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TEN
YEARS AFTER – REELING IN THE YEARS:
WOODSTOCK
made them into world stars, but instead of capitalising on
their new-found fame they were losing the plot. Classic Rock
talks to Alvin Lee, Leo Lyons and Ric Lee about how it all
went so wrong for Ten Years After.
Going
Home:
Written
by Hugh Fielder (Modified Corrections by B & D)
From
the August 2003 issue of Classic Rock Magazine
It
was getting dark by the time Ten Years After took the stage at
Woodstock back in 1969. The rain had come bucketing down
mid-way through the afternoon, just as they’d been about to
go on, drenching the stage and turning the site into a
quagmire. The audience variously estimated at between 350,00
and 500,000 was wet, chilled and bedraggled; many of them were
the worse for wear after three days in the open.
The
band weren’t in much better shape, having travelled
overnight from St. Louis, making the last leg by helicopter
and then being cooped up on-site in the back of a trailer,
waiting for the rain to stop.
In
the movie of Woodstock, the camera picks out the skinny frame
of Ten Years After’s Alvin Lee, his boyish face ringed by
shoulder-length hair. “This is a thing called “I’m Going
Home” by helicopter!” he announces, and for a dozen
seconds he rattles out notes on his trademark Gibson guitar
that sound like a sustained burst of machine-gun fire. The
band then kick into a breakneck boogie and the song takes off;
Alvin spits out the vocals, filling in the spaces with more
guitar salvos. The camera remains fixed on him; there are just
occasional glimpses of keyboard player Chick Churchill,
drummer Ric Lee (no relation to Alvin) and bassist Leo Lyons,
who is head banging furiously. Alvin leads the song high and
low, never letting the pace flag, until nine minutes later he
builds to a final warp-speed cacophony. The crowd, their
central heating now restored, erupts.
When
the Woodstock movie came out in late 1970 (more than a year
after the actual festival) it did for Ten Years After what
Live Aid did for Queen and U2; it transformed them into
superstars. Suddenly Ten Years After were the new heroes of
British Blues Rock.
Or,
as Alvin puts it: “That’s when fourteen year old girls
started showing up to our gigs with ice creams.”
Ten
Years After had been in the vanguard of the second (and much
heavier) invasion of the US by British groups, touring
relentlessly and rapidly reaching top of the bill status.
“We had this thing – and looking back I’m a bit ashamed
of it now – that we had to sting any band that went on after
us,” Alvin recalls. “We used to go out of our way to blow
them off and make them look bad, it wasn’t so much playing
well as going down well; we’d learnt that from our years on
the club circuit, and there were a lot of bands in America who
wouldn’t go on after us. At Woodstock Country Joe McDonald
whipped his equipment on before us because he’d played after
us at the Fillmore East and died a death. We used to wear the
audience out. It really was a heads-down-let’s–go-for-it
attitude. (Alvin and Leo called it “Their Blow’em Off
Policy”).
Leo
used to shake his head off, that was fine on stage, but he’d
do it in the studio too, we used to have to gaffer-tape his
headphones to his head.” Leo’s head-banging style even got
him an offer from Frank Zappa to appear in a movie he was
planning called “The Choreographers Of Rock “n” Roll.
Leo reveals the secret behind Ten Years After vigorous and
intense live shows: “Ric and I egged each other on when we
flagged (slowed down a bit, and needed that edge back) I’d
yell “Hit them you bastard!” and he’d shout back:
“Fuck Off.” Leo would also spur Ric on by spitting at him
– anticipating the punk movement by a decade – but the
drummer never minded as Ric says “because he always missed”.
Riding
the crest of this high-energy wave, Alvin would sneer and pout
outrageously as he tore through solo after solo. Even on the
slower songs his burst of notes seemed faster than mere human
fingers could manage. No wonder the American media dubbed him
“Captain Speed-fingers.”
