FREE STUFF

We have some fantastic USA released DVDs to give away.
There’s no competition, it’s just the luck of the draw.
Email me john@djtees.com and put the DVD you’d like in the subject box, I’ll draw them out of that hat on 30th July.
The lucky winners will get an email from me.
Good luck!

Deep Purple - History, Hits and Highlights.

A fantastic 2 Disc set that covers the band from 1968-1976. You get 287 minutes – yes over four and a half hours of live footage, archive interviews, rare and unreleased live, studio and TV footage. Choc-a-block with shockingly good music, anyone who loves the band will want to make a whole night out of watching this. Get the beers in, feet up and rock out. Brilliant stuff and we’ve got five DVD to give away.

Dio - Holy Diver Live

2 hours in the company of one of rocks finest singers is always a pleasure, add in the whole of their classic album Holy Diver and a smattering of Rainbow songs too and you’ve got two hours that will satisfy anyone who loves the music we still love to call HEAVY! We’ve got 2 of these to give away.

Festival: A Film by Murray Lerner: The Newport Folk Festival 1965

This is important, historical stuff as well as a musical delight. Lerner’s film rolls together four Newport folk festivals and in doing so depicts the shift of folk music from traditional beard and roll neck sweater stuff to balls out rock-based power. Dylan is well to the fore here of course and as spine-tingling as ever, also interesting is a waif-like Donovan. Joan Baez features heavily as she goes from Queen of Folk to ‘that woman who went out with Dylan’ within four years. Some great blues here too from Mississippi John Hurt and Son House who seem bemused to see all the white folks getting down with his ‘ethnic’ music. 97 minutes of social and musical history, this is a trip definitely worth taking. We’ve got two to give away.

If you fancy a chance of winning any of these just email mejohn@djtees.com and put Purple, Dio or Folk Fest into the subject header, or any combination of those three.
I’ll pick the winners at random in the last week of July.

Well done to everyone who won last month, you lot are free to enter again if you wish. Hard luck to everyone else - don’t give up! Your time will come!

OBSCURE GUITAR HERO Steve Hillage

The ambient techno music of the first half of the 1990s owed a lot, thematically, to space rock of the early 1970s. Yet the number of people who have worked significantly in both genres can – and we welcome corrections here – be pretty much counted on the fingers of one finger.

So step forward, Steve Hillage. The Chingford man is an underappreciated craftsman whose fluid, clever guitar-playing was illuminating the Canterbury scene in 1970 with Gong and, as System 7, was gracing sophisticated, velvety ambient in partnership with Detroit techno legends like Derrick May 25 years later and beyond.

Born in Essex in 1951, Hillage was in a school band that would go on to be Egg, a moderately successful prog rock group that served as something of stable for Canterbury scene figures. In 1968, he moved to Canterbury to study at the University of Kent. It was fertile ground for a young musician: Hillage played occasionally with Caravan and Spirogyra; and Caravan’s manager got Hillage signed to Deram (Decca Records’ prog offshoot) on the strength of demo material with Egg. Hillage put together a band, Khan, with vocalist Nick Greenwood – who had already been in The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. They played some gigs supporting Caravan and began recording their debut in 1972, but Hillage and Greenwood fell out over direction, while the label lost interest.

Hillage tinkered with the line-up, with a variety of Canterbury scene musos coming and going – including former school pal Dave Stewart (not the Eurythmics one). Together he and Hillage wrote a track called ‘I Love Its Holy Mystery’, which would go on to form the basis of Hillage’s masterpiece, ‘Solar Musick Suite’. However, it wasn’t really working out for Khan and the band broke up in autumn 1972.

Hillage soon hooked up with Kevin Ayers, late of Soft Machine, and played on his fourth album Bananamour, before joining the Anglo-French psychedelic band Gong and getting together with its keyboardist, Miquette Giraudy. His silky, spacey guitar playing illuminated Gong’s best work,recorded from 1973-1974, on the Gnome Trilogy.

Around this time, he also performed on a live version of Tubular Bells for Mike Oldfield. When Daevid Allen, the Aussie co-founder of Gong and general top banana, left the band (Allen refused to go on stage at a Cheltenham gig in 1975, because there was “a wall of force” preventing him; well we’ve all been there haven’t we), Hillage and Giraudy picked up the reins for a bit, but eventually went their own way.

Hillage was inspired by the success of his Fish Rising debut solo LP – check out the aforementioned Solar Musick Suite off this; a piece of music he would periodically re-work in a live setting. Fish Rising would set the template for this period – hypnotic riffs shaped like an aural music mantra backed with a jazzy but tight band. He had evolved away from the loopy anarchy of Gong into more formal song structures but kept the trippy, cosmic elements.

This was beautiful guitar music. Hillage had his own unique tone, derived from a small armoury of effects pedals as he strove to create music that ever better expressed the truly cosmic nature of the songs subject matter. With keyboard genius Tim Blake onboard doing inter-stellar synth and sequencer sounds, it was a breath-taking debut that found a home in many a greaks household. However, that easy, hippy categorisation of the music is to under-estimate its radical nature. This was ambient music, as hip and as original as anything the more critically acclaimed Fripp and Eno were doing. The difference was Hillage with his long hair and tea-cosy hat, often dressed in an orange boiler suit, looked straight out of 1968 and the ever fashion-conscious, uptight British press found that uncool. Plus, Hillage played guitar solos, really long, really brilliant guitar solos that would soar and soar and take the top of your head right off. Yet Hillage was a reluctant guitar hero, shying away from the status awarded to him by his fans. This wasn’t cock rock, after all.

Fish Rising, for a radical album, did well reaching 33 in UK charts in May 1975. It features his classic, Salmon Song, an eight minute piece built around a typically hypnotic Hillage riff; it would feature in his live shows for years.

Suitably encouraged by the response to the album, Hillage embarked on its follow-up in 1976 as punk began to break across the UK. For this project, he abandoned his Gong/Canterbury family and recorded the album, eventually called L with members of Todd Rundgren’s Utopia. It is a different sound all together, still magical, but far more direct, less spacey and with more jazz elements, indeed Jazz legend Don Cherry features on this New York-recorded gem.

While the covers of Its All Too Much and Hurdy Gurdy Man would become live favourites, the stand out tracks are Hillage originals, Lunar Musick Suite and Electric Gypsies, the latter being a virtual manifesto for Hillage’s philosophy and outlook at the time.

The more straight forward sound proved more commercial and it peaked at 10 in October 1976.

Despite punk rock claiming Hillage’s music as irrelevant, with a touch of bloody-mindedness, the 1977 album Motivation Radio saw him fully embrace even more far-out themes and notions. He fully deployed his ‘glissando guitar’ sound for this album, laying down much of it on 7/7/77 for presumably cosmic reasons. The disc was produced by Malcolm ‘Tonto’s Expanding Head Band’ Cecil, so there is much synth bubble and squeak throughout. But if fans thought this was pretty you-roll-em-I’ll-smoke-‘em, Green, its follow-up was properly far out, cosmic and solid, co-produced by Nick Mason of Pink Floyd. Naturally, it came on green vinyl. Ambient-wise this is a rich, densely layered sound that embraces and submerges you into its uplifting world of light, rhythm and melody.

