2003

ALVIN LEE / TEN YEARS AFTER

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TEN YEARS AFTER – REELING IN THE YEARS:

WOODSTOCK made them into world stars, but instead of capitalising on their new-found fame they were losing the plot. Classic Rock talks to Alvin Lee, Leo Lyons and Ric Lee about how it all went so wrong for Ten Years After.

Going Home:

Written by Hugh Fielder (Modified Corrections by B & D)

From the August 2003 issue of Classic Rock Magazine

 

It was getting dark by the time Ten Years After took the stage at Woodstock back in 1969. The rain had come bucketing down mid-way through the afternoon, just as they’d been about to go on, drenching the stage and turning the site into a quagmire. The audience variously estimated at between 350,00 and 500,000 was wet, chilled and bedraggled; many of them were the worse for wear after three days in the open.

The band weren’t in much better shape, having travelled overnight from St. Louis, making the last leg by helicopter and then being cooped up on-site in the back of a trailer, waiting for the rain to stop.

In the movie of Woodstock, the camera picks out the skinny frame of Ten Years After’s Alvin Lee, his boyish face ringed by shoulder-length hair. “This is a thing called “I’m Going Home” by helicopter!” he announces, and for a dozen seconds he rattles out notes on his trademark Gibson guitar that sound like a sustained burst of machine-gun fire. The band then kick into a breakneck boogie and the song takes off; Alvin spits out the vocals, filling in the spaces with more guitar salvos. The camera remains fixed on him; there are just occasional glimpses of keyboard player Chick Churchill, drummer Ric Lee (no relation to Alvin) and bassist Leo Lyons, who is head banging furiously. Alvin leads the song high and low, never letting the pace flag, until nine minutes later he builds to a final warp-speed cacophony. The crowd, their central heating now restored, erupts.

 When the Woodstock movie came out in late 1970 (more than a year after the actual festival) it did for Ten Years After what Live Aid did for Queen and U2; it transformed them into superstars. Suddenly Ten Years After were the new heroes of British Blues Rock.

Or, as Alvin puts it: “That’s when fourteen year old girls started showing up to our gigs with ice creams.” 

 Ten Years After had been in the vanguard of the second (and much heavier) invasion of the US by British groups, touring relentlessly and rapidly reaching top of the bill status. “We had this thing – and looking back I’m a bit ashamed of it now – that we had to sting any band that went on after us,” Alvin recalls. “We used to go out of our way to blow them off and make them look bad, it wasn’t so much playing well as going down well; we’d learnt that from our years on the club circuit, and there were a lot of bands in America who wouldn’t go on after us. At Woodstock Country Joe McDonald whipped his equipment on before us because he’d played after us at the Fillmore East and died a death. We used to wear the audience out. It really was a heads-down-let’s–go-for-it attitude. (Alvin and Leo called it “Their Blow’em Off Policy”).

Leo used to shake his head off, that was fine on stage, but he’d do it in the studio too, we used to have to gaffer-tape his headphones to his head.” Leo’s head-banging style even got him an offer from Frank Zappa to appear in a movie he was planning called “The Choreographers Of Rock “n” Roll. Leo reveals the secret behind Ten Years After vigorous and intense live shows: “Ric and I egged each other on when we flagged (slowed down a bit, and needed that edge back) I’d yell “Hit them you bastard!” and he’d shout back: “Fuck Off.” Leo would also spur Ric on by spitting at him – anticipating the punk movement by a decade – but the drummer never minded as Ric says “because he always missed”.

Riding the crest of this high-energy wave, Alvin would sneer and pout outrageously as he tore through solo after solo. Even on the slower songs his burst of notes seemed faster than mere human fingers could manage. No wonder the American media dubbed him “Captain Speed-fingers.” 

But behind the bravado that had propelled Ten Years After into the premier league was another, more insecure Alvin Lee who just couldn’t handle the superstar status that the Woodstock movie had bestowed on the group: “We’d been playing for the heads, the growing underground audience”, he recounts, “ But then it got bigger and people had to come to ice hockey arenas and stadiums to see the band, and because of this, we lost the personal connection with the (our) audience. “You had police with guns and cotton wool sticking out of their ears, sneering up at the band and looking for half a chance to beat up some unfortunate and unsuspecting audience member. It was awful, and at this point I realized that it had all gone wrong and I found myself thinking, “what the fuck am I doing here?”

