Ray didn’t drive for a long time after the accident. I still dislike long car rides, and I get nervous when I’m merging onto the highway, especially when it’s raining. And we all suffered from recurring nightmares of the crash, sometimes with different, horrible endings. Compared to what could have happened, however, we got off lightly. We were extremely lucky, and our good fortune fueled our willpower, so we were able to compartmentalize. We put what happened behind us and summoned the motivation to carry on with what we had planned. In a way, Ray and I did the same thing we’d done after our dad died. We compartmentalized, strapped on our instruments, and returned to the practice room. On various levels, that’s probably what kept us together as bandmates for more than twenty-five years.
When we finally arrived at Advision, Malcolm and Gary were waiting for us. We didn’t talk about the near-death experience at first. We just got on with the business at hand and started working on preproduction for the new songs. We had decided to self-produce Three Friends, having learned so much sitting in with Tony on Acquiring The Taste. No one knew what we wanted as well as we did, and now that we had the skills to set up mics and man the board, it made sense to cut out the middleman. A great producer can help make a good album sound amazing (some have even made bad albums sonically pristine), but we knew we had the material for a great album, and we didn’t need help fine-tuning our creative ideas. When you’re that focused, a producer can actually be a third wheel.
As we had feared, however, Malcolm’s inexperience slowed our progress. He would sometimes speed up and slow down while he was playing, and maybe we should have been more understanding, but I was determined to get the record done right, with as few hiccups as possible. And Malcolm was hiccupping like a kid who drinks too much soda. He was nervous, and it messed with his timing. The more we criticized him, the more mistakes he made. He wasn’t used to dealing with hotheaded musicians, and we weren’t willing to put up with anything less than perfection. It was a bad combination.
Time and again, Malcolm kept missing the ‘one’—the first beat of a musical measure, which is supposed to solidify the rhythm. I tried to help him out by standing in front of his kit with my headphones on, listening to the playback, loudly counting for him while he drummed. Kerry did the same from the control booth. It took some work, but we got the tracks down, and he sounded good. Maybe we should have used a click track, but for some reason no one thought of that. In the end, his drum breaks and technical skills would shine throughout the album.
The way Malcolm mixed jazz drumming with rock—I’d never heard anything like it. But he was so focused on his playing, he was unable to sync with the chemistry of the rest of the band. In retrospect, he was so far behind us as a professional musician that there was no way he could catch up. We were perfectionists and he was young and still learning his craft. I suppose we could have handled it better, but the only solution was to find another drummer, which we would soon do. But first, we had to get through a monumental tour opening for Jethro Tull, at what was probably the peak of their career.
That was revelatory in two ways: we played big arenas night after night, and we got to watch Tull putting on a fantastic show full of creative stage design and lighting that gave us direction for what we could do with our own productions. Tull were supporting the monumental Aqualung and premiering songs from their soon-to-be-released masterpiece Thick As A Brick. There was a strong mutual respect between us and them. They gave us full use of their lights and plenty of stage room, and they made it clear to promoters and staff that it was fine with them if our set went longer than our allotted time. When we were on fire, they wanted to see us play an extra song as much as our biggest fans did, and we were grateful for that.
We all quickly became friends, hanging out on one another’s buses before and after the shows and nerding out about our favorite music, books, and movies. None of us were after-show party people, so we never got fucked up and threw televisions out hotel windows. Ours was a real friendship, not one spearheaded by drugs and alcohol. I was closest to the guitarist, Martin Barre, partially because he was a friendly, stand-up guy, but also because vocalist Ian Anderson’s first impression of us made him gun-shy.
Ian was heading into our dressing room at the beginning of the tour to say hello and wish us well when he heard Phil and me having a heated argument. The door was closed, but we were loud enough that Ian turned the other way and went somewhere else. The distancing didn’t last, though, and within days Ray, Phil, and I were having esoteric conversations with Ian as well.
The audiences at the Tull shows were eighty-five percent male. There were loads of guys who were there with their friends. Very few of them had girlfriends at the shows, which made them quite different from the times we had opened for Slade or T. Rex, or even back when we headlined large venues with Simon Dupree & The Big Sound. That probably had a lot to do with the kind of music we were all playing, but at the same time, Ian Anderson was not exactly a sexy frontman. He’s no Paul Rogers or Ian Gillan. So, not only was the music largely unappealing to females, but the musicians weren’t the kinds of guys girls wanted to gaze at onstage. It wasn’t until prog bands with decent-looking singers and catchy songs started getting airplay that a greater number of girls started coming to prog shows.
The one good thing about that was that if we had our girlfriends with us on the road, we never had to worry about them having any interest in the types of guys who were sneaking backstage after the shows. It was funny because instead of girls coming backstage and wanting us to sign their breasts, like we’d experienced with Simon Dupree, there were boys coming up to us wanting us to sign their tour programs and copies of our sheet music. That’s the nature of the beast when you’re a band like Jethro Tull or Gentle Giant and not Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones.
We learned another important lesson playing with Jethro Tull. Until we hired a highly skilled drummer with immaculate timing, we were never going to blow the headliners off the stage, and we’d be lucky to come across as the highlight of the night when we were the showcase band. Malcolm’s internal clock was even more off-kilter live than it was in the studio, and there was no one to stand next to him and count off the beats. Sometimes he’d play so fast we’d finish the set in seventy-five minutes instead of ninety. It was like punk rock before punk.
Malcolm wasn’t just a sloppy player; he also took foolish risks. He loved to speed around on his motorcycle, and I’m not sure he was a much better daredevil than he was a drummer. Before a gig in Vienna, Austria, he had a nasty spill on his bike and seriously bruised his left arm, which the doctors put in a cast. Since we didn’t have time to find a replacement, Phil attached a drumstick to Malcolm’s cast and wrapped it with a mountain of duct tape. It didn’t work very well, but at least we played the show.
Then, fate really cracked Malcolm across the head. In late March 1972, he crashed his motorcycle and was thrown from the bike, breaking his left arm, left leg, and pelvis. He needed intensive physical therapy and months to recover. We had wanted to replace him anyway, but we didn’t think we’d have to do so before we could audition a new batch of drummers. After Martin’s accident, we offered the gig to ex-King Crimson drummer Mike Giles, but that didn’t work out. We were in a bind. We had to either cancel shows or hire someone else right away and return to the road.