MUSICIAN - June 1976

Alvin Lee – Has A Problem !

By Eamonn Percival

Alvin Lee has got a problem. He may not be aware of it – although I suspect he is, but he really has to get off his arse and rock and roll, if he is going to sustain his position in the ranks of rock’s elite. He’s worked hard to get there, but he will have to work just as hard to stay there. Over the last couple of years, he has lost a lot of ground and every week sees a new “Guitar Super Hero”. Not that he particularly wants to be a “guitar-super-hero”, he had enough of that with Ten Years After, but his forte is undoubtedly his six string dexterity.

Ten Years After was the band that elevated the name of Alvin Lee to superstar status. In the early sixties blues boom, it was a case of the faster you play, the better you are. Alvin learned to play fast. From “a good band with a fair guitarist” Ten Years After became “a great guitarist with a fair band”. The band did particularly well in the States always thirsty for boogie, and America took Alvin Lee into their hearts and he came out “A Superstar”. The film Woodstock put the seal on it. Alvin’s red hot solo on “Going Home” was for many, the highlight of the film. Ten Years After were now “Big Business”, but it was the beginning of the end for the band. Alvin became disillusioned everywhere they played, the audience wanted to re-live the film. Cries of “Going Home!” eventually provoked Alvin Lee into returning home to England. The band split and he retired to his modest £ 100,000 mansion near Reading, presumably to “get himself together”. 1973 saw an album called “On The Road To Freedom” which Alvin recorded with Mylon Lefevre who was a very powerful gospel singer. It was a complete change of direction for Alvin, and his new found independence and renewed enthusiasm culminated in a new road band, called “Alvin Lee and Company”, which consisted of Mel Collins (Saxophone) Ian Wallace (Drums) Tim Hinkley (Keyboards) Alan Spenner (Bass) and Neil Hubbard (Guitar). With a minimum of rehearsals, the new band performed one outstanding performance at London’s Rainbow, from which the “In Flight” double live album was taken. After the phenomenal success of that gig, Alvin went on to do a world tour, with a slightly different line up, with Ronnie Leahy replacing Tim Hinkley and Spenner’s place was taken by Steve Thompson.

In the summer of 1975, Alvin dug up Ten Years After for another American tour. Unfortunately, the tour coincided with the release of another Alvin Lee solo outing, called “Pump Iron” It was a fair album, but not strong enough to sell on its own. With Alvin touring the States, “Pump Iron” didn’t really live up to expected sales. He returned home and set about looking for members for yet another band. His old pal Tim Hinkley was brought in on keyboards, along with Bryson Graham and Andy Pyle playing drums and bass respectively. Together, they recorded an album which should be released in the near future and are now busy rehearsing in preparation for the road. A trip down the M4 to Reading was the order of the day. Four in the afternoon found Alvin only just surfacing, he had been in the studio until eleven that morning, and after a reviving coffee, we retired to the T.V. room to conduct the interview. A video recorder, countless cassettes, a T.V. camera and other playthings littered the floor, while our hero relaxed in an antique armchair and lit up the first in a long chain of cigarettes.

Perhaps Alvin’s lifestyle has something to do with his “Problem”. Tucked away for most of the year in this gigantic house, next door to an enormous converted barn, housing a professional sixteen track recording studio. It’s a comfortable life for a humble Nottingham lad, perhaps a little too comfortable. There’s always the temptation to hibernate for most of the year, and only occasionally popping across the Atlantic for a short tour with Ten Years & Company or whoever, eventually returning to Hookend Manor to escape and recuperate. Of course, there’s always the studio to keep him occupied at home, but I couldn’t help but wondering if his sojourns into the studio are really borne out of a deep desire to be creative or a deeper desire to escape and relieve the boredom.

With the new band, however, he seems to have found a brand new enthusiasm. There is a definite change in direction as he explained this way: “With the music that I’ve been doing in the past, I was influenced, like a lot of people, by funk and soul. The Rainbow gig we did, had  very funky leanings, and the second Alvin Lee and Company band was sort of jazz / funk.

When I went out on the road with them, I thought that instead of being a sort of copy of Cornell Dupree, I should really get down to doing what I do best. It’s a musician’s trip, always trying to play above yourself. Playing jazz and things with more taste, that would be appreciated by other musicians but that’s about it. When all was said and done, we really did have a good funky band, but it was nothing like: The Meters or Kool And The Gang, so it’s all down to getting back to the Rhythm and Blues roots now. What’s good about it now is that, previously I got the very best musicians that I could find, where as now I’ve got a band.

The four of us are a unit, which is really nice. It’s like the first three years of Ten Years After. Everybody’s really into what we’re doing, and it’s a very communal thing”.

Ten Years After stopped being “fun” for you then?

“Ten Years After went through that but then lost it. It’s like the very early days, all over again now. Sometimes we sort of sit around talking about what we’d like to do for about three hours. Discussing various records and new directions and things like that”. The friendship that exists within the band is very important to Alvin. For the first time in quite a few years, he is working with friends as well as musicians.

Alvin continues: “It really is important to a band, and it shows in the music as well. Like, we’ll be doing a take and it might not be quite right, so we come in here and sit around and get our heads together. It’s a whole different thing, and it just gells”. When asked how permanent the band is, Alvin was a trifle hesitant in replying. “Well, it’s a permanent as……well, it could well be permanent . I’m quite optimistic. It’s just a really nice unit to work with”. Before they started recording the album, the band had only been together a matter of weeks.