But
behind the bravado that had propelled Ten Years After into the
premier league was another, more insecure Alvin Lee who just
couldn’t handle the superstar status that the Woodstock
movie had bestowed on the group: “We’d been playing for
the heads, the growing underground audience”, he recounts,
“ But then it got bigger and people had to come to ice
hockey arenas and stadiums to see the band, and because of
this, we lost the personal connection with the (our) audience.
“You had police with guns and cotton wool sticking out of
their ears, sneering up at the band and looking for half a
chance to beat up some unfortunate and unsuspecting audience
member. It was awful, and at this point I realized that it had
all gone wrong and I found myself thinking, “what the fuck
am I doing here?”
And
the song that made Ten Years After famous was becoming an
albatross (a ball and chain): “You’d walk on stage and
people would be shouting for “I’m Going Home”, which was
the last song in our set. I often wonder what the rest of our
career would have been like if the Woodstock movie had used
another song. As it was, everything became focused on the last
song, which also happened to be our most high energy number
and show topper”.
To
make matters worse, Alvin was also becoming estranged from the
rest of the band members: “I think they began to resent me
because I started to back off then,” he admits,
“I
couldn’t help it, I hated it, I just hated all of it, I used
to go on stage and go; “dong” (as he mimes a big chord)
and the audience would go “YeaHHH!” You could do anything,
it was just crazy, it was horrible. “My problem was that I
couldn’t communicate it to anybody, as my band mates thought
I was Looney, as I went into sulks and things like that, maybe
I should have tried
to talk more with them, but it didn’t work for some reason,
they started to get jealous because they thought I was being
singled out to do all the interviews and the photo sessions. I
wasn’t getting singled out, I was the songwriter, singer and
lead guitarist, after all, so obviously I was the one they all
wanted to talk to.”
There
was indeed resentment from the rest of the band, but it was
born out of frustration rather than jealousy. Around the time
of Woodstock, Ten Years After’s management had decided to
focus all the attention on Alvin, which is fair enough you
might think, as it was Alvin who was the front man, the guitar
hero and the pin up poster image. But Leo Lyons and Ric Lee
believe differently, to them (and they should know better than
anyone else) “Alvin was temperamentally unsuited to assume
the role: “I felt it would be too much pressure for Alvin,
and told our manager, Chris Wright, that he was creating a
monster he couldn’t control,” Leo says.
Their
misgivings were well-founded, because at the very moment that
Ten Years After should have been seizing the initiative, Alvin
retreated behind a wall of dope smoke. Whenever Ric and Leo,
angry at being marginalised, managed to provoke a reaction out
of Alvin it was invariably the wrong one. It created a rift,
and the recriminations continuing to this day.
What
added to the bitterness was how close the group members had
been up to then. Ric describes Alvin and Leo’s relationship
as “a well-oiled marriage”. It dates back to 1960 when Leo
started playing with Alvin, already a precocious guitarist, in
a local Nottingham band called “The Jaybirds”. They even
went through the classic 1960’s rock group apprenticeship
together, playing a five week stint at Hamburg’s Star Club
in 1962 – just a week after the Beatles played there.
According to Ric Lee, “We stayed in a two-room apartment
above a mud-wrestling / sex club,” Ric remembers. “The
rooms were filled with bunks and there were probably ten or
twelve people living there. I was eighteen, Alvin was
seventeen, and we were exposed to prostitutes, pep pills and
music twenty four hours a day.” Alvin confirms that the
Hamburg experience was “a real rite of passage, as one day I
went into the bathroom and there was one bloke sitting on the
toilet, a guy in the bath and another guy washing his socks in
the bath water, when all of the sudden another bloke runs in a
fires off a gas gun into the room – it was total madness.
There was also a scary side to it with the gangsters. One guy
had this big welding glove and when you used to see him going
out with it you’d think: “Uh-oh, trouble.”
