Sometimes, as in one magnificent version captured at Boston’s Tea Party the first week of February 1970, he found it. By then, though, he had already succumbed to the belief that he was being held back by the band, and that once he was free of them – just as his mind had been ‘freed’ by LSD – he would be at one with God. A series of sessions in the fall of 1969 with Clifford Davis, ex-Mac member Bob Brunning’s new band, and Peter Bardens, demonstrated how much he felt constrained by a band he had cast in his own image.
This conviction took full possession of Green during another US tour in January 1970 that included a three-day residency at the Fillmore West and a two-day stint in New Orleans with Grateful Dead; and another shattering experience, courtesy of Owsley’s acidic assistance (during the Louisiana jaunt, Green told Patti Boyd’s sister Jenny, ‘Stay away from me. I don’t want to get caught in your world’). Playing with real fire, he was about to get burned. Yet in the lysergic present the outcome was the gloriously grandiloquent ‘Green Manalishi’, a song beyond anything dreamed of in Elmore James’ philosophy. If the long-term result was a mind prone to shutting down, in the here and now this outlandish epic became the centrepiece of some of the most experimental rock sets since Barrett took Floyd into overdrive. Green later sought to explain how his true masterpiece came about; the result of what he says was a dream, but was in all probability an acid trip:
Peter Green: This little dog jumped up and barked at me while I was lying in bed dreaming. It scared me because I knew the dog had been dead a long time. It was a stray and I was looking after it. But I was dead and had to fight to get back into my body which I eventually did . . . [] . . . I woke up and looked around. It was very dark and I found myself writing a song . . . The reason this happened was this fear I got that I earned too much money and I was separate from all the people . . . [The song] wasn’t about LSD, it was [about] money, which can also send you somewhere that’s not good. [In this] dream I saw a picture of a female shop assistant and a wad of pound notes, and there was this other message saying, ‘You’re not what you used to be. You think you’re better than them.’ I had too much money . . . The Green Manalishi is the wad of notes. The devil is green, and he was after me. [1994/1996]
By now, the dog wasn’t the only thing barking: Green was giving some of the wackiest interviews to ever appear in the UK music press. One dating from the previous December contains a description by himself of ‘someone who does try to do the will of God in an earthly way . . . I want to do something and it’s difficult to know what. I don’t want to just waste my life . . . Sometimes I think music is everything, other times I don’t think it’s anything . . . I want to put something in my head because there’s nothing there.’ This now oft-voiced concern soon led to the infamous front-page headline in the 28 February 1970 NME, ‘Why Peter Green Wants to Give His Money Away’. It seems he felt increasingly ‘guilty about squandering my money on myself’. If bemused band-members were wondering where this was all heading, Green had confided his state of mind to Mick Fleetwood during that ill-fated US tour: ‘I want to find out about God. I want to believe that a person’s role in life is to do good for other people, and [that] what we’re doing now just isn’t shit.’
Two months after he bared his soul to his closest confidant in the band, Green found himself at an all-night party in Munich. He had decided to disregard the concerns of the rest of the band and escape to a hippy commune in the company of roadie Dennis Keane, where he could be free to do drugs and make music, in that order. For an unprepared Keane, imbibing the wine laced with LSD resulted in ‘all hell [breaking] loose in my head’. If Keane somehow made his way back to the band, Green stayed on through the whole dark night of his soul. This would be the trip that finally tripped Green’s mind. Two decades on, with Green finally returned to a halting lucidity after many painful years in and out of mental wards, he offered a surprisingly metaphorical explanation of the events that evening: ‘I just sat around and thought about everything. I was thinking so fast! I couldn’t believe how fast I was thinking! And I kinda run out of thoughts.’
Shortly before Keane stumbled away from the weird scene at the Munich all0nighter, he had ventured into the basement, where he found Green jamming with his equally high German hosts. To Keane’s ears: ‘The sound they were making was awful, this kind of freaky electronic droning noise. It wasn’t music as I knew it.’ Jeremy Spencer, who had made his own way to the party and briefly sat in on the jam session, was equally critical of the results: ‘It was pretty weird. I didn’t like what [Peter] was playing. He was just jamming.’
