Original subtitles

You've been a friend of mine.

That's that one chord.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll try.

There was such a mishmash of people in those days, and I'm talking about, I

guess, the 70s, 60s, 70s? Late 60s, perhaps.

That nobody remembers how they met.

But Peter was always a kind of ghostly, legendary figure that you heard about.

You always heard his name, Peter Asher. Peter Asher, this guru, you know,

record world.

I didn't even know what he did.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Eric Idle, and tonight it is my honor and privilege to introduce

to you all tonight one of the finest names in show business today.

A successful pop star, record company executive, producer, manager, and

recognized throughout the world as one of the greatest...

I'm sorry. I can't read your handwriting Peter one of the greatest things

in the entire universe Humanitarian bloody bloody bloody blah

Grammys bloody bloody bar Shag Mary unfaithful. I don't think so. Um, will

you welcome please tonight?

When I see her coming down the street I get so shaky and I feel so

weak

I tell my eyes look the other way But they don't seem to hear a word I say

And I go to pieces and I wanna hide Go to pieces and I

almost die every time My baby passes by

Go to pieces and I cry Every time my baby

passes by

Go to pieces and I cry every time my baby passes by

Thank

you very much

Well, this is, of course, as it's built, the show is a memoir.

And so it may contain, I warn you, you know, the acceptable proportion of self

-aggrandizing revisionist history.

But I'll try to keep that to a minimum, I promise.

So, I mean, I guess the question is, one of the questions we're addressing

tonight is how did all this happen?

You know, how did the son of an eminent physician and a classical musician end

up doing all this other interesting stuff?

Actually, you know, I kind of lurched into show business entirely

accidentally, long before I started singing professionally.

Now I can go and play my favorite game, watching the grown-ups.

The acting thing came about in an interesting way.

I have two very beautiful and talented sisters.

My sister Jane, two years younger than me. My sister Claire, two years younger

again.

My understanding is that it all began in the park when somebody saw the three of

us and said to mother, have you ever considered putting your children on the

stage or something like that?

The hair. I think it was the hair.

This is

the actual page we found in the spotlight casting directory.

In fact, it even says under the Asher family.

All have red hair.

I guess that was the sales pitch, you know. It wasn't all our incredibly great

actors or anything like that.

Daddy didn't tell me you were shooting this morning.

Aren't you going to say good morning?

I don't want to miss the guns.

Tell Daddy I'm coming.

Look out!

It's a wolf trap.

If you got down under the pit, I could go and tell him you'd fallen in.

No, you get handed the net.

No, you. I thought of it.

No, I'd be frightened down there.

Besides, boys can't act.

That was when my acting career kind of gently tapered off, shall we say.

I went to put the English with their gift for irony called a public school,

which means it's not public at all.

And it's very hard to get into and expensive.

Now, by that time, I had persuaded my parents to give me a guitar.

And while I was at school, I noticed that there was somebody else, another

pupil, walking around holding a guitar case from time to time.

His name was Gordon Waller.

Gordon, as you can see, was incredibly handsome.

I mean, all of us who played guitar and sang used to stand in front of the

mirror and pretend to be Elvis.

But he actually did a very creditable job of it and sang really well with his

big Elvis-y voice.

I don't know whether I heard Peter singing or he heard me singing. I think

I heard him singing and I started singing in harmony with him. And we

actually realized that, you know, we had a pair of voices which sort of sounded

okay together.

So we started working up a little repertoire.

And then eventually we took our combination of songs and we started

trying to get some actual paid gigs.

We would go into pubs and coffee houses.

We bumped into a couple of people who owned a place called the Pickwick Club.

And they said, would you like to come down and audition?

And we did our usual sort of two or three demo songs.

They said, when can you start?

Bigfoot Club was a sort of late-night eating and drinking club that all the

cool young actors of the day would go to.

We were making £40 a week each, plus tips.

I know it was nearly as much as my father was making.

Now, at that point, we had, you know, maybe a dozen songs we could sing.

And as a duo, we had a special place in our hearts for the Everly Brothers.

I'll never let you see The way my broken heart is

hurting me I've got my pride and I know how to hide it Every duo

that there's ever been, whether we're talking Simon and Garfunkel, Peter and

Gordon, or even Lennon and McCartney, we all look to the Everly Brothers as the

best part close to how many singers of that era.

That music, gosh, you know, it shaped rock and roll.

You know, I was born in 1957, so I was listening to Peter and Gordon and to the

Beatles before I was listening to the Everly Brothers.

And I became interested in the Everly Brothers because, wow, these are the

guys, these are the guys that Peter and Gordon and the Beatles thought were

cool.

We loved what they did. We did lots of their songs.

We tried to sound as much like them as we could, which wasn't very successful.

You know, and then I realized how it all works, which is you try to copy people

who you greatly admire, and in failing, you come up with something kind of

interesting and different, you know?

So one night, we were there in the Pickwick Club doing our usual gig, and

we were approached by this man in a very shiny suit.

He introduced himself to us as Norman Newell, said he was an A&R guy from EMI

Records. Do you want to come and have a drink at my table?

Then he said he wanted to take us in the studio and record us.

Norman had picked out some songs from the set he'd just seen in the Pickwick

Club. But he also said, look, if you know any other cool songs that you'd

like to try, feel free to bring them along, maybe even a new song.

And at that point, when he asked that question, I thought, you know, maybe I

do know such a song.

And that's because there was a whole other subplot to the story happening at

the same time.

When I quit acting, my sister Jane stuck with it. Where are you going, love?

London. And of course, she turned out to be incredibly good at it.

Jane was a proper movie star.

Can I get you a cup of tea, Alfie?

Take it easy. You always want to be doing something.

So she was very well known in England as an actor and also as a music lover.

And welcome to another session of Jukebox Jury.

Jane was on this TV show where they had celebrities rate the new record.

Is it going to be a hit or a miss?

So it was in that context she was approached by a magazine to go and see

this new band from Liverpool that all the fuss was about.

Jane went to the show, then she was taken backstage at the end of the show

to meet them as the visiting celeb.

And of course, she found them to be witty and charming and all the things

that we know them to be.

So she liked them all very much. They liked her very much. One of them liked

her in particular and asked her out.

I remember having met Jane.

Number one, I thought she was blonde because I'd only ever seen her in Black

and White on Jim Fox TV.

I think we all immediately tried to pull her, you know, being the order of the

day.

But I ended up with her.

And from then on, I made a strenuous effort to become her boyfriend.

I would get invited to her house.

And really, I suppose what solidified London for me was the house that I lived

in, 57 Wimpole Street.

Paul would come visit.

He would come over for dinner.

He would bring his laundry for our mum to do and stuff like that, you know.

I mean, kind of boyfriend stuff.

And he was there so much that in the end, our parents took pity on him, I

think, and offered him the guest room at the top of our house next to my bedroom

as a pied-à-terre when the Beatles weren't out on the road.

So I moved in with the Ashers.

They're a fascinating family.

I was learning an awful lot.

Never known people stuff so much into a day.

And it was really like...

conscious shock coming from the working class in Liverpool.

Richard, the dad, was a wacky medic, very intelligent and rather eccentric.

My father was an endocrinologist.

He was also very interested in mental health and particularly in psychiatric

diseases.

He identified and named Munchausen syndrome.

Doctors traditionally, when they identify a disease, name it after

themselves. So one does find a lot of people saying, who was Dr.

Munchausen?

But in reality, there was, of course, no Dr.

Munchausen. It was Baron Munchausen who made up fictitious stories, a bit like

Don Quixote.

Mrs. Asher Margaret, she was really very nice, very warm person, very mumsy, and

for a young guy who liked his home comforts.

Boy, did she spoil me.

My mother was an entirely remarkable woman.

She had several different jobs and did all of them brilliantly well.

She was a working musician.

She was oboe professor at the Royal Academy of Music.

She also gave private oboe lessons.

And among the pupils that she had was George Martin, who wanted to brush up

his oboe playing.

and was recommended to my mother as the best oboe teacher in town.