When
the band returned to England Alvin bought his first Gibson
ES335 – which would become his trademark guitar. Ric, who
came from nearby Mansfield, replaced the previous drummer
(Dave Quickmier) in 1965 (as it was Quickmier who personally
recommended that Ric take his place in the band) and soon
afterwards they brought in Chick Churchill on keyboards. The
following year they started tapping into the burgeoning blues
market in Britain that John Mayall had opened up. “I threw
myself headlong into that,” says Alvin who had grown up
listening to his dad’s collection of pre-war bluesmen such
as Big Bill Broonzy,
Lonnie
Johnson and Josh White, but it was the jazzier influences in
the group that meant they were always, as Ric says, “a bit
sideways-on to the blues”.
That
paid off when Chick Churchill got them an audition for
London’s then legendary Marquee Club early in 1967 and
equally legendary club manager John Gee who was very impressed
by their version of Woody Herman’s “Woodchoppers Ball”.
To celebrate, they changed their name from the now outdated
Jaybirds to Ten Years After – which Leo found while flicking
/ leafing through the pages of the Radio Times Magazine.
Via
the Marquee, Ten Years After landed a spot on the 1967 Windsor
Jazz and Blues Festival (which later became known as the
Reading Festival), where they got a standing ovation from
20,000 people in attendance. Among them was noted blues
producer Mike Vernon, who was there checking out one of his
charges, Fleetwood Mac. It was Vernon who later signed Ten
Years After to Decca’s new Deram label (which ironically,
the band had just recently failed their audition for Decca).
In
keeping with the times, Ten Years After slapped down their
very first record album in just five days, and “Mike could
see that we were a bit radical as far as his kind of blues was
concerned.” Alvin recalls, “but he basically gave us the
freedom and said get on with it.”
The
album caught Ten Years After’s raw, jazzy approach to the
blues, which could be high-velocity, as on the opening song
“I Want To Know”, or the slow, extended and mood building,
closing number called “Help Me”.
The
record was rough and ready, but it attracted the attention of
famed American concert promoter Bill Graham, who was looking
for new bands to play at his Fillmore venues in San Francisco
and New York and figured there must be more where Cream and
Hendrix had come from.
In
June of 1968 Ten Years After started a seven-week US tour at
the Fillmore West: “That first tour was great”, Alvin
recalls, “We had such a good time out there, and we lost
around $35,000, but we got asked back so we knew we were on
our way. The strange thing was that we had gone to what I
considered to be the home of the blues, but they’d never
heard of most of them, and I couldn’t believe it – “Big
Bill who?”
We
were recycling American music and they were calling it the
English sound, while all the American bands were using Fender
equipment, which sounded really tinny when compared with the
juicy sound that you get from Marshalls.”
Then,
of course, there were the psychedelic delights of the West
Coast, and Ten Years After had already been a part of the
London underground scene during 1967’s “Summer Of Love”;
they had even made a whimsical trippy single in early 1968
called “Portable People”,
and played at the very hip Middle Earth.
Publicity
shots of the time reveal Ten Years After’s garish fashion
sense: “Ah, Paisley shirts!” Alvin laughs, “That was my
girlfriend, Lorraine, she was the wild one, as she had me
wearing my mother’s curtains for trousers, with those
lampshade frills around the bottom.
“I
loved the underground,” he says. It was so experimental ,
everything opened up, and you could try anything (and it all
was accepted) and by now the drugs were taking effect, and
that was all part of it – the opening up of consciousness.”
In
America, you had to be careful not to find your consciousness
being expanded unwittingly.
“There
was one gig at the Fillmore West,” he remembers, “where
somebody gave me this joint as we were going on stage, and me
being Mr. Bravado, I had to have a toke – and it turned out
to be angel dust, and by the time I got to the stage, my left
leg felt a mile long.
