"Day On The Green" 
article AND INTERVIEW by  UK writer Kate Phillips for Sounds magazine
 

 
 
 

 

 Oakland, CA . 
Oh magical  California, where it all began. Ninety degrees in the shade, and sixty thousand in the audience --- and nobody's fighting, nobody's freaking; nobody's drunk or even undressing. 
 The massed California girls and boys, dirty blond hair and round pretty faces, are making themselves comfortable, as if for a picnic, with blankets and cushions and iced drinks in portable iceboxes. Tiny white jets whizz overhead towards San Francisco airport. 
  Right of the stage, a man quietly dies of heat stroke-- the Medical Corps dispose of him in seconds. And up in the stands a pregnant girl goes into labour: it's a fine boy comes the announcement. 
  "Day On The Green" they call it, and all the bands playing here today are British. 
Robin Trower. A Big Deal in the U.S.,  is top of the bill. The trailer they've given him as dressing room looks like an old big grey caravan from the outside, except that the names of the band, in pokerwork on wooden boards, are fixed to the door, looking as if they should proclaim it "Four Winds" or "Dunromin". But inside, instead of bunkbeds and camping stoves there is wood panalling settes, and actually a tree - a stiff little mulberry bush in a pot. And every available surface, down to the lampshade is plastered with pastel coloured badges that captioned "Think Trower"

​

 
Given to me by good friend John Rewind

 

 

 

 All right: "Trower". Now what ? 
  But right now, at this very moment, it's Peter Frampton onstage; slender in white jacket, white trousers, gold curls and "Jumpin' Jack Flash".  He seems to be pleasing the punters no end. Everything pleases them, but nothing qite jolts them out of thier sunshine haze. Sunshine and guitar heros, dope and cocacola, it's every festival you ever read about. 
 Backstage the same calm prevails. Not for nothing is Bill Graham called The Most Efficient Promotor In The World. The security's very strict, but once you've made it to the inner sanctum of press and performers, you're enveloped in the atmosphere of a high class garden party: raost chicken, ice cream and parasols. 
 As the afternoon wears on the Trower party dive nervously in and out of the van. There's Bill Lordan, the American drummer, going in to change his amazing blue silk t-shirt for something even more glamorous to wear onstage.  There's Bill Lordan's extremely beautiful chick in a Grecian gown.  There's Jimmy Dewar, bass and vocals, heading the Scottish faction, with Jimmy Dewar's extrememly beautiful wife, and Frankie Miller, a friend who's lost his voice, and Frankie Miller's manager, telling tales of Alex Harveys youth. Alex Harvey's not here. 
  And there's Robin Trower's brother, who's also chief roadie, completely in control and yet somehow out of place, too English : he ought to be running a garage - a high class garage mind you - back home in Southend. And Robin Trower's manager, Wilf Wright, also totally efficient, but perhaps a little annoyed that Frampton's encores are going to make Robin's set late. 
 But have you ever seen Peter do an encore? He does run back to the microphone so charmingly. 
 And somewhere , presumably, is Robin Trower. But nobody sees him untill music time. 
  The stage set, Trower assures me later, was all Bill Grahams idea, a tribute to the old country: all the amps are hidden by crenellated cardboard battlements, with Union Jack pennents flying above. For Trower and Trower alone, they use the drawbridge; it's let down jerkily at one side of the stage while heralds blow a trumpet fanfare, guards in busbies range themselves on either side, and the musicians stumble out rather sheepishly to greet the crowd.

Their reception, however is the standard "Tulmultuous" model reserved for headliners. 
I don't want to be grudging, but it's my guess that whoever topped the bill in this show would stir up the same oddly pre-stressed rapture, as long as they were halfway competent. 
  Trower , of course , is much better than that : an actual virtuoso, one has to admit it. A very pretty player, soaring and Wurlitzing about with a lot of genuine conviction. Just the man, infact, to convince the kids that they are watching a hero at work.

 

 

