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By Root 1042 0

were inside getting stoned, who knows. The point was, they seemed frozen, unable to move. John Lennon came out of the Speakeasy with Lulu on his arm and, as he did so, his beautiful hand-painted Rolls-Royce came around the corner. It pulled up outside the club, and as he got into it, he gave the police the V-sign, and it was as if there was a force field all around them. They just stood there paralyzed, and we all just took off. I stayed high for three more days. I couldn’t sleep and was seeing the most extraordinary things. Without Charlotte’s guidance I probably would have gone mad. Most of my vision seemed to be through a glass screen with hieroglyphics and mathematical equations painted on it, and I remember I couldn’t eat meat because it looked just like the animal. For a time I was a bit concerned about whether it was ever going to wear off.

It was at the Speakeasy, several months before, that I had first met one of the great loves of my life, a very beautiful French model, Charlotte Martin. I was smitten with her from the very first moment I set eyes on her. She was very beautiful in an austere way, classically French, with long legs and an incredible figure, but it was her eyes that got me. They were slightly Asian with a downward slant, and a little bit sad. We started dating right away and soon moved in together into a flat in Regents Park belonging to Stigwood’s partner, David Shaw, who was the financial brains behind the organization.

Charlotte was an incredible girl, more interested in films, art, and literature than in modeling, and we had a great time together. One night down at “the Speak,” we were sitting with some friends at a table when we were joined by an Australian friend of hers, an artist named Martin Sharp. When he heard I was a musician, he told me he had written a poem that he thought would make good lyrics for a song. As it happened, I had in my mind at that moment an idea inspired by a favorite song of mine by the Lovin’ Spoonful called “Summer in the City,” so I asked him to show me the words. He wrote them down on a napkin and gave them to me. They began…

You thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever,

But you rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun.

And the colors of the sea blind your eyes with trembling mermaids,

And you touch the distant beaches with tales of brave Ulysses.

These became the lyrics of the song “Tales of Brave Ulysses.” It was the start of a long friendship and a very fruitful collaboration.

The recording of “Tales of Brave Ulysses” and the other songs that made up the album Disraeli Gears took place in New York at the beginning of May. This was quite a different experience from our previous trip. We stayed at the Drake Hotel on Fifty-sixth Street, and Ahmet had two of his top people in the studio to record us: hot young producer Felix Pappalardi, and one of his most experienced engineers, Tom Dowd. We recorded the whole album in the space of a week. I was immediately impressed by the way Felix took what we had and polished it into something saleable.

On the very first night, he took home with him the tape we had previously recorded of “Lawdy Mama,” which was a standard twelve-bar blues, and came back the next day having transformed it into a kind of McCartneyesque pop song, complete with new lyrics and the title “Strange Brew.” I didn’t particularly like the song, but I respected the fact that he had created a pop song without completely destroying the original groove. In the end, he won my approval, by cleverly allowing me to include in it an Albert King–style guitar solo.

When we started recording, Tommy Dowd, who was to become a close friend and be very instrumental in my future projects, was thoroughly confused by the way we approached it. We were used to making albums as if they were live and did not expect to play songs over and over again, or to have to play instruments separately on different tracks. He wasn’t quite prepared for the noise levels, either, and I got word that we could be heard several blocks away. As for Ahmet,