It is topped off by perhaps his riff of all riffs; a towering Buddha of a riff that circles around itself, drawing you in, through, up and across your consciousness. The Glorious Om Riff deserves wider recognition as one of guitar music’s most titanic creations.

Still charting in the low 20s and 30s, Hillage next released a live album,’ Live Herald’ which is a great sampler of his best stuff and reflects accurately how hypnotic the live Hillage experience could be. But this was to be the end of an era, as he went off into less song and guitar riffage-based music and further into soundscapes.

In 1979, he released the ground-breaking, proto-ambient LP Rainbow Dome Musick
Hillage was already proving himself a producer of verve and sophistication, and when Punk saw him fall out of fashion– although he himself embraced the new wind blowing through British music, recording punk-ish tracks like ‘1988 Aktivator’ and ‘Getting In Tune’ on his 1979 LP Open – a move behind the controls proved fruitful.

He produced for Simple Minds, It Bites, Murray Head and others throughout the 1980s. But it was a chance meeting that ignited Hillage’s second career. He heard a chill-out DJ playing Rainbow Dome Musick at a club, and introduced himself to the bloke, who turned out to be The Orb’s Alex Paterson, and a friendship and partnership was born.

With Giraudy, he formed the blissfully spacey and really quite brilliant ambient outfit System 7, legends of the chill-out scene in London throughout the 1990s. The sort of inventive and whacked- out, yet always perfectly judged, guitar playing and facility for mood creation that had lit up his work with Gong was still all there, and the System 7 sound system was a guaranteed top trippy night out for many years. Various UK club big noises like Paterson and Paul Oakenfold have contributed, as have titans of the Detroit sound like Derrick May and Carl Craig.

Probably the best System 7 album is 1996’s Power Of Seven, although the 1994 LP Point 3 is also a very cool project. It featured two totally different mixes of the same tracks: Fire Album (dance beats) and an almost beat-less ambient version, Water Album. ‘Mysterious Traveller’ and ‘Overview’ – in league with Derrick May – on the Fire one are absolute corkers.

For those who like their techno a bit more down and dirty, check out Plastikman’s mix of System 7’s ‘Alpha Wave’ – a 303-tweaking classic. 1997’s Golden Section LP c ontained a couple of cool tracks – ‘Don Corelone’ with Talvin Singh and recordings of old collaborator Don Cherry, for instance. Hillage and System 7 continue to produce their warm and skilful blend of ambient loveliness to this day, launching a beat-free side project called Mirror Intent in 2006.

Hillage always was a reluctant guitar hero –and so, while other less talented but more publicity keen players gained far more acclaim and far bigger riches, Hillage’s contributions to the genre have gone over-looked for way too long. He can rightly claim to have created some of the most startlingly original 6 string manifestations in rock history and is virtually peerless in the ambient-rock genre.

A man of tremendous taste, power, poise and articulation in his music, and by all accounts, a splendid chap too, Steve Hillage continues to take us to places above and beyond this mortal coil.

LIVE AT THE FILLMORE EAST CHAPTER 3:

1969 was a momentous year for the Fillmore and for its owner Bill Graham, after a difficult start, it quickly became the place to play for every major rock band. By the end of January, Led Zeppelin had played their first shows in support of Iron Butterfly and just days before Jethro Tull had done the same as second on the bill to Al Kooper’s new jazz/rock venture Blood Sweat & Tears. Within four months Zep were back as headliners as they stormed back and forth across America, blowing everyone away as they did so.

Bill Graham’s empire was expanding apace. He decided to set up and fund two record labels – well why have one when you can have two - Fillmore Records and San Francisco Records under CBS & Atlantic’s wing. There was also the Millard Agency and a management company called Shady Management. Typically for the times, these got set up, funded and then largely forgotten.

The only act on Fillmore Records was an obscure band called Aum, on San Francisco Records you could find the great jazzy rock band Cold Blood and funky hornmeisters Tower Of Power as well as one record by a band called Hammer. None of which sold much and can’t have made Fillmore Corp any money. But not to worry because both East & West Fillmore’s were packed to the rafters and cash was pouring in.

In New York they started opening midweek in February putting The Dead on with Janis, then later in April a triple header with Ten Years After topping the bill above The Nice and Family in an all British show.

But there was one band Bill really wanted to book but had been unable to. Ever since Music From The Big Pink had come out, he’d been a huge fan of The Band. Early in ’69 word on the grapevine was that the eponymous follow-up was very, very hot. The Band hadn’t played live without Dylan and being laid back types were in no hurry to do so, which just upped the mystique of course. But it was snowy in Woodstock where they lived so the offer of $25,000 a gig to play at The Winterland Ballroom – another Bill Graham venue – in San Francisco – plus the warmer west coast winter persuaded them to do it. $25k was a lot of money – The Band had been offered five or six grand a night previously.

The show went down well despite Robbie Robertson needing to have psychotherapy to get out of bed! Three weeks later they were playing the Fillmore East to huge acclaim.

The Who debuted Tommy and for the first time the venue opened all week long to accommodate them. From Monday 20th August to Saturday 26th, they played every night supported by new proggers King Crimson and the aforementioned Aum. By all accounts it was considered a mutual honour by both parties. Bill and his team being big fans of the Who and of Pete Townshend – one of rock n roll’s more thoughtful people – and the band had recognized early the prestige of showcasing the album at the hippest of venues.

The whole Fillmore team were now the go-to people for organizing rock n roll, so it was no surprise that the Woodstock organiser Michael Lang got them on board to advise them. Chip Monck did the whole staging of the event for them as well as the MC-ing “I was scared shit-less,” he later said. Bill had spotted they were ‘rank amateurs’ but liked the radical nature of the event. He helped put in a good word with bands, and advised them on legal stuff and organisation in return for a place on the bill for his favourites Santana at prime time on Saturday.

As his role was strictly advisory, he made few criticisms, and rather just tried to be supportive. However, privately he was horrified by many things – especially the quality of the sound – which he prided himself on at the Fillmore East – describing Santana’s set as ‘background music for a Tarzan movie,’ the congas being the only noise to travel any distance. But when it came to the movie, Bill got 35,000 dollars from Warner Brothers for Santana’s appearance, because they looked and sounded so great.

The Allmans turned up late in the year to play for the first time and jaws dropped at just how good they were. Alan Arkush who worked for Bill at the time blew the whole of the day’s budget on wine for the band because they didn’t want beer. When they played again 6 weeks later, everyone got dosed up with Owsley’s Acid. A tape exists of a jam between Peter Green – Fleetwood Mac was in town - Duane Allman and Jerry Garcia. All of them higher than God.

The Allmans would go on to record their legendary live album at the Fillmore that year. And to listen to it now is to hear a band almost psychically inter-linked.

