Читать книгу Tony Visconti: The Autobiography: Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy - Morrissey - Страница 10

Now that I was doing what I’d dreamed of for so long, I started to settle in London. For a while I stayed at Denny Cordell’s flat on the Fulham Road but I needed to find somewhere a little more permanent as life there was crowded; there’s only so long that anyone could be expected to sleep on a sofa. Besides which I also had to get to grips with washing my hair in the bath—why don’t they have showers in this country, was all I kept thinking? My plans were somewhat fluid, as I only anticipated being in London for six months, which certainly made me determined to enjoy every minute of my stay and not miss out on a single experience. Professionally my goal was to learn how they made records with alchemy rather than with equipment. On the cover of the Magical Mystery Tour EP were some words about four wizards and a grand wizard, alluding to the Beatles and George Martin—I took this literally. I knew, as I walked down Fulham Road to the tube station, that I loved London—the people, the funny money. I was in a movie, my own A Hard Day’s Night. I knew I was in way over my head but something inside me kept saying, you could get ahead in this city; with hindsight I suspect that everyone else was too. I kept telling myself, I will learn the arcane arts of British recording and someday I’ll be a mover and a shaker here. I was what would later be called ‘driven’—back then I was just a crazy Yank.

It was confusing to me that most London streets only went on for a few blocks before they ceased to exist. New York is a grid city, mostly. I grew up on 74th and 11th; I went to school on 79th and 16th; the subway was on 69th and 11th. In New York I always knew where I was and where I was going. It took me months to get familiar with my London surroundings; in the first few weeks I walked a lot.

London accents were probably the hardest to fathom. I saw A Hard Day’s Night and Help! a total of 30 times or so, and I knew the Scouse accent of course; I just wasn’t prepared for the Cockney accent. Even a thick Glaswegian accent was easier to understand. I would tilt my head sideways like a dog and try to understand this new, twisted English.

I noticed that there weren’t many young kids that were dressed like the Beatles or the Stones. Most people just had ordinary jobs and dressed rather dowdy. But I was totally impressed when I saw a long-haired guy wearing a military jacket from Portobello Road—that’s what I expected to see—but the ratio of hipster-to-square person was about the same as New York at the time. I wore my hair long in London and I was stared at and sometimes sneered at by the older generation. Girls in miniskirts drove me crazy. Skirts were short in New York but in London girls were wearing their skirts unbelievably short, maybe just an inch or two below their most delicate parts. I’m sure I strained my neck many times—before I was joined by my wife.

The food was awful. The Wimpy burger tasted like dog meat. Coffee was as bland as dishwater. Fortunately I liked tea, as my mother used to make it with milk and sugar although most New Yorkers took it with just lemon. I realized very quickly that I had to learn words for food, like chips for French Fries, etc. I wasn’t used to eggs fried in oil either. They tasted disgusting. But I did like British sweets and cookies, known as biscuits. I discovered digestive biscuits with and without chocolate covering and often made a meal of a packet. I loved English milk, it was far tastier and richer than American milk.

The British money system just didn’t make sense at all. I’m sure I was taken advantage of in the first few weeks. Not only were there 240 pennies in the pound but each coin also had a few different names to memorize. There was a half crown, but there was no crown. There was a ten shilling note that was referred to as a ten bob note, and a sixpence piece, that many called a tanner. None of this made sense. Just when I became familiar with the system Britain went decimal.

Of course I couldn’t take a shower wherever I lived. Washing my hair was an ordeal; I don’t think I ever satisfactorily rinsed it out with a saucepan or two of water.

Television and radio were very disappointing. Radio hardly played rock or pop. I had to tune into Radio Luxembourg for the hour or so that they played music in the evening. Radio Caroline was okay although the signal was weak. But the DJs were awful; they sounded old and had a patter like vaudevillian comedians. The television was all of three channels then and they flickered off between 11 p.m. and midnight. That’s it, all of Britain was meant to go to bed like well-behaved children. If I wasn’t working in the studio everyday with Denny Cordell I would’ve gone back, there was nothing else exciting to do in those first few months.

