Six months later I was back in Britain with Holzman’s grudging agreement that I could ‘look around’ for artists to sign to Elektra. Robin and Clive had left Edinburgh, but I eventually tracked them down to a regular Saturday gig at Clive’s Incredible Folk Club in an old warehouse in downtown Glasgow. In early March ’66, I dodged the drunks and the pools of puke that were prominent features of Sauchiehall Street nights, arriving at the venue only to find the door locked and a crowd outside arguing with a policeman. Hamish Imlach, a singer I had met in London, told me the club had been closed as a fire hazard and gave me a phone number along with the news that Robin and Clive were now a trio called, in honour of the padlocked club, the Incredible String Band.
The group photo on the cover of
The Hangman’s
Beautiful Daughter
gives an idea of the atmosphere at the cottage north of the city where I found them the following afternoon: kids and dope everywhere, flowered skirts and blouses, velvet cloaks, silk scarves and muddy shoes, all infused with the scent of patchouli. The new recruit was Mike Heron, formerly of the Edinburgh band Rock Bottom and the Deadbeats. He was short and solidly built with clumsy-seeming but effective movements, a contrast to Robin’s vague ethereal grace. He teased the other two constantly, laughing and slapping his knee at the slightest provocation.
We drank tea and smoked joints for a while, then Robin and Mike played me the fruits of their new interest in composing. I was astounded: the songs were completely original, influenced by American folk and Scottish ballads, but full of flavours from the Balkans, ragtime, North Africa, music hall and William Blake. The combination of Mike’s Dylan-tinged vocals and Robin’s keening glissandos created harmonies both exotic and commercial. I had to have them. Fortunately, when Holzman heard an acetate of Robin’s ‘October Song’, he said, ‘Yeah, this is pretty good, go sign them.’ I then had to deliberately misunderstand his instructions and add £50 to the advance to beat out Nat Joseph at Transatlantic Records for their signature.
We made the first LP one weekend in London. Clive, a true rebel who didn’t care a fig for my ambitions, left soon afterwards for Afghanistan and told Robin and Mike not to wait up. The record didn’t fit any obvious category but got good reviews and was a surprise success in both Britain and the USA. By the time I left Elektra and was trying to figure out how to avoid going back to New York, they were almost ready to make a second. Mike and Robin’s agreement that I should manage them – along with the launch of UFO – enabled me to stay in London.
In the studio that winter, two musicians sounded sparse after the varied textures produced by the trio. We were still using four-track tape machines in 1966, but the concept of multiple over-dubs was being explored and expanded by Denny Cordell, Mickie Most, George Martin and other British producers.
Revolver
had shown what was possible, so we set out to make the sound of two musicians comparable to the original three. The explosion in dope smoking and acid in 1966 also helped to alter recording practices: the stoned ear loves complexity and Robin and Mike were nothing if not drug culture pioneers.
Edinburgh now has one of the highest heroin addiction rates in Europe, but the grim estates that provided the setting for
Trainspotting
in the 1990s were mostly on the booze in the sixties. Students and middle-class kids living in unheated flats in the beautiful Georgian buildings of the undeveloped city centre were leading the way in Britain’s exploration of altered consciousness. Mike and Robin were part of a milieu in which hashish and LSD were constant factors of sociable life. They had both read Koestler’s
The
Lotus and the Robot
and Huxley’s
Doors of Perception
and Robin was an expert on Blake, the hippies’ favourite poet and painter. I found their approach to drugs comfortably familiar: it reminded me of the Cambridge folkniks. And in 1966, drugs could still be viewed as a benign phenomenon: thanks to the purity of the chemicals, bad trips were rare and acid casualties virtually unknown.
I had to wait for a visit to Havana in 1995 to have as much fun in a studio as I had making
The 5,000 Spirits Or
The Layers Of The Onion
. Their new songs had strange lyrics and rich melodies and they kept coming up with off-the-wall ideas for harmonies and over-dubs; cramming all the ingenuity on to four tracks was our biggest problem. When we finished recording, I had my first experience of a sensation I came to relish in the coming years: I couldn’t wait to get the musicians out of the way so that the engineer and I could start mixing the multi-track tapes into a stereo master.