So long before my mother met George as her daughter's boyfriend's record

producer, she already knew him as George the oboe student.

I like afternoon tea.

It's a very civilized thing. Where is your oboe? I had to sell it. I needed

the money.

You've still got yours?

Oh, yes, of course.

You treasure it, do you?

Yes. She wasn't just a nuts-and-bolts person telling you how to handle a bit

of wood. I mean, music was her life.

I'll give you one lesson.

Would you really?

For nothing.

Sometimes she would say, would you mind if I gave you my lesson in my apartment?

So I would go along to her apartment, and running around the flat, there were

three ginger-headed children.

In fact, the kids were called...

The Carrots of Wimpole Street.

It was such a family.

Claire was a very nice younger sister. A lot of fun.

And then there was Peter.

He was an interesting, bright guy.

I could talk to him about anything.

And also very interested in music, very musical.

So there was a lot of connection there.

They got a piano in my room and there was a piano in the basement as well.

So when John came to visit, we could write there on the piano at the same

time.

There was a little music room in the basement and I do remember one

particular occasion, shortly after Paul had moved in.

John came over and he and Paul went down to this music room.

They were down there for a couple of hours and then Paul called up the stairs

to me in my bedroom and asked if I wanted to come down and hear this song

they had just finished writing.

They sat side by side at the piano and hammered out the first version anyone

had ever heard of this brand new song they had just finished called I Want to

Hold Your Hand.

So in that context, of course, I did hear quite a number of songs.

And I remembered hearing this song called A World Without Love that Paul

had explained to me was actually an unfinished song and a sort of reject.

Partly, I think, because John didn't think that much of it.

In particular, John apparently made fun of the opening line.

The song starts off with a line, please lock me away.

And when I would play it, John would respond, yes, okay.

I would joke that that was the end of the song.

So when Norman Newell said, do you know any other cool songs?

I asked Paul, did anything ever happen with that World Without Love song?

Gordon and I would like to have a go at it.

So he said, okay, fine.

And to make sure we got it right... he did a couple of things for me. First, he

wrote down all the lyrics on a piece of paper.

This is the original Paul McCartney draft of the chords and the verses.

He also, on a reel-to-reel tape machine that I had in my bedroom, made a little

demo of the song insofar as it existed at that point.

Please lock me away And don't

It's a good demo.

It's a good demo.

Of course, I did have to nag him a little bit as the date of our session

grew near because he had to finish it. We didn't have a bridge.

What happened was I finally said, look, Paul, it's only a week away. You know,

we really want to do that song.

He said, well, hold on a second. I'll go into my bedroom.

And he came back about three minutes later, and he put this away in the wild.

I will see my true love smile, that middle section.

It all just gelled together when he finished that middle bit.

And it just went, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.

So we took the song in. We played it to Norman Yule. He said, fantastic.

So it's about six or seven minutes walk down Grove End Road, and we'll find the

studio. Cool.

At the time when you and Gordon went to EMI, were you super nervous?

Yes, we were. We were nervous, but we were also super excited.

We'd never been in an actual recording studio.

The first thrill was hearing ourselves back on a proper microphone with the

proper recording technique.

That day was also pretty much when I decided I wanted to be a record producer

because in addition to loving the experience I also loved the idea that

there was this job where you got to hire musicians Much better than yourself and

tell them what to do. I thought that's genius.

You know, how do I get in on that racket?

And here we are So is this sign still the same well used to say EMI Studios, I

think it was red lettering the fuzz I can remember

We picked about five songs to record on that first day, cut them all, and by the

end of the session, everyone agreed that World Without Love was going to be our

first single.

Please lock me away And don't allow the day

Here inside where I hide With my loneliness

I don't care what they say, I won't stay in a world without love.

It came out a month after we cut it, went to number one in England, number

one all over Europe, and finally, it was beyond our imagination, went to number

one in America.

It was incredible.

Don't you think it's rather a waste of an expensive education to have become

pop singers?

Not at all.

Why not? Not at all. I mean, well, it's not as a matter of waste of money, is

it? You know, I mean, education is education.

That's all there is to it.

What do you feel about your song, A World Without Love, sort of getting into

the top for the hit parade and edging you out?

Well, it's fine, you know. I don't mind at all, as long as it's one of our

songs. It's great.

You know, Peter was famous.

having the song written by Paul, which is a very clever thing to do.

Yes, exactly.

One that John hated, apparently. Was that true, or was it a rumor? No, that

is true. He despised it.

Hi,

this is Peter Asher, and you're listening to Sirius XM, The Beatles

Channel. And I'm here at Abbey Road Studios with the amazing Twiggy.

Cutting World Without Love here in the studio was 60 years ago. Did you do it

here? Yes. Oh, my God. I have to tell you a story about it. I was 14. My mum

and dad used to let me go to the local mod dance, and there was a rather lovely

young lad there, and he bought me a present, and do you know what it was?

It was a record called World Without Love... Amazing. ..by Peter and Gordon,

and I'd played the record over and over and over again.

And then the phone rang and it was this lad.

And he said, well, the thing is, I'm saving up for a scooter and I can't

afford a scooter and a girlfriend.

So I'm going for the scooter.

But I still had World Without Love.

So I went up to my bedroom and played it and cried my eyes out. Oh, no.

I'm so sorry.

So I wait and in a while.

One of the effects of having a big hit was that suddenly now we were being

approached by big package tours.

And one of the tours we got offered included an act that I knew well,

because I'd gone to see them very often at the club stage of their career.

The most interesting thing about that tour is the sort of oddity.

We were not the headliners, but neither were the Rolling Stones.

Because based on his huge hit record he just had at the time, this gentleman was

the headliner on the tour.

It was Freddie and the Dreamers, and then there's this absurd dance called Do

the Freddie.

The Rolling Stones would close the first half, and quite a lot of the girls would

leave. because they'd not come to see Freddy do the Freddy. They'd come to see

Mick do the Mick, which was much more interesting.

So there we were, and suddenly we found ourselves part of this whole British

invasion phenomenon.

Now, when people talk to me about that, I always point out that in my view, it's

pretty much 90% the Beatles and 10% all the rest of us put together.

Yes, there were a whole string of bands who had hits in America, but if the

Beatles hadn't kicked the door down in the first place, it never would have

happened.

Courtney, if you are listening, Adrienne from Brooklyn loves you with all her

heart. I mean, these days, people in England don't think twice about going to

America. But it was unheard of for an English senior to be going there.

Paul came back and said, Ed, guys, you've got to get over to America. It's

amazing.

It really is sensational.

From England, the two London youngsters who met while they were attending

Westminster School and developed into top flight stars. Ladies and gentlemen,

Peter and Gordon.

I don't want to see you again.

I hear that love is planned.

How can I understand when someone says to me,

I don't want to see you again?

America to me then was a mystery. I'd never been here. It was also sort of the

promised land.

It was an exhilarating time.

And now, direct from London to Boston,

Peter and Gordon. The swinging sound of Peter and Gordon. Everybody welcome

Peter and Gordon. Peter and Gordon.

We did a ton of TV shows because television was still the major way of

promoting your record

Listen to the bird who sings into the tree And then when you've heard him, see

if you agree Nobody I know could love you more than me

Nobody I know could love you more than me

Aubrey Richardson on the mandolin and the sooty.

Jennifer Overy on bass and orchestra.

Our drummer on this occasion is a very skilled percussionist as well, Mr. Steve

Aho.

And our very own band leader and keyboard player, Jeff Allen Ross.

In America, we didn't have our own band.

So the local promoters in each area would put together a band for us.

Of course, the bands did vary in quality, but there was one band called

the King Bees who I rather liked.

And in particular, I liked and admired their guitar player.

They needed a backup band for a short tour of New England.

So we were playing a club in New York, and I looked up, and there's Peter and

Gordon. They had come in to check us out.

And for some unknown reason, they picked us.

We really didn't have that much in common with them. We were playing R&B.

So I didn't see how we were going to really fit in with World Without Love,

but we did.

I was immediately attracted to Peter because he was so smart.

