And what a taste it was. The headliners, of course, were to all, in name if not in person, but even the bands popped up at the foot of the bill, were something special; had only to catch their new singles to know that. "The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack," by The Nice; "The Great Train" by The Outer Limits; at a time when there were possibilities of exploding through outer limits of their own, records such as these (and more: the Move's "Flowers In The Rain," Pink Floyd's "Apples And Oranges," and The Experience's "Burning Of The Midnight Lamp" were all reasonably new on the racks as well) pushing frontiers which were all but unimaginable a mere year before. And it wasn't just the musicians who knew it. The industry itself understood.
Through the 1960s, package tours were the lifeblood of the. Talking shortly before his death in 1995, The Move's manager Tony Secunda explained, "the idea was to cram as many bands on to the bill as possible, not simply because it made financial sense, also because it gave massive exposure to bands who might never get out there." A couple of decades later, Perry (Farrell) came to much the same conclusion with his Lollapalooza, and it's interesting to note that the basic formula hasn't really changed one iota.
The Experience closed the show with 40 minutes; The Move received an hour; Pink Floyd had 17 minutes; Amen Corner got quarter of an hour; and at the foot of the bill, The Nice had 12 minutes. Eire Apparent and The Outer Limits, eight-minutes apiece. "But eight minutes was enough," Secunda shrugged. "If you were a new band, and you couldn't prove yourselves in eight minutes, you might as well give up there and then."
Sixteen cities, 31 shows - all but the opening London gig with both an afternoon matinee and an evening performance... more than a quarter of a century later, Secunda still looks at the itinerary with bemusement. "Somebody threw darts at a map, then joined the dots," he swore, and a quick glance at the staggering date sheet appears to confirm his suspicions:
At its best, the tour buses followed the road from point A to B. Its worst, however... the US equivalent would be to play New York on Saturday, Boston on Monday, then slip in to Seattle in on Tuesday. "And this was before they'd finished building most of the motorways as well," Secunda continued. "So you'd be along two lane roads, one lane north, one lane south. It was exhausting."
Nice guitarist Davy O'List agrees with him. Almost as soon as a show was finished in one city, the tour would be on the move, with just a handful of roadies delegated to scour the local pubs in search of stray band members. "Immediately you were done your set, you could leave, which was great; we used to be on third; sometimes I'd stay back to watch the Floyd play, but it was off to the nearest pub or wherever, and wait to be hauled out again." Or not, as it sometimes transpired.
"Everyone used to hang out with everybody else," confirms Noel Redding. "Us lot [The Experience] were really close with The Move. Trevor Burton, the rhythm guitar player with The Move, used to travel with us, and if I was running late, I'd travel with The Move. So after the show, we'd all go to pubs, get pissed, then attempt to get on the coach at the time; we'd miss the coach and have to get buses and..."
The thought of however many drunken musicians, trying to find their way through the labyrinthine intricacies of a night British railroad timetable beggars belief, but Redding adamant: "we did it, and we went everywhere."
The Move, of course, were familiar faces around the Hendrix camp. Friends of Redding's, Burton and The Move vocalist Roy Wood had guested on The Experience's forthcoming second album (Axis: Bold As Love), where they added backing vocals to "You Got Me Floatin'," after the two bands found themselves sharing Olympic Studios. Wood himself also treasures another example of the friendship, "the best thing I ever heard was Jimi Hendrix's 'I Can Hear The Grass Grow' after rehearsal once." Their rendition of The Move's second hit single, Wood acknowledged, "was brilliant."
A lot of the credit for the internal success of the tour must go to promoters Tito Burns and Harold Davison. Every group on the bill had had (or would have) their share of horrific concert mismatches, from The Experience's with The Walker Brothers earlier in the year, to The Nice billed alongside Sammy Davis Junior the following summer. A competing package that same fall highlighted The Who, Traffic, before spiraling into unabashed pre-teen bop appeal with The Tremoloes, The Herd, and The Marmalade. One can only imagine the backstage vibes on that tour. But on the Hendrix tour, here wasn't a single dissenting voice in the house.
