In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Authenticity from the Delta – the Blues

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Authenticity from the Delta – the Blues

At the same time that my ear was getting attuned to the wonders of Mersey and Beat my friend Dick Brunning, who was evidently utterly immune to the marvels of Pop Music, seemed keen to introduce me to authentic Chicago Blues. I have no idea how Dick got into what was such an obscure thing as Chicago Blues. In 1964 it was still largely unknown and certainly not popular. It wasn’t even by some eccentric word of mouth as he did not seem to know anyone else interested in Blues. He was, like me, fourteen years old and living in Surrey. Yet he’d developed an obsession with Blues.

Dick was one of that small group of people who you might find wandering around clutching a Blues album under his arm. This was how Mick Jagger had met up with Keith Richard. If Dick had lived in the right place and been on the correct railway platform he might have ended up playing in the Rolling Stones – but then he probably would have needed to have mastered a musical instrument and I don’t remember Dick having any musical abilities or interest in playing any instrument.

Dick lived some way off in Aldershot so it was quite a bike ride to his house. Therefore, whenever I went, he had a captive audience. We sat on his bed while he extolled the virtues of various Blues Artists. His favourite was an album of Lightnin’ Hopkins called ‘Lightnin’ Strikes. It had an echoey quality as Lightnin’, unaccompanied, played highly amplified electric guitar and had nailed bottle tops to his shoes so that he could accompany himself by tapping his feet. I kinda wished he wouldn’t.

At first it was a noise. I couldn’t make out a word the guy was singing and it was raw and unsophisticated. After many hours during which I politely showed interest I began to get more attuned and had a revelation as I started to make out that it was actually being sung in English even if it was not quite the variety I was used to.

Lightnin’ sang in a rich, black, broad Texas drawl that seemed to deploy a novel approach to the English language. In fact it appeared that he was attempting to create a whole new grammar as well. I found it quite intriguing. Out of sheer boredom I graduated to carefully listening to the guitar. I liked electric guitar but had never listened to anything that was remotely like this. Lightnin’ was playing loud with a great deal of distortion. As my ear tuned in I gradually grew to love the type of fluid runs he was putting together. That was all it took. The door had opened.

It did not happen overnight. It took Dick many months of hard work to get me hooked but get me hooked he did. I grew to love it. I have since hunted for that old vinyl album of Lightnin’s (He released a whole slew of albums called Lightnin’ Strikes) but have failed to locate it. I got its sequel ‘Dirty House Blues’ but it’s not as good. I have all the numbers on CD but they don’t sound the same. Somehow I imagine that even if I tracked it down those sounds are trapped in Dick’s bedroom over fifty years back and it could not possibly have the same magic.

Dick went on to introduce me to Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Moaning in the moonlight’ and Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed and a host of others. I am eternally grateful.

On one occasion I can remember we were at his local record shop and they miraculously had a John Lee Hooker EP in featuring ‘Dimples’ and ‘Boom boom’. Dick was debating as to whether he could really afford it while I was extolling the virtues of  ‘Ferris Wheel’ the new Everly Brothers single that had just been released. He ignored me and bought the Hooker.

On another occasion I found an old 78 of Muddy Water’s ‘Honey Bee’. I was really proud of it. Dick conned it out of me – promising me that he knew a place where he could get me a replacement. There wasn’t any such source but Dick was so insanely in need of the 78 that I let him have it. He still owes me.

Because of Dick I got into a lot of the Blues before the Beat groups brought out their versions. That didn’t stop me loving them though. I loved the way the British Beat bands did their often freaked out versions of old Blues. They made them different.

So there I was playing my Lightnin’ Hopkins in my bedroom along with my Searchers and Beatles. It seemed to make sense to me.

A strange thing happened to Dick at some future point in time. He was at a crossroads at the top of a hill leading down into town and edging out to go down to the shops. A car came careering along, tried to get round the bend and ended up rolling over twice and ending up in a field. Dick sat there open-mouthed. The driver of the crashed car kicked his door open and clambered out. He staggered across to Dick. Dick thought that he was going to say something like ‘Did you see that?’ and wound his window down. Instead the driver simply thumped Dick right in the face and knocked him out. Dick slumped forward, his foot came off the brake and he rolled down the hill.

He came round with his car in a great heap of tinned baked beans and a copper slapping his face. Seemingly he’d gone straight down the hill and through the front of a supermarket, right through the tills and into the beans. Fortunately, miraculously, nobody was hurt.

My love of the Blues blossomed and I ventured out into acoustic and also discovered the wonders of slide guitar. I was on the trail of Son House and I did not even know it.

First I had to discover Robert Johnson who I loved. Then I stumbled on Elmore James and I lit up. Elmore was a revelation. Those searing guitar runs and cracked up voice were explosive and I adored him. Dick had Lightnin’, Muddy, Jimmy and Howlin’ but Elmore was all mine. I discovered him!

I remember driving past Dobell’s on my motorbike and noticing two Elmore James albums in the window. They were like gold dust and the first I’d ever seen. Unfortunately the place was shut and I had to go back. It took me best part of a day to buy them. I had to drive all the way up to Charing Cross Road. It was like breaking into Tutankhamen’s tomb. The place was a treasure trove. I spent ages picking through the racks of American Blues. There were albums I’d never dreamed of! I had severely limited funds but came out clutching a handful of precious albums. I might not eat much for a few weeks but my ears were going to get nourished!

Unfortunately Elmore died before ever playing to a white audience so I never got to see him. Supposedly he had a heart attack in the recording studio in the early 60s. I always imagined that somewhere out there is a tape of Elmore crying out in pain and expiring. But that’s just me and my bad taste. I adored Elmore.

Later, because of the Blues boom, I got to see a number of the great Blues guys. I got to see Jimmy Reed play in a small London club. He had his son on bass and brilliantly slurred his way through a set of all his immaculate songs. But then he’d always sounded permanently drunk and the show was spot on.

I saw Muddy Waters three times with Otis Spann and his late 60s band. He was great but I think he’d toned down his act for white audiences. I would have loved to have seen him in one of those steamy Chicago clubs doing his full on act with all the women screaming at him, when he used to put a coke bottle down his trousers and get ‘em all going with ‘I’ve got my Mojo working’ and then flick the top off of the bottle and spray the audience at the crescendo. I think he felt that white audiences might find that a bit too raunchy. He may have been wrong.

That’s what Blues meant to me. It was dirty, dangerous and full of sex – a million miles away from sanitised white Pop music. You could see how it had fed into early Rock ‘n’ Roll. There was something seminal and real about it. It didn’t skirt the subject. It didn’t play for a gentile audience. It hadn’t been over-produced. It was still authentic and earthy. Where Sinatra sang of ‘Moon in June’ McKinley sang ‘I just want to make love to you.’ It was direct and honest.

They brought these Blues packages across in the late 1960s and I was privileged to see two of them at the Hammersmith Odeon. It gave me the opportunity to see many of my heroes before they slipped away. Many were at the end of their lives but still managed to give great performances, revitalised by the adulation of white audiences in Britain. They’d been dug out of obscurity and put back on the stage for a second career.

One package was Mississippi artists. I was really looking forward to it. I loved Bukka White, Skip James and Big Joe Williams and they did not disappoint. There were lots of them on the bill and they each got a twenty minute set. Big Joe Williams went down so well that he wouldn’t leave the stage and in the end they had to physically drag him off. Skip and Bukka were both ill and nearing the end of their days. Skip died shortly afterwards. But they both were great and their honest performances brought tears to my eyes. You wouldn’t have known how ill they really were.

