As the band’s drummer he co-created some of history’s greatest albums – but then the machines took over. As he publishes his memoir he explains how their computer world crashed
When a teenage Karl Bartos told his parents that he wanted to dedicate his life to music, his father was so furious that he kicked his son’s acoustic guitar to pieces.
After hearing the Beatles at 12, something had awakened in him – “I wanted to feel like how they sounded,” he says – and so he persisted past that smashed guitar. Tripping on LSD listening to Hendrix was another portal. “The music spoke to me in all the world’s languages at once,” he recalls in his memoir. “I understood its message down to the very last frequency. Never before had the essence of music been as clear.”
