Ric Lee of Ten Years After on Today’s Debut of ‘A Sting in the Tale (Deluxe Edition)’
By: Frank Mastropolo
Tags: 1960s, Music, UK, Woodstock, Rock

Ric Lee of Ten Years After on Today’s Debut of ‘A Sting in the Tale (Deluxe Edition)’

Ten Years After fans will be thrilled at today’s release of the Deluxe Edition of A Sting in the Tale. The venerable blues rock band has added four live tracks to their well-received 2017 studio album: “Land Of The Vandals,” “Last Night of the Bottle,” “Silverspoon Lady” and “I’d Love To Change the World,” their biggest US hit.

The core of the original band — singer-guitarist Alvin Lee, drummer Ric Lee (no relation), keyboardist Chick Churchill and bassist Leo Lyons — formed in the UK in the mid-1960s as the Jaybirds. By 1967 they’d adopted the name Ten Years After.

Ten Years After burst onto the scene at 1969’s Woodstock Festival. The ensuing Woodstock documentary and soundtrack album highlighted the band’s electrifying performance of “I’m Going Home.” Ten Years After never focused on producing hit singles but songs like “I’d Love to Change the World,” “Love Like a Man” and “I’m Going Home” remain staples of classic rock radio.

Ten Years After (l-r): Colin Hodgkinson, Ric Lee, Chick Churchill, Marcus Bonfanti

The band broke up in 1974 after the release of its Positive Vibrations LP. Alvin Lee, who died in 2013, pursued a solo career but never enjoyed the success he’d had with the band. After a period of brief reunions and other ventures, Ten Years After reformed. Original members Ric Lee and Chick Churchill were joined by guitarist-vocalist Marcus Bonfanti and bassist Colin Hodgkinson. A Sting in the Tale features this hard-rocking lineup.

There are limited edition bundles available here that include the CD along with a t-shirt and tote bag emblazoned with the Ten Years After logo and an autographed photo of the group.

The pandemic has slowed but hardly stopped the band. In November 2020 the band took part in Let Me Help, Inc.’s livestream concert to benefit victims of COVID-19. Produced by New York philanthropist John “SoHo Johnny” Pasquale, the concert also featured Sir Patrick Stewart, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, Julian Lennon, John Lodge, and many other stars.

Ric Lee published his autobiography, From Headstocks to Woodstock: A Drummer’s Tale, in January 2021. Ten years in the making, the book is packed with little-known stories of the band’s rough-and-tumble beginnings in Mansfield; performances at famous venues like Fillmore East and West; meeting Muhammad Ali, The Who, Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis; and how they almost missed their career-changing chance to perform at Woodstock. The book can be ordered on Lee’s website.

We spoke recently with Lee from his home in the Midlands region of England.

“Suranne Suranne” by Ten Years After

Let’s talk about some of the tracks on the new album. Some are about real people. Who is “Suranne Suranne”?

Ric Lee: That’s from my stalking period [laughs]. Seriously, there was a series called Scott & Bailey on British TV, which was a kind of an English version of one in America, Cagney & Lacey. There are two female cops and one of them was played by an actress called Suranne Jones. For some reason I fell in love with her. She’s a brilliant actress. I met her and had a photograph taken with her. I wrote to her later inviting her out to dinner but she didn’t come back to me.

Who is “Two Lost Souls” about?

Ric Lee: Oh crikey, that’s another one started by me. I wasn’t divorced but I was separated. When I’m not on the road, I do a bit of drum teaching at schools and colleges. I walked into one of them where I’d known this young lady for several years, a very attractive lady, flaming red hair, and I said, “How are you doing? You don’t look well.” She said, “If you’ve been through what I’ve been through. . . I’m getting divorced.” I said, “Well, that’s strange, it’s happening to me. Do you want to go out for a drink sometime and we can cry in each other’s drinks?” She said, “Yeah, that would be great.”

We started a little relationship but it didn’t actually go anywhere. Shame, as we got on famously.

“Land of the Vandals” by Ten Years After

What inspired “Land of the Vandals”?

Ric Lee: That basically was Colin and Marcus. I think it was a reflection on what’s happening in town centers in certain parts of England. There’s a negative effect from kids hanging around and becoming vandals and creating problems for the rest of humanity.

How did you choose the new live tracks in the deluxe edition?

Ric Lee: Deko Entertainment said, we need to put some bonuses on this. Can we get four live tracks? And we’d like “I’d Love to Change the World,” which was a big hit. Luckily we’d done an album subsequent to A Sting in the Tale, it’s called Naturally Live. They took the live tracks from that.

Last November I talked to a good friend of mine in New York, “SoHo Johnny” Pasquale. He has a couple of foundations, one of which is called Let Me Help. And he wanted to do a fundraiser concert for COVID sufferers. They were putting together a virtual streaming concert.

