THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ZOOT

ZOOT’S TIME TRAVEL GUIDE FOR ROCK MUSICIANS

Einstein and H.G.Wells would have been fascinated by the life of a travelling rock musician, let alone a bandleader like myself. For our experiences can only ignite debate about the whole concept of space and time. They highlight those mysterious universal laws that govern how much time is spent travelling and how much actually staying – and playing. Speaking from experience, you can find yourself doing more of one and much less of the other.

In the old days, when I started out as semi-pro, playing in my home town, you could get on a bus with a guitar AND an amplifier and get off the bus in plenty of time for a hot meat pie before the gig. Usually you’d be playing to a bunch of people who knew you and even if they didn’t much like you, at least they respected, or were impressed by your naivety, and they were willing to stay throughout the performance until your ‘act’ was finished. All of these parameters change almost immediately once you go professional.

For one thing the amount of time it takes to get to the gig increases drastically. This is mostly because you believe your growing popularity has reached out to far flung fans and you are therefore tempted to accept gigs further and further afield. This self delusion knows no bounds. The result is that your travelling time increases in direct contrast to the amount of time you are actually expected to play.

THE GIG? NOT FAR SIGNOR!

If say, you are booked to travel from the U.K. to Italy for a festival in the southern regions, you can bet you will be in for a frustrating time.

The venue will be unreachable without enduring a car journey to the airport, a bumpy flight over the Alps and a four hour van ride with no air-conditioning, before arriving at some cheap hotel. THEN you discover to your chagrin that you are only required to play for an hour, just when you are all psyched up to knock the Italians dead with a marathon show. Back home at your handy local gig you could easily do a two hour and a half set…and love every minute!

Encouraging comments from promoters about the proposed venue like: “It’s not far from the main highway/airport“, means so many different things to people who live in the region where you’re going.” Not far” to them maybe, but that’s because they’re familiar with landmarks that help them estimate how late or early they’ll be for the gig. “We’ll be there in plenty of time” means nothing to someone who’s miscalculated the amount of sleep he needed for the day’s travel.

Most stress for musicians occur in such moments, as well as the other 23 hours spent wondering if a measly one hour ’s performance really justifies the monetary rewards. So much for the time/travel ratio. Come back H.G. Wells, all is forgiven.

FROZEN, BOILED AND DEAFENED – THE HOTEL CHOICE IS YOURS!

Holiday makers may regard staying in a hotel a pleasant part of a luxury break. But for long suffering musicians, who spend a life time on the road, hotels, guest houses and the rest can be grim environments, full of hidden perils.

As far as singers, bandleaders and musicians are concerned, hotels are places to sleep in between gigs. But when others are in charge of the arrangements, your haven of rest could turn out to be more like a prison or a monastery cell.

Finance has nothing to do with this aspect of your profession. The most expensive suite bestowed on you by a well meaning local promoter could be equipped with a vicious air conditioner or heater unit controlled by switches you cannot find…until morning. The result is you are either frozen or roasted all night.

Because hotel windows don’t open on the 15th floor, due to health & safety regulations, you risk drying out your throat. This is no good for singers. So, even after enduring a long road or air trip, you have to resist that afternoon nap to re-vitalise your body for the evening gig.

Perhaps the promoter thinks you would appreciate being housed in a ‘happening’ disco-enhanced ‘digs’ rather than a posh hotel. He assures you a good rest is guaranteed and you can wind down from a gig at your leisure. But he has omitted to tell you the disco may be four or more floors below your room. It’s good ‘vibes’ can be felt in your room until 5 a.m.. Just great if the alarm call for the tour bus is at six or seven o’clock!

At the other end of the hovel market, a nice quiet little B & B, just out of town with Mrs. McGinty ’s home cooked apple pie and eggs-over-easy for breakfast can seem far more preferable. Until you awake to the morning juggernauts firing up past your window’ cos you didn’t ‘t realise the ‘quiet room at the back’ was closest to the motorway you never saw on the map. Or even in the dark, you hadn’t noticed the farm yard next door. Not the quietest places in the world, once the sun has risen.