Towards the end there was this guy Son House. I’d never heard of him. He was old and frail – in his late seventies. He shuffled on stage trailing his steel guitar behind him and we all wondered what on earth they were serving up. This guy looked well past his sell-by date. He sat on a chair, somehow lifted his guitar in his lap and began mumbling into the microphone like Hillbilly Bear (A cartoon character of the day). There was a muffled set of laughs. It was embarrassing.

Then he started to strum the opening to ‘Death Letter Blues’ the years dropped off him and the power radiated out. It was so powerful that it blew the whole audience away. The bottle-neck National Steel guitar was the most strident and forceful guitar-work I had ever heard. His voice was rich and expressive and he sang from the heart. By the end everyone in the hall was up standing on their seats bellowing for more. He shuffled off dragging his guitar behind him. The noise went on and he came back on without guitar. He stood there, clapped and stamped and sang a cappella.

I had discovered him.

I had found what I did not know I had been looking for. Son House had entered my life.

It is one thing to discover something but quite another to fully understand it. That is something I have been pursuing to this day. It is only with the advent of CDs that much of the material has come to light and is available. Back in 1967 there was only one album that had been released entitled ‘Death letter blues’. I played it in the shop in a tiny listening booth and it was every bit as strident and powerful as I remembered. I snapped it up.

Now I have 26 CDs of Son house material – including his early ‘field’ recordings and a number of live concerts.

Son House was playing at the time of Charlie Patton and those other early itinerant Mississippi blues musicians. He is fabled to have taught Robert Johnson to play. As such you could say that he was the focal point for all that was to follow! Rock music might not have existed without him.

You could say that my quest had led me all the way back to the beginning.

The beginning is a good place to start. Once you have the beginning you’ve got a cornerstone to build the rest of the story on. I consider myself fortunate to have seen the man who started it all. He was as awesome as his reputation.

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

In Search of Captain Beefheart – The day the world Rocked

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The day the world Rocked

It was sometime early in 1963 and I was sitting in Tony Humm’s bedroom as he sat me down and told me to listen to this. I had never seen Tony so animated and excited about music; he usually only got this worked up over snakes. We were not ones for playing a lot of music. Tony was my animal collecting friend and track bike making friend not a music buff.

I am a collector as I have previously explained. It isn’t just music and musical memories I collect. I collect anything that appeals to me. I had what was loosely called a museum at home. It has fossils and minerals that I collect with Billy. It has shells which I collect with my mother. It has butterflies, moths and insects that I collected with Jeff and Clive. It has birds’ eggs that I bought in a jumble sale. It has miscellaneous objects, such as a mammoth’s tooth, a hippo’s tooth, a pair of antlers and the top of an American Indian totem pole.

I also collected animals. Some of these were wild animals that I collected with Tony others were tame. At one time I had two thousand mice with the full range of colours, forty hamsters, forty guinea pigs, a rabbit, a crow, a couple of gerbils and some stick insects. I made money out of breeding them and selling them to the pet shop. I also had a bit pit I had dug in the garden. I had sunk an old porcelain sink into it as a pond and placed rocks and plants around. This was my wild animal sanctuary.

Tony and I would head off into the surrounding countryside on the track bikes we had made from old bikes we had salvaged out of the ditches. We had painted these old rusty frames up with garish gloss paint we had liberated from our parents’ garages so that they were decorated in stripes and stars. They were the first psychedelic bikes and were obviously a precursor of Ken Kessey’s Magic Bus – Furthur. (Perhaps me and Tony invented psychedelia?). We clutched an aluminium milk pail with lid into which we were to put our finds. We waded in ponds for frogs, toads, and newts. We waded up streams for sticklebacks. We lifted up old corrugated tin in search of slowworms, lizards, grass snakes and voles. We took our spoils back and released them into my pit, or kept them in aquaria. The sticklebacks always faded and died no matter what we did.

But that day in late March it was pouring with rain and we hadn’t gone out collecting. Tony took me up to his room and did something that changed my life. Unbeknownst to me, for I had allowed my interest in the charts to wane, Tony was tuned in.

‘Listen to this,’ Tony instructed. He placed a black vinyl disc on his Dansette and put it on 33 RPM and carefully manually lowered the needle on to the rim.

I sat there with no great expectation.

What came out of those crappy speakers set in the front of that Dansette changed my life for ever. I also believe that it changed the whole world in a way that nothing before or after has managed.

For obvious reasons Tony had played the first side. Not just because it was obvious running order but because that was the track with most impact.

Thus it was that the first Beatles track I ever heard was ‘I saw her standing there’ and it blew me away. I was gob-smacked. It was like nothing I had ever heard. It was raw and exciting. It wasn’t like 1950s Rock ‘n’ Roll. It was somehow more modern.

Somehow ‘Love me do’ had passed me by. I had allowed the trite Pop of Bobby Vee, Fabian and Bobby Rydell to drift over my head. I’d been content with the old Rockers. But this was so vital and alive. It felt like it was my music – music produced for my generation. Old Rock ‘n’ Roll was brilliant but it was from someone else’s time. This was mine!

Tony never struck me as particularly hip and yet he had latched on to ‘Love me do’ and had actually purchased the ‘Please Please Me’ album on the day it was released. I was listening to it just a few days after that and my life would never be the same.

We played the whole album through and through a number of times and I loved it. From there on I bought every Beatle single, album and EP on the day of release and I, like all my friends, were glued to the charts. It had set me on fire again.

I was thirteen years old, living in Surrey on a housing estate in post-war Britain. It was all in the shadows of rationing and war. There were bomb sites and prefabs. The world had seemed very drab and black and white. But on that day in Tony Humm’s bedroom the 1960s began. Hard on the heels of the Beatles Merseybeat hit the charts as Brian Epstein exploited the Beatles overnight appeal to launch a host of Liverpudlian acts and every label in the land fell over themselves to sign up a ‘Mersey’ band. There was an explosion of new acts and all the established Pop acts were blown away. Immediately they were part of the old world. We all went Pop Music mad. It’s all we talked about at school.

Unbeknown to me I had been searching for the Beatles. They were definitely part of my quest but I did not put them in the title because that would have been too trite. Besides, in many ways the Beatles were the stepping stone to what came later. Rock and Pop music were still styles aimed at a young teenage market. When you grew up you were supposed to leave that behind and grow to like more mature types of music like Classical and Opera. At the start the Beatles were a Pop band with many Rock elements. As they developed their music became more complex and their lyrics, under the influence of Dylan’s poetic masterpieces, became deeper and prosaic. They led the way for Rock Music to be considered something much more than trivial Pop music and be considered as an adult art form. They enabled Rock musicians to be regarded as genuine musicians.

But I jump ahead. Right then the Beatles were essentially a Pop band unlike any that had gone before. They actually wrote their own songs as well as nicking stuff from American R&B and Rock ‘n’ Roll. I heard someone talking on the radio the other day saying that the Beatles were probably embarrassed by the banality of their earlier Pop songs. He was talking shit. Right from the start their stuff was brilliant. There was a patina on every song. It shone with Beatle magic that transformed it into something more. Those songs have quality that lasts to this day, even the Pop songs. They were in a class of their own and I can’t think of a bad one.