They wanted a video of “I’d Love to Change the World.” And I said I don’t think we’ve got one with the current lineup. Marcus and I searched around and found one but the sound wasn’t very good. So Marcus did a great job of dubbing the sound from the live album we used for the additional tracks for A Sting of the Tale.

We sent it over and we closed the show with it. Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon were on it, Sir Patrick Stewart, John Lodge of the Moody Blues; it was a good lineup and they had a huge number of views from around the world.

Let’s talk about your autobiography. It’s packed with good stories. You’ve said Ten Years After was an underground band and didn’t concentrate on singles. Why did you make that choice?

Ric Lee: Alvin was never a big fan of singles or AM radio, or as we had it here, pop radio. Consequently he was never into writing that. If you take “Love Like a Man” as an example, which did become a single, the original version done in the studio was seven minutes long. Decca wanted to put out a single in the UK so they insisted on editing it. They edited it down to three minutes. They cut out the guitar solo, which is the largest portion of the song in the seven-minute version. The guitar solo on the edited single version is one note. It was really silly.

Alvin must have been thrilled about that.

Ric Lee: What he did, which was very smart, he said, right, if you’re gonna do that, we want to give the fans value for their money. You have to put the full version on the B-side. They said, well, we can’t get it on there. So he said, you can if you put it at 33 RPM. So the A-side was put out at 45 and the B-side at 33!

It created problems in jukeboxes because jukeboxes play everything at 45. That’s an example of why we didn’t tend to put singles out.

What went into the recent decision to record shorter tracks?

Ric Lee: With this album, A Sting in the Tale, we wanted to make a radio-friendly album, which is why the songs are all that much shorter. The longest one is “Up in Smoke,” which is six minutes long. Everything else is less than that.

You’ve said you regretted not pushing back when Alvin wanted to write the original songs alone.

Ric Lee: Yes. We suggested that we all write together and Alvin said, No. I can’t sing other people’s songs. That was a bit hard to believe because virtually all the songs on the first album, Ten Years After, were covers. A majority of them were on the second album as well. So the thing about not being able to sing other people’s songs didn’t really hold water. And I think in all honesty we were too soft and we should maybe have dug our heels in and said, “We’re helping with these arrangements. It’s the way we play them that are making them Ten Years After material.”

At worst, we could have had a small percentage between us as arrangers. And I think that would have been a fair reward for everybody in that instance.

A Sting in the Tale was the first time Chick and I have been involved in a collaborative way, making an album. And it was a great joy, it really worked well. I actually said to Marcus, what are we going to do about the writing splits? Because quite often the thing that causes problems with bands is the splits. Marcus said I don’t see the problem, we’re all going to be involved in this.

You were friends with John Entwistle of The Who, who had a similar experience.

Ric Lee: We were talking together somewhere and he said, “Yeah, [Pete] Townshend gets all the writing, and he does fantastic demos, but at the end of the day, the final product ain’t the same as the demo. It’s how we play ’em that makes it sound like The ‘Oo.” I thought, hello, kindred spirits here, John.

You also talked with John after Keith Moon died.

Ric Lee: He said they were thinking of firing Keith because he was getting very unreliable, wasn’t turning up when he was supposed to for rehearsals, for recordings. So they had a word with him, they said listen, you’d better get your act together otherwise we’re going to have to start thinking about somebody else.

So the next rehearsal, Keith was there first, the drum kit was all set up, he’s ready to go, smiling as he always did, and they said, God, well done Keith. He said, yeah, yeah, I thought I’d get here early and set everything up. And they said, that’s fine but today’s Tuesday and the first rehearsal was yesterday!

I liked Keith, I got on well with him. I always said it was not a good idea to get too close to Keith because you could get killed. Not by him but by something stupid he might do. As a person, I loved him, I thought he was a great character.

“I’m Going Home” (live at Woodstock) by Ten Years After

You almost didn’t play Woodstock. What happened?

Ric Lee: The problem was, Frank Barcelona was our, we used to call him Super Agent, in America and he kept phoning Chris Wright, our manager, saying listen, there’s this festival being put together in upstate New York. He said it’s going to be big, they’re already expecting about 50,000 people, which is what the original estimates were.

Chris said, so what are they offering? Frank told him. Chris said, we’re doing better than that in an auditorium. In an auditorium we can do 3,000 people on our own and we can do 5,000 if we’re with somebody like Frank Zappa or with Blood, Sweat & Tears. And the money’s better. So what do we want to do that for?

So Frank said, I think it’s going to be pretty big, 50,000 is a lot of people. The weeks went by and the press got on it more and more, people were showing up and more and more acts were getting signed. Frank picks up the phone with the final call and he says, Chris, you’ve gotta do this because Jefferson Airplane just signed, Janis Joplin signed, The Who are doing it, and today I heard that Hendrix is signing. So yeah, you’d be crazy not to do this. And thank God we did.

