by Zoe Howe
‘William had a vintage Gretsch Tennessean guitar that was a horrible coffee-table colour,’ Jim explained to Select magazine. ‘A classic guitar, you know? Dave Gilmour walks past and sees William with a pot of black paint, painting this wonderful vintage Gretsch guitar black. Ruining it. When he sees this, he [looks horrified] and hurries away. Probably to tell Pete [Townshend]. I wish I’d had a video camera.’
At least when the Mary Chain’s path crossed with that of the irreverent Smash Hits, they were among like-minded souls – the writers were fans, evidently excited to have the Reids on board. The Reid brothers in turn were funny and erudite in their double-page interview and looked wilfully dour on the cover, a place usually reserved for grinning popstrels with perfect skin. Accompanying their cover photo were the scrawled words ‘loud, spotty and weird’. Jim and William were pleased, not least because they’d heard that, when Spandau Ballet realised the Mary Chain were the cover story and not them, they withdrew their interview – something Jim considers to be up there with the Mary Chain’s finest achievements. ‘I was thinking, Wow!’ Jim laughs. ‘If my life ends today, I’ll be happy. That’s fantastic, great!’
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Meanwhile some vital new blood was about to be injected into Blanco Y Negro; Jeannette Lee, now co-owner of Rough Trade, was about to start working with Geoff Travis, both on Rough Trade and the Warners imprint. Jeannette had punk-rock form, unparalleled dynamism and savvy, not to mention considerable style. She had initially worked with Don Letts at his shop Acme Attractions on Chelsea’s King’s Road during the punk era. The shop was close to Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s boutique Sex, and was another hub for young punks; Sid Vicious used to come in and consult Jeannette on what he should do with his hair.
Out of this scene grew, amongst other groups, the Sex Pistols and eventually Public Image Limited – John Lydon, Keith Levene and Jah Wobble – with Jeannette going on to work with them during the early 1980s. By the time Geoff approached her, however, Jeannette was raising a child with her husband, Pop Group/Rip Rip And Panic founder Gareth Sager. One of the first bands that Geoff played to Jeannette was The Jesus and Mary Chain.
‘It instantly felt like home to me,’ Jeannette reflects. ‘It was completely in sync with everything I’d ever loved. I wanted to work with Geoff, but musically speaking it was the Mary Chain that made me feel this was somewhere I could be.’ Geoff and Jeannette agree to this day that the Mary Chain were ‘one of the most important bands we have ever worked with’.
Jeannette was thrown into the cut and thrust of working on the release of Darklands, which was due in October 1987. Her earliest memory of working with the Mary Chain is of spending time with the Reids going through options for potential artwork for the album. At that time the relationship was uncomplicated. ‘I loved working with them,’ says Jeannette. ‘But because of their shyness and because they were so intense, I always felt like they weren’t that good at expressing themselves verbally to people they interacted with. It all seemed to go into the music.
‘I think that’s part of the reason it ended up with things being kicked over and them going mad at each other onstage, because they had a lot of stuff they couldn’t get out, so it all poured into the music. It’s the only time they seem able to get it all out. They’ve got a lot to say, they just have trouble saying it.’
*
The Jesus and Mary Chain still didn’t have a manager – Jim had no choice but to man the phone and be the point of liaison, and the stress was overwhelming. Both Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee helped all they could, as did Laurence, but the time had come to find someone to fill that role.
‘It was hellish,’ Jim admits. ‘We were a bunch of fuck-ups and I was the least fucked-up of the fuck-ups, so it would be my phone that would ring every five minutes. Honest to God, I felt like I was going to have a nervous breakdown. It couldn’t go on.’
As unlikely as it might seem, considering his initial reaction to the band, the person who would step in and take them into the future was Jerry Jaffe, former PolyGram A&R executive, and Warners consultant. Jerry was working with UK music manager Chris Morrison, taking care of the US side of business for him. He is also the man who, let’s not forget, had proclaimed the Mary Chain the worst live act he’d ever seen just months earlier.