That afternoon at Tony’s is fixed in my mind so that here, over fifty years later, I can still remember the excitement and wonder of it. We played the album to death and thrilled to every track.

Suddenly the world had changed. The charts were full of Mersey bands. I rushed out and bought everything by the Beatles and avidly watched their progress in the charts along with all the other lesser bands. All the kids were turned on like never before. There was a palpable excitement.

There was a record stall at Kingston cattle market that sold new albums for £1.25. By saving up my pocket money I could buy one album every two weeks. Gradually I got my collection together. Alongside my Beatles albums I soon had just about every new Mersey band. There was Gerry, Billy J, Freddie, Brian, Dave, Searchers, Hollies and the rest. I had all the singles and EPs. I even sent away for the two ‘This is Merseybeat’ albums and Billy Pepper and the Pepper Pots. My Rock records had been displaced further down my wall and there were considerably more brackets. One entire wall was full and I’d started on the second wall.

Somehow I never got to see the Beatles play. I don’t know why. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I could. None of my friends did. The Beatles did not seem to play anywhere nearby. There were no venues on the Thames Delta. We were a Rockin’ backwater. It’s one of my many regrets.

But at least the Beatles were in my life and I listened to them, watched them on telly and grew with them. I felt I understood them.

I can’t explain the excitement there was waiting for each new release. You pre-ordered it and were dying to hear it. You watched it explode on the charts and excitedly discussed it to death at school. Was it as good as the last? How was it different? As soon as you got your hands on it you rushed home and played it endlessly. I used to put it on the old Dansette with the arm raised so it played non-stop. I’d do the A-side a dozen times and then flip in over and do the same with the B-side. Unlike all the rest the Beatles never disappointed. There’s nothing like it now. Nothing has ever matched that.

There was a disaster on the day of the release of the Beatles second album. My Dansette broke. I rushed out to the local record shop where I had placed my order and picked up the album. I rushed home and I could not play the thing. It was the most frustrating time of my life. I sat in my bedroom holding ‘With the Beatles’. I studied the cover and noted the length of their hair. Hair had become incredibly important. I studied the track list. I could hold it, look at it and take it out of its cover but I could not play it. It was driving me mad.

In the end I had the idea to nip down the road to me mate Jeff. He had a Dansette.

Jeff was only too keen to play it and the two of us spent the day listening and it was brilliant.

Then I had to go home and the agony started again. Jeff suggested that as I didn’t have a means of playing it perhaps I could leave it with him until I’d got my record player fixed. The idea was appalling but I could not think of a single reason why not. Reluctantly I agreed. For the next two weeks my new Beatles album resided with Jeff and I can still remember the gloom and despondency this produced in me.

I grew up with the Beatles and they were a bit part of my musical voyage. As Rock Music progressed and developed into the revolution of the 1960s they were always there at the forefront on the leading edge.

I never got to meet any of the Beatles or even see them play though I got very close. When Roy Harper was recording at Abbey Road studios I was invited along to the sessions. I spent a lot of time there in the early 1970s and all the Beatles dropped in for various projects. I happened across loads of other musicians there but I never bumped into any of the Beatles though. On one occasion I took this American girl along to a Harper recording session. She had been staying with us and turned out to be a bit of a pain in the arse – a typical strident American whose boyfriend was a college jock. – That about summed it up! Liz had got really pissed off with her and suggested I took her out to get her out of Liz’s hair. I took her to Abbey Road where, true to form, she proceeded to piss Roy and everyone else off. She eventually went for a wander and found Paul McCartney and Wings recording in the next studio. She actually barged in while the red light was on and they were in the process of laying down a track and got severely bollocked by Paul McCartney. So the irony is that I went along all those times and never saw them once and she went once and got to meet Paul. Ho hum.

S

So why the Beatles? Why not Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Eddie, Buddy or Elvis? That’s what Mark Ruston asked me.

Well I loved all those early rockers and the music they made and I still do. I was excited by them but they weren’t mine. Somehow they were from the era before. I was too young when Rock ‘n’ Roll started up in 1956 to really get in to it. I caught up with it five years later. But in 1963 (the year sexual intercourse began – as Mark pointed out) the Beatles were mine. I felt like they were playing just for me. Crazy huh? Their image, the attitudes, the sound was all new. We were creating a new vision for the world, a sixties idealism. It was vital, alive and full of optimism. They blew away the drab post-war drabness of Britain with the Ena Sharples (an old Coronation Street harridan) old ladies in dowdy coats and hairnets. Right from that first track in Tony’s bedroom I felt the energy, excitement and possibility. We were a new generation, with new ideas, a new way of looking at the world. Our horizons were way broader than our parents. We weren’t tied to the strictures of conformity to old ways of dressing, living and thinking. We were making up our own rules. I sensed all that ravelled up in that first track.

Then as the 60s progressed we all grew together. It wasn’t a fan thing. It was a synergy. As our minds expanded with art, poetry, literature and music so did theirs. We mirrored one another. We fed off each other. The sixties scene was an explosion of possibility. There were no leaders. We all evolved along the same lines.

The Beatles were my gateway drug into the hard stuff of the 60s. They were mine – all mine.

As an aside – back in the 1980s I started doing tapes to play in the car. Interestingly I found I could fit all the songs I wanted to listen to of Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis and even the legendary Little Richard on one side of a C90 while the Beatles ran into 5 complete C90s – that about sums it up for me.

(Recently I tried to get Roy Harper to put together a box set and managed to narrow down the essentials to nine CDs!)

By the end of 1963 Merseybeat was dead in the water. Only the Beatles and Searchers really survived. A whole new bunch of bands had appeared with a bluesier, harder sound, a scruffier long haired image and had usurped the besuited Mersey Bands with their chirpy ‘Boy next door’ image. Longer hair was ‘in’ coupled with a surly attitude and ‘Bad Boy’ image.

I did catch Gerry and the Pacemakers in Hull a few years back at a matinee at Hull New Theatre. I went along out of interest and wasn’t expecting much. The original band had reformed and they were performing a show that was their story. Gerry narrated it, told his anecdotes and jokes, and played the music. They ended with the original line-up doing a short set. It was surprisingly good and the when the band kicked in they were really loud and powerful and nothing like the twee Pop stuff they’d charted with. As it was a matinee there were coach-loads of pensioners (mainly old ladies) who had come along to see the nice little Pop group. I’m not sure they appreciated all the stories from Hamburg’s red light district and when the band kicked in at the end they were putting their hands over their ears and complaining. I was impressed. They were good!

Ironically the rise of the new Beat music coincided with the storming of America by the Beatles and every Tom Dick and Harry from England who could pick up an instrument.

We watched in pride, disbelief and ecstatic delight as the Beatles had seven singles in the US Top Ten and Beatle mania was rampant in the States.

Britain was no longer a musical backwater on a par with Finland. We were the centre of the universe and Elvis no longer ruled. There were big differences though. In the States all the new Beat bands somehow got mixed up with the old-hat Mersey acts. There was no progression or distinction. All the Merseybeat bands got a second lease of life.

One of the weirdest downsides of the British invasion was that Herman’s Hermits became one of the biggest acts. It was Cliff all over again!