With Woodstock catapulting the counter-culture music onto the front page, the Fillmore hosted many of the big stars from the festival within weeks. Ten Years After were back in early September, as were CSNY, The Who, Mountain, Country Joe & The Fish, Santana and finally, closing the year Jimi Hendrix who played the New Year shows supported by the Voices Of East Harlem. Everyone got a tambourine for the new year show – can’t imagine health and safety would allow that now! Jimi brought in the 1970s wrestling Auld Lang Syne out of feedback. This Hendrix gig was later to be released as a live album. Indeed, many if not almost all shows were recorded and were later used for live albums by the likes of The Dead, Mountain, Airplane, John Mayall, Santana and TYA. The new sound system designed by John Chester and put into place in the late summer of 1969 was state-of-the-art and coupled with the professional staffing of the venue meant bands often performed at their peak, to sizeable 2,500 plus passionate crowds.

But it wasn’t all good vibes. The year ended with the nightmare at Altamont in California – an event you can read about in our History of Festivals series. But back on the east coast rock n roll was going from strength to strength. Bands that just months earlier had been underground, unknowns became big selling touring bands selling out big tours. The British bands like Ten Years After, Zeppelin, The Who and even people such as Incredible String Band were capable of selling the Fillmore out. Blues in the form of BB King, Bobby Bland and Albert King, along with Johnny Winter and John Mayall was still hugely popular and burgeoning singer-songwriter era was already being ushered in by Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro as well as international superstars CSNY.

If you lived in NYC at the time you could see the great, good and genius of rock music week in week out at the Fillmore. In an extraordinary period the only touring band not to tread the boards of the Fillmore was the Stones.

So the 70s had arrived. The Fillmore had one good year left in it. And what a year for music it turned out to be.

Read the final chapter of Live at the Fillmore next month.

Read previous installment of Live At The Fillmore. chapter 1 / chapter 2

A HISTORY OF ROCK FESTIVALS

CHAPTER 9

Texas International Pop Festival, 1969

AUGUST 1969, three days of acid, peace and love, hippies and music. It can only be one thing, right? Perhaps not: just two weeks after Woodstock came the Texas International Pop Festival.

Nowhere town Lewisville was the host to 120,000 hippies, as well as Led Zep, Grand Funk Railroad, BB King and Janis Joplin for the Labor Day weekend in August 1969. The festival took place on the now-defunct speedway track and was distinguished by a scorching, hard, bluesy Led Zeppelin set.

Texas had its first taste of the Zep a month previously when they played in Dallas and Houston and this performance showed a band on the up, coming between their first and second albums. Hard and horny versions of ‘Train Kept A Rollin’ and ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ kicked off a sweaty, thumping set that featured a tremendous ‘Dazed And Confused’ and served notice to America of a major new force in blues rock.

If the night-time belonged to Zep, there was plenty to enjoy in the daytime too. Local residents were shocked –SHOCKED! – to see hippies skinny-dipping in Lake Lewisville. Some of them were so shocked that they had to get in boats to have a closer look at the naked boobies, which were officially the most exciting thing to happen to Lewisville Texas in a generation. Naked hippies; you can’t beat ‘em.

The town was blessed, or rather the festival was blessed, with an unusually tolerant police chief, who had the foresight to see that a non-confrontational approach to the longhairs would pay dividends. Maybe it helped that Chief Ralph Adams was leaving his job that summer, but he managed to preside over an event that saw just a couple of dozen arrests out of 120,000 punters.

To give you an idea of how mellow it was – certainly when you compare that Altamont was only four months in the future – Kesey’s right-hand man Ken Babbs ran a free stage, security was handled by the ‘Please Force’ and Wavy Gravy offered counselling for those who had overdone it on the mind-bending drugs. The clown/activist/icon/pharmaceutical experiment, in association with activist commune Hog Farm, also dished out free food. In fact, Wavy Gravy got his name, one of the great loon monikers – from no less a personage than BB King, who played for three nights here, when the blues legend found him lying on the stage.

The event also saw Janis Joplin return to Texas and get the sort of rousing reception from her home-state crowd that had not always been the case.

Grand Funk Railroad, then relative unknowns, opened the festival for free, confident that the exposure would be well worth it. Selling more albums than any other US band in the following year (1970) suggested it was a shrewd move.

Other blues rock big guns playing included Chicago and Johnny Winter (check out the album of his set – he’s on the form of his life), while Sly And The Family Stone closed the festival with ‘Hot Fun In The Summertime’. And indeed it was.

If Lewisville was a peaceful, innocent celebration of the hippie ideal, it was to be one of the last gasps of it, too. The dark disaster of Altamont in December of the same year seemed to sound the death knell.

But in the first half of 1970, plans were nonetheless afoot for a festival in Middlefield, Connecticut. So here’s a quiz question: what was so special about the July 1970 rock festival at Powder Ridge Ski Area, which was attended by around 30,000 people?

Answer: the event was cancelled. The establishment got pretty wise, pretty quickly after Woodstock and the fun of 1969, and local communities mobilised to prevent tens of festivals in 1970. Festivals were seen as political events, and one such that could not get its legal injunction was Powder Ridge, which had booked Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, Sly Stone, James Taylor, Fleetwood Mac, Chuck Berry and others. But the mere fact that the event wasn’t going ahead didn’t stop the promoters from promoting it.

30,000 souls were not going to let such inconveniences as a cancelled festival spoil their weekend and turned up anyway, leading to one of the most heroic displays of mass public drug-taking the continental US had ever seen. Without the distractions of bands to see – with the exception of a few local outfits like Melanie.

Drugs, lots of bad drugs, were the order of the day, with dealers hawking their wares untroubled: “Buy a tab of acid and get a shot of heroin free”, they shouted. You don’t get that in Boots.

Festival medic William Abruzzi was treating 50 freaking out trippers an hour amid scenes of considerable wigging out. Connecticut – not exactly known as a party state – hadn’t seen anything like it.When the Black Panthers got involved to protest the 1970 BP trials that were taking place in New Haven, it was clear that this wasn’t your average festival. When people started dumping drugs into the barrels of drinking w ater, plots were being lost left, right and I-can’t-feel-my-face centre.

Not a good day for The Kids.

CHAPTER 10

Castle Donington 1980

A MOTOR-RACING TRACK in Leicestershire might not be the most inspiring venue in the world, but it played host to anyone who is anyone in hard rock and metal for a decade and a half. It is, of course, Castle Donington Raceway and the event is the Monsters Of Rock festival.

In 1980, the one-day event immediately established itself as a metal challenger to the Reading festival by booking Rainbow, Judas Priest, Scorpions and Saxon. Completing the seven band line-up were April Wine (from Canada – who I saw at Newcastle City Hall in all their cheesy spandex glory touring the Harder… Faster album) and Riot and Touch (both from New York City). Neal Kay, champion of the burgeoning New Wave Of British Heavy Metal movement, was the DJ.

Official attendance was given as being around 35,000. It had rained in the days leading up to the event but the 16 August itself wasn’t bad at all. The event was promoted by Paul Loadsby – who had also been promoting Rainbow’s tour that summer – and was pretty well organised. And you could take your own drink in. That’s the spirit. There was even one of them newfangled video screens.

