Dead air, dead rock stars, and the time I got to grill Cock-Eyed Larry on The Doors

LISTENING to the radio recently I got a laugh from a young lad who sounded like he was aged somewhere around eightish, nineish, ( anyone for tennish?).

I had missed all the detail earlier on but from the question he was asked I now knew where I was – in Temple Street Children’s Hospital and the boy was a former patient.

The bright, shiny presenter enthusiastically asked him, ‘What do you remember about Temple Street?’

Now, there is no greater catastrophe in broadcasting than dead air on the radio. It happens so abruptly that people fall off chairs, old ladies halfway across the street sprint for the other side. Fender benders happen at every street corner and kids eating ice cream cones poke themselves in the forehead.

This kid’s silence was the equal of a six- second radio blackout. I wondered during those six seconds was the boy’s mind hunting for anything that would satisfy the interviewer as he finally answered the question about what he r e membered about Temple Street.

‘Not much,’ was the long-awaited response.

Paul Simon gave the first two verses of Bridge Over Troubled Water to piano player Larry Knechtel and Art Garfunkel.

Simon liked what they’d done so much so that it prompted him to write a third verse.

It was a No.1 in Britain and America and Larry was invited out on tour. Simon confessed that listening every night and watching Garfunkel and Larry bringing the house down with his song irked him and drew this ungracious remark from Simon when he said: ‘It’s not a very generous thing to think, but I resented it.’

IMET Larry for the first time when I saw him playing with The Cock-Eyed Camel, a band of session heads that played together for the joy of it. In Nashville they were known as The Wrecking Crew.

The drummer was a kid called Duane Eddy Jnr ( Dad was a famous recording star and guitar player). My pal Jake was a songwriter and producer.

The band were great and during the chat around a table, more and more information on Larry was slowly emerging.

He played bass on the Elvis’s 1968 Comeback Special and other Elvis shows; he joined Bread and played the great iconic guitar solo on The Guitar Man but best of all he played on The Doors’ first album with Jim Morrison.

That’s the story. A long dead Jim Morrison still draws huge crowds at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris where he is buried but we had a chance here, that day in Nashville, of getting the inside story on Jim Morrison. He was a founder member of the 27 Club, which includes Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin.

But what about a location to do Larry’s interview? My pal Jake pulled me aside. ‘ Larry’s a Civil War freak and he knows all the history about The Battle of Franklin,’ he tipped me off. Larry was delighted and suggested we repair to the graveyard in Franklin. It was steamy and terribly hot, but Larry and myself are ready to rock.

The Battle of Franklin took place on 30 November 1864. It was an unmitigated disaster for the Confederates.

They lost 14 generals and were routed over an intense period of almost a day. It was one of the most decisive battles and possibly the one that turned the Civil War.

Our first stop that day was at Carton House, a magnificent country mansion which was turned into a field hospital during the Civil War.

The amputated limbs were stacked against the gable wall like turf put out to dry and on the floor of the biggest room inside there were mysterious dark circular stains in the wood.

I dared to ask what they were and it turns out that the bibs worn by the surgeons would fill up like a pelican, and the blood would overflow out of them on to the floor in a crescent shape which resisted all attempts at removal.

After Carton House we turned on the radio as soon as we got back into the van and sang along to Glen Campbell until we reached the graveyard in Franklin.

Thousands of small white obelisks, stretching out on a green sward, crushing in their impact and yet so simple in their presentation.

We set up for the interview with Larry in the shadiest corner we could find and the excitement was building inside me.

I had discussed our tactics with the crew at breakfast – we would warm things up and slowly draw him out until we got to the moment where Larry would spill the beans on his friendship with Jim Morrison.

So I started off slowly, kept the pace going nicely, got through the Carpenters, the Mamas and the Papas, and Elvis.

Elvis was the cue. The moment had arrived.

I took a deep breath, lowered my voice by half a tone and said, kind of choking back a tear, ‘Larry, what was Jim Morrison like to work with?’

And the answer was: ‘He wasn’t there the day I played’.