I
hit the first note on my guitar and it struck the back of the
hall and I saw it bounce back hitting the heads of the
audience and ricochet up into the roof, and I was just
standing there going: “Wow”. I don’t know how I managed
to play, but I noticed at one point the band were looking at
me strangely. After we finished the song I said: “What’s
wrong?” and they replied: “We just did the same song twice!”,
but it didn’t matter as the audience were in the same state,
it didn’t seem to matter.”
Needing
a new album to promote the band, Ten Years After hastily
recorded a live album at a club called Klook’s Kleek in
London. “Undead” caught the sweaty, small-club vibe /
atmosphere and the band’s free-form approach to the blues
with the jazzy, flashy “I May Be Wrong But I Won’t Be
Wrong Always” and “Woodchoppers Ball”, the intense
emotional blues of “Spider In You Web” and a very early
yet potent version of “I’m Going Home”.
“Basically,
that album put it in a nutshell,” Alvin reckons, “I was so
happy with it, when I first heard it I thought, what are we
going to do next? After that my attitude was, “Let’s go
into the studio and experiment, because we’ve already made
the ultimate album.”
The
result of that initial experimentation was the not-so-subtly
titled “Stonedhenge” (with all due credit being given to
Alvin for the very apt title) as it was Ten Years After’s
“Psychedelic Blues Album” Alvin’s recollection is
“Pipes and stuff like that all over the place” and it was
very experimental in places. I was into my musique concrete
phase. There’s quite a lot of (avant-garde industrial
composer) Todd Dockstader in there. It was still very
underground at that point, and we were making music for that
audience / for ourselves really because we were that audience
too.”
”Stonedhenge” could fairly claim to be Ten Years After’s
most innovative album, as it’s light and trippy (their
“Flower Power” album, reflecting the time period or the
insistent “Going To Try” and the ever bouncy / catchy and
addictive hook of “Hear
Me Calling”, or the positively spooky lyrics / tone of “A
Sad Song”. Despite, the apparent substances involved behind
the scenes, and in common use during this period – the band
itself were tight, strong and confident.
Stonedhenge
was released in February of 1969, the record set up Ten Years
After for a momentous year. In fact Woodstock was just one of
half a dozen festivals they played that summer, which also
included Texas, Seattle, and the prestigious Newport Jazz
Festival, which also proved to be the only year that rock
bands were allowed to participate.
At
Flushing Meadow in New York they played alongside of Vanilla
Fudge and Jeff Beck. While Led Zeppelin also turned up to
check out the competition. In Richard Cole’s notorious
“Stairway To Heaven” a kiss and tell all book, the former
tour manager relates how Jimmy Page was awestruck by Alvin’s
super-sonic playing, much to the annoyance of an inebriated
John Bonham, who suddenly lurched forward and threw a glass of
orange juice all over Alvin’s guitar, in order to slow up
his (Alvin’s) finger work as the strings and fret-board got
stickier.
When
asked about this incident, Alvin doesn’t remember anything
having been thrown, although Ric Lee confirms the story. He
also remembers a more amusing incident at the end of the show
when he and Bonzo joined Jeff Beck for the encore: “There
was Robert Plant, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and three
bassists I think Bonzo was beating out a riff on the drum kit,
so I grabbed a floor tom and started thrumming hell out of it.
The crowd were going ape-shit as we banged out a blues
standard and Bonham, who was already stripped to the waist,
took off his trousers and underpants. He was sitting there
naked, playing away, when the police saw him, I then saw Peter
Grant and Richard Cole spotting the police as the number
fizzled out, all I saw was Peter and Richard running on stage,
each grabbing one of Bonzo’s arms, and his bare arse
disappearing as they carried him off.”
Alvin
tended not to get involved in the rock n´ roll high jinks,
however: “ The reason I didn’t mix with bands like Led
Zeppelin and The Who too much and go in for all that hotel
wrecking was that I was a doper; I was always carrying hashish
around, and in those days you could get twelve years if you
got caught with a joint in somewhere like Texas.