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

In Search Of Captain Beefheart – 1 – On The Starting Line

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On the starting line

Once I got out of Clive’s bedroom I began my quest in earnest. I looked everywhere I could but there were no signs of my heroes. This was probably due to two things: firstly I was an eleven year old kid living in the Delta region of the Deep South (Thames Delta that is – Walton on Thames) and there was very little in the way of record shops or live venues (Walton on Thames was not renowned for its boulevard cruisin’ in red Cadillac’s or its jiving’ Honky Tonks and Juke Joints) and secondly my heroes were still out of circulation. Woody was going down with the terrible Huntingdon’s Chorea which would stop him performing and writing anymore. Don Van Vliet was probably living out on his trailer in the desert with his mum Sue and hanging out at school with Frank Zappa. Roy was causing mayhem Blackpool way with Beat poetry, feigned madness, army desertion and pregnant girlfriends. Bob was doing his Little Richard impersonations and starting out on the road to putting together his auto-constructed mythology and was about to start singing to Woody in the sanatorium. Son House hadn’t been rediscovered and had yet to relearn the guitar, get back in the studio and be trundled out to white audiences.

I filled my time in by substituting in other heroes.

Hard on the heels of Buddy and Adam I soon discovered Elvis, Eddie, Cliff and then the revelation of Little Richard. He was explosive! ‘Here’s Little Richard’ was an immense album. I got obsessed with it. That voice belting out that basic thumping Gospel influenced yet wholly secular primitive Rock ‘n’ Roll along with his wild pounding piano. He was the true King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. There was no one to touch him. Elvis, who copied a lot of his songs, was a pale imitation in more ways than one. I remember sitting on the sofa with my 52 year old big fat jolly Nanny (Grandma), who was shortly destined to have a stroke and die, and watching a Little Richard, come-back, hour long TV show in the early 60s. He put everything into it. The sweat was beaded on his face and dripping off him. He stood and hammered the keys, played it with his foot, backside and elbow and pulled off every trick in the book while my Nanny roared him on and bounced around causing the sofa to suffer earthquakes. My Nan was a rocker!

My school had a fete and I took my Dansette in with my record collection and performed as a Juke Box. I charged six pence a play and only played Little Richard all afternoon. I didn’t get to make much but I had a great time!

I finally got to meet my hero not so long ago when he played in Bradford. I took my younger son Henry with me as an essential part of his education (I also took him to see Chuck Berry, Rambling Jack Elliott, Love, The Magic Band, Lazy Lester & Jerry Lee Lewis and got him to see Bo Diddley, the Fall, the Buzzcocks and John Cooper Clarke). The Little Richard Show was a strange affair. There seemed to be three elements to it. There was the Rock ‘n’ Roll – but lacking in the energy and athleticism – he was in his mid seventies – but there was also this cloying evangelical Christian crap and a very camp gayness all of which did not quite gel with raw Rock ‘n’ Roll. It left me feeling dissatisfied. I would have loved to have seen him in 1957 when he was revolutionary. Even more disturbing was going back after the show to see him. He was doing a poster signing. There was a long queue and two big black heavies on the door who were distinctly underworld. They collected your £30 quid off you with a very heavy warning: you went in shook hands, had your poster signed – if you tried to get anything else signed, like my original ‘Here’s Little Richard’ album from my childhood it would be taken off me and smashed. I got the feeling that there would likely be a few more things broken in the bargain.

I walked up to get my poster signed by the great Mr Penniman with the guy from the support act. He’d done a great version of ‘Casting my spell’ and I said that it sounded just like the Measles version that I used to love. He was nice and friendly and turned out to be the lead singer with the Measles.

The next few years were quite fallow for me and lacking in real heroes. The charts, which we all drooled over, were full of sanitised Pop stuff – Fabian, Bobby Darin, Bobby Vee and Bobby Rydell. Some of it was OK and I quite liked Del Shannon, Roy Orbison and Dion & the Belmonts but I drew the line at Bobby Vee and Fabian and had headed off back into the 1950s for my fix. I devoured all the Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Eddie Cochran I could get my hands on and added some Shadows, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, Huey ‘Piano’ Smith, and early Elvis before discovering the bombshells of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

I didn’t know what I was searching for. I thought I’d found it in good old Rock ‘n’ Roll. It hit you right in the belly and got you moving. I thought everyone should record fast rockers. Rock ‘n’ Roll was great but it wasn’t the whole caboodle. I would grow up a little.

I had a lot to learn.

The lean years ended in 1963.

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

In Search of Captain Beefheart – A Memoir

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The Blurb

Blurb

The sixties raged. I was young, crazy, full of hormones and wanting to snatch life by the balls. There was a life out there for the grabbing and it had to be wrestled into submission. There was a society full of boring amoral crap and a life to be had in the face of the boring, comforting vision of slow death on offer.

Rock music vented all that passion.

This book is a memoir of a life spent immersed in Rock Music. I was born in 1949 and so lived through the whole gamut of Rock.

Rock music formed the background to momentous world events – the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, Iraq war, Watergate, the miners’ strike and Thatcher years, CND, the Green Movement, Mao and the Cultural Revolution, Women’s Liberation and the Cold War.

I see this as the Rock Era.

I was immersed in Rock music. It was fused into my personality. It informed me, transformed me and inspired me. My heroes were musicians. I am who I am because of them.

Without Rock Music I would not have the same sensibilities, optimism or ideals. They woke me up!

This tells that story.

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

Book of the Week: In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Pt. 24 – On the road with Harper

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On the road with Harper

As the 70s exerted its unpleasant grasp like a dead man’s clammy fingers around your throat I was in a world of my own. I was hanging on to the dream of the past, reluctant to face the truth and let it slip away.

We convinced ourselves that this was all a blip. Out of the ashes the phoenix would rise. There was evidence for this: Beefheart’s wondrous 1973 Rainbow concert, Lennon’s great two solo albums, Floyd’s flashes of creativity, Syd Barrett’s two albums. They shone amid the overblown hype of Yes, Genesis and ELP with their extended and exceedingly boring opuses, or the Pop of Glam Rock with TRex, Bowie and Glitter. We Freaks looked down on the commercial junk of the charts or pretentious crap. We wanted something that reflected the socio-political view of alternative, underground life. Glam and Prog didn’t cut it! It was chart orientated Pop!

I was somewhat sated by my progressing relationship with Roy Harper. Regardless of what was happening to the scene around him he remained unaltered and true to himself, his ideals and the spirit of the times. He told it as it was without a thought to how it might affect his career.

 Opher with Roy in the Baltic 2010

I’d been going to at least one or two Roy gigs a week so I was getting quite au fait with his songs, thoughts and persona. I was meeting him regularly for long stoned talks and social time in Kilburn. I was still making those lengthy phone calls. I guess I was the complete pest. But I do suffer with these obsessions and Roy was consistently talking and performing the stuff that made me think, that grabbed my imagination so that I wanted more. He was one of the few elements that hadn’t let me down. There was a great intellect, imagination, poet and musician at work and I had the chance to see it first hand who could resist?

His gigs had gone from small numbers to queues around the block. I’d been to the St Pancras gig which was pivotal. It was like the last gig for the original faithful before he headed off to bigger things. It was not only a milestone but the most incredible gig. It had that real homely feel and personal touch. It was a shame that Jackson C Frank had failed to show. He was a good friend of Roy’s and it would have been special.

Roy always tried to treat his gigs as if he was playing to friends in his front room. He hated the idea of performance and being paid to perform. He hated barriers. The St Pancras gig achieved the impossible.

From there on in it was bigger venues and larger audiences. It looked as if Roy was going to make it huge. But then there was Roy busy sabotaging himself at every turn.