Each track – which in those early days might include a combination of instruments or voices – could be positioned anywhere from right to left on the stereo spectrum by the proportion assigned to the two channels. The lead voice (and bass, if there was one) was always divided equally, meaning it went in the middle. Volume in relation to the other tracks was controllable by the fader on the mixing desk. Above each fader were the dials that added reverb (of which many varieties of length and texture were available) or subtly calibrated the high, low and middle frequencies. You were, in a sense, creating the ideal physical location for each instrument or voice: the violin in the Sistine Chapel, the singer in your mum’s shower stall and the bass drum in Alfred Jarry’s cork-lined bedroom. If a track sounded too quiet, one option was to simply turn it up. But if you changed the stereo positioning, that track might be more audible at the same volume. Or, by adding one decibel at a certain frequency, you could heighten its clarity or weight, making it appear louder, without making the others sound quieter. A glass can never be more than full: if you increase the level of one instrument, you reduce all the others.
My grandmother’s studies with Leschititsky taught her the ‘singing right hand’: the melody line is made to ring out without being louder than the other notes. All the composer’s intentions are heard, the melody line is clear but without distorting the balance between the notes. Those early years sitting under her piano influenced me: the ideal for which I strove was to hear everything in balance with the melody singing out clearly.
Mixing was an endlessly fascinating jigsaw puzzle with the reward of hearing a wonderful piece of music slowly emerging before you, like watching a print in the developing bath. But with sounds you could control the colour, the contrast and even the positioning. I found the prospect that my life would involve countless repetitions of this process very pleasing. Adding to the excitement was the conviction that a significant number of people would want to buy the music as soon as they heard what you had made of it. These feelings would often be delusional, of course, but in the case of
The 5,000 Spirits
, they were to be amply fulfilled.
WHEN I RETURNED TO NEW YORK on holiday in the summer of 1966, George asked me to help him with an outdoor concert at Lewisohn Stadium in Washington Heights. It was a double bill: the Miles Davis Quintet and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. On a balmy night, 3,000 people were seated across the infield of the stadium.
Ellington was viewed then as a little passé, but since it was a big band, dynamics dictated that Miles’s Quintet would open the show. Their level of fame in the mid-’60s was as great as any ever reached by modern jazz artists. (Black ones, anyway; Dave Brubeck made the cover of
Time
magazine.) Dressed in Ivy League clothes – snug Brooks Brothers blazers or tweed jackets, button-down shirts and ties, horn-rimmed glasses, slim grey flannel trousers and brown loafers – they embodied a confident new ethos in the black community. Their hair was short and ‘natural’. The girls who swirled around them backstage had either a ‘Seven Sisters’ (female Ivy League) look with gabardine skirts and hairbands or huge Afros, giant gold looped earrings and dashikis. Miles’s set was muted and perfect. Afterwards there were handshakes all around and possibly a few early sightings of a high-five, but no exuberance. Everyone was extremely cool.
Backstage during their set, I would occasionally pass an older man in a rumpled suit and a head-rag whittling down a sax reed, or sorting through piles of sheet music. I would do a double-take and say to myself, ‘Isn’t that Harry Carney?’ or ‘Wow, that’s Johnny Hodges!’ The backstage hangers-on paid these men no attention whatsoever. When someone asked ‘Anybody seen Duke?’ the answer was that he was in the bus getting his hair fixed.
When I started setting up the famous Ellington music stands, Carney or Hodges or Paul Gonzalves would come out to make sure their stand was just so, and to organize their sheet music. George, Father Norman O’Connor (the ‘Jazz Priest’) and Whitney Balliett from the
New Yorker
were just offstage talking to Miles when there was a murmur in the wings and someone hissed, ‘Here comes Duke.’ Parting the sea of flannel and tweed like a surreal Moses came Ellington in a suit of thick blue cloth. The jacket was ‘zoot’ length, almost to his knees, and his trousers broke fully on the tops of blue suede shoes. His shirt was a shade lighter than the suit while the third note in this triad cluster of blue, the broad tie, was darker than either. In his breast pocket was an impeccably folded bright orange handkerchief. From head to foot, Duke was clothed in Ivy League anti-matter.
