One Train Later: A Memoir (13 page)

Although it's a daunting prospect, we are thrilled when we are invited to Paris to play on a rhythm-and-blues extravaganza as support for our hero James Brown. Not only do we get to share the stage, but we are also actually going to see him perform-fantastic. We're on just before the great man and don't expect much other than to do our usual show and clear off before the real thing happens, but as things turn out, we just about upstage him.

As we play and try to get the Parisians to move their chic little derrieres, there is noise and heckling from the audience. We stare in the direction of the hecklers, who turn out to be Eric Burdon and drummer Barry Jenkins from the Animals. As we're raving away on the last number of our set, they leap up onto the stage. This gets a big cheer from the audience that swells in volume and they proceed to debag Zoot-in other words, pull his trousers off until he is left with only his underpants on, still singing and hammering away at the organ the entire time. Of course, this is hugely entertaining for the crowd and is greeted by a wild reaction, which James Brown-the Godfather of Soul-will now have to top. Later while drinking with the perpetrators and calling them bastards, etc., it's all deemed very amusing. In fact, it is a turning point in the fortunes of the Big Roll Band, and in a way the beginning of the end.

The next issue of Melody Maker has a full page devoted to our little lark in Paris, with a strip of photographs running along the top of the page replete with sardonic captions, and is in effect a great piece of publicity. A day after the paper hits the streets, we have a gig at the Manor House. We drive across London as usual through traffic and bitter rain, chortling away about this unexpected piece of publicity. When we pull up outside of the Manor House, there's a line around the block and we wonder if we have gotten confused with someone else's gig. But it turns out that the line is for us. The Melody Maker article has made a serious impact and from nowhere people turn out in droves.

As a result of this publicity our fee and our percentage go up, but also at the end of the show (which we almost always end with the song "Bare- footin' ") it becomes almost mandatory for Zoot to end the show by prancing about on the top of his Hammond, singing and slowly stripping down to his Y fronts, which is greeted with roars of delight from the audience. This act develops as we go on, with Zoot eventually having on not one pair of underpants but two and at the climax daringly removing the outer pair to find yet another pair underneath. At first these garments are of the common garden Marks & Sparks variety but later evolve into brilliantly colored pantaloons with large polka dot patterns of which there are several pairs. Zoot gets up to about seven pair in the end, with fans tossing special designs with little messages sewn on inside.

It's great fun for a while and we are sure to sell out everywhere we play, but it's beginning to feel like a circus. Something else is happening with music, the Big Roll Band is more like a novelty act than a serious band, and it suddenly feels like we are getting left behind.

Six

BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

I roll over in bed arid stare at the clock. Am I mad, or are the hands actually going backward? Maybe my mind is unraveling.

I stare at the wall, unable to sleep: "Madman Running Through the Fields," the one song of our next band that is still regarded as a classic of the era. With Dantalian's Chariot, I felt freer and planted the seeds of many of the guitar parts I play in the Police. Decades seem to blend seamlessly from one to another and then assume their own true identity. How different the sixties are from the eighties, although in a way I have always thought of the Police as the last great sixties band. In Dantalian's Chariot we tried to swallow the zeitgeist whole, even if it came in a small white capsule.

'Sixty-six and the rainbow flag of freedom rolls out, flaps in the breeze, and climbs the pole to herald the news.

It's happening. The revolution rolls out from West Ken tube station, lays a fiver in the betting shop, gets a curry at the New Delhi, drops off a couple of shirts at the dry cleaner's, and flops onto the coconut mat by the front door. The Beatles spearhead the charge and set the style as they write their own songs, grow long hair, and swallow acid. Suddenly everything seems possible, and we all want to be the Fab Four. The bomb-shadowed fifties and the Cold War seem to melt away like spring snow, and what has just been an intimation now leaps into the outer world with bright clothes, hair like Jesus, and a roaring guitar.