Green, though, was convinced that he had found what he had been looking for, even telling Beat Instrumental in May: ‘[When] I played on the commune [in Munich] . . . it was then that I found out how much I’ve changed, through playing personally for them. When the pressure is off, it all comes out naturally.’ He even took a tape of the session with him when he finally emerged from the twenty-four-hour party, and on occasions played ‘this LSD tape’ (as he called it) for friends. One of them, percussionist Nigel Watson, ‘found the playing weird, even scary at times, but it was still there, free-form in one sense but spot-on in another. He was obviously really pleased with it.’ Even after Green mislaid the tape in Los Angeles at the end of his lost decade, he recalled the experience with surprising fondness: ‘When we jammed, I couldn’t believe what I was coming out with. I was playing things that I didn’t know I could play and the notes seemed to be going all round the room.’
He now tried to take this sense of freedom into the studio when, after a six-month hiatus from recording, he returned there in April to cut ‘Green Manalishi’. Although it would be his last recording with Fleetwood Mac before he quit – the band had already been apprised of his decision – there was precious little required of the others. As John McVie recalls: ‘“Manalishi” . . . was very much Peter sitting at home with his Revox . . . He came in with a demo and said, “Here’s the parts”.’
Green himself was delighted with the outcome: ‘Making “Green Manalishi” was one of the best memories [from that time]. The mixing down of it in the studio . . . I thought it would make number one. Lots of drums. Bass guitars. All kinds of things . . . Danny Kirwan and me playing those shrieking guitars together.’ In fact, the single stalled at number ten; probably because the whole thing was just too widescreen to be contained on the seven-inch format. Certainly compared with the stunning fifteen-minute version Mac recorded for the BBC in the last few weeks of Green’s tenure in the band (available on Receiver’s second archival trawl, Showbiz Blues), the single barely qualified as a prototype.
In the months after his departure from Mac, Green cut two singles and an experimental album of instrumental (End of The Game), hoping to get back to that Munich vibe – ‘trying to reach things that I couldn’t before, but I had experienced through LSD and mescaline’ – only to find when he came to edit the tracks that ‘there wasn’t enough to make up a record; it was only freeform’. The first of two solo singles – ‘Heavy Heart’ b/w ‘No Way Out’ – continued in a similar vein. The second single, ‘Beast of Burden’ – not issued until the beginning of 1972, when it sank without trace – was more like the Green of old, castigating the world for its ill-treatment of ‘beasts of burden who worked for the right to live’, to a crescendo of congas and wailing guitars.
But Green the guitar-god was done; it was time to go home. Sometime in 1971, back with his parents, the diffident East End boy went down the pub with original Mac bassist Bob Brunning. While there he confessed ‘he’d given away all his guitars, didn’t want to play music and didn’t want to talk about it’. The damage had been done in double-quick time. The repair work would proceed at an altogether more painstaking pace. Meanwhile, for some years his former band continued trying to bring him back into the fold, before chancing on an FM-friendly sound a million miles and ten million sales removed from ‘Green Manalishi’.
*
Green’s journey from �
�Black Magic Woman’ to ‘Green Manalishi’ almost exactly replicates the travails of Syd Barrett, another figure who back in the spring of 1966 was playing Slim Harpo with his own r&b combo, The Pink Floyd Sound, but had by the close of 1970 reached the end of his creative tether. A key difference, though, was that Green’s relationship with the band he formed and fronted for the first three years of its existence was generally a supportive one, even when the others were plagued by doubts as to Green’s creative direction, or Green himself was experiencing acid flashbacks or demonic visions.
Unlike Green, Barrett had conflicting emotions about his former band – its ongoing status had been eating away at him ever since he left them to their own game plan. The experience of working with two of his erstwhile colleagues on The Madcap Laughs had produced decidedly mixed results. And he seemed profoundly unimpressed by what Pink Floyd had achieved on their own, telling one journalist in the stint of promotional interviews arranged around his debut solo offering: ‘When I went I felt the progress the group could have made [without me]. But it made none, none at all, except in the sense it was continuing . . . [So] I didn’t have anything to follow.’
