The Private Life of Alvin Lee
by Simon Stable
New Musical Express - May 6, 1972
Alvin Lee of Ten Years After seems to spend
more time on tour than on holiday, but recently
before yet another American tour, I managed
to get to see him at his country home. After
a pleasant and enjoyable chat he played me
a track he’d written and recorded the night
before, a number he’s thinking of putting
on the next album. It was another of his
fast foot-tapers with plenty of harmonica
and guitar panning from side to side. He
told me he was planning to call the song
“Holy Shit”, though he did say he might be
forced to change the title and some of the
words. I’ve known Lee for about three years
and, despite his success, I’ve always found
him to be an easy-to-get-on-with guy. He
is, as the following interview may show,
an interesting and intelligent person.
After your third album “Stonedhenge”, why did you change producers? Why produce yourself?
Good question. Well, when we did our first album we were very new to the whole recording situation, and our producer was provided with the studio and we were told to appear at ten o’clock in the morning and make an album. And it was out in four days. We were very green. We just recorded all the numbers we did on tape in the studio. I don’t think at the time we even heard it until it came out. When it finally did go out, we were quite disappointed, really, as the result didn’t seem to have the dynamics of the record we had played within the studio. And we realised this was down to the recording techniques. The second album was live, so there was nothing to do about that. Then we decided to produce ourselves. Still, being rather green we used the same studios that we’d been given. It’s a Decca album, so we used a Decca studio. It only had a four-track machine. There were no facilities for panning stereo, and what little bit of that we did we had to have equipment specially made. We had this little box made to pan across an instrument, from one side to another. That’s the reason for all the corny panning, just one box with one knob on. It was just a matter of getting into the format. Getting to know what it was all about. We realised that rather than doing what somebody else suggested, who wasn’t really interpreting our music the way we wanted it interpreted, anyway, it would be best doing it ourselves. Even if you make a mistake, I believe that your own mistakes are better recorded than someone else’s. Ten Years After music is quite personal to us as musicians, and I think it should be recorded our way than the way a third party sees it. I believe of all musicians , I find it hard to respect a musician who uses a producer, because I think that if a musician knows what he wants to put down, he should do it himself. That’s where the art of recording comes in, to know how to apply your music to the tape, to get the results in. We haven’t, to my own personal satisfaction, done anything at all incredible, but every album has had good bits, and we’ve learned from them. So, hopefully, we are in control and will make them better and better as we go along, which is the logical progression anyway. I must be putting producers out of business!
Do you feel your part in “Woodstock” helped
your career as a musician or not? I mean,
it put you in the public eye, but did you
not find you were playing more and more requests,
and less and less of the things you actually
wanted to do?
Well, we never play requests. We never play anything other than what we want to do. However “Woodstock” did have considerable effect. When we did “Woodstock” we didn’t realise it was going to be such a big thing, just a festival which we had to arrive at on time. It wasn’t until we got into a helicopter, and flew in, that we realised what a big thing it was. Even then, we weren’t to realise how much world attention it would get, which it did. It was on national news in America and everything, and that’s more than I expected, so the kind of publicity we got from being in the “Woodstock” film initially, like gave us a boost in popularity. A lot more people had heard us, where as before “Woodstock” we were still playing the concert halls and we were still selling enough albums, we were doing really well. After “Woodstock”, well we found that more people were coming to the concert halls, more people were buying the album, but it was on the strength of “Going Home”, which is a nasty situation. You can’t take control of it. First, like, a lot of young kids were coming to the concerts who weren’t particularly into what we were trying to do, merely into us having been at “Woodstock”, and it was more or less a kind a rock ‘n’ roll circus, which is what we’d been trying to avoid up to then. And it got a bit out of hand, and I did in fact regret having been in “Woodstock”…fearing it was going too far out of hand, but we used the opportunity of the press and that, doing Press articles to say that we wanted people to get into the structures of the music, and listen to what we were trying to do as well as rock ‘n’ roll.
