Gary James' Interview With Ric Lee Of
Ten Years After



In 1968, they auditioned at the famed Marquee Club in London, the club where The Rolling stones once performed. They would go on to play the major festivals of the day, including Woodstock '69, the Isle Of Wight Festival, the Newport Jazz Festival, as well as the Miami, Atlanta and Texas Pop Festivals. Their song, "I'm Going Home" was featured on the "Woodstock" soundtrack album and the film Woodstock. That song really propelled them to superstar fame. They are also known for the song "I'd Love To Change The World" off their Platinum selling album, "A Space In Time". Now they've released "A Sting In The Tale", deluxe edition, through Deko Entertainment. The release comes with four live bonus tracks, including "I'd Love To Change The World". The group we are speaking of is Ten Years After. Drummer Ric Lee spoke with us about the history of the group.

Q - Ric, I would imagine this last year has been tough on you. You really miss that performing, don't you?

A - Yeah, but in fact in a strange way I personally have been busier than ever. Last June (2020) I sat down, and normally in the past when Ten Years After has come to America it's usually been a mad rush with no promotion. So I thought what can we do to improve that for the next time? A very good friend of mine who's a d.j. down in Philadelphia, we met in '67, he was the first guy to play our records in '67. He'd seen the band playing in England at The Marquee Club. Anyway, I gave him a copy of "A Sting In The Tale", which was the studio album we had out in Europe. I think it was 2019 when we came over to do the 50th Anniversary of Woodstock. He said, "This album is really fantastic. You need to get it out." I said, "Well, it is out. It's out on Import for shops that want a copy." He said, "Yeah, but nobody knows about it. You've got to let 'em know." I said, "A lot of record companies say they'll do this, do that." He said, "I've got some good friends at Deko Entertainment. Would you like me to try and introduce you?" I said, "Yes, please." Ever since that, we licensed the album to them and added four live tracks. It's called "A Sting In The Tale Deluxe Edition" and we've added "Land Of Vandals", "Silverspoon Lady", I can't remember the other one, and "I'd love To Change The World", which was a Top 40 hit for us in the '70s. So, it's really a nice package. They've done a bundle with it. There's a t-shirt and a tote bag and a signed photograph. They're doing a terrific job on promotion. I'm really pleased we're with Deko. They're doing a fantastic job.

Q - They're doing a fantastic job in getting the group airplay? Is that what you're saying?

A - Well, just generally. I've not stopped doing press and all sorts of promotion, radio, YouTube, podcasts since January, 2021. We're in May (2021) now and I'm still talking to you. (laughs)

Q - Is there a leader in Ten Years After now or is this a democratically run band?

A - It's a lot more democratic than it used to be, even after Alvin had moved on and Leo Lyons and Joe Gooch, which was the 2004 to 2013 period. I do all the administration for the band and I've been doing a lot of the promotion. But when it comes to the musical content, when we did the "Sting In The Tale" album, I said to Marcus Bonfanti, our new lead guitarist and vocalist, and Colin Hodgkinson is the bass player and Chick Churchill of course is my old buddy from Ten Years After, I said to Marcus when I was writing material, "What are we going to do with this? Are the main writers going to take the lion's share of the songs and then we'll put a share aside for the other members of the band for sort of arranging stuff?" He said, "No. Hell man, we're all going to be involved in this in a major way." So, we just split it four ways, which was fantastic. I never expected that because it's always the songwriting that becomes a problem with bands. That decision has proven to be fantastic. We have a very happy, happy relationship. We all put in our quarter share and we get a quarter share out and it works out great.

Q - Smart decision. That's what Led Zeppelin did. That's what Areosmith did. Very few bands do that.

A - There was one thing from that. Chick and I have never been in a collaborative process. we were always sort of pushed to the sidelines. So, this is an absolute joy to do this "A Sting In The Tale" album, because we were just so involved in it. It was fantastic. What happened was, Marcus was the hub for the writing. So, I live in the north of England. He lives in London. So I used to travel down to London for a couple of days and he and I would write stuff and then Colin would go see Marcus and they would write things together. Then Chick would write with Marcus. Then what we did is we got in a rehearsal room and we kind of took it all to pieces and put it together again. We had the verses, the choruses and the basic lyrics. The major changes were when we got into the rehearsal room and we just kept honing it until we were happy with what we wanted. We also wanted to make a radio friendly album because most of the Ten Years After stuff in the past, a lot of the songs have just been too long to get any reasonable airplay. And the longest song, just to give you an example, the longest song on "A Sting In The Tale" is "Up In Smoke", which is six minutes long, whereas you compare that to previous Ten Years After records, "I Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes", the last time I looked at it, it was nineteen minutes long.