He had a point. The latest in a series of stop-gap Floyd long-players was the double album Ummagumma, released on 1 November, which comprised a series of individually composed song-suites, resulting in four different shades of ‘Saucerful of Secrets’, bumped up by a ‘bonus’ live album of old tracks. The latter had been due to include their concert tour de force ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ before the track was removed at the last minute, perhaps because it was too much of a reminder of the Barrett-era. A tepid ‘Astronomy Domine’ had to suffice instead. From the other side of Dark Side . . . , Barrett’s replacement, Dave Gilmour, duly admitted: ‘At the time we felt . . . Ummagumma was a step towards something or other. Now I think [we] were . . . just blundering about in the dark.’
When Barrett himself heard what they had done to the brand, he was underwhelmed, telling one journo who summoned the nerve to ask: ‘They’ve probably done very well. The singing’s very good, and the drumming is good as well’ – the muso equivalent of the kindly teacher typing a school report on some backward kids left in his charge, looking for positives, but failing to hide the condescension (and the clue is: the studio album contains exactly one vocal track).
And yet, despite everything, when Barrett began work (with surprising haste) on a second solo album, with Madcap barely in the racks, it was to Dave Gilmour he again turned to make it happen – barely a month after he had told one rock critic: ‘There [will be] no set musicians [on the next album], just people helping out . . . which gives me far more freedom in what I want to do.’ Waters, though, would not be required; either because Barrett had had enough of that kingly leer, or because Waters didn’t need no more education.
For now, Barrett seemed full of enthusiasm and ideas, insisting that he was keen to discover whether ‘it’s possible to continue some of the ideas that came from a couple of tracks on the first album’, while dismissing his debut offering as ‘only a beginning – I’ve written a lot more stuff’. And on the evidence of a BBC session and a couple of EMI sessions at the end of February 1970, he really did seem to have developed some ideas first explored on ‘Octopus’ and ‘Dark Globe’, the two most successful tracks on The Madcap Laughs.
On 24 February 1970, Barrett turned up at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios for the first time since his Christmas 1967 farewell to the Floyd. There ostensibly to plug a new LP, he decided instead to again use a Top Gear session as an opportunity to work up new songs. And, just as in 1967, this chronically unreliable artist breezed through the session, recording five tunes in an afternoon, only one of which – ‘Terrapin’ – came from The Madcap Laughs. Of the other four, one was a Richard Wright song he had always liked, but never returned to (‘Two of a Kind’). The remaining three were new Barrett originals, ‘Baby Lemonade’, ‘Effervescing Elephant’ and ‘Gigolo Aunt’, though the last of these for now only consisted of a single verse, which Barrett sang three different ways. As Gilmour later told journo Tim Willis: ‘Syd was great that day. Listen to those perfect double-tracked vocals. [And] he only had three hours for mixing.’ The experience seems to have convinced Gilmour to give producing his friend another try. And this time he would hold the fort the whole night through.
The nice pair thus convened at Abbey Road studios two days later to begin work on a second Syd LP, with drummer Jerry Shirley requisitioned to play whenever the song demanded it, and engineer Peter Bown there to press record (and hold Barrett’s dick, if we are to believe one particular Bown tall-tale13). On day one they worked quickly and efficiently, cutting ‘Baby Lemonade’ in a single take and two vocal takes of another new song, ‘Maisie’, which would be cross-cut on the released take. All very professional.
The following day Barrett began proceedings by demoing to two-track (i.e. stereo) no less than four ‘new’ songs, none of which he’d recorded at the BBC session: ‘Wolfpack’, ‘Waving My Arms in the Air’, ‘Living Alone’ and ‘Dylan Blues’. The last of these actually pre-dates Floyd. Perhaps it was recalled here because Barrett thought it was time he recast himself as a singer-songwriter by doffing his satirical hat to the daddy of them all. He then moved on to ‘Gigolo Aunt’, one of his funniest, finest songs, now with three distinct verses. It was a good start – in fact, the following month Barrett happily boasted to Sounds’ Giovanni Dadomo that he already had ‘four tracks in the can’ (it was actually three). At the same time, Gilmour was telling a Disc reporter he was the only man for the job: ‘No one else can do [a Syd album]. It has to be someone who knows Syd, someone who can get him together.’