MEAT WAGON

Legend has it that one well known British blues band leader used to refuse to pay for hotel rooms for his musicians. But he thoughtfully suggested the guys ‘pull a bird with her own gaff’. Or they could stay in the bunk beds rudely constructed in the rear of a foul smelling converted meat delivery van that was his band’s mode of transport.

The choice of hotels booked for itinerate musicians can vary wildly and it all adds to the perils of life on the road. One place can be as grand as the enormous castle that Tito once requisitioned on taking over Yugoslavia. Conversely it could be someone’s private house in the Isle of Skye, because they only have one hotel and two pubs.

So on a festival day you can imagine your chances of getting a room. But don’t go to either places in the winter because you will need two overcoats on the bed (no heaters available) and gaffer tape to block out the howling wind coming in the ill-fitting windows. It’s hard to decide which hotel/house was the coldest. This happened to me but it WAS some years ago and things have improved since, I ‘m told, but I haven’t risked going back yet!

‘WE’VE GOT A KEYBOARD FOR YOU MR. MONEY…’

The Dreaded Saga of Borrowed Equipment

Apart from providing hotel, promoters will often kindly volunteer to provide equipment for travelling bands. All well and good. It makes perfect sense. Less travel costs, less hassle on stage, especially when there are lots of bands on a bill. But for a keyboard player, such as myself the equipment on loan can be a fraught issue.

Just to explain, and so as not to sound churlish….not all pianos are the same. Not all keyboard players are the same. None of those players desires the same sound from those instruments. To be fair it’s not always the lenders fault, but you don’t want to hear that dreaded phrase. ‘It ’s really got some poke. I had it fixed.’ This on looking at a beaten up; dropped down many flights of stairs; redesigned by an amateur boffin who thought he could improve the sound with a built-in pre-amp that makes a high voltage scream (to get above an insensitive guitarist, no doubt) and can ‘t be disconnected….you don ‘t want to know!

PAINTED

Firstly on my shopping list of horrors are plain old ordinary pianos. Acoustic pianos and their tuning history used to be the classical musician’s nightmare. But a rock/jazz or blues artist who has to use the club or pub piano endures a worse scenario ‘What ’s wrong with it? I’ve just had it painted!’ was the manager/landlord’s chilling response to questions about the piano’s condition. Mercifully the arrival of electric pianos now more or less guarantees a reliable set of keys for the band.

In a different country, when touring, if you don’t email the actual supplier (person) or you ‘ll get to Greece and be told ‘It ’s OK , it hasn ‘t been used it ’s been in a studio, locked up safe, for months.’ So when they presented the Hammond B-3 to me the dust build up in the keyboard area should have warned me that the volume pedal would have a bird’s nest in it!

The ’studio’ they spoke of was, of course, a converted barn. Electronic ‘keys’, as they are now annoyingly referred to, are more likely to be in tune, but represented by a myriad of different makes let alone models to choose from and a misspelled email is all it takes to. So you request a digital Hammond, shall we say only to be supplied with anything from a 15 yr old version of the first XB1 ever made, or a brand new XK3 i (Mk 5 or some such) with various non required presets and access to extra computer and midi outlets allowing you to program your domestic lighting and auto-pet-feeding machines at home while you’re out gigging.

DRAWBARS

All of which, together with experimenting local lighting guy’s ‘atmospheric’ contribution adds to the excitement of the gig as you punch one button to the left of the correct one and hear yourself not quietly providing a Jimmy Smith chordal, smooth, warm backdrop for the singer’s sensitive passage but blowing he or she off the rostrum with the heavy metal, John Lord ‘full on’ solo sound or even Stevie Winwood ‘Keep on Running’ intro setting”…which for those of you who don ‘t know involves almost ALL the drawbars being pulled out! Too late, you’ve been conceived as an “overplaying insensitive bastard” before you can scramble for the soft pedal (the one they omitted to supply you with remember?) or any quieter setting.
Briefly it should be noted if you are serviced with other kinds of synthesizer check out the popular music of the country you are in because….the presets used by the owner having to make a living ‘covering’ his countrymen ’s favourite pop songs will have a whole range of the most unusual ’sounds’ you will have ever heard. 80 percent of them totally unsuitable and most of them quite frightening!

It’s possible to start ‘Green Onions’ with a preset used for the beginning of Dr Who.
Yes is has happened to me. Good luck!

