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AUTOBIOGRAPHY....... the story so far At this time I am living in Finland with my family and apart from an average of 120 gigs a year spend most of my time writing new pieces for the two very different bands that I work with. My plan is to produce a new record every 18 months or so. The Finnish music scene is much the same as most I have worked in with record companies concentrating on fashion and the young and radio playing from narrow playlists; usually imports or songs in Finnish. Apart from the Finnish stuff, which is new to me, I seem to hear an awful lot of fairly manufactured sounds. However the audiences are fantastically loyal to all sorts of music especially if it’s played with all the soul you got. Also there are many talented players here and I have been most fortunate to have worked with some of them. For example, Hasse Walli, an extraordinary guitarist who has fused Hendrix with Senegalese music and with whom I have made two records (www.hassewalli.com for more info). Eero Raittinen is also a big star in Finland, much respected for many years and a great singer. He has recorded one of my songs, as have other local names like Nina and Bablo. Thanks to modern, inexpensive equipment and the relatively cheap cost of making CDs it is possible for people like me to make records. All my time in the business has been a build up to this and the frustrations you will read about in the biography have largely gone away. After all if one is part of the established music business one has to play by the rules and that works for many. Of course I would love to sell a lot more records and reach the audience that I know is out there and welcome any help from the ‘Big Boys’ if they offer, but there is great satisfaction in making records for oneself with no one to answer to. So enjoy the site for what it is intended for, the music, and if you want a stroll down my memory lane…. read on. I bought my first guitar for ten shillings when I went to St Edwards College in Malta in 1963 and there I met Victor Patacciola from Boston MA and he taught me all the chords he knew and we formed a band “The Pythons” and played our first gig at the school. Vic wrote some cool tunes, one instrumental I remember called ‘Suspense’ (There’s a old tape around somewhere) I fell in love with the guitar and when sent back to Britain to study at H.M.S. Conway in 1966, I was enrolled at the same time as Pete Brown a gifted drummer, guitarist and also nephew of Joe Brown of “Joe Brown and The Bruvvers” (Big star in the U.K. ‘Sheik of Araby’e.g. was a big hit for him) who provided us with VOX amps and our parents with warnings of the dangers of the music business. I left in 1970 and after a spell learning computers at ICL I jumped at the chance to join an American heavy rock band “The Clouds” whose guitarist and singer quit a tour of southern Africa during the Zambian leg (where my Dad was teaching tech college) They had charted in Billboard and had a mass of huge Sunn amplifiers. John Stein was on bass and Danny Surtak on drums (see photo) We played huge stadiums and hit the TV shows and landed on the front page of the national paper thanks to the gyrations of one Kathy Keppi (see photo again) Mum and Dad were not best pleased. I was a teenager and they were still my legal guardians but they let me go. John and I wrote a song called ‘Hold on baby’ that seemed to be in the right direction with Danny playing huge double bass drum lines and me screaming gamely.(Much faded copy here as soon as I can repair it a bit) We were supposed to go on to Italy but the band was eventually stranded in Livingstone for a month after being refused entry to what was then Rhodesia. (Johns ‘stars and stripes’ clothes and waist length hair? Or a scam by the agent to nick the gear- take your pick) We spent the first week swimming in the Zambezi river about a mile above Victoria Falls until some chap in a slouch hat yelled at us that the water was infested with man-eating crocodiles. We stayed by the pool from then on. The Americans finally got home and I hitched back to Mum and Dad and an ‘I told you so’ But Danny and I had got on really well and talked of me heading to the States and starting a new band when tragically he was drowned after being caught in an undertow while swimming in a flooded mine pit back in Belleville, Illinois. I then roadied for
“The Casuals” (U.K. hit “Where Jesamine goes”) when they came out to tour
Zambia and through their guitarist I got an audition in London so I went
back and as it turned out the gig was gone so I started street busking and
made good money down the underground. However I really wanted to be in a
band and after soul destroying rounds of auditions in London I headed to
Southampton to look up Pete Brown and Pat Bond (a great bassist who played
left-handed upside down.) who were both studying engineering there. Pete
had left town but Pat and I hooked up and after a miserable time living in
a van and sleeping at the station, we managed to get a gig with a
wonderful dance bandleader, Bob Ames. Bob was scrupulously fair and we
stayed with him quite a time playing working mens clubs and bingo halls.
