Terry Reid was fated to be remembered much more for what he didn’t do than anything he did, forever immortalised as a kind of Zelig figure in pop.
He never became a household name but, to musicians and critics, he was a legendary singer – affectionately nicknamed “Super Lungs” – whose influence straddled the Sixties, Seventies and beyond.
I was lucky enough to see him at The Borderline some years later and the affection and reverence in which he was held by an appreciative audience was heart-warming to experience.
He was also not averse to self-referential moments, at one point playing the opening bars of Stairway To Heaven, prompting knowing laughter and enthusiasm, before switching back to one of his own songs.
Back in the late Sixties, Reid had famously turned down an offer to be the lead singer of Jimmy Page’s new group afterThe Yardbirds disbanded – but only because he had already agreed to tour America supporting The Rolling Stones and Cream.
Reid said he would consider the offer if Page agreed to compensate him for his lost earnings – and call Keith Richards to explain why he was letting the Stones down.
When that didn’t happen he recommended a Brummie singer called Robert Plant, whom he had seen when Plant’s band The Holy Joy supported him at one of his own gigs – and told Page to check out a drummer called John Bonham too.
The following year Reid was invited by Ritchie Blackmore to replace Rod Evans as lead singer in his band Deep Purple, but once again turned the job down to pursue his own path.
Who knows what might have happened had he taken one of those offers; for all we know Page’s new band might have sunk like the lead zeppelin after which it was named, and Deep Purple might have continued playing pastoral psychedelia.
Even before those job offers came along Reid had been reasonably well known; as a teenager he joined The Jaywalkers, supporting the Stones in 1966 and playing on a minor hit, The Hand Don’t Fit The Glove, before they disbanded.
Under the management of Mickie Most (in partnership with future Led Zep manager Peter Grant), he made a single called Better By Far and a debut album in 1968, Bang Bang, You’re Terry Reid.
One song he had written when he was 14 then developed a life of its own when it was recorded under slightly different titles by The Hollies as A Man With No Expression, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as Horses Through A Rainstorm, REO Speedwagon as Without Expression (Don’t Be The Man) and, under its original title, Without Expression, by John Mellencamp.
After his US tours with the Stones and Cream, and UK tours supporting Jethro Tull and Fleetwood Mac, the increasingly well-connected Reid performed at the wedding of Mick and Bianca Jagger in Saint-Tropez in 1971 and played the Glastonbury Festival that year.
Stardom surely beckoned as the new decade dawned.
Falling out with Most, who wanted to mould him as a balladeer, he was signed by Ahmet Ertegun to Atlantic Records, with a band of crack musicians that included guitarist David Lindley and drummer Alan White. But Lindley left to join Jackson Browne on tour and White moved on to join Yes.
Reid’s 1973 album River was his masterpiece, its funky fusion of folk, jazz and blues leading to comparisons with Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, but it failed to sell in numbers.
The next one, Seed Of Memory in 1976, was produced by his old pal Graham Nash, whom he had first met when supporting the Stones at the Albert Hall a decade earlier, but in a stroke of rotten luck his label (ABC) folded in the week of its release.
In the Eighties, Reid put his solo career on hold and worked mainly as a session man, recording with Jackson Browne, Don Henley and Bonnie Raitt, before making another solo album, The Driver, in 1991 – his first for 13 years – produced by Trevor Horn.
This song, Dean, (LINK BELOW) is the opening track from the wonderful third album River. Its laid-back blues-funk rhythms remind me of Little Feat.