Alvin Lee has the biggest teeth in the world.

They’re as big as a horse’s. They’re Bigger than Carly Simon’s. When sitting on the couch in his hotel suite, he’s a pretty reasonable guy, brighter than you expect a boogie man to be. But you still get distracted by those teeth, which flash like big pearly piano keys — except when he shuts up to take a toke. Onstage it’s even worse, because all the lights are shining on him, and with the adulatory eyes of the masses on him he can’t help but smile; his choppers pierce the gloom like two dozen headlights. When he really gets into his music, breaking out with an especially, involved solo in “Goin’ Home” or leaping proudly back onstage for the “Sweet Little Sixteen” encore, he forgets himself completely and starts to grind his teeth with such ferocity that he looks like Dr. Sardonicus; it’s a wonder he’s got more than molar stumps at this point.

When Lee really gets down to it, though, you can forget his teeth long enough to dig his whole act. As it stands now it’s one of the best-honed unqualified boogie venues on the boards. Lee has been doing basically the same thing for so long that he’s got it pat. It’s not boring or cold but Alvin Lee is a true professional. He knows exactly what his audiences want, and always gives it to them. If you’re on the other end of the noise, there’s a kind of comfort in the absolute predictability that Ten Years After represent. Half a decade now they’ve been at it, and if they’re not quite the monstro superdraw they once were, they still have a good time. You get the feeling from watching them play and from talking to Alvin that even years from now, when the whole popstar riff is up for them and they’re back playing bars in England, their music and their attitude will both remain the same.

When he’s in full flight Alvin sidles up to the microphone and grins like a moose. He’s built like a football player, and his guitar english is in accordance with the image — none of this fey barely-touching stuff for Mr. Lee (unless he wuz touching one of the Bobbettes) — he grits and grinds and bumps and juts, making it clear without overstating his virility that he don’t fuck around.

He has a great sense of humor, too — whilst playing 78 RPM ultimo methedrine guitar with one hand, shaking the mike with the other, bouncing stage front in a kind of electric slouch (like a vibrating spring) and singing in the corniest and most blatant ripoff of something resembling an old New Orleans Smiley Lewis vocal style ever heard, he’ll swivel his skull and literally leer at the audience with glee at once sly and mindless. Naturally they eat it up. That man ain’t no fool.

The other members of TYA have been resigned to being out of the spotlight for so long that they seem almost sheepish about it. I can’t even remember what they look like right now. When you go for the interview it’s apparently a tacit, unspoken assumption that you want to talk to Alvin and if they come in at all it’s to tell their manager something or cop a joint. All of which is too bad, in a way — I still remember Ric Lee in the movie of Woodstock, thrashing back there behind the cymbals, licking his drawn lips like a chameleon, face so literally black and whole visage such a classic frame of beyond-the-pale methedrine beatitude (like the cool channel at the eye of the jetstream) as to summarize the nervous immolation of a whole generation in one frozen piece of celluloid.

But that was then and this is now, when TYA are in some ways the granddaddies of the whole blooming boogiebloozup-getdown school of band which has proliferated since they first hit the sets. Savoy Brown copped their riffs in all comradeship, Cactus would be lost without their model, and Foghat would never have existed had TYA not blazed the trail, Alvin hacking away the jungle with a machete that arced up the frets of his guitar light years beyond Lightnin’ Hopkins’ pocketknife. They’ve been around, they’ve prospered and endured, and now they can afford to kick back just an ampere or a decibel, cruising on the highway they themselves laid. The audience doesn’t care, because the fire is there often enough, on stage or record. Just like their stage show, their new album Rock & Roll Music To the World is just more of the Same Old Shit — “Choo Choo Mama,” or “You give me lovin’ that I can’t return/ BOMP BLAM/ Your give me lovin’ that you know I’ll burn ...” — but it’s good same old shit, and all the Ten Years After fans, including yours truly, are perfectly satisfied with it.

I recall seeing TYA at a West Coast concert back in the summer of’69, and being highly amused; for a week afterward I went around my job entertaining anybody who would stand still long enough with free vocal imitations of the TYA instrumental sound: “Ah-drnt drnt drnt drnt DUUUUHH, ah-drnt drnt drnt drnt DUUUUUUHH,” and then of course the solo break: “SKREEEEEEEE-harowlarggblunzzzzawonk! ”

What I was too snotty to realize at th^ time was that music like that may have been obvious and one-dimensional, but was still valid as a concept. Fuck esthetics — it was still a whole crock of fun. Nobody will ever be able to accuse Ten Years After of taking themselves too seriously.

Up in his hotel suite, Alvin Lee sat back, slouched low on the couch with his feet sprawled on the carpet in front of him and the back of his head hitting the couch at Kilroy level. He looked like a lazy sap but he was a cheerful fellow, gave us some grass which made him even more benevolent, and made no bones about where both he and TYA had been, were at now and were headed. “We’ve gone the whole route, from little clubs to ballrooms to festivals to arenas. When we were in the clubs we’d get fired for being too loud, or earlier for having long hair, or for too many long guitar solos. I always got off on solos, even before it became a sort of fad, and now I guess some people come for that and nothing else.”

