"We want a scene with you", said the smaller of the two girls. Their eyes were made up like TV screens blank with static. A scene?
"Oh?" said I, dripping with insouciance.
"Yes. We've already rented an apartment for two weeks."
"That's confidence for you", I said, trying to relax the mounting constriction in my throat.
"There's only one condition", said the small girl.
"What's that?" I was being as indifferent as possible in view of the fact that my wife was standing at my side.
"You have to wear your helmet and make-up while you're in bed with us", said the larger girl.
"How do I know you don't have some horrible disease?"
By now I was a little irritated. Was it me they wanted, or was I merely an object of their sexual fantasy?
"We only go with the best groups."
"In that case, I know you've got something nasty."
End of interview.
Angie leaned over towards me from the armchair on which she was perched, her eyes boring into mine. Said she, "One of these days I'm going to fuck you silly."
Said I, "I keep road managers for that."
After this particular conversation, she never again liked my music, although she did claim to like my pipes.
I was pretty straightforward about sex. Some of the other musicians of my acquaintance were somewhat more deviant. Often their girls would make them do strip-tease before they allowed lovemaking. Some of these players carried their own whips. I later wrote a little couplet about this:
One whirr with my spur
And the pussy starts to purr
One prod with my rod
And she believes in God
When I uttered this on stage, I got a quick lesson as to just how I was being identified. I created this poem out of the circumstances around me. I was imagining a character and then putting my all into acting it out. I remember the first night I did so: a girl in the audience shouted out, "You filthy sadist!" Ouch, I felt personally abused. I wasn't like that. It was just words. I suppose when you play a character, you must accept responsibility for what you portray. As it was, I was neither advocating nor decrying deviant sex.
"Senor Brown, I know that een Eengland you put your hand on the Bible and swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Here een Sicily, we are more realistic - you tell your story, he tell his. Which eez the better story?"
The judge was a worldly man with an obvious great deal of patience. There were grooves in his chair caused, I thought, either by tremors of suppressed anger, or, as some inept villain told a palpably false story, by rocking backward and forward between belief and incredulity. I was in a tight corner. Again. My counsel and I had prepared a long document something like a Shakespeare play, analysing my stage act: The death of the hero, his trial by fire and his rebirth, represented by my naked figure re-appearing on stage.
I could sense that this would not work. My story would simply have to be more radical. So, when the Chief of Police stated that I had appeared on stage without clothing, I rebuffed the charge. "I did have clothes on", I said. "The Chief of Police stated in his presentation that I took off my black underwear. In fact, I was wearing blue undies. If he couldn't judge the color of my underwear at a distance of two feet, how can he possibly claim his eyesight is good enough to determine whether or not I had any clothes on?"
"In that case, your honour, I have no option but to produce these!" said the chief, as he handed over what proved to be photographs of me in my birthday suit, singing in true operatic style. At this point, I conceded that, by the unfair use of props, his story-telling proved superior to my own.
I felt the ground had been pulled from beneath my feet.
You have to understand that by that time I had spent what was, by the clock-measured time, a rather short while in Sicily's high security jail (internally it was as long as any other event in my life; longer than school or my first love-making marathon).
The Palermo Pop Festival was the first to be held in Sicily. I had, at this period, no band of my own, so I was guesting with Pete Brown (the poet/lyricist for the Cream, amongst others) and his band of the day "Piblokto". He was a friend of mine and found the idea of creating together interesting. He was to do his set, and I was to follow, using the same band.
Upon arriving in the office of the promoter of the festival, a Mr Bonaparte (I wonder if a relative of his was responsible for the perpetration of many "gigs" of a different sort in an earlier age), a conversation something like the following ensued:
"I don't have anything particularly exciting prepared, Mr Bonaparte."
"I think we can rely on you for something to stimulate the audience."
Says I, "OK, I suppose so."
Said he, "You will do 'Fire' won't you?"