Space age giant tellies aside, there were some technical difficulties in the warm up that would not have shamed a Spinal Tap outtake, when the PA system was damaged during tests for Cozy Powell’s pyrotechnics. The legendary drummer had good reason to want to go out with a bang: this was to be his last gig with Rainbow as he had grown disillusioned with the direction Ritchie Blackmore was taking the band. But more of them in a minute. How brilliant, though: to knacker the PA because you were playing with fireworks. It has been claimed that the explosion could be heard three miles away. Just a surprise that there wasn’t a freak gardening accident.

It wasn’t the only weird mishap at the event: the bassist of second-on-the bill Riot – who were the pet project of Neal Kay – had the misfortune to swallow a BEE while on stage. Not in the Ozzy Osbourne manner, biting its head off, though: the buzzing chum just flew into his gob mid-song.

After the two American acts, it was into the meat and drink of the event: The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Saxon were the first band with a real following, as a result of their recent success with Wheels Of Steel and 747 (Strangers In The Night). Always wondered if that record freaked out any misdirected Sinatra fans. Barnsley’s finest were in good form and got the crowd going nicely. This was a band on the up – the next years saw them release Denim And Leather, arguably the classic NWOBHM record.

April Wine played next, the highlight being their ‘I Like To Rock’ – which is featured on the excellent live album of the event Castle Donington 1980 – Monsters Of Rock. It’s got two tracks from Rainbow and Scorpions and one each from the other bands, with the exception of Judas Priest who were bringing out a live album of their show and didn’t want to steal their own thunder. Worth remembering that Priest were probably at their peak of popularity at this time and we still didn’t know Rob was gay!

After Canada came Germany. The younger generation might think of Scorpions first and foremost as the purveyors of earnest Berlin Wall ballad Wind Of Change. But in the days before they learned how to whistle, the hard rockers from Hanov er could play a stonking live set – notably on ‘Another Piece Of Meat’.

The real big guns came out, though, when Judas Priest arrived. Rob Halford took to the stage on a massive Harley, and the crowd were ready to go. Funnily enough, he did the same thing at Donington this year when the Priest played at Donington’s Download Festival. Doesn’t quite have the same ring as Monsters Of Rock, does it?

Anyway, the Judas Priest set was a stormer. They had been around for a while by then, but were right back in the forefront of the British scene thanks to 1980’s British Steel and the crowd were well up for it. They opened up with ‘The Ripper’ and played a belting take on ‘Living After Midnight’ – check out the live album of their performance.

Headliners Rainbow were brilliant. The energy and connection with the crowd in ‘All Night Long’ is just great, as was the unlikely and brilliant cover of Carole King’s ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’. The guitar work on Kill The King is stunning, just before Ritchie trashed his guitar and blew up a Marshall stack (although he’s smart enough to change his Fender Strat for what looked like some sort of dodgy stunt guitar with a very short life expectancy).

Singer Graham Bonnet was wearing a pair of tight red trousers, a pink shirt and a sort of white boating blazer. Particularly next to Blackmore (all hair and rock God black blousy thing) he looked like he’d wandered in off the set of Miami Vice. No wonder this was also his last gig with Rainbow although, unlike Cozy, he didn’t know it at the time. Cozy’s drum solo was totally balls-out, and the version of ‘Stargazer’ was terrific as well. Rainbow, much like Purps gigs usually revolved around how hot Blackmore was: here he was on rip-snorting form; the sort of radical guitar noise and humongous riffs that were his unique gift to rock ‘n’ roll dripping from his fingers.

The event was a big gamble by the promoters – to have a purely metal line-up – and was a defining moment in the NWOBHM movement. Although not a financial success in itself, it paved the way for the Monsters Of Rock festivals for nearly two decades and proved that metal could carry a festival on its own terms. Still no news on that poor bee though.

CHAPTER 11

Watkins Glen 1973

IT WAS THE largest gathering of people in the United States ever, they said. 600,000 came. It was only a one-day event, but they came a week early. There were 50-mile traffic jams to get there. Only three bands played. There was a huge storm. And yet it was a commercial success that changed the way rock festivals were put on – and maybe a landmark in the way rock and roll saw itself and its potential.

The 1973 Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in Upstate New York was the brainchild of Shelly Finkel and Jim Koplik, promoters who worked mainly out of nearby Connecticut. They had put on a successful concert with the Grateful Dead the year before where, by a happy accident, some of the Allman Brothers Band had been backstage. They came onstage in Hartford for an impromptu jam, to the mutual satisfaction of the two bands – and the Deadheads.

Finkel and Koplik mooted a possible joint outdoor gig the following summer and both bands were keen – especially when the promoters started talking the big numbers. The Dead would earn $117,000 for Watkins Glen, then their biggest career paydate.

They needed a third act and signed up The Band –who were ready to play out again after an 18-month layoff for studio work. And as they were living in the New York St ate area it all added up.

The Watkins Glen Raceway provided the venue. Because the race track was well-used to handling large numbers of visitors, and it was only a one-day event and the slick promoters convinced the powers-that-be that this wasn’t going to be one of those goddamn hippy things with mindfreaked longhairs wandering around for a week and going on about Vietnam, there was relatively little local opposition and bureaucratic hassle.

Two weeks prior to the Saturday 28 July date, 100,000 tickets had been sold at ten bucks a piece and the promoters sought and gained permission to sell another 25,000 on the day. Problem was, people started arriving early. Really early. Some were turning up a full week before; by the Wednesday, police reckoned there were 50,000 already camping. Double by the next day.

Come the Friday afternoon there were maybe 250,000 people there, and the traffic was queuing back 50 miles! The cops started turning back people without tickets, and even some who did have them. Harsh.

When the Dead came to soundcheck on Friday afternoon, there were 100,000 people in front of the stage. What you gonna do? Well, it turned into an impromptu gig and, The Dead being The Dead, they played for two hours, occasionally stopping to sort out sound but basically playing a bonus gig. Not to be outdone, the Allman Brothers and The Band also played for an hour or two each.

Awesome, but the main event, of course, was the next day. The Dead played first, a beautiful, mesmeric five-hour performance of two sets, opening with ‘Bertha’ Their Wall Of Sound was simply immense, Jerry’s guitar smooth as silk. ‘Truckin’… ‘China Cat Sunflower’… ‘Stella Blue’… ‘Sugar Magnolia’. It was a good day to be a Deadhead.

The Band played next but were interrupted an hour into their set by a storm. As it cleared, a tragic accident marred the day, wh en a skydiver, carrying flares (like incendiary devices, not trousers) got into trouble while parachuting. The flares combusted in the air, engulfing him in flames, rendering him unable to operate his parachute and causing him to fall to his death.

The Band came back on, but it was hard for them to get going. Nevertheless, it was an accomplished performance, sleek and hard, some of which is captured on the Band Live At Watkins Glen live record – although the provenance of some tracks on that is questionable. It saw them premiere ‘Endless Highway’, play Dylan’s ‘Don’t Ya Tell Henry’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Back To Memphis’. Garth Hudson’s organ-playing is mighty fine.

The Allman Brothers played last and turned in a superb performance, the highlight of which was ‘In Memory Of Elizabeth Reid’. Afterwards, Robbie Robertson, Jerry Garcia and others joined for a jam featuring ‘Not Fade Away’ and ending in a barnstorming version of ‘Johnny B. Goode’.

