Rod: The Autobiography (26 page)

However, I still maintain that Billy Gaff, my manager, slightly
bamboozled me into the move. At the very least, I was a little confused about the details.

Gaff – who was an Irishman and didn’t care much for England in the first place – flew to LA in advance and found a three-bedroom house on Doheny Drive. The idea was that Tony Toon and I would join him out there. I thought I would give it a go for a couple of weeks and see how it panned out. And if I didn’t get on with it, then never mind. I could always fly home again.

Maybe I should have listened a bit more closely. When I arrived at Doheny Drive and set my bags down in the bedroom (I got the master suite, obviously), Gaff explained to me that I couldn’t go back to England for a year. I would be able to return there eventually, he said, for a set number of nights in any tax year, but not until I had served a full twelve-month period of absence.

My heart sank. A whole year away from Britain? Not even to visit? But what about the British things I loved: football, roast dinners, decent cups of tea, crap weather? What about my family?

That first year was tough. I felt like a tourist – couldn’t see myself adapting, was just observing everything from a distance and waiting to go home at the end of it. Sometimes when it rained – which wasn’t often – I would run out and stand in it until I was soaked, just to remind myself properly what wet weather felt like. I missed my parents and my siblings. Being with Britt helped. Gradually the sunshine helped. Being in LA helped. LA can be a great place to live, and I grew to love it eventually. I still do.

In the summer of 1975, I bought a house for $750,000 on Carolwood Drive in the Holmby Hills. The place had fallen into disrepair; most of its twenty rooms were clogged with bugs and there was a family of wild cats living under the terrace that had to be solemnly evicted. But it clearly had the potential to be a fabulous home – less grand than Cranbourne Court in Windsor, but dreamier. Britt moved in with me in August and
we threw ourselves headlong into doing the place up, a project which took several months. Needless to say, art nouveau glass featured prominently. In the dressing room, the wardrobes had art deco glass doors. We had a set of leather sofas, backed with elephant tusks, nests of silver tables and a pair of life-size ornamental pelicans – not exactly understated, but I thought it was fabulous, like a dream palace. I installed Tony Toon in the guest house in the garden. Britt, who seemed to share Dee’s resistance to Tony’s charms, insisted he could only come into the main house when he was invited, but he would occasionally plod into the kitchen in the morning, smoking a cigarette, fix himself a cup of tea and plod out again.

And nearly every day the sun shone. Exile was beginning to have its advantages.

Because Britt’s young children were often with us, we tended to stay at home a lot and enjoy the house. But if we did go out at night, it would very often be to Le Dôme restaurant. Le Dôme was established by Eddie Kerkhofs, a Belgian restaurateur who became a close friend. Eddie figured that if you could get celebrities eating in your restaurant regularly you were halfway to making it look like a happening destination. So he devised a start-up scheme wherein anyone who put up a $3,000 stake would be credited with $5,000 of food at the restaurant. He offered this deal to me, Elton John, Dudley Moore, Olivia Newton-John, various members of Pink Floyd and all sorts, and soon he had quite a scene on his hands.

At the time, Le Dôme was one of the only places in LA that stayed open late – until one or two in the morning. And often, even after that, Eddie would be prepared to switch off the lights at the front and allow a lock-in for anyone who wasn’t ready to go home. The premises were also handily equipped with a back exit to the car park, so that anyone leaving the worse for wear, or with someone they ought not to have been leaving with, could do so in relative privacy.

Inevitably, given the clientele and its tastes, the downstairs bathroom at Le Dôme rapidly became a sort of romper room
for the ingestion of mood-enhancing substances and, occasionally, sexual dalliances – between-course intercourse, as it were. As a measure of how hardcore that facility could get, note only this: Elton John preferred to use the disabled bathroom upstairs because he found the one downstairs too rock ’n’ roll for him. Even after one of its periodic redecorations, it never seemed to lose the faint odour of cocaine. And yet, for a long time, the bathroom was staffed by a gentleman called Gil, who, despite the debauchery raging around him (or perhaps because of it), would sit quietly in the corner, reading the Bible, and then silently offer you a towel on your way out. It was hard not to feel slightly judged.

One night I had a big table at Le Dôme for members of the Exiles (my football team, of whom more later), and Dudley Moore tried to get my attention across a crowded room by lobbing a pork chop at me. The most almighty food fight ensued, possibly the worst I have ever been in: a blizzard of meat-balls and mixed vegetables. The scene appalled even the normally equable Eddie. He had a fit and banned us both on the spot. We were soon back, though.