One thing that was very obvious was English reserve. In the ’60s in New York you could make a good friend within 15 minutes of meeting the person. Americans were always more informal than the British and the heady Flower Power made us ‘all one’. This was not so in London during the same period. My wife was told at a Sunday tea party that we were not of their ‘set’. I think it took a year to make a good English friend, although it was easier to be more casual with musicians.

Denny Cordell became a good friend the first day we met, and during those early days in London I went everywhere with Denny and learned his routine, although there was little routine about it—it was insane. Denny was a guy who couldn’t say no. He was also at the top of his game, which made everything possible; he couldn’t turn down anything, especially if it was cool and lucrative. He was recording Manfred Mann, the Move, Procol Harum and Denny Laine simultaneously at sessions catered with tea, digestive biscuits and spliffs. These Jamaican-styled hashish joints were a revelation to me and despite their strength Denny could still recite the table of elements while he smoked. My tolerance was far less and cocaine was not yet in fashion. Being at Denny’s beck and call twenty-four hours a day was very definitely worth it for the experience. It allowed me to infiltrate the sanctity of British recording studios and I was a quick learner. During my first month in London I heard a white label of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and that alone was worth the price of admission.

Records like Sgt. Pepper were the result of all night sessions and so there was a downside to all this. As budgets grew larger, tempers grew shorter. To this day I am still dealing with the anxiety of recording artists who want to sound great, and better than their competition. It was ever thus, but as a novice in 1967 I had to learn about this. Recording in New York was still a superficial process compared to the depth and attention to detail that was going on in London. But I said to myself, ‘if this is the way the Brits do it I have to learn.’

Denny had recently become an Associate Producer at Deram, a division of Decca Records, which is how I met Tony Hall. He was in charge of Deram’s PR Department and for a while he put me up in his flat; I moved up from a sofa to my own bedroom. Tony had been a radio DJ in the early ’60s and he was working hard at promoting the careers of the Move, Denny Laine and Procol Harum. The contrast between Tony’s two-floor flat in Mayfair’s Green Street and Denny’s basement flat could not have been greater. I was only just getting to grips with London’s geography and had no idea about the demographics of London neighbourhoods, but I quickly realized that Mayfair was ‘posh’ (another new word for me). Tony was a lot more conventionally British than Denny. He wore cardigans and suits as an executive for Deram, but most amazing of all—he had short hair. Then again he must have been in his forties, which to me, aged 23 (just), was ancient. But he said something that made it all right with me to live at his place: ‘I went to George Harrison’s home in Henley-On-Thames. When I arrived along with some other people George opened a little Indian pill case he was wearing around his neck. He pulled out an acid tab and popped it into each of our mouths. I had no idea what I was taking, but soon found myself on a ten-hour acid trip. I had the most awful time, people’s faces became grotesque; it was my first and last acid trip.’

Maybe so, but dropping acid with a Beatle made you instantly cool in my mind.

It was through Denny’s deal with Deram that I began working with Denny Laine, who was so easy to get along with by comparison to the Manfreds. Twenty-three-year-old Denny had been the lead singer with the Moody Blues who had a No 1 in the UK with a cover of Bessie Banks’s, ‘Go Now’. The band had split up in late summer 1966 and while they had reunited with new members, Justin Hayward and John Lodge, almost immediately, Denny pursued a solo career.

There must be something in the name Denny because DL was as adept at making spliffs as DC. I became close to Denny L early on, especially as Siegrid did not arrive in London until the latter half of May. I would go to his flat over a Greek deli in Moscow Street, Bayswater and work out things with him; I wrote the string arrangements for his Electric String Band. He had a guitar stringing ritual that always amazed me. It started with rolling a giant spliff. Then he’d put the first string on, wind it up to the correct pitch and improvise a long, usually Eastern-flavored melody on the one string. Then, after several pulls on the spliff he would wind on the next string and improvise a two-string melody, which was usually a rock riff oriented thing on the low E and A strings. This would continue with each string, wind-play-smoke, wind-play-smoke. An hour later the guitar would be strung up, in tune and we’d be stoned out of our minds. Our subsequent recording sessions were fairly unfocused, and no wonder. Denny Cordell would be in charge, we’d have a room full of great musicians, the string players came from the Royal Academy of Music, but Denny Laine would just run out of steam after a few hours. He’d say that he had great ideas for this section or that section, but nothing was ever finished, save for one song—‘Say You Don’t Mind’. This was a small hit on British radio and a promise of great things to come, but Denny had a habit of leaving things unfinished.