We asked him how the concert scene looked now in comparison with what he’d seen of it all down the line. “I really wonder,” he said, “why a lot of people come to concerts these days. The places have gotten so big that you lose all contact, and the audiences know what they’re supposed to do. They wait for a trigger. Like tonight, they were waiting for “Goin’ Home,” and the instant it started they were rushing down to the front of the stage.

“I would prefer it if the process were more organic, somehow, with everybody getting off on the music to the fullest possible extent, all through the evening, building up to a peak. That’s an ideal situation. When you play one of these big arenas, you never know what the audience is thinking. There’s one out there that’s listening to the guitar, the next one’s listening to the drums, the next one’s not paying the slightest attention ... the next one’s really listening. So like we play for our audience, not to it or at it. There’s a sea of faces, but I see a lot of individuals, and I play for them. I play for the guy who’s sitting there and he’s listening to it just as if he was listening to it through headphones.”

We’re interrupted by the entrance of the group’s manager, who hands Alvin a silver muzzuzah coke spoon on a chain, and tells him that it was a gift from a girl outside. “Where is she?” asks Alvin.

“She’s gone now.”

“Uh-huh. Stop trying to cut me off from Fate.” He’s joking, but in another way he really means it. He looks at the coke spoon. “It’s nice but I wouldn’t wear it anyway. But you shoulda brought ’er up.”

Well, Alvin, we press on, ever alert for some scum, what about drugs?

“I dunno ... certainly have nothing to tell anyone else on them, as far as advice goes. I just smoke grass myself, though I might take acid again.”

Yeah, we pry, but you guys are supposed to be the big speedfreaks!

Naww, says Alvin, and launches into a rap that from anyone else, phrased or intoned a whit more intensely, would start to seem pretentious on the usual dreary cosmic levels. He’s such an easygoing, unaffected cat, though, that it comes out as a simple statement of operative policy, philosophy if you like, in his life and his music. “When I go onstage each night I have to have a certain concentration. We’ve done tour after tour and if you don’t know how to handle yourself it can wreck you. I try to keep things building through the set, but sometimes that can get me wound up so tight that my jaws are clenched and I just grind my teeth away. And it’s really hard to unwind from something like that.

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“But I try to get a certain type of concentration that, if you have it, you can play music or work or do anything you have to do without spending yourself. You can block out the distractions and perform at the peak of your abilities. That’s what I try to do onstage. I’m usually oblivious to what’s going on out front; I have to be. If I’m getting off on it, they will be too. It’s like Baba Ram Dass said: “I perceive nothing but what it is essential for me to perceive in the present moment.’ He had to go to the Himalayas to find it and he was a Harvard professor!”

Yeah, we said, but what else would you expect from one of them? Tumbling headlong into a rare non-boring discussion of whether cosmo dudes in the line of Baba R.D. and Leary are or are not worth their weight in shit. Alvin Lee maintained that they were, to at least a limited degree, and said that he had gotten some good advice and hot tips out of Ram Dass’ last book, Be Here Now. We said that the reason that Dass the Ass’s Himalayan guru didn’t come on to all that acid he gave him was probably because the old fart was too stupid! Alvin said he wouldn’t know about that, so we changed the subject to football, or more precisely the wide world of sports in general: Are you a frustrated athlete? we asked slyly.

He pursed his lips, relaxedly swinging the coke spoon in an arc around his head, and considered the question: “Well, no, but I have wondered what it would be like to play professional football. It must be like being an invulnerable bullock.”

Before he’d even consent to let us talk to his charge, TYA’s manager had fixed us with a probingly icy stare and said: You’re not going to ask all those stupid questions like ’what kind of guitar strings do you use,’ are you?”

Sheet no, we said. We’re pros! And since we had comported ourselves in such prolike manner as to keep the interview at a properly lofty level of intellectual dialogue up till now, we decided it would be even more prolike and supercool to say fuck it and make idiots out of ourselves, so we shot from the hip: What kind of guitar string do you use, Alvino?

The next question was going to be Did your parents name you after Alvino Rey?, but he didn’t answer the first one so we never got around to it. Instead he laughed and said: “It’s really funny, y’know. I could never be the kid who’s screaming-out in front of the stage. Not anymore; there’s no way I could ever put myself in his shoes at all. People that wait in line to see you, or shake your hand. But I was just like ’em once. I remember the first time I met Eric Clapton. I was gonna be real cool, not act like I was just some kid. When I wanted more than anything else just to shake his hand. So when I finally met him I blew it, blew my cool entirely. I shook his hand and he looked at me and I started asking him every one of the usual stupid questions. The first thing, the very first thing I asked Eric Clapton was what kind of guitar strings he used. And now I can’t even remember what he said.”