"Yes. We've rehearsed the music." This was it, then. I was to provide the excitement. Little did Mr Bonaparte know just how excited his audience would become.
In the stage act of the 'Puddletown Express', I had taken the purification by fire rite to previously unreached visual heights. Entering in a crown of flames, I disappeared and re-appeared naked. To me, it was exactly as our defence at the Sicilian trial had stated: It was an image, a symbol of purity. Who knows what it meant to others.
So, here we are at the Palermo Pop Festival, with a crowd to excite. On I come, fire helmet ablaze, with my face made-up somewhat like an angry racoon (although it was supposed to be a 'Death's Head'). The crowd immediately rose to its feet, and they were indeed excited. And not prepared for what happened next. They thought the fire helmet was a climax. When I appeared naked, their expectations were dashed. The 'climax' had been reduced to foreplay, and some people grew violent. They began throwing buns, books, anything.
From on stage, one has a distinct advantage at a big concert. Such thrown items appear to be suspended in space and move very slowly in time. It's easy to catch them and hurl them back at the crowd. Of course I did not do so. But, the concert was stopped. I found myself ushered to the side to the stage. And it turned out my usher was none other than the Chief of Police.
"I'm sorry Mr Brown, but I'll have to take you to the police station. It'll only be for a few minutes." I jumped in his car. Upon arriving at the station, he spoke with someone and turned to me apologetically. "I'm afraid I'll have to put you in a cell while you're here."
Since I was still high on the concert, this all seemed extremely interesting to me. Another experience.
I waited in the cell several hours. The Chief finally appeared again, again looking apologetic, saying, "I'm afraid you'll have to stay in the cell overnight." This still didn't faze me.
The night was, to say the least, uncomfortable. The floor of the cell was angled from the ceiling at the back to the bars at the front, and the slope was about 70 degrees. They gave me a blanket, but every time I lay on the floor, my feet would stay where they were, and the rest of my body pivoted on them 'til I slid down the slope, parallel to the bars. Just in front of the bars, in the cell, was a flat space, just large enough to stand on, but not large enough to lie in with enough comfort to sleep. I slept not.
The next morning, after my unintentionally acrobatic night, the Chief came in. This time he looked a little grimmer, with an expression reminiscent of John Houseman's famous 'disapproving face' in 'Paper Chase'. "I'm afraid things have grown worse. We must take you to prison." I was still coasting on being abroad. This was still an experience to me, you see.
I was taken to the prison and stuck in a cell with three other people. One was a huge man with bullet-hole scars up and down one side of his body. He proved to be in for murder. The other two were a rapist and a forger. They quickly introduced me to prison etiquette.
We were a very sociable group, sitting around in the cell discussing the prison's amenities as if it were some posh hotel we were considering honouring with our presence. "You see," said the forger, "we are not allowed coffee in here." "But we do get it," said the murderer. "A guard smuggles it to us," said the forger.
"But how do you make it?" I asked. "Well," said the rapist, "One friend smuggles in a little cooking oil. Another leaves behind a bootlace. Another time, he'll leave shampoo in a tiny metal packet. We tear the packet in half, wash it thoroughly, and put the coffee and water in it." He indicated a small metallic sachet, about two inches by three inches. "That's one of them," he said. "We're not allowed fire in here, in case we set the jail alight. So, we then have to bribe a guard to give us a match. We then put the oil in an upturned can, use a bit of bootlace as wick, and, with our improvised candle, cook the coffee." When they had finished this long and arduous preparation, after much planning, bribing and tedious holding of the package, there was just enough coffee for one sip each. This did not seem like hospitality to me.
The next morning, as I rose from my bunk bed, I was told it was time for 'walking exercise'. I had met one of the guards entering the prison. As the Chief of Police was introducing me to an officer, the guard turned to me. "You English?" he said in Italian.
"Si," I said.
