mous slogan in your sleeping ear. “Quest into the unknown.” And Larry Wallis was walking around in a t-shirt that read “Fuck Art, Let’s Dance.” The times were not only changing, but also becoming damned confusing, frequently surreal, and, on a bad night, when the stains on the barroom floor were legible hieroglyphics, starting to make terrifying sense. One tried and true recipe for keeping at least a portion of one’s sanity was to approach the vagaries of time, place, and the rock’n’roll profession as one mighty, never ending roll of the dice. Every so often, life and the cosmos might cut a boy a break, and the bones would turn up a natural seven-come-eleven, but on others, the devil himself would wink, just as he’d winked at Gene Vincent and poor Johnny Ace, and you’d find yourself looking at a bad dose of snake eyes. Mercifully, though, the instants of good fortune and the moments of dire catastrophe were the exceptions. Most of one’s time was spent trying to roll a four the hard way. Often, it seemed, uphill, and with the tip of one’s nose. The story that you are about to read is neither one of triumph nor tragedy. Some of us who have survived would not even admit that the tale is entirely complete. Maybe the bulk of the drama has been played out, but there is always room for one more round while the boys can hold their cards, and engage in one final and maybe defining scene before we fold and take the ultimate bow. The narrative is one that talks of both inspiration and desperation — and players in the drama soaked in perspiration — the stage sweat that’s a given. At best this story is the saga of a travelling show, a constantly mutating carnival of souls and sinners, clowns and con artists, jesters and jugglers, pirates and posers, floozies and fabulists, methedrine musketeers and orphan Ophelias, on a journey both haphazard and hazardous, with Russell Hunter and Duncan Sanderson maintaining the thunder through times as ‘interesting’ as any Chinese curse. The heydays of the Deviants and then the Pink Fairies left blurred impressions of constant, if punctuated motion, and an entire world viewed from the chronic distortion of three chords and a four-piece band — with the great Boss Goodman leading the mission from God — and musicians plying their trade while still learning it. Was this Leeds or Liverpool, Penzance or Paris, Amsterdam or Aberdeen? What time was it, what day was it? Was that the rising sun before us, or the fire of the apocalypse? And what route do we take from Portobello Road to Haight Street? Someone roll a joint, pass the bottle, count the pills, and we’ll give our best guess. No idea of the destination but we’re going anyway. A line from Bob Dylan ......KEEP IT TOGETHER!
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