"They were great people," confirms Kathy Etchingham, Jimi's girlfriend throughout his years in London. "But none of those other bands was really Jimi's type of music at all. You'd never have a Pink Floyd album in our record collection. He liked Amen Corner, they were kinda bluesy at that time, they were alright, and of course Eire Apparent, we know about them."
Alongside Outer Limits, a recent addition to Andrew Oldham's Immediate label, Eire Apparent were probably the least known on the bill, although fame by association, at, was not far away. Robert Wyatt, of Soft Machine, produced the Irish band's first album; Jimi handled their second, Sunrise.
In November 1967, however, the Irish group was relative to the London scene, and complete unknowns almost anywhere else. Indeed, they were very much a late addition to the tour schedule, having signed with manager Chas Chandler just recently. The fact that the tour made only one scheduled stop in all of Ireland, at the Festival Of Arts in Belfast, only to the group's dislocation, although years later, vocalist Graham would acknowledge, "it was a learning experience, just like everything else we did with Jimi. And audiences seemed to it."
The Nice, too, were still an obscure unit, although all four bands were certainly familiar faces on the live circuit: player Keith Emerson and bassist Lee Jackson with the gigging Gary Farr and the T-Bones; the 16-year old List and drummer Brian Davison with The Attack. Like The Outer Limits they, too, were newly signed to Immediate, but the Nice's stage show, and vigorous blending of rock and pop music had already earned them a scrapbook's worth of cuttings, just three months into their union.
Emerson, in particular, was a dynamo, an ebullient showman whose nightly routine included impaling his Hammond organ with thrown objects; beating it with a bullwhip; even setting fire to it. A few months before, he had ensured The Nice stole the show at The Reading Festival, by exploding several dozen smoke bombs at the tent where the band were playing, convincing several concert goers that a major disaster was unfolding before their eyes and ears. A few months later, he would succeeded in getting The Nice banned from the Royal Albert Hall, after burning an American flag during the band's performance of Bernstein's "America." Normally, the venue's management wouldn't have minded, but this particular night was an event, studded both with American performers and audience members.
Today, of course, Emerson is as revered a keyboard player as was he a guitarist, and for much the same reason ... he was of the few rock showmen who could match his visual flash with flamboyance. Even he, however, would acknowledge how much a debt he owed to Jimi, with "The Barbarian," a track from the band's debut album. "'The Barbarian'," he explains, "was kind of a tribute to Hendrix; we went on stage the night he died and said to the audience, 'this song's for Jimi,' because that started almost with the 'Purple Haze' chords."
Moving further up the bill, of course, there was little doubting stellar nature of the performers. Welsh blues heroes Amen Corner, led by future Roger Waters/Eric Clapton sideman Andy Low, joined the tour armed with their second Top 30, "World Of Broken Hearts," while the month before, on October 22, DJ John Peel's legendary Top Gear radio program broadcast the group's first ever BBC radio session, which marked one of the best broadcasts of the entire year.
Not at all coincidentally, The Nice made their own session debut on that same evening; the impending tour was widely regarded as one the concert events of the year, and Top Gear was to prove to its promotion. In those days before MTV and the such, such advance promotion was invaluable, particularly as tickets were about to go on sale as well. Peel's audience devoted, "serious," fans of psychedelic music was exactly the kind of crowd the promoters ... and the bands ... hoped to attract. Pink Floyd, The Move, and The Experience would all have recording sessions that same month. (For the record, The Experience's October 15 session (originally recorded on October 6) featured "Little Miss Lover," "Driving South," "The Burning Of The Midnight Lamp," "Hound Dog" and "Catfish Blues," together with two tracks which were not broadcast, an alternate version of "Drivin' South," and a couple of Motown inspired songs "Jammin'," and "I Was Made To Love Her," both featuring Stevie Wonder on drums.)
Pink Floyd, with their legendary guitarist/songwriter Syd Barrett on board, were probably the most surprising addition to the lineup. Two Top 30 hits earlier in the year, a Top 10 album and tours in their own right, had already established the group amongst the country's top-flight psychedelic attractions, and there was little doubt that they could comfortably have taken billing alongside any band in the country.