It’s said that the event was so big that 1 in 350 Americans was at the gig that weekend! But Watkins Glen does not have the same place in rock folklore as Woodstock. The 1969 gig was, among other things, a political act, in a way that Watkins Glen was not. The withdrawal from Vietnam was well underway, there seemed to be fewer battles to fight, maybe. The politicisation of pop music was not high on the agenda of so many bands. By all accounts, there was less LSD and hard drugs, more pot and booze at Watkins Glen. The overall vibe – peaceful and inclusive though it might have been – was more that of a great party than a social movement or era-defining experience.

Yet it certainly changed rock, if not society. Promoters across the US saw that there was serious money to be made from one-day festivals and soon, the ABC television network were getting in on the act. California Jam the following year attracted 200,000 and was a slick, well-organised, profitable success – and a definite staging post on the journey to rock corporatisation. It ushered in the era of rock stars arriving by private helicopter and big bucks, and in its own way, Watkins Glen was one of the precursors to that. Still, none of that is what anyone there, or anyone listening on record, is thinking about when Jerry Garcia is doing ‘Playing In The Band’.

CHAPTER 12

Reading Festival 1973

THE READING AND LEEDS FESTIVALS of today are the UK’s longest-running events of their type, and evolved out of the National Jazz And Blues Festival, which was born all the way back in 1961. Not much jazz on the bill these days and, in truth, by the early 1970s it was on the outs – although there was a brief outbreak of syncopation in 1973 with the cultish booking of the stripy-jacketed libertine George Melly.

But the 1973 event at Reading, was a significant event in the history of UK (and Irish) rock for several reasons. It saw Rory Gallagher at the top of his game, Rod and The Faces when it was clear that the former had outgrown, (if that’s the word for a man who would two years later release ‘Sailing’) the latter, as well as foreshadowing the rock-fan-as-intimidating-wide-boy vibe of the later Seventies with the football-scarf wearing Faces fans.

It also featured Genesis who were by now fully immersed in their revolutionary, pastoral progressive rock, the tremendous Commander Cody, Pete York back with Spencer Davis and, of course, heads down, no-nonsense boogie from The Quo.

The event, as the National Jazz And Blues Festival, was organised by Harold Pendleton, the manager of The Marquee Club where the Stones played their first gig and which would go on to have such significance in the Punk movement. This was the third year at the Reading site and organisation was pretty solid. The crowd a mixture of hairy students in trench coats with their girlfriends in Afghans and wild-haired sheet metal workers on the drink looking to headbang themselves to oblivion. Rightly so.

The late August three-dayer was an eclectic mixture, with less hard rock than punters had been accustomed to, and a not insignificant smattering of folk. Poor Tim Hardin, bloated and sick, played his ‘If I Were A Carpenter’ but found not all of the crowd as benign as his legendary performance of the same song at Woodstock. The endlessly inventive John Martyn, whose brilliant and sad, career-defining ‘Solid Air’ – the title track written for and about Nick Drake of course – had been released a few months previously, also put on a strong show with little more than an acoustic guitar and an echoplex… and the genius of Danny Thmpson on the double bass. RIP, John.

George Melly, that great English eccentric was also booked and proved a hit, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, his blend of trad jazz and bonkers-ness going over well with a rock crowd not necessarily predisposed to outsized, camp jazz singers. Chris Barber, the legendary jazzer, also played.

Reading has never been a festival especially noted for its broad taste. I (writes Al T) remember going there in 1994, and seeing Ice Cube (!) last but one on the Saturday – near 15 years before the hoo-ha about whether Jay Z was an appropriate Glastonbury headliner. The crowd, and the former NWA frontman, really didn’t know what to make of each other. Reading, of course, is also famous for its bottling off of, well, almost anyone really. Apparently the ones that really hurt are the ones full of still-warm bladder contents. Poor old Bonnie Tyler. And 50 Cent. You shouldn’t laugh.

Anyway, back to 1973, and the crowd wanted to see blues rock, and that is what Rory Gallagher gave them on the Friday night. The Cork man was on peak form, full of energy and drive – and unseen material from his forthcoming Tattoo album. He was without doubt the Friday highlight, and maybe the weekend as a whole. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen gave great value with their rockabilly, especially on that excellent monument to low times in the highlife, ‘Down To Seeds And Stems Again’.

Cometh the Saturday, cometh The Quo. In the special guest role, they opened for Rod and company. Rossi and Parfitt were well on their way by then – ‘Piledriver’ had set the formula for their hard boogie sound that would propel them into the strata of the rock super-rich. In fact, it was the album released just a few weeks after Reading, September’s ‘Hello!’ that would give them their first UK album number one.

Saturday night’s headliners were Rod and The Faces, the biggest draw of the weekend – and the magnet for a huge group of football scarf-wearing fans. Clad in Tartan scarf, Rod The Mod opened up by kicking footballs into the crowd as he always did. Laddishness was in full force as per usual but though The Faces were a fine band, and one of the best live acts of the era, this maybe was not one of their best gigs.

They had been together for the best part of four years by then, and superstardom was beckoning for their Rodney, whose solo career – 1971 saw him achieve massive success with ‘Maggie May’ and 1972’s utterly brilliant album Never A Dull Moment (one of rock’s forgotten classics) – was eclipsing that of the band, even though, ironically, the Faces played on most of his solo stuff anyway. The summer of 1973 saw the release of his greatest hits Sing It Again Rod - the cover was a die-cut whiskey glass. The Faces were a beer drinking band, but Rod was already on the shorts - that was how it was seen by the rock press at the time anyway. Like drinking shorts and wine is a socially aspirational way to get mullered!

Nevertheless, it was a decent show – and, in terms of the fans, their vibe and the attitude – a good example of how the rock and roll aesthetic would later mutate into a punk sneer.

Very much not punk at all were Sunday night’s headliners, Genesis. An immensely elaborate stage set took over two hours to put up, but eventually Peter Gabriel appeared in that mad ‘pyramid-with-eyes’ thing that heralded their magnificent Arthur C Clarke-inspired ‘Watcher Of The Skies’. Little green men aside, though, these were serious musicians, at a creative peak, and they put on a fine, layered musical feast.

As the festival program of the day declared of Gabriel, “there’s got to be something spiritual, perhaps evil, about a man who has got seven cats.” And indeed there probably is.

Melody Maker called their show “startling”, but they was plenty more to them than just the portentous stage sets. They played ‘The Musical Box’, ‘The Return of the Giant Hogweed’ and ‘Supper’s Ready’, which came in at a punchy 23 minutes. This was Genesis as pioneers of new music; a staggeringly original period for the band as they set about creating a brand new aural experience.

So that was Reading 1973: gay jazz singers,football scarves, Gabriel on alien invasion and Rory playing the living daylights out of a battered Strat. Not a bad way to spend a weekend.

There’s a live album of the show but its a bit inadequate really, featuring Rory doing ‘Hands Off’ – brilliant, Strider, Greenslade, Quo, The Faces, Andy Bown, Lesley Duncan and Tim Hardin.