* * *

God, I loved my job in those days – and continue to love it. Who wouldn’t? A rock star: what a thing to be. But, particularly, what a thing to be in the mid 1970s. I was so fortunate in the timing of it – to serve my apprenticeship in the 1960s and to break through in the 1970s, when everything in this area was new and surprising and when you seemed to be on a largely unbeaten path. I loved the romance of it; I loved the excess of it. I was in a state of permanent wonderment about it: that someone from a pretty basic and humble background could suddenly find his life going ‘whoosh’ – taking off in this quite extraordinary, completely transformative way. I don’t think that state of wonderment has ever left me. It’s always there, just below the surface of everything I do.

In the two years that I was with Britt, I made two of my most successful albums – as her lawyer would eventually point out in no uncertain terms. Billy Gaff had secured me a new solo recording deal with Warner Bros. and it was time for a shift of gear and a fresh approach. In 1974 I began preparing the
Atlantic Crossing
album, first in Los Angeles and then down at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Alabama, under the guidance of the legendary producer Tom Dowd.

The first shock about Muscle Shoals was how primitive it was. It was an absolutely tiny room, with egg boxes on the wall for soundproofing. There was nothing fancy about it at all.

The second shock was the Muscle Shoals session players. With the exception of Al Jackson, the drummer, they were all white. I thought I had ended up in the wrong studio. How could the rhythm unit on so many classic soul records not be black?

Tom Dowd was fifty and came, of course, with this monumental reputation. He produced Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say?’; he did Otis Redding; he did Aretha Franklin; he did Dusty Springfield; he did Eric Clapton’s best work. You were expecting somebody with a huge amount of gravitas, someone a bit frightening, possibly. But Tom was such a great old hand; a delicate touch, so gentle. He had a presence about him, but it was such a warm and quiet, twinkly-eyed presence, not authoritarian at all, just fatherly, in the nicest way. He would blend right in and let us get on with it. His attitude was: when it’s going well and things are bubbling in the room, leave it alone. He would sit back and smoke his pipe and read the paper. And we would check back with him. ‘What do you think of that, Tom?’ And he would listen and chew on the pipe and say, ‘Yeah, going well.’

Because of his work, I had great respect for him. If he was doing nothing, I respected that. If he was talking to me about what I should do – which he only ever did in a very loving way – I definitely respected that. There was never any shouting, bad vibes or anger. If he was frustrated, he never showed it.
Other producers want to put their mark all over things, ladle on their so-called ‘signature sounds’. Sometimes the ego of the producer is as big as the artist’s, and that’s not a recipe for fun. Tom was different, and you thought, ‘Christ, now I know why all those great people wanted to work with him. Not only does he know what he’s doing, he’s so
easy
.’

For the first time, really, I was in a studio and properly relaxed. We had a lock-in at Muscle Shoals, meaning we could come and go as we pleased, and no budget constraints, so there was a lot of sitting around and telling stories. Tom talked about Otis Redding writing ‘Dock of the Bay’ on a guitar that Steve Cropper had tuned to an open E. If you tune a guitar that way, you can play ‘Dock of the Bay’ with one finger, and that’s how Otis did it. And he talked about the tussles he used to have with Otis about Sam & Dave, the R&B vocal duo, when both those acts were rivals on Stax, with Otis saying, ‘You’ve got to do something, Tommy, you’ve got to do something. It’s getting hard to follow them on.’ Otis sounded great. He saw no shame in being commercially successful – in being an entertainer. I drew as much as I could from his example.

The first time we finished a track, Tom stood up and said, ‘Right, time to go out on the balcony.’ I was a bit confused. ‘It’s the balcony test,’ he said. ‘They’ve all done it. Aretha’s done it, Otis has done it . . .’ And the idea was, you would go outside and listen to the track from the balcony, through the door. Then you would hear whether it genuinely had a groove. In the studio, turned up loud, pretty much everything sounds great. You need to get some distance from it to see if it genuinely works. Later Tom introduced me to the car test, another Muscle Shoals tactic: running a couple of wires out to a car in the car park and playing the track through its tinny speakers. If a track could survive that and still seem to be grooving, you knew you were on to something.