 And the song that made Ten Years After famous was becoming an albatross (a ball and chain): “You’d walk on stage and people would be shouting for “I’m Going Home”, which was the last song in our set. I often wonder what the rest of our career would have been like if the Woodstock movie had used another song. As it was, everything became focused on the last song, which also happened to be our most high energy number and show topper”. 

 To make matters worse, Alvin was also becoming estranged from the rest of the band members: “I think they began to resent me because I started to back off then,” he admits,

“I couldn’t help it, I hated it, I just hated all of it, I used to go on stage and go; “dong” (as he mimes a big chord) and the audience would go “YeaHHH!” You could do anything, it was just crazy, it was horrible. “My problem was that I couldn’t communicate it to anybody, as my band mates thought I was Looney, as I went into sulks and things like that, maybe I should have  tried to talk more with them, but it didn’t work for some reason, they started to get jealous because they thought I was being singled out to do all the interviews and the photo sessions. I wasn’t getting singled out, I was the songwriter, singer and lead guitarist, after all, so obviously I was the one they all wanted to talk to.”

 

There was indeed resentment from the rest of the band, but it was born out of frustration rather than jealousy. Around the time of Woodstock, Ten Years After’s management had decided to focus all the attention on Alvin, which is fair enough you might think, as it was Alvin who was the front man, the guitar hero and the pin up poster image. But Leo Lyons and Ric Lee believe differently, to them (and they should know better than anyone else) “Alvin was temperamentally unsuited to assume the role: “I felt it would be too much pressure for Alvin, and told our manager, Chris Wright, that he was creating a monster he couldn’t control,” Leo says.

Their misgivings were well-founded, because at the very moment that Ten Years After should have been seizing the initiative, Alvin retreated behind a wall of dope smoke. Whenever Ric and Leo, angry at being marginalised, managed to provoke a reaction out of Alvin it was invariably the wrong one. It created a rift, and the recriminations continuing to this day.

What added to the bitterness was how close the group members had been up to then. Ric describes Alvin and Leo’s relationship as “a well-oiled marriage”. It dates back to 1960 when Leo started playing with Alvin, already a precocious guitarist, in a local Nottingham band called “The Jaybirds”. They even went through the classic 1960’s rock group apprenticeship together, playing a five week stint at Hamburg’s Star Club in 1962 – just a week after the Beatles played there. According to Ric Lee, “We stayed in a two-room apartment above a mud-wrestling / sex club,” Ric remembers. “The rooms were filled with bunks and there were probably ten or twelve people living there. I was eighteen, Alvin was seventeen, and we were exposed to prostitutes, pep pills and music twenty four hours a day.” Alvin confirms that the Hamburg experience was “a real rite of passage, as one day I went into the bathroom and there was one bloke sitting on the toilet, a guy in the bath and another guy washing his socks in the bath water, when all of the sudden another bloke runs in a fires off a gas gun into the room – it was total madness. There was also a scary side to it with the gangsters. One guy had this big welding glove and when you used to see him going out with it you’d think: “Uh-oh, trouble.”

 

When the band returned to England Alvin bought his first Gibson ES335 – which would become his trademark guitar. Ric, who came from nearby Mansfield, replaced the previous drummer (Dave Quickmier) in 1965 (as it was Quickmier who personally recommended that Ric take his place in the band) and soon afterwards they brought in Chick Churchill on keyboards. The following year they started tapping into the burgeoning blues market in Britain that John Mayall had opened up. “I threw myself headlong into that,” says Alvin who had grown up listening to his dad’s collection of pre-war bluesmen such as Big Bill Broonzy,

Lonnie Johnson and Josh White, but it was the jazzier influences in the group that meant they were always, as Ric says, “a bit sideways-on to the blues”.

That paid off when Chick Churchill got them an audition for London’s then legendary Marquee Club early in 1967 and equally legendary club manager John Gee who was very impressed by their version of Woody Herman’s “Woodchoppers Ball”. To celebrate, they changed their name from the now outdated Jaybirds to Ten Years After – which Leo found while flicking / leafing through the pages of the Radio Times Magazine.

