the band was now travelling in, thanks to our advance from the Vertigo deal – one of those luxurious German limos with forwards-and backwards-facing seats and drapes for the enormous rear window; massive front grille; power divider down the middle. Looked like a Rolls-Royce, only better!) You turn up for a gig in one of those, you feel like genuine rock royalty.

  ‘Paper Plane’ also became a hit in several countries in Europe – and New Zealand, which was nice as I’d never been there. When the Piledriver album was released ten days before Christmas, it flew into the UK charts and went to number 5. It would stay in the UK album charts for the next eight months, a phenomenal amount of time. The album was also a hit around Europe but not New Zealand. It did get into the Australian charts though. I’d never been there either. That Christmas I was as happy as a dog with two dicks, as we used to say back then. We all were, especially Rick, who was now able to live out his fantasies in full.

  We ended the year with a New Year’s Eve show at the Greyhound, which was like our hometown gig, in Croydon. I can’t remember anything more about it than that. The party had started when ‘Paper Plane’ and Piledriver were both in the top 10 at the same time and it had continued right through Christmas. The thing that does stick out for me all these years later is that a week later – six days, to be precise – we headlined our first show at the Rainbow Theatre, in Finsbury Park. The Rainbow was then the most prestigious rock venue in London. It held about three thousand people, and the fact that we were suddenly able to headline it said everything about the new status of Quo. (Shit joke, sorry, couldn’t resist!) The Rainbow was where Eric Clapton would stage a famous show later that month, and where Rod and the Faces and Bowie would play. The Rainbow was where you played if you were a big rock band with a record in the charts. Suddenly, that meant us. Well, not suddenly.

  It had taken ten years to achieve this ‘sudden’ success. But that’s where we now were, top of the world, Ma! All we had to do now was come up with another hit album and single. Then another and another and another and …

  Chapter Five

  Get Down!

  If the first ten years of being in the band, from the Spectres to Status Quo, had been about trying to make our dreams come true, the next ten years would be about living that dream, but somehow seeing it turn into a nightmare.

  It all started so well. In 1973, Status Quo was suddenly hot property. Colin had merged his management company with Billy Gaff, Rod Stewart’s manager, to form Gaff Management, and he made it known to us that we were his big priority that year.

  We did our first shows in New Zealand and Australia at the end of January, headlining some and opening on other, bigger dates for Slade, which was mind-blowing. Not just the people, who were so friendly and so into the group, but the weather. It was all rain and snow when we flew out of London, but it was in the middle of summer over there. It sounds a cliché but the whole prawns-on-the-barbie, cold tinny and bikini-girls on the beach scene really brought home to us the feeling of having stepped into a dream. We went from there to touring these huge venues in West Germany with T. Rex, getting screamed at by Marc Bolan fans and being hounded by denim-clad German lads who wanted nothing more than to get very, very drunk while we played very, very loudly for them.

  We came back from that and began a two-month headline tour of Britain topped off with another two sold-out shows at the Rainbow. Did it go to our heads? Of course it did. It is meant to, isn’t it? For all the newfound success none of us had the faintest idea that it might last longer than a couple of years – if we played our cards right and got lucky. So we made the most of it. Apart from the money and the three grand Deutsche car, this was when we got more into dope smoking. All of us apart from John. Years later Rick would talk about how he was never that much into hash or marijuana and that he would feel alienated from me and Alan and Bob, who all liked a puff. But that’s not how I remember it. In my memory, Rick was as into enjoying a joint after the show as anybody.

  Rick probably liked his cigarettes and his speed and his booze more. But dope was definitely part of his thing too in those days. I was twenty-four, having the time of my life, and as far as I was concerned smoking a few joints was fuelling my creativity – man. It really was, though. Bob Young was the same. We didn’t see dope smoking as drug taking. We felt it was certainly better than drinking to get high, which is something I had never enjoyed.

  Another thing we were now getting more than our fair share of was groupies – not ardent girl fans looking for a bit more than just an autograph. I mean, real, proper groupies, as the term was understood in the early seventies. In the current MeToo climate this has become a tricky subject to try and explain. But the fact is that back in the late sixties and early seventies there were dedicated groups of girls that devoted most of their spare time to looking after bands. Not just having sex with them but actually taking care of them. Feeding them, showing them around places other than the hotels and venues, mending their clothes, shopping with them and having meals, listening to their boring stories, putting up with them, knowing they would only be together for a short time. In the days before email and mobile phones and texting and FaceTime and all the other ways we now have of staying permanently in touch with each other no matter where we are in the world, being away from home on the road for weeks and months at a time was a wearying, lonely existence. You’d get the high from doing a good show – and the lows you suffered when the show had been a disaster – but mostly you’d get that weird disconnected feeling of not knowing where you are, of not having anyone new to talk to, of being stuck in the same car/dressing room/ hotel with a lot of smelly men who you have gotten to know far too well. Being detached from reality, basically.