Q - Perfect for the FM stations.

A - Well, in the old days. I was going to say when Tom Donahue was at KSAN in San Francisco, I remember going in and doing an interview with him, very early days, 1967. It was the "Undead" album, our second album, and he said, "Hey, this is great! I'll tell you what. We'll just talk a little bit and then I'm going to play the whole of side one." That was like nineteen, twenty minutes worth of music. I said, "What about your advertising?" He said, "That's okay. I'll do all the ads at the end of the hour. So, we'll play the first side of the album and then we'll talk about it and then I'll play the second side of the album and we can do the ads afterwards." And that's the way it was in those days. Of course later the advertisers took a lot more control. So, things change.

Q - Was it your ambition growing up to become a Rock musician?

A - No. (laughs) I started playing drums because of my older brother Peter. He had a wind-up Gramophone and he was buying Jazz records. These were the old 78s. He had Jazz from the Southern cities like New Orleans and those places. Then eventually we moved on to more Pop stuff. I remember buying Guy Mitchell's "She Wears Red Feathers In The Hula Hula Skirt", which was a number one record in America and the U.K. Then we had Rosemary Clooney, some of her hits, "Green Door" was one. We used to play those records and sit and tap along to them with knitting needles, my Mum's knitting needles. Then we'd be tapping along on a Sunday lunchtime. There was a program on the radio called The Billy Cotton Band Show, which was a pretty raucous affair. My father hated the guy, but we insisted on having it on. We used to sit at the table and tap along with our knives and forks. Then when the food arrived he'd say, "Now pack that up 'cause I'm turning it off. I can't stand the guy anyway." (laughs) So, we had to use the knives to eat. So that's how I got involved in drumming. Actually, the first teacher I had, a guy called Harold Jennings, my Mum knew him 'cause he played for the local operatic society when they did musicals. He played drums. We went to see him and asked if he would give me lessons and the first thing he said was, "Go away for a year and learn piano and come back and I'll teach you drums." Harold could play a kit, but he was really more of a Classical player. He could play timpani and xylophone and vibraphone, snare drum in the Classical fashion. I remember one of the first things he did was he took me along; I didn't actually go and learn piano, which was my one big regret, my only regret in life to be honest, and there was a Classical rehearsal orchestra in Mansfield where I was brought up and he took me along to that and that's where I first learned to read some music and I remember the first thing we did was he said, "You can play timpani in this and I'll play the snare drum." He tuned the timps for me. We had two. It was a piece of Beethoven. I can't remember the title, but it's very, very slow. There's a tempo of sort of One, Two, Three, Four. Incredibly slow. He said, "You see that line there?" I said, "Yeah." He said, That's telling us we don't play in that bit." Over the top of it, it said 1-6-8. I said, "What's that?" He said, "That's 168 bars rest and then we come in." I said, "You're kidding!" So he said, "But it's okay. Look at the two bars toward the end of that." He said, "They've got little notes above the stave." I said, "Oh, yeah." He said, "That's the flute. What we do is we listen for that flute bar. The conductor will give us a cue as well with the baton and then we play." And that's how I got started to play. It was a hell of an education, actually.

Q - So, you can actually read music is what you're telling me.

A - Oh, for sure.

Q - That's a big plus for you. You could have been a studio musician.

A - I did do some of that later, but in fact I never got given parts. I used to write my own chord charts when the guys were touting, in other words running through the songs. We used to do three hour sessions. This was in London in Tin Pan Alley they called it, on Denmark Street. There was a studio underneath Southern Music. We used to do demos in there. Leo used to play bass on those sessions. I was hired to do drums. But I was in a booth on my own, which was sealed off from the rest of the guys. So I had no idea where we were going to be in the song. So I decided I would write my own parts. I used to write chord charts where the guys were and somebody would say, "C, F and G and then we do a 7th." So I wrote a load of bars so I could find out how long the verse was and where we went into the chorus so I could work it out. Normally we'd do a fill 'round the kit to go from the verse to the chorus. So you'd give it a lift. That kind of thing. Not in every song, but in a lot of them. And so that's how I got by because as I say, I was isolated. The only way I could communicate with the guys was by speaking into the mics around the kit, also listening on headphones. They only just fit in the booth and then they shut the door. There was no air also. You always prayed it was a quick take, otherwise you'd be gasping for breath. The only companion I had in that room was a big, blown up photograph of what we called in those days a dolly bird, which was a girl called Adrienne Posta. She was a young film actress at the time. She was photographed and had a mini-skirt and the boots on, which was all the fashion at the time. So, that's what you had for a company in the drum booth.