We'd read a lot of the same books. We were interested in a lot of the same

stuff, same music. He knew all about rhythm and blues.

So we had a lot in common in that way.

On the other hand, Gordon was the opposite of Peter.

Gordon wanted to get drunk, chase chicks.

and have a ball now gordon it seems to me that peter who want of a better

definition is the sort of cute member of the duo while as you represent the sort

of mean moody and sexy part of the act would you agree with this up to a

certain extent yeah i think i'm sort of wild type when he's very reserved but uh

i think i'm quite cute sometimes we rehearsed for a couple of days and then

out we went

I loved every minute of it. I was a kid.

And here I am with stars and teen audiences going crazy.

I thought it was the height of glamour.

Will did I know.

Lucille, you don't do that as well.

The very first gig we did in America was the World's Fair.

And it was surrounded by a moat.

So what happened is these girls all rushed forward as soon as we came on

stage, jumped into the moat and swam across to the stage, which is in the

middle of the pond.

All these soaking women running towards us. It was terrific.

You know, mostly you got the feeling that when they're chasing you, even the

Beatles, they weren't really sure what they'd do if they caught you, you know.

There wasn't a plan.

Gordon, what happened last night? Just about everything, I think.

We didn't have enough policemen there to hold back the people.

Sometimes they just get knocked straight over.

And this has happened a hundred times to us.

Were your clothes ripped off of you in either place? They were ripped off. They

were just sort of loosened a bit, you know.

These flaps on the back of our jackets were taken off.

The weirdest

fan moment was when we were playing an outdoor gig.

Girls running across the grass to where the stage is.

I jumped down.

My glasses fell off and hit the ground.

I reached down, picked them up, and put them on.

As I looked back again, this girl was crouched where the glasses had fallen,

was pulling the grass out and eating it.

And I went, that's really cool.

That's bizarre.

Just you know why.

I met Peter at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City.

I knew who he was before I went there from working in publicity.

Betsy was the Rolling Stones publicist, so she was in the music business.

I knew that Peter had a reputation for being smart, and I hoped that he would

like me.

Betsy was a Nashville.

My father did not approve of me.

I mean, he was nice enough, but you could tell deep down that he wouldn't

have chosen a long-haired Englishman.

Before I started working in publicity, I had heard about Grimm's Village.

It was the start of Dylan and the folk music.

So I just sort of ran away and was a waitress at the coffee house.

What Peter and I shared originally was that he was a folk music fan.

Betsy was friends with everyone in the village. She was very much on the folk

scene. She introduced me to Phil Oakes and a lot of people I only knew by

reputation.

We had a wonderful, wonderful time in New York City.

And eventually, she came back with me to London.

and it was great timing for me to have been in the village in the early 60s and

swinging London in the late 60s. It was great timing.

Mid-60s, swinging London, hipness, decadence and exquisite tailoring.

We were going to change everything, of course, but mostly... We were going to

change the rules.

We grew up in the 50s with rationing and no television and all that.

Coming out of the war, we admired the tighten your belt and spirit of the

Blitz. But at the same time, we thought, enough of that. Enough of that. Let's

put some flares on. Let's put silly flares. Exactly.

It was the first real time that youth had a voice, wasn't it? Yeah.

I was 16 and a half.

I mean, it was insane.

It was exciting.

Girls weren't looking like their mothers any longer.

And boys had decided that they would grow their hair.

Everything seemed to have a creative energy to it.

It was kind of like an electricity.

It was all changing, and we wanted to be part of it. We wanted to catch up.

We intended to create a bookshop and an art gallery in two separate locations,

but sharing a common name.

The name we chose was Indica.

What was his last name?

Indications.

Indications of what? The future?

How did you come up with the name?

Cannabis Indica.

We always claimed it came from indications.

So the future, we're telling you what was going to happen next.

No, we all smoked dope, basically. That's why it was called that.

Indica. It's the full name of cannabis. Is it?

Yeah. You learn something every day.

Okay.

I would work behind the counter with Miles when I wasn't out on the road.

My sister Jane came in and helped. And actually, her boyfriend Paul was a great

help too.

I remember distinctly him helping us the day we had to put up those shelves by

the counter.

Kind of a useful boyfriend to have hanging around, you know. He can either

write you a number one record or put some shelves up.

Depending on what's required that particular day.

Older and older, this gang of people from Indica and the whole scene, you

know, is trying to do, is trying to see where we are now.

You know, it's just a straightforward...

endeavour, kind of thing, just to do something.

Other than what's been done before, because what's been done before isn't

necessarily the answer.

Indica Bookshop is one of the headquarters of the group of people

who've come to be known as the Underground.

It's naturally the first place to which the International Times arrives after

it's come off the presses.

After all, the editorial offices are downstairs.

The International Times was the... a modest name for a new newspaper, but

that became the underground newspaper of the day.

The thing that people seem to get wrong a lot about Indica is that they know it

was a bookshop and an art gallery, but they often think they were in the same

place, which they weren't.

The art gallery was here in Mason's yard.

That, and I don't know what it is now, it looks like another art gallery.

That was where the art gallery was.

Oh, cool.

Peter Asher? Yes, that's me.

Can we take your picture? Curiously enough, of course you can.

It's hilarious, the timing of it.

Do you mind? No, no, not at all.

First 45 I ever had?

Yes. To know you is to love you.

Great, thank you very much.

Loved it. Thank you so much.

I do a...

a tour and talk about peter almost every day of the year what do you say

well this is where the 60s musicians graduated they came here

and uh they could all meet meet each other it became a breeding ground for

for art and music instigated by by peter and his his friends you know yeah thank

you very much yeah

Thank you so much. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you.

How weird. I didn't expect to be part of a tour.

How would you

describe the London art scene at that moment in time?

Very square.

Very square, very boring.

Just sort of shit pictures, I used to call it.

Indica was a great gallery. I mean, the art and also who it attracted.

In those days, galleries weren't really that exciting or they didn't draw people

in. And I have to admit, I don't think I really went to galleries before then.

John Dunbar once posted that he never once had a painting on the wall. It was

all objects and super cutting edge.

John Dunbar.

He made aware of this Japanese-American artist called Yoko Ono.

And he thought she sounded suitably interesting and wacky to be in our avant

-garde gallery.

People wouldn't wait until this crumbles. You see, people are not that

patient. So they like to eat it, you know, or they like to steal it.

And then, of course, famously, when we were hanging in a show, that was one of

the days that John Lennon showed up in his little wide wheelbase mini with a

chauffeur.

She was having a show at this gallery and she had all these things on like all

these like hammer nail things and there was this ladder and a thing on the

ceiling.

So I climbed the ladder and on the ceiling it said yes.

If it had said no I would have carried on with my preconceived ideas about art

and artists you know that they're all sort of yeah yeah sure sure but it said

yes and that was enough you know and that was that was how we met actually.

Thank you. That's very interesting because that was a nice little round of

applause. Sometimes it's a, ah, you know, like what a great love story.

But other times it's a... And the most dramatic one, which has only happened

once, but was quite startling when it did, was as soon as the clip was over,

John says, and that's when we met, some bloke in the audience jumped to his

feet, pointed at me, and yelled at the top of his voice, it was you!

You broke up the Beatles!

I reject soundly any implication that I was responsible for breaking up the

Beatles, but there is a breakup for which I do accept some responsibility,

and that was the breakup of a marriage.

Before he opened the gallery, John was a student at Cambridge University.

When he came back, he was in an incredibly good mood.

He was grinning from ear to ear.

And he told us that he had met the woman of his dreams.

Woman, do you love me?

Woman, if you need me... John was different from any boy I had ever met.

He seemed to know everybody you could ever want to meet in London.

And he was great friends with Peter Asher.

It was clear they were madly in love. And when John proposed to Marianne, He

was kind enough to ask me to be the best man at the wedding.

It was a very long time ago, and it was... Weddings, weddings.

What does best man mean, exactly?

They were so sweet together, Marianne and John.

Yes, indeed, they were sweet. But I suppose I could have seen some early

signs of trouble.

About a year before the wedding, John called me up and said... Let's have

dinner.

