18 HEADLINER
ROADBLOG
LOVE H U R TS (OR HOW I GOT THE EDGE OVER AXL)
BACK IN OCTOBER 1974, TWO members of durable Scottish rockers, Nazareth, attended a wedding in Edinburgh, leaving the remaining two musicians to take advantage of the studio time they had pre-booked — little realising the consequences. They had laid down the backing track for the classic Love Hurts, using as a reference model the stupendous version that Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris had recorded on Grievous Angel. Returning to the studio after the festivities in the Scottish capital, lead singer, Dan McCafferty, shook his head as he attempted to overlay the vocal track, saying the key of G was out of his register. But then he had a brainwave, and tried singing an octave higher… and the rest, as they say, is history. The song was scheduled as a B side, but when A&M Records co-founder, Jerry Moss, heard it, he insisted it replace the band’s cover version of Randy Newman’s Guilty on Hair of the Dog (the band’s sixth album). The result was their biggest selling single. Forty years on, I remembered that event when switching onto Radio 2’s Sounds of the Seventies just as Johnny Walker was interviewing Nazareth bassist Pete Agnew. He related the story about how he and McCafferty had attended a music journalist’s wedding — for as
I gaze down the muzzle of my own 40th Wedding Anniversary, I was that journalist. So I decided to contact Pete for a long overdue catch-up, and it was fitting that when he returned my call he should be ringing from Germany. For that’s where this story begins — and my first meeting with the ingénue Scots band at Frankfurt’s legendary Zoom Club. Until that time I had only associated ‘Nazareth’ with the birthplace of legendary guitar makers, C.F. Martin & Company (in Pennsylvania)… and, er, Jesus Christ. Prior to that, Nazareth had enjoyed a press launch at the infamous Nell Gwynne strip club in Soho. And however much fun it was watching the Nazarenes embarrassingly holding a prostrate topless lady for the photocall, it paled besides seeing them play the late show at the Zoom in the Spring of 1972. I had been invited to Germany for a gig in Heidelburg with Atomic Rooster, who had been newly joined by Chris Farlowe. Farlowe met me at the airport, and we then embarked on a bizarre drive around the Main’s notorious militia shops in his hunt for Nazi Memorabilia to furnish his own emporium in London. After the gig, someone suggested we swing by the Zoom. Nazareth were a well funded band who, as the Shadettes in their home town of Dunfermline back in 1968, had aspired to little more than playing at their local Kinema Ballroom. Certainly they didn’t seem