Ted’s diary records Tear Gas’ meeting with Bill and the first rehearsal with Alex
1 FRAMED
‘HOWFF’ is an old Scots word for a drinking den, and the Burns Howff in Glasgow’s West Regent Street was an old Scots place for musicians to play and hang out. That’s where Tear Gas waited until Alex arrived, dressed like a coollege professor in a corduroy jacket with elbow patches, with his guitar strapped over his back. There was a short conversation – he may or may not have bought them a drink – and they proceeded to Thor Studios to put their music where their mouths were.
TED: Alex said: ‘Okay, I’ve got this song called Midnight Moses – be careful with it, because it’s not quite as straightforward as you think.’ So everyone picked up their bits and we went through it, and I thought, yeah, we can play this.
ZAL: He’d been doing what he did, and I hadn’t been impressed – this is out of tune, he’s not singing that very well… but when we got a hold of Midnight Moses it all changed. He was just bouncing about with his manic grin and there was a real buzz about it: about him as a performer. He had so much conviction about what he had in the bag – he had the material, he had the presentation – he just needed the backing.
HUGH: My impression is that Alex knew what he wanted from the word ‘go’. I recall playing Midnight Moses that day, the solid eight-part on the right hand, and thinking it was kinda boring, there was no opportunity for me to show off… But it turned out it was harder to keep going than I’d thought.
They also ran through Framed and I Just Wanna Make Love To You that day, but it was the instant bite of Midnight Moses that grabbed them. Alex would later say: ‘When I met them they were playing a thousand different things at the same time, while I try to be simple, so we stripped it down a bit. I don’t think the band could believe they played like that.’
DAVE: They were trying I Just Wanna Make Love To You and Zal was doing the guitar part, and Alex was saying, no, turn it down, turn it down. Of course, anything lower than 11 and it wasn’t happening for us. You could hear the guitar from the body as loud as the amp – but Zal stayed with it, and once the tiptoe dynamic was established, there was everywhere to go. That was a big big lesson to us all.
But there were still doubts – and in some views there’d always be doubts – about what was going on. The main thing was that nothing else was going on, for Tear Gas or Alex, and so with a jumpstart like this both parties decided to give it a bash.
CHRIS: It was just relief – it could have been the last, never mind first, rehearsal – but we realised we could still do the Fear Gas thing. We worried we’d be made to tone it down later on – we didn’t realise that’s exactly what Alex liked about us. So afterwards we went to the pub and asked each other, was that alright for you? And it was. Alex could easily have said, I want you to play that and you to play that, and it would have been, hello I must be leaving…
It was about this time, very early in the new band’s development, that Les Harvey died on stage. He was on tour with Stone The Crows, the band he’d started with Maggie Bell. Preparing for a show at Swansea Top Rank Ballroom, Les made contact with a live mic while touching his guitar, received a huge electric shock and was killed instantly.
Alex never got over the tragedy. He’d always been close to his brother – so much so they had an almost psychic connection. They used to turn up at the same place without having made arrangements to meet. Alex had taught Les to play the guitar, bringing the shy young boy out of his shell and giving him the skill to use his huge musical talent.
Somehow Alex kept it together as he dealt with most of the funeral arrangements. Friends suggest he was trying to stay strong for his mum, while others believe Bill provided the support he needed, and there’s no doubt his loving family were there for him. But whether it was a method of therapy, or to build a fitting tribute for his lost brother, Alex threw himself into his work and set a pace that saw SAHB thrown into a manic fury of gigging, writing and recording which would last five years.
CHRIS: Alex didn’t talk about it much to us. It wasn’t a taboo subject – it was mentioned but it was best left alone. It was a great thing for Alex when Tam Fairgrieve came on board backstage, because he was a master electrician. Tam ran about with his wee meter all the time, checking it was impossible to get even a wee static discharge. Alex was really grateful for that. If anyone said they’d had a wee shock, like putting the key in the hotel room door, it always got a reaction from Alex. He was conscious of it all the time. There were points every now and again when something would ding off the Leslie thing, some tenuous link or other would send him off into a morose mood.
TED: It didn’t come up till we went to Swansea. We’d gone down a storm – it was one of the first nights it all really came together. Everyone was in the bar except Alex, so I went into the dressing room to join him, and he started to cry. I got really emotional too, because he hadn’t shown any emotion until then.