Q - How far is Mansfield from London and Liverpool, England?

A - Mansfield to Liverpool is about two and a half hours I guess. So you're virtually going due west from Mansfield to Liverpool. London is about 130, 140 miles. In the old days when we were first going down to London, the M-1 motorway, which you would call a freeway, only went from London to Northhampton, which would probably be fifty to sixty miles long. From the rest of the distance is what we would call "A" roads, which were not very wide. You couldn't get up much speed in those days. And also the van that we had was very old, like a camper van but not with any sleeping equipment in it. The fastest speed, I think it was diesel, about thirty-five miles an hour. So when we first started traveling to London we got a job in a theatre show, which is how we first got to London, Alvin, Leo and myself. That used to take us about seven hours each way, which was absolute torture really 'cause we used to go on a Friday night, which is the worst time to be doing it. So, we were rehearing in London all week for the show and we would go back on the weekends to do gigs that we had left over from before we went to do the show. Then we would go back on Mondays and we got later and later leaving actually. We eventually got to London maybe two o'clock in the afternoon, maybe three sometimes. So, we only did a couple of hours rehearsal on a Monday.

Q - The whole band arrived in London in 1966. Is that accurate?

A - That's correct.

Q - You arrived at a time when the eyes of the world were on Great Britain.

A - That's correct. Absolutely.

Q - When you'd walk down the streets of London, would you see the guys in other bands that were getting all the attention like The Beatles or The Stones?

A - We never saw The Beatles or The Stones. I just wanted to point out that Chick Churchill had been asked to join us by Alvin before we left for London, but he wasn't at the audition for that show. The producer of the show only wanted a three piece. So, Chick had to hang on and he then came and joined us later. We stayed in a hotel called the Madison Hotel, which is on Sussex Gardens, which is not far from Paddington Station. We shared a room, the three of us, Alvin, Leo and me. It was 24 shillings a week, which would be about three dollars a week. It was cheap, but it was good. It was clean. So it was okay. There were quite a few bands that stayed there. Amen Corner was one band that stayed there. I remember meeting them. They had a couple of Top Ten hits. Then The Mindbenders. They had been with a guy called Wayne Fontana. The Mindbenders was another three piece and they had a big hit with "A Groovy Kind Of Love", which Phil Collins had a big hit later with as well. They'd split from Wayne and had a number one with "A Groovy Kind Of Love". They were at the hotel and I remember seeing them loading their van up and I went and congratulated them. Funny enough, one of my best friends, and I saw him today, is a guy called Paul Burgess, who became the drummer with 10cc. He an I met in 1974 in Detroit, Michigan when we played a concert at Cobo Hall. We were headlining. They were the support band. Paul and I have stayed friends ever since. It's been a good run. We didn't meet The Stones or any of those guys, but we did meet in a sense the peripherals.

Q - You auditioned for a gig at The Marquee Club. That is where The Rolling Stones once performed on a regular basis. Who did you audition for at The Marquee Club?

