Inside Out (18 page)

The problem was that Michelangelo wanted total control, and since he couldn’t make the music himself he exercised control
by selection. Consequently each piece had to be finished rather than roughed out, then redone, rejected and resubmitted –
Roger would go over to Cinecittà to play him the tapes in the afternoon. Antonioni would never take a first effort, and frequently
complained that the music was too strong and overpowered the
visual image. One device we tried was a mood tape. We sub-mixed various versions and overdubs in such a way that he could
sit at the mixer and literally add a more lyrical, romantic or despairing feel by sliding the mixer fader up or down. It still
didn’t work. Antonioni ended up using an assortment of pieces from other musicians like Jerry Garcia and John Fahey, and despite
a dramatic and explosive finale, the film bombed critically and commercially. Continuing our policy of recycling anything
remotely useful, we quietly gathered up all our out-takes. There was sure to be some opportunity to use them in the future.

T
HE BATH & WEST
Showground in Shepton Mallet, a small town in Somerset, was the site of the Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music in
June 1970. We had chosen this event, in the depths of the English countryside, as an opportunity to perform ‘Atom Heart Mother’,
an ambitious piece we had recently recorded complete with French horns, tuba, trumpets, trombones, a solo cello and a twenty-strong
choir – the kitchen sink must have been unavailable for session work.

The festival, a two-day extravaganza, in an attempt to emulate the scale of Woodstock the year before, had imported an array
of groups from both sides of the Atlantic. There was a hefty quota of headline acts from the States, including Jefferson Airplane,
Santana, the Byrds and Steppenwolf, alongside the British bands: as well as ourselves, the bill featured Fairport Convention
and Led Zeppelin. In an attempt to keep up with the John Paul Joneses, it seemed entirely appropriate that we should make
the grandiose, but logistically challenging, gesture of herding the entire complement of backing musicians out to the wilds
of the West Country.

Rock festivals by nature tend to start off with good intentions and then slide gently into chaos as the crowds increase and
technical problems multiply, particularly if Mother Nature takes a hand – although on this occasion the weather was idyllic.
This volatility has since become one of the things people seem most to look forward to: much of the anticipation for attending
Glastonbury seems to be the prospect of continuing the great Woodstock tradition of some decent mud bathing.

The police would be warned to expect an attendance of approximately half the expected number, since if they knew the true
total in advance each event would have been banned for failing every conceivable health and safety provision. At this particular
festival I think Freddy Bannister, the promoter, finally had the requisite nervous breakdown as the full horror of what he
had taken on revealed itself.

In order to get past the traffic clogging up every major and side road on the way, we had enjoyed a desperate drive up the
wrong side of the road. The coach carrying our backing musicians had a driver with a far less cavalier approach. He took the
safer, surer, but eight-and-a-half-hour option. Even the brass players, noted as a breed for their resilience, were showing
signs of wear and tear by the time they were finally decanted. After all their tribulations, they found they had in fact arrived
far too early since the festival was running well behind schedule: the programme note All times subject to change’ was frequently
a euphemism for ‘Everything will be running about half a day late’.

Sensing the way things were going we tried to negotiate an earlier slot by changing places with one wild-eyed guitar hero.
Anxious but unable to help, he apologised explaining that having just loaded up on the pharmaceuticals he thought necessary
to give his best performance, he lacked sufficient supplies to reach those heights again, and so would be obliged to stick
to the running order.

Our original slot had been 10.15 p.m. By the time we were finally able to lead our merry band of musicians on stage – most
of whom had never encountered anything quite so chaotically magnificent even in their long and varied careers – dawn was breaking.
As a result events conspired to give us a dramatic backdrop that really lifted the impact of our arrival on stage. The choir’s
conductor, John Aldiss, did a magnificent job of
controlling the choir and orchestra, and we managed to stagger through the show, even though the tuba player found that some
bucolic reveller had poured a pint of beer down the horn of his instrument.

One might have thought that after such an event a short rest would have been in order. However, it was festival time, so we
found ourselves leaving the stage and on another demon drive through the early morning mist straight back to London to catch
a flight to Holland to play another, but less extravagant, festival the following night. With no time to recover, we were
plunged back into exactly the same kind of scenario, although at least this time we were minus the orchestra, a merciful release
for both parties.

‘Atom Heart Mother’ had been assembled during a number of rehearsals after we returned from our stay in Rome courtesy of Michelangelo
Antonioni. Once we had settled on the nucleus of the piece (a theme supplied I think by David), everyone else had contributed,
not only musically, but also in devising the overall dynamics. I can’t remember now if we had decided to create a longer piece
or whether it just snowballed, but it was a way of operating we were starting to feel comfortable with.

After some lengthy sessions in early 1970, we had created a very long, rather majestic, but quite unfocused and still unfinished
piece. One way to develop such a piece was to play it live, so we played shortened versions, sometimes dubbed ‘The Amazing
Pudding’, at a number of gigs. Gradually we added, subtracted and multiplied the elements, but still seemed to lack an essential
something. I think we had always intended to record the track, but the songwriters must have all felt they had hit a specific
block, as in the early summer we decided to hand over the music as it existed to Ron Geesin and asked him if he could add
some orchestral colour and choral parts.

