Wild Tales (16 page)

You ask me, “On a Carousel” was one of the Hollies’ best songs. It’s a pop song with an infectious chorus, but flirts with gorgeous shifts in rhythmic texture. The transition to “Horses chasing ’cause they’re racing / So near yet so far-r-r-r-r” features a hook that keeps the melody from becoming predictable. Tony’s barblike accents that echo the phrase “on a carousel” demonstrate his subtle virtuosity. And the lyric captures the essence of young love without the usual moon-and-June clichés. We knew it was a hit from the get-go.

After “Carousel,” it felt like we were on an express train. You couldn’t avoid that fucking record. It exploded out of the box and ran right up the charts, so the gigs got better, as well as the money. This was the first time I’d made any serious dough. We’d made plenty steadily over the years, but after “Carousel” the bank vaults
opened. Sometime around its release we got a check from Columbia for $250,000. A quarter of a million big ones! That made an impression. In retrospect, I handled it pretty well. I wasn’t used to having a lot of money, so I wasn’t a big spender. Okay, I did treat myself to a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, but a secondhand Rolls, which I bought from one of my dearest friends, Ronnie Stratton. We took it for a test drive down to London and when we came out of a show, it was covered in lipstick:
I LOVE TONY
,
I LOVE GRAHAM
,
I LOVE ALLAN
, all over the car. Otherwise, I sent money home. I tried to help my family as much as I could. One of my mother’s dreams was to have her own pub, so I bought her one, the Unicorn in Pendleton. She ran the place and sat at the end of the bar regally, like Queen Elizabeth. But I didn’t buy a lot of extravagant things because that kind of stuff never meant anything to me.

In December, I went out one night to Blaises, in the West End of London, to see a kid from America whom Linda Keith told me about:
Jimi Hendrix. I sat directly behind John, Paul, and George. We were all stunned by his music; it was so primitive, so wild, so unbelievably rock ’n’ roll. A few months later, in March 1967, the
Byrds came to England for a short promotional tour to support their new single, “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star.” This was the first time they’d been to the UK since 1965, when the promoter fucked up by billing them as “America’s Answer to the
Beatles.” Utter blasphemy. It was absurd to make that kind of comparison. They’d gotten trashed by everyone all over London, the press, audiences, women, stray dogs—everyone except for the Beatles themselves, who sympathized and were incredibly kind to them. I remember catching the Byrds on the opening gig of that tour at Blaises, the same place I’d seen Jimi Hendrix for the first time. They came out and
 … they were smoking
cigs onstage!
The Hollies would never have done that. We wouldn’t have dared; we’d have gotten crucified for it. And they weren’t particularly good. Their equipment was shitty. Two guys plugged into the same amp. No one was happy, onstage or off.

But this time around, all was forgiven. They were major stars
trailing a ton of hits: “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “All I Really Want to Do,” “Eight Miles High,” “Renaissance Fair.” The
Beatles invited Crosby to visit them at Abbey Road during a
Sgt. Pepper’s
session. The Byrds’ hotel was a hoity-toity affair called the White House in the north of London. I knew the place. It was full of blue-haired ladies and old fuckers in tuxedoes, the last place you’d expect to trip over a guy like Croz. So I gave David a call and said, “You’ve got to get out of that place. You can’t smoke dope in the White House. Come stay with me.” And he did. It was great to see him again.

Since our introduction in LA, he’d sent me a tape of stuff he was working on, including “Déjà Vu.” Quite frankly, I’d never heard anything like these songs. I was used to writing in the standard pop format—an intro, first and second verse, go to the chorus, maybe do a bridge, do the last chorus and get the fuck out of there and get paid. I was trained to do that by the Hollies, and we were good at it. But “Déjà Vu” was a completely different beast. It was jazz-oriented; it never repeated itself. There was no first or second verse, no chorus. It just kept moving forward. I was completely blown away and, as a songwriter, quite humbled. I played Croz a couple sketches of my songs, and he was very encouraging. But I knew, at that point, musically he was miles ahead of me.

Crosby wasn’t happy with the Byrds. They were refusing to put his songs on the albums, and in return David was behaving badly. He was being a dick, refusing to show for rehearsals, staging hissy fits, and acting out. (Little did I know, David had a PhD in acting out.) There was already talk about the Byrds getting rid of him.

Despite all that, he was the same ol’ Croz I’d met with Cass. His irreverence and musical ability were extraordinary features. What amazed me most was the incredible amount of dope that this kid could smoke and yet still function. Still bright, still funny, still able to maintain his train of thought, still philosophizing, while I was still laughing at that fly on the wall. The guy was fucking immune to it all.