  This is where the groupies came in. They weren’t manic fans, jittery just to meet you. They were used to being around bands. They knew the scene. They would become your best friends – for a few hours or a few days – before you moved on to the next part of the tour and they moved in with the next band. There was even a magazine in the US specifically for groupies called Star. Groupies weren’t one-night stands. They had the
ir own role on the road. The novelty of having sex with strange girls every night had already worn off. As the singer, I had gotten used to getting the best-looking girl back to my room. But the whole thing would fill me with anxiety. It was the same for all of us. In the end we would often rather have a polish than full-on sex with a stranger – a ‘polish’ being what we used to call masturbation. We had all known each other since we were teenagers, so wanking was no big deal to us. A few sweaty knobs all swinging in the same room together was a fairly ordinary occurrence for us back then.

  One night, in Munich or somewhere like that, the local promoter gave us this 8-mm porn film – or blue movie, as we used to call them. Again, you have to picture a world where videorecorders haven’t been invented yet, let alone smartphones. So we would get these films and run them through an 8-mm cine camera. You would stick a white sheet up on one of the hotel room walls and we’d all sit there ‘entertaining’ ourselves.

  On this particular occasion, for a laugh we got Bob to aim the projector out the window onto the side of the building opposite our hotel. Suddenly the people on the street were being treated to these 20-foot-high film images of people having sex. At the same time, we had a few of the regular groupies in the room with us. They were all game for a laugh, but they couldn’t interest us. They were all gorgeous and shoving their tits in our faces going, ‘You like fuck, Englishman?’ I was like, ‘Sorry, love. Not tonight. I’m having a polish, can’t you see.’

  We didn’t really encounter the real dedicated groupie scene, though, until we got to America – which became the next place we went to play for the first time in 1973. Talk about a culture shock. Going to America back then was like going to the moon. We went from headlining the Sunderland Locarno, supported by the John Peel Disco, straight to playing a private showcase for our new American record company and assorted media people at the fabled Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles, once the home of the Doors, Love and Frank Zappa. Vertigo didn’t have an operation in the US so Colin had done a separate deal for us with A & M Records. This was the label formed in the early sixties by Herb Alpert of ‘Spanish Flea’ fame. It had mainly specialised in easy-listening acts like Burt Bacharach and the Carpenters. By the start of the seventies, though, it had branched out to include album-oriented rock acts like Joe Cocker, Procol Harum, Humble Pie, Free – and us.

  At the time, the brand of hard blues-based rock we now specialised in was hugely popular in America. Rod and the Faces were already huge there and so were Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and so on. It seemed like only a matter of time before the American audience took to us as well. Except, of course, things are never that simple.

  It all began promisingly enough. We had a forty-five-date tour booked, mostly opening for bands like Slade, who we had already become good friends with, Savoy Brown, Dr Hook, Tim Buckley, Climax Blues Band, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, ELO … anyone that would have us, basically. There wasn’t much emphasis on putting together bills that would suit just one particular audience. It was all about working hard each night to win over new audiences wherever you happened to have arrived on the map.

  We also did a number of headline shows at various clubs, including three nights at the Whisky in LA and runs of shows at small but raucous places like the Draft House in Colorado, the brilliantly named Fat City in New Jersey and, right at the end of the tour, a week-long residency at K-K-K-Katy’s in Boston. We still didn’t have any records in the US charts when we returned home in July but we had left with a lot of goodwill in the bank, especially in Canada, where we had done a couple of shows and where the records were now starting to sell.

  One other thing I still remember from that tour, which would have an unnervingly lasting echo through the years, was something that happened to Rick. I think we were in San Francisco and we were in the dressing room getting ready to go on when these girls sort of wandered in. Nothing particularly unusual for those days. But one of them was this extraordinarily beautiful woman who walked straight up to Rick, pointing at him, going ‘You… You…!’ I think we were all thinking, I wish it could be me… me… she was going for. But not after we saw Rick, the next day. He never really told us what happened, just that he’d spent a very strange and disturbing night with this girl, who he’d gone home with after the show. I don’t know if she laced his drink with LSD or what happened but Rick came back completely freaked out. There was definitely something very witchy about this girl and whatever she did to get inside Rick’s head, I don’t think he ever really got over it. Years later – many years later, towards the end of his life – he would sometimes accost me, when he’d had a few drinks, perhaps, pointing his finger at me, going, ‘You… you…!’ before unloading whatever crazy stuff was on his mind. There was so much crazy stuff going on in the seventies to do with drugs and weird people that came to your shows in America that I quickly put it out of my mind. But, I swear, Rick never really got over it. Whatever ‘it’ actually was.

