THE AVERAGE WHITE BAND

THE AVERAGE WHITE BAND

Up From The Gaelic Ghetto

Steve Clarke

First it goes for your ankles. Then it attacks your forehead. The nape of your neck is the next victim, and finally your fingertips are sweating too.

The heat is perfumed by a not-unattractive blend of perspiratipn and assorted brands of cigarettes and scents. It’s enough to stifle a Turkish bath attendant, but the music transcends it all, and the temperature doesn’t seem to be worrying either crowd or band.

“The Average White Band with a few other people sitting on the perimeter,” is how Alan Gorrie put it a few days earlier. The occasion in question was Robbie McIntosh’s benefit concert at The Marquee. All donations, with a minimum of $2.50 required to get you into the club, go to Robbie’s widow, Edith.

“We’re responsible for seeing that Edith and the kid are well taken care of,” says Gorrie, the group’s bassist and a man as indubitably Scottish as a crate of Glenfiddich. “As well as this benefit, the whole of proceeds of the first gig on our British tour will also go to Robbie’s family.” r ^

The Average White Band is meeting with the success it deserves, and not before time. It’s all the more to the band’s credit that their music has had its first major success in America. The Average White Band plays black American music - soul music which is more than a feeble copy of “the real thing.” The Average White Band is the real thing, and the fact that the group is Scottish and not American is totally irrelevant.

Although their music is aimed at what is technically known as “crossover audiences,” (i.e. black and white 'record buyers are equally into their music), there is at the moment a more favourable response to the AWB from black radio stations and audiences.

The AWB was getting warm critical reception right from the start and their debut album Show Your Hand won them mufch approval. But it wasn’t until their signing with Atlantic Records that things really started cooking for them. Atlantic is still the black label simply because they handled Otis Redding and

Aretha Franklin - which makes the

AWB part of The Great Atlantic Tradition.

In retrospect, the major flaw of Show Your Hand was its production; even if white Britishers could get it on instrumentally, they still couldn’t quite come up with the sound required for an allsoul record.

All was rectified on the Atlantic album, which has been heaped with lavish praise from every brand of critic. Produced by Arif Mardin, one of Aretha’s plethora of producers, it’s a frighteningly good album. With regard to the British - artist - in - theL hands - of - the -American - producer syndrome it’s the exception which proves the rule, and only fellow-countryman Frankie Miller has found anything like the same degree of artistic success at the hands of a Yank producer.

In fact, sifting through what are generally regarded as last year’s best black records I didn’t find a single one as consistently moving as Average White Band. Play it back-to-back, with The Isley’s Live It Up (a band which has obviously been something of an inspiration to the Scottish group) and you’ll see what I mean.

At the time of the album’s British release, the group was already in America playing what was in fact its second U.S. tour.

Consequently they weren’t around to do any promotion in England.

“I don’t know how much live appearances equate with album sales, because we played here solid for nine months around the time of the first album, and it only sold eight or nine thousand,” points out Alan Gorrie. “We haven’t played here since this album came out and it’s sold twice that already - but I feel it could sell a lot more. It’s picking up again at the moment.”

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The U.S. tour opened with a week at New York’s Bottom Line, followed by a week at LA’s Troubador where the band encountered ecstatic receptions, with the like of Elton John, Cher, and Martha Reeves getting up on-stage to sing with the band.

As Gorrie says, “They don’t come out of the woodwork too often.”

It was at the end of that week that drummer Robbie McIntosh accidentally snorted some heroin cut with poison at an after-gig party. He died the next day. Despite the shock, there was no thought of splitting up within the band.

“Immediately everybody felt that if we break up now it would be a waste of McIntosh’s life and all his work - to get this far and then buckle under just because that happened,” says Gorrie. “Elton John had a week at the Troubador at the start of his career in America and we had the same kind of reaction as him.”

Four weeks of complete confusion followed.

“When somebody who’s your brother goes, you just go through all the natural human reactions. People are either laughing or crying, and they don’t know why.

“You’re a bit hysterical for a couple of weeks. Nobody can reason with you. Nothing seems logical. You go through everything. You go through the ‘Why me? Why him? What’s it all about?’ It takes a lot of time to sort all that out.

“I’m not saying we’ve finally sorted that out yet, but it made everybody realise the only thing we could do was get back and get playing again before we got too blasted by what had happened.”

Four weeks after Robbie’s death, the band were onstage at a small Californian town called Fresno... playing in front of 17,000 people. Their new drummer was a guy called Steve Ferrone, who came from Brighton, was then gigging with Bloodstone, a softsoul vocal group, and had curiously enough replaced Robbie McIntosh twice before - once when McIntosh quit Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express, and before that in a group called Piranha.