Even
legal drugs such as alcohol could also be hazardous for Alvin,
particularly if they were being brandished by someone like
Janis Joplin: “She used to chase me around a bit,” he
chuckles,” but I wouldn’t have it. She was just too
dangerous.
“There
was a show we did with them at the Fillmore East and they were
handing her bottles of Southern Comfort on stage and she was
drinking them, I thought it must be something like sweet wine.
She came off stage and grabbed my ass and gave me a bottle, so
I promptly collapsed and passed out in a quiet corner. When I
woke up it was about five in the morning and there was just
some guy sweeping up, and I didn’t even know which hotel we
were staying at.”
In
fact, on the Richter scale of rock groups behaving badly, Ten
Years After barely registered (“I tried to start a food
fight one night, and everyone went “behave yourself.” Ric
admits). So it’s something of a surprise to find them
appearing in the grossly overrated movie “Groupie”.
In
a scene that attempts to prove guilt by insinuation, Leo is
seen with a young lady in a hotel coffee shop, ordering tea,
while the soundtrack plays Ten Years After’s “Good Morning
Little Schoolgirl”. “Oh boy, was my friend Iris pissed off
when she saw the movie,” Leo laughs, “ Someone sent me a
copy recently, and I watched it while hiding behind the sofa
with one eye closed, but it’s pretty tame stuff now. The
musical segments are worth watching, but Spinal Tap would be a
better buy for the backstage antics.”
It
was Ten Years After’s SSSSH album, recorded just before they
embarked on their US summer tour in 1969 – that included
Woodstock and the other festivals – that opened up the rift
in the band. The album itself wasn’t a problem, after the
laid back trip of “Stonedhenge”, Alvin was up and flying
again; his blistering solo on “I Woke Up This Morning” was
a corker / cooker, as was the reworked riff that anchors
“Good Morning Little School Girl” was tougher than the
rest. The problem was the album sleeve, which in Ric’s words,
“stuck it to everyone, as we’d done a photo session
together and then suddenly we were presented with this album
cover with just Alvin on the front, and we went: “What The
FUCK Is This?”
“This”
was the new management strategy of putting the focus on Alvin,
and Alvin admits the pressure got to him almost immediately:
“There’s the story about how I nearly didn’t play
Woodstock because I had a bad back, it wasn’t a bad back, it
was a bad head. I couldn’t face the tour, I looked at the
thirteen week list of dates and thought, I’m not going to
get through this. “I pretty much had a nervous breakdown at
the beginning of the tour, I’d done five days of interviews
before it started, I’d left my girlfriend back in England,
and I really wasn’t feeling very capable and I just
collapsed.
It
was our American manager, Dee Anthony (who went on to manage
Peter Frampton), who got me through it. He used to give me all
these pep talks – “Stay on the bus, it’s your music,
forget all the bull-shit, that one and a half hours on stage
is all that counts”, but I was still getting upset, and I
was still going on stage saying: “This is Horrible.”
Nevertheless,
the relentless schedule continued and successfully too. The
twenty-eight US tours they notched up between 1968 and 1974
were unequalled by any other British band, and the album sales
were also getting bigger.
“CRICKLEWOOD
GREEN” may not sound as exotic as “ACAPULCO GOLD” or
“LEBANESE BLACK” admittedly, but then the grass always
seems greener on the other side
doesn’t it?
Cricklewood
Green, (the record) was released in 1970 cracked the American
top twenty and was Ten Years After’s biggest selling UK
album, helped by the hit single “Love Like A Man” which
Alvin remembers writing most of the songs in a taxi on the way
to the studio, (while the music riff was credited to Leo
Lyons).
