We are well into the touring thing now and looking at 1 week to go. Call me weird, but I don’t want it to end, as usual. It’s my comfort zone, you see. The gigs are all going well and no major incidents to report, just a lot of laughs. Yesterday we collected Markus from Birmingham airport. He’s a cameraman and he flew in from Germany. His job is to film a kind of road movie / documentary of our last week on the road, prior to the London show. This will be included as a bonus with the main event The Concert. He’ll be looking for some rock & roll mayhem. I’m not sure what’ll occur although if he’d have been with myself, Bob and our promoter, Gavin, in Galashiels a couple of nights ago, he would have caught a post show encounter with a bottle of single malt whiskey, that disappeared rather quickly (down our throats) in the dressing room. Bob later recounted to me, the next morning, my antics on the way home from the pub, which included (apparently) me disappearing into various shop doorways as I tried to keep walking in a straight line. Then, I was seen to be pitching forward, (apparently) head first, into my luggage, which I was trying to retrieve from our tour van at the time. Naturally, I remember none of this, so it cannot be verified.
Already, last night, at the Robin 2 venue near Wolverhampton, our cameraman did get some backstage footage and then some with the fans at the merchandise table. I’ve had a problem interacting with inanimate objects during the last few days. Guitar straps seem to be the wrong length and cause me problems onstage, due to the large number of guitar changes for the different songs. Then, I’ve had a problem with doors. I got locked in the dressing room toilet (bathroom for Americans) last night and had to bang on the door so the band could let me out. Then, in Crewe, the wind blew the rear van door closed as I was in the cargo section retrieving some T-shirts. The van was in a car park, some distance from the venue. Usually, a Mercedes Sprinter has the little lever on the inside f the door, designed precisely so that you can get out, if you are unlucky enough to get trapped inside. Didn’t work! Luckily I had the mobile phone on me and called for help, after trying to attract passers-by, by banging frantically on the doors from inside the thing.
I watched a couple of great, newly released YouTube vids of Hendrix yesterday. One was with him at the Royal Albert Hall and the other was the earliest known vid of him playing rhythm guitar on the song, Shotgun backing Buddy and Stacey. He looks about 16. The moves are all there and he’s ‘working it’ in a line with the sax players behind the singers. It felt great to see this because a lot of us 60’s players, cut our teeth in similar bands in the UK doing our version of the same thing (not that I’d put myself in the Man’s league - but you get the idea). You see, a lot of the early great rock players had their roots in R & B, Soul, Blues and black music in general. We weren’t listening to other rock players so much (there weren’t any) and we all moved through the ranks of being rhythm guitarists first, before becoming, lead players. It was to be a while before guitarists moved out from behind the singers in the bands to become the stars themselves. You were lucky to be allowed to play a couple of lead licks, at maximum, in a big bands like that at the time and if you did, then they’d better have been good licks! Good times. Check out Steve Cropper, Cornell Dupree. Of course the black blues players in the clubs in Chicago had way more going on but these records were hard to come by. The only ones I really ever listened to at any length, were Howlin’ Wolf and Albert King.
~ A.P.