The full line up across the three days was this…

A J Webber who?
Alex Harvey SAHB. They released Next this year – a stone cold classic album
Alquin eh?
Andy Bown – top notch jazz rocker now forgotten
Ange – never ‘eard of ya
Capability Brown – a great Charisma label band who did Tull-ish style rock. Did a great cover of ‘Rare Bird’s Sympathy’ and The Dan’s ‘Midnight Cruiser’
Chris Barber Band – 50s jazzer
Clare Hammill – she was from Middlesbrough you know. Wasn’t she later, bizarrely, in some weird incarnation of Wishbone Ash?
Commander Cody – whacko rockabilly outfit with great album covers.
Dave Ellis – anonymous Dave as we like to call him.
Embryo – if you say so lads
Faces – the famous Faces
Fumble – nah, don’t know them
Genesis – ah yes
George Melly – goodness me
Greenslade – Greenslade were great keyboard-led prog and even had Roger Dean album covers. Dave Greenslade went on to do loads of TV theme music.
Jack the Lad – spin off from Lindisfarne. Beer, fiddles and sing-a-longs. Excellent.
Jimmy Horowitz Orchestra – who he?
Jimmy Witherspoon – old blues man
Jo’Burg Hawk – Another Charisma label band. From South Africa
John Hiseman’s Tempest – Ah, the beginnings of jazz rock fusion here with Holdsworth on the first album and (I think) Clem Clempson on the second. Great for noodle lovers.
John Martyn and Danny Thompson - stoned immaculate I should think.
Lesley Duncan – folkyness
Lindisfarne – Geordie folk rock. They were magnificent - their first three albums are classics
Magma – Christian Vander's madness - he inveted his own language!
Mahatma – I’m guessing they were hippies
Medicine Head – long-forgotten but excellent duo doing that folk/rock hybrid. They even had hit singles.
PFM – Italian prog rock. Oh yes. Chocolate Kings is a stunning album; they were on ELP's Manticore label.
Quadrille – I bet there was four of them
Riff Raff – sounds like a punk band
Rory Gallagher - The Man
Roy Buchanan – legendary telecaster technician. Get his live albums and be amazed
Spencer Davis – R & B old school style
Stackbridge – came on stage with rhubarb for some reason.
Status Quo – Down, down deeper and down
Stray Dog – Now, Stray were a great band. Not sure who Stray Dog were though
Strider – 2nd division-coming-to-your-local-small-venue-every 6-months type touring rock band. Good but not great
Tansavallian Presidency – if you say so squire.
Tim Hardin – folk legend.

ROCK ON SCREEN Pink Floyd Soundtrack Special

With their genius for strange, huge soundscapes, relentless technical invention and mastery of mood, there can be no band in rock better suited for continued excellence on movie soundtracks than Pink Floyd.

In 1967, they performed on Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London, a documentary about the swinging Sixties, baby, that featured everyone who was anyone – John and Yoko, Mick Jagger, Michael Caine, David Hockney, Vanessa Redgrave and so on. It’s distinguished by a very long early take of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’; the original album left off an instrumental ‘Nick’s Boogie’, but the CD version has this on.

They provided the soundtrack for the unsettling, Kafkaesque 1968 film The Committee, about an unnamed man who murders an acquaintance for no apparent reason, decapitates him and then sews his head back on. The man then meets the victim, apparently not dead after all, several years later and discovers that they are both on some sort of committee that runs everything in the world. Or nothing. Try not to freak out. Recorded in May 1968, this is some of the very first music that David Gilmour made with the Pink Floyd. It’s sparse, obscure, stuff – hard to listen to because the audio track of the movie, the characters speaking, runs over the top of the music. Perfectly fitting for this confusing, intelligent film though. Arthur Brown’s ‘Fire’ is used in this movie as well.

They were commissioned to do the soundtrack for the 1969 French film More, by the director Barbet Schroeder. It follows the tragic descent of a student into heroin addiction and death in Ibiza. Modelled on the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, naïve Stephan is drawn too close to the sun that is beautiful American druggie Estelle – played by the peculiar, alluring and splendidly-named American actress Mimsy Farmer – and lured to his eventual horsey doom. Very much a flick of its time, the soundtrack does sterling work attempting to recreate something cinema has consistently, perhaps inevitably, failed to do: convey accurately the sensations of being off your rocker on the drugs. The Floyd album More – which was considerably more commercially successful than the film – features some cool tracks, notably birdsongy, acoustic ‘Cirrus Minor’ and blissed out, dripping ‘Cymbaline’. A lot of the tracks on this were worked up into live staples throughout the coming years.

After the recording of Ummagumma later that year, Floyd were asked to contribute to the soundtrack of Zabriskie Point, director Michael Antonioni’s follow-up to Blow Up.The film – a stone-cold counterculture classic – follows hippie chick Daria and activist boyfriend Mark as they steal a plane, paint it trippy colours, make love, wig out and get involved in an orgy at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. Yeah baby.

Floyd contributed several songs: ‘Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up’, a reworking of ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’, which remains one of our all-time favourite song titles. Richard Wright did a solo piano piece ‘Love Scene (Version Four)’, there was a song about chess (as you do) called ‘Country Song’ and ‘Rain In The Country’, an instrumental. The disorientating, multi-layered ‘Heart Beat, Pig Meat’ opens the soundtrack album and, rather oddly, there is also a sort of up-tempo country number called ‘Crumbling Land’. It’s well worth checking out this soundtrack – which also features The Grateful Dead and several Gerry tracks. The Stones ‘You Got The Silver’, a gem of a song, was in the film but not on the album, while Jim Morrison wrote ‘L’America’ for the movie only for Antonioni to reject it.

In 1972, Floyd hookedup with Barbet Schroeder again, to provide the music for his film The Valley. This soundtrack is generally known by the album title Obscured By Clouds. The production of the soundtrack was pretty tight: the band had only two weeks to get it all done, working from a rough-cut of the film and timing sequences with stopwatches. There is some early use of synthesiser techniques by Richard Wright that he would expand on throughout his career – including the use of a droning note to open the album, a stylistic trick that would be employed in concerts for several years. The album is also notable for including the song ‘Free Four’, which was the first Floyd song to receive significant US airplay. The film is about a woman who gets lost in the Papua New Guinea jungle and goes on a voyage of self-discovery when she meets tribes untouched by ‘civilised’ society and all its hypocrisies and flaws. A bit like going to some bits of Scotland today.

In 1992 – and this is real rockristocracy excess as it should be enjoyed – David Gilmour and Nick Mason decided they wanted to compete in the Carrera Panamericana rally in Mexico. Gilmour crashed, and his map-reader Steve O’Rourke – the band’s manager – suffered a broken leg. A mixture of previously released stuff like ‘Run Like Hell’ (although not for Steve, ha, ha) and ‘Sorrow’ was augmented by original compositions.

No look at Pink Floyd’s soundtrack work could be complete without mention of the superbly overwrought and ambitious project that was The Wall nor, of course, The Dark Side Of The Rainbow theory about the synchronicity between the band’s magnum opus and the Judy Garland movie. Whether that is true or not, there’s no doubt that Pink Floyd had a terrific gift for creating soundtracks that brilliantly enhanced and evoked the movies they were accompanying.