According to Tony Secunda, however, Floyd's managers knew exactly what they were doing when they slipped the band into such a lineup. "Basically, they were worried about Syd Barrett, but needed to keep the band's name out there, but nobody knew if Barrett was up to it. The general feeling was that he wasn't."
By the fall of 1967, Barrett was indeed busily building the themes of his eccentricity which would subsequently become his maker. And no matter how lowly the band's billing may have, the tour only added to the legend. Co-manager Peter recalled, "[Syd] was going onstage and playing one chord the entire set. He was into this thing of total anarchistic and never really considered the other members of the group."
Offstage, too, Barrett was hard to pin down... Literally. "Every when we reached a new town," O'List recalled, "Syd would go for a walk, and not get back to the venue until just a few minutes before the band was due onstage. He'd play the show, go off again, come back hours later, in time for the second. But one night, he didn't turn up at all, so they asked me to go on instead of him."
The Floyd's set, with characteristic unconventionality (but with an eye for Barrett's own unpredictability), comprised one song, a full on version of "Interstellar Overdrive." "It was a fairly straightforward guitar thing, so I was able to pick it up quite quickly," recalls O'List. "At first I kept my back to the audience while we were playing, and the audience was really impatient, shouting 'turn round, Syd,' and things like that. So I turned round, and they all shut up immediately. Then turned back and carried on playing." After Barrett's departure the Floyd was confirmed, O'List admits, he entertained hopes he might be invited to replace him full time. "But of, they'd already decided on Dave Gilmour by then.
"Syd was an amazing guitarist," O'List continues. "He really was, as much as Hendrix was in his own right." And in later, with both Jimi and Barrett long since absent from the scene, British journalists slavered at the thought of how these geniuses of the guitar might have related to one another. In a 1974 edition of the English New Musical Express, journalist Kent asked Peter Jenner, "surely the two uncrowned kings of rock, Hendrix and Barrett, must have socialized in some?
"Not really," replied Jenner. "Syd didn't talk to anyone."
Move bassist Ace Kefford agrees. "Syd never spoke to anyone. He hardly moved sometimes. He was on another planet."
"Once the Floyd started having hits, Syd changed dramatically, "Secunda confirmed. "I remember different members of the, and the other bands as well, tried to get through to him, it was like he had this shell around him. Personally, I think the best thing that could have happened to him would have been to have a night out with The Move."
Or with The Experience. Practical jokes are an inevitable part of the package tour life, and Noel Redding remembers The Move gave as good as they got. "It was hilarious. I remember The Move were playing once, and I rode a bicycle across the stage," Redding smiles. "Another time we put stink bombs in [drummer] Bev Bevan's foot pedal."
Offstage socializing notwithstanding, there was a lot of rivalry between The Experience and The Move. Although Secunda insisted "in Britain in 1967, there were only two bands who fell into a rivalry, The Beatles and The Move." The Experience had risen, as their premier place on the bill amply indicated. Six months earlier, The Move would indeed have been billed over Jimi, but the tables had turned since then. The Experience had scored hits - four, to The Move's three - and while The Move could have hit higher chart positions, The Experience was the band of the moment.
Everyone had seen The Move play by now, Secunda had seen to that. Jimi and company had only given a handful of British shows over the last six months, and most of them were in London. This tour was the provinces' chance to find out what all the fuss was about... and The Move's chance to make up some lost ground. He explains, "we played for 45 minutes, they had half an hour, and it was like the shows we did with The Who; they'd try to upstage us, and we'd try and upstage them."
Further spice was added to the battle by the two band's for showmanship, a battle in which The Move had long grasped the initiative. Back in March 1967, the toured with The Walker Brothers. The Move had been banned from the same outing, because of the violence in their act!
By November, of course, it was difficult to say whose act was the most outrageous, and as the tour wound on, most observers agree the two bands emerged with honors even. In terms of crowd pleasers, The Move might have inched ahead, sharp and to the point, a traveling jukebox blasting out hits. It was difficult to argue with any live set which "Night Of Fear," "I Can Hear The Grass Grow," "Cherry Clinic" and "Flowers In The Rain." But for sheer feeling, The Experience was unstoppable.