One of the greatest experiences I had in the short time since arriving in London was to write five string arrangements for Denny Laine and then have them played on the stage of the Shaftsbury Theatre at a rock show. Jimi Hendrix was also on that bill and Denny Cordell grabbed me backstage saying, ‘Visconti, come, you must see this.’ Hendrix poured lighter fluid on his Stratocaster and threw a lighted match on it—so that’s why two members of the Fire Brigade were standing in the wings, one with an axe in his hands and the other with a fire extinguisher. The audience went berserk and I was just horrified. It would take me years to save up for a Stratocaster.

After Denny’s set, which was very well received, Tony Hall came on stage and asked me to come out from the wings to take a bow as the arranger. I wasn’t expecting this at all. I was introduced as a young, up-and-coming record producer from New York City and he told them that they’d be hearing lots of good things about me very soon. It’s a good thing I was only told afterwards that the Beatles and the Stones were in the audience as I might have embarrassed myself.

I had already seen Hendrix at the Speakeasy a few nights after landing at Heathrow. I sat next to Kit Lambert, the producer of The Who’s Happy Jack, one of my favourite records. I was anxious to ask him how he got the sound on the record. It reminded me of Not Fade Away on which you can hear the reverb of a small room, like there must have been just a few mics picking up the slap back coming off the walls. This was typical of me back then, I used to imagine how records were made because there were no books or college courses teaching the art of production. I would try to mentally picture how things were done, which served me well when I started producing myself. Kit had no recollection of recording Happy Jack; in fact I was looking into the eyes of a very vacant man that night. He was already into advanced stages of whatever. He died after a coke dealer pushed him downstairs but he was on other things too, like Mandrax, a hypnotic drug; he was certainly zonked out that night. Hendrix got up to jam about 1 a.m. They never even put a spotlight on him; he literally played in the dark. I don’t know who played drums or bass but it wasn’t the Experience. Hendrix was really great. After two long jams Denny said, ‘We’ve got a 10 a.m. start tomorrow, we need to get going.’

Denny Laine was another who was caught up with the whole business of how records were made. He had ideas about how the Beatles did it and urged Paul McCartney to give him some insights. According to Laine, Paul would say in a session, ‘I want you to set up this kinda loop thing where I keep taping guitar solos and then I could go back and take guitar solo number 7 and mix it with guitar solo 9.’ It was sort of multi-tracking meets electronics, but nothing like that had been invented yet. McCartney misled him, as a prank, making up fantasy techniques. As a believer in recording alchemy I almost believed it. But it got ridiculous: if some big star, especially a Beatle, had said, ‘I plunged the microphone into a bucket of water’, some people would rush off and do it and destroy perfectly good microphones. It was a strange, strange period—but really exciting.

Being a guest at Tony Hall’s flat had one particular downside; I had to help with feeding his two cats, a valuable Abyssinian and a common fat, black cat. This was a nice arrangement for a couple of weeks, but I felt a growing familiarity with Tony, which made me feel uncomfortable. We would often chat late into the night over a few drinks, as I didn’t know anybody and had no place to go. I began to feel a little trapped in this luxurious apartment with this well-spoken man in his 40s. I imagined that he had other interests in me than just friendship. I was wary of such attention because I was hit on by gay men throughout my teens. Tony never hit on me, I’m sure it was all in my imagination, but in this first month in London I didn’t know how to read a social situation yet. Things were very different here. I felt more secure once Siegrid arrived from New York and came to live at the Hall residence.