The bright lights were calling though and before long we were both asked
to join “The Fantastics” back up band. They had a big hit with “Something
old, Something new” and toured Britain incessantly. We were eight in the
band and four great singers from the States, stylistically like The Four
Tops and The Temptations. Don Heywood the leader and MD taught me a great
deal about soul and funk guitar and I owe him a lot. Two years of roadwork
and many band changes later I left to join Southampton group Iguana who
had recorded an album for Polydor. This was the top band in the area with
power and soul and a great groove fronted by Bruce Roberts on vocals and
guitar. Bruce’s influence on me is constant as he is soul personified. On
drums Pete Hunt with as heavy a groove as Al Jackson Jnr and John
Cartwright on bass, a songwriter of great talent plus ace trombonist Chris
Gower and the still Coltranish Ron Taylor on alto. (I heard Ron recently
and he was burning!) We sent tapes to the London labels and recorded for
Island but were turned down. I relocated to London and in the summer of
1974 while loading steel pipe at Chiswick Ironworks received a call from
Island and went to meet Jess Roden (Alan Bown, The Butts Band, Bronco) who
had heard the Iguana tapes and wanted us to go on the road with him. Jess
was in the final stages of a new record produced by Allen Toussaint and
Chris Blackwell with The Meters on most of the tracks. The album is still
available and lucky me I play a couple of solos on it! Iguana and Jess
became the imaginatively named Jess Roden Band and went on to tour with
The Sutherland Brothers (‘I am sailing’ composers), Roxy Music, opened for
Eric Clapton (where I had the great honour to meet Freddie King) and
toured France with The Who (We had such a bad time in Colmar with the
17,000 strong crowd throwing bottles and apples and stuff, well only 2000
of ‘em but still, that Pete sent Mooney in to our dressing room after
their set and he showed us the fine art of trashing and smashing and that
cheered us up no end. And to be fair they chucked things at The Who as
well. There’s no pleasing some people. The other memorable gig was the
30,000 seat Palais de Sport, Lyon. The Who’s crew told us that if we
thought Colmar was bad it was a snip compared to Lyon. Last time out the
crowd petrol-bombed the support act. I drank a lot of whiskey before we
went on but happily we took Roger Daltry’s advice to make it “Larger than
life” and we cut all the slow stuff and went down pretty well) We did
many festivals with the likes of Uriah Heep, Little Feat, Bad Company and
Status Quo and then went on to tour on our own. Dr Feelgood opened for us
one night and promptly blew us off the stage and on another Heart crowded
us off the stage with loads of Marshalls. We made an album with Steve
Smith producing and at one stage Steve Winwood came and played some great
Hammond on a couple of tracks. Island had an amazing artist list, Traffic,
Cat Stevens, Robert Palmer, Bad Company, Paul Kossoff, The Wailers, Third
World, John Martyn, Speedy Keen. the list goes on and on. You didn’t have
to look too far to find great talent to play on your record. I did a
session for Reebop Kwaku Baah one time and he had me tearing my hair out!