Jerry was working one afternoon in the New York office of Warners when he heard a song being played in the adjoining room. It immediately arrested his attention, to the point that he leaped up from his desk and burst into the neighbouring office where the music was coming from. He was interrupting a meeting, but he didn’t care. Inside the room he found, among other people, Geoff Travis. ‘I said, “Man, that is a great song, who the heck is it?” Geoff said, “The Jesus and Mary Chain.” I said, “You’ve got to be kidding!”’
The song was ‘April Skies’, and as Jerry listened to the track play out, Geoff added that they were looking for a manager. ‘Now this is how my mind works,’ says Jerry. ‘This band was the worst live band I’d ever seen, and they made “April Skies”, so they’re doing something that I don’t know, and they’re so big in England . . . this is definitely a Jerry Jaffe thing. I don’t get it but the music is great, that’s all I care about.’
Jerry arranged a meeting between himself, Chris Morrison and the band as soon as possible. The Mary Chain were in the midst of a European tour, and would be playing Dublin that September (1987). This provided the perfect opportunity for Jerry to take Chris to their show and schmooze the group afterwards.
Jerry Jaffe: ‘I said, “This band are huge in the UK, they have a great song, Chris, it’s going to be number one all over the world.” That’s how much I believed in that freakin’ “April Skies”. I still think it’s one of the best songs of all time. That line, Making love on the edge of a knife . . . The imagery, the changes . . . Anyway. I arranged with Chris to fly to Dublin.’
That evening at St Francis Xavier Hall, Chris Morrison climbed the stairs of the venue with Jerry to watch the gig from the production office, which overlooked the stage. Chris didn’t know what to expect, but Jerry was enthusing constantly. He hadn’t yet realised that the group now used a drum machine on stage, something that wouldn’t be to his taste, to put it mildly.
Laurence had been given the job of feeding drum tapes into the Portastudio by the sound desk on the Darklands tour. This was not without its stressful moments. ‘Jim was very drunk on that tour. Some of the songs start in quite a similar way, and there were a few incidents where I’d put on a track and Jim started singing another song. A few times I’d stop the tape, but Jim would turn round and say, “Don’t fucking stop it!” It was so funny.’
‘Everything was on cassettes,’ says Jerry Jaffe, aghast. ‘Cassettes! I was a real purist, I hated that. So there’s three guys looking completely bored and a drum machine.’
Chris Morrison had glanced at his watch one too many times. ‘I just said, “Chris, there’s 2,500 kids going crazy there!”’ says Jerry. ‘Anyway, after the show we met at the hotel in the lounge, and the next thing I know Chris had put the deal together. We were managing The Jesus and Mary Chain.’
Jim Reid says: ‘We thought it was good to have someone like that representing us. There was a breakdown in communication between us and Warners, but Chris understood how people like Warners work. And Jerry Jaffe’s a wonderful guy. He’s been in the music business for years. He signed Bon Jovi. Don’t hold that against him.’
Chris Morrison liked the group, and kept them entertained with his dry sense of humour and tales of managing Thin Lizzy, but he was initially dubious as to how suitable he was for the Mary Chain. ‘I said to Jim, “I’m not sure I fit your thing. I mean, you’ve come from Alan McGee,”’ says Chris. ‘And he said, “We need someone who is organised so we can be chaotic.” Very smart.’
They now had someone onside who could take care of business so that they could focus on the music. One thing their new management couldn’t control, however, was the way Jim
and William would react to the reviews that were coming in for Darklands. Most of them were excellent – ‘nines and tens out of ten,’ Mick Houghton remembers. ‘But I don’t think William thought the press got it. It’s a very deep record.
‘Darklands was my favourite record of theirs to work on. I think it’s the best album they made, it’s a brave album. They made something that’s a much more lasting statement than Psychocandy, in a way. William felt it was a better album, and I’m sure I remember them actually being disappointed in the reviews.’
Laurence picked this up too, and it taught her a valuable lesson that would take her forward into her own successful career as a music PR. ‘The guys took things very personally. It helped me learn to look after the artist rather than the record label. It was hard for them to read reviews – you know, you bare your soul, and these guys were so reserved, so baring their soul was huge. Being open to criticism was something they were never good at.’