When I had gone to the airport to meet Siegrid I was unprepared for what she’d done. She had cut off all her beautiful long blonde hair and had a very short boyish cut; it didn’t really suit her. She had an Indian prayer shawl draped around her shoulders and carried a spiritualist book in her hand. She topped it all off by wearing wire-rimmed glasses, which she had never worn before. She had changed dramatically; especially with a holier-than-thou attitude she’d adapted in the month we were apart. The first casualty of this situation was our sex life—it stopped. Tony Hall did not like Siegrid and our nightly chats had come to an abrupt end. Siegrid and I kept his flat immaculately clean and tended to the cats’ needs which included cleaning out the stinky litter tray. As a couple our stay was very brief. Soon after Siegrid arrived we left in search of a place of our own.

Besides working with Denny Laine during the few weeks that I stayed in Mayfair I also worked with Denny C on Procol Harum. He was frantically trying to finish their first album at his favourite studio, Olympic in Barnes, a state-of-the-art studio across the river from Hammersmith. A Whiter Shade Of Pale came out at the end of May and was a huge hit. One evening Denny and I were walking in the hallway that separated Studios A and B and bumped into Brian Jones; he was there working on tracks for an album that would become Their Satanic Majesties Request. Brian was dressed in what looked like a French noble-man’s jacket in a shade of blue and made of crushed velvet, with frilly, laced cuffs sticking out; he was also wearing makeup. If I’d approached him from a distance, and had seen him coming towards me, I might have taken this in my stride, but we literally bumped into him as we turned a corner. I was shocked.

‘Hey man, I love the Procol Harum single. I heard it on Radio Caroline, and I’ve just sent my chauffeur out to buy it for me.’ I was struck by how well spoken he was.

Denny introduced me to Brian though I was still reeling to see such a (well, there is no other word for it) fop in a recording studio; it wasn’t the ‘uniform’. Of course, Brian was at the forefront of creating that hippy chic look. I was still a scruffy guy with jeans and a pale blue workman’s shirt, which was what everyone was wearing in New York; I even had a pocket flap with a hole for a pencil to go through.

The Rolling Stones were in Studio A, which was a lot bigger than B; the latter was adequate enough to record a rock group or a small string section. In Studio B I was assisting Denny with the Procol Harum album, but it was far from smooth sailing. Denny was having a problem with the band’s drummer and Denny’s solution was simple: he fired him in the middle of a session. Cordell had very high expectations for drummers and this one was not the first to feel his displeasure. In contrast Gary Brooker and Matthew Fisher were a joy to work with, and Keith Reid was always lurking in the background overseeing the entire affair. He made me feel like he knew more than anyone about what was really going on in the studio—only he wouldn’t tell us because that would be cheating.

Studio A was an enormous cine stage studio with a screen and a projector; it was used for film scores. After the Stones left, Dudley Moore was in doing a score for some film, while we were in B with Procol Harum. We had to be very quiet for about 30 minutes while he recorded a little piano motif with three flutes.

One aspect of that first Procol Harum album that I couldn’t get my head around was the fact that it was in mono; stereo was still regarded as inconceivable for rock music or pop in Britain. In New York groups like the Lovin’ Spoonful and others were experimenting with stereo and I found it weird that in England, where they were making superior sounding records, stereo was mostly a no-go. It certainly answered my question as to why there were no stereograms in the homes of British people I visited; David Platz had supplied me with one for my flat.

The fact that Siegrid and I had to do some flat hunting tempered the joys of working. We eventually found a two-storey flat in Elgin Avenue. Our flat led out to the garden from the basement; the bedroom and rear living room was down there. Upstairs was another living room and a second bedroom where we kept instruments and a writing table for Siegrid. It may sound quite nice but the walls were damp and there was plenty of mould. It was a furnished flat with furniture that would have been old around the start of the War. There was a small bathtub, a larder but no fridge, and the electricity worked only when we put a shilling in the meter; we had never seen anything so primitive. The bath water was never hot enough and we often ran out of shillings to keep the electricity running. An electric fire in every room, which ate about three shillings an hour, emitted the heat. Luckily it was summer and there were many beautiful days when the windows stayed open and the fires stayed off.