In the Big Roll Band we continue on with a strong following around England, but I begin to feel as though we are rapidly becoming an anachronism. The new thing is here and we aren't part of it. I begin to feel uncomfortable with the music we're playing, the nightly funny entertainment we are putting on, playing other people's songs. Our show suddenly feels too jollytoo showbiz. In the new mode you write your own songs, crank the amp, and dress in the coat of many colors. A great cultural shift is taking place; I want to be a part of it and express this desire to the band, hoping we'll all feel the same way and freak out together. It falls on deaf ears, but with all the changes that are happening around us in London, a double rainbow is beginning to arc through my skull-and this needs a different kind of musical expression.

We have been friends for a while with the Animals, who are a hit group, almost at the level of the Stones or the Beatles. Constantly touring in the United States, they sit at the edge of the new scene and frequently mention something called acid. They chuckle to themselves about Owsley, sunshine, and windowpane and we don't really know what they are talking about but are intrigued. I sit in a doctor's office in Earls Court one afternoon and read about the dangerous new drug that is now epidemic in the United States, how it's ruining the minds and lives of young people. I can't wait to try it.

Inevitably, via the Animals, it will come our way-and the redbrick greyness of West Kensington, with its moldering architecture, Carlsberg signs, sublets, and language schools, will be the initiation scene of the orgasmic, kaleidoscopic mindfuck known as acid.

Almost every night when we return to London after a gig there will be a rave or a get-together in Zoot's flat. The word spreads and it reaches the point where most of showbiz London seems to pass through or pass out. By eleven-thirty or midnight there will be a motley group of the famous, the semifamous, and their suppliers, all in an elevated state and having a jolly good time. These include musicians, entertainers, girls, hangers-on, and drug pushers, all of whom lie around in the flat and usually partake of illegal substances accompanied by large amounts of alcohol. The Animals are regu lar visitors and, already pioneers of the new consciousness, seem to be in an advanced state of chemical usage.

Their talk is full of California, San Francisco, the Fillmore, Jim Morrison, L.A., and Owsley. Hilton Valentine in particular appears to be the leading head, and it is he who tells me with enthusiasm about acid and its effects. I am nervous but willing to try it-my head is already full of tripped-out psycho material, the books of Thomas de Quincey, Aleister Crowley, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Coleridge, and Blake-I tell myself this is just another step in that direction.

Eventually the night arrives when we are to try acid for the first time, but for me it is preceded by a complicated little event on the mundane plane. Naturally, it involves a woman, a girl I have been living with, a very pretty Angle, Indian girl from Chingford in Essex named Angela.

Angie had been the girlfriend of Chas Chandler, the bass player for the Animals, for a while, but has moved in with me. I am hung up on her in a way that isn't healthy because we are patently unsuited for each other and, apart from the sex, there is no way I can relate to her-a full-tilt hedonist with no visible boundaries. Most nights I arrive home around one or two A.M. to an empty flat and then twitch in an empty bed until about five A.M., when she will stagger in., reeking of alcohol and cigarettes. I can't handle her, I'm suspicious that she's having sex all over the place, and I simply don't have the experience yet to deal with someone like this. I should kick her out and move on, but instead, I moon about in a feeble way.

I read books about Zen and Scriabin's experiments with synesthesia; she swallows another vodka martini and fucks the next drummer. Later I recognize that it was nothing more than an early rite of passage and give a hollow laugh about it. We break up for a while but I get sick. Every time I try to eat I vomit, as if I have some form of bulimia. I grow thin and weak to the point where people start to notice and make comments. This goes on for a couple of months. I lose weight and become listless. But finally, as if the hex has finally worn off, I wake up one morning with the smell of food in my head and rush to the nearest Chinese restaurant to wolf down a plate of noodles. It's over. I remember where I was before and gradually start to recover. It's as if I have been under some sort of shamanic curse. I have had dozens of girlfriends in London but for some reason with Angie I have lost all sense of myself.

So tonight Zoot and I are going to try out this LSD stuff with the Animals, and I am interested but slightly nervous. Coinciding neatly with this and executing the coup de grace to our fun-filled relationship, Angie is in Chiswick at St. Mary's Hospital, having what is delicately known as a scrape-in other words, an abortion. Whether it's me or some other lucky guy who has planted the seed, I don't know; but as a last-ditch attempt, and with the usual apprehension I have come to experience regarding this girl, I make arrangements to go over and collect her. With a churning stomach, a bunch of roses, and a box of Cadbury's milk flake, I mount the stairs to Ward Six. The day feels like lead.