One morning soon after he arrived at my place, I woke him up with tea and muffins and said, “I’ve got to go to a press conference with the
Hollies. Feel like coming along?” He was game. The event was in support of an artist named Keith, who’d had a hit with “98.6” and had just released a single of our song “Pay You Back with Interest.” It was over at Pye Studios, where we’d recorded with the Everly Brothers, so it was familiar and comfortable turf. Crosby dressed for the occasion, in a cape with leather doodads and Borsalino hat.

The place was full of press, the usual guys who covered these events and asked the same meaningless, idiotic questions. Right off the bat, a reporter came up to us and asked some fucking stupid question like “What color are your socks?” or “What did you have for dinner last night?” Normally, the Hollies would have answered those questions. We were used to photographers saying: “Go stand in the doorway and put your elbows in your ears.” And we’d do it, we played the game. That’s the way things were done in England. But Crosby turned on the guy and said, “Hey,
fuck off!
Ask him a decent question.” And the room went silent. He generated more publicity with those few words than the entire press conference.

His whole attitude was different from ours, but I instinctively knew that this was where I wanted to go. I was twenty-five and fed up with acting like a little moptop, no longer happy with being played for a fool by the press. It was time to move on, especially in the image department. And now I had a role model—of a sort. Crosby was a guy who seemed to be more in control, even though he was out of control. I loved his whole take on things.

A
FTER
D
AVID LEFT
, the Hollies set out on a package tour of the UK with Brian Poole and the
Tremeloes and the
Spencer Davis Group. In the few short years since our emergence on the scene, the quality of music had risen exponentially. Both bands were great onstage. They knew how to duplicate the high level of their records without losing the edge. Plus, everyone had learned to perform—to
pace their shows, to make sure the sound was perfectly balanced, and to excite the crowds. Bottom line was: You had to be good. You couldn’t get by anymore just by shaking your ass. Word got around if bands couldn’t cut it onstage. The kids weren’t gullible. You know: We won’t get fooled again.

The
Tremeloes were enjoying an amazing resurgence. They’d suffered serious blowback when word got out that Decca had chosen them over the
Beatles in 1963. That was a hard one to live down. Then their lead singer, Brian Poole, left the group in 1966. Seems that a change of scenery was just the thing, because since then they’d had a string of three gold records: the Cat Stevens song “Here Comes My Baby”; “Silence Is Golden,” the old Four Seasons hit; and “Even the Bad Times Are Good.”

The
Spencer Davis Group kicked serious ass. Spencer was a nice cat, and not a bad musician. But everyone knew that
Stevie Winwood was the power behind that band. He was an enormous talent: a voice that mimicked Junior Walker’s sax, same musical sensibility as the Mar-Keys. Only eighteen years old. Helluva combination. The last night of the tour in London,
Dave Mason came backstage in a pair of foppy knee-length English riding boots. Stevie introduced us and told me he was leaving Spencer Davis to form a new band with Dave, Chris Wood, and Jim Capaldi. Gonna call themselves
Traffic. I wonder if they ever got off the ground?

The pressure was always on the Hollies to stay on the charts, and as “Carousel” wound down its incredible run we struggled to come up with a follow-up single with the same kind of infectious groove. Tony had been playing with a melody influenced by the
Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It was a three-chord progression dressed up with a strangely affecting refrain, but he couldn’t put a lyric to it. As a placeholder, he kept singing, “Hey, Mr. Man,” which not only didn’t cut it but didn’t spark any ideas. We tried forcing the issue, latching on to different parts of it as a springboard, but nothing doing. It wouldn’t give.

Sometime that spring, we were rehearsing for a tour at Albert Hall.
Marianne Faithfull was on the bill. We’d known her since she was sixteen, an insanely stunning woman. She was brilliant at image, pretty good voice. When she did “As Tears Go By,” it was frail, vulnerable, projecting exactly the vision that stroked my Catholic schoolgirl fantasy. More than a few nights I went to sleep with her on my mind. Anyway, she turned up wearing a white blouse and gray schoolgirl’s outfit. She was fabulous at playing that game. Man, it worked on me. The sight of her raised my fucking blood pressure, and gradually “Hey, Mr. Man” morphed into “Hey, Marianne … what’s your game now, can anybody play?” But we chickened out. We didn’t have the balls to sing, “Hey, Marianne,” so we made up a name that we’d never heard before: Carrie Anne.

