Just about 44 years ago, on a soggy wet farm in upstate New York, a little festival was taking place. It was originally supposed to be an “Aquarian Exposition, three days of peace and music” to celebrate the hunky dory enchanted freedom that the 1960’s had mythicized almost into reality. The last night, a Sunday, the grounds inhabited with thousands of weary followers winding down their adventure when a lightning bolt erupted on the stage and a band of British blues boys pulled out their arsenal and awoke the lilting butterflies from their impending slumber. Sporting a small peace sign on his red guitar, Alvin Lee lit the fuse to what would eventually explode into a whirlwind of attention once the movie about the festival was released into theatres along with the three album soundtrack. Almost 44 years later, Ten Years After is still touring.
What some people may not have noticed or have sadly forgotten, if all you’re familiar with is the aforementioned film, available on DVD for anytime consumption, is that there were three other guys on that Woodstock stage, tearing up the infamous “I’m Going Home” right alongside Lee, who passed away this March, and Glide had the privilege of talking with bass player Leo Lyons recently about his career and that fateful night.
Lyons would have certainly fit well into the metal scene, even today. Live footage from the sixties concerts show a shaggy-head in free-flowing turmoil as it herks and jerks through “I Can’t Keep From Crying” at 1970’s Isle Of Wight Festival or a psychedelic version of “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” The man is a jitterbug physically while producing some of the most deep-throated bass lines coming out of that era. What is surprising to find out, is how many notes he actually DOESN’T play. Listening to the music, you hear a subtle, laid-back coolness that doesn’t match up with the visuality of Lyons’ fast finger movements.
The white-haired Lyons, who continues performing with longtime TYA bandmates, drummer Ric Lee and keyboard player Chick Churchill, may have slowed his bounce down a bit but he can never stand still. The head bobs in rhythm with the knees and he still knows his way around some snookeringly cool bass vibes, while pulling double-duty: not only does he tour with Ten Years After but he tours with his other band Hundred Seventy Split. Featuring guitar player/vocalist Joe Gooch, who also pulls double duty in both bands, HSS are readying a new record, while TYA are gearing up for an American tour that kicks off in late July in Las Vegas. If you’re looking for some great blues music with shots of psychedelic rock, this is the time to get out and see them perform live.
What are you up to today, Leo?
It’s coming towards the end of my working day. I’ve been in the studio. I’m mixing. I’ve got another band called Hundred Seventy Split and we just finished a record so I’m mixing it. It’s our second record so it’ll come out probably in October. I don’t know when in the States, though.
How did you find Joe Gooch? He is a fabulous singer and guitar player.
Yeah, very talented guy. Joe’s actually the guitar player in Ten Years After. He replaced Alvin and he’s a longtime friend of my son Tom. In fact, they went to school together. So when we went looking for another guitar player, Tom suggested Joe. I was in Nashville at the time, Joe lives in Wales, so I suggested that he send a tape to one of the other guys in Ten Years After and he got the job, to cut a long story short. But both Joe and I like to do different things and about two years ago now, I guess, a record label asked me if I’d do a solo record and have some guests on it and I asked Joe to be one of the guests. I got so frustrated with record company politics, sorting out distribution and one thing and another, that I booked some time and he and I went into the studio and made a start. We did the record together rather than it being a record with guests.
If you’re both in Ten Years After, how would you say that these two bands differ?
The music is different. I think Ten Years After is basically 75% of an original band. People grow and have different tastes. We’re a little bit edgier, we’re probably a little more diverse, we can rock out a little bit more. It’s the two younger guys with me, I guess (laughs)
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I YouTubed some recent performances and you seem to be playing with as much energy as you did in the early days of Ten Years After. Your fingers are just a-going.
Well, yeah, I love it (laughs). It’s what I do and what I like to do. Traveling sometimes gets a bit tiring, wears me out, but actually the playing is invigorating. And I’ll keep doing it as long as I can, as long as people want to hear me play. And I’m always excited about doing something new. With Ten Years After, I enjoy playing the Ten Years After songs when people want to hear them but you can only do, if you’re doing a live show, maybe three hours maximum; mostly, usually two. And you can’t put all the songs in that people want to hear and add new songs as well. So Hundred Seventy Split was a way of saying, “We don’t play Ten Years After songs, we play something different but we hope you’ll enjoy it.” And the Ten Years After fans come along and new ones too. Some people have never seen Ten Years After and now Hundred Seventy Split fans come and see Ten Years After. I think what would be great to do would be for Ten Years After and Hundred Seventy Split to do a tour together. That would be really exciting and interesting.