He rolled the tape, about fifteen minutes of wild drumming, and said
“Play!!” and I said “What key?” and he shouted “Play!!!” and I said
“Reebop, I have to know what key at least!” and he started jumping up and
down, “PLAY!!.PLAY!!” and finally Roscoe Gee from Traffic came to the
rescue and we worked something out. I think Reebop was happy. In Ghana you
better just play and let the Gods guide you I guess. Reebop played with
Miles Davis so you know he was a brilliant spirit. Anyway, Chris Blackwell
didn’t dig the first album so we went back and started again and “Keep
your hat on” is the result. (Blackwell gave his artists a lot of time to
develop, unheard of today.) The title was taken from the Randy Newman song
we covered which Joe Cocker had a big hit with some months later. We all
thought his version sounded pretty close to ours but maybe that’s sour
grapes. The album did pretty good in the U.K. and was a Billboard National
Breakout in the U.S. but Island U.S., which was just starting up, didn’t
push it and so it sank. It’s a collectors item now and I bought a much
played copy in 1996 for £8.00 in a Notting Hill second hand store. 1977,
two albums later, “Play it dirty, Play it class” and “Blowin’ “ and Jess
decided to go on his own again so I headed back to Southampton to share a
flat with John Cartwright, the extraordinary talented song writer and
multi-instrumentalist (He wrote most of the songs in the JRB) and we tried
to figure out what to do. The phone rang and it was one Gary Farr who had
heard I was free and wanted me to try out for his new band Lion and I
needed some bread so John said ‘Do it.’ Gary was one of the greats from
the early sixties R&B boom and with his band The T Bones was a big
influence on the London scene. He had then gone on to the States and was
signed to Atlantic and made a wonderfully poetic album “Addressed to the
censors of love” which is changing hands for a lot of loot these days. His
new outfit had John Sinclair on keyboards, Eric Dillon on drums and Steve
Humphries on bass. Various guitarists had been considered, Snowy White was
in for a time, but after a fitful start I was asked to join. The other
players had all been in successful bands, John in The Heavy Metal Kids,
Eric in Fat Mattress (Noel Redding’s band that toured with Hendrix) and
Steve with Mahatma Kane a popular London mob. Gary’s brother Rikki was the
manager, he had put on the Isle of Wight festivals and ran a huge sound
company in the U.S. When we first met he said “Webby, you remind me of
Eric Santana especially when you scale up to the treble E.” Now you can’t
top that I thought but he did. “Lads, we’re gonna go to Los Angeles, build
a studio and in six months you’ll have a record deal.” And that’s exactly
what happened give or take a few months. We added another guitarist, the
wonderful Robin Le Mesurier (now playing with French star Johnnie Halliday),
signed to A&M in 1978 for a monstrous amount of money and had a great time
auditioning producers at our demo studio out in Topanga Canyon. We saw Roy
Thomas Baker (of Queen fame) who came out in a Rolls and a fur coat, the
temperature was 30c, he listened and said, “You want stringy-poohs do
you?” Gary wasn’t having that. Todd Rundgren, who sat on the floor and
trashed the lyrics, said if he took the job it would end up a Todd album,
Gary wasn’t having that. Glyn Johns (Stones etc.) who after a listen said
he’d take the synth outside and chop it up first thing. Well you guessed
it! Finally Ron Nevison came out, said nothing, just told us to play and
recorded us using our 8 track and ropey old mixer. The result was stunning
compared to our own efforts up to then and we wanted him on the case
immediately. Nevison had engineered some of the Zep stuff and had huge
hits in the States with The Babys and other hard rock acts. His assistant
was Mike Clink and we all know Mike went on to produce Guns & Roses, I
guess he learned a lot of that sound working with Ron. We worked at the
Record Plant and the recording went well and the album was delivered but
then the plot began to unwind and Rikki and Ron fell out for God knows
what reason, who had the biggest Rolls Royce is my guess. We re-recorded
the whole album again with Pete Henderson who had just won a Grammy for
Supertramps “Breakfast in America” and I guess we spent A&M’s profit. What
a great pile of money. The band were on a weekly advance, $200 bucks or
so, so we weren’t rolling in it ourselves but the studio costs and the
equipment and all the rest, about four hundred grand, no wonder at the end
of it all A&M decided to drop us. We did tour with the Tubes and that was
fun, but the band had lost its way and at the end of 1980 we fell apart.
The Lion album “Running all night” has been re-released on CD in 2006 by
www.retrospectrecords.com with the tag “At last!! The long lost album
!!” But if you want to hear Nevisons album, the REAL long lost record, go
to the music page to hear a mastered copy of the only known cassette of
this recording to exist! Updated April 2008 |
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