Alvin Lee: Running On Diesel Twenty Years After

Alvin Lee: Running On Diesel Twenty Years After

Harold DeMuir

“This is my first talk for a few years," says Alvin Lee, in the Big Apple to drum up support for Detroit Diesel, his first new LP in five annums. “I can’t think of anything to say," confides the English guitarist/singer, grinning at the thought of throwing his inquisitor into a momentary panic.

Actually, Lee’s got plenty to talk about. For one thing, there’s the new album, which returns him to the steak-and-spuds hard-rock style he’s most comfortable with. Then there’s his five-year break from vinyl action, during which he seriously reexamined his musical options before arriving at the conclusion that flat-out rock ‘n’ roll was the way to go. And of course, there’s always the checkered but successful career of Alvin’s old band, Ten Years After, who busted an eardrum or two in their day.

Lee, who took up the guitar at age 13, began playing in blues bands in the early ’60s, and met up with bassist Leo Lyons in 1964. The pair toured together for a few years (including successful stints on Hamburg’s legendarily nasty Reeperbahn). By 1967, they’d added drummer Ric Lee (no relation) and keyboardist Chick Churchill, and altered their name from the Jaybirds to the spacier Ten Years After.

The quartet’s late-’60s LPs— Ten Years After, the live-in-a-club Undead, Stonedhenge, Ssssssh—presented a sturdy, workmanlike blues/rock/jazz fusion, spotlighting Lee’s quick-fingered axe work. The guitarist’s instrumental prowess made TYA a solid concert draw and won them a sizeable following in the States, but Lee was already growing restless.

“I remember thinking, after Undead, ‘Well, that’s really it in a nutshell, now what am I gonna do next?’ And that’s when I started experimenting and looking for other directions, doing the odd country tune and the odd jazz-funk tune. And that’s where the direction disappeared.”

While Lee was questioning their policy, Ten Years After’s 11-minute Woodstock performance of “I’m Going Home” was increasing the group’s audience and nailing down Lee’s public image as flash guitar idol.

“The funny thing was, we did the Woodstock festival, and the movie didn’t come out for a year, and we just carried on playing 10,000-seaters and doing quite nicely. And as soon as the movie hit, that’s when we started getting 14-yearolds with their ice creams in the front row. At the time, I didn’t understand it, and I got on a bit of a high horse about it, and thought, This is not for me.’”

Despite his doubts, TYA continued to tour their behinds off, pausing for the occasional LP session. Cricklewood Green and Watt found them dabbling in multiple areas, in an idealistic but half-cocked effort to stretch their style.

Cricklewood Green was a sort of hazy period,” Lee recalls. “A lot of people seem to like that one, but there’s a real mishmosh of songs on it. It was very natural, though. Somebody leaned on the master machine as it was going ’round, and we were all so out of it that no one noticed. It got through and was pressed up, and it’s on the record—‘Rrrrowww.'

“As soon as the Woodstock movie hit, that’s when we started getting 14-year-olds with their ice creams in the front row. ”

“There’s a song on that album called ‘Working On The Road’—‘Workin’ on the road for 15 years, blowin’ my mind and blastin’ my ears. Even then, I was looking for some time off.”

Increasingly disillusioned with the endless roadwork and less than thrilled with the bulk of his band’s recorded output, Alvin became that most pathetic of creatures, the Unhappy Rock Star.

“I always thought it was what I wanted, and with the initial ego of being a guitarist, it’s kind of what you shoot for. But the realization of it was the fact that we were playing inferior concerts. When you can’t see the audience because there’s a 50-foot pit full of police, in a big old concrete place with the sound echoing away, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. And if you do that for six months solid, you start to think, ‘What the hell am I doing this for?’ It’s not for the money, because when it gets to that stage you don’t need money anymore.

“After the success comes, and all you’re really trying to do is fill the date sheet, it’s the jukebox syndrome. You’re working and working and working, with no time for creative thought. You turn into kind of a jukebox—somebody plugs you in and you light up, and it doesn’t really seem to matter if you play well or not. You’re just repeating yourself endlessly, and the creativity that you started with just disappears. You turn into an entertainer, when all the while you were struggling to be a truthful musicican.”

Lee bailed out of the touring grind for several months in 1971, recharging his batteries in preparation for the album that would become A Space In Time.