 

Via the Marquee, Ten Years After landed a spot on the 1967 Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival (which later became known as the Reading Festival), where they got a standing ovation from 20,000 people in attendance. Among them was noted blues producer Mike Vernon, who was there checking out one of his charges, Fleetwood Mac. It was Vernon who later signed Ten Years After to Decca’s new Deram label (which ironically, the band had just recently failed their audition for Decca).

 

In keeping with the times, Ten Years After slapped down their very first record album in just five days, and “Mike could see that we were a bit radical as far as his kind of blues was concerned.” Alvin recalls, “but he basically gave us the freedom and said get on with it.”

The album caught Ten Years After’s raw, jazzy approach to the blues, which could be high-velocity, as on the opening song “I Want To Know”, or the slow, extended and mood building, closing number called “Help Me”.

The record was rough and ready, but it attracted the attention of famed American concert promoter Bill Graham, who was looking for new bands to play at his Fillmore venues in San Francisco and New York and figured there must be more where Cream and Hendrix had come from.

 

In June of 1968 Ten Years After started a seven-week US tour at the Fillmore West: “That first tour was great”, Alvin recalls, “We had such a good time out there, and we lost around $35,000, but we got asked back so we knew we were on our way. The strange thing was that we had gone to what I considered to be the home of the blues, but they’d never heard of most of them, and I couldn’t believe it – “Big Bill who?”

We were recycling American music and they were calling it the English sound, while all the American bands were using Fender equipment, which sounded really tinny when compared with the juicy sound that you get from Marshalls.”

Then, of course, there were the psychedelic delights of the West Coast, and Ten Years After had already been a part of the London underground scene during 1967’s “Summer Of Love”; they had even made a whimsical trippy single in early 1968 called “Portable People”,  and played at the very hip Middle Earth.

Publicity shots of the time reveal Ten Years After’s garish fashion sense: “Ah, Paisley shirts!” Alvin laughs, “That was my girlfriend, Lorraine, she was the wild one, as she had me wearing my mother’s curtains for trousers, with those lampshade frills around the bottom.

“I loved the underground,” he says. It was so experimental , everything opened up, and you could try anything (and it all was accepted) and by now the drugs were taking effect, and that was all part of it – the opening up of consciousness.”

 

In America, you had to be careful not to find your consciousness being expanded unwittingly.

“There was one gig at the Fillmore West,” he remembers, “where somebody gave me this joint as we were going on stage, and me being Mr. Bravado, I had to have a toke – and it turned out to be angel dust, and by the time I got to the stage, my left leg felt a mile long.

I hit the first note on my guitar and it struck the back of the hall and I saw it bounce back hitting the heads of the audience and ricochet up into the roof, and I was just standing there going: “Wow”. I don’t know how I managed to play, but I noticed at one point the band were looking at me strangely. After we finished the song I said: “What’s wrong?” and they replied: “We just did the same song twice!”, but it didn’t matter as the audience were in the same state, it didn’t seem to matter.”

 

Needing a new album to promote the band, Ten Years After hastily recorded a live album at a club called Klook’s Kleek in London. “Undead” caught the sweaty, small-club vibe / atmosphere and the band’s free-form approach to the blues with the jazzy, flashy “I May Be Wrong But I Won’t Be Wrong Always” and “Woodchoppers Ball”, the intense emotional blues of “Spider In You Web” and a very early yet potent version of “I’m Going Home”.

“Basically, that album put it in a nutshell,” Alvin reckons, “I was so happy with it, when I first heard it I thought, what are we going to do next? After that my attitude was, “Let’s go into the studio and experiment, because we’ve already made the ultimate album.”

The result of that initial experimentation was the not-so-subtly titled “Stonedhenge” (with all due credit being given to Alvin for the very apt title) as it was Ten Years After’s “Psychedelic Blues Album” Alvin’s recollection is “Pipes and stuff like that all over the place” and it was very experimental in places. I was into my musique concrete phase. There’s quite a lot of (avant-garde industrial composer) Todd Dockstader in there. It was still very underground at that point, and we were making music for that audience / for ourselves really because we were that audience too.”
”Stonedhenge” could fairly claim to be Ten Years After’s most innovative album, as it’s light and trippy (their “Flower Power” album, reflecting the time period or the insistent “Going To Try” and the ever bouncy / catchy and addictive hook of  “Hear Me Calling”, or the positively spooky lyrics / tone of “A Sad Song”. Despite, the apparent substances involved behind the scenes, and in common use during this period – the band itself were tight, strong and confident.