And you’re going to be wore out
I know (laughs). Ten Years After will be doing about a twenty date tour of the States starting the end of July, so that will be quite a grueling run, I think. Not the playing but the traveling. I think it starts on the 27th of July in Las Vegas and runs until the 25th or 26th of August. It’s one of those, oh, what do they call them? I can’t think of the correct word. Old man tours (laughs).
Why do you prefer to play bass without a pick?
I’ve done both. Over the years I started out with a pick and then I started playing with my thumb. I just became interested in playing the upright bass and it seems more natural to play with my fingers. Now, it would be uncomfortable to use a pick. I think the tone, really, in short. It’s a completely different tone.
What makes a live bass solo into a great live bass solo?
Luck, on my part (laughs) I don’t know, I think you’ve got to get, at least, talk about getting into the zone where all of a sudden something can be channeled through you. I think it’s a means of expression. I think you learn your scales, you practice your scales, and then it’s an inspirational thing, I think, to make a good bass solo. Not just technique.
What kind of bass do you use?
For many, many years I’ve played a Fender Jazz bass, since 1962, I guess. A few years ago a company in London called The Bass Center approached me and wanted to do, I think they call it a tribute bass, and built it from computer graphic pictures and measurements of my original bass. They built those and I have a couple of those and that’s what I use mostly. Although I do have a collection of basses but I use this. I think it’s called the Leo Lyons Woodstock Bass. It looks like a Jazz bass. In fact, people think it’s my old bass because it’s all beaten up. But when they built it for me, I had a bit of an input in saying yes, I like this, this needs changing, so forth so on. I use it 95% of the time.
You were born and raised in England. How did you get into music?
Like a lot of people, listening to a radio station, Radio Luxembourg. It was the only radio station. It was a medium-wave radio station. You could only pick it up in the evenings in the UK and they did all the pop music, rock music, at the time. Of course, most of it at that time, starting out was American and then we had the English bands come along. We had a period too called the skiffle period. I don’t know whether you know anything about that but it was homemade music with basically guitar, washboard, and bass, a stick with a string on it. It was kind of very, very basic. I suppose you could say the closest thing to it would be bluegrass music without any musical technique. It was called skiffle and it came out in the 50’s and a lot of English musicians – I think the Stones and the Who and Zeppelin, all of us, kind of grew up on skiffle. Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, that kind of music. And most of the time we’d listen to it on Radio Luxembourg because the local UK radio stations were not playing that kind of music.
Was your family musical at all?
I had a great-uncle that was an opera singer. He was with a metropolitan opera company in New York and Covent Garden. But that’s two generations or three generations removed.
You never wanted to be an opera singer?
I wish I could. I still haven’t given up on being a singer but the chances are I would never be able to do it as a professional opera singer (laughs). I’ve never tried to sing opera, obviously, but I do sing a little bit. I write. I was in Nashville as a staff songwriter so I write songs and I attempt to sing them. Not with a great success. I usually get someone else to interrupt my ideas.
Did you start writing songs first or did you start playing a musical instrument first?
I started playing a musical instrument first. I think it was probably five or ten years before I thought, well, maybe I could write some things. I think in the last fifteen years, maybe, time flies so maybe it was the last twenty years, I’ve taken it seriously and I was a staff writer in Nashville for quite a number of years and then I went back on the road again with Ten Years After. I kind of put my staff writing job on hold and it ended (laughs) but I still write, obviously.
Do you find it easier to write than to try to do new things on the bass?
No, no, I think it’s harder to write because playing bass is like, I guess, riding a bicycle in a way. I’ve got the technique down and I can generally come up with some new ideas. Writing, lyric writing, is quite hard to do. When it happens, it’s a wonderful thing.
What is one of your favorite memories from the really early days, the Jaybirds days?
I think it would be getting a gig, you know, the first gig. The first few gigs you do and then you play maybe a local dancehall and people like it. I mean, it’s a dream come true, just to be able to be a musician. Even when I had a job, you know, it was something I always wanted to do. I was fifteen or sixteen, maybe.
How did the Marquee residency gig come along? Was that after you guys went to Hamburg?
Oh yes, we went to Hamburg in 1962, so in 1966 or 1967 was the Marquee. The Jaybirds were a three-piece and we played all over the UK and we were always trying to break into London because at that time, pre-Beatles you could say, London was where everyone had to go if you wanted to be something in the music business. So it was a big dream to play the Marquee and I happened to know the assistant manager of the Marquee. He was a promoter in the north of England or the east coast of England, and I managed to persuade him into giving us an audition. Although he couldn’t give us the gig, he could get an audition and the manager at the Marquee, a man called John Gee, actually liked the band. I knew he liked Frank Sinatra and that kind of stuff so at our audition we did a Woody Herman, “Woodchoppers Ball,” and he was quite impressed with that and we got a gig. That was a real turning point for us as far as London went.