I explained, that we rock ‘n’ roll at the end, just to have a good time. Roland Kirk does the same thing—plays all his serious structures for two hours, then ends up laying on the piano playing a twelve-bar. It’s a good way to finish off a gig: gets everything out of your system, and everyone can have a good rave-up and go home feeling exhilarated, which is a good thing. But I feel that if “Woodstock” had used “I Can’t Keep From Crying”, it might have been a bit more helpful to us, ‘cos it would have spotlighted the more constructive stuff we’re doing. But all in all, now that “Woodstock” has died down, I don’t think it has made much difference. It might have turned-on a younger audience, maybe they’re now into something else. I find the straight pop, the entertainment side of music, has a very select audience. It’s not something we get involved in. Like singles, we don’t get involved in them, because you have a hit single, then “Top Of The Pops”, it doesn’t bring anything that progresses the band. Like a band that’s nowhere can have a hit single, and suddenly start getting a reasonable turn out for their concerts and probably better contracts for their next single. But they’ve got to keep on recording hit singles, and to do that there are people that specialise in aiming hit singles at the mass market. It’s a disgusting , soul-destroying kind of business to get into. I believe the musician should record the sounds he likes and wants to express, and a lot of it as far as we’re concerned is left to chance.
When TYA took off it wasn’t because we aimed to write music at the audience, it was just that people had picked up on what we were doing, and the more we did it, the more people got into it. That’s all it’s ever been really. When thinking of Ten Years After, one usually thinks of Alvin Lee rather than the rest of the band. Do you ever feel any resentment from the others? TYA is a co-op, we all get paid the same; we all attempt to do the same amount of work; we all tour the same, because I’m the singer and the lead guitarist, it was quite on the cards I should be singled out as the front man, because I stand in the spotlight. It was intended originally, when we started out, we hoped to make it four people on an equal level. It was through nothing to do with ourselves that this Alvin Lee business got picked out, we didn’t encourage it.
We had to disown this new Decca album they’re bringing out of old tracks, because it’s got Alvin Lee and Co., and that’s the very thing we’ve been trying to avoid. We talked about it when it happened and said, “look, this looks like it’s going to happen, and there’s nothing much we can do about it.” When people say Alvin Lee this and that at concerts, I usually personify what they either like or don’t like about the band. It’s just how they refer to the band. You yourself say that when one thinks of TYA, some people do think of an Alvin Lee back-up band. To our minds it isn’t. It’s not a thing to really get concerned about ourselves, it’s irrelevant to what we’re trying to do. It’s a kind a super-star role, which we’ve never encouraged, it’s just a kind of misunderstanding. I mean, I can explain myself completely to anyone who calls me a super-star, but I know very well they don’t know me, they’re just saying that without enough knowledge, so there’s no answer to it. It’s a shame that everybody can’t understand every musician that exists for the true fact of what he’s trying to do. Eric Clapton is your number one guitarist, and so many people adore Eric Clapton and hate everyone else for no logical reason, it’s just the way things go. You can’t control it, it’s just the way people think.
Your last album “A Space In Time” didn’t do incredibly well in England. Do you feel this had anything to do with the fact that American copies were imported and on sale long before its British release? Or was it that the album wasn’t up to standard?
Well, I wouldn’t say up to standard, I think the standard as far as we are concerned was better in some ways. The major reason it didn’t do as well in your album charts was due to us not releasing it at the right time in England. We were pressured to get a release date with the new Columbia label in the States, so we released it there first. It was three months before it was released in Europe, and a lot of European sales were lost because of the import shops buying it from the States. That helped the sales in the USA, it was a gold album in the States, the first one, so obviously it was received there better than anything else we’d done. That’s the reason I was given when I said “what’s happened to the last album?” I think it’s true. Our next album is going to be released on the same day world-wide, so every market that sells it will be selling their own copies, not importing it in.
What did you feel about your concert at the Colosseum. Was the Sunday night better than the midnight, Saturday?
Oh yeah, The midnight show was a bit slow, the audience seemed tired. Those things like having to wait an hour from the time you got in, to when the first band played, always affect a concert. That can be the difference between going down well and having chairs thrown at you, whether the road managers and equipment function well, and it all comes together in time or not. If it doesn’t go well there’s nothing you can do except get it together as quickly as possible. I wasn’t disappointed with any of the concerts.To my mind there’s no good concert hall in London. We didn’t play the Rainbow unfortunately, that might have changed my mind. You see, we were playing to four balconies at the Colosseum, an eighth of the audience. With our spherical array of speakers and horns we can hope to cover about a hundred degrees of sound, which is about forty percent getting good sound. It’s just acoustic problems and technical difficulties in projecting the sound into the audience, which is always a problem where ever you go.
There will always be people getting bass boom, always be people hearing too much guitar, too much vocal. I think people who sit in the middle, about ten or fifteen rows back, get a good sound and know what’s going on. It’s unfortunate that someone standing at the back gets the sound blocked off by people standing up in the front.
It’s Better At Festivals, in Fact?