All the same, good reviews continued to flood in as the Mary Chain travelled around Europe before heading to America, but the Reids were blue, thanks no doubt to a combination of feeling misunderstood musically and, in William’s case particularly, a hatred of being on the road. It didn’t help that they were also coming up against widespread dissent regarding their decision to tour with a drum machine, something the Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie had warned Jim about after bumping into the Reids at the Hammersmith Palais.
‘Robin said, “You’re going to go to America with a drum machine? They won’t like it. Don’t!” He was absolutely right,’ Jim says. ‘We got there and it was, “Hey! Where’s the drummer? I don’t get this.” So straight, 1980s America. They want to see a bassist, a singer, a couple of guitarists maybe, and a drummer. They want to know where those drums are coming from.’
Unfortunately this was also the tour that parted Jim from his beloved Vox Phantom, the guitar he bought from McGee two years earlier. Another of Jim’s guitars was also stolen, but the Vox Phantom was his favourite. To add insult to injury, not only did his guitars get taken, but the thief also left something behind. ‘We’d played in Detroit,’ Jim explains. ‘We were driving to New York, and there was this horrible stench in the van. I was thinking, No, I’ve had a bath . . .
‘We were all talking about it, “What is that smell?” We get to New York and start unloading the gear, and there’s half a pig’s head in the bass drum. The guys took the guitars and left us with that. What’s more, I think I know who stole the guitars. There was a guy there a few days earlier and he’d been desperately trying to buy the Vox Phantom off me, but I said, “No, it’s not for sale.” It could be a coincidence, but it’s a hell of a coincidence.’
It’s not surprising, perhaps, that the vibe on this tour might have been low, but at least on stage the Mary Chain could vent their frustrations and transcend everyday life. That short time on stage also connected them directly to their earlier years, when they just wanted to play live and ‘grab people by the throat’, as Jim put it, with none of the music industry complications, cynicism or bullshit in the way. Laurence, technically the ‘drummer’ on this tour, remembers: ‘You could see William really letting it all go while he was playing guitar. You’d see him crouched and looking at all the pedals, and you could feel that energy – anger, in a way.
‘Everything was going as well as it could with the guys going, “I don’t like touring, I don’t like playing, I don’t like doing this . . . I don’t like nothing”, basically. There were funny moments, but there were moments when it was quite hard. They became depressed very easily.’
Some people believe dark thoughts beget dark incidents by sheer energetic magnetism. If that were genuinely the case, the Mary Chain would have to be more careful. The power of negative thinking is potent indeed, but whatever you believe, an incident that was to shake their foundations was just around the corner.
20
Meatheads, a Mic-Stand and the Drunk Tank
‘Sidewalking’ reminds me of things that get you wasted. I think 1988 was the year I really discovered I was an alcoholic . . . and I liked it.
Jim Reid to Marc Spitz in Spin, 1998
The Mary Chain still attracted what Douglas Hart describes as ‘the meathead contingent’ at their live shows, and their now outdated reputation for troublesome gigs still preceded them in some parts of the world. Even though the Mary Chain had and continue to have a huge fan base in Toronto, Canada, there were a number of said meat-heads in the audience on the night of 15 November 1987 at the RPM Club. One individual in particular had, of course, elbowed his way to the front and was hurling abuse relentlessly at Jim. Jim was used to this and generally managed to shrug it off, but this time it went too far. Already feeling thin-skinned after a long period of touring and championship-level drinking in the often gloomy world of the Mary Chain, Jim cracked.
‘You’d be playing and a dark shadow comes flying towards your head,’ Douglas says. ‘You get through it most times, but then you just fucking break. That’s what happened to Jim that night. To be wound up like that all through the gig, I’m amazed he only hit him towards the end of the set. So yeah,’ concludes Douglas evenly, ‘he quite rightly hit the cunt.’
Jim shares his memory of that night: ‘This idiot was just calling me a cocksucker all night. Sober, I can handle it, but when I get a bit drunk, I think, “Well, fuck it.”