A - The Marquee Club was owned by a guy called Harold Pendleton. He and his wife had a manager called John G. and there was an assistant manager called Jack Berry. Now, Jack had known Alvin and Leo. He used to do promotions in Norfolk and he did Saturday night dances. The band that I joined first of all, that Alvin and Leo were in, was called The Jaybirds. Jack used to hire The Jaybirds for Saturday night gigs. So, he knew them. He also had a fish and chip shop that all the bands got their fish and chips from, so they had something to eat on their way back home. Jack had moved to London and Leo had been in touch with him and said could he do anything for us. Jack said, "I could probably get you an audition at The Marquee Club," which he did. He was very, very helpful actually because I think we got there at 5 o'clock one day. We auditioned before the club opened at 7, and we set up and Jack said, "Right. John G. will be along in a minute to audition you. John is a big Jazz fan. Do you do anything jazzy?" Well, in those days we played a track called "Woodchopper's Ball", which is a fast and furious version of the one that Woody Herman did with his band. He said, "Well, play anything jazzy." Anyway, we played "Woodchopper's Ball" and when we finished John G.'s face was beaming. Alvin said, "Do you want us to play anything else?" He said, "Nope. A band that can play like that and play my kind of music, I'll give you a date. Give me a call tomorrow and we'll fix up a date for you." He gave us the interval spot on a Sunday evening which was a half hour set with a band called The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. We were first called The Blues Yard, just for that one gig. We went down a storm. We got a standing ovation. The club in those days, the people sat down. It very much had its feet in the Jazz era. But it was gradually moving, as you rightly said. The Rolling Stones were hired by Alexis Korner to be his support band. When The Stones started to draw more people than Alexis, he fired them. (laughs) But he was supportive for many, many years after that and helped them through many things. Colin Hodgkinson knows a lot about that 'cause he worked with Alex when he first started playing bass. So, Chris Wright, who came to that gig, became our manager. He became half of Chrysalis Records. Chris said, "I like the band. I'd like to manage you but you need a new name. Blues Yard doesn't mean anything. It's no good." So Leo got a copy of the Radio Times, which is equivalent to your TV Guide, and he got a pin and went down with his eyes shut on the page with all the television programs on it and just kept stopping every now and again. Wherever the pin stopped, he wrote down whatever it landed on. I think there were more than two, but the two I remember were Life Without Mother and Ten Years After. Those two were sent up to Manchester to Chris' office and the office decided Ten Years After was the name, which I think turned out to be very fortuitous.

Q - Did you eventually become the House Band at the Marquee Club?

A - No. They didn't have a House Band. We did several support spots with other bands who were up and coming and they'd done their apprenticeship, as it were, so they were then the headliners. When you played as a support band you got five Pounds between the four of you, or however many were in the band. The headline band took a percentage of the door with The Marquee and they actually had to pay out the five Pounds to you as well. Five Pounds I guess is about eight dollars. So, it wasn't very much. But eventually we started to get a following there. Blues was becoming very popular in London at the time. John Mayall was coming up through The Flamingo Club. Georgie Fame And The Blue Flames were also at The Flamingo. Then the Marquee was having people like Jeff Beck, who'd recently left The Yardbirds. I think John Mayall moved over to play The Marquee as well when he had Eric Clapton on guitar. So, those bands were coming up. We were doing supports as I say. Then eventually they set up a Friday night Blues night and we were the resident band on that occasion. We used to play every two weeks, or a fortnight as we say in England. So, once a fortnight we played there. Then The Marquee ran what was then the Windsor Blues And Jazz Festival, which became The Redding Festival many years later. I think it was the first major festival in London, music festival. We were invited to play that because of our following at the club. We played there on a Sunday afternoon or it might've been Saturday. We played there and again we got a standing ovation. Went down a storm there. People like Jeff Beck were on it. Eric Burdon had just left The Animals. He was there. Arthur Brown was there. He had a number one record with "Fire". All those kind of acts were on there. I think The Small Faces were on. People like that. Mike Vernon, who was a staff producer at Decca Records at the time, saw us and wanted us to get signed to Decca, which he organized. We signed with Decca's subsidiary label, Deram, which was kind of their Pop label. The first band on there was The Move. Anyway, we signed with them. Ironically a couple of months earlier or maybe seven less than that, you could do auditions for record companies in those days. We'd done an audition for Decca and failed. (laughs) And also, we auditioned for the BBC, and they failed us as well.

Q - Decca turned down The Beatles, so you're in good company.

A - Well, that's right. But then we got signed through Mike Vernon and Mike was producing John Mayall at the time. He did the famous album where Eric Clapton is sitting on the front, reading a comic. I think Mike produced three or four of John Mayall's albums. And he produced three of our albums as well. He produced "Ten Years After", which was the first one, the studio album "Undead", which was the live album, and then "Stonedhenge". The engineer on those was a guy called Gus Dudgeon. Gus went on to produce Elton John and Chris Rea. So we're in good company.

Q - You guys played all the big festivals of the day, including Woodstock (1969).

A - Yeah.

Q - What did you think of Woodstock?