And I said, of course, and if you're interested, I'm going to a party after

dinner this evening, and you can come with me if you want to.

It was a party given for the Rolling Stones.

Well spotted, yes.

Trouble ahead.

We all got to the party.

The Stones were already there.

And actually, the person who paid the most attention to Marianne at the

beginning wasn't any one of the Stones. It was their manager, Andrew Lou

Goldham.

He wanted Mick and Keith to write a song for Marianne.

It was incredible. I was just standing there, and there was junk, and there was

Andrew Oldham, and Andrew said to him, could she sing?

And that was that.

A week later, I got a telegram.

Be at Olympic Studios at 2 o'clock. Stop.

Andrew Oldham.

As some of you may already know, Mick did in fact write a song for Marianne,

and much else besides.

Eventually, they ran off together and became the sort of scandal of the day.

I suppose you could charitably look at it as being a kind of full-service best

man, you know, who gets you married and then after your honeymoon introduces

your beautiful wife to Mick Jagger and off they go.

But it's not a complete disaster in the sense that we did end up with a really

good song, the one that went, you know... It is the evening of the day

I sit and watch the children play

Smiling faces I can see

But not for me I sit and watch

as tears go by Well, what did you learn about marriage?

It just doesn't... It just isn't the scene for me.

In late 66, John Dunbar was having domestic problems, which were coming

between him and his gallery.

I'd bust up with Marianne, so, you know, motivation had sort of gone, and it got

to be very difficult financially. I really had to sort of do business, or

not, you know, and I kind of did not.

Well, John just didn't show up to business meetings or anything.

Yeah, he was just hardly ever there.

Miles called me and said, you know, this is not going to work.

We didn't mean for it to be a fly-by-night operation, but it clearly

was being run in a slightly haphazard way.

Only three years after it opened, the Indica Gallery and bookshop closed down,

reflecting the end of an era.

Gordon Waller, just half of the top act, Peter and Gordon. Gordon, there's

something we ought to sort out.

I've been reading suggestions that you're going to split up and others that

you're going to continue working together now, which is true.

How would you describe Peter and Gordon as a duo?

They were very different.

They were a sort of chalk and cheese, yes.

Peter was a human being.

I was just an animal.

I was something that had been let loose into this world.

And I realised it.

And I took advantage of it.

I'd love to genuinely think I regret it, but I had so much fun being an arsehole.

There was one time we were on stage somewhere in Ohio or something, and they

were banging away, playing their tunes, and Gordon was pissed off at something.

He said, fuck it.

He just walked off stage and left Peter on stage by himself.

Gordon just fucking walked off, man.

Gordon could get into fairly fiercely bad moods, and when he did that,

anything could happen.

We used to have some pretty fearsome arguments.

I had a girlfriend and she knew my heart was singing rock and roll.

She said, you don't need Peter.

Peter's crap.

Peter can't sing. Peter's this, Peter's that. I said, well, but we are Peter and

Gordon.

Fuck Peter and Gordon.

Gordon's made a record on his own.

So we're not going to do as much continuous work as we have been doing.

How good did you think you were?

I think we were perhaps not very versatile.

We only had one style, you know.

And we weren't particularly good songwriters, though we wrote some songs

for albums and B-sides and stuff.

But I think we were a very good duo. I mean, I liked the way we sang together

very much.

Neither of us remembers the last gig we did for the very reason that at the time

we had no idea it was the last gig, whatever it was.

Gordon and I just kind of drifted apart We weren't sure if we were simply on a

break or what but it ended up that this break lasted for 38 years

There

she was

We toured in America in 1964 with Peter and Gordon.

We had just had a number one with Do What Diddy.

There was one night where we were stuck in, I think it was Cleveland, Ohio,

fog-bound at an airport.

I spent the whole evening...

with Peter Asher talking.

And I could see that there was a bigger horizon, much bigger for Peter.

I didn't think he was going to head out of music.

I just thought he was going to head out of Peter and Gordon.

After I left Manfred Mann, my career was not going the way I wanted it to go. And

I thought, if I get someone like Peter involved...

That would be a step forward.

So I rang him up and I just asked.

I said, have you ever thought of actually producing records, becoming a

record producer?

And he said, why do you ask?

I confess I was surprised in the sense that Paul provided an opportunity based

on very little evidence.

To ask someone to produce a record who's never actually produced a record before

shows a considerable boldness and imagination, and I'm very grateful to

him for that.

The first track I ever did

was a Bee Gees song called And the Sun Will Shine.

That was Peter's choice, absolutely.

I don't think at that point I even knew who the Bee Gees were.

It was a minor hit.

It's only become notable slightly now because I did put a good band together.

I wanted to take no chances on my first time in the studio.

I didn't realise that Peter was going to come to the very first session that we

did having booked Jeff Beck, Paul Samuel Smith and Paul McCartney.

And I went...

Paul McCartney on what?

Drums?

Peter sent me the $40. I said, damn, that's

really good.

How did he know?

I was over the moon. I couldn't believe it.

He's a producer.

One of the things I knew is that I wanted to be a record producer.

But there I was, a kind of half-baked, half-retired pop star, deciding what to

do next.

So it was a very exciting moment.

One night I got a call from Paul McCartney.

Why are you here today?

April 8th, yes.

concerning records, films, and electronics.

And as a sideline, whatever it's called, manufacturing or whatever.

But we want to set up a system whereby people who just want to make a film

about anything don't have to go on their knees in somebody's office.

Probably yours.

So Paul said, look, you know, this is all going ahead.

Would you like to be head of A&R for the label?

Which means you're overall in charge of...

who makes what kind of records, who gets signed, who produces Zoom, and all that

kind of stuff.

So, of course, I was thrilled.

It was a very huge idea. It was going to be just everything, you know, films,

theater, television, records, spaceships.

There was just no limit to what Apple was going to be.

Did you ever spend any time at Apple?

Not really, but I helped sort of name it and started off.

Paul and John were around my flat in Benton Street.

Maybe we were on acid.

At least I probably maybe was.

And we were talking about what to do with the money.

What money?

That they were making.

They were Beatles, for fuck's sake.

Evidently, someone in accounting or something had convinced the Beatles that

they had money they needed to spend.

And among other things, they bought this incredible building that happened to be

on a street not previously associated with the music business at all.

This is Savile Row, which as you probably know is most famous classically

for incredible tailoring.

Handmade, beautifully made, incredibly expensive, made to measure suits.

You had to have an introduction, you had to have a reference before they would

consider making a suit for you. Right.

My office was top floor on the left.

And the Beatles' office were on what we would call the first floor.

Derrick Taylor's was on the second floor.

And that was where the fun was.

Derrick Taylor was sort of the public relations department and more or less

the heart of the hippiness, or indeed the hipness, at Apple.

One day he came to me and said he had this girl, this American woman.

We had to find a job for.

I was a Hollywood girl at that point.

And Derek Taylor called and said, I think you should come to London. I think

you should come to Apple. This would be a really good time to appear.

I'd gotten there on a Saturday.

Then Monday morning, boy, I was in that taxi headed to Apple.

I had three months on my visa.

And so I was doing anything I could to get a job for Apple, anything.

I was running out of time.

But then Peter came to me and he said, would you like to be my personal

assistant?

And I went, yes, absolutely, saved.

And then I asked you, what do I do?

And you said, I don't know. I've never had a personal assistant before.

So we just kind of winged it at that point.

The energy there was just amazing.

From the time you walked in the door, throughout every room, every floor in

that place, there was so much going on.

During the day, we would tend to work, but by the time it got to the cartel

hour, one did tend to find oneself in Derek's office. He had the drinks

cabinet, I know. And the drawer of interesting substances.

There was a lot of Beatle madness and weird hippies wandering in and out.

Ken Kesey coming to visit.

Do you remember the Krishna's coming?

Yes, I do.

And you went, oh, I hope that's not for me.

Well, it probably wasn't. Yes, it was. It was? It was your next appointment.

It was kind of chaotic, I admit, but at the same time, one has to remember that

we did succeed in putting out a number of pretty good records.