To me, though, his playing, despite the accumulation of style and skill, is fundamentally soft-centred, It's too pretty, almost too accomplished. And for the old vexed question of you know who he's supposed to sound like.......  well, his record company specifically requested a journalist who hasn't ever seen Trower before, presumably hoping the the Hendrix chestnut would be left alone this time. But I'm going to be boring and say it anyway : Trower does sound as if he's spent his informative years trying to copy the "mans" style note for note, fuzz for fuzz. And that being so, one can't help remembering two major things about Hendrix - he was a daemon, and he had a sense of humour, and neither of those things are easy to imitate. 
 Stil and all, this band is just the job to climax the ritual scene: Lordan tossing his long blonde locks like a dream of hipness gone by, Dewar's voice strong, but lost in the music, like vintage Cream days, and Trower in stripped djellaba and Robin Hood boots with a great line in reptilian charm - head poking back and forwards like a tortoise, one shimmering green leg waving up and down on the effects pedal, crooked grin of delight permanantly spread across the features. Picturesque adn I don't mean maybe. 
  But for the Trower party bill-toppers with a reputation to consolidate, nothing but the best : trees in the trailer, black limousines to ferry us across the Bay Bridge, and rooms at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, Nob Hill, where the decor is all dark red brocade and everything you order arrives in an ice bucket, even hot tea. 
 It's a strange life. You can get every luxury in the world on room service, and yet it's curiously two- dimensional, literal minded existence. You've got all the physical comforts, and if you want any others - well ther's always the Gideon Bible. 
 It's not much like home, 
 Trower is sitting alone in his suite on the fifteenth floor. He's covered his dashing blue and white shirt with a knitted pull over- in gets cold in San francisco at night. Except for the corner where the television stands, the whole of the huge "gracious" room is in darkness. 
 Trower is watching an old movie on the box. It's called "The Snakepit". He would, he makes it clear, prefer to go on watching it ; but gives way politely when opposed. 
  Robin Trower doesn't like journalists. Perfectly understandable, this, and often traceable, in rock musicians, to some recently aquired trauma. But it tends to make his conversation a bit terse. His favorite answer to any searching (or pseudo- searching) question is a defensive " I've never really thought about it, to be honest. " Thus : 
Why have you never really cracked it in England? 
 " Ive never really thought about it, to be honest." 
 Requested to think about it now, he explains that the bands music"hasn't a British note in it" and, American taste being so far ahead of the Brits, he's never expected audiences to be "aware" enough, en masse, to appreciate it. 
 "They like pop music in Britain, " sez Trower. "That's what they like and we don't play pop music. That's all there is to it." 
 How come El Zepp sell out in Britain then? 
 "Well isn't that pop music?" 
 Not to be outdone, one advances the opinion, in a roundabout sort of way, that British taste, guitar -hero wise, is about two years ahead of American, and that British audiences aren't excited by sub-Hendrix because they've heard it all before. 
 "That's the way you see it." Trower shrugs. And he adds further fuel to this promising fire by informing me that (a) "no-one in England or America comes anywhere near what we're doing" and that (b) he "hasn't heard anything come out of Britin that was any good at all." 
 Phew. 
 Surprisingly enough, though, his manner isn't overly offensive, though he's edgily aware of the impression he is making.  He's so certain of the statements he makes about his own quality, and so certain at the same time that journalists are out to number him, that he can't relax for a minute. 
 Because England, proffesionally speaking, is to Trower, " just a little dot on a map," and yet his wife and all his family still live there, he seems just a little like a man in exile; and his well-known habit of spending the wicked hours of night alone in his hotel room adds colour to that idea. It's a very low-key portrait of the guitar hero. He refuses to admit any pretensions to "image" at all, in fact. 
 I'd been warned in advance of this meeting that Trower would probably tell me that he knew more about music than I had hot dinners. What he actually says is - 
 "Iv'e probably spent more time standing on a stage than you've had hot dinners. It's a very natural thing to me, to be onstage." He's really a businessman's musician, wary of talking about himself. Not feeling assured, despite my calling, that he should be forced to, I don't press the the subjects of money ("I don't like discussing it"), his family ("I wouldn't even tell my press agent about them"), or his age ("I think it's a daft question"). 
 Mind you , I am sure he is past his official age,30. He talks about his rock and rolling days in Southend with the nostalgia of one recallign the distant past. 
 "I had me first guitar when I was fourteen. The first real band I got together was called The Paramounts. We was a really good rock and roll band; but not as good as the Rockefellers. They came from Ronford, Brentwood, Gidea Park, round there, and they were fantastic. The're still going you know, and they make these kids look daft- " 
 You don't, you can't mean.....  "Dr. Feelgood, yeah; I heard them on the radio. We was playing that stuff God knows how long ago, and ten times better than them as well. 
 Oh man, that's sacrilidge, man. 
 But so strong is Trower's self confidence, even the threatened fury of the killers of Canvey I can't abash him. So, to change the subject, I ask him how he sees the role of vocals in his songs, when his guitar is so continually dominant. 
 " Maybe you've just cracked why I'm so big, " he replies thoughtfully. "My guitarplaying is very dominant, I know that. But Jimmy's a great singer, and he lives with me very well. 
 " And he has to be bloody good to do that. There aren't many other singers could do ti. Most of them have no taste whatsoever. And no sense of rythem, tone, phrasing, melody -- you name it." 
 Trower freely admits that he likes to be in control of his band all of the time. "I like to be the whole thing. And the others like to get me off. That's what they get off on. The're pro musicians- they're not up there to pose and fop about." 
 But maybe they'd like a bit more of the limelight sometimes? 
 " It'd be very hard for anyone else to dominate a group I'm in." 
 Now just in case you think this guys numbered himself rotten as a primo megalomaniac during the preceding conversation, it seems only fair to close with his opinions on being interviewed. He puts up a pretty good case. 
 " Most interviews are so much load for nothing." he says. 
 "For a start, why should a musician say anything worth putting in print? It's not his language. " 
 "And I've never, except for Guitar magazine, been interviewed by another musician. So I've no common ground with critics in general; they're not even what you call students, let alone someone on the same level as yourself, that you could communicate with. 
 "Usually they're just pop fans, you know." 
 as for revealing anything about the non-musical side of a musician - 
 "What's a page? You can't put someone down in a page! You have to knwo somebody a long time before you really know them." 
 " But it makes what people say seem important. Kids read it and they say, ' oh, it's in print, it must be right.' But nobody really knows what they are talking about. I'm guessing, you're guessing.... It should really all just be a laugh." 
 "As long as you don't get the idea thatwhat you're doing has any importance..... " 
"Even if it's great art." 
 He leans over the little black box. 
 "You're not taping all this are you?" 
 Yup. 
 "That's all then."