A - Oh, I loved it. It was very, very good. It was very disorganized. I think one of the best things Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld (Woodstock promoters) did was to declare it a free festival when the kids started breaking down the fences because when you compare it to the following year when we played The Isle Of Wight Festival, that became a very nasty affair when the kids tried to make it a free festival. They set dogs on them and hit them with night sticks. It was a nasty, nasty thing. Luckily that all happened after we left. Woodstock was a festival of peace, love and music. It was fantastic. 300,000 people, or however many people it was, living together certainly for three days, possible longer than that, and some of 'em didn't have food. They had helicopters dropping food parcels. When the kids caught them and the person next to them didn't have any food, they were sharing it together, people who they probably just met. They weren't life long friends. So it gave us a blueprint of how we actually could live in this world if we chose to. I think money and politics get in the way of that. But I won't go there. (laughs) That's another story.

Q - No one could have seen how big Rock 'n' Roll and Rock would become. In 1958 or 1959, Buddy Holly remarked he didn't think Rock 'n' Roll would last. Would he have been surprised!

A - Well, that's right. Mick Jagger was asked "How long you think you'll last?", and he said, "I think we'll be lucky if we make three years." And we all felt that way. Here I am, 75 years old and I'm still doing it. I'm very happy about (that). I'm very lucky. To go back to Woodstock, we flew in by helicopter. You couldn't get within six miles of the place by car. Obviously it was an amazing sight to see all of those people down below. When I flew in there was a media onboard and he said, "Whatever you do, don't eat anything that isn't cooked. Don't drink anything that's not from a sealed can. We have hepatitis breaking out and if we're not careful we could have an epidemic on our hands." As you probably know, my autobiography is called From Headstocks To Woodstock, and if I ever do write a sequel I was going to call it From Woodstock To Whaley Bridge, where I live now. But I sat and watched Joe Cocker's set in the beautiful sunshine and then we were due to come on, but Country Joe And The Fish went on. They played with us at Fillmore East. We supported them and Joe vowed to never follow us. He said he couldn't follow us. We drained the audience. So he said he would always go on before us in the future. And then Johnny Winter snuck on as well. And then the storm came up and made the whole stage live and it took about two hours to sort that out. We went on eventually about 8:30 in the evening, I've been told. I thought it was later than that. The guitars wouldn't stay in tune because of the atmospherics, the condensation and everything. We had to start "Good Morning Little School Girl" three times, maybe four times. In fact, next year (2022) there is going to be a Woodstock release, a Ten Years After Woodstock album with all the tracks that we actually played there. We've left the three false starts on there just as sort of a collector's album really. It sounds good. It was going to come out this year (2021), but Chrysalis has a delay on it and so it's going out next year because October is the 50th Anniversary of the "Space In Time" album with "I'd Love To Change The World" on it, and they want to do something special with that. So, if they had released the Woodstock album that would have crashed into the "Space In Time", so they didn't want to do that. So, it's been busy. We've been doing all these amazing things with Deko Entertainment and Chrysalis is doing a lot with the back catalog. So there's a lot going on with Ten Years After. It looks like it's lightening up in Europe. We're due to play a festival on August 27th, 2021 in Denmark. We got all the flight details through. So it looks like the promoter is really gong to go ahead with that. But that will depend on the quarantine regulations and the travel restrictions the U.K. has in place at the moment and whatever the other countries may have because if we have to do quarantine for ten or fifteen days after we come back in a hotel, that will cost us a lot of money and it won't be worth doing the show unfortunately. So, we're at the mercy of the gods at the moment. Then we're supposed to do some tour dates with Manfred Mann's Earth Band in October / November (2022). We're old mates. We get on really well together.

Q - Your appearance, Ten Years After's appearance really brought a lot of attention to the group, didn't it?

A - A lot of people said to me, "Did you know when you played Woodstock that that was going to make the band big?". I said, "No. Not really." As far as we were concerned, yes, it was a big gig, but it was one gig on a tour. In fact, we weren't going to do it. Chris Wright kept turning it down. Finally, Frank Barsalona, our agent said, "You're crazy not to do this. Jefferson Airplane have just signed up for it. Janis Joplin is doing it, and I just heard that Hendrix is going to sign. So you'll be crazy not to do this." In fact, we did do it.

Q - You had one smart agent in Frank Barsalona.