Stonedhenge was released in February of 1969, the record set up Ten Years After for a momentous year. In fact Woodstock was just one of half a dozen festivals they played that summer, which also included Texas, Seattle, and the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival, which also proved to be the only year that rock bands were allowed to participate.

 

At Flushing Meadow in New York they played alongside of Vanilla Fudge and Jeff Beck. While Led Zeppelin also turned up to check out the competition. In Richard Cole’s notorious “Stairway To Heaven” a kiss and tell all book, the former tour manager relates how Jimmy Page was awestruck by Alvin’s super-sonic playing, much to the annoyance of an inebriated John Bonham, who suddenly lurched forward and threw a glass of orange juice all over Alvin’s guitar, in order to slow up his (Alvin’s) finger work as the strings and fret-board got stickier.

When asked about this incident, Alvin doesn’t remember anything having been thrown, although Ric Lee confirms the story. He also remembers a more amusing incident at the end of the show when he and Bonzo joined Jeff Beck for the encore: “There was Robert Plant, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and three bassists I think Bonzo was beating out a riff on the drum kit, so I grabbed a floor tom and started thrumming hell out of it. The crowd were going ape-shit as we banged out a blues standard and Bonham, who was already stripped to the waist, took off his trousers and underpants. He was sitting there naked, playing away, when the police saw him, I then saw Peter Grant and Richard Cole spotting the police as the number fizzled out, all I saw was Peter and Richard running on stage, each grabbing one of Bonzo’s arms, and his bare arse disappearing as they carried him off.” 

 

Alvin tended not to get involved in the rock n´ roll high jinks, however: “ The reason I didn’t mix with bands like Led Zeppelin and The Who too much and go in for all that hotel wrecking was that I was a doper; I was always carrying hashish around, and in those days you could get twelve years if you got caught with a joint in somewhere like Texas.

Even legal drugs such as alcohol could also be hazardous for Alvin, particularly if they were being brandished by someone like Janis Joplin: “She used to chase me around a bit,” he chuckles,” but I wouldn’t have it. She was just too dangerous.

“There was a show we did with them at the Fillmore East and they were handing her bottles of Southern Comfort on stage and she was drinking them, I thought it must be something like sweet wine. She came off stage and grabbed my ass and gave me a bottle, so I promptly collapsed and passed out in a quiet corner. When I woke up it was about five in the morning and there was just some guy sweeping up, and I didn’t even know which hotel we were staying at.”

 

In fact, on the Richter scale of rock groups behaving badly, Ten Years After barely registered (“I tried to start a food fight one night, and everyone went “behave yourself.” Ric admits). So it’s something of a surprise to find them appearing in the grossly overrated movie “Groupie”.

In a scene that attempts to prove guilt by insinuation, Leo is seen with a young lady in a hotel coffee shop, ordering tea, while the soundtrack plays Ten Years After’s “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl”. “Oh boy, was my friend Iris pissed off when she saw the movie,” Leo laughs, “ Someone sent me a copy recently, and I watched it while hiding behind the sofa with one eye closed, but it’s pretty tame stuff now. The musical segments are worth watching, but Spinal Tap would be a better buy for the backstage antics.”

 

It was Ten Years After’s SSSSH album, recorded just before they embarked on their US summer tour in 1969 – that included Woodstock and the other festivals – that opened up the rift in the band. The album itself wasn’t a problem, after the laid back trip of “Stonedhenge”, Alvin was up and flying again; his blistering solo on “I Woke Up This Morning” was a corker / cooker, as was the reworked riff that anchors “Good Morning Little School Girl” was tougher than the rest. The problem was the album sleeve, which in Ric’s words, “stuck it to everyone, as we’d done a photo session together and then suddenly we were presented with this album cover with just Alvin on the front, and we went: “What The FUCK Is This?”

“This” was the new management strategy of putting the focus on Alvin, and Alvin admits the pressure got to him almost immediately: “There’s the story about how I nearly didn’t play Woodstock because I had a bad back, it wasn’t a bad back, it was a bad head. I couldn’t face the tour, I looked at the thirteen week list of dates and thought, I’m not going to get through this. “I pretty much had a nervous breakdown at the beginning of the tour, I’d done five days of interviews before it started, I’d left my girlfriend back in England, and I really wasn’t feeling very capable and I just collapsed.