"In guerra passa," he chuckled with malice, pointing his machine gun at me. "I aka aka aka Englishmen". He was razing me with imaginary bullets from the gun.
Now I am a performer, and I was not to be intimidated by this malicious piranha. Adopting a goose step, I marched up and down like Basil in Fawlty Towers, my left hand delivering the Hitler moustache, my right hand clearing the air in true military style. Only the presence of the Chief of Police saved me from any reprisals.
Anyway, this guard was not in the bunch that took us to the "marching yard", which proved to be a square area with 30' high metal gates and stone walls of the same height. The 'God of Hellfire' would have needed to become Samson to get out of that one. The doors were swung shut and the guards stayed outside, apart from one who perched on the wall.
After a while, as we trooped around in single file, the prisoner behind me said, "You cantor?"
"Yes," I replied.
"You cantor rock and roll?"
"Yes."
"Well, sing."
"No, I mustn't."
"Sing!"
I started into Little Richard's 'Keep on Knocking'. It was such a reassuring testament to the all-pervading nature of modern culture that, within seconds, the whole line was incanting the song (they obviously knew the words). They became frenzied and started to beat on the giant metal gates as if they were huge steel drums in a sci-fi movie. Rhythmic pandemonium prevailed. The guards rushed in and I was quickly escorted away. They were kind enough to raise the level of the company I was to keep. Yeah, I was put in solitary confinement.
That night, as I lay on my bunk, drifting off, the door was thrown open. In rushed a guard with a huge iron bar. He leapt straight across the cell, running that bar forcefully across the bars of the windows. The noise was horrendous and drove home the fact that there is absolutely no right of privacy for a prisoner.
In the morning, around mid-day, the door was once again flung open. A huge plastic trash bin appeared. A bowl was thrust into my hands and the trash bin was angled over it until some of its contents were slopped into the bowl. Ah! Lunch! Spaghetti.
Feeling quite comfortable after lunch, I engaged in conversation with the guard just outside the door of my cell, which was chained open just wide enough to let me see the row of partly open doors to the right of my cell and a net thrown across the area enclosed by the four adjoining blocks of cells. "It is good of them," I said in pigeon Italian and making use of mime, "to put a net over that gap. If prisoners fall, it will save them." "Very good," was the reply. "But the net is not tight enough. It's just tight enough not to kill, but loose enough you will break something."
This was, I suppose, their way of trying to prevent attempted suicides. The cruel nature of the jail was beginning to have its effect on me. I was slowly mounting a feeling of desperation. I had no manager. No one in the group had stayed behind, and I had no representation. I thought I had better ask to see the consul and mentioned this to the guard. He said, "Si."
Several hours later, still no reply. The wave of desperation began to wash over me. I began beating the bars of my cell, shouting, "Consul! Consul!" He stared blankly, apparently unable to understand. I screamed a few more times, and he went away. About an hour later, the cell door flew open, and a guard summoned me out.
We arrived at the commandant's office.
He asked me, "What do you want?"
I replied, "I want to see the consul."
"Oh?"
I practically screamed, "Yes!"
He grumbled, "HMMM."
A silence ensued while we looked at each other.
He motioned to an open appointments book. "Let's see," said he. "This week consul busy." He turned a few pages. "This month busy." He turned more pages. "Next two months busy." He flicked through the rest of the pages. The event obviously titillated his sense of humour for he was smiling. Let's call it a smirk. "Try next year. Goodbye." End of interview.
I was becoming increasingly alarmed. No one to speak to me. In a Sicilian jail. Home of the Mafia. Little or no chance of getting out. For a moment I felt totally helpless. Powerless.
I remember, years later, the words of that splendid old man John Bewnet, in his school in Gloucestershire. "Left to his own devices, faced with the challenges that surround him, man is helpless without the intervention of a Higher Power. What we learn here is how to allow that Higher Power to work through us. But it can't do that until we realise our true situation - just how helpless we are." He paused and looked around at us slowly. "Those of us who have been in prison know what it is to feel helpless."