A - Oh, he was terrific. Frank's forte was packaging groups together. I'll give you an example. We weren't really happening in Los Angeles for quite awhile. We were always bigger on the East Coast than the West Coast for an unknown reason. San Francisco was okay 'cause we started out there playing Bill Graham's Fillmore West. But when we went to play the Los Angeles Forum; Frank wanted to get us in there. Grand Funk Railroad were a big act at the time and they were very popular in that area. What he persuaded their manager to do was to let us go on as headliners and they supported us. So, they were drawing the people but we looked like we were the headliners, which was a very smart move on Frank's part. Back to Woodstock; The first time I really got wind of what was happening or was about to happen with the band was when we went to the premier of the film in Los Angeles, the premier of Woodstock. The audience was made up of our contemporaries obviously, people who'd been on the show and a lot of business people who in a sense I'd call hard nosed business people. You had to do something to impress those people. When "I'm Going Home" finished, the whole cinema stood up and gave us a standing ovation. I just didn't believe that. I thought, wow! There is something going on here. We seemed to have done something right. After that we played Madison Square Garden, Albert Hall in London, although we had played Albert Hall already, Budokan in Tokyo. It was an amazing leap onto the world stage basically.

Q - In the beginning the group was called Ten Years After. At some point it became Alvin Lee And Ten Years After. Did that cause any friction in the band? Did anyone in the group resent Alvin's name being put up front?

A - Yes. It was a bit of a play by the management. They said, "Oh, this is a guitar hero band. Alvin is the star of the show." I always said I know he's the star of the show. I don't have a problem with that. It's obvious. But I said it's the sum of the parts rather than any individual part that makes Ten Years After what it is. And I still believe that today. The first thing that I recall that upset the band was the cover of the album, "Sssh", which was basically Alvin's face. I know it won prizes for the photography. It was quite a way ahead photograph of the time. Very psychedelic. But we thought that's putting all the focus on Alvin. And we were put on the back cover of the album. A similar thing happened with "Rockin' Roll Music To The World" later on. So yeah, there was friction and tension building because of those sorts of things. At one point I requested that I was allowed to do some interviews, that Alvin didn't get to do all the interviews 'cause I had things I wanted to say to people. So, they did let me do some interviews.

Q - Had Led Zeppelin decided to carry on after John Bonham's death, your name came up as a replacement for John Bonham. Is that true?

A - (laughs) On this promotion trail that I've been doing since January (2021) that's come up several times. I have to be honest, I was never aware of that. Nobody ever approached me. I would've been very flattered to be asked, but I have to say I don't think I would've been the right drummer for the gig. Bonzo had something different than me. He was very good. He had the swing. I have the swing. I didn't really have the heaviness that he had.

Q - He really pounded those drums.

