Touring with HAWKWIND. Post 10. San Francisco Events.

Chatting with bass player, Adrian Shaw, over the last couple of days, he's amazed at how much I can remember of the tour but he did correct me about something I said about him and SIMON KING, the drummer. I said that they didn't get on at one point and he can't remember any problem between the two of them. I think I must have misread an occasion when they were pretending not to get on but they were in fact imitating the Dave Brock/Bob Calvert relationship which was very dodgy at this time to say the least. So I apologise for that unintentional error.

My memories of San Francisco are many and various and I can't remember in which order they happened. The gigs at the Old Waldorf, owned by Bill Graham, I can hardly remember except that it was a rather cold place to play and that we played two gigs on each of the days we played there. Round the gigs we seemed to do quite a lot.

Dave was being very friendly and invited me and Simon King to go out of town with him to visit some Hell's Angels. They seemed a friendly bunch at home, out of their standard uniform. They were obviously bootleggers in quite a big way and had boxes of albums they had created from bootleg tapes. We were invited to choose a few each. I was sifting through the boxes with the others and found a bootleg of Genesis live. a group I rather liked at the time. When I pulled it out the box, Dave said to me,"No more of that. You already play too many fancy chords. We don't want to end up sounding like them."
Simon took me aside in the garden and said,"What can I do? One of those guys has just asked me to sleep with his wife so he can take some photos! What if he changes his mind half way through and decides to kick the shit out of me." So I told him to give some excuse like he'd picked up a bad dose of crabs and wasn't clear yet. This was ironic in view of later events. The whole visit was a bit bizarre with Dave off having serious chats with the guy whose house it was who was obviously 'the man'.
Sylvie, Daves's wife flew in that evening to join him for the end of the tour and a short holiday afterwards. Now I knew Sylvie and, from what Dave had said, she had seen quite a lot of my wife while we had been away with his son Pascoe being the same age as my youngest, Nat. They only lived about 4 miles from us in remotest North Devon. So perhaps that is why he chose me to come out on a trip with the two of them, going over the Golden Gate bridge and to visit some people they knew out in Marin County. He called me to his room quite early, while Sylvie was in the shower, to tell me where we were going. He was quickly taking a couple of lines of coke and handed me the paper wrap it had been in and told me to chew it.
So we set off, Dave obviously right out there, driving to perfection with his eyes out on stalks, Syvlie trying to make a little conversation and me going through the strongest coke hit I had ever had as I slowly chewed through this rather large wrap of paper. We shot over the Golden Gate and drove through this countryfied area known as Marin County, the place of choice for freaks with some cash. We stopped at this timber bungalow in a pleasant suburban village where we were to visit Simon House in his girlfriend's house. He wasn't in though: he was off rehearsing with the David Bowie band somewhere.
A joint was rolled, some sort of perfumed tea served with little wholemeal cakes and I detected interest in me from the lady of the house. This was confirmed when I asked for the loo and she showed me, showing me the power shower at the same time and saying I could enjoy a shower if I wanted to with a flirty look. Now she was very attractive but Sylvie Brock was here and she was a friend of my wife. When Dave and Sylvie got up to leave, the lady suggested outright that I stay there and she would get me back into town in time for the gig.
The horrible thing is I can't remember what I did, I was too out of it at the time. I do remember stopping off at the park just before the Golden Gate bridge and looking at the incredible views as the sun fell into the Pacific. And I do remember hanging out with this lady (name forgotten) before and after playing. Anyhow, she will re-appear in a later chapter.
Another memory I had was of us all going to eat in a Korean restaurant, eating food that was cooked on hot stones in the middle of the table, totally delicious and then being told we all had to go back to the hotel together, to be guided around a black neighbourhood where we could invite trouble. Our hotel was not a Holiday Inn: it was a Japanese hotel and this made a big change. For one thing, in the bathroom there was what we call a slipper bath, a bath you sit in rather than lie in because it is shaped like a chair. There was a booklet of instructions on how to use the bath. I can't remember them now but I know it made having a bath a lot more interesting than a normal one.
Now someone told me that at this gig, well 4 gigs, 2 a day, we were supporting Foreigner, a group on the up and up, but I haven't been able to find any truth about the matter. Whatever, the afternoon gigs were poorly attended and wouldn't have helped Dave's mood which had got rather crotchety. After the drive out into the country, I didn't see him much except at the actual shows. But he did come to see me in my room once to ask me something. We had received lots of presents, as you do, and Dave had quite a few of these in his hotel room, including a couple of framed paintings of the group and a few fluffy toys. Dave told me he was wondering how best to get these home to the UK and asked me if I could carry a couple with me. Given the experience with my synthesiser on the way out, I didn't want to be carrying probably large amounts of coke in souvenirs we had picked up in the States. I was determined to stay out of prison, particularly American prisons. I'd seen them in the movies and they seemed to be hellish. And I was right to refuse as, allegedly, quite a large quantity of coke did find its way back to Brock Manor and in that way, at least someone made money out of this over-budget and less than brilliant tour. Rumour even had it that the tour had been organised in order to enable this transaction with the Hells Angels.
My final memory of the gigs was at the after gig party in the club where I ended up chatting with a load of guys who were involved with Greenpeace and were trialling a vessel that was going to be used for preventing whale hunting. We got into talking quite intensely about the whole issue and then

Inside the Old Waldorf.

I was invited to join them on the boat sailing down the coast to LA. That would be fun I thought until someone took me aside to point out that all the members of the crew were gay. Now, some of them would have been fine but all of them seemed perhaps a step too far, so I turned the opportunity down.
But San Francisco was the end of the tour, Phoenix and New Orleans having been dropped. I wasn't ready to go home at all and nor was Simon King. Ade had to rush home because his wife was expecting their baby, Dave was going somewhere with his wife and Bob was probably on a plane within minutes of coming off stage: he really hadn't enjoyed the tour at all.
But Simon King had a plan which he presented to me. Quite simply, he wanted to hang around but off the usual scenes, out in the sticks, in order to get off smack before returning to the UK. And his plan was simple : he knew a girl in the record company's office quite well. He'd get her to change our tickets home from fixed date to open so we could go home when we were ready to do it. Then he said, we would grab one of the big estate cars, set off for the airport and get lost on the way. And this is what we did, immediately heading for Route One which follows the coast all the way down to LA.

TO BE CONTINUED...........When the Music Stops?