LITMIR.BIZ

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he would wind on the next string and improvise a two-string melody, which was usually a rock riff oriented thing on the low E and A strings. This would continue with each string, wind-play-smoke, wind-play-smoke. An hour later the guitar would be strung up, in tune and we’d be stoned out of our minds. Our subsequent recording sessions were fairly unfocused, and no wonder. Denny Cordell would be in charge, we’d have a room full of great musicians, the string players came from the Royal Academy of Music, but Denny Laine would just run out of steam after a few hours. He’d say that he had great ideas for this section or that section, but nothing was ever finished, save for one song—‘Say You Don’t Mind’. This was a small hit on British radio and a promise of great things to come, but Denny had a habit of leaving things unfinished.

      One of the greatest experiences I had in the short time since arriving in London was to write five string arrangements for Denny Laine and then have them played on the stage of the Shaftsbury Theatre at a rock show. Jimi Hendrix was also on that bill and Denny Cordell grabbed me backstage saying, ‘Visconti, come, you must see this.’ Hendrix poured lighter fluid on his Stratocaster and threw a lighted match on it—so that’s why two members of the Fire Brigade were standing in the wings, one with an axe in his hands and the other with a fire extinguisher. The audience went berserk and I was just horrified. It would take me years to save up for a Stratocaster.

      After Denny’s set, which was very well received, Tony Hall came on stage and asked me to come out from the wings to take a bow as the arranger. I wasn’t expecting this at all. I was introduced as a young, up-and-coming record producer from New York City and he told them that they’d be hearing lots of good things about me very soon. It’s a good thing I was only told afterwards that the Beatles and the Stones were in the audience as I might have embarrassed myself.

      I had already seen Hendrix at the Speakeasy a few nights after landing at Heathrow. I sat next to Kit Lambert, the producer of The Who’s Happy Jack, one of my favourite records. I was anxious to ask him how he got the sound on the record. It reminded me of Not Fade Away on which you can hear the reverb of a small room, like there must have been just a few mics picking up the slap back coming off the walls. This was typical of me back then, I used to imagine how records were made because there were no books or college courses teaching the art of production. I would try to mentally picture how things were done, which served me well when I started producing myself. Kit had no recollection of recording Happy Jack; in fact I was looking into the eyes of a very vacant man that night. He was already into advanced stages of whatever. He died after a coke dealer pushed him downstairs but he was on other things too, like Mandrax, a hypnotic drug; he was certainly zonked out that night. Hendrix got up to jam about 1 a.m. They never even put a spotlight on him; he literally played in the dark. I don’t know who played drums or bass but it wasn’t the Experience. Hendrix was really great. After two long jams Denny said, ‘We’ve got a 10 a.m. start tomorrow, we need to get going.’

      Denny Laine was another who was caught up with the whole business of how records were made. He had ideas about how the Beatles did it and urged Paul McCartney to give him some insights. According to Laine, Paul would say in a session, ‘I want you to set up this kinda loop thing where I keep taping guitar solos and then I could go back and take guitar solo number 7 and mix it with guitar solo 9.’ It was sort of multi-tracking meets electronics, but nothing like that had been invented yet. McCartney misled him, as a prank, making up fantasy techniques. As a believer in recording alchemy I almost believed it. But it got ridiculous: if some big star, especially a Beatle, had said, ‘I plunged the microphone into a bucket of water’, some people would rush off and do it and destroy perfectly good microphones. It was a strange, strange period—but really exciting.

      Being a guest at Tony Hall’s flat had one particular downside; I had to help with feeding his two cats, a valuable Abyssinian and a common fat, black cat. This was a nice arrangement for a couple of weeks, but I felt a growing familiarity with Tony, which made me feel uncomfortable. We would often chat late into the night over a few drinks, as I didn’t know anybody and had no place to go. I began to feel a little trapped in this luxurious apartment with this well-spoken man in his 40s. I imagined that he had other interests in me than just friendship. I was wary of such attention because I was hit on by gay men throughout my teens. Tony never hit on me, I’m sure it was all in my imagination, but in this first month in London I didn’t know how to read a social situation yet. Things were very different here. I felt more secure once Siegrid arrived from New York and came to live at the Hall residence.

      When I had gone to the airport to meet Siegrid I was unprepared for what she’d done. She had cut off all her beautiful long blonde hair and had a very short boyish cut; it didn’t really suit her. She had an Indian prayer shawl draped around her shoulders and carried a spiritualist book in her hand. She topped it all off by wearing wire-rimmed glasses, which she had never worn before. She had changed dramatically; especially with a holier-than-thou attitude she’d adapted in the month we were apart. The first casualty of this situation was our sex life—it stopped. Tony Hall did not like Siegrid and our nightly chats had come to an abrupt end. Siegrid and I kept his flat immaculately clean and tended to the cats’ needs which included cleaning out the stinky litter tray. As a couple our stay was very brief. Soon after Siegrid arrived we left in search of a place of our own.

      Besides working with Denny Laine during the few weeks that I stayed in Mayfair I also worked with Denny C on Procol Harum. He was frantically trying to finish their first album at his favourite studio, Olympic in Barnes, a state-of-the-art studio across the river from Hammersmith. A Whiter Shade Of Pale came out at the end of May and was a huge hit. One evening Denny and I were walking in the hallway that separated Studios A and B and bumped into Brian Jones; he was there working on tracks for an album that would become Their Satanic Majesties Request. Brian was dressed in what looked like a French noble-man’s jacket in a shade of blue and made of crushed velvet, with frilly, laced cuffs sticking out; he was also wearing makeup. If I’d approached him from a distance, and had seen him coming towards me, I might have taken this in my stride, but we literally bumped into him as we turned a corner. I was shocked.

      ‘Hey man, I love the Procol Harum single. I heard it on Radio Caroline, and I’ve just sent my chauffeur out to buy it for me.’ I was struck by how well spoken he was.

      Denny introduced me to Brian though I was still reeling to see such a (well, there is no other word for it) fop in a recording studio; it wasn’t the ‘uniform’. Of course, Brian was at the forefront of creating that hippy chic look. I was still a scruffy guy with jeans and a pale blue workman’s shirt, which was what everyone was wearing in New York; I even had a pocket flap with a hole for a pencil to go through.

      The Rolling Stones were in Studio A, which was a lot bigger than B; the latter was adequate enough to record a rock group or a small string section. In Studio B I was assisting Denny with the Procol Harum album, but it was far from smooth sailing. Denny was having a problem with the band’s drummer and Denny’s solution was simple: he fired him in the middle of a session. Cordell had very high expectations for drummers and this one was not the first to feel his displeasure. In contrast Gary Brooker and Matthew Fisher were a joy to work with, and Keith Reid was always lurking in the background overseeing the entire affair. He made me feel like he knew more than anyone about what was really going on in the studio—only he wouldn’t tell us because that would be cheating.

      Studio A was an enormous cine stage studio with a screen and a projector; it was used for film scores. After the Stones left, Dudley Moore was in doing a score for some film, while we were in B with Procol Harum. We had to be very quiet for about 30 minutes while he recorded a little piano motif with three flutes.

      One aspect of that first Procol Harum album that I couldn’t get my head around was the fact that it was in mono; stereo was still regarded as inconceivable for rock music or pop in Britain. In New York groups like the Lovin’ Spoonful and others were experimenting with stereo and I found it weird that in England, where they were making superior sounding records, stereo was mostly a no-go. It certainly answered my question as to why there were no stereograms in the homes of British people I visited; David Platz had supplied me with one for my flat.

      The fact that Siegrid and I had to do some flat hunting tempered

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