No longer was I floating on the euphoria of a new experience. Here was a situation that didn't seem to be in accord with 'going with the flow'. 'Experience' usually flows. There was no movement here.
The next day I was not in top spirits, though I had cheered up somewhat. I heard voices coming down the corridor. In came a very svelt young man in black lawyer's garb, a fur collar piece and very suave slicked-back hair.
He said, "You are to come to lunch with me." We drove away from the prison, and I felt like I was breathing again. It turned out he was the brother of the girl who attended to the booking in Bonaparte's office. We went to a restaurant and dined luxuriously. It was during this meal that we pieced together our Shakespearean defence.
Back in jail, I was a little more sanguine. In fact, I was overjoyed to see, between the bars in the wall of my new marching yard, the first lemon tree I had ever seen. Somehow it was a shock to see one of those fruits that I had so often used to ward off colds and to cool off on summer days in England, actually hanging on a tree.
Three days later, I was taken to trial. Our Shakespeare defence disintegrated, but somehow I was sprung. Plunging from office to office while signature after signature hurriedly confirmed my lot, I was whisked away till I suddenly found myself at the airport. Signor Brown, once called "a modern Don Quixote" in the Guardian newspaper, lived to ride again.
by Arthur Brown
In the hotel. In the elevator. Jeff Beck talking to someone. "Some stars even believe their own publicity", he said. I, at the time, was, of course, on a Divine Mission, the 'God of Hellfire'. But something in what he said rang a troubled bell inside. I thought: Was he aiming it at me? In fact, I don't think he was.
The seamy side of rock and roll is, after all, the seamy side of life, which brings to mind a conversation I had with Chris Stamp (Terrences's brother and manager of the Who) on one occasion thirty-two years ago.
Said I, "I'm disturbed, Chris."
Said he, "What's going down man?"
Said I, "Well, I've heard, on good authority, that when Hendrix met Jim Morrison, they made out together."
Said he, "Arthur, you've got to realize they're both sex symbols. What else could they have done?"
Steve Paul's Scene was, in its heyday, one of the greatest creative hangouts for music in New York. Steve somehow created an atmosphere in which diverse musicians would want to get up and jam together under the watchful eye of Steve's manager, Teddy. I remember one golden night when I sang with Jimi Hendrix playing bass and various other luminaries on guitars and drums. His bass playing was superb, but he declined to sing. One couple in the audience that night said the music was like a "festival of joy."
Hendrix came down quite frequently to these jams at 'the Scene', as well as to my performances of 'Crazy World'. I think it was these appearances that led to him once calling me over to his hotel. Tony Garland, our tour manager, and a friend of Jimi's, took me over, As I entered, I noticed the floor was strewn with papers, each marked by very few musical notes. It seems that whenever Jimi made a mistake, he didn't correct it, but started over on a fresh page, throwing the old to the floor.
I waited for some time. He finally looked up. "They told me you wanted to see me", I said. "Er, so they say", he said. "I've been watching you for some time, and you sing very well. I was thinking we should put a musical thing together. Your keyboard player and me on guitar. We can have big visual screens and tapes of Wagner playing in the background." "Sounds fine to me," I said. "So they say," he said.
He was more serious now than the perpetually smiling man who seemed to have as many arms as a centipede has legs, all reaching out to any waitress that came near our table down at London's 'Speakeasy'. Of course, the waitresses always responded warmly. Now he seemed alone, somewhat tower-like, lost in a reverie, yet able to focus on anything musical. His presence was very gentle. This was not the same person who locked his girlfriend in a closet after she came home from an intimate evening spent with me. (The next time I saw this girl, she told me about Jimi having locked her up. Then she said, "Your love-making was OK, but you know Jimi takes me right to the edge. Till I feel like I'm going to fall into an abyss. It goes on like that for a long time. You don't do that.")