Do you remember seeing any of the now-famous musicians come in to see you guys play?
Oh yeah, I read about it (laughs) and I meet people now and they say, “I saw you thirty years ago,” and whether it’s someone from Aerosmith or Queen or whatever, there’s guys that say, “Oh yeah, we came to see you.” Every musician does, don’t they. You go and see a new band, you hear about it, it’s how we all develop, I think.
What do you think Ten Years After had that no one else had at that time?
A self-belief, I think, that we could do something. When I think back, we were pretty arrogant (laughs). Not big-headed but we were determined that we would become the world’s best musicians. It took nine years, I guess, of being, well, you know, it’s 98% rejection in this business and you have to keep going, and to keep going you have to believe that you have something. It wasn’t the money. Now, I feel a lot of young musicians, young entertainers, say, “I want to be a rock star.” I don’t think we wanted to do that. We wanted to be, it sounds so pretentious, but we wanted to be great musicians one day. The more I think about it, the more ridiculous it is. But that’s what we felt. We felt we wanted to be the best in the world and we just plowed away. And if you have that dream and you’re prepared to give up everything for that dream – and that would be relationships, somewhere to live, food in your stomach; literally anything – if you’re prepared to give up everything for it then you do. We just continued and, I don’t know, we just had a tremendous amount of luck too, being in the right place at the right time. But that was just the persistence of it. All the guys I started out with, of course apart from Alvin, left.
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What do you remember most about recording the band’s first album? You had been in a studio before, correct?
I think I got my first recording deal in 1961 with a guy called Joe Meek, who was kind of a UK version of Phil Spector. He produced the Telstar records and that kind of thing. That was my first experience. Then we worked as a backing band for a pop trio, a little bit like the Beach Boys, called the Ivy League, and I worked with them in the studio. Then I started working in London as a session musician, playing on other people’s records. So by the time we got our own record deal, I wasn’t a novice in the studio. I knew a little bit about recording.
So what was it like with Ten Years After? Did Alvin kind of take over or did you all work together?
I think we were pretty much a team. I think there were some people that weren’t as much a team as others but we were all in the same boat, we all had the same goal at that time. So we all kind of worked together and it was all being a band and having a record deal. It was new to us. I mean, that was really, when I started out, what everyone wanted was a record deal. They didn’t expect to make any money out of it. They just wanted to put on the poster, such and such recording artist, and that’s what we did. And it was very corporate. We got an album deal, which was very unusual, with Deram, which was a part of Decca Records, a new label but was a very, very established studio and you’d do a session from nine till eleven and then one till four or five. It was that kind of thing. It wasn’t like we blocked off the studio for twenty-four hours and just go in and hang out. It was three hour sessions that we’d do and I think we did the record in probably ten days or something like that. And the first record was more or less a live set, which is pretty much what it is with a lot of bands. Having produced a lot since then myself, usually the first record is their repertoire and the second record it’s getting a little harder.
For you, personally, what was more momentous: Woodstock, Newport or the Isle Of Wight?
I think it would have to be Woodstock because of the aftermath of it. Didn’t really think anything about it at the time till the movie came out and then the people started asking about it. People ask about it even today. Every interview I do, every young person that I meet says, “Oh, what was Woodstock like?” And I say young now, even people that are forty years old are asking me that (laughs). So that one has to stand out. But all those festivals you mentioned were great in their own way. And so many others, like the Texas International Pop Festival or whatever it was called and then there was the Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival, all those things, they’re all great.
Did you get to see anyone perform while you were at any of these festivals?
I saw a few, I think. I’m just trying to think who. I didn’t see that many at Newport, that I recall. That was probably because we had to go somewhere else. The Isle Of Wight, I saw four or five acts and at Woodstock, probably, three or four.
Was it exciting?
Well, we played with all the people that were on these festivals several times before. So there were people that I actually knew. I guess it wasn’t like seeing your favorite artists for the first time. I’d already seen them all and knew most of them.
When you first heard “I’d Love To Change The World,” what did you think? Because the lyrics were very bold for that time.
We had a few songs that were a little risqué, I think, in our naivety. It wouldn’t have been that bold in the UK but in America I think it was. I didn’t write the lyrics to that. I think the song is great. I think it’s the best song that Alvin’s written. I think some of the lyrics are a little bit strange in today’s thing but “I’d love to change the world but I don’t know what to do” is very, very relevant right now. And we do play it. Alvin would never play the song live. He refused to do it.