Needless to say,
Ron Richards loved it. He could smell a hit a mile away and designated it as our next single. Listening to it today, you can hear its pull. The verses paint little tortured scenarios about the eternal conflict sparked when someone young and innocent confronts the sophistication that comes with growing up. The singer feels left behind when his childhood playmate takes on overt sexual appeal. He realizes she has to play the field a little bit, and for that he’ll be rewarded: She’ll be back once she’s gained experience. Even so, his lament is downright painful:
You’re so, so like a woman to me / So like a woman to me …
His attitudes are constantly shifting. The distance between heartache and resentment narrows:
When the lesson’s over, you’ll be with me …
Maybe, maybe not. Either way, the crowning touch is the irresistible chorus—
Hey, Carrie Anne, what’s your game now, can anybody play?
—which weaves the scenes together in our signature three-part, right up to the dramatic climax, leaving her name echoing over the end.

We nailed that track in one session. You can hear the confidence in our voices in the way we pounced on those lyrics. The harmonies surge forward from the opening notes, building right to the crescendo that segues into the verse. It’s a nicely polished performance.
And then we had the solo played by a steel-drum busker whom
Ron Richards found on the street, that little calliope flourish that winks at the whole affair.

The Hollies had developed into a good little band. We’d become professional, efficient, and could always recognize a potential hit when we heard one. We could turn out hits like this in our sleep, again and again. We had the formula down pat (eventually we had seventeen top-twenty records in the six years I was in the Hollies). But I was tired of the routine. Sure, we could write a hit single to order, but the mechanics of it no longer intrigued. I was bored with the moon-and-June rhymes, singing about schoolboy crushes and forbidden sex. There were deeper things to be thinking about, other horizons to cross. I was listening to more intricate songs, like “Over Under Sideways Down,” “Itchycoo Park,” “Somebody to Love,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Under My Thumb,” “Hey Joe”—the radio that year was full of great songs. Their construction, lyrically and musically, showed off how far rock ’n’ roll had come, and they served as a blueprint for where I wanted us to go, but we hadn’t evolved like the
Beatles had. Our material was fairly simplistic: We wrote pop songs. And the rest of the guys liked it that way. Me? I was smoking dope, opening myself up to new frontiers, growing creatively.

I’d been working on a few things intended to take us in a different direction. One particular number, “Sleep Song,” threw the Hollies a powerful curve. In it, I wrote: “
And when I awake, I will kiss your eyes open / Take off my clothes, and I’ll lie by your side.
” They freaked when they heard it. “We can’t sing that. It’ll never sell.” Hey, different strokes. Except that poetry and mature experiences seemed to be outside their scope. My lyrics offended their provincial sensibilities and sent out signals that mine were on a different trajectory.

That summer, we were at Abbey Road, in the midst of recording our fifth
album,
Butterfly.
The Beatles were in and out of the studio, putting the finishing touches on a long-awaited album, and in the course of things I became pretty friendly with their manager, Brian
Epstein. He gave me three gifts that rearranged my chromosomes: a 16 mm movie of the Beatles at Shea Stadium and another they’d made to promote their single “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The final gift was an advance copy of
Sgt. Pepper’s.
From the opening notes, I knew it was an incredible piece of work. Listening to it, there was wonderment, envy: “I wish we’d have been that smart.” Musically, I was overwhelmed. I played it repeatedly for days, soaking it up. I knew every note, understood how beautiful it was, felt the power of the individual songs, and was stunned by the composition as a whole.

A few days later, my old friend Allan McDougall, BMI’s publicity guru, called and wondered if he could bring the Turtles by my place. They were arriving from the States only that afternoon, and he thought a visit with me would help to acclimate them, get them into the groove. They’d been on a plane all night and were feeling pretty fucked up, but they weren’t as fucked up as I was about to get them. I had a hash pipe that was eighteen inches long with a nice silver bowl that gave a good draw. At one point, after we’d been smoking it about an hour, I said, “You guys think you are high?” They said, “Yeah, we’re totally fucked up.” I said, “Well, good, because I want to play you something.” And I threaded a reel of tape on the machine; it was the yet-unreleased
Sgt. Pepper’s
album. I knew the album would wipe the floor with them. Very few had heard it, and everyone was anticipating it. Without telling them what I was going to play, I said, “Listen to this.” And I turned it up
loud!
It was obvious from the first few bars that it was the new Beatles album, and the Turtles, Mark and Howard, duly shit their pants. They went directly from my place to Jimi’s with news of what they’d heard. It was their first time in the UK. Welcome to England, baby!