And indeed, we did try to follow the original concept of the label, which is

that it would be much more receptive to outside material than the record

business traditionally has been.

In support of that aim, we actually took an ad.

This man has talent.

We sent his songs in, and now he drives a Bentley.

We ran that ad, and we got a huge response.

There were tapes everywhere, all over his office. Everything was just covered

with tapes.

They'd made a point of saying, you know, we're here to listen to everybody's

stuff, so we would get just sack loads.

I had a lot of people listening to tapes, and then I would listen to

anything that was even vaguely good.

Unfortunately, most of it was awful.

I'm just going to remember a couple of things from way, way ago in the 60s when

we were starting a new record label called Apple.

And my friend Peter Asher one day came to the office and he showed up. He said,

I've got this guy from New York.

I said, go on, come on, let's listen to it.

And for once, it was someone really great.

Let's start at the beginning of Peter.

How did you guys end up meeting?

We met through Danny Courtsmark.

The King Bees, we ran out of gigs.

It just got to be too much.

We were playing these shitholes. We were playing the dumpiest place, and we

weren't getting anywhere, so I quit.

And when I quit, I called James.

James and I met when we were 13 on Martha's Vineyard.

James hitchhiked down to New York and slept on my couch and we made a band. We

started a band.

I spent some time in New York City making music

with a rock and roll band in the village.

I was paying my dues as they say, you know, whatever.

I quit that group because New York City got to be a little bit too much in the

commercial music business and everything.

He had had a really hard time in New York when we were with the Flying

Machine. He was living in a shitty little apartment up on the west side.

He was lonely, he was miserable.

He liked playing, you know, but he didn't like the rest of his life very

much. And, you know, I think he started to, that's when he started using heroin

probably.

So he called his father, and his father drove up from North Carolina, picked him

up, and drove him back to North Carolina, where he started to rehab.

Next thing I hear from James is, I'm going to go to London, you know, just,

you know, go there and see what happens.

I said, well, if you're going to go there, you've got to get in touch with

my pal Peter Asher.

He pretty much just showed up out of the blue, you know. He called me up,

introduced himself as a friend of Kooch's, and I said, great, you know,

come on over. And he came over to my flat and played me the demo tape he'd

made. Then he picked up my guitar and played me some stuff live.

You know, I went crazy. I said, this is amazingly good. I can't believe it.

A couple of days later, I invited James to come over to the office and meet the

proprietors. There's something in the way she moves.

Looks my way, calls my name.

Peter had set up this audition with Paul and George.

It wasn't lost on me how remarkable it was.

And he started singing, and it was just so beautiful that right there and then

we said, okay.

And if I'm well, you can tell she's been with me now.

Paul said, yeah, you know, if you want to produce him, let's go.

I was the first person signed to the label.

So now, of course, I did want to do things by the book.

I wrote an official-looking memo.

And item one, James Taylor, he's an American songwriter and singer who's

extremely good.

I rest my case.

I'll stand by that opinion to this day.

The first James Taylor album, I orchestrated a lot and made more

complicated, which was based on my desperate desire that James not be taken

just as another long-haired folky like all the rest. So I decorated the record

to make people pay attention.

And I... Maybe it was getting in the way of James and the song to some degree.

To me, that early Apple album sounds primitive.

Primitive in that it's new, it's raw.

It's a work in progress.

James Taylor is somewhat tall, and he sings on Apple his songs of tomorrow,

today, in an album that fuses the mind to love.

It's a heavy experience.

It came out, and it wasn't particularly successful.

Got a couple of good reviews. People were interested in James.

People did admire his songwriting.

I don't know if we didn't get the album quite right or what.

I think part of it was that at that same time, Apple Records itself was starting

to fall apart a bit.

Some very good records got made.

But this is when the Beatles were falling apart themselves.

A lot of arguments going on. That's when they all started suing each other and

all that stuff.

The general mood that it created was impending

doom.

And then, at the same time...

My father was in charge of the mental observation ward at Central Middlesex

Hospital.

He was an endocrinologist officially, but treated mental patients brilliantly.

Then one day, they decided that the person in charge of the mental

observation ward needed certain specific psychiatric credentials, which my father

did not have.

They took that role away from him, which made him very sad.

We were all horrified.

Emotional wrecks.

We didn't talk about it a whole lot and still don't, but it changed things a

lot.

I'm not generally a particularly emotional person.

In a very English way.

Well, also, to be fair, we were born in a war.

Yeah.

Emotions are not really so much important as survival.

And, you know, stiff upper lip was a very important thing because people are

bombing you and you don't give a screaming all over the place. You know,

you can't hold it in a bit. Scary, scary times. Right.

Exactly. Are you all right? Yeah.

I was concentrating on looking forward.

I was looking forward in particular.

to building James's career.

James and I decided our future would be best served by leaving Apple.

So that's what we did. We pretty much just sort of packed up and left. They

were all busy arguing.

So I took the master tapes out of the vault downstairs and off we went.

Sunny sky sleeps in the morning.

Why did you look at California?

I'd always had that in mind.

I mean, I'd been here many times, of course. I'd been to both ends on the

road. But California was always where I'd had the most fun.

In the 60s, I rented a Mustang convertible and drove down Sunset Strip.

I said, this is, you know, there's nowhere else to live. This is it.

Now, Peter, here we are under a soft California sun, lotus blossoms,

champagne, beautiful spread you've got there.

Are you glad you left the old country?

I'm glad I'm here. I mean, that doesn't make me necessarily glad I left England.

Truthfully, I loved London. I loved our life in London. I wasn't keen to come

back to America, really.

But we rented a house down on Longwood for $450 a month.

The house was empty. We didn't have furniture or anything. It was coming up

to Halloween.

So the kids from the neighborhood came around trick-or-treating and then went

home and told their parents, hippies have moved in down the street.

I came over here with really not much money to speak of.

I mean, actually no money. I had like $5,000 or something.

And I didn't really know what I was going to do. If James had been a

failure, I mean, I could have actually been down and out in Beverly Hills in no

time.

Ending with a friend named Sunny Skies When we just started to

leave Apple, James stopped off on the East Coast for a bit of rehab.

I was in a withdrawal from opiates in western Massachusetts, and

Peter called and said, listen, I propose that we try to find you another record

label and that I manage you.

sort of digested that for a while. And since I've never had much in the way of

a good business head, I called Paul and I said, what do you think of that, you

know, as an idea?

And he said, I think that's a great idea.

And then, you know, I said, well, what do you think one should pay a manager?

And Paul said, I don't know, 1%. Yeah,

it wasn't, that was ideal was slightly better than that for me.

Peter was obviously kind of a star coming into the scene because everybody

knew who he was. He had the advantage of being a well-known public figure and

having the added thing of being part of the British invasion.

We used to hang out at the Troubadour.

It was the hang in the late 60s, early 70s for anyone in the local L.A. music

scene.

People always think that there's sort of a social scene and a musical scene all

mixed in together and concentrated in one place, and usually it's not the

case, but the Troubadour was a real case of that phenomenon.

If you weren't hanging out in the Troubadour bar, you know, you should be.

And that's where a lot of people met each other, made friends, found lovers.

It was a happening scene.

That's when I first got to know Peter and Betsy.

They'd invite us all over after, and we'd hang out and talk music.

James was there and Cooch and everybody.

It was kind of an extension of the Troubadour scene.

I was in London, but somehow you found me and you rang me and said, would you

like to come to Los Angeles and work for me? Right.

So I must not have been horrible.

And you're supposed to say, no, you weren't, Chris.

He said, you'll have to live with us. So I did. I lived with them. And he had an

office back in the cottage past the pool.

I think Peter, when he got to America, he actually kind of let his hair down a

little.

He found himself.

He actually was on his own now and making his own career.

and not associated with the Beatles.

When it came time to make the first American album, we made a deal with

Warner Brothers Records.

And I wanted to keep it very simple. The Apple album's quite orchestrated and

complicated. So I put together a small band.

The difference between the Apple album and Sweet Baby James was that we

essentially had a band.