ZAL: Philosophical’s not the word, but he had an outlook, a broad view, and everything fitted in; so something like this was part of it. When you knew him offstage, he was very deep, very intellectual, very concerned about everything… A lot of it’s in the songs – wonderful messages. Death was something he was prepared to go along with, but he never got over these things.
SLOWLY but surely, the band began working on developing a set. The vast majority came from Alex’s bag of tricks, soul and blues songs he’d written or covered in the past; but all the time everyone was working on a dynamic shape for the band. In between times, Tear Gas continued to play and Alex fulfilled his Hair commitments, with pre-Tubular Mike Oldfield depping for him when he came north to join in the fun with his new bandmates. Although the definition of ‘fun’ was arguable. Maybe it was the age gap – Alex was nearly 17 years older than the others; or maybe it was the way Tear Gas fans booed Alex…
TED: When we played at Clouds we didn’t have enough material to do a whole set with Alex. So he was going to do an acoustic thing, and that’s when people started shouting at him. And he started shouting back, calling them everything under the sun. My heart sank – I thought, that’s it, that’s the band split, it’s not going to happen – but Alex loved it.
CHRIS: So the audience are fucked off, we’re fucked off, Bill’s fucked off – because he thought we were too loud and it still said ‘Tear Gas’ on the bass drum – and Alex is going about celebrating… A bad reaction’s better than no reaction. During the Soul Band era, his hire purchase company wrote to him and said, start making payments again or we’ll put your name in the paper. Alex wrote back saying, dear sirs, we’re skint but we’d love the publicity if you’d be so kind as to put us in the paper… All publicity was good.
Never mind the band – Tear Gas fans remained to be convinced. There was an early gig at St Andrews, supporting Arthur Brown and what he called his new ‘commercial’ set, consisting of his band painting themselves gold and Arthur himself being rolled on stage in a huge syringe – which, Spinal Tap style, he got stuck in. Alex arrived in a stookie, claiming he’d broken his leg, and performed in a wheelchair; but the jury’s still out over the escapade. After the show, a couple of guys in the bar asked to speak to Ted and Chris; they understood this wee guy Harvey had heavy-mobbed his way into Tear Gas, and if the band required heavy-mob help to remove him again, there were several dozen volunteers waiting.
At another early show Chris was attacked after a disagreement over a girl. On hearing the news, Alex marched on stage during the support band’s set and demanded to know who was responsible, taking his belt off and threatening to destroy the whole audience unless the culprit was surrendered. It was a taste of things to come.
Work progressed, and the guys began to get a handle on Alex’s musical philosophy. Their hard rock influences meant they were fans of outfits like Vanilla Fudge, Little Feat, Frank Zappa and so forth; but he asked them: ‘Why do you want to to that? They’re doing that – we should be doing something different.’ Alex wanted to include the benefits of the band’s wide-ranging influences, but he wanted to use them to break new ground. This self-motivational attitude was soon to be expressed in the band’s name.
TED: The way Alex put it was, we’ve got to let people know what they’re going to get. If we say it’s going to be something, we’re gonny have to be it. So we’ll call it the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, and what I mean by that is: we’ve got to be sensational.
CHRIS: This lineup was such a change for Alex as well. There had been other Alex Harvey Bands but there needed to be something else. I remember saying, we’re setting ourselves up here – writers will say, Sensational? We’ll be the judge of that… It was very brave, I thought. I remember the discussion, going through the fabulous this, the wonderful that, and he said, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band – that’s it! I wasn’t sure, but then at the time we still thought it might be a one-album wonder. You wouldn’t really call it sensational, not until well after Framed; but now we started having to think about things that made us sensational…
EDDIE: When you heard him announcing it, it worked – it’s a great title to announce.
IN the early 70s record labels had a more lenient approach to a band’s first album: the point of it was to have a product to tour with, and use the experience to gel the band’s abilities; and the money would start coming in with the second album. Nowadays, of course, bands are dropped when their first album doesn’t make enough profit. So when plans were put in place to start touring seriously in December of 1972, it seemed perfectly natural to cut a disc of the old Alex standards the band had been playing up until then.