I had been introduced to Ron through Sam Jonas Cutler. Sam
had given up a career as a special needs teacher to become a tour manager. His earlier skills no doubt helped him greatly
in his involvement with the world of rock’n’ roll: he had worked with the Rolling Stones on their 1969 tour of the US, including
the ill-fated free concert at Altamont, and later with the Grateful Dead.

Ron Geesin is a talented musician and arranger, as well as a virtuoso performer on banjo and harmonium, when his style might
best be described as ragtime poetry on speed. He had also built for himself what was effectively one of the first electronic
home studios. Ron, who was not much older than us, but appeared significantly wiser with his demeanour of a wild-bearded professor,
had a basement in Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill where he pursued his craft, surrounded by a collection of recording machines,
spools, miles of tape, and a number of bespoke and proprietary musical devices.

Although this might sound chaotic, one of Ron’s great strengths was that he was very well organised. Working with recorded
music on tape has one inherent and major problem: all tape looks exactly the same, which is a logistical nightmare. Unless
you keep very close tabs on which bit of tape has been transferred from one spool to another and immediately keep a record
of the changeover, it can take you days to find the piece of tape you need again. Due to his meticulous organisational skills,
Ron never seemed to have a problem laying his hands on the correct piece.

Ron had been working on his own for quite some time, so his idiosyncratic techniques and modus operandi were entirely his
own. He had interested both Roger and me in home production and his influence can clearly be detected in one element of Roger’s
contribution to
Ummagumma,
namely ‘Several Species’. Roger and Ron also worked together on the music for an unusual medical documentary called
The Body –
based on the book by Anthony
Smith – which was released in 1970 and on one track of which, ‘Give Birth To A Smile’, Rick, David and I also played.

Ron passed on a variety of tricks with Revox tape recorders hooked up in tandem that went well beyond the bounds of standard
use as recommended in the manufacturer’s manual. He did all his own wiring and instructed me in the rudiments of soldering.
With stereotypical Scottish parsimony he would collect discarded tape from professional studios. After erasing the tape for
reuse, he would then splice together any half reels to make up a full one, or painstakingly re-make any of the studio’s edits
that failed to come up to his own high standards. Apart from anything else Ron taught me to splice tape beautifully.

One pleasant spin-off of this relationship was that Ron wrote the music for the soundtrack of one of my father’s documentaries
–
The History Of Motoring
– and I like to think they both enjoyed the experience. My father in particular was delighted by the fact that Ron always
turned up not only with the music but also with some new home-made gadget or cable that he had purpose-built to simplify the
transfer of the music from Ron’s machine to the film.

Ron seemed an ideal choice to create the arrangements on ‘Atom Heart Mother’. He understood the technicalities of composition
and arranging, and his ideas were radical enough to steer us away from the increasingly fashionable but extremely ponderous
rock orchestral works of the era. At the time arrangements of such epics tended to involve fairly conservative thinking; classical
music graduates had been indoctrinated with a lack of sympathy for rock and ‘crossing over’ was still seen as something of
a betrayal of their years of discipline and training. The good news was that with Ron at the helm, it was unlikely that we’d
end up with ‘The London Symphonic Philharmonia Plays Pink Floyd’.

Ron set to work on our piece, and with little further input from us, he arrived at Abbey Road armed with a sheaf of scores
ready to record. He immediately ran up against a major hurdle. The session players balked at being directed by Ron, who they
perceived as belonging to the world of rock music. Revenge could only be exacted in the confines of the studio, and my God
how the blood could flow! In the case of Ron, an actual human sacrifice in the studio itself was being offered up.

As Ron waved his baton hopefully, they made as much trouble as they could. Ron had not only written some technically demanding
parts, but the phrasing he wanted was unusual. The musicians hated this even more. With microphones open they knew every comment
would be noted and their discreet laughter, clock-watching, and constant interruptions of ‘Please sir, what does this mean?’
meant that recording was at a standstill, while the chances of Ron being had up on a manslaughter charge increased logarithmically
by the second.

This was not his only problem. At the time the piece was recorded EMI had just taken delivery of the latest in recording technology,
the new eight-track Studer recorders. These utilised one-inch-wide tape, and with admirable caution EMI issued a directive
that no edits were to be done on this, as they were worried about the quality of any splicing.

Unfortunately ‘Atom Heart Mother’ is twenty-four minutes long. Roger and I embarked on what can only be described as an Odyssean
voyage to record the backing track. In order to keep tracks free for the overdubs we had bass and drums on two tracks, and
the whole recording had to be done in one pass. Playing the piece without any other instruments meant that getting through
it without mistakes demanded the full range of our limited musicianship; matters such as tempo had to be left in abeyance.
The delights of quantizing – using computers to digitally adjust
tempos without affecting pitch – were still some twenty years in the future.