MEMORIES OF DANTALIAN’S CHARIOT

How well I remember 1967 and ‘The summer of love’! That’s when I formed Dantalian’s Chariot with my old mates from the Big Roll Band, Andy Summers and Colin Allen. It was the year when all things hippie had taken root but we were still playing soul music. We wanted to start writing our own music, just as The Beatles had done and Pink Floyd were creating their own style too. It seemed the right time to step out and make some big changes.

But first we had to let our fans and audience know what we had in mind. That’s why we recorded the album ‘Transition’ now coming out on a Repertoire CD. The whole idea of the album was to try and explain why we were going psychedelic. I thought it might be a way to introduce Dantalian’s Chariot to die hard fans of the Big Roll Band. They would hear we were going towards a softer side. We still used all the guys from the Big Roll Band like Nick Newall on flute. I guess we were pensioning them off! We had been writing some more sensitive songs even before this album, but they got put by the way side.

TRANSITION

We came off the road for ten weeks and to spent time rehearsing and recording, which was really stupid because only The Beatles could afford to do that. We thought we could write in the studio and it would all come good. But the Beatles could write songs in the back of a van before they got to a gig. They were just very good at composing and remembering what they’d done. It wasn’t until later they began experimenting in the studio and we thought that would be easy to do it ourselves.

Tony Colton and Ray Smith wrote a lot of the songs for ‘Transition’. They were musicians and producers as well as a composers and they later formed Head, Hands & Feet. They were Brill Building type songwriters who’d come up with an idea and play it to you. They gave us ‘Coffee Song’ and ‘Recapture The Thrill Of Yesterday’ – really great songs.

But the most psychedelic track is ‘Soma’ an instrumental devised by Andy and myself. We didn’t actually play it with Dantalian’s Chariot. As it turned out we didn’t do a Chariot album because the record company pulled the plug. They had thought our single ‘Madman Running Through The Fields’ was going to be a hit. But it was hard to make the new group a success and ‘Transition’ wasn’t released until 1968, after the Chariot had broken up.

We were trying to make a transition for ourselves, but we didn’t have a big enough following. It took just ten months to get rid of two year’s worth of money! And our audience took a bashing as well. People just wanted to hear the old hits. We had spent two and a half years building up a following with the Big Roll Band, sometimes playing 13 gigs in a week.

FREAKING OUT

But Dantalian’s was great while it lasted and we had a fantastic light show. I remember when we played at the Saville theatre in London, Pink Floyd wanted to use our strobe lights, which are now illegal. I’ve had people come up to me years later who said they gave up drugs completely after seeing us perform. They’ll say: ‘I came to one of your gigs and it completely straightened me out. I now have a very successful business. Thank you very much!’

The DJ Jeff Dexter once asked me if I could put Dantalian’s back together again to play at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. So I said to him ‘Can you afford Andy’s fees?’

When I hear ‘Transition’ now I still think it stands up. The first track ‘Let The Music Make You Happy’ is a little naive but it says what it means. It is still an interesting album people can enjoy even if they don’t know who the hell I am!

ZOOT AND THE SOUND CHECKS

 

A bane of any musician’s life is the phenomenon known as the ‘sound check.’ It’s a necessary evil and it affects all bandsmen, whether they be keyboard players or guitarists not to mention horn players and drummers. But as I know all too well – the best laid plans of mice, men and sound engineers often go astray, usually at the start of a gig.

When it comes to sound checking before a gig every instrument has to balanced and that includes the keyboards, annoyingly known these days as ‘KEYS.’

Like the drummer, the keyboard player’s main disadvantage is that he is immobile, once set up on stage. So, whatever monitor volume/balance is fixed, he’s rooted to that sound balance, even when it goes wrong! Unless he has a mike connecting to him DIRECTLY to the monitor operator, it’s a dead cert that even a minor volume adjustment, to the guitar, let’s say, will result in uneven tempos and violent thoughts against everyone in the group, except the real the culprit.

The culprit in question is of course whoever managed to contact a sound mixer ‘out front’ and told him to turn their personal volume UP. Also guilty is the MAIN sound guy who, after the sound check in the afternoon agreed he wouldn’t change the settings, then went out for curry or fish and chips of questionable catering quality and a pint, with the humping crew. On returning to the gig and he believes he is now the Beethoven of the knobs/faders/switches that he promptly applies – only to screw up the acoustic balance.

