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Which One's Red?

Red Lenny: The Forgotten Band, part one

Pink Floyd casts a pretty wide shadow over rock music. And that's just Dave after a night at the buffet! But I kid.

No, in terms of influence on rock music, Pink Floyd ranks behind only the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Aerosmith, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Kinks, the Beatles (solo), Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac, Black Sabbath, ABBA, Nirvana, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, AC/DC, KISS, the Sex Pistols, Steely Dan, the other Nirvana, Van Morrison, the Beatles (again), NWA, Marvin Gaye, the Beatles (one more time, just for good measure), Elvis Costello, METALLICA RULZ! WOO!, the Band, the Band (after the one who wrote all the songs quit), the Baehnd, Band (the), the Banned, Ban Roll-On, da Band (P. Diddy's), the String Quartet Band Tribute to The Band, Prince, the Spice Girls, Michael Jackson (pre-freak years), the Velvet Underground, and several hundred others, at least according to the editors of Rolling Stone magazine, many of whom regard Britney Spears to be a pretty good singer, even when they're sober. So take that how you will. Still, anyone who even mentions the term "concept album" is unlikely to get five paces without being compared to Pink Floyd. Or maybe the Who. And quite possibly the Beatles. But you see my point.

Very few bands felt the effects of this shadow quite as much as Red Lenny, the rock quartet based just down the road from Floyd's native Cambridge, in Forkhamshireton-on-Trentcamyorkentonshirebridgewickwhydontyoujustgopissuparopenham. Aside from the obvious difficulty in anyone trying to give directions to local clubs where Red Lenny might be playing, the band and its members suffered from a string of impossibly bad luck and timing in regard to their more famous counterparts.

The first problem was their choice of a name for the group. Whereas Syd Barrett combined the names of two obscure bluesmen for his band's designation, giving them instant credibility when asked to reveal the origin of their name, Red Lenny's Ralph "Sy" Barnett plucked his group's name from two comedians, Red Skelton and Lenny Bruce. And thus, band members were doomed to hour upon hour of answering the questions "Yes, but why comedians?" (as well as "Which one's Red?").

The group officially took form in late 1965 when Barnett teamed up with friends Vic Anson and Dickie Knight, as well as non-friend Sven "Codger" Walters, with occasional input from Juliette Gale, who really got around, if you know what I mean [1]. The four Lennys met in art school, where all were students, except for Walters, who used to beat them up for their lunch money before classes. Realizing they shared a passion for music--specifically, the kind listened to while getting baked--the teenagers vowed to start a band. Unfortunately, this idea was forgotten when Knight floated the idea of ordering a pizza. Said pizza was delivered by one Codger Walters, who resurrected the idea when he mistakenly asked Knight if they were "those four fruity music students" he was always beating up. Then and there, Red Lenny was born.

[1] Gale owned a van, and therefore traveled often.

One thing lacking early on, however, was musical skill. (Even earlier on, the group was also lacking in musical instruments, which they overcame only through sheer force of will. And burglary.) But this intrepid band of bandsmen seemed destined to overcome all obstacles, provided that they weren't, you know, really difficult obstacles. Anson moved from bass to drums after just two practices, while Knight moved from keyboards to glockenspiel, then to guitar, before taking on the drums as well. Walters, who, with his established predisposition toward beating things, started on the drums, and in fact stayed on them, leading to the unusual combination of three drummers and Barnett, who opted for the triangle.

This configuration survived for their first official gig, at Barry Lowenstein's bar mitzvah on January 22, 1966, where Red Lenny took the stage and played the only number in their repertoire, "Wipeout." Their version lasted five hours, which was two hours longer than the event. The all-percussion lineup was dropped immediately afterward, owing to Mr. and Mrs. Lowenstein's refusal to pay the band after they failed to play any Paul Anka. Subsequently, they fell into a more traditional lineup, with Barnett taking guitar, Knight back on keys, Anson remaining on drums, and Walters taking the bass, which he returned after Barnett threatened to tell his mum. Gale contributed the occasional vocal, but mostly just played Knight's flute when no one was looking, if you know what I mean [2]. The group played mostly out-of-tune R&B covers, with the occasional off-key Beatles tune thrown in for good measure.

[2] She was very shy.

Several uneventful gigs followed, during which the Lennys perfected their "psychedelic" style, which was really just a polite way of saying "playing without sufficient practice or talent." Songs stretched on and on, for hours on end, not because they were attempting to experiment with the form, but because none of them could remember how the tunes ended.