One day, not long after we moved in, Tony Hall called and asked if we wouldn’t mind taking his cats for a few weeks while he went on holiday. He said he was impressed by how we took to the cats and how much they liked us. In the States we had three cats so we welcomed these furry guests. The cats were never out of their flat and were totally freaked out during their first few days with us. One gorgeous day we left the top floor living-room window open and the cats sat on the window ledge watching the birds in the trees. There was a ten-foot jump from the window to the garden; a leap we assumed the cats would never attempt. The fat, black cat didn’t, but the Abyssinian was a mean, lean cat machine; after she made her leap we scoured the area for her but never did find her. Tony Hall was so pissed at us when he came back, he told us we might as well keep the fat cat, Shoshone, named after a Native American tribe. She stayed with me until 1971.

London continued to cast a weird spell on me. Once I was walking with Viv Prince, the drummer in a group called The Pretty Things. This was the first time I witnessed the chasm between the young and the old. Viv was a wild man who partied to the hilt, and he was dressed in a flowery shirt, very tight trousers, Cuban heeled boots and a kind of Edwardian velvet jacket. His hair was dyed yellow (not blond) and he wore pink-tinted glasses. Of course he was stared at. He would get back at the gawking passers-by by shouting and hooting at them, which I found embarrassing. We turned into Fulham Road underground station and Viv stomped down the escalator, causing everyone to turn to see the commotion. As we were passing a fragile OAP, Viv pulled a rubber spider out of his pocket and waved it in front of the old man. He retorted quickly in his London accent to Viv, ‘They don’t frighten me, I’ve seen ‘em before you git!’ This was my version of a Beatles movie—the old man resembled Wilfrid Brambell. It was hysterical—Viv had no come back.

Denny’s bread-and-butter band was the Move, although I don’t think he ever took them as seriously as Procol Harum. In Denny’s mind they were just a pop band, but with both Carl Wayne and Roy Wood as lead singers, and Roy’s incredible melodies and hook-laden songs I think they were much more. I was called upon to write string parts for them.

My first string session was for a song called ‘Cherry Blossom Clinic’; it was about an insane asylum. The string writing was the easy part; the hard part was conducting the twelve string players. Having loved the fabulous strings on ‘Eleanor Rigby’, it was clear to me that none of the players I had were from that group; mine were a tough lot. They refused to wear headphones so we had to play the track quietly on the studio speakers; we couldn’t allow the drums and other instruments to ‘bleed’ into the microphones for the strings. They seemed to be old school players who were used to classical conductors. In that world it is customary to conduct ahead of the beat because they play with a delayed reaction. Pop musicians respond to the throb of the beat and I was conducting in that fashion, with the result they lagged behind. It wasn’t going well until the lead violinist came up with the suggestion: ‘Perhaps you should hold a pencil in your right hand and tap the beat on the palm of your left hand, that way we can follow easier.’

This reduced me to a human metronome stick but it got the job done. It wasn’t so much that I was a bad conductor, although I probably was; their refusal to wear headphones had made it come to this.

My next session with the Move was my biggest accomplishment in those first months. I wrote a score for a small wind quartet for ‘Flowers In The Rain’. Denny was unhappy with the track and felt that his production and performance didn’t nail it; especially the bridge that lagged behind, almost imperceptibly. Denny’s solution was to trash the track—with no plan of re-recording it. But I loved the song; I said I thought it was a hit single and my wind quartet arrangement would smooth over the rough edges. I persuaded Denny to indulge me. I convinced him that we could one-up the Beatles and George Martin (who changed the sound of pop with classic instrumentation on songs like ‘Yesterday’) and choose an instrumental combination that they hadn’t yet thought of. Instead of the usual string section I chose a quartet of flute, oboe, clarinet and French horn. My logic was simple—the song had a pastoral theme (albeit through the context of magic mushrooms). I used instruments that Mendelssohn would have used, paying homage to him by quoting the Spring Song in the outro. I asked Denny to record the quartet at half speed during the dodgy bridge to create a very special effect; the instruments sounded like they were played by pixies sitting on mushrooms in an enchanted forest. The Move and Denny, and even the very staid session musicians, thought the experiment was a success.