“All of the managers and record company people were totally against that; they couldn’t understand it, because I could have gone out and made a million bucks. There’s me saying that I don’t want to do it, and they’re all going, ‘You’re mad, get out there while you’re hot, it might not last forever.’ But this was in the ’60s, when it was very uncool for musicians to say they wanted to make money.”

A Space In Time was the first Ten Years After LP to channel the band’s scattered interests into a cohesive style, and spawned a hit single in the dreamier-thanusual “I’d Love To Change The World.” “A Space In Time is one of my favorites,” says Lee. “I had time to sit and play again, and write songs without pressure. I think that came through on that album—it was the only time it did.”

After 1972’s Rock ’A/’ Roll Music To The World and 1973’s Recorded Live, TYA took an extended break from touring. Lee retreated to his 15th-century home in Berkshire, where he built a 16-track studio and recorded On The Road To Freedom, a countryish collaboration with American gospel/blues singer Mylon LeFevre, that featured guest appearances by the likes of George Harrison, Steve Winwood and Ron Wood.

“That was a very truthful record, and people still come up and tell me they love it. It was a very homegrown affair—we did the album cover on the kitchen table. I had a lot of faith in that album, and it took quite a lot of wind out of my sails when it failed to be recognized at all.”

Lee attributes the disc's lackluster commercial performance to business politics. “Ten Years After hadn’t broken up, and there were a lot of reasons why managers and other business people didn’t want On The Road To Freedom to be a hit. Had it shot into the Top 50, Ten Years After would have been gone, because I'd have had my direction. I think that album got a very raw deal.”

In early 1974, a month prior to Ten Years After’s scheduled show at London’s Rainbow Theatre, Lee performed with a hastily-assembled nine-piece band. The show was recorded and released as Alvin Lee And Company In Flight, one of the few of his albums that Lee admits to liking.

“It was a different direction for me, and I took more of a background seat. I had three soloists in the band, so I wasn’t doing every solo, and I enjoyed that. Most of the criticism leveled at me was that it was all pyrotechnics and no taste. I wanted to get away from being Captain Speedfingers, and prove that I could be more tasteful.

“For a while, I just refused to play Tm Going Home' or ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,’ and did a totally different set. I was confusing audiences terribly, because I wouldn’t play any of the tunes they knew. I finally realized that I was a little misguided, when I went to see Jerry Lee Lewis and he did all country tunes. He didn’t do ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ or ‘Great Balls Of Fire,’ and I was really disappointed. And I realized that if people came to see me and I didn’t do the songs they wanted to hear, they left with the same feeling.”

The final Ten Years After LP was 1974’s Positive Vibrations, whose title Lee now finds amusingly ironic. “That album’s a bit cringeworthy. Maybe the music isn’t that bad; what I remember is all the arguments in the studio. The guys in the band were all looking for their own identities, so they didn’t say, ‘OK Alv, you write all the songs and let’s go.’ They all wanted to be involved, and there was always a struggle over what we should be doing. That album was just utter confusion, really.

“The band had really broken up three or four years before it was officially broken up, and during that whole period we were trying to wedge it together and trying to make another buck out of it. Whatever it was that we had was gone, for lack of creative time and lack of real inspiration. The band got fed up with touring, and didn’t really have any burning desire to make a record, but nobody had the nerve to let go and say ‘That’s enough.’ Instead of breaking up, we went on hammering it into each other for another four years.

“When Ten Years After were finally looking like they were gonna break up, I was under pressure to form a new band and go out as Ten Years After. That was the management’s idea of a sensible thing to do, to keep the audience we’d built up. To me, it was the most dishonest thing I’d ever heard of.”

Instead, Lee formed another In Flightstyle lineup and toured as Alvin Lee and Co. Though Ten Years After officially split in May 1975, the band was on the road again a month later, fulfilling contractual obligations with their 28th and last U.S. tour.

Lee continued to record fairly prolifically during the latter half of the ’70s, with the LPs Pump Iron, Saguitar (both released under his own name), Rocket Fuel, Ride On (credited to Alvin Lee and Ten Years Later) and Free Fall and RX5 (as The Alvin Lee Band). In retrospect, Lee views these as indecisive, directionless works.

“They weren’t saying, This is me doing what I do best.’ They were saying, This is me, experimenting with this and that, and wondering what to do.’ And that confusion came through in the music.”