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At the time?
At the time, yes.
Did you ever find out why?
(laughs) Because he’s what they call … no reason. I always think of that movie Little Big Man where the guy comes out of the water and rubs himself all over with dust or the other way around. It’s a controversy, he does things differently and Alvin was very much like that.
You got to jam with Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell. I know people always ask you about Jimi Hendrix but what was Mitch like?
Down-to-earth, very nice, as far as I knew him. We worked together three or four times maybe, maybe a little bit more. He died a few years ago, but it must be fifteen years since I spoke to him. But Mitch was very much of a jazz player. I was asked to join Jimi Hendrix’s band when he first came over to the UK. I think Jimi was a great player and a great songwriter and everything, but I’d put too much time into Ten Years After before Ten Years After made it or Alvin and I made it. I think we were called Ten Years After at the time, I’m not sure. But I decided not to. Mitch was a different player. I like to play more in the groove and if you were playing bass with Jimi, a lot of the bass lines are guitar lines. It’s not like being a part of a rhythm section. But too free-form for me, Mitch’s playing. But I was invited to play with him, a lot of people were like that at the time.
When you first decided that you wanted to be a professional musician, all these years later, was it all you had imagined it would be?
I never imagined it would be anything other than standing on stage playing a bass. That’s what I thought it would be. A lot of people want to become musicians because it’s popular with the girls and that kind of thing, which of course it is, but I didn’t think about making a lot of money or having people recognize me on the street. My goal was to stand on stage and play bass and to enjoy doing it. That was the thrill, that was what started me doing it.
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The industry has changed so much, the recording process has changed so much. What do you like best and what do you like least about the new way of doing things?
The length of time it takes. I like the spontaneity of the way it was recorded. Now with all the digital age, you can do whatever you like. People expect perfection, everyone goes for perfection, and if you don’t actually come up with that perfect thing, it doesn’t seem to fit in with what people expect of you. I like recording live because I think that’s a good spontaneous thing. I embrace the technology in as much as some of the sounds are good. But a lot of the old records, even going back to the 50’s, have such a wonderful sound to them because they were done live with everyone playing together and everyone feeding off each other. I kind of miss that. We try to do that with Hundred Seventy Split. We try and record everything live.
Joe Gooch doesn’t sound like Alvin. There’s a difference I can see in the guitar playing.
Oh yes, we didn’t want him to be a copy of Alvin. I think I said once that when Ten Years After reformed and I produced the first record, I wanted it to be like Ten Years After now with a fire lit underneath, to capture the fire we had way back when we started out. And that was the thing and how to set about doing it. So we told Joe, just to be yourself. We play live so obviously he has to learn some of the riffs but in between that he has to come over as his own man. And the thing with 75% of the original band, the flavor of the band is going to be the same. It’s the same drummer, the same keyboard player, and in a way, although I’ve played all sorts of styles since the beginning of Ten Years After, but when I play with those two guys it kind of pulls me back into that kind of feel, you know. So it kind of sounds like Ten Years After.
What is the most interesting piece of memorabilia that you own from your career?
I guess it would have to be the bass that I’ve still got, which I bought second-hand from Ian Hunter, the singer with Mott The Hoople.
Since the Rolling Stones have been touring in celebration of their 50th anniversary, did you back in the 60’s ever run around with those guys or see some of their shows, during the Brian Jones era?
I didn’t know them in the Brian Jones era but I did see them in the Brian Jones era. I knew them latterly, after Brian had left, even before he died. I run into Bill occasionally. Ronnie Wood, I knew from the Faces, and before the Faces, actually, when he played with Jeff Beck. Mick Jagger, I don’t really know. Charlie Watts, I’ve spoken to a few times. But we used to record in Olympic Studios and there were two studios there and it seemed we were always in recording when the Who were in the other studio, and vice versa. We used to visit each other’s sessions and Jagger used to come along sometimes and I met him there but I don’t really know him.
We touched on this earlier, but what are your plans for the rest of the year?
We start the tour of America in July. Then in September, I think I’m on tour in Europe with Ten Years After through November. In December, Hundred Seventy Split will tour Europe to promote the new record. Then I take a day off (laughs).
For fans, where’s the best place they can go to find out about the new music and tour dates?
www.tenyearsafternow.com should have the dates as they’re confirmed. For Hundred Seventy Split, it’s www.hundredseventysplit.com and from there, there are links to Facebook and that kind of thing, which is a little bit more interactive with fans. People are posting photographs and things. Between those two sites, that should really fill in all the dates. And on my own website, of course, also, www.leolyons.com. I forgot that (laughs) or my Facebook site.