I’d gone through the experience of Roy’s first real epic song with ‘McGoohan’s Blues’. At the time there were only two things worth watching on the box. One was Marty Feldman and the other was ‘The Prisoner’ featuring Patrick McGoohan. The Prisoner was set in the Dali-esque Portmeirion. It was a surreal series concerned with allegorical tales of society and reality that played with your head. Roy did this epic song about it. I’d heard Roy play it in the very beginning and it had blown me away. It seemed to hold in it all of the views of the exploitative capitalist society, with all its arrogance and greed, that I detested. He summed it up so well it sent chills through me. We were all playing the game.

I’d seen the way it was recorded on Liberty. They’d wanted a hit album and brought in Mickey Most to produce it. That must have been fun. I’m not sure what Mickey made of Roy’s twenty five minute burst of vitriol. I doubt if he saw it as a potential hit single! In fact he probably scoured the rest of the material and came up short when it got to potential radio play.

I think it is fair to say that Mickey and Roy did not quite see eye to eye. The album was made in a series of rushed first takes and Roy was out of there. He even had a row over the cover. Roy wanted it as a diamond. The company printed it as a standard square. Roy argued and they compromised with an off-centre diamond that pleased nobody.

The result was highly disappointing if you seen Roy at the time. Songs like ‘McGoohan’s blues’ and ‘She’s the one’ were tours de force live but were highly flawed on the record. I never really found a version of ‘McGoohan’s Blues’ that lived up to the intensity of Roy’s live singing back then.

Liberty and Roy parted company.

Roy signed to the prestigious Harvest label and the more conducive Pete Jenner as producer. They hit it off. The label provided him with unlimited time in Abbey Road studio and for the first time Roy had the technical back-up to make a decent album that would do justice to his incredible songs.

Roy invited me down to the studios to see the recording. It was to be the focus of my life. I was still catching Harper gigs as well as attending sessions. I was to go on through ‘Flat Baroque & Berserk’, ‘Stormcock’, ‘Lifemask’ and ‘HQ’ until I moved up North to Hull in 1975 and that put an end to it. It did mean that I was privy to the recording of four of Roy’s most brilliant albums.

The strange thing about Abbey Road studio was the incredible low key security. I used to park my good old 350 AJS outside and saunter in. Nobody ever challenged me. Lennon was recording there. Wings were recording there and I suppose a number of others but there was no great shakes. I wandered in and down the corridor to where Roy was recording and walked into the control room. I suppose I could have popped down and said hello to Paul or John but it did not occur to me. We were much to cool for that. You didn’t do that sort of thing.

In the control room you’d meet all sorts. At one time I was sitting there with Dave Gilmour, Keith Moon and Bonzo when Jimmy Page and entourage walked in. Page was with this petite girl with incredibly long hair that was well past her bum. Page’s friend asked me what I did and I was a bit thrown. What was I doing here? I came up with something lame like ‘I’m just watching.’ It was quite intimidating to be in a control room with the elite of Rock Music. I met everyone from Ronnie Lane, John Paul Jones to Robert Plant, the Nice and Tony Visconti. There were times when me and Roy were the only non-millionaires in the place. Roy certainly had the support and backing of all the best musicians. They appreciated the quality of his stuff and it had a great influence on their own music.

It was a privilege to see people of the quality of Moon, Page and Gilmour perform live in the studio. I’d be sitting there, trying to melt into the walls, and Page would be laughing around and then he’d pick up a guitar and instantly transform into a professional guitarist. When he played he performed in the control room it was as if he was on stage. He’d strum and pick and you’d sit mesmerised watching the intensity and hearing the crispness of the chords and notes. I wish I’d taken a camera.

I was there in the studio when Roy recorded ‘East of the sun’. He was having a great deal of difficulty with the harmonica. It kept playing up. He eventually got it down and then smashed it in the door. The annoying American girl I’d brought along, to give Liz a bit of peace and quiet, gathered the bent instrument up. She left it with me when she finally went home but I’ve no idea what happened to it.

I was there when Roy in the course of his frustration and high jinks managed to tip the vandal-proof drinks vending machine over. Quite a feat!

I was there when he recorded ‘Hell’s Angels’ with the Nice. EMI had wanted a single and Roy was never keen on singles. They smacked of sell-out and commercial sell-out to him. So he wrote ‘Hell’s Angels’ knowing they could never play it on the radio. It was done in one take and at one point Binky Jackson loses the rhythm and Roy comes in to talk him through it. They dropped the backing out and left it like that for the recording. It seemed to work.

There were the magic times with Moon laying down the drums on ‘Male Chauvinist Pig Blues’, or Page rockin’ back and forth as he played along to his own guitar on the fabulous ‘Lord’s prayer’.

I was in heaven.

I sometimes went along with Liz and on one occasion Dave Gilmore offered us a lift in his taxi. We declined out of politeness but he was very pleasant and friendly. We should have accepted.

In 69, when Dylan was performing on the Isle of Wight, I was sitting in the basement at Les Cousins watching Roy record ‘I hate the Whiteman’. He was aware of what had happened to his previous ‘McGoohan’s Blues’ epic and did not want the same disaster to occur with this masterpiece. He’d decided it would best be served live. That was a great recording session in a real intimate setting, in the place where Roy had first started out. I remember him putting so much into it that he broke a string. It later came out as a CD that I wrote the liner notes for.

Other notable Harper concerts that I remember in those halcyon days were Roy’s Royal Albert Hall appearance where he played a storming version of ‘Male Chauvinist Pig Blues’ and ‘One man Rock ‘n’ Roll Band’.

At the fabled Rainbow concert I got along to see the rehearsal as well as the show and met Keith Moon, Ronnie Lane, Bonzo and Jimmy Page. There was a great atmosphere, much clowning about and a brilliant gig.

Then there was the Hyde Park concert where Roy was supposed to be headlining but left that to Roger McGuinn. Roy had this amazing band with Dave Gilmour on guitar, Steve Broughton on drums and John Paul Jones on bass. They blew McGuinn off the stage. I wish I had a recording of it. The guitar was brilliant.

 Roy & Nick at the Royal Festival Hall 2011

When Roy formed the band Trigger with Chris Spedding, Bill Bruford and Dave Cochran they hit their peak as a Rock Band. Spedding’s guitar was extraordinary. He later went on to play the guitar stuff on some of the Sex Pistols stuff. I hitched over to York uni to see them play and they were superb. That album ‘HQ’ is one of the best.

Likewise with the bands Chips and Black Sheep that Roy put together with Andy Roberts, Dave Lawson, Henry McCullough, John Halsey and Dave Cochran. They were a great band and produced two great albums – ‘Bullinamingvase’ and ‘Commercial Breaks’. I hitch-hiked round a bit to see them as well. They were superb.

In 1982 I met up with Roy on his ‘Born in Captivity’ tour and suggested to Roy that we should get together to write his biography. He thought he could trust me and agreed. After a number of sessions he decided that it could end up upsetting too many people. We changed the concept to a book about his lyrics. I spent twenty years working on it then Roy pulled the plug on it. I am left with thirty hours of tapes and a book in four volumes that is ready to go. Ho hum. Some things work out and some things don’t.

Book of the Week: In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Pt. 23 – A house of memories

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A house of memories

After leaving college and heading off on our world tour I ended up back at the same college working as a laboratory technician and doing research. It kept me in the thick of things. The place was full of Freaks and there was music everywhere. I had my hair and lifestyle pretty much intact.

