Pete Way was made for the 1970s, when to be a rock musician was as much a chance to live exactly as one wanted, as a means to make music. As Ozzy Osbourne put it, unnervingly: “They call me a madman, but compared to Pete Way I’m outta my league; he’s fucking mental!”
That attitude made Way, who has died aged 69 following a serious accident, something of a hero to a younger generation of musicians, too, the ones who wanted to replicate the excesses of their forefathers. “Nikki Sixx [of Mötley Crüe] told me that I was his hero and how he used to watch me do this and that, and would copy me,” Way wrote in his autobiography, A Fast Ride Out of Here: Confessions of Rock’s Most Dangerous Man. “It was an odd feeling for me, being viewed as a kind of elder statesman and also to see Nikki get up to pretty much all of the things that I had done what seemed almost a lifetime earlier with UFO. I really am talking about as much excess, women, booze and drugs as one can possibly imagine.”
But if it’s easy to simply push Way into the box labelled “Wild Men of Rock” – not least because it would be hard to dispute the proposition that his best musical days were done by the 1980s – it would also be unfair. As the bassist of UFO from 1968, he was a major creative force in the band who, alongside Thin Lizzy and Judas Priest, built the bridges between the the blues-based hard rock of the 1970s and the much sharper lines of the emergent metal scene of the late 70s. Not for nothing were UFO favourites of Steve Harris of Iron Maiden, who still take to the stage to UFO’s Doctor Doctor.
UFO, who had begun as a bluesy, slightly dull space rock band, were transformed when the wunderkind German guitarist Michael Schenker joined in 1973. Very quickly they shifted to a melodic hard rock, and by the late 70s they were a very distinctive group indeed, with Schenker’s guitar lines intertwining with Paul Raymond’s keyboards and Way’s bass playing, which rarely took the least-resistance path of playing endless root notes.
Way also emerged as an important writer for the band: Only You Can Rock Me, one of the great hard rock singles of the late 70s, was pretty much all his work, and he contributed to a bunch of their best songs – Lights Out, Too Hot to Handle, Shoot Shoot, Natural Thing, Mother Mary and their hit single Let It Rain. More than, that, though, he helped reinvent the role of the bass player: not just the bloke who stood still at the back of the stage in front of his amp, but a showman, part of a troika of showmen who fronted the band, along with Schenker and singer Phil Mogg. They made their reputation on the road, especially in America, leading to the live album Strangers in the Night, capturing them at their zenith as an arena rock band. Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers saw them in 1977, opening for AC/DC, and told me: “They were beyond phenomenal. AC/DC was great too, but I’ll go to my grave swearing that UFO took the night.”
Speaking to me last year, Schenker characterised the personalities of the members of UFO (he described himself as “shy and fragile and sensitive”). Mogg, he said, was “the control freak”; drummer Andy Parker was the butt of the jokes, but accepted it because he liked the attention; Way was “the very friendly outgoing person”. He was also, Mogg told me, the practical joker. “He would change the sign on the Holiday Inn to Welcome Andy No Neck Parker and The Puppet Show. He would get the hotel to change it.” On one occasion he stole a hotel manager’s dachshund to take to that night’s show, returning afterwards to find the manager devastated, assuming he’d lost his dog.
Way left UFO in 1982, disgruntled at the poppier direction they followed. He formed Fastway with “Fast” Eddie Clarke who had left Motörhead, but in true Way fashion, left to join Ozzy Osbourne’s band before Fastway had recorded a note. He then formed his own band, Waysted, the name an accurate reflection of his interests (he was not deserted by his admirers: Waysted toured the UK supporting Iron Maiden, and Osbourne joined them onstage to sing Paranoid at their Hammersmith show with Maiden). But Way would never hold the same place in hard rock as he had with UFO, and his career tailed off into the familiar round of band reunions, side projects and solo albums.
So Pete Way died in the way most musicians do, no longer near the spotlight. That he deserved his place in that beam, though, was evident as the tributes rolled in over the weekend. From his former bandmates, of course, and from his contemporaries and those he inspired – Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler, Kirk Hammett, Saxon, Tom Morello, Pearl Jam, Nikki Sixx, Geddy Lee. It’s worth noting the number of bass players in that list, because no matter how colourful his life, it’s the music he left behind in those few years with UFO that will be his legacy.
• This article was updated to remove an image that had been wrongly labelled by a photo agency as featuring Way.