You know, a good band.

We already knew we wanted to have Danny Korchmar play guitar, of course, because

we both love him and love his playing.

And I found a drummer who was perfect, a guy called Russ Kunkel.

He was playing with simplicity and clarity.

And I kind of went, that's my drummer.

But I was giving some thought to who we should get to play piano.

There's a ton of great piano players in L.A., you know, proper studio guys who

can play anything and incredibly dexterous.

jazzy but my instinct was to avoid that so i had an idea because by this time i

had heard the original demos that carol king made of all those songs i loved so

much and

i realized that i loved her piano playing very simple unjazzy kind of

singer-songwriter piano so i went that would be perfect for james So I got to

meet Carol through Cooch.

Luckily, he'd been in a band with Carol called The City.

She didn't know who James was, but she agreed to come over to my house to meet

him. I just remember Peter gently but firmly directing.

No, well, why don't you have a seat at the piano? And James played guitar.

Why don't you play something that you both know?

So we started playing.

I mean, he probably started playing and I picked up whatever key it was and

started playing.

It was an amazing musical connection.

And that was the beginning, of course, of James and Carol's long and successful

musical relationship.

We would all meet at my house in the afternoon.

I didn't really have any furniture, as you can see.

I did have a rented piano, and the cat was free.

And that was about it.

With us, we rehearsed and got to know each other in Peter's living room way

before we went in the studio.

So we got to know each other, and we got to learn how to integrate our styles. Me

on guitar, James on guitar, and Carol on piano.

We would go over there in the afternoon and sit on the floor, and James would

play a song.

When Tucci and I started working with Peter, we had a very clear idea about

how we wanted the music to sound, and my guitar was the center of the arrangement

that we came up with. That was a relatively new thing.

We're all free to make creative suggestions or just play the thing we

think should be played.

And that's what made the magic.

Peter was directing things, and he would let the thing go wherever the creativity

was coming from.

In many ways, he was responsible for a different kind of recording beginning to

happen in L.A.

We would run the songs in the living room first and work them out, and then

go straight into Sunset Sound and cut them.

They totally rehearsed that album so that when they went in the studio, the

whole album cost $7,000.

And we got the whole thing done in two weeks.

We named it Sweet Baby James, and it came out February of 1970.

Our album Sweet Baby James was basically the first album where the musicians were

listed on the back of the cover.

I do remember being frustrated as a music fan and as a record collector not

being able to tell who these incredible musicians were because they were not

credited. So I resolved to credit people wherever I could.

That changed everything.

Because he listed us musicians, producers and artists would say, oh,

those are the guys that played on Change Daily, get them.

It changed all our careers completely.

It gave us careers.

When we did Sweet Baby James, we didn't have a permanent bass player.

But it was shortly after we'd made the record that James called me and told me

that he'd found a bass player as good as Paul McCartney. And I said, good, this

will come in handy.

He introduced me to Lee Sklar, who's played bass on most of the records I've

made ever since.

They were going to do this gig at the Troubadour, and they tracked me down.

So we went over to Peter's house, and that was the first time I actually met

Peter. And I'm kind of sitting there looking at him going, Peter and Gordon,

really? It's like all of a sudden to be sitting in a room with a guy that I've

seen on Ed Sullivan.

I was fanboy.

And it was something, because that's the first time I met Danny, and that was the

first time I met Carol.

So it was this whole thing kind of came crashing together at Peter and Betsy's

house.

Kind of for all of us, but I know for me, I ended up going from zero to a

hundred in an instant.

I played as a sideman with James, and I was happy to be a recording artist.

But at some point, Peter, in his understated British manner, said, we'd

like to invite you to go out on the road with James.

And I was like, well, no. I have my daughters and my life, and I'm not a

performer.

So Peter said, no, it's only on weekends. We're doing a college tour,

and it's only on weekends.

So you wouldn't be away that much, and we just want you to play piano.

She was reluctant about playing, and that's why she became our opening act at

the Troubadour, in order to experience what was it like to play to a live

audience. I don't know how many of you know who Carole King is, but I've known

her for about two years now, and I've worked an awful lot with her.

And it's really been a privilege and a pleasure for me to be associated with

and with such a fine composer.

And Carol, we're rolling music that she's going to play for you tonight.

And some of the songs go back quite a ways.

Let's give a warm welcome to Ms. Carol Pink.

Looking out on the morning rain I

used to feel

I said to Carol, simply playing the songs she'd written and telling people

she wrote them.

That'll amaze everyone on their own. They didn't know she wrote Up on the

Roof and Natural Woman and all that stuff.

That began a process

for me where I could become a performing artist.

I had James out working on the road as much as possible. You know, opening for

people, playing the folk clubs, which he was starting to sell out.

And it started to speed up.

Eventually, Fire and Rain came out as a hit single.

And people started to talk about him in major terms as being a new kind of rock

and roll. Just yesterday morning, they let me go, you were gone.

Suzanne, the plans we made put an end to you.

I walked out on the morning while I wrote down this song.

I just can't remember who to send it to I think that Peter just got

better and better at what he did.

Producing is a very broad term, and sometimes it means he's a

musical prodigy, and sometimes it means he's a social worker or a

therapist, and sometimes it means he or she just...

enables somebody who's musically gifted to do their thing and get out of the

way.

And I think he probably can wear any of those hats.

So you hadn't really been a manager before.

You've got James, and he's kind of a junkie.

Yes. What made you so certain that you could base your future on him?

Um...

youthful naivete, I suppose. I just thought his music was incredibly good,

and that if I liked it this much, everyone else would too.

Throughout some really

dodgy times, Peter stuck with me.

I think that's no...

small thing to make that happen. Very, very few people could do that.

As I started working with James, I also got to meet his entire family,

who are extraordinary.

And I was super impressed not only by James, but by his sister, Kate.

When James was making the record in England, I thought, you know what, I

should go over there and make sure they're taking good care of him.

So James took me to Apple, introduced me to Peter.

Then one afternoon, Peter had a gathering out in the country.

There was an ancient stone-lined swimming pool in the backyard, and James

and I went down into that pool, and we started singing.

I remember walking by that empty pool and hearing these two amazing voices and

realizing that one of them was Kate.

I got out of the swimming pool, I went back home, and a month later, the phone

rings, and it's Peter.

And he said, did I want to make a record?

I said, let me think about it, yes.

Basically.

It was wonderful working with Peter, but I was green.

I was 19, excitable, and didn't know what the hell I was doing.

She really wasn't quite ready to go out on the road.

She did like one night at the Troubadour and was fantastic.

She was jumping on the tables and singing and everyone loved it.

But she blew her whole voice out.

She was so like manic with energy.

I loved touring. I loved the whole thing. The singing, getting it from the

audience, the band.

Loved it.

But by the time the tour was over, there was an inner voice.

That was telling me, you're going down the wrong path.

At that same time, I was facing my own personal dilemma.

It all began when I was in New York and somebody said, you have to go down to

the village and hear this girl.

I went down and she was terrific.

The most amazing voice.

It was incredible.

Barefoot, tan, beautiful California girl belting out these terrific songs. I was

very impressed.

We met Linda. She was playing at the Bitter End, and we hit it off, Linda and

I, and became friends.

She was fantastic.

Somebody told Peter he should check out the show.

He had Betsy with him.

And they were so nice.

You know, they seemed to be genuinely sympathetic to what I did.

I told them to come to the troubadour.

So we hooked up there.

I was 26 years old.

I had had two hits very far apart when I didn't know what I was doing yet.

I was just wandering around doing all this different stuff that I liked.

I was singing a country song here and a folk song here, but it was hard for

somebody to make a cohesive product out of it.

Linda had decided she was going to look around for a manager, and she approached

people like me at the Troubadour because we were part of the music scene.

I was so... in love with her voice and her singing, and I knew she was going to

be a big star. Everybody did.

It was just a matter of getting the right combination of things together.

So she asked me if I had any suggestions. I said, look, the only

manager I know is Peter Asher. He manages James Taylor, who's a friend of

mine, and James says he's great.