VIDEO OF THE MONTH ELP 1973

See the Video

For everyone who thinks ELP was all about giant mountains of keyboards and massive instrumental wig outs, here’s Greg Lake doing his thing on acoustic. One of English rock’s finest singers who would have graced many a band for his voice alone, he couldn’t half play a bit of nifty classical guitar as well. And what a cool shirt too.
Ah 1973 – we love you.

DJTEES PLAYLIST - ALBUMS

Black Sabbath: Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

Often forgotten is how delicate some of Sabbath’s work was. Here’s were they blended the bone-crunching riffs with a bit of acoustic loveliness

Steve Hillage: Live Herald

Gloriously ambient riffing from the master.

Winger – In The Heart Of The Young

Big hair metallers who tried to copy Def Leppard and ended up making superb pop/metal with a seasoning of shred on top. Sang about having it off with 17 year old girls. Obviously.

Man: Back To The Future

Climb on board, light a big one and enjoy the ride. Welsh stoners in excelsis.

Whitesnake: Early Years

When they were more blues and soul. Would I lie to you just to get in your pants? I think so. Wonderful.

Badfinger: No Dice

Melodic Beatlesy pop-rock. Should have been massive. Weren’t. There were casualties.

Steely Dan: Aja

Staggeringly tasteful, hedonistic, musical and downright coooo-oo-ool.

Deep Purple: Live In Europe

The forgotten live album. Listen to Paice’s drumming on Stormbringer. Extraordinary.

Doobie Brothers : Long Train Running box set.

More Doobies than you can shake, well, a doobie at. Huge box set with everything they ever recorded in. Started off doing boogie ended up doing soul then came back with rock. All good. Moustaches to the fore.

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers : The Last DJ

2007's return to form for the, when he’s good he’s really good, songwriter. Ascerbic, barbed and full of chunky, beefy choruses.

Montrose: Montrose

The debut and the best album. Set the template for 80s metal ten years previously

Steve Miller Band: Recall The Beginning…A Journey From Eden

Portentous title for one of Steve Miller most ignored albums but remains satisfyingly laid back, stoned immaculate and melodious with a bit of nifty lead guitar thrown in. Lovely summer record.

Genesis: Trick Of The Tail

Satisfies on all levels. Great melodies, great musicianship, great songs and wonky time signatures. Accessible but still difficult enough to stand the test of time.

Wee Tam – The Incredible String Band
Intriguing 1968 effort, much more delicate than a lot of the “wow – CLOUDS!” psychedelica of the time. ‘Job’s Tears’ is beautiful.

Fashion Nugget – Cake
Dry, wry college rock that spawned hit single ‘The Distance’, although ‘Frank Sinatra’ is the standout in our humble opinion.

You Can Tune A Piano, But You Can’t Tuna Fish – REO Speedwagon
Career high from the stadium rock bazillion sellers; a guilty pleasure.

Play – Moby
Brilliant and typically mixed bag from the multi-talented little bald wizard.

LA Woman – The Doors
A great blues band back to something near their best; and their last with Jim.

Hunky Dory – David Bowie
Hugely different from The Man Who, this is a richly rewarding, sophisticated, poppier masterpiece.

Boys Don’t Cry – The Cure
Robert and the boys in all their edgy, tearstained glory.

Slim Shady – Eminem
Disturbed, disturbing funny and lyrically precise.

Kind Of Blue – Miles Davis
The greatest jazz record ever made.

Modern Life Is Rubbish – Blur
Made when they were in the indie rump and prior to oi-oi-saveloy Brit Pop glory; stands up pretty well

STRUCK FROM THE RECORD Manticore & Purple Records

STRUCK FROM THE RECORD

A celebration of sadly departed labels - Manticore & Purple Records

MANTICORE RECORDS

A manticore is a legendary beast with the body of a lion, the head of a man, the tail of a scorpion and a giant Hammond organ for a bottom. Okay, the last bit is made up. Well, the whole thing is made up; it’s a mythical creature.

It’s also the name of the record company formed by Emerson, Lake and Palmer in January 1973.

ELP’s second album, Tarkus, aside from featuring some blistering prog and a rare guitar solo from Greg Lake, also contained the anti-war Tarkus suite, which ran across all of side one. The Tarkus was a sort of mechanical armadillo, said by Greg Lake to represent the military-industrial complex. ER, right. The Tarkus is eventually defeated by a Manticore.It’s sort of hard to explain, really. You kind of have to listen to it.

Anyway, aside from worrying about World War Three and mechanadillos, ELP were also unhappy with their label, Atlantic Records, and the sort of Seventies supergroup that sold the number of LPs that Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and Carl Palmer did were not in a position to have to put up with being unhappy with their label. After their third LP, Trilogy, they were ready to go it alone.

Along with manager Stewart Young, they set up the label and drafted in Atlantic promo man Mario Medius – who Lake knew from his King Crimson days – to help run it.

Over the next four years, ELP would release their own records on Manticore, distributed first by Cotillion and then Motown from 1975 until the label’s demise in 1977. The label’s first release was Brain Salad Surgery, one of the great sci-fi rock records, and one of the finest of all prog albums. It’s probably the group’s most complete record, with Emerson’s organs and keyboards absolutely titanic and Lake’s voice at its most powerful. Lyrically, it’s certainly their best record, thanks to the input of former King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield.

Shortly afterwards, Manticore released an album by Sinfield called Still, which would be his only solo release. It featured an impressive line-up of ex-Crimson members including Lake, Mel Collins and Ian Wallace, but did not prove a springboard to solo success, as Sinfield – although a lyricist of some beauty and imagination – was perhaps not a strong enough vocal presence to carry it off. In addition, he found himself co-opted into ELP as a lyricist, as well as contributing English lyrics to another Manticore act: PFM.

Premiata Forneria Marconi, a prog band from Milan, came to the attention of ELP during an Italian tour and were signed to the Manticore label. They had enjoyed success in Italy with Per Un Amico, and Sinfield was charged with creating lyrics for an English release that would rework existing music but with new words. The resulting Photos Of Ghosts was the first Italian rock record to enjoy significant success in the UK and USA. Over the next four years, Manticore released The World Became The World, PFM Cook, Chocolate Kings and Jet Lag – the last of which, in 1977, would be the label’s last product.

But why have one Italian prog rock band when you can have two? Brothers Vittorio and Gianni Nocenzi formed Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, known also as Banco. They signed for Manticore in 1975 and the label put out a self-titled LP.

Other acts on the label were Hanson – not the boy band trio, obviously – Keith Christmas and Stray Dog.

Hanson were the group of Junior Marvin, the Jamaican-born guitarist (again, not to be confused with Junior ‘Police And Thieves’ Murvin) who would later join Bob Marley and The Wailers in 1977. Prior to this, he released the 1973 LP Now Hear This on Manticore and the album Magic Dragon a year later.