It was a fateful comment. As Gilmour knew all too well, only Syd could get himself together, and between the end of February and the start of April he once again lost his way in the woods. The relatively lucid interviewee of January became in just two months someone who, to evoke Andrew King’s depiction of the latterday Barrett, ‘was trying to battle his way through the most enormous barrier to say two coherent words’. When sessions resumed the first three days in April, they proved exponentially less productive, the musical equivalent of pulling teeth.
Barrett’s flatmate, artist Duggie Fields, who went with him to the final session on 3 April, remembers: ‘He was so dysfunctional [he] literally sat there, not knowing what he was doing. Forgot what he was supposed to be singing, was certainly not focused at all.’ It was a shock to Fields, who recalls that ‘he didn’t have those problems when . . . we first got the flat14. They developed. Maybe he had symptoms of them which one didn’t really register, but . . . he wasn’t like that at first – he functioned.’ Meanwhile, though Gilmour continued to be remarkably patient, gently prodding and prompting, ever prepared to play the waiting game, EMI engineer Pete Bown was about as unsympathetic as a collaborator can be:
Peter Bown: I made sure they were closed sessions. Because if anyone had seen Syd, that would have been it. He used to wander around, couldn’t stay still in the studio; his legs were jittery and nervous all the time. I had to follow him around the studio with a microphone in my hand – wearing a pair of carpet slippers so I didn’t make any noise – just to get a take. He was wandering all over the place musically too. His pitch was out and his timing completely shot. They took down everything on tape in those days, so it’s all there somewhere, with David trying to keep him calm and relaxed. It was like a teacher trying to help a forlorn child.
At some point during these April sessions, Gilmour (and Bown) decided they would have to work with what they could get – or abandon the album altogether. Barrett’s performances in the studio had always sat somewhere between erratic and idiosyncratic, but it now seemed he could no longer control his vocal cords. As the Barrett album sessions progressed, the inclusion on Madcap of those three songs from the Gilmour/Waters session began to seem positively prescient. As drummer Jerry Shirley told Kris DiLorenzo: ‘Sometimes he’d sing a melody absolutely fine, a
nd the next time around he’d sing a totally different melody, or just go off key . . . You never knew from one day to the next exactly how it would go.’ In the end, Gilmour realized that this time around he would have to intervene:
Dave Gilmour: We had basically three alternatives at that point . . . One, we could actually work with him in the studio, playing along as he put down the tracks – which was almost impossible . . . The second was laying down some kind of track before and then having him play over it. The third was him putting the basic ideas down with just guitar and vocals and then we’d try and make something out of it all. It was mostly a case of me saying, ‘Well, what have you got there, Syd?’ and he’d search around and eventually work something out. [1974]
By now, Barrett could slip from one mode of synaptic discourse to another with nary a nod. When the authors of the British Journal of Psychiatry article ‘Laing’s Models of Madness’ challenged the validity of Laing’s worldview, they went to some pains to describe how someone sliding into madness would be unable to ‘distinguish two very different kinds of experience, [the] psychedelic and [the] psychotic’: when it came to the former, the person would be ‘seeing more possibilities that can be acted upon, which makes life exciting’, whereas with the latter, s/he would be ‘seeing so many possibilities that action [became] impossible’. This was now Barrett. The April 1970 sessions demonstrated that his capacity to see things through was fast evaporating, replaced by an often overwhelming feeling of inertia. He had passed through the fire too many times, and each time it was becoming harder to wend his way back.
And yet he still had the odd song, or four, lying around. When two sessions in a single day (7 June) were squeezed between Floyd tours of the USA and Germany and work on their own album, Atom Heart Mother, the result was another quartet of demos: ‘Milky Way’, ‘Rats’, ‘Wined and Dined’ and ‘Birdie Hop’. The demos were further evidence that Gilmour was now committed to getting Barrett to put ‘basic ideas down with just guitar and vocals and then we’d try and make something out of it all’. But just as with the February demos, Gilmour did nothing with these particular tracks, ‘Milky Way’ becoming yet another mystifying discard. Only ‘Rats’ and ‘Wined and Dined’ were revived at the pukka album sessions, which finally resumed on 14 July as Gilmour succeeded in squeezing three solid days of work out of Syd (14, 15 and 17 July).
All the Madmen Page 12