“It was an absolutely automatic choice. He was the only guy that could do the gig. He’s the only guy as good as Robbie, only different in his way.”

Ferrone was in LA when McIntosh died, and called the AWB up to offer his services on a temporary basis. After they worked with him, no one else would satisfy them.

“We spent a whole day auditioning people. We’d been through eight or nine drummers and we were really depressed. Steve walked in just for a blow, not to audition, and the minute we started the band went from its depressed stage right to where we’d left off with Robbie.

“This band wouldn’t continue if we couldn’t play that way. We could have all the hit records in the world,’but there’s no way we’d get out and play gigs if we weren’t that good ... if we didn’t get that spark.

“If you take the whole spectrum of drumming, there’s a whole chunk in the middle of the range where Steve and Robbie coincide. Robbie was developing new things before he died and Steve seems to take over where that left off as far as new licks are concerned. Steve has got a lot of new licks - things that I hadn’t heard drummers play before.”

For a man like Robbie McIntosh who was something of a drinker, it was especially ironic for him of die of a drug overdose.

“Robbie was the master drinker. He could hold more liquor than any human being that I’ve ever met. Having never been into drugs it was easy for it to happen to one of us, because we’re not knowledgeable about drugs. Somebody gave him a nasty. It was as simple and as stupid as that.

“It’s easy to say ‘Stupid sod for taking it’ when you read about it a thousand miles away. You always do that when it’s somebody you don’t know. But when you’re actually in the middle of it you see it as an accident.. . Oh well.”

After a four month American tour, the band was a little drawn, but during that time they’d met with still more critical approval. Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun finally caught up with them at Long Beach Arena.

“He was quite bowled over by it all -which helped us because Ahmet was the one guy from Atlantic that we hadn’t really got to know. He’d never seen us play and he hadn’t quite caught the enthusiasm of Jerry Wexler and the other people.

“That allayed any doubts that we might have that Atlantic wouldn’t go the whole hog on the alburm When Ahmet got back from Long Beach he reenthused the whole New York office.”

And then there was the time at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre when the Detroit Spinners, particular favorite of the AWB, gave their seal'of approval to the group.

“They asked us backstage. We went in there to idolize them for a minute or two and they said, ‘Hey, what an album you’ve made.’ They just couldn’t stop talking about our album and we were completely turned around. We didn’t know what to say cause they’ve always been one of our favorites.”

Back at the Marquee, “the Average White Band with a few other people sitting on the perimeter” open their set with the Isleys’ “Work To Do,” a track from the Atlantic album. Brian Auger’s on organ, Gonzales’ Richard Bailey does himself nothing but good on drums, and with Gorrie’s own bass work filling in all the right holes, it’s a remarkably tight rhythm section considering they’ve only had one rehearsal. The band’s own horn player is joined by Chris Mercer and Richard Dodds. Someone called Lennox plays congas that you can actually hear and Alec Ledgerwood fills in on back-up.

Gorrie is stashed away so far behind the horn section that you hardly notice he’s on stage, and he leaves it to Hamish to take the front-line. He grins a lot and looks ecstatically happy. Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” follows. Perhaps a little ambitious for most units, but the band recreate the song’s ultracool mood perfectly.

Edith McIntosh, her hair done up in a peak and sashaying about the stage in a figure-hugging outfit, which gives the audience a glimpse of her midriff, joins the back-up singers. She looks a treat.

“Pick Up The Pieces” is irresistible funk at its best, with its gyrating melody line from the brass section, but best of all is the new song “If I Ever Lose This Heaven,” a warm piece of slow, sensual soul that has Edith and Hamish singing lead. In fact, the only musically weak moment is Frankie Miller’s rendition of “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg.”

Just as if to demonstrate the immaculate taste of the musicians concerned, there’s also a neat version of “Then Came You” - the song Dionne Warwicke and The Spinners did last year. Another Gaye song ends the set and predictably enough it’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine,” which has one Elton John onstage exercising his vocal chords. A reprise of “Pick Up The Pieces” serves as an encore, and somewhere in between all this someone announces that 1,500 pounds (about $3,750) has been raised for Edith and her family.

When a band loses a memoei through his joining another band it’s sometimes enough to cause a total collapse of the group, but when a group member dies before the band has tasted large-scale success, it’s pretty difficult for the band to carry on, and even more so to carry on and then triumph. The Average White Band are doing just that.

Wish them luck, though with their guts, I doubt that they really need it.

(Reprinted courtesy New Musical Express.) ip