  Coming home to London, top of our agenda was to record a new album – and though no one was spelling it out, a new hit single. Singles were still looked down on in the album-buying rock community. It was the reason we hadn’t rushed to try and record an immediate follow-up to ‘Paper Plane’. In 1973, according to the rules of the music press, which was becoming immensely powerful in the business back then, you could either be seen as Slade or Wizzard – one big hit single after another, but no one really paying much attention to your albums. Or you could be seen in the same bracket as bands like Free and the Faces – one single per album, maximum, with all attention being aimed towards your albums. Even David Bowie, who’d taken off massively the summer before, only released one single, ‘Starman’, from his Ziggy Stardust album. We very much saw ourselves in the latter category.

  Of course, the so-called rules were broken all the time. Elton John seemed to have a new single out every other week. But mainly the serious new faces like Roxy Music, Bowie and Mott the Hoople were all about shunning the idea of being seen to rely on hit singles. Like us, Roxy would begin their career with stand-alone singles never intended for any of their albums. Bowie also followed up ‘Starman’ with two stand-alone singles. It gave them the huge profile a radio hit would do, but it kept their integrity intact as album-oriented artists. It was an idea that appeared to be backed up when our old label, Pye, released two singles back-to-back from the Dog of Two Head album – ‘Mean Girl’ and ‘Gerdundula’ – to try and cash in on our new success while we were away in America. ‘Mean Girl’ got into the top 20, but ‘Gerdundula’ barely made the top 40.

  Lesson learned: fans – real album-buying fans who read Melody Maker and the NME each week – were not so easily taken in any more. Meanwhile, I was fretting quietly in the background, desperate for ‘Paper Plane’ not to turn into another one-off like ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’, here today, gone later today. No one was pushing the point, but I knew in my bones that the thing that would really keep the show on the road was another hit single. There is a music business saying that began doing the rounds later in the seventies, when bands started to come to their senses about such things: art for art’s sake; hit singles for fuck’s sake. I wouldn’t have said it out loud at the time but that is how I was feeling as we got ready to make our second album for Vertigo.

  As a dad with two kids now I also felt the pressure to keep the money coming in. After the Vertigo deal was signed and we got some money I was able to lay down a deposit on a mortgage to buy a four-bedroom semi-detached house next door to where one of my Italian aunts lived in Forest Hill. The price of the house was £10,000, the equivalent today of about £128,000, though again you have to amplify the purchasing power of a pound in those days. You wouldn’t be able to afford a one-room flat for that money these days. So we were lucky to be living in a time where such things were possible. But at the time, the responsibility for coming up with the monthly mortgage payment weighed heavy on my mind.

  At the same time, there was a much greater f
eeling of confidence about the band in 1973. We knew we’d cracked it, that we just needed to keep our eyes on the road ahead and not get distracted. It was a great relief, though, I have to admit, when Bob and I remembered the country song we had written three years before called ‘Caroline’. We were scrabbling for material to make up both sides of the album (anyone under the age of forty reading this, you’ll have to Google what side one and side two meant in the old days of 12-inch vinyl). Like Piledriver, we were back in IBC Studios in London, blasting everything out as loud as the speakers would let us and recording to tape what we came up with. We only planned on having eight tracks, four each side, again the same as Piledriver. But we didn’t have enough, so we included tracks like ‘Softer Ride’, which was another song Bob and I had written but which we agreed could be credited to Rick and Alan just to keep the peace as they were moaning that they didn’t get enough of their songs on record. It was originally just the B-side of ‘Paper Plane’ but it was a good track and deserved its place on the new album. And ‘Caroline’, which might have been a disaster but we were short of material and, blow me down, it sounded fantastic speeded up and given the full Quo treatment. I knew it was a hit the moment Rick started blasting out the chords. I put a sort of finger-wagging riff over the top, then Alan and John came piling in and we were off to the races.

  By now we knew what we were supposed to sound like, what our fans really liked most about us, and the rest of the album followed suit. We only had one slightly more plaintive song on there, ‘And It’s Better Now’, which Bob and I co-wrote, and that earned its place fair and square. The melody and arrangement were so sweet you could eat them. The two most memorable tracks on the album, after ‘Caroline’, were of a different class though. The first, ‘Roll Over Lay Down’, which opened the album, was another song that Bob and I had come up with, but which again we agreed to have credited to the whole band. Colin Johnson had talked Bob and me into allowing that to happen, just to keep the others happy. They had seen how much money had been coming to us for writing ‘In My Chair’, ‘Mean Girl’ and ‘Paper Plane’, particularly after we had negotiated a much more equitable deal with Vertigo than the one we had with Pye. Colin could see Alan, in particular, getting more and more bent out of shape about it, to the point of starting to argue for more of his songs to be included on albums or chosen as a single, simply to try and keep up with the money I was now earning.