It was our American manager, Dee Anthony (who went on to manage Peter Frampton), who got me through it. He used to give me all these pep talks – “Stay on the bus, it’s your music, forget all the bull-shit, that one and a half hours on stage is all that counts”, but I was still getting upset, and I was still going on stage saying: “This is Horrible.”

Nevertheless, the relentless schedule continued and successfully too. The twenty-eight US tours they notched up between 1968 and 1974 were unequalled by any other British band, and the album sales were also getting bigger.

“CRICKLEWOOD GREEN” may not sound as exotic as “ACAPULCO GOLD” or “LEBANESE BLACK” admittedly, but then the grass always seems greener on the other side  doesn’t it?

Cricklewood Green, (the record) was released in 1970 cracked the American top twenty and was Ten Years After’s biggest selling UK album, helped by the hit single “Love Like A Man” which Alvin remembers writing most of the songs in a taxi on the way to the studio, (while the music riff was credited to Leo Lyons).

 “WATT” was released at the end of the year, but failed to make any substantial impact, but Alvin got what he wanted, time off in which to write songs for the next album, called “A Space In Time” and he came up with the band’s biggest hit, the deceptively simple, catchy but out of left-field “I’d Love To Change The World”. It became the crucial opportunity for the band, “but by then I was too confused to take it,” Alvin says, “I’d Love To Change The World” was a hit and I hated it because it was a hit, by then I was rebelling and I never played it live, to me it was a pop song,” Even worse, Alvin vetoed the record companies choice for the follow-up single, which annoyed the head of their US label, the redoubtable Clive Davis, who had earlier told the band: “Give me the tools and I’ll do the job”, promptly made “I’d Love To Change The World” a Top Ten Hit.

 Ric remembers being invited to a Columbia Records meeting chaired by Davis, with all the radio promotions people saying that “Tomorrow I’ll Be Out Of Town” was a perfect radio cut. When Ric said the band didn’t want that as a single, Davis growled: “So why is that track on the album? If you want me to do the job, don’t give me the tools and then take them away from me.” “He’d been on our side up until then,” Ric says, “But after that the albums never sold as well and we never had another hit. If the artists didn’t co-operate, then the record company would simply move on to one that did; they weren’t going to wait around for us to get our act together, and this was a stark lesson in reality,”

Not that even Clive Davis could have done much with “Rock and Roll Music to the World” which was recorded and sold pretty much on auto pilot, and while “Recorded Live” fared much better, it also highlighted the fact that the core of the set list had remained unchanged since Woodstock four years earlier. “What’s the point?” was Alvin’s response. He didn’t have the inclination, he was miserable and communication within the band was generally reduced to “Shouting and screaming matches”.

Leo contends that Alvin in turn made the band’s lives a misery: “It stressed me out so much that I stopped trying to reconcile things, I still enjoyed playing live shows, provided there were no tantrums. If there were confrontations, I stupidly rose to the bait every time.”

Amid such an atmosphere, the management kept their distance, and eventually Ten Years After took a six-month break for the second half of  1973.

Alvin recorded a solo album with gospel singer Mylon Lefevre (who’s band “Holy Smoke” had supported them on tour) at his newly furnished home studio, Mylon was great, he arrived and said: “Where do all the musicians hang out?” I told him the Speakeasy. He went straight off and returned about six hours later and said: “I got us a band”, and in walked George Harrison, Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi! Mylon really had a silver tongue, he captivated everyone.” Harrison even goaded Alvin into putting on his own gig. Alvin: “He said: I’ll bet you couldn’t,” and I did, I rang up and got a booking at the Rainbow Theatre. I had twenty four songs that hadn’t worked with Ten Years After , and I rehearsed them with a band that included Boz Burrell, Tim Hinkley and Mel Collins.”

The titles of the Mylon Lefevre album – “On the Road to Freedom” and Alvin Lee & Company live “In Flight” both seemed to offer broad hints about Alvin’s intentions, but surprisingly, there was a new Ten Years After album due out in 1974, called ironically “Positive Vibrations” Except that it wasn’t.

Alvin didn’t seem to know what he wanted: “I did an American tour with Alvin Lee & Co. and it was all new material; I didn’t play “I’m Going Home” or any of that. We were playing little theatres, getting good reviews, but to tell you the truth, I did miss the oomph of the audience, I’d gotten used to that. I mean they enjoyed it and clapped and stuff, but there wasn’t the oomph there, then I did a Ten Years After tour and got the oomph back.”