A - Yeah. Well, he used to work on a building site. He used to carry a hod, which you carry a lot of bricks over your shoulder. It's a wooden thing. So he was built for it. When Ten Years After was folding up, I was asked by Howard Stein, a promoter in New York who's a very good friend of mine, "You know Alvin's going solo." I said, "I know all about it." He said, "What are you going to do?" I said, "I'll be fine. I'll get by. Don't worry about it. I'll get involved in my music publishing company," which I did subsequently, "And do a few things. I'll probably play with some other people. Whatever. I'll take each day as it comes." He said, "No, no. You ought to be playing. I want you to talk to Bruce Payne. Bruce Payne is the manager of Deep Purple, and he's still managing Ritchie Blackmore, and Rithchie Blackmore is forming a band and I think you should go play with Ritchie. You should be in a band with Ritchie." So I said, "I'm not the right man for the job. I'm not a heavy drummer. That's what he'll be looking for." He said, "I'll talk to Bruce." Anyway, Bruce rings me and he said, "We think you'll be very good for Ritchie's band." I said, "I gotta tell you, I think the opposite." He said, "I want you to go out to California and spend a few days with Ritchie and jam with him. We'll pay the airfares. What are you doing tomorrow?" I said, "I'm flying back to England." My first wife is on tour with me. But in those days you could get a ticket you could change. Not like these days. We used to do tours where we had a three month air ticket, and you could vary it. You can't do that nowadays. He said, "There'll be two tickets at the hotel desk tomorrow morning for you to go to California. So cancel your U.K. flights." I said, "I don't think it's right, but alright. I'll do it." Next morning I went to the desk and said, "I think you have a letter for me or something." He said, "No, I can't see anything sir." At that moment the phone rang and he picked up the phone and said, "Oh, it's for you Mr. Lee." I said, "Hello." "Hi, it's Bruce here. Actually I've talked to Ritchie and Ritchie has listened to your records and he agrees. He doesn't think you're the right man for the band." "Well, I did try to tell you." So he said, "Well, he needs a drummer. Can you recommend anybody?" I said, "Yeah. The man you need is Cozy Powell." So he said, "Where do I get Cozy Powell?" I said, "Well, he just had a hit record in England called 'Dance With The Devil' and Mickie Most produced it. If you get in touch with Mickie Most, they'll tell you how to get in touch with Cozy." And the next thing I knew, Cozy was in the band. I didn't see Cozy for a long time. I'd met Cozy when he was drumming with Jeff Beck when we were in Denmark together in the early days. And we did a load of gigs together. We did a lot of gigs with Jeff Beck actually when he had The Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart and Ron Wood and Mickey Waller on drums when we first came to America. A lot of those tours were supporting the Beck Group. I didn't see Cozy for a long time after he joined Rainbow. There was a pub near my flat in London which I used as a office. Quite a lot of music people used to go in the pub. One day Cozy was there and I went over and said hello. He said. "Ric, how are you? I haven't seen you in ages. What's happening?" We chatted for a bit and I said, "By the way, I don't know if you know this," and then I told him the story of Rainbow. He said, "You're kidding me! Really?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Good God. I'll get you a pint." Finally I was able to tell him what happened. Sadly, I saw him a long time later in Denmark again when he'd put a band together about Peter Green. Peter Green hadn't been too well and started playing again. Cozy was in the band. He and Neil Murray were basically running the band for Peter. I said, "When are you getting back to England? Where are you living? Why don't come over?" He was living just down the M4 where I was living. About an hour maybe. I said, "Why don't we get together?" He said, "Oh, great. That'll be fantastic. I'll tell you what. I've got to finish off an album with Brian May. I should finish off this week, and I'll give you a shout." So, we arranged a date and the week before he was due to come, he was killed, driving his car on the M1 in a horrendous rainstorm. He was a bit of a naughty boy 'cause he was on the phone and he didn't have a hands-free phone. So, I'm very, very sad about that.

Q - I must tell you, I interviewed Alvin in the mid-1980s I believe it was.

A - How was he?

Q - He was very nice.

A - I'm glad it went well. We had our ups and downs, but I always held him in great respect as a guitarist and musician. That's really the main reason I joined the band when they asked me to join The Jaybirds way back in '65. I just had a feeling that he was going to make it at some point because he was just so good. He got the label of "Captain Speedfingers", but he was so much more than that. He could play Jazz, Country, Blues, Rock. You name it, he could do it. Chris Wright suggested when we split up the first time in '75, and Leo and I had said it to Alvin, "Why don't we get together once a year and do a major tour of America and Europe? And then we can do our own solo material or whatever the hell we like for the rest of the year, and you've got the umbrella of Ten Years After to keep it going," which is what The Who did. But he didn't want to know about that. He was convinced he wanted to break away and do something totally different. Sadly, he never really cracked it like that, in my opinion.

Q - I can honestly say you've interacted with a wide array of musicians in your career.

A - I helped Black Sabbath get their first gig at The Marquee. I was very friendly with Sabbath. Tony Iommi and I had a partnership in a booking agency in Birmingham at one time.

Q - And of course Cortland, New York's contribution to Black Sabbath and Rainbow was Ronnie James Dio.

A - Ronnie was a lovely man. I met him in Holland at a festival. We got on famously. He was a very, very nice man. He was excellent on the show. I loved it. ZZ Top was on the show as well. They were our support band for two tours of America because they were on London Records, same as we were. Just a final thing. Can you guess who was our support band at the Philadelphia Spectrum, after Woodstock?

Q - I have no idea.

A - They were an up and coming band at the time.

Q - Grand Funk.

A - No.

Q - Who would it have been?

A - You'll never guess in a million years, the Eagles. (laughs) Then they supported us, I think it's called Hialeah in Honolulu as well. They were just on their way up. In fact, Glenn Frey came into the dressing room with Timothy B. Schmit and introduced themselves. They were very nice, those two guys. I had a lot of good times with them. I never saw Henley. I don't know where he was. They just said, "We wanted to say hi to you. We're doing a few dates together. It's great if we can hang out." For some odd reason we never got to hang. I don't know why.

Official Website: www.Ten-Years-After.co.uk

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