But once you are trapped ‘in situ’ you gotta roll with the overtones and hopefully embarrass everyone connected with the appalling sound. A well known artist I have worked with has done this. Not only on one occasion I might add. No names…yet. (Van-tastic!)

There are occasions when a sound check has to double as a rehearsal for the set stage dressing. I remember a backdrop of a gaudy Union Jack flag being lowered behind the band that caused considerable disquiet in the ranks. It had been painted by an Aussie who had been living in USA too long and he had painted the blue bits thicker in the wrong places.

This caused an outburst by bass man Chas Chandler at the start of the 1983 Animals Reunion tour. ‘I’m not playing in front of that! It’s an insult to the Queen, mon!’ he protested.

His Geordie accent was a lot broader but an accurate reproduction of what he actually said here would just confuse you, dear reader.

CAN WE HAVE A PA PLEASE?

The other extreme of this example was my own experience of turning up to a village hall to do a gig with a 4-piece band (me/guitar/bass/drums). I had requested the rather unprepared, but keen lady host to provide the band with a PA.

My casual words were ‘Oh just a mike and one monitor will do.’
I of course meant at least a 1K rig, a PA with two main speakers for the hall (on poles if the stage is high) just one boom stand to hold my mike (as there was no sax so no other mike was required and just one monitor was to be at my feet.

When we arrived , you guessed it……. one mike…no stand…and one monitor…..no PA, no amp…no speakers…!

‘I thought all concert halls had a public address system,’ the formerly Public Relations trained promoter sweetly explained.

Of course the council owned hall DID have a World War Two vintage Tannoy system built into the wall 15 feet up and with no means of adjusting its volume.

The caretaker did his best, but it was only an urgent call to a local gigging guitarist with his own PA who lived nearby, that saved the day. Thanks to him turning up with some emergency supplies of gear, the gig was able to get underway.

‘TESTING TESTING’…

So, from the solo/duo performer to the 16-20 piece big band the one thing that won’t get sorted to everyone’s satisfaction at a sound check is the sound. Sound checks are designed to make you look like a professional. To look like you know what you are expecting the crowd to hear. Impossible by definition because as a performer you don’t know what the audience wants or is expecting to hear. Certainly not tone-wise.

Your first obstacle is the drum check, a continuous headache producing monotonous repetition of each drum separately beaten with no syncopation for at least half an hour so that the sound operator can discover how many possible frequencies within each drum he can tweak to cause feedback plus a ringing undertone to confuse you while you’re playing. Actually, the sound he inflicts you with is similar to the ‘head splitter ‘ you experience if you hang around the hall during this checking period. An upstairs dressing room if what you need to avoid this , better still, go outside before the sound guy says to the drummer ‘Now, play them all together.’

Now comes the bass. It’s likely he won’t often play those slow simple low notes during the set …but don’t tell the sound guy! One more abyss of over/under/sub tones he will search out so as to then mysteriously conjure up during the performance.

MORE GUITAR MAN!

 

The guitar check, an oxymoron itself because an electric guitarist can’t explain the tone he’s after. It’s a myriad of tonal ether-driven possibilities that never satisfies him due to the extensive business possibilities the makers can utilise to bewilder him out of the money he earns. Not many guitarists will admit to using, and being happy with, just one axe. (How apt a word to describe the splinters they make of the melodies from great oaks of harmony they swathe through).

Too much embellishment? Just sit through a guitarist’s sound check…that’s embellishment of the ego. What a pity so few can intelligently incorporate them into the tunes in the set. Oh yeah, and he won ‘t play at that volume on the gig.

There are two kinds of sax players who are forced to or play with electric fellow players. The first is the one from the jazz/blues world who can’t realize that playing in a sensitive manner a little distance from the mike (on a stand) will be totally useless when other mikes on stage pick up various louder instruments and fire their racket straight through the monitor at your feet, into the sensitive ears that thought it was a concert and not a war for volume supremacy.

