More now from Jerry Donahue’s notes in the CD insert, where we begin to get to the tragedy.
“Out in the real world, this was not an especially happy period for us. Though we’d changed managers and actually enlisted someone whom we knew to have our best interests at heart, he had relatively little experience and we were simply not realizing [sic; American] any degree of career advancement. Meanwhile we watched many of our peers rise to great heights. Surprisingly bad decisions continued to be made (hard to believe as it was), and most of us found the whole situation, other than the music, increasingly difficult to endure. The unfortunate result of all this was the departure of some of the band within the course of one year. DM (Dave Mattacks) was the first. Though he’d enjoyed the music and working on those sessions with Glyn, he had decided during the course of the tour that followed, that he wasn’t prepared to devote any more time to a situation that he had come to feel was hopeless. And so he was the first during my tenure to say that regrettably he had come to the conclusion that he must leave. The others of us had not yet arrived at this stage and, so far, had the desire to press on with the rest of the album (the last one for Island Records as things would turn out – as well as for most of us, come to think of it). I’m so glad we did!”
As Sandy Denny said in Oslo: “…we call it the creature cos we’re always falling apart…”.
More next time.
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