“WATT”
was released at the end of the year, but failed to make any
substantial impact, but Alvin got what he wanted, time off in
which to write songs for the next album, called “A Space In
Time” and he came up with the band’s biggest hit, the
deceptively simple, catchy but out of left-field “I’d Love
To Change The World”. It became the crucial opportunity for
the band, “but by then I was too confused to take it,”
Alvin says, “I’d Love To Change The World” was a hit and
I hated it because it was a hit, by then I was rebelling and I
never played it live, to me it was a pop song,” Even worse,
Alvin vetoed the record companies choice for the follow-up
single, which annoyed the head of their US label, the
redoubtable Clive Davis, who had earlier told the band:
“Give me the tools and I’ll do the job”, promptly made
“I’d Love To Change The World” a Top Ten Hit.
Ric
remembers being invited to a Columbia Records meeting chaired
by Davis, with all the radio promotions people saying that
“Tomorrow I’ll Be Out Of Town” was a perfect radio cut.
When Ric said the band didn’t want that as a single, Davis
growled: “So why is that track on the album? If you want me
to do the job, don’t give me the tools and then take them
away from me.” “He’d been on our side up until then,”
Ric says, “But after that the albums never sold as well and
we never had another hit. If the artists didn’t co-operate,
then the record company would simply move on to one that did;
they weren’t going to wait around for us to get our act
together, and this was a stark lesson in reality,”
Not
that even Clive Davis could have done much with “Rock and
Roll Music to the World” which was recorded and sold pretty
much on auto pilot, and while “Recorded Live” fared much
better, it also highlighted the fact that the core of the set
list had remained unchanged since Woodstock four years earlier.
“What’s the point?” was Alvin’s response. He didn’t
have the inclination, he was miserable and communication
within the band was generally reduced to “Shouting and
screaming matches”.
Leo
contends that Alvin in turn made the band’s lives a misery:
“It stressed me out so much that I stopped trying to
reconcile things, I still enjoyed playing live shows, provided
there were no tantrums. If there were confrontations, I
stupidly rose to the bait every time.”
Amid
such an atmosphere, the management kept their distance, and
eventually Ten Years After took a six-month break for the
second half of 1973.
Alvin
recorded a solo album with gospel singer Mylon Lefevre (who’s
band “Holy Smoke” had supported them on tour) at his newly
furnished home studio, Mylon was great, he arrived and said:
“Where do all the musicians hang out?” I told him the
Speakeasy. He went straight off and returned about six hours
later and said: “I got us a band”, and in walked George
Harrison, Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi! Mylon really had a
silver tongue, he captivated everyone.” Harrison even goaded
Alvin into putting on his own gig. Alvin: “He said: I’ll
bet you couldn’t,” and I did, I rang up and got a booking
at the Rainbow Theatre. I had twenty four songs that hadn’t
worked with Ten Years After , and I rehearsed them with a band
that included Boz Burrell, Tim Hinkley and Mel Collins.”
The
titles of the Mylon Lefevre album – “On the Road to
Freedom” and Alvin Lee & Company live “In Flight”
both seemed to offer broad hints about Alvin’s intentions,
but surprisingly, there was a new Ten Years After album due
out in 1974, called ironically “Positive Vibrations”
Except that it wasn’t.
Alvin
didn’t seem to know what he wanted: “I did an American
tour with Alvin Lee & Co. and it was all new material; I
didn’t play “I’m Going Home” or any of that. We were
playing little theatres, getting good reviews, but to tell you
the truth, I did miss the oomph of the audience, I’d gotten
used to that. I mean they enjoyed it and clapped and stuff,
but there wasn’t the oomph there, then I did a Ten Years
After tour and got the oomph back.”
Not
for long though. Another petulant spat resulted in a threat to
put the band on wages. They limped through one more US tour
before it all disintegrated. Alvin then embarked on a solo
career as Alvin Lee & Co. – The Alvin Lee Band – Alvin
Lee and Ten Years Later and even just plain old Alvin Lee.
Meanwhile,
the others got on with music-related careers, playing,
sessions, producing, managing.