The group suffered a bad break when, en route to a gig at London's famed Marquee Club, they stopped for gas and were unavoidably delayed. It seems that the station attendant asked about the band name, which Codger had painted on the van, along with numerous rude epithets and slurs, forcing Barnett to spend the next two hours trying to explain it to him, using elaborate charts and diagrams to illustrate his points. To make up for the absent group, club managers phoned Pink Floyd instead and asked them to play. As it happens, two young managers were in the audience that night, Peter Jenner and Andrew King, and they signed the Floyd on the spot. It marked the first time Pink Floyd snatched victory from Red Lenny, but it would not be the last.

The group did eventually find management, but they were now one step behind. Their first single, "Allen Payne" (backed with "We Should Get Really, Really Fucking High") told the heartwarming but generally disinteresting story of a nice man who returns stolen clothing. The song failed to chart, partially because it was a bland and boring tune, but also due to the shockingly, er, blunt B-side that many record stores refused to stock and which radio stations refused to play, which was fine, because the record company refused to press it.


As any junkie can tell you, drugs and science don't mix.

Astonishingly, the band had even less luck with their second single, "Look at Lucy Leap" (b/w "Tin Man"). The single actually charted, which would seem like good luck for most bands, but for Red Lenny, this only meant that people were starting to attend their gigs at numbers slightly higher than random chance. Not only that, but they were expecting them to perform in-tune and on-key, which was difficult, particularly for Knight, who had developed a musical style dependent on getting really wasted and rolling his head back and forth on the keys. However, a good portion of the audience was so high that they would have listened to a deranged mental patient whacking cats with hammers.

Modest success had considerable impact on the group. Gale stopped playing Knight's flute altogether, and disassociated herself from Red Lenny, instead concentrating on her other hobby [3]. Walters, frustrated by the crowds, took to punching random old ladies in his spare time. Worst of all, bandleader Barnett was quickly becoming an acid freak: acetic, phosphoric, sulfuric, hydrochloric--whatever he could get his hands on. He stopped coming to rehearsals and started spending all of his money at back-alley laboratory supply shops. Anson later recalled: "Sometimes, after gigs, fans would just hand him test tubes of butyl carbitol. He was a mess. He would stay up until all hours of the night doing his experiments and come to the gigs totally knackered."

[3] Having sex with as many men as possible.

The band pressed on, but again found themselves stymied by their better-known compatriots. Following Pink Floyd's bizarre appearance on American Bandstand, Dick Clark puts a temporary ban on all "hippie bastards" (as Clark put it), resulting in Red Lenny's booking getting cancelled. The group found solace in the recording studio, where they were making their first LP, Dick Clark Deserves a Bullet in His Head, which yielded the Barnett-penned single "Bludgeoning Dick Clark with a Mallet" (b/w "My Car has a Dick Clark-Shaped Dent in It"). The entire affair was decried by many (particularly in America) as being entirely too violent, an opinion that Walters openly agreed with and indeed relished, but record buyers failed to embrace. The album has been retroactively recognized as an important influence on gangsta rap.

Barnett's acid problem was escalating. He sold his guitar to buy a new Bunsen burner, and he very nearly traded Anson's valuable collection of antique bicycles to a band of gypsies who promised to score him a gas chromatograph in return. Barnett was also taking lots of drugs, and as any junkie can tell you, drugs and science don't mix. (Unless you're Stephen Hawking. That guy can party down. Hoo boy. There was this one time, backstage at a Yale lecture on quantum decay physics, Hawking and Keith Richards had a "heroin-off," and Keith... well, let's just say Keith lost, meaning he had to give the keynote speech on lepton phenomenology from Hawking's notes, while Steve went off to get a hummer... but I digress.) Barnett, however, was no Hawking, and was ruining guitars faster than you can say "third-degree chemical burn." His voice was shot, and this Dick Clark fixation just wasn't going away, either. (His sole contribution to the next album would be the disjointed "Beating Dick Clark with a Different Mallet Blues".) Red Lenny was at a crisis point: Dare they abandon the man who wrote nearly all their material, or keep a "performer" who was too absorbed in his research to perform?

Well, duh...

To be continued. Maybe. Or not. What's it to you?

Patrick Keller is a freelance writer for Phosphoric Acid Weekly. Despite his claims, he knows little about quantum decay physics, and very rarely parties with Stephen Hawking or the Rolling Stones. Although Jerry Hall did offer to play his flute once.


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