They rehearsed the numbers for a week, cut rough versions in the studio and then took them away for a weekend to “live with the songs”. When they came back, arrangements were ironed out and the songs recorded. Alvin says: “It was like the equivalent of three months on the road. That’s the reason the whole thing is coming together so quick. It’s like when you’re on the road and you’re doing a number, and you think to yourself ”Oh I’d like to put this in here” and by the end of the set, you’ve forgotten all about it. When you’ve got it down on tape, you can analyse it in different moods. And when you record it and listen to it afterwards, everyone is very critical. It’s an amazing facility really, having a studio to rehearse and record in”.   

In keeping with Alvin’s principle of “getting back to the roots” most of the tracks on the album will be very basic. He is insistent on not doing too many overdubs. He adds: “Most of the stuff I really used to get off on didn’t have eight overdubbed voices or anything like that. The old Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard stuff was all done in just one take, usually. They might have had to do it a load of times, but when they got it, they really got it. I think overdubbing really only helps if your basic track is weak. What we found is with the tracks we’ve done, overdubbing just doesn’t fit because the basic tracks are good. Unless you’re super careful, you tend to cross whatever is already happening. You can very easily go too far, and it can happen a lot with multi-tracking too.”

Alvin tells me that he’s co-producing the album with Chris Kimsey. The partnership goes back a long time, to the days when Chris was engineer at Olympic Studios and he worked on three Ten Years After albums. It is the first time Alvin has used another producer, and he’s very pleased with the results. Alvin adds: “He’s really good, and it really helps. It’s like having a really attentive ear in the studio. It sounds very different up there in the control room. You can get too close if you’re producing yourself. Like, I might play a part on the guitar and think to myself “Yeah, that’s the one” and Chris will say no, that’s not right, and then sometimes I’ll do a bit and think to myself: “No that wasn’t right” and Chris will like it. A mistake you might try to bluff out of sometimes, turn out to be the best licks. It’s just because if you didn’t do what you intended to do, you think it’s wrong”.

On most of the basic tracks, Alvin sticks to his old Gibson ES-335 Guitar, although he sometimes uses a Telecaster or a Stratocaster and various acoustics. He also finds that when he changes a guitar, his playing style alters accordingly. “I picked up a really old Stratocaster in Texas. It’s a beautiful guitar, one of those that seem to play itself. The notes sound so nice, you don’t have to play a lot. With my stage Gibson, I use a very heavy bottom E string so that if I’m playing up high, I can whang down on the bottom string and it sounds like a grand piano. Where as if you do that with a Les Paul or a Strat, it just doesn’t happen because the note just bends away. Also, on the Gibson, I’ve got heavy gauge Gibson strings for the E,A and D and then the top three are light gauge Fender Rock and Rolls, because they’re the one that I bend. That came about by accident really. I was in the States, and I used to use fairly heavy strings, but I cut my finger once and decided to put light gauge strings on the top, so they were easier to bend. Since then, I’ve just got used to that set-up”.

Apart from his own band, Alvin recently became involved with an outfit called FBI (Funky Blues Incorporated – 1976) Just over a year ago, Alvin was watching T.V. when he spotted them playing on a children’s show. At the time the band had been slogging around the London pub circuit and getting nowhere fast, but Alvin liked them and offered to lend a hand. He invited them over to his studio and with Chris Kimsey, they both helped to get their sound down on tape. Their first album was recently completed at the studio, (Space-Studio) and Alvin is still very much involved with them. Alvin says: “We’ve been having a bit of trouble getting them the right set up. They’re going to go with me on the tour, and it will be a bit different for them, having to play to a seated audience. They’re basically a club band. They’re great at somewhere like Dingwalls, but they need experience playing concerts.

The trouble with looking after a band a band like that is from the business angle. I’m not a great businessman. Warner’s wanted the band right from the get-go. They heard the demos we did and they said, “Great” so we worked out a deal and everything. Then with my lack of business knowledge, I told everyone else who were interested in them that it was off and that we were going with Warner Brothers. “A few days before it was all signed, sealed and delivered, Warner Brothers called the whole deal off – they had cut-backs and closed some of their offices and even dropped some of their artists. By that time, I’d blown it with everyone else. Now, we’ve got Polydor really raving about the band in Europe, and the guy in England doesn’t like it. We almost had a deal in England tied up, but the guy wanted the option for America too, which was totally ludicrous, because they were going to see if it sold in England first, and then release it in America six months later. Well, ideally I wanted it out at the same time. So I’ve given up trying to be a businessman. It started to affect me. I wasn’t playing any music. Some people can get into all that, but I’m not inclined that way. I mean, I’d get stoned and go into a meeting and tell them exactly what I thought and what I wanted to do, and that’s not the sort of thing to do in the business world” !

After a month long British Tour, Alvin will go to the States in late August, although it’s doubtful that FBI will support him on the American jaunt. He says: I’d like to take them with me, but it could cost a lot of money. They’re a nine piece band, and with hotels and plane fares alone, it could be quite expensive. “Naturally, after his problems with Ten Years After in the States, Alvin hasn’t set his sights firmly on the USA. The question remains then, where does he see the bands future?