So we went to his office, and I said, will you manage me?

He said yes.

So I was elated.

And then about a week later, he called me and he said, I'll have to decline.

I was crushed.

I didn't think having two girls on similar paths would be practical or

fair.

And so I very reluctantly said no.

He was really fair-minded, and there was a lot of reason to do something.

But if there's one good reason not to do it, that's the reason you should

consider it.

So I think the one reason not to do it was that it would not be fair to Kate.

I was supposed to go back out to California and start on the new record.

Peter and I had talked about what songs we were going to do.

But as much as I was loving being in Los Angeles and immersed in this scene, I

was homesick, too.

So I called Peter.

I called him. I said, you know, I just need more time.

When Kate made the call, I wasn't surprised, I admit.

It was clear that she was not very comfortable in the role of would-be rock

star.

And I think Kate herself told Linda.

She was opening for James in Tanglewood.

And I said to her, you know, you should call Peter.

I hear that you called Betsy and talked to her before you approached Peter

again. Oh, I probably did.

Betsy was the soft gate in.

Peter can be uncomfortable socially, and he's shy, basically.

I'm a shy person, too, so I appreciate it.

Betsy was a good liaison between Peter and the rest of the world.

They worked together very much as a team.

She had a very good ear for songs.

and for songwriters and artists, and I think he relied on it.

I think Betsy was more excited and enthusiastic about Peter producing me

than Peter was.

I think he'd heard that I was difficult to deal with or something.

I mean, she did have a little reputation for being difficult, but it was clear to

me very rapidly that she wasn't difficult at all.

Half the time, no one had actually listened to her.

There was an awful lot.

but don't you worry your pretty little head about that.

Nobody was really giving Linda credit for being brilliant.

Whatever masterstroke genius idea I had, it was mostly just, let's listen to what

Linda has to say.

And now here's a very special guest of ours, a very lovely distraction, Miss

Linda Ronstadt.

I had this song called Heart Like a Wheel.

I suggested to a couple of different producers.

It became a sort of test case, apparently.

She'd play it to people and they'd go, oh, yeah, it's quite pretty, but, man.

Some say the heart is built like a wheel

When you bend it, you can't mend it

Peter liked that song.

Peter understood it.

Say, where's the hook?

I mean, we're all looking for hits, but that struck me as a song so beautiful

that it almost didn't need to be a hit to be a hit.

It became one of the biggest songs of my career.

When Peter came along, everything changed.

The records got a lot better. The musicians he got were all brilliant.

These are all like the best cats, Kenny Edwards and Andrew Gold.

Peter, back then, was very aware of how Linda really did well on oldies.

We reorganized, you know, good. We were doing it on stage, but differently, a

different groove and everything.

And the guys in the band came up with the ideas.

Peter recognized that from where he was sitting in the control room, said, keep

that. Feeling better.

We did it a couple of different times because we were both convinced it must

be a hit, but it kept not sounding like one.

So we did a version that Andrew Gold played most of the instruments on.

He played drums and bass and keyboards and one of the guitars.

We left a big section in the middle, 16 bars I think it was, with the sort

of reggae beat.

We had no idea what we were going to put there. We really didn't.

Andrew and I stayed in the studio that night working on some guitar solos to

fill that gap.

Multiple overdubs and going crazy.

We'd been there all night.

And Linda came back in the next morning all scrubbed and fresh.

And we played it to her and she went, I don't really like it. It sounds like the

Beatles.

It was just such a letdown because they were really excited about it. And I

said, I don't know, play it again. They played it a second time and went, this

is a hit.

And then our engineer accidentally pushed a button and erased everything.

And by that time, I was jumping up and down going, this is really good.

And Peter didn't have a fit. He didn't go, what was me? He said, get your

guitar out. Let's do it again.

He didn't finish until dawn.

They could have declined it as a whole, your fault, your fault, your fault.

And he didn't.

That was Peter.

I came in right where her career was blossoming.

I was working for other producers in town.

I had not cracked Peter Asher's circle yet, but my good friends were working

for Peter. So I went by the studio one time, and my friend J.D. Souther saw me,

and he goes, you've got to play on this record, man.

And then I saw Peter go, oh, God.

You know, like, oh, no.

So I'm just sitting there listening, and I started going, I know what to do on

this. And when I did it, I could see Peter go, whoa, what was that? What

happened just then?

And after we did the take, all of a sudden things were a lot warmer,

let's say.

Unlike most producers, Peter had Linda singing live in the studio.

These songs that were going down, like Blue Bayou is a live vocal.

Normally, you would play a track with what they call a guide vocal.

But if you're going for the performance with the singer, you're going to make

sure you're on your game.

It was extraordinary to be part of it.

Hasten down the wind.

I'd especially like to thank Peter Asher.

Thank you.

When I went on the road with Linda, Peter's concept was, I want the band

that plays the record to be the band on the road so it sounds and feels the

same.

Peter was largely responsible for a very, very different paradigm.

We rehearsed together, we recorded together, and we toured together.

So now we're a family.

And Peter, he was always there with us.

He'd be out there singing with me on my microphone.

He was always part of it.

Do I enjoy being on stage? Yes.

But I don't think I stepped on stage gratuitously.

To my mind, at least, I always had the excuse of providing some actual

function. But maybe not. Maybe it's all just vanity.

He's a ham like the rest of us.

You know, you can't shake that.

We got out on the road, and we just became closer and closer friends.

We would wind up in some jacuzzi somewhere with a bottle of cognac and

just go completely out of our minds.

Peter doesn't seem like the kind of person that would have done a lot of

drugs. Oh, he loved it.

He did?

Yeah.

Peter was a pothead. He loved pot.

But he maintained perfectly on it.

I partook.

The actual quantity was, you know.

We shall leave for the history books. But I had fun when everyone else was

having fun.

It's so easy to fall in love.

It's so easy to fall in love.

We had a lot of fun.

But there were lots of obstacles in those days.

Egos and narcissism and tons of drugs.

They got very heavy in the 70s. I'm surprised so many people survived.

Me included.

Coke changed things, yes.

Particularly when used in excess.

Things got a bit more intense.

They just got edgy, you know. People spoke to each other through gritted

teeth.

Eventually, I think if you do enough of it, you can just lose your grip on

reality. And they'll start getting mean and nasty and saying shitty things.

And like that, I've seen it happen over and over again.

Cocaine was a lot of fun, but it ruined everything.

I got taken away in an ambulance.

That sounds kind of like a nervous breakdown or something.

Yeah, that's what it was. Yeah, it sort of was a big one.

Bethy's brain chemistry was too fragile.

She was a person that had a lot of emotional problems that we didn't

realize how sick she was.

She got to the point where she never left the house and it went downhill from

there.

She did end up taking the drugs a bit seriously.

But that's one of the mysteries is how some people can survive drugs quite

effectively.

Some people can't.

I got put in Los Encinas.

I was in the net house for a long time.

She's been afraid to go out.

She's afraid of the knock on the door.

There's always the shade of a doubt.

She can never be sure.

James and JD and I were playing, and then we just started.

throwing words around, and all of a sudden it became about Peter and Betsy

and coming to the end of their road. It became about them breaking up.

She gets the house and the garden He gets the boys

in the van Some of them his friends Some of them her friends

Some of them understand How did Betsy's disintegrating state?

impact you in your career?

I don't know. I mean, that's... I don't know.

I'm sorry, I don't... I mean, I just, the career, I suppose I took refuge in

my career, you know?

In 1977, Peter Asher was clearly the producer of the year.

And Rolling Stone had begun doing these awards and polls to wrap up a year.

And then, when you're bouncing ideas around at an editorial meeting, anything

can happen. They called me up and said, we're going to do a big story on you.

And the fact that you manage and produce these two acts. Ben Fong Torres is going

to write the story, which he did brilliantly.

But they also said, we want you to go and do a photo shoot with Annie

Leibovitz in New York next weekend. I went, yes, I'm in.

I'll get on the plane now.

But they did say, oh, there's one more thing.

We are considering this as a possible cover story.