‘I remember stepping to the side of the stage and saying to security, “If you don’t get rid of him, something’s going to happen.” Nobody did, so it just got to breaking point. I hit him over the head with the mic-stand.’
Jim’s intention was ‘just to frighten the guy’. He knew he hadn’t hurt him and, after the gig, he put the incident from his mind and made his way back to the coach with the others. But the bus didn’t move – their way had been blocked. The ‘fan’ who had been hit had complained to the promoter. The Mary Chain were going nowhere.
‘We couldn’t get out,’ says Jim. ‘Someone said, “Call the cops.” And that was it. I got arrested.’
As Jim was taken away, Laurence rushed to the hotel to collect a toothbrush and gave it to the tour manager to pass on to Jim, before returning to their hotel room alone. During the night, Laurence put on the TV to distract herself from her rising anxiety, but every few minutes the phone would ring. Groupies.
‘For some reason they’d managed to call through to the room, and it was extremely annoying,’ says Laurence. ‘I remember getting these phonecalls from girls trying to talk to Jim while I was watching Apocalypse Now.’
Jim, meanwhile, had been taken to the police cells, and his mood momentarily brightened when he realised he had the cell to himself. ‘I thought, Well, this is all right, I might not get raped in jail after all. Because I’m standing there with a pair of leather trousers on . . .’
*
Somehow Jim managed to fall into a doze, but, at 4 a.m., the police burst in and moved him down to the courthouse. This was when the situation became particularly surreal and nightmarish for Jim.
‘I’m handcuffed to a down-and-out and a guy who has blood gushing out of his face,’ he remembers. ‘Then I got put in this drunk tank, and, during the course of the night, loads of people came in; there were about thirty of us in there by the end of the night. Nobody said a word to me except when I got bailed out in the morning. “Hey, leather pants! Where are you going?” It was quite entertaining on some level, but bloody scary.’
By the time word had reached the UK, the incident, in news terms, had largely blown over. Had this happened twenty years later, it would have been all over the internet and on the front pages of every red-top. But this wasn’t the end of the story for Jim, who would have to return to Toronto for his trial three months later. Jerry Jaffe immediately organised a defence lawyer, but the tour manager, who had stayed behind to bail Jim as the rest of the touring party moved on, was starting to unravel psychologically. By the end of the tour he had a nervous breakdown, running away and flinging
all of the Mary Chain’s documents into a skip as he went.
*
Jim returned to Toronto in February 1988, Jerry Jaffe by his side. Both Jim and Jerry wore suits, but the complainant, whose repeated verbal assaults had driven the singer to violence, dressed down in a Metallica T-shirt. ‘Weird guy,’ Jerry Jaffe recalls. ‘Jim hadn’t hit him in a way that was going to cause any physical pain. He was big, hardcore. Anyway, he was going to press charges and we had to show up to this court case. I remember how amusing it was, before we even got there, the fix was in, but we had to go through the process to make it look like justice was being meted out.’
During the two-hour trial Jim had to sign a handful of Jesus and Mary Chain records for the judge’s daughter. ‘That was part of the penalty,’ Jerry laughs. ‘Part of it was that he had to show remorse and say he was sorry, and then we had to pay a token fine and pay the defence attorney, even though this was completely frivolous. If you did that in the US the judge would be thrown off the bench. It was the equivalent of a Cold War-era show trial. It was scary.’
Once the trial was over and Jim was free to go, he and Jerry had some time to kill, but all Jim wanted to do was get back to the airport. ‘He didn’t want anything to do with Toronto.’
*
Amid the drama, the Reids were still writing fluently, William in particular, and among the songs he had ‘kicking about’, as Jim puts it, was ‘Sidewalking’. The Reids were always soaking up new influences as they travelled the world, and they were especially inspired by hip-hop. ‘We wanted to experiment with those kinds of drum beats,’ Jim explains. ‘The drum beat on “Sidewalking” was sampled from a song by Roxanne Shante called “Roxanne’s Revenge”.’
