This will probably be the penulimate post on this topic, which relates exclusively to Jerry Donahue’s notes in the CD insert. We have just come to the sad departure of Dave Mattacks:
“Anyway, with DM’s departure at the end of the tour* and only half a completed album in the can, we now had the difficult job of trying to get another drummer in DM’s league. Well, of course the first person we’d all thought of was Gerry Conway. And since he had been my team mate in Fotheringay [see above], just a few years earlier, everyone felt that I should be the one to try to entice him along. Well, though when I made that phone call, we had an absolutely wonderful chat, the unhappy outcome was that Gerry would decline the offer. He said he was honoured to have been thought of (he’d always been a fan of the band, as I had) and, had his situation been at all different, he would have loved to come on board. You see, shortly after Fotheringay had split up, he’d landed the job with Cat Stevens – at the peak of his success – and the situation was just too comfortable for him to walk away from. We could certainly understand that!
“But now we would have to hold auditions to find a suitable drummer to carry on where DM had left off. We’d seen many in the weeks that followed and narrowed the choices down to three people: Paul Warren (who had been working as our roadie, but was a wonderful drummer as it turned out), Pete York (drummer on all the big hits as co-founder of the Spencer Davis Group) and Bruce Roland (whom we’d known as a member of Joe Cocker’s Grease Band). Well, after much discussion and consideration we finally put it to a vote and…in came Bruce!”
*We know it was more complicated than that, as it was Paul Warren who actually did drum for them on the tour, DM having quit before they set off on it – see all the “Many Ears To Please” posts just above.
Anyway, the last of the notes in this insert next time.
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