At the packed Royal Albert Hall opener on November 14, they opened their set with "Foxey Lady"; slid effortlessly into "Fire" and "Hey Joe"; picked up more pace with "The Burning Of The Midnight Lamp" and added one new song, "Spanish Castle Magic," to preview their forthcoming album, Axis: Bold As Love. Then it was into thes alvo of "The Wind Cries Mary" and "Purple Haze." It was a devastating performance; a far cry, perhaps, from the marathon outings which Jimi would later turn into his onstage trademark, in terms of unrelenting punch, these seven songs said more about The Experience's power than any other set they ever played. The band was already confident when they went into tour but by the time they came out the other side, they were on top of the world.
November 1967, on the other hand, was a very fraught time for The Move. Engineering one of the most audacious publicity stunts in his life, manager Tony Secunda had recently circulated a postcard depicting British Prime Minister Harold in what can only be described as compromising, not to libelous, circumstances.
Certainly Wilson thought so. Intended simply to promote the Move's new single, "Flowers In The Rain," the postcards instead sent them in a hopeless legal battle with the most powerful man in the land. Wilson then donated his winnings ... the proceeds from the single ... to charity, but despite all that, Secunda says while "things got out of hand very quickly," it was a funny side to the affair.
"Before the lawsuit got started, the government put all these in shades, driving big black limousines, on our case. We'd be coming out of a show and there would be this big limo parked across the road. It'd follow us to the greasy spoon [all night cafe], the next gig, wherever we went.
"And Hendrix was bugging out a bit, because he thought it was the FBI or the CIA or someone, after him. It was really bizarre, we'd say 'Jimi, why would they be after you?' and we were thinking maybe they wanted to send him to Vietnam, maybe this, maybe that, and he'd just go 'no, you don't understand, they're spooks, it's the secret, they want to know what I know,' like there was some huge conspiracy he was involved in, UFOs and space aliens in the Whitehouse. So he spun this out for hours, and then he finally let up, laughing 'and man, you guys are so gullible'."
The "spooks" may not have been after him, of course, but Hendrix was in demand nonetheless. A solidly sold-out headlining tour made sure of that, that, and the imminent release of Axis: Bold As Love, an album which ranked second only to The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request in terms of the holiday season's most anticipated new releases.
On November 13, the very eve of the tour's opening night, anyone listening to the BBC's World Service would have caught The Experience's second BBC session of the season, a three-track cracker which paired them with Rhythm 'n' Blues man Alexis Korner. The session featured live renditions of "Driving South," Dylan's "Can You Please Crawl Out Of Your Window," and that legendary version of "(I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man," truncated when Jimi broke a guitar string.
On November 25, at Blackpool's historic Opera House, a large portion of The Experience's set was filmed by the BBC: including the performances of "Fire," "Hey Joe," "Purple Haze" and "The Wind Cries" were joined by typically idiosyncratic versions of the' "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and the Troggs' "Wild Thing." Portions of which are featured on Peter Neal's 1969 film Experience (Ed., Now available in a remastered version on VHS and DVD as Experience: Jimi Hendrix.)
Two nights later, bands and media alike descended upon the venue to join in on Jimi's 25th birthday celebrations. "The thing about Hendrix on that tour," recalled Secunda, "was that he hadn't bought into his own legend. He still felt he had something to prove. Later, he could do no wrong. It didn't matter what he did, or how badly he'd screw up, the audience would always applaud. But when he toured with us [The Move], he knew he had to pull out all the stops, and that there wasn't time for mistakes. We'd have eaten him alive otherwise."
Whether or not Jimi really was pushed to new heights by The Move ... or anybody else on the bill for that matter ... we'll never know for sure. But his performances on that tour remain legends; which were only amplified by the December 1st release of Axis: Bold As Love their in Britain. The album quickly entered the Top 40 two weeks later, and drove unerringly towards its Top Five destiny. Christmas drew closer, and The Experience wound up their first year together, they knew they had competed with some of the best around, at home and abroad, and had come out on top. 1968 was looming and it was looking brighter every day.
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TAKING BRITAIN BY STORM
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© 1995-2008 Experience Hendrix, L.L.C. All Rights Reserved. |
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