I got put in charge of the animal house which suited me down to the ground. I had four days of work. Two days were cleaning out the rabbits, rats, mice, guinea pigs and cats, sterilising and scrubbing. I was used to doing all that from my childhood and I could play music while I did it. That was OK! I loved animals. On the other two days it was a case of topping up the food and water and then getting my feet up and reading. I read a lot of books.

It also meant I could pop in at weekends and top up the water and food and get two half days of overtime for a couple of hours work.

But then I started getting into a bit of conflict. I didn’t like the way the animals were cooped up. It felt wrong. They were all fat and bored to tears. So I built a large run outside on a bit of waste grassland at the side of the animal house. I put the rabbits and guinea pigs out there.

I remember the big old rabbits sitting there blinking in the sun not quite sure what was going on. Then they started moving about. Before long they were bounding about kicking the air for joy, nibbling the grass and madly bonking each other. It was liberation.

I started drawing up plans for a big rat enclosure with runs and ladders. That was a bit more challenging.

After a few weeks the authorities came along and told me that they were lab animals under Home Office regulations and they had to be caged appropriately.

Then I turned my attention to the wild animals being used for dissection. We would get consignments of grass snakes and salamanders live caught on the continent and frogs from Ireland. They’d come in boxes, packed with moss, by train.

My job, as animal house tech, was to unpack them. Put them in aquaria and dole them out when needed. I was appalled that they were still using live caught animals particularly as salamanders were on the protected species list! Not only that, but over half the animals arriving in this way turned up dead! I ended up with a great pile of dead bodies when I’d unpacked. I started taking photos with a view to putting a case to the hierarchy. Seemingly photos were a major no-no. That came to a head when I went in and took photos of the cats that were being used in the psychology department. The cats were beautiful and tame and were used for vivisection. They drugged them, opened up their cranium and cut bits of the brain out to demonstrate the effects to groups of students. I was sure we had the technology to film this and so not have to kill all those cats. So I took a photo or two.

I was then visited by the College Principal and two Home Office men who informed me that under the Official Secrets act any disclosure of information concerning animals used in research projects, i.e. photographs of living cats with their skulls cut open, would result in prosecution and a likely lengthy prison sentence.

So I restricted my displeasure to naming the animals (I was well ahead of Dylan here!). When a technician came to get a couple of guinea pigs or a cat I gave them ‘Matilda’, ‘Emily’ and ‘Harry’. I was amazed at the huge effect this simple practice had. It reduced many of the technicians to tears. It made them think of the animals as having personalities. Before long I got another visit and a severe reprimand. Ho hum.

At the time I was living in this amazing house. We had a little flat, consisting of two rooms and a corridor kitchen, on the fourth floor. The place was a mass of small flats and bed-sits occupied by a spectrum of society.

On the ground floor there were two girls who were on the game. The landlord had the whole of the next floor. He was eighty four and absolutely brilliant but couldn’t work out why the two girls were so popular. He told me about their string of boyfriends. He thought they were very popular.

On the next floor was John in a bed-sit and the McDeed family who had come down from Scotland. John had a first-class degree and PhD in Literature from Cambridge. He was heavily into dope and seemed to spend all his time smoking dope and reading. He was a bit eccentric. He had a big square oak table and had put the roaches of all his joints on it. By this time there was big conical mountain of thousands of roaches. The McDeeds had moved in by stealth in stages. First Mr McDeed had moved in and then introduced his wife. Then the kids (all teenagers) started to arrive one by one. They had taken over two little flats and there were about six of them. Mt McDeed spent his days sitting on a park bench sipping whiskey out of a bottle in a brown paper bag. Every phone box for miles around was out of action because Mr McDeed would jemmy them open to steal the change to pay for his whiskey faster than they could be mended. It did not make him popular but he did not seem to care. The McDeeds were reputedly running from the Glasgow underworld. They were gangsters. Coinciding with their arrival all the giro cheques arriving for the unemployed regularly went missing. If you did not intercept the postman you did not get your cheque. Then the dry cleaners got raided. Somebody broke in and stole all the clothes as well as the money from the till. Incompetently someone had dropped a letter with the McDeeds address. They got raided and the clothes retrieved along with knives and guns that were hidden under a mattress. The McDeeds disappeared very quickly.

The garden was a revelation. Mr Rose, who was 84 years old, had created a masterpiece of psychedelic grandeur. It was a mass of bright paint, lights, tacky ornaments and vines, with swing boats, ponds and crazy designs. It was a place to come to trip to and we often found strange Freaks roaming around enunciating profound evocations of wonder such as: ‘Wow!!’

Book of the Week: In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Pt. 22 – Jimi’s Spanish Castles crashing

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Jimi’s Spanish Castles crashing

Jimi epitomised the whole 60s thing. He burst upon the scene in 1966 with ‘Hey Joe’ propelling the British Psychedelic scene into a new dimension.

I remember I was with my best mate Oz when I first heard it. You did a double take because it was a new sound. Your ears hadn’t heard anything like it before. It sent shivers through me. That guitar was out of this world.

It had a similar affect on everyone else, particularly musicians. I have read extensively about the effect it had on the British guitarists of the time – Clapton, Beck and Entwhistle. It hit them harder than it did me. They got to see him close up right from the start! At least I got to hear a few singles and a couple of albums first!

Jimi brought all the showmanship of the black R&B scene along with a prowess on the guitar that hasn’t been matched before or since. He was a revelation.

 Opher – still working on that same complicated chord impersonating Jimi

Following ‘Hey Joe’ was a string of equally astounding stuff. There was ‘Purple Haze’, ‘The Wind cries Mary’ and ‘the burning of the midnight lamp’. There were the first two albums – ‘Are you experienced?’ and ‘Axis bold as love’.

Hendrix was the hottest act round. Not only was the music so different, explosive and amazing but the act was as well. He played the guitar behind his head, with his teeth, elbow and backside. He created all this feedback that he harnessed and played. He smashed his guitar, burn it, sacrificed it and made love to it. He salaciously rubbed his guitar up against the speaker stacks with his hips while it shrieked and wailed.

Has anything ever been so exciting? I’d never seen it if it has!

I caught him in a small club in full swing. I caught him in Woburn abbey in full flow and I caught him at the Royal Albert Hall looking a bit jaded.

The trouble was that it was all too intense!

He’d started off really enjoying the act but after a hundred times of doing the greatest hits with all the histrionics it had all become tiresome. There were only so many times you could churn out even a track as good as ‘Foxy Lady’ without it becoming tiresome. It ceased to be fun and became a chore. There was a big difference between playing the guitar with your teeth for a laugh and doing it for the umpteenth time because it was expected of you. You could see he’d got tired of it.

I don’t think it was so much that he’d grown out of the Experience as he needed a break from it and needed some new stimulation and direction. He could have done with a long holiday.

Then there were the wrangles with Chas Chandler which ended with a parting of the ways. Jimi did his next album ‘Electric Ladyland’ with a wider set of musicians, longer, more fully realised tracks and a sprawling double album release.

It was panned at the time. Everyone thought it was too long, needed editing down, and would be better as shorter more punchy songs like on ‘Axis bold as love’. Even Hendrix responded by saying he should have worked on it longer and it wasn’t complete.

It was only later when you go back to it with fresh ears that you see what a work of genius it was. It just takes a while to tune your ear into its greater sophistication.

