Fire, nude performances, and highway pile-ups: How a US tour landed Arthur Brown in jail
Sweat glistened on the naked flesh of Arthur Brown, basking in the heat of the Texan sun. Once a grammar school boy from North Yorkshire, Brown now stood in full, naked glory before the world as a psychedelic god. Admittedly, though, it is unlikely that the motorists on the Houston highway who witnessed this bizarre sight on the balcony of a chain hotel by the road recognised Brown as anything other than a crazed hippie with a penchant for exhibitionism. In many ways, Arthur Brown was both.
Emerging from the vibrant music scene of England’s capital back in 1967, at the peak of the psychedelic age, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown were a group that certainly lived up to their name. Although they never achieved the same kind of enduring success as some of their contemporaries, the 1968 single ‘Fire’ was enough to carry them through to the pinnacle of Britain’s psychedelic exploration.
With Brown bellowing “I am the god of hellfire” during the introduction of the song, audiences had never encountered anything like ‘Fire’ before, and they had certainly never witnessed anybody quite like Arthur Brown himself.
If you were to walk past Brown in the street, you probably wouldn’t notice him, for he has spent much of his performing life hidden behind flamboyant outfits, elaborate face paint and, crucially, a flaming headdress. In keeping with the themes of ‘Fire’, the performer’s signature look involved a leather skull cap which he had modified to set alight, something which captivated audiences, although the producers of Top of the Pops wasn’t overly pleased with the unplanned getup when Brown performed the song on the show in 1968.
Inevitably, this wild psychedelic approach eventually took the Whitby-born performer across the Atlantic. On the band’s first tour of the United States, supporting the likes of Frank Zappa, The Doors, and the MC5, tensions within the group had boiled over, leading to the departure of drummer Drachen Theaker. Their second visit to the States was equally as tumultuous, but for entirely different reasons.
“Before the first American tour, I’d never even touched a joint,” Brown told Classic Rock in 2004. “On the second tour, I took acid, and that changed everything. I had a completely different realisation of what was going on.” If Brown was able to think up the bizarre nature of ‘Fire’ without the influence of LSD, just imagine what he could do with that mind-expanding drug in his system. As it turns out, the people of Houston, Texas, didn’t have to imagine.
Shortly after checking into the Houston Holiday Inn during the tour, Brown walked straight into a swimming pool, fully clothed and carrying his luggage. Quickly, he asked to be transferred to a higher room, where, without any dry clothes, the songwriter chose to discard clothing altogether.
Emerging onto the hotel balcony, overlooking the highway, a naked Arthur Brown treated motorists to a full performance, complete with a light show, smoke, and, of course, his flaming helmet. “There was pandemonium out on the highway,” he recalled decades later.
Seemingly, a naked and on-fire man giving a psychedelic performance on a hotel balcony is enough to cause traffic chaos in Texas. “There were pile-ups; it was completely blocked. There were probably a thousand people watching, and the police were trying to get through on their bikes,” Brown remembered.
This bizarre LSD-fueled saga ended with Brown and his group becoming targets for local law enforcement in Texas. “We got put in jail,” he shared. “Which in the US is not very pleasant.”
It speaks to Brown’s extensive career in music that he can compare the quality of jails in different nations; there are even a few myths that Brown was banned from performing in the US altogether after this tour. In actuality, Brown spent much of his life in Texas, relocating to the Lone Star State during the 1980s. Thankfully for road users, though, his residence in the state did not overlook any highways.