Keith Christmas is probably best known as the acoustic guitar player on David Bowie’s Space Oddity album, but had also supported Crimson, Ten Years After and The Who. Manticore released his 1974 Brighter Day and the splendidly-named 1976 cut, Stories From The Human Zoo. Cat Stevens did the string and horn arrangements for the latter; it’s some nice folk rock Keith had going there. He’s got a website where you can check some out if you fancy.

Texans Stray Dog had met Greg Lake in London and enjoyed a short and riotous career of hard drinking and hard blues rock, with Manticore releasing their eponymous 1973 debut and While You’re Down There in 1975, which was the year the band broke up.

Turning back to ELP themselves, Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends (1974) was an accomplished triple live album, and an excellent showcase of the band at that time. As for the label, the fate of Manticore was naturally inextricably linked to the fortunes of ELP. After the brilliance of Brain Salad, the group was pulled in at least three different directions with none of the three seemingly sharing a vision. With rows about money and the huge costs of their stage shows, as well as the changing mood of the times, it was getting harder to see a future for a prog rock supergroup. The label was closed in 1977.

ELP released Works Volume I on Atlantic Records that year, but it feels like three albums in one, with each member being given one side of the double LP and the fourth being a ‘collaborative’ effort. Works Volume II from the same year is something of an oddity – some blues, jazz and bluegrass thrown into a mix of other offcuts – while ELP’s last album before splitting up was the dire Love Beach, made for contractual reasons only. They split in 1978.

Manticore Records may have only lasted for four years, but it produced some great records by some of prog’s most intelligent and skilful musicians, as well as showcasing some quirky artists who might not have enjoyed much airplay otherwise. Its crowning achievement remains Brain Salad Surgery, and although you didn’t last for ever, Manticore, still, you turn me on.

---

PURPLE RECORDS

Would it be unkind to call this a vanity label? Certainly Purple Records put out a lot of material by various band members or hangers-on, and it is fair to say that not all of it would have got a commercial release on a non-Purple-affiliated company. But a lot of the material was excellent in its own way, and the history of hard rock and metal would be the poorer without it.

Established in 1971, the label only put out one LP in the first couple of years – Curtiss Maldoon by Curtiss Maldoon. Dave Curtiss had been involved in an early incarnation of Purple when they were called Roundabout (he played bass), while Clive Muldoon had joined Curtiss in Bodast with Steve Howe, later of Yes. Howe plays guitar on the record, while it also feature the single Sepheryn which, of all things, was reworked by Madonna into her 1996 hit ‘Ray Of Light’.

The Purple People sampler of 1972 was a great showcase of their acts, but for obvious reasons of cost and risk, the early days of Purple Records saw them focus more on single releases – ten in 1972 and five the next year, but from 1973 to 1979 they released a handful of albums a year. However, with Purple themselves disbanding (albeit only temporarily, of course) in 1976, it is the period of 1973-1976 that marked the label’s heyday.

The group that begat the label were just about to enjoy their finest hour: Machine Head, their greatest work, was the first Purple release on the EMI-distributed Purple Records. Recorded with the Stones’ mobile studio in Montreux, Switzerland, it was an instant classic and, of course, went on to sell absolutely shed-loads.

In musical terms, and certainly with the benefit of hindsight, the classic Deep Purple Mark II incarnation had already peaked. The next release (non-UK) was the live Made In Japan (the record that sent them over the top in the USA), but it was followed by the less instantly striking, Who Do We Think We Are, which would prove to be Ian Gillan’s last with the band until 1984, and Roger Glover also left after learning that Ritchie Blackmore was planning to fire him. Grumpy old Ricardo.

But with Saltburn’s finest son David Coverdale installed on vocals, and Glenn Hughes on bass, the band enjoyed a new lease of life with 1974’s Burn, an excellent record.After that, Stormbringer, Ritchie’s last, and Come Taste The Band, Tommy Bolin’s first, albums on lead guitar all charted well. The much under-rated live album Made In Europe followed and then 1977’s Last Concert In Japan was the last non-compilation Purple release on the label, but was a dreadful shambles – Bolin couldn’t play properly because he had lost feeling in his arm. There was also a Mark II singles compilation in 1979 on the Purple label.

So that’s the label’s big Purple releases: what about the rest?

They released some right dirty, pounding early metal from Hard Stuff – a project for Quartermass bass player John Gustafson and Atomic Rooster’s guitarist John Du Cann and singer Paul Hammond. They were signed in 1971 when Rooster folded, and originally called Bullet, but discovered there was another band of that name. They changed their name to Hard Stuff and released Bulletproof and Bolwx Dementia on the label before John joined Roxy Music briefly and, more enduringly, the Ian Gillan Band.

Glam rockers Silverhead looked like they might go all the way, with singer and Pamela hubby Michael Des Barres and (later) future Blondie bass player Nigel Harrison. They recorded an eponymous debut in 1972, with Purple producer Martin Birch on the controls. Ian Paice also did some production for them, but they never quite took off. They also put out a single by Des Barres, who would later be a frequent character actor face on US TV with roles in everything from Roseanne to MacGyver to Seinfeld.

As for Purple members’ solo stuff, the label released records by Jon Lord (Gemini Suite – which helped launch the label, and featured Tony Ashton on vocals, and has the single worst cover in the history of recorded music too) and First Of The Big Bands, another Lord collaboration with pal Ashton and a kind of Hammond organ v boogie piano showdown.

David Coverdale’s 1977 LP White Snake (nb two words, not the 1987 Whitesnake) was his first solo release and steps on the road to the mighty hair metal act of ‘Here I Go Again’ fame.

One of the stranger releases on the label was the 1972 release ‘Who Is The Doctor’ – with Jon Pertwee on vocals. Worth a lot of dough to Doctor Who fans. It was a fun little project for Roger Glover, and although it was really just a novelty record, showed that Purple Records were forward-thinking in terms of electronica. The track was done by Rupert Hine, who would go on to be an important synth-rock producer, and Stevie Nicks squeeze, and who was signed to Purple Records by Glover, putting out a couple of albums for him. Glover, with Ian Paice, also produced for Purple Records signings Elf, whose Ronnie James Dio would later go on to sing for Rainbow.

Also showing Purple Records willingness to take a risk and innovate was the signing of Carol Hunter. The great New York session guitarist who worked with Richie Havens and Neil Diamond, but left Diamond’s band to pursue a solo career – her first release was ‘The Next Voice You Hear’ on Purple Records.

Other signings included Tucky Buzzard, a hard rock project perhaps best noted for being produced by Bill Wyman, and Yvonne Elliman who put out a very interesting mix of quiet acoustic numbers and some rip-snorting rockers including a magnificently banging cover of The Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’ – the sample of which formed Fatboy Slim’s 1997 hit ‘Going Out Of My Head’, big-beat trivia fans.

As Deep Purple went into hiatus, the label inevitably slowed down, with the last non-Purple release being Coverdale’s second album in 1978, Northwinds. It seemed that the story was over at the end of the 1970s, but in 1997 a CD reissue label approached the owners with the idea of re-establishing the label and releasing material that fits the label’s ethos.
Yes the label was purple and had a big P on it and a vanity project it may have been, but what’s wrong with a bit of vanity, eh, especially when you are as brilliant a band as the Purps.