We did the fourth album and Ahmet Ertegün said we had to put the name of the band and the record company on the cover. I didn’t want to do that. I went to New York with Peter Grant to argue the point. Record companies put labels called hype stickers on the shrink wrap, but our point was that we weren’t a hype. We had a body of work that stood up in its own right without the name of the band. What we were selling was the music and nothing else, and that was the stratagem.

And then I said, We’re going to tour, and Ahmet said, ‘No, you can’t tour before the album comes out. That’s professional suicide.’ But I saw it the same way as not doing singles: why not just see what happens? The album could be released whenever it needed to be. We went to America in August and Tokyo at the end of September prior to the album release, and the crowds were the biggest we’d ever had. Atlantic didn’t understand what we were doing, otherwise they would have trusted us. As far as they saw it, we were just product.