My Bass and Other Animals by Guy Pratt

Author:Guy Pratt [Pratt, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B01F1UD7ZS
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2008-09-17T14:00:00+00:00

On another rare drive, this time from New York to Hartford Connecticut, Mal cocked up and the bus didn’t show. The gig was that day, so something needed to be sorted sharpish, but the only wheeled transport available in Manhattan to take a party of twenty-two turned out to be a preposterously long limo. It was done up inside like a Turkish brothel, and you had to shout to be heard from one end to the other. We drove round and round the city, as there were only certain corners it could take, which severely limited our options for getting off the island. Eventually we did, and once we were on the freeway, someone had the bright idea of going to McDonald’s. Everyone agreed, and we turned off at the next one, the only snag being that the limo wouldn’t fit in either the drive-thru lane or the car park.

Amongst the crew was an ‘ambience coordinator’ - I should point out that he wasn’t actually hired by the band. I think they found him in one of the flight cases left over from the Genesis tour the year before and let him tag along as a sort of necessary evil. He had two jobs essentially. One was to obtain cocaine for anyone in the band or crew party who felt they needed it, and the other was to look after our parents whenever they came out on the road, both of which he did fantastically well.

He used to do merchandising for Frank Sinatra and had quite the driest and potentially offensive New York wit imaginable. Once I asked him how far the equipment trucks had to drive that night, and he thought for a second before replying, ‘About a hundred dollars.’

Much as all this sounds like a drug-crazed, childish rampage, I should point out that most people were pretty restrained, several didn’t indulge in much more than the odd sherry and half the time that Jon and I stayed up all night getting high, rather than careering around nightclubs, we were usually in one of our rooms, listening to gig tapes to see how we could make the show better. But there aren’t many funny stories in that.

David and I played on a Peter Cetera album for producer Pat Leonard when Floyd first hit LA. That experience taught me that one should never hire musicians in the middle of a tour, especially one as huge and out of control as the Floyd’s. Our playing, and my behaviour, was, well, enormous.

Peter Cetera had been the lead singer with Chicago, famed for such saccharine anthems as ‘If You Leave Me Now’. Pat must have thought his songs could do with a bit of English meatiness, so he asked us to play on one of his ditties, a playful romp about teenage suicide called ‘You Never Listen To Me’, which is just the sort of adolescent petulance that applied to my performance.

By the time I got to the studio I’d been up for

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