Did I miss Ronnie Wood and Micky Waller and my old muckers off the five Mercury albums? Well, Woody was on tour with the Stones when
Atlantic Crossing
was being prepared, so
he wouldn’t have been able to play any part in it anyway. I missed their company, of course. But at the same time, Tom had listened to the Faces and had suggested to me that they weren’t musically flexible enough for what he was after; and here I was, singing with the legendary R&B instrumentalists, the MGs: with Al Jackson, ‘Duck’ Dunn, Steve Cropper and (on a track that didn’t make it onto the album, a cover of The Bee Gees’ ‘To Love Somebody’) with Booker T. This, you could say, had its consolations. It was the realisation of a dream.

The one dark shadow cast over these sessions was that Alabama was a dry state. Steve, Duck and I had a bottle of rum back at the Holiday Inn, where we were staying, but we were having to eke it out very carefully, day by day, and there was no alcohol available at all on the morning when Tom phoned me up at ten and told me to come and sing ‘Sailing’. I panicked. I’d never sung anything in a studio without having a drink – let alone a big old anthem. And I’d never sung anything, anywhere, that early in the morning. Got it in six or seven takes, though. ‘Sailing’, which was written by Gavin Sutherland, was another huge song for me: a hit twice in the UK, first in 1975, and then a year later when it was revived as the theme tune for a BBC documentary series about life in the navy. I, of course, as with ‘Maggie May’, argued vehemently against releasing it as the album’s first single. I wanted ‘Three Time Loser’ instead. And once more I was proved amusingly wrong, and happy to admit it.

After my experience with Tom, I was in a fever to record again. Even while promoting
Atlantic Crossing
I was carrying bits of paper in my pockets with possible song titles scribbled on them for the next album. In early 1976, we were back together in the studio, in Los Angeles this time, making
A Night
o
n the Town
, which yielded the cover image I so hated: the photograph of me in the straw boater, holding the crystal champagne glass. People blamed Britt for that, but they were wrong. Britt might have been responsible for buying me the hat, and I’ve no doubt, when I wore it, she said what she always
said: ‘You look luverly darklink.’ But she wasn’t responsible for me posing in it like a ponce for an album cover, and approving it all the way down the line. At any point, I could have said, ‘You know what? This is the worst album cover I’ve ever seen. Let’s do something else.’ But I didn’t. I don’t know how I got through that and came out the other end. I cringe now every time someone offers me that album cover to sign. I turn it over to the mock Renoir painting on the other side, which has at least got a splash of humour about it.

Still, I would say in my defence that I regretted it pretty quickly. When we toured the album, I insisted that the artwork on the advertising posters and on all the backstage passes for the band and crew featured a picture of a fist coming through a straw boater. It was an expression of disgust at what I’d allowed to happen; an attempt to say, ‘I didn’t mean it, honest. I’m still in here somewhere.’

Good album, though, embarrassing sleeve notwithstanding. And this despite the fact that my voice had decided to pack up during the LA sessions. I had been trying to sing and there was nothing there: the edge had gone right out of it. Very alarming. We wondered whether it was something to do with the LA smog, which would have been a nice comeuppance for my exile. ‘Rod’s gone all Hollywood – and Hollywood’s done his voice in.’ The sessions were moved from Cherokee Studios in Hollywood to Caribou Ranch in Colorado. Elton had recorded there, and the Beach Boys, and it was a beautiful rural setting, in a converted barn, high in the Rockies – too high, in fact: 7,000 feet above sea level. It felt airless to me and, if anything, my voice was worse. By now I was beginning to get desperate. But Tom kept calm and we moved again, this time to Miami, where finally my voice reappeared. This was by no means the last of the struggles that would go on between me and my throat.

‘The Killing of Georgie (Parts I and II)’ is on the album, probably the most ambitious song I have ever written in terms of narrative construction, and certainly one of the longest. The
verses for it were coming to me in the middle of the night for what seemed like days on end. Every night I would have to get up and write another one down. I started to wonder whether maybe I wasn’t writing a song at all, but a novel. It appeared to reach a conclusion eventually, though, and was just about short enough for a single. There were people at Warner Bros. who were medieval enough to fear that a pro-gay message would alienate my heterosexual following. Stuff ’em, I felt. It’s one of the songs that I’m proudest of. (And was a big hit, so no one particularly got alienated.)