‘Good evening, Miles. Good evening, George. Good evening, Father.’ As he made his way to the stage the beautiful hip girls, the tightly Brooks Brother’d men and even Miles seemed to evaporate. Duke just kept walking, took his seat at the piano, leaned into the microphone, and told the audience: ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I just want you to know that we
do
… love you madly.’ At a nod of his head, the orchestra tore into the opening bars of ‘Take The A-Train’.
A few months later, I was on the phone to George, having lost my Elektra job: the conflicts between my desire to be a producer and Jac’s need for a marketing genius proved impossible to reconcile. A shortage of experienced tour managers and the impending start of Newport in Europe ’66 meant our need was mutual. I headed for Barcelona where one branch of the tour kicked off. My first trip to the Catalan capital two years earlier had been a stressful visit with Hawkins and Edison. This time I arrived a few days ahead of the musicians and explored the city. The concerts were being held in the Palacio, a beautiful art deco hall: Sonny Rollins and Max Roach on opening night, followed by Illinois Jacquet, then a sold-out show with Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto.
The pairing of these two had a tortured history. I heard a version of it late one night in the hotel bar from Stan’s Swedish wife, Monica. The partnership was supposed to be between Stan and João Gilberto: Astrud was just the wife who could carry a tune on the demos they recorded. Monica claimed credit for persuading MGM to release Astrud’s version of ‘Girl From Ipanema’ as a single. The record shot up the charts, but Monica suffered blow-back when Astrud and Stan began an affair on the resulting tour. João and Astrud divorced and Monica soon put an end to the collaboration. But going back to being simply Stan Getz or Astrud Gilberto was something of a financial let-down and George’s offer had enticed them to work together again. Both arrived flanked by sexual bodyguards in the form of Astrud’s muscle-bound
shtarker
(as another tour manager referred to him) and Monica. You could cut the air with a knife. When Astrud passed by in the hotel restaurant on the first day, Monica said, ‘What a beautiful dress that is, Astrud.’ (Pause.) ‘Too bad it’s not your colour.’
The pressure quickly got to the Getzes. Underwear and Swedish curses flew at Barcelona airport as bags were unpacked, divided and repacked in front of the check-in desk. If Stan expected Astrud to get rid of the boyfriend after Monica decamped to Copenhagen, he was mistaken. He took his revenge onstage: after agreeing ‘Shadow Of Your Smile’, he would whisper ‘Ipanema’ to the band and she would have a few beats to figure out which song they were playing. I was back to shuttle diplomacy in hotel corridors. In Rotterdam one evening, Stan told me that he never spent a night alone if he could possibly help it. I watched as he hit on girl after girl in a bar, eventually settling for a very plain waitress, the last to remain after everyone else had gone home.
I imagined that a switch to ‘The Max Roach Quintet with special guest Sonny Rollins’ would make a refreshing change. But I met them on a November morning in fogbound Copenhagen airport awaiting a delayed flight to Vienna and it went downhill from there. Everyone else was on their way to Paris for a concert or a day off. The young guys in Max’s group – Freddie Hubbard (trumpet), James Spaulding (sax) and Ronnie Saunders (piano) – were disgruntled: everyone had a girl in Paris or knew where to find one. Their day off that week had been in Oslo.
I had hung out with them a week earlier in Barcelona and Hubbard had inadvertently advanced my gastronomic evolution. George’s schooling had not addressed my shellfish aversion, but when I accidentally spooned up a mussel from a bowl of Catalan
bullabesa
in a Ramblas restaurant, Freddie looked at me and said, ‘Well, go on, man,
suck
the motherfucker!’ What choice did I have but to cut the final cord to the peanut-butter-and-jelly land of my boyhood?
There were no such high spirits in Copenhagen, just gloom about the delay and the destination with duty-free Scotch for solace. The three of them were drunk by noon in the airport and snoring on the plane to Vienna. On the bus to Graz in southern Austria the promoter had thoughtfully provided a case of beer that they eagerly attacked. Nondrinkers Sonny and Max sat up front ignoring the storm brewing in the rear. First it was the Beatles, who had ‘ripped off black culture and made a fortune’, then George Wein, ‘the Jew who was sending us off to play for a bunch of Nazis’ (Freddie had read that Hitler came from Graz). When we arrived at the beautiful opera house, the crowd was calmly seated, dressed very formally and glancing at their watches: the three musicians were raving and out of control.