Right, you’ve got no acoustic problems, and you’re in the open air, which is always nice. There is a problem being in the open air that is easy to overcome, you just have to use a lot of power and a lot of speakers. It’s when you get sound bouncing around halls, hitting the ceiling and bouncing back. When you play loud, it’s a different case. You get good sound drifting across an auditorium, reaching a listener up on an acoustic level, but when you’ve got a lot of sound coming out of the speakers, then suddenly the corners of the room, and what the ceilings are made of, start affecting the sound. These are the problems, more or less.
You’ve just been on an extensive European tour and you frequently tour America and Japan. Which countries do you prefer to play most and why?
Well, it changes, at the moment I really enjoy playing in England. The last concert we did, you could hear a pin drop all night long, and people really sat listening, getting into what we were doing. When it came to like rock ‘n’ roll at the end, they got into that and had a jive around, which is—as far as the format of our concerts go—perfect . More recently than that we did the colleges, which was like getting back to the roots-razzle-bit after playing Madison Square Gardens and the Philadelphia Spectrum. Twenty thousand people. Really it was almost a shock. The first college we did was at Reading University: it’s just a little wooden hall with about 1,300 people in it. You go on stage and there’s none of this Ten Years After bit, awoah! You just walked out and said hullo, and people were sitting there and it was like getting back to the old club bit, I really enjoyed it. I felt you had to really kind’ve work; get things to work on stage. At a really big concert it becomes a bit like a circus, often comparable to feeding lions to the Christians at the Colosseum in Rome. You stir up so much excitement: by the time the band goes on you sometimes feel that what you play isn’t that important. That’s a wrong feeling to take, but sometimes it occurs to you when you do a lot of concerts. When you walk on stage and people cheer for two minutes you feel flattered but are they going to listen to what we are going to do? And half the while, they’re cheering through the first three numbers as well. They’re just having a good time, which is great, but I like people to listen to the music. If you go down well I like to feel it’s been earned—rather than just happened.
Are you going to do any festivals here?
I hope so. I want to see festivals continue myself, for more reasons than one. I don’t know of any plans to do a festival, but we’ll spend time in England after we’ve recorded the next album. We’ve got possible dates for festivals, but nothing’s been confirmed.
On your last album you added strings to your last track—are you in fact thinking of adding horns on the next one?
Yeah, thinking of it. On an album we try and show where our music is at, but for variety, we try and have a couple of tracks to play around with, and we always find it nice to do a track which is out of character so everybody says ‘Why Good Lord This is Nothing Like Ten Years After!!!! So therefore, if you put a nice soft mellow un-Ten Years After between two Hard TYA tracks, it adds to the overall variety of the album. You don’t get this grind, grind, grind, grind of some rock albums, because they’re all the same tempo throughout. So for that reason alone, we really enjoyed doing the strings on the last album. It was just an experiment to see what we could do with strings, and I’m really happy with it. It’s one of the best string things there is. It had very little to do with TYA’s music as people would think of it, but there again, music doesn’t really mean that it’s just what people have picked up through things like “Woodstock”, and variety is quite important to us.
We’ve just been recording in the South of France. We hired a big house there and the Rolling Stones’ mobile truck, and whether we were influenced by being in the Rolling Stones’ truck, or whether it’s that the Rolling Stones truck has its own sound, I’m not sure—but a lot of the tracks we did there sounded very similar to the Stones. So rather than just forget them, just for a joke we got a saxophonist from Supertramp to overdub some sax parts on it and beef it up. If you listen to the last Stones album without the overdubs it’s quite surprising, and if you listen to some Beatles tracks without the overdubs there’s nothing there. Some people specialise in overdubs, but we don’t. We specialise in the basic four instruments. But I don’t see any reason why, for one or two tracks, we don’t have a nine-hundred-piece orchestra just for the variety of it all. It’s a groove to do, so we’ll probably get into something like that.
Your best album to my mind was “Cricklewood Green”, and the best track on that was “Circles”. I liked it because it was acoustic. Are you planning more things in this vein?
This was a side trip again. It was a direct influence from “Astral Weeks” by Van Morrison which moved me considerably at the time, and I used that kind of format; the folk acoustic format, to say something I wanted to say. Which was life going round in circles, which is a pretty…..well, it was just a phase I was going through. I mean. I still think that way sometimes. It was more of a folk outlet to me….more like a truthful thought….a thoughtful thought being sung instead of spoken. I haven’t had any other ideas along the same vein. We could always do something like that. We did acoustic stuff on the first album and third album. It’s not planned. It was where we were at, really. I mean, the last album showed we could play some nice tunes, so I’m happy with that, that’s past. I think we have to show now, more of our expression of our own selves and our instruments.