In mid-March, back in England the quintet returned to Lansdowne Studios to complete work on their fourth album. It was a real pleasure to work with the pair of them. Lee was a fantastic drummer, and Gary would come up with these great bass lines that never got in the way of the melody of the song but always seemed to enhance it. “Having those two powerhouses behind us provided a wonderful foundation for the band. “Now we finally had a real steam engine of a rhythm section,” Box says, admiringly. The pair’s obvious chemistry, and superior musical ability, immediately elevated the whole band to a new level. New Zealander Thain had come from the Keef Hartley Band, and clicked instantly with Heep’s other new addition, drummer Lee Kerslake, who had joined just three months previously. While Bronze Records readied The Wizard for an international release, Heep bedded in Mark Clarke’s replacement Gary Thain with a five-night stand at the Whiskey A Go Go club in Los Angeles in February ’72. That’s the note you hear at the beginning of the song.”
“We went into the kitchen, recorded the kettle whistle two or three times and got it re-tuned to a high C. “We were making a cup of tea, and had the studio door open, and as we were listening back to the intro of the song we heard the whistle, and thought: ‘Hang on!” Mick Box recalls. Before the session ended, The Wizard’s semiacoustic intro was beefed up with the addition of an unusual instrument – the studio kettle. Ahead of their second visit to the US, Heep were rushed into Lansdowne Studios in Holland Park, where they tracked the song (and single B-side Why) in a matter of hours. Gerry Bron, too, heard potential in Hensley’s whimsical power ballad. I think we all knew it was something special."
He couldn’t find a middle eight, so Mark Clarke wrote that, and the whole song sounded so good to everyone. “It was the first time I’d heard anyone play guitar with a drop-D tuning. “I remember Ken playing The Wizard on an acoustic guitar in the back of our van,” says Box. Mark felt that he just could not keep up with it, that he was going to have a full-on nervous breakdown if he stuck around any longer.”Īlthough Clarke’s time in the band was short, the ex-Colosseum bassist did make one lasting and significant contribution to Uriah Heep, writing a striking, harmonised middle eight for a new Ken Hensley composition titled The Wizard, based on a fantastical recurring dream he’d had every night for a week. “Mark jumped ship because he couldn’t deal with the stresses of the touring we were doing, which were excessive, I have to say,” Box says. On January 31, upon completing the final date of the Deep Purple tour, bassist Mark Clarke quit the band, having joined only four months previously. But such a lifestyle wasn’t for everyone.
Uriah heep demons and wizards full#
“You’d tell the bird you were in Uriah Heep, and next minute the hotel was full of women,” Box recalled cheerfully. Their gregarious guitarist, meanwhile, was taking advantage of his group’s burgeoning reputation by thumbing through local phone directories and placing calls to random young ladies, inviting them along to gigs and parties. When the group returned to the US for the second time, in January 1972, they were booked to open for Deep Purple, their noisy neighbours from Hanwell Community Centre.
Uriah heep demons and wizards cracked#
Believe me, lots of champagne was cracked open on that first night.”
The American audience loved us from the first minute onwards. “We all felt that this is where we should be. “There was never a feeling of being overawed by it all,” Box insisted to Heep biographer Dave Ling. “When we got there, and saw all the limos and groupies, it was mind-boggling for us,” Hensley said later. For the Londoners it was a first glimpse of the infinite possibilities of rock stardom. In between the two releases, on March 26, ’71 Uriah Heep played their first show in the US, supporting Three Dog Night, in front of 16,000 people at the State Fairground’s Coliseum in Indianapolis, Indiana. Their unfairly maligned Very ’Eavy, Very ’Umble album, mixing folk, blues, jazz and hard rock, was followed by two studio albums in 1971: the progressive rock-inclined Salisbury – on which multi-talented keyboard player Ken Hensley began to eclipse Box and frontman David Byron as the band’s main songwriter – and Look At Yourself, the first release on Gerry Bron’s new record label Bronze Records. By their own admission, on their first three albums the young Uriah Heep were “just thrashing about trying to find a direction”.
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