In
1983, Ric Lee got a call from the Marquee presuming that Ten
Years After would be playing at the club’s 25th
anniversary celebrations. “I rang around the others and said:
“I think we should do this”. Alvin felt, “It showed us we could do it, and it was fun
actually, we had one rehearsal in the afternoon and then we
plugged in and played and it was Ten Years After. That amazed
me, and we thought that from that gig there would be a reunion,
but it didn’t happen, as it was a funny time in music, we
weren’t respected legends, we were old farts.”
Ten
Years After petered out when the bickering started up again.
It also hampered subsequent reunions at the end of the
1980’s and late 1990’s which included a nostalgic
appearance at the Woodstock 29th anniversary
festival, which was billed as “A Day In The Garden”. Their
reactions to that are revealing:
Alvin
Lee: “It was a big disappointment, there I was, standing in
a field that they tell me is exactly where it happened, but
the people weren’t there, the vibe wasn’t there, it had
nothing to do with it.”
Leo
Lyons: “It turned out to be a series of flashbacks for me,
we were booked into what used to be the Holiday Inn, Liberty
– Tranquillity Base in 1969. I didn’t realise until I
walked into the hotel bar, it stopped me in my tracks, I swear
I could see and hear Jimi, Janis, Jerry Garcia, Bob Hite, all
of them gone now. We were together in that room twenty nine
years ago.”
Ric
Lee: “Disappointing, really. We hadn’t played for awhile,
I was certainly rusty, the original thing was funky, this was
all very clinical, it was like an MOR concert. Still, at least
we had dressing rooms, which we never had the first
time….”
For
Ten Years After, it all came to a head at the last series of European Festival shows in 1999,
when a vicious spat between Leo and Alvin buried any chance of
a reunion, under a mound of perceived grievances on all sides.
Alvin went back to his own band, while the others remained
together, occasionally playing and recording with various
American guitarist.
However,
five things are directly related to the resurgence of interest
in the band:
1. The reissue of the Ten Years After Catalogue on cd format
2. A new book by Herb Staehr called “Alvin Lee & Ten
Years After – Visual History”
3.
The release of a lost or misplaced Ten Years After Fillmore
East Concert from 1970
4.
This website – That we started in 2001 and dedicated to Ten
Years After and its members
5.
Popular demand – fan request – fans desire to see the band
perform live – and recordings
These
five things prompted Leo Lyons, Ric Lee and Chick Churchill to
revive the band once again last year (2002). This was due to
the fact that when asked to join the band Alvin turned them
down flat / cold, so they went in search of a new guitarist
and found one via Leo’s son Tom, who told his father about a
“shit-hot” guitarist that he’d known in school.
Enter,
twenty five year old Joe Gooch.
Says
Ric Lee about Joe: “Initially I was sceptical because of his
age,” he admits, “but as soon as I saw him play I had no
doubts.” A couple of European dates last autumn convinced
all the band that Joe was the man to replace Alvin. Joe,
“has his own style but can still deliver all the Ten Years
After hits,” Ric says. The new-look Ten Years After are
playing British dates this summer, with an album to follow in
the autumn.
And
what about Alvin? – Alvin finds the current Ten Years After
situation “very sad”. Ten Years After used to be a
credible name and I was proud of it,” their former guitarist
says, “Now it’s just an embarrassment, I asked them to
change the name slightly, so as not to confuse the fans, but
they refused.”
Alvin,
who has just recorded an album with Elvis Presley’s original
backing musicians, guitarist Scotty Moore and drummer DJ
Fontana (“my teenage heroes”) in Nashville, and
tentatively titled “The Real Thing” (but became Alvin Lee
in Tennessee) also reckons that
“it’s a shame the new guitarist, who must be
pretty good to play my licks, is copying somebody else’s
style instead of playing his own music. If I had taken a job
copying somebody else’s music when I was starting out, there
would never have been a Ten Years After.”
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