But it'll only be a cover story if you bring James and Linda with you to the

photo shoot.

Now, at that point, I'm the kind of manager who usually...

is very calm and rational and kind of goes, we've been offered this. What do

you think? Here are the pros. Here are the cons.

Do you think we should do it or not?

But did I want to be on the cover of Rolling Stone?

Fuck yes.

So I had no hesitation.

I had no hesitation in kind of bullying James and Linda a bit.

I suppose I do have this sort of generally optimistic view that what I

set my hand to seems to work out okay.

And I don't think it's necessarily to my credit at all.

I think it could just be a series of fortunate circumstances.

But I've never really known what I was going to be doing next.

Wendy and I first met at a party in Malibu.

Fell in love, got married, had a kid.

I mean, it's not a highly original story.

I'd never been sure if I wanted children or not, to be quite honest.

But I was thrilled and delighted when Victoria arrived.

It was a super fun household to be in because there was just tons of people

all the time and different characters that were living in the house and a lot

of creative people.

You'll never see this few people at this table. It's always, you know, Wendy's,

Wendy's, Wendy's, Wendy and Peter, Wendy and Peter.

Joni Mitchell lived a few doors down, so we just... had dinner at each other's

house every three nights. We switched.

Peter used to come home to big old parties at our house.

He'd call and he'd say, can I talk to Wendy?

And they'd say, who's this? He says, Peter, I live there.

Because he was on the road all the time.

At one point, Peter had said that he might have been just happy producing

James and Linda.

Yes, I was pretty busy. But at the same time, when opportunities arose to

produce other people, particularly people I'd idolized, you know?

Diana Ross?

Diana Ross, for example, yeah.

And baby, every time you touch me Wish your heart was

a heart of stone Just say what you want to

say He was born on a summer day in 1951 Was a good kid

Goodbye Norma Jean though. I never knew you

I knew absolutely nothing about Peter except that, here I'll show you, this is

what I knew about Peter Asher, that my mom had some albums, had these Peter and

Gordon albums, and that's basically all I knew about Peter Asher until he was

suggested as a producer.

What we love about pop music, those of us who love pop music, is that in that

three and a half minutes that there's this kind of ecstatic energy and this

moment of bliss.

There's an art to being able to find those moments and accentuate those

moments and render those moments.

And I think that Peter has that ability.

We said, we've been working on these songs.

You know, we're thinking of it as bluegrass.

So we didn't know what Peter thought of that.

I love good songs that stick in your head, regardless in which field they're

written.

What is it that drives both of you to take risks and to leap off cliffs into

new territory?

I've never thought about it as leaping off cliffs so much. I just was going to

say that. I never think of it as a risk. A risk would imply...

I have this career, but if I do this, my career will go away.

Yeah, exactly.

Part of it is just being unguided.

And seeing something, as I say, as an opportunity.

You kind of go, well, that should be interesting or fun, or maybe I'll learn

something new if I do that.

And the winner is Robin Williams. Come up here.

Comedy album of the year was not a Grammy I ever expected, that's for sure.

Robin was just a friend.

I sort of talked myself into the gig.

I want to thank Peter Asher.

We call him DJ Mensa. Thank you, Peter. God bless you.

He's English. He knows more than we do. God bless him.

As much as he's great at music, he was great at picking out the best bits.

It's kind of like a live music album, where you really get the feeling of,

this is what it's like to be on the road. And that's why I thanked him.

No, sweet.

Now, this man, look at this suit. Thank you so much for coming. Look at this

suit.

Peter dresses amazingly, like, with, like, Edwardian stuff.

It's things that even, like, you know, a gay leprechaun would go, no, it's too

much, you can't wear that.

Now, I would be remiss if I were to end this show without catching you up on the

Peter and Gordon story.

I must admit, as those decades rolled by, it had always been my assumption

that we probably wouldn't sing together again.

And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, we got this phone call from Paul

Schaefer, who was putting together a benefit.

You saw in the paper that Mike Smith, lead singer of the Dave Clark Five, fell

off a fence and was paralyzed.

Kathy said, you've got to do something for Mike Smith.

a tribute of some kind.

And I started getting this idea I could base this thing around the British

invasion.

Kathy said, well, you got to get Peter and Gordon. I get Peter and Gordon. And

he went, they're not going to do it.

He's never going to do it. I said, ask him.

So he called me, and I realized that if we were ever going to try singing

together again, this would be the right time to do it.

I said, I'll call you back.

He phoned me up, and I said, well, don't be silly. Of course we'll do that for

Mike. No problem.

Get me there. I'm your man.

I had to learn to sing the songs properly, because I've been

singing them on my own in the way that I would like to sing them for the last 35

years.

Peter hadn't sung them at all for 35 years, so I don't know whose job was

harder.

I said yes.

And then later on, it dawns on you that saying yes extends to the moment when

you actually have to do it. And that was scary.

Ladies and gentlemen, Peter and Gordon.

I

think

it dawned on me towards the end.

we still probably sounded okay people seem to like it you seem to still sound

like us to all of a sudden have that harmony

alongside me that i've been i've been looking i mean i've tried i must have

tried 50 people but no one can get close so

thanks peter

The gig was a success.

And that's when the question came up. There are other gigs available.

Are you interested in doing them?

And we did a few of those.

Now it's in our guitars.

Same way we started.

You realize that these songs played a considerable role in people's lives and

how much that means to people.

You actually see people in the audience crying.

If you miss the train I'm on You will know

that I have gone If you talk to them afterwards, it'll be, well, that's the

song I proposed to my wife, that was our song.

Sounds like a cliche, but it actually is a privilege to be able to be part of an

operation in reminiscence

We lost Gordon in 2009.

He was one of those people who really didn't look after himself at all and

kept getting, you know, doctor's warnings, you know, and things. But his

voice remained completely intact.

The beautiful baritone that I'd fallen in love with all the way back in school.

It remained almost exactly the same.

When Gordon died, I had this choice.

Am I never going to sing these songs again?

That's when I had this idea for a show that's half talking, half singing, that

would tell stories.

So I began to assemble what I eventually called A Memoir of the 60s and Beyond.

And I get to sing the songs with various different people, including Eli Lovett

or whoever, you know, Gordon DuJour happens to be.

I don't care what they say. I don't care what they say. I won't stay.

I won't stay. I don't care what they say is unison, right? I don't care what they

say. I won't stay.

I don't care what they say. I won't stay in a world without love.

That's it. That is exactly it. Great.

And, uh... Birds sing out of tune.

And is that in unison? Should we do it one more time? I'd love to. So I wait,

and in a while I will see my true love smile She

may come, I know not when When she does, I'll know So baby, until then

Lock me away And don't allow the day Here

inside, where I hide With my lonely

What do you think is Peter's reason for going out on stage at age 80 and change?

Well, he didn't start at 80.

You find yourself to be 80 and still being able to do it, just about.

So I wait, and in a while I will see my true love smile

Okay, your verse is coming up pretty soon.

Stand by.

Here we go.

Fabulous, isn't that great?

Thank

you

very much.

Thank you to my fabulous staff.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much. Fantastic.

Is it true Mike Myers modeled his character, Austin Powers, after you?

Yeah, baby, yeah!

Rumor has it that they modeled Austin Powers after Peter.

Oh, really?

That's hilarious.

Does Peter know this?

I kind of, yes, I sort of get it.

Yes, it's possible, I suppose.

I see Peter.

Not at all.

Not? I don't think so, no.

The Buddy Holly glasses.

I think Peter had a velvet suit with a, you know, ruffled collar.

Everybody, hey.

You wouldn't voluntarily choose bad teeth and glasses, you know.

Yeah, but you're a pretty snappy dresser, Peter. Thank you.

against the sky so bright that I can't even close my eyes.

I know I will follow.

Follow love. I know I'm there to go.

Follow love.

Yes, I will follow.

Follow love.

Follow.

And drifting like the cloud in the sky, I can see myself from high.

Then if I'm called to run,

I guess I will follow, follow

love.

Oh, half the future and half the past.

Till at last it's your time.