The crowning glory was when ‘Flowers In The Rain’ reached No 2 on the charts and all for the relatively small expense of hiring four classical musicians at £12 each. It was kept from the top by Engelbert’s ‘Last Waltz’ but had the distinction of being the first ever single played on the BBC’s new ‘pop’ station, Radio One by Tony Blackburn shortly after 7 a.m. on Saturday 30 September 1967. ‘Flowers In The Rain’ became the first release on the resurrected Regal Zonophone label, which EMI used exclusively for Denny’s Straight Ahead Productions. The label originally dated back to the 1930s but had been used in the early ’60s to release records by the Joy Strings, the Salvation Army’s very own pop group.

That Engelbert Humperdinck kept the Move from the top of the charts was a stark reminder that 1967 was a year of very contrasting musical styles. There we were, stuck in the middle of ‘the summer of love’ with a man wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie topping the chart. Britain was not quite as I thought it was going to be from 3,000 miles away.

One of the guys that worked for Essex Music told me, ‘I’ve got the arrangement for the new Tom Jones single.’

‘Can I take a peak?’ I was amazed. It was in three-four time and I could see the chorus was absolutely crass cabaret mush. The song was ‘Delilah’, which would become a No 2 hit for Tom early in 1968. Two years earlier he had blown us all away with ‘It’s Not Unusual’. It all seemed very strange.

There was an interesting, and costly, postscript for both the Move and Roy Wood in particular as well as Regal Zonophone. The group’s manager, Tony Secunda, decided to send out a flyer with a caricature of the Prime Minister performing a sexual act to promote ‘Flowers In The Rain’. Unfortunately Harold Wilson took the offending promotional postcard somewhat to heart and sued Regal Zonophone. The judge found in favour of the P.M. and he decreed that all royalties from the sale of the record were to be paid to charity, a situation that is still in existence. All rather unfortunate for the song’s writer, Roy Wood, who, like the rest of the band, was unaware of the management’s little scheme, as he does not receive a penny from it.

On another session for the Move, I was conducting some string players when a stranger walked in on the session. Denny quickly walked up to my podium where I was standing and whispered in my ear, ‘He’s from the Musicians’ Union, cool your American accent.’ I had not yet received a work visa and it was potentially a tricky situation. I proceeded to communicate with the string players in mime or very hushed tones. It seems so trivial now but I could’ve easily been banned from ever working in Britain if the M.U. representative had worked out that I was an illegal alien.

I gained a lot of confidence working with Denny and the Move. It was on those sessions that I learned how to get a great drum sound. At one of them Denny just couldn’t get the sound to his satisfaction and he made poor Bev Bevan play his kick drum for three hours. Bev actually broke down in tears.

‘My leg’s so fucking tired I can’t even play the song now.’

Denny seemed not to care, but we attended to Ace Kefford’s bass sound, which took almost as long, so Bev got a rest. All this was being committed to a 4-track machine so the sounds and balance of the entire drum kit and the bass had to be near perfect before both performances were locked onto one track. This was a great learning experience for me but I vowed never to put a drummer through the torture that Bev received on that day. I have since learned to get up drum sounds very quickly. Not that Denny was anything but a gentleman when trying to deal with a difficult situation. When he wanted to give advice he would say, ‘Shall I tell you something?’ Having asked your permission he would go on to say his piece. Even when it was uncomfortable for you to hear he would phrase it in a way that was perfect. But he was a man of few words, he wouldn’t go on and on about something; but he wouldn’t give up until he was satisfied. If Denny said, ‘I think it could be better’, that’s all it would take for the musicians to run back into the studio, just to please the ‘king’. He had a great skill.