Following all the pressures – there were rumours of racism, antagonism with Noel, the mafia and pressure from the Black Panther movement – there was the disaster of the split of the Experience.

Jimi got together with some black musicians and produced the funkier ‘Band of Gypsies’. They were slated. Everyone wanted the exciting, dynamic Experience back. They wanted the wild showman and raucous rockin’ Jimi. They got a more thoughtful, subdued and sophisticated funky Jimi who was focussed on producing a mellower jazzy sound.

He played the Isle of Wight and then was gone. He suffocated on his own vomit.

It was not only tragic but was surrounded with rumour. There’d been wine and sleeping pills? Jimi had been left for hours while they cleaned up the flat and got rid of the dope because the police would bust them? His girlfriend panicked and didn’t call an ambulance? It all sounded a mess. Seemingly Jimi arrived, after a botched ambulance fiasco, at hospital barely alive and they couldn’t revive him. Who knows the truth?

It summarised the whole 60s. There was excitement and huge promise, followed by decay, disillusionment that descended into despair and apathy; then a break up and the culmination into death.

You can substitute Koss, Barrett, Lennon, Morrison, Joplin, Brian Jones and a host of others.

Jimi was probably the greatest loss of all. The stuff he was working on at the time of his death was incredible. You could hear what he was capable of. There is no telling what direction he would have headed out into. I can’t imagine him decaying into a trite cabaret act like Clapton. He had balls, imagination and desire to back up his immense prowess.

At the time of his death he had released three studio albums, a live Band of Gypsies album and ‘Smash Hits’. It was not a huge amount.

Since his death the releases have continued to come and come. I have numerous ten CD boxes, 6 CD boxes and 4 CD boxes. There are a huge number of studio outtakes, live performances and radio/TV shows. I don’t know how many hundreds of hours of music I have. I only know it is not enough! I stood outside Electric Ladyland studio’s in New York and wondered.

Book of the Week: In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Pt. 21 – A slow motion crash

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A slow motion crash

The 1960s came to an end like a slow motion crash. I imagine it as a huge ocean liner serenely piling into an iceberg. Like in some cartoon the front end just crumples up as it sails into the immovable berg and it just keeps going getting shorter and shorter. It left all us 60s freaks floundering around in the icy waters of the second-rate 70s.

We never thought it would and didn’t really believe it had when it did. It took me years to finally accept. All those dreams, alternative societies, camaraderie and ideals seemed to decay into fluff and get blown away.

All around me was death, sell-out and casualties.

Jimi choked on his own vomit in strange circumstances, Jim Morrison mysteriously died in his bath in Paris, and Janis O.D’Ed in her hotel room, Brian Jones was found suspiciously floated face down in his pool. Even Bob Dylan’s motorbike accident a few years earlier was weird. He’d come back as an impostor! If I had a suspicious mind I might have thought someone had organised all this.

Then there were the walking wounded, the acid casualties like Syd Barrett and Peter Green, the heroin victims like Clapton and a whole series of others.

On the personal front one of my good friends, Jeff Evans, had got really fucked up on Hollis Brown cough medicine and then acid and dope. He developed extreme paranoia and ended up jumping off a bridge into an express train.

The last time I saw him was in the so called summer of 1970 when I was working as a road sweeper. Unbeknown to me I was busy sweeping down his road. He had popped out of his flat and bumped into me. It had been a really warm greeting. I hadn’t seen him for a good year or so. We chatted for a couple of minutes. His eyes looked strangely blown and vacuous but he sounded fine. Then Jeff said that he was going to get a newspaper and I’d have to pop up for a coffee. That sounded good to me. I worked my way up the street and noticed Jeff coming back. He was hiding behind trees and peeping round at me and scuttled into his house. It was weird. I figured I wasn’t going to get that coffee after all.

That night I met up with a few friends and mentioned it. They said that he’d been getting all these flash-backs and paranoid stuff. Rooms melted and there were machines in the walls. He thought people were robots sent to spy on him.

A few weeks later he killed himself.

Lanky was another friend who got into heroin. He just dropped out of sight and mouldered.

It was a pattern I’d see on many occasions. Once into the abyss they’d rarely make it back, at least not as the same people.

There is a fine line in all risks, explorations and quests. A life without risk is an empty life but taking risks without engaging the brain is just plain stupidity.

The optimism of the 60s was fractured. The Beatles split, as did the Doors, Country Joe & the Fish, Love, Cream, Jimmy Hendrix Experience, Taste, Free, Fleetwood Mac, Velvet Underground and numerous others. It was carnage.

There was the bad vibes of Altamont and the decay of San Francisco.

Those bands that were left were lacklustre and becoming boring.

At first we were lulled. Out of the ashes there were some notable tours de force. Lennon’s first two albums were vitriolic and brilliant. George Harrison released a great triple album. Even Bad Company did a couple of great tracks, but in general it was over.

Everyone woke up to the fact that all the sharing and idealism was a lot of lip service to most of the two faced bastards. There were all our heroes jet-setting around the globes with huge mansions and limousines, flying hairdressers in to do their hair before a gig, while preaching equality and sharing. At least the Beatles tried a more egalitarian approach with Apple and got their fingers burnt for all their trouble.

I was a little shielded from it. I had my hero Roy Harper to buoy me up.  Strangely as the scene disintegrated he was reaching his apotheosis with one startling creation after another and I was part of it.

 Opher & Liz – our wedding invite!

In 1971 Liz and I got married. We had a great time. We started off with a Buddhist ceremony, in which Liz and I were regaled in our red and orange gear, and to which we invited all the bemused relatives to. They were subjected to a long session of chanting from twelve Thai monks, witness to ceremonial lighting of candles and incense, signifying some drawing nearer to the truth, and then sprayed with water imbued with love and kindness. I’m sure they enjoyed it all. I certainly did.

 Opher & Liz – Buddhist ceremony 1971

The following week, to appease Liz’s estranged parents (who just because they had read her diary had taken a sceptical view of me and banned her from consorting with me) we had a brief registrar office wedding (to which we were half hour late – that being two whole weddings!). We were late because we could not get the car started. We were trying to bump start it in our red and orange wedding gear! Fortunately a guy said he’d fix it for five quid and he did (£5 was a lot to us then!). On the way round the North Circular I got cut up by a lunatic (there’s a lot of them on the North Circular) and had to brake hard which sent the diced cheese and butter that we had in bowls on the back seat, flying through the air. We spent a while picking lumps of butter out of our golden locks and had our first big row. Liz seemed to think I could have avoided braking so hard. I took a different view. Fortunately when we finally arrived, with Liz’s Dad gleefully thinking we’d pulled out (Liz’s Mum refused to come), we were able to fit in a slot because an ex-girlfriend of mine by the name of Cas had forgotten to pick up her wedding banns and so couldn’t get married. It was all a bit hap-hazard back then!

Opher Liz & friends ceremony in the woods 1971

In the afternoon we had a ceremony in the woods. All our friends were invited and asked to bring food, drink and a performance. It was May the first. We wanted a maypole but nobody would let us have one. We wanted it in the park but nobody would let us do that either. So we settled for the woods. Someone set up a sound system, there was dancing, music, poems and sunshine. It worked like magic!

Following that we went to the States as the start of our world tour. We worked in Boston selling underground magazines, working as a waitress and dishwasher. Then we hitched and greyhounded our way round to San Francisco and LA and met loads of great people. San Francisco was in decay. The place was full of junkies. Fillmore West had a big sign up advertising the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane but it was historic and they no longer performed there. The scene may have decayed but we were experiencing an Indian summer. The dregs were good enough to hang on to and we did not notice.