I was, at the time of my conversation with Jimi, at the point of nervous exhaustion and collapse and was able to do little more than state my willingness to work with him. I know that he later make the same offer to Keith Emerson. Anyway, 'Crazy World' soon collapsed, itself, and I returned to England to recuperate. The next news of Jimi was that he had formed 'Band of Gypsies'. When I look back on the proposal he made me, I realize now how very flattering it was, indeed. At the time, I don't think I truly realized the honour I was being offered.
In his Knightsbridge apartment, where, on previous nights, circus boys had performed acrobatic feats for him, Kit Lambert smirked at me (Kit was Chris Stamp's partner in 'Track Records', and was also heavily involved with the Who). His face - bulldog eyes and jowls - allowed a smile, as he showed just why the Who had nicknamed him "The Baron". Doing his best to be nonchalant, his eyes twinkling in anticipation as he said to me: "I'm going to appeal to their snobbery."
"Whose?" I asked.
"Those people out there, the punters, the general public", he replied.
"About what are you going to appeal to their snobbery?" I queried.
"About this thing that Pete and the boys have put together."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm going to call it an opera, which it certainly isn't. But I'll get them hooked. You just wait and see." This last was said with determination, a mysterious sense that it was pre-ordained, and a boyish grin.
Of course, history bore him out. People did jump at the idea of an "opera", and it was an enormous success. Kit had said to me on a previous occasion that, "Peter writes for adolescents and even younger. He always will." It is a tribute to Kit's genius that he managed to get the older critics, and people en masse, adolescent or not, all fired up about it.
He and Stamp were masters of image manipulation. How else could Kit have taken a shy, somewhat timid, country boy like myself and have the world believe that he was the "God of Hellfire"? (Kit also managed my career.) Who knows what might have been achieved, had Kit not died? It is true they went bankrupt due to money mismanagement, but Robert Stigwood has gone bankrupt several times, and became huge once again.
Music in this century has been formed around a concept of youth without a productive part in society; those finding identity defined by rebellion. As such, it becomes something detached from real social living - a slice of fantasy, to be visited and revisited. A place in all of us that is inviolate as a memory, and sought for as an actuality.
The myth that ageing brings deterioration of mental and physical powers is shattering now. Perhaps this will remove the accent on youth and the preoccupation of forty year-olds trying to act twenty. Then we shall see a different music. In such a climate a new Shakespeare could arise. New feelings and attitudes may be more highly valued.
Of course, Neuro-rock is not far away. There are already bands whose total sound is produced by monitoring body functions and nerves, feeding the electric current they emanate into various instruments. We tried in 1973 (with Kingdom Come) to use an EEG machine connected to a synthesizer, so you could play solo just by thinking. Or maybe have the Pope sit in with King Sunny Ade. Just by thinking.
In the distant future, interesting musics will be made by the monitoring of interrelating energy fields between people in social interaction, and their conversion to sound. We could also be making this music using the relationships of the sun and the planets. Whoa.
The Astrodome was vast. The audience clung to the contours of the building like mites to skin. Pete Townshend, having prepared us in advance for a deaf old man in his dotage who couldn't do a windmill, proceeded to break down yet another image (this time, of course, one he, himself, had planted in the public's eye). The brass lines injected precision, but at the same time, they occasionally introduced sufficient chaos to recreate a Who still driven by Keith Moon's mad impetus. Townshend, with bandage around an already damaged right hand, badly twists an ankle. He is off stage for a few minutes. When he reappears, he walks up to the mike and explains, "When I drank a lot, I didn't feel pain. Now I don't drink." To which Roger Daltry rejoins, "No pain, no gain."
Alcohol and amphetamines or caffeine do seem to have the effect of reducing the sensation of pain. I'm sure this has to do with the endorphins produced in physical action. The 'Boz', that famous haircut that plays football, says he takes caffeine pills equivalent to thirty-one cups of coffee before each game. If a horse trainer gave this to his horse, he would be had up for cruelty to animals. But self-administration is different.