By the mid-1970s, Alvin decided to go solo and the band broke up. What happened?

Ric Lee: Effectively I quit in ’75 because Alvin said you’re going on wages, I’m the star of the show. And I said, you are the star of the show, there’s no two ways about it, I’m not arguing with you on that. But in fairness, if that’s what you wanted to do, you should have done it eight years ago. We’ve played through the rough with the smooth and this may never have happened, we may never have gotten to this. So I think it’s unfair that you now turn around and say right, you guys are now getting paid wages and I get the lion’s share. He’d already got all the writing on the albums anyway.

So I said no, I’m not prepared to do that. He said, well, you can’t do that. I said, I can do that. And that’s what I’m gonna do. If that’s the story, then I’m out. And I did. I said I’ll take my chances.

The band did reunite a few times in the 1980s. How did that happen?

Ric Lee: I don’t really know. I don’t know whether it was money with Alvin or it was trying to be back at the forefront again. Sadly, he didn’t do as much as a solo artist as he probably could have done although I expected he would do.

At one of the rehearsals when we did get back together and we played a couple of tracks he said, this is incredible. This sounds just like Ten Years After. And I said, that’s ’cause it is. I always thought that the band, and to a degree a lot of bands, is the sum of the parts, not just one individual. And I think that was definitely the case with Ten Years After.

You end the book with the performance at Woodstock. Did you consider ending the book with the band’s breakup?

Ric Lee: Originally I was going to write from my date of birth to the age that I was whenever I finished it. I was going to do more or less my whole life. And then I realized if I wasn’t careful, the years from Woodstock through to 1975 could sound like sour grapes ’cause it was the gradual disintegration of the band.

So I have started writing that and I’ve gotten a great help, there’s a book called Alvin Lee and Ten Years After: Visual History, which is put together by a guy who sadly died now, he was one of our most loyal fans, called Herb Staehr. That was a chronological history basically from the beginnings of the Jaybirds with Alvin and Leo right through Sept 20, 1999. We terminated at the House of Blues in Hollywood. Just after that we did a gig in Madrid and Alvin and Leo had an almighty row and that was basically the end of it.

I’d stupidly said to somebody I’d probably be working on the second one. And so they’re now asking me, what is it like and when is it going to be ready. It took me 10 years to do this one. I’ve got two rough chapters and I said I’m hoping I’ll be around long enough to finish it.

What’s coming up for Ten Years After?

Ric Lee: We can’t really tour until the vaccine is completely sorted. It’s going very, very well over here. Both our American and European agents are of the opinion that we can’t think about anything until 2022. Which is a bit of a blow because we’ve got the album coming out in America.

One of the ideas that we had was to maybe link with a younger jam band, which would pull a new audience for them and also for us.

We’ve got the Woodstock album coming out in June, July on Chrysalis. I believe it’s going to be red vinyl in America. That’s the actual six or seven tracks we did at Woodstock, which I don’t think have been out before.

What songs are on that set?

Ric Lee: “Spoonful” is the first track. “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” And there are two false starts, which have been left in on purpose for the collectors. We had to keep tuning up the guitars because of the dampness in the atmosphere. And then the actual full version of “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” And then I was surprised that this was there but “The Hobbit” is on it, my drum solo. And then “I Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes” and “I’m Going Home.”

I approved it a couple of months back and it sounded really good.

“I’d Love to Change the World” by Ten Years After

October this year is the 50th anniversary of A Space in Time, which of course was the first studio recording of “I’d Love to Change the World.” I thought A Space in Time was a highlight of Alvin’s songwriting. I thought he was really coming on as a writer at that point.

We’re all doing individual video interviews that Deko is going to put out to promote the album. We all talk about how we made the album with different views on how it was made. I’ve got another one to do, which is to explain the difference between recording in the 1960s and recording now.

Marcus took the guitar off “Land of the Vandals” and did it as a video explaining and playing the chords. And then we’re inviting would-be guitarists to play on the video, film themselves with the backing track, so they get to play with me, Chick and Colin. And then we’ll have a competition to judge who’s the best. And then they get a one-to-one Zoom chat with us.

If the guitar thing works, then we could do the same, we can take the drums off or we can take the bass off or whatever and people could play along on different instruments.

We’re gonna do a Zoom town hall press conference and the first hundred people who buy the album bundle get to be the guests there, to interview us and ask us questions.

As soon as we can get to Germany, ’cause all our equipment lives there, and also in the town where our sound man lives, there’s a very good venue; we want to get in there and make a video of the whole set, all the songs. That way we’ve got individual videos of each song as well if we want them. And we can use them for streaming or whatever. Which we could do as a kind of a re-promotion in Europe as well.

So yeah, we’ve got plans. That’s when we can get the hell outta here, of course!