Opher at Haight Asbury 1971

Memorably we hitch-hiked with our friend Jack to Pfeiffer State Beach at Big Sur. This was a mythical place where the legendary Henry Miller had set up home. We ambled two miles down the steep dirt road to the beach and arrived as the sun was getting low. There was a line of Freaks on the beach passing jays, strumming guitars and watching the sun slide down as the waves crashed through the big hole in the large rock in the middle of the bay. It was idyllic.

The sea turned orange, crimson, and then a deep mauve with turquoise foam on the waves.

After the sun had set we all got a big campfire lit and sat around eating, drinking, passing jays and strumming.

Then we got bust.

Opher at Big Sur 1971

The cops rolled up and rounded us all up. They frisked us down and informed us that it was illegal to camp on the beach. They threatened Liz and me with deportation. However they didn’t find any dope and decided to take us back up the road and dump us at the side of the highway.

We ended up getting our sleeping bags out and sleeping at the side of the road. It was a magical night up there in the Sierras. A huge wind got up and threatened to blow us away. Then it went completely calm and the sky was so clear the Milky Way was like a band of thick smoke and the heavens were a mass of stars. There were no spaces between them. I’d never seen anything like it. We lay on our back and stared up into the cosmos and talked while the mountain lions roared in the hills around us. We talked about life, infinity and the universe and it all seemed so incredibly near as if we were connected to it all like some great mystical dream.

Our world tour petered out into reality.

We came back penniless having literally spent our last dollar in getting a tiny present, a wind up plastic frog for the bath, in Macy’s, for my baby sister.

College was over. The 60s were over. I had to get a job.

I got a temporary job as a lab tech at my old college. It was a sort of halfway house. I could pretend I was still living the dream but I’d really sold my soul to mammon. We had to pay the rent. This was confirmed in 1973 when we had our first baby. The carefree hitch-hiking, sleeping on floors and partying all night, the mad rapping and idealistic dreams were replaced by a tempered realism.

Book of the Week: In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Pt. 20 – The flat where it happened

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The flat where it happened

Pete and I shared a tiny room in the flat where it all happened. In the flat above lived Tony Merrington and Geraldine. She was the black haired girl who was the subject of Donovan’s song ‘Geraldine’.

We shared our flat with Tony Merry and Hans. Hans was Dutch and had a snore like a ripsaw. It actually shook the partition wall between us.

There was just enough room in our tiny cubical to fit two single beds. We had French Windows at the end and the place was freezing. In order to deal with this we blocked up every crevice of the badly fitting French Windows with newspaper and had a paraffin stove for warmth. It was a wonder we didn’t asphyxiate ourselves. Even though we kept it on all day and night the place was still freezing and we piled all our clothes on top of the bed to keep warm. Some days it was too cold to get up. The paraffin stove also acted as heater for the kettle. We found that if we filled the kettle with water and left it on the stove overnight there would be enough water left to make two cups of cocoa in the morning. We could reach out and pour our cocoa without having to get up. That was our breakfast.

 Lipher the pet rat who roamed our room

We shared our room with Lipher the pet rat. She lived in a bird cage with the door open and roamed the room hunting for soap which she gleefully ate with great relish. She was exceedingly friendly and adorable.

At one end of the room Pete had stacked three harmoniums which he had managed to purchase for next to nothing. He had a guitar and some mando-yukes that he had made himself and later a violin. The place was full of instruments. It was a wonder we fitted in at all.

It was here that Pete taught me how to play guitar. He showed me the three cheat chords to play ‘Light my fire’. I practised religiously – at least I shouted out ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ quite a lot. It was then that I discovered that having a great interest and love of music did not necessarily equip you to become a musician. Firstly my ear did not seem able to detect whether a sound was higher or lower and so I couldn’t actually tune anything. Then my fingers had obviously evolved more for counting than manipulating. While I had very good control over my index finger and thumb (which I still use for all my typing) the rest do not seem to be under the control of my cerebellum. Their only function is to make up the numbers. This phenomenon manifested itself when I tried to force them to assume the shapes necessary to make chords.

Opher holding down an incredibly complicated chord 1976

Pete enthusiastically encouraged me to persevere. It would all come right with practice. I watched the effortless way he played the real chords complete with twiddley bits and finger-picking and realised I was destined to be a fan and not a practitioner.

In the flat where it all happened we entertained, read sci-fi, headed off to gigs, talked through the night like maniacs, played arrows with the guys next door, and played lots of music. We stuck homemade posters on the walls and Pete made his weird light-shows out of polarised sheets.

We had one meal a day which might be a huge heap of cheese potato (we cadged cheese scraps from the local supermarket – they took pity on us because we were so obviously starving) or lambs head stew (we bought a sheep’s head from the butchers for one shilling and six pence – when boiled up with a range of vegetables scrounged from the greengrocers it would last for a week of meals for all four of us) or brawn (that entailed boiling a pigs head (also one and sixpence) with vegetables). We got sick of brawn though – it set into a gelatinous jelly that was not greatly appetising even when curried.

The worst meal of all was when we’d run out of money. It was Pete’s turn to cook and the cupboard was bare. I was presented with a plate of what looked like fried spinach. I tucked in but it was so gritty and bland it was almost inedible despite the malnutrition. It turned out that Pete had gone into the garden to find something edible and had ended up frying up grass. It is a meal I will remember for ever.

Food was not our priority. Gigs and albums were my priority. Pete bought instruments.

Book of the Week: In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Pt. 19 – Further losses were sustained

Posted on by Opher

Further losses were sustained

On going to college and becoming old, wise and mature as I surely was at the distinguished age of eighteen, not only had my tastes become more refined but the current Underground scene was also a tad different to what it had been when I was a tender fresh-faced lad. Alright, I’ll admit to never being fresh-faced! What was hip in the playground at fourteen did not look quite so cool four years later.

This necessitated a certain refinement of the collection. The last thing I wanted was to have a cultured friend rifle through my treasured records and produce a frown on the discovery of my Billy J and Freddie and the Dreamers albums. They would probably have had a field day with the rest of my Merseybeat collection, not to mention Cliff, the Shadows and Adam Faith as well.

 Opher & Liz 1968 – complete with patches & Kaftan

What was needed was a culling.

I went through and selected the stuff I was currently into and stashed the rest up in the loft.

This meant that my Folk, Blues, Acid Rock and Progressive/Psychedelic stuff all accompanied me to my digs while the bulk of my Rock ‘n’ Roll, Mersey and Beat stuff kept the spiders company.

Life was too full to dwell on things much. It was only much later when I had got over the pretentiousness of being hip that I decided to dig them all out. That was when it became apparent that things were not right.

To start with my Mum had done a Spring-clean of my old bedroom and chucked all my old magazines and stuff away. These included all the Beatles magazines that I had collected as well as my autographed Them postcard.

When I went to retrieve the albums from the loft there were hardly any there. One of our neighbour’s sons had liked Rock ‘n’ Roll so she’d given him a heap on the basis that I was no longer interested in them. Another load had gone to the jumble sale to clear a bit of space in the loft. This apparently included all my first edition Merseybeat stuff including my two Oriole ‘This is Merseybeat’ albums, my Kinks, Who, Yardbirds and others. She’d dumped a good couple of hundred priceless albums! It was a catastrophe!