Like a long white coffin, the ward stretches into infinity. Angie is in the last bed at the far end, or so I think. With a look on my face somewhere between a shit-eating grin and a death's-head rictus, I begin the long-roses-andchocolates trek. With my Cuban heels clicking like overheated castanets on the stone floor, I wake one or two patients who stare at me with downturned mouths and say, "What's that?" I keep smiling and go forward like a prisoner on the way to the gallows. Eventually I get there and, of course, the bed is vacant. In shock and paranoia that come at me like deja vu I stare at the ghostly white sheets and ask the ward sister where Ms. Angela King is. This is the bed, isn't it? Or is she actually in another ward?

She looks at me with a Nurse Ratched smile that seems to convey pity, disdain, and chilling contempt for the male of the species.

"She left this morning with someone called Eric Burder-a pop singer or something."

Fuck, the bitch-I should have known-fucking cheated again. And with him-my friend!

I feel a strong urge to lie down and throw up, but I toss the roses on the bed, decide to keep the chocolates for later, spin on my heel, and make the mile-long fandango back down the ward, all eyes on the one-man carnival, fringed leather, girl's hair, eyeliner, and cowboy boots.

Back in Kensington, I kick the wall and throw an LP across the room. It smashes on the floor and I start laughing-this is ridiculous, I am giving her all the power, what about my power, and ... oh, fuck it all. I lie down on my oversize orange bed, staring at the ceiling. Fuck it ... what is it with women? ... or is it just this one? ... I can't handle her ... I'm too hung up on her. Just like the Mothers' record is going on about at that very moment: Are you hung up? Do you have any hang-ups? Well, yes, I fucking do-it's this Anglo Indian with the incredible body that I seem to be sharing with about two thousand other people in London. After a while, helped by the spacing effect of the Nepalese, a new peace flows through my mind. It's all in the past, I am free, I am free-bye-bye, have a good life-and the Zappa record grows large and deep in my mind as I drift into a rose-colored sleep.

I wake up around nine-thirty P.m. feeling groggy, hungover, and with a sense of something missing. What-oh yeah-her. I sit on the edge of the bed for a moment and think, This time its different... that's it.. . victim no more ... must eat ... Chinese. I play a few eleventh chords on my Telecaster-they have the right air of renewed hope, a new beginningthrow on a jacket, grab a book on Zen, and slam the front door to cross the street to the Lingam and Lotus. I plonk down in a dark corner and squint at the menu: sweet and sour shrimp, vegetable fried rice, and crispy seaweed, that should do it. I open my book, sip a beer, and try to make up some Zen koans. Where is your girlfriend when eating rice (on the end of someone's dick)? No, that's no good.... Ummm ... where is God when practicing (having it off with her)? What is your name before you are born-oh, for fuck's sake. This is pathetic. I look at the greasy menu and change my mind-vegetable fried rice, kung pao chi ... no, Mongolian beef and spring rolls ... yeah. I stare at my book-"to give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is to control him." Christ, what does that mean: give 'em enough rope and they'll hang themselves? I must stop thinking about her, let her/it go, there is peace out there, another world, the guitar-that's right, the guitar-the savior of my soul ...

I eat, and with the nutrition I start to feel better. The food, the earthy clarity of Zen, the shrouded peaks of Japanese mountains, and the words of Bodhidharma, the twenty-eighth patriarch, crowd into my mind and suddenly I start laughing. A tear forms in my eye and mistily I stare up at the Hokusai print of Mount Fuji on the wall. It's all beautiful: this place is beautiful, the rice is beautiful. I laugh some more-the guitar-ha-ha. Li-chee the waiter comes over. "'S everthin awright?" He smiles anxiously through several gold teeth. "Yeah, great." I smile back. "'Cept could I have some jas mine tea-ta?" I stare down at the tablecloth with its brown stain like a Rorschach test. "Strive on with diligence," I say to myself-the last words of the Buddha-and, placing some pound notes on the chipped white plate and patting the table in thanks, get up and raise my hands in namaste to Li-chee, then exit.