I've noticed the effect of alcohol on several occasions. One such occurrence was when someone struck me on the mouth during a performance - for being too weird and provocative. I stood up after regaining consciousness atop the organ. I was seeing blood trickling across the keys. Trooper that I am, I re-launched into the song. The guy who slugged me (and his comrades) started cheering, apparently the street code ethic: anyone who can take a punch is as good as the one who gives it. In fact, I didn't feel a thing. I was in a state of extremely high energy and focused only on the gig. I had had several pints of beer and was grooved into a pounding rhythmic dance. (Years later, my then wife was attacked, while sculling on Town Lake in Austin, by a black swan who behaved very similarly. There was not much she could do to defend herself for fear of overturning the scull. But the swan, having given her his best kidney shot with the meaty portion of his wing, glided away, squawking and beating his wings in triumph.)
One other time, we arrived in New York to support the Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore East. Someone on the official end, knowing I had just deplaned after two days with no sleep, gave me a pill and said, "This will take you through it. Moon takes them all the time." This last remark should have warned me. With the combination of the pill, lack of sleep and alcohol, I could feel the whole auditorium spinning around me as I hit the stage. We launched into the set and were doing quite well, when, after three or four numbers, I suddenly found myself surrounded by complete and utter darkness. I could feel the microphone still in my hand. I continued singing, although the instruments sounded strangely distant. I noticed lights above me. I realised they were the floor lights of the stage. I had fallen a good ten feet into the orchestra pit. The strange thing here was that I had felt an impact from the fall, but I had somehow interpreted it as my having jumped in the air (which I did) and fallen back the (normal) distance to the stage. I had figured the delay in landing as a distorted perception of time and space brought on by the drugs. I felt no alarm or pain, but I had, in fact leaped three feet in the air and fallen ten.
All these considerations passed through my mind very quickly, and I now had to decide how to proceed. Naturally, I decided to carry on as if nothing extraordinary had happened and I scratched and clambered out of the pit as if I'd planned the jump as part of the act. Not a bad recovery after the 'Moon pill'.
For a lot of people, drinking induces blurred vision, slurred speech and uncoordinated movements. I was blessed with a constitution that could take much beer and still function well. There was a ferocious concentration, that brought my primal energies that were released by the alcohol into a focused beam of power. I could sing in tune and remember my physical movements as well. I realise that many people delude themselves that they function well on alcohol, but I have the reviews and recordings that prove my true stamina.
The Who's act is, to my mind, heavily feminine in nature, despite all their male braggadocio and posturing. They do not build their act to one giant climax. Rather, they create various climaxes thoughout a three hour performance. I prefer building to one climax. Of course, this is OK in a one hour performance. And, of course, this makes me more macho.
At one point in their act, though, I did have a revelation about modern music. In most of its forms, I don't like overt violence, but what I saw in the Who was a group of kids who'd been brought up in a world in which violence surrounded them. What they had magically done was to take this violence and incorporate it into their music in such a way that the overall impression was one of beauty. It presented a whole new vision of young music.
Whereas the 'Fugs' (predecessors of the Mothers of Invention) would parody the attitudes that gave rise to violence, with lyrics such as in "Kill for Peace", the Who would actually enact the violence that surrounded them. Daltrey swung his mike savagely. Townshend smashed his guitars. Pills and Coca-Cola. Rockers. But the Who, while presenting the violence in concrete action, managed, at the same time, to make it abstract, so that their targets were internal, rather than exterior recognisable entities. Like other rockers. Or any particular class of people.
Much hardcore music follows this tradition. It presents the attitudes and prejudices of a kind of twentieth-century barbarism. Of course, where the groups presenting this are identified with it, the perspective ceases to be spiritual, and the vision displayed becomes a parody of their own inner alienation. God bless them for this.