Not for long though. Another petulant spat resulted in a threat to put the band on wages. They limped through one more US tour before it all disintegrated. Alvin then embarked on a solo career as Alvin Lee & Co. – The Alvin Lee Band – Alvin Lee and Ten Years Later and even just plain old Alvin Lee.

Meanwhile, the others got on with music-related careers, playing, sessions, producing, managing.

 

In 1983, Ric Lee got a call from the Marquee presuming that Ten Years After would be playing at the club’s 25th anniversary celebrations. “I rang around the others and said: “I think we should do this”.  Alvin felt, “It showed us we could do it, and it was fun actually, we had one rehearsal in the afternoon and then we plugged in and played and it was Ten Years After. That amazed me, and we thought that from that gig there would be a reunion, but it didn’t happen, as it was a funny time in music, we weren’t respected legends, we were old farts.”

 

Ten Years After petered out when the bickering started up again. It also hampered subsequent reunions at the end of the 1980’s and late 1990’s which included a nostalgic appearance at the Woodstock 29th anniversary festival, which was billed as “A Day In The Garden”. Their reactions to that are revealing:

Alvin Lee: “It was a big disappointment, there I was, standing in a field that they tell me is exactly where it happened, but the people weren’t there, the vibe wasn’t there, it had nothing to do with it.”

Leo Lyons: “It turned out to be a series of flashbacks for me, we were booked into what used to be the Holiday Inn, Liberty – Tranquillity Base in 1969. I didn’t realise until I walked into the hotel bar, it stopped me in my tracks, I swear I could see and hear Jimi, Janis, Jerry Garcia, Bob Hite, all of them gone now. We were together in that room twenty nine years ago.”

Ric Lee: “Disappointing, really. We hadn’t played for awhile, I was certainly rusty, the original thing was funky, this was all very clinical, it was like an MOR concert. Still, at least we had dressing rooms, which we never had the first time….”

 

For Ten Years After, it all came to a head at the last series of European Festival shows in 1999, when a vicious spat between Leo and Alvin buried any chance of a reunion, under a mound of perceived grievances on all sides. Alvin went back to his own band, while the others remained together, occasionally playing and recording with various American guitarist.

 

However, five things are directly related to the resurgence of interest in the band:  


1. The reissue of the Ten Years After Catalogue on cd format

2. A new book by Herb Staehr called “Alvin Lee & Ten Years After – Visual History”

3. The release of a lost or misplaced Ten Years After Fillmore East Concert from 1970

4. This website – That we started in 2001 and dedicated to Ten Years After and its members 

5. Popular demand – fan request – fans desire to see the band perform live – and recordings

 

These five things prompted Leo Lyons, Ric Lee and Chick Churchill to revive the band once again last year (2002). This was due to the fact that when asked to join the band Alvin turned them down flat / cold, so they went in search of a new guitarist and found one via Leo’s son Tom, who told his father about a “shit-hot” guitarist that he’d known in school.

 

Enter, twenty five year old Joe Gooch.

Says Ric Lee about Joe: “Initially I was sceptical because of his age,” he admits, “but as soon as I saw him play I had no doubts.” A couple of European dates last autumn convinced all the band that Joe was the man to replace Alvin. Joe, “has his own style but can still deliver all the Ten Years After hits,” Ric says. The new-look Ten Years After are playing British dates this summer, with an album to follow in the autumn.

And what about Alvin? – Alvin finds the current Ten Years After situation “very sad”. Ten Years After used to be a credible name and I was proud of it,” their former guitarist says, “Now it’s just an embarrassment, I asked them to change the name slightly, so as not to confuse the fans, but they refused.”

Alvin, who has just recorded an album with Elvis Presley’s original backing musicians, guitarist Scotty Moore and drummer DJ Fontana (“my teenage heroes”) in Nashville, and tentatively titled “The Real Thing” (but became Alvin Lee in Tennessee) also reckons that

“it’s a shame the new guitarist, who must be pretty good to play my licks, is copying somebody else’s style instead of playing his own music. If I had taken a job copying somebody else’s music when I was starting out, there would never have been a Ten Years After.”

 

 

 


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