The second is the world wise one who has played a couple of stadiums in amongst a flurry of guitar Rock Gods, sometimes on a rostrum high up at the back of a stage that’s more like a boat show layout. With spotlights to blind them thus cutting them off from the ‘band vibe’. These ’soldiers of the impossible’ have got themselves a contact mic so as to do battle with rather than suffer the aural intimidation standing in front of the barrage of speakers, apparently necessary to relay the guitarist’s single note salvos.

Sound checks? Gimme shelter!

ZOOT’S MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION – ANSWERED

How did you get that name ZOOT?

When I was 19 years of age my brother took me to see ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ a wonderful concert devised by the late American promoter Norman Granz. He managed artists, producers dozens of records and presented all star concert tours all over the world from the 1940s onwards.

The London JATP package show that year showcased four mighty saxophonists including British heavyweights Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes with American stars Al Konitz and Zoot Sims. Around this time I was fronting a skiffle/rock group in my home town. I had been raving about the fantastic array of talent I ‘d just seen, when the guitarist ( one John Goggin) was trying to write our one-inch by two-inch, £2.10p advert in the local Bournemouth Echo.

He missed the point of my enthusiasm and said would I mind being called Zoot in the display advert as with my surname, it would stand out from all the others. I said: ‘Yes, yes OK’ and continued raving on about one day getting a saxophone player in our group, as cool as Zoot Sims. And so forever more I too became ‘Zoot’ Money.

Many years later I was at a jazz/blues festival in Cheltenham, about to take the stage wearing long hair, a beard and clutching an acoustic guitar, having shed my R&B/blues band in favour of the singer/songwriter facade that was to be a brief foray into selling my writing skills. I then discovered that not only was I on the same bill, but I was to share the dressing room with my nom de performance, the immensely talented let alone world famous sax man himself.

I felt I had to explain to him, my hijacking such a hip name. After all, as far I knew, he was the originator and deserved my respect. He was also a founder member of the Bebop generation, for whom the phrase meant ‘stylish’ or ‘fashionable’.

Feeling somewhat guilty I sheepishly suggested Mr.Sims that he call me George. If anyone should use my real name, HE should be the one.

‘After all we can ‘t keep calling each other Zoot all evening.’

‘You ‘d better call me what my mother called me then,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ I asked expecting Cuthbert or Lindsey or something even more embarrassing for a jazz icon.

‘Call me John, Zoot.’

JAMMING WITH JIMI

Everybody wants to know how I first met Jimi Hendrix. It’s an old story but most writers still get it wrong. Well, it happened like this. Back in September 1966 my old mate Chas Chandler of The Animals arrived back in London from New York, escorting his latest discovery, a rather special guitar player. It must have been one of the only nights in the Sixties when The Big Roll Band wasn’t working. We held the record at the Rik Gunnell Agency for playing the most gigs, thirteen in one week, only JUST below Georgie Fame’s record.

My phone rang in the early evening to relay Chas Chandler’s agitated voice. He was calling from Heathrow airport where his plane had just landed. Chas was accompanying the young American on his first trip to London. Chas thought Hendrix should be invited to sit-in with whoever was playing that night at such clubs as The Bag o’ Nails, The Speakeasy or as it turned out, the Scotch of St James. Jimi needed a guitar. Was Andy Summers in? Did I have a guitar? All the music shops were shut.

‘Andy’s out’ I explained ‘But I can maybe go downstairs to his flat and purloin one!’

I do this and Jimi Hendrix arrives at my West London flat with Chas. Jimi sits down and fools around with Andy’s revered Telecaster…. upside down of course. I play on a Wurlitzer piano and we jam for a while, by which time Andy returns. I think he might kill me for letting someone else use his pride and joy. However Jimi also tries out my own ‘axe.’ It is a £23 job that I bought so I could do a spoof guitar section on stage with the Big Rollers. It was and is…a Wampree. Yes, only a handful such guitars were made and shipped to England before the family firm went bust. Each one was different. Thing is…Jimi loved the action on it even though the tuning struggled with itself.

I remained friends with Jimi during his years in England right up until his ill-assisted demise and although I was from planet Earth and he was from a higher plane, I never saw him upstage or musically embarrass anyone. He was always in concert mode, never in competition.

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 in The World According To Zoot.

<< back