According to that article I was a communist atheist who'd screw anything in skirts and was anyway bisexual (I'd admitted I'd slept with a guy once, just to see what it was like; it was nothing special and I kept having to think of women to keep a hard-on, and I made the point that I'd avoided sodomy from either end, so to speak and, while the whole experience wasn't totally unpleasant, I'd no intention of repeating it; and, damn it, I'd said it was off the record!). I was also trying to corrupt and pervert the minds of all decent, patriotic, mom— and dad-loving American children with my vicious, drug, Marx, anti-Christ and semen-sodden song lyrics.
Oh, did we have some albums burned south of the MasonDixon line.
Suddenly it was noticed that the instrumental on the first side of Liquid Ice was called 'Route 666'. The number of the beast! Oh God, oh Jesus, lock up your nuns! This was a joke, of course; I'd originally called the song '25/68', naming it according to the opus numbering system I'd used when the only places my songs existed were in an old school exercise jotter, a low-fidelity, high-hiss C-60 cassette, and between my ears. '25/68' sounded too much like '25 or 6 to 4', by Chicago, so I renamed it after about ten seconds' thought, in the studio just after we'd recorded it.
Meant nothing. But suddenly it was a Sign that I was a Devil Worshipper. All the other lyrics were put under the microscope as well then; professors of colleges in the South where the level of learning was such they thought evolution was a blasphemy started writing learned articles proving that everything I wrote was directed at destroying the American Family, Flag and Way of Life.
Holy shit; I should have been so lucky!
Ah, what the hell; we didn't lose out. We must have sold another three or four extra albums for everyone thrown onto flaming pyres, just because of all the publicity. And having maniacal fundamentalist Christians turn up shrieking and waving banners where we were playing eventually became part of the show; they were as much part of the entourage as the groupies.
But there were death threats. I started to get paranoid, worrying about car bombs, people breaking into my hotel room... worst of all — because you could always protect yourself from that sort of threat, with enough security, sufficient money — I worried about somebody with a rifle in the auditorium. It might have been crazy, because of course there were always police and security men outside and inside the venues, but maybe not that crazy. If somebody was determined, they could get in, they could smuggle a rifle in beforehand and then buy a ticket; they could even get a job in the place, long before we arrived — tours are set up long enough in advance — and take a gun and a telescopic sight in any time they wanted. A spotlight operator would be the ideal person; those were the people that scared me most, I don't know why... the man with the Super Trooper and the Winchester M/70 Magnum...
I know it's crazy, but I started wearing a bullet-proof vest on stage. It made me feel like a looney, but it was the only thing that let me play; the worry about being out there, naked and exposed under the lights, picked out with the others, a tall, broad, stationary target, was starting to affect my playing. Sticky fingers; almost stage fright, a couple of times.
The vest was embarrassing — I kept it a secret from the others for months — but it calmed me; it worked. I could face the unseen mob and play them their music, and afterwards, as the police shoved people back from our limo and we crawled past clutching hands and anguished faces mouthing God knows what, secure within our thick green glass windows and armoured steel, on our way to secure hotel suites and whole floors patrolled by large men with bulging armpits, I could look into the night-time craziness of the people who wanted to tear us apart because they loved us and the people who wanted to tear us apart because they hated us, and feel less crazy: a sensible madman in a world where only paranoia prepared you for reality.
The Great Contra-Flow Smoke Curtain, the idea conceived that day in the English countryside outside Winchester, when Inez and I made a cloud and I danced in the ashes, the total bastard of an idea it took several months and a hundred grand to get just right, was produced by using lots of dry ice, fans, heaters, smoke machines, and lights, both laser and ordinary.
It consisted of fan-driven dry-ice machines, positioned above the front of the stage, and smoke machines — also fitted with fans, plus powerful electric heating elements — which were set at the edge of the stage beneath, directly under the line of ice machines, but staggered, so that each two-metre wide nozzle pointed at the space between the equally large ice-smoke outlets above, where giant intakes sucked the warm smoke away to outside vents; similar intakes between the smoke machines sucked the dry-ice fumes away as well, to avoid filling the whole auditorium with freezing fog.
There were lights positioned inside both smoke and ice machines, shining straight up and straight down respectively, as well as batteries of lasers and spots and strobes set up to illuminate the Curtain itself from various angles and directions. The Curtain was created by the opposing, interspersed streams of vapour, alternately boiling up and fuming down.
We had twenty-four of those units, though the number we actually used on any given night varied according to the size and shape of the venue's stage. It looked impressive as hell once it was all working, but getting the streams set just right, so that the currents didn't get all mixed up, and making sure the intakes didn't suck the ice fumes or smoke from the machines right alongside them, proved to be extremely tricky; we needed a Curtain check before the gig that was longer than the lighting and sound checks combined; and the Curtain had to be fine-tuned for each different auditorium. We were never entirely sure it was going to work.
We couldn't just leave it at that, of course, even with all the fabulous lights; we set up a massive battery of fans and what I guess were de-tuned concussion grenades or claymore mines or something, so that, instead of just switching the Curtain off, we could blast a gigantic hole out through it, revealing the band in one vast, backlit explosion of smoke and sound and light. And we had big booms and moving platforms built too, and wire harnesses set up, so that we could just suddenly appear through the Curtain, more or less anywhere.
We played a few gigs in Britain, without the Curtain, getting ourselves together, trading freshness for tightness, I guess, then we were ready to head across the pond for the American part of a world tour that was intended to take us through South America, Japan, Australia, and even — firsts for us — India and Nigeria before heading back through Europe (East and West) and Scandinavia, for a final set of British dates.
We'd just brought out Nifedge, the vastly complicated double album we'd been working on since '78. Symphonic, lyricless, frighteningly expensive (not to mention twice as long as it had been supposed to be), we'd recorded it in '78 and '79, and spent a year trying to mix the bastard. Recording and releasing And So The Spell Is Ended (not intended to be a prophetic title, but apt as it turned out) in late '79, was quick and simple by comparison, even though it was still the most musically complicated and studio-time guzzling album we'd recorded, apart from Nifedge.
Even the songs on Ended were starting to sound too contrived to me; we'd taken twice as long to record single songs for that album as we had to lay down the whole of Liquid Ice. We were getting to be obsessive, losing sight of the music in the beguiling mathematical filigree of production and mixing possibilities. Wes, ever the perfectionist, was the instigator of all this, but we were all affected. We were becoming... I don't know; choked; decadent, even.