As an example of this dilemma, Lee points to the AOR-slick Free Fall, probably the most uncharacteristic LP of his career. “That was an album that was very easy to sell to the record company, because it sounded like it could be a hit. But it just wasn’t me.

“I didn’t have any songs, so I formed a band with other songwriters and used them as a catalyst to get me going. My part in it was kind of in the background, the odd hot solo and a bit of singing. It was a pretty good record, and I enjoyed making it, but it wasn’t anything I could relate to personally, and I couldn’t really get my teeth into it when it came time to play it live. And RX5 was a similar kind of thing.”

Dissatisfaction with his recorded work led Lee to maintain a voluntary low profile from 1981 until this year. Though he did a brief U.S. club tour in 1983 and occasional European gigs, ‘‘just to keep my hand in,” the artist spent much of his time in his home studio, sharpening his production chops and rethinking his direction.

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‘‘I found that I was going out on tour promoting albums that I didn’t particularly like,” he explains. ‘‘People would say, ‘Tell me about your new album,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, there’s one good track on it.’ So I thought, I’ve got to get myself together, tie all my loose ends up, and find out what I really want to say on record—if anything, and I wasn’t even sure of that at the time.

‘‘People were saying, ‘All you need is a hit,’ sending me tunes saying ‘This is a hit song.’ They didn’t realize that I didn’t want a hit. I didn’t want to be on TV, singing something I didn’t feel comfortable with. I was more concerned with finding a niche where I could feel comfortable.

“It’s important to have a direction, a target, something to shoot for, and I’d been lacking that for about 10 years. For a long time, it was, ‘Oh alright, I suppose I’ll do another album, if you insist,’ and I needed to get outside of that. You get to a point where you can’t see the wood for the trees. Once I got outside the wood, I saw it in perspective. Once sorted out, it seems easy; but in the haze of being in the middle of it, it took me quite a while to decide what I should be doing.”

All of this eventually led Lee to decide that his old style was also his most effective. This reaffirmation of his original musical values is evident on Detroit Diesel, which Lee describes confidently as “the best thing I’ve done in a long, long time.” The music is, for the most part, straight-ahead bluesy hard-rock, with just enough techno frills to defuse accusations of revivalism.

Instead of turning things over to an outside producer, as he’d done on many past projects, he took charge of the recording himself, building from his original home-recorded demos with the help of such longtime cohorts as bassist Mick Fe’at, keyboardist/guitarist Steve Gould, keyboardist Tim Hinckley and drummer Bryson Graham, plus guest players George Harrison, Jon Lord and Boz Burrell. “This is the first album I’ve done for about 10 years where I can say, This is me, as I am,’” Lee states.

“I started with about 150 songs, but the direction wasn’t there. I was spending ages writing songs for Simon and Garfunkel, thinking maybe I should do them. But as soon as I had the direction, I didn’t bother—I put down the acoustic guitar and cranked up my big red Gibson. If it felt right on the first few bars, I’d go with that. I wouldn’t waste time finishing a song that wasn’t in my style—once I’d figured out what my style was.”

Lee promises that, in forthcoming live performances, he’ll be “going for broke, playing rough-edged rock ’n’ roll, the way I've always liked it. I know I’m a good guitarist, and when I get out there I’ll be doing my best to prove it. There’s a lot of Eddie Van Halens out there now and a lot of hot licks flying around, and I just basically want to keep in there and prove my stuff as far as guitar-playing goes.”

And does he worry about Detroit Diesel's falling through the commercial cracks, being neither thrash nor melodic/prettyboy semi-metal? “That went through my mind, and in fact that led me to keep back for a while. But through it all, rock ’n’ roll has never actually died. The punk thing in England was basically pretty rough rock ’n’ roll played by musicians who hadn’t really perfected their craft. And the heavy metal thing really is rock ‘n’ roll with a bit of leather.

“A lot of intellectualizing goes on about the music and the business and everything else, and that is really why I had to clear my head. If my head’s right, and my target and my direction’s right, I can cut through all that. If this album doesn’t sell, it won’t upset me. Because I like it, and I know it’s the best I could do, and I’m happy to put it out there and give it a shot.

“My era’s the blues—people like John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, who are still bashing away when they’re pushing 70. Those people are my heroes, and if I can feel the space to do that, then that’s what I’d like to do, rather than retiring to the executive suite.”