Framed was recorded in three days at Morgan Studios in London. During these lightning-speed sessions SAHB developed an approach to recording that served them well in years to come. The mainstay was knowing the material inside out, playing it together as fresh and as lively as possible, and adding the bare minimum of overdubs to the raw noise. Fast and honest. The laid-back vibe on a track like I Just Wanna Make Love To You was achieved because the band knew exactly what they were about: they weren’t recording, they were performing. The result is a great album – even if the technical side of recording lets it down a tad.
CHRIS: The quality of recording really dates it – but the playing is good.
TED: The sound of my kit had been emasculated on Tear Gas, and that had been annoying because I was proud of my drum sound and people used to compliment me on it all the time.
CHRIS: And then these people got taken away in ambulances.
TED: I made sure I got a lot closer to my sound this time. But the vocal sound they got for Alex was wrong. It was too boxy and dry. I was always very aware of Alex’s lyrics – they inspired me as I played. Some of these great lyrics don’t come out clearly enough.
CHRIS: Yeah, it did end up like, Alex Harvey’s voice also appears on this album. They saw it as part of the music instead of the main feature, and we’d arranged the songs round his voice. I’d love to get hold of the original tapes and mix it properly… We were all chuffed with it, though.
ZAL: Big Louis is a song I never understood at the time. I was thinking, should we be playing this? We did a lot of that, wondering if it was really stuff we should be doing. But when we played it in the 90s it suddenly occurred to me how interesting the song was.
TED: I remember in the car park at Morgan Studios, Alex and Chris suggested to me quite strongly that I take a drink. Southern Comfort and coke, they said, is just like a milkshake and you won’t even know you’re turning into an alcoholic… Up till then I didn’t drink, but they saw to that…
The band visited the double-shite end of the Gorbals for the cover shots, scrabbling about in the semi-demolished tenement rubble for props. The uncredited sixth member on the sleeve was a jakey called, appropriately enough, Harvey, who wandered over, decided he was enjoying the proceedings and stayed for the duration. Alex borrowed his glasses for the shoot and Ted bought his belt buckle, and wore it for many years afterwards. As a touching epitaph, Harvey’s mum saw the album sleeve and was re-united with a son she thought had been long dead.
Melody Maker were kind but neutral about Framed, suggesting perhaps that the reviewer may not have seen the band live. ‘Framed,’ they noted, ‘gets the album off in fine style but lacks the magical touch possessed by the Coasters’ original version’.
It was early days, though, and very soon afterwards no one had an excuse not to have seen SAHB. In November they made their first TV appearances including their premiere on the Old Grey Whistle Test, launching a series of legendary appearances with Whispering Bob Harris. In between these TV shows they commenced their first full-scale UK tour, and it wasn’t long before the reviewers began to notice the difference between a pinkish-sleeved vinyl disc and five fuck-off Glaswegians giving it laldy in your face. The NME cottoned on early: ‘The Fantastic [sic] Alex Harvey Band gave entertainment rather than a technical display of musical prowess – and that, after all, is what live rock should be all about. Evil is the best word to describe the demonic stage presence of Harvey himself.’ And instead of slating the recorded version of Framed, Roger St Pierre praised the way Alex ‘came closer than anyone I’ve seen before to the brash womanising evoked by the Chicago blues greats’.
Every live appearance was a learning experience. SAHB were picking up every lesson fast, and turning their collective knowledge into a powerhouse of presentational mastery. And they were gradually getting used to each other’s little foibles.
ZAL: Before every show Alex would do his exercises, do his headstand then go and start screaming at himself in the mirror: Cunts! Cunts! Cunts! He got himself really wound up. It was scary until you got used to it.
EDDIE: When we saw Joe Walsh at the Electric Gardens, that was the first time we heard a JBL sound system. Our first impression of a real sound. You could feel it in your chest at the back of the hall, and we were like, fuck’s sake, gie’s wan o’them… We got one and it broke down on the first night. Bill was a little upset: What the fuck have I spent my money on?
TED: But there was one night the sound came together and we all really felt it. So on the way home we all stripped naked in the van and ran into a field in the morning sunlight, and we thought this was hilarious… We got back into the van, still naked, and drove into a wee village for petrol. Chris and I got out and grabbed a bike we’d seen then pedalled round the village, totally bollock! It was the sheer euphoria of the gig. We thought everything was hilarious… The idea of being rock stars was hilarious.
Nevertheless, it was shortly about to be.
