Saturday May 6, 1972

There is always an eerie silence about a festival site first thing in the morning. That Saturday morning was no exception. I rose disheveled to discover wakening revellers coming to terms with a new day. Coffee was fetched from a stall, drunk amongst the yawning and stretching. Our new found Camden friends Dave and Maggie were folding up their bedrolls. The previous night’s downpour had dissauded them from erecting their tent. Dave’s portable cassette player whined with strident acoustic intro of Uncle John’s Band. Workingman’s Dead from a battered cassette stirred tangled mops from underneath their bedrolls. It was a clear, bright Saturday morning.

Musically the day started I think with Maynard Fergusan and his Orchestra. The trumpeter’s set was further testimony to me of the need to throw off a narrow set of listening values. Wall to wall rock tends to get tedious. The high noted trumpeter sang to the beat of a different drum. A welcome change. The next morning, a brass band would play, an advert for the county and an invitation to find the nearest pub to sink a cold pint down. Dave and Maggie went off to erect their tent. The Grateful Dead’s souvenir album of that year’s European sojourn sports a picture of the aforementioned canvas. At the time the tent made a handy marker when returning from shopping or foraging trips.

Some of my memories of Saturday remain blurred with the passage of time. Was it Saturday that Donovan and Al Stewart played? Did I really miss Mike Westbrook and the Brotherhood of Breath? I finally caught up with the West Countryman’s jazz and brass band orchestrations and became captivated. I regret missing the late and very fiery trumpeter Mongezi Fesa although the powerhouse MacGregor, Puckwana, Moholo, Dyani highlife swept over me later that decade.

LINDA LEWIS

One artist that totally wound me up was squeaky Linda Lewis. Despite the lady’s Family credentials I couldn’t get behind her Shirley Temple giggles. She missed me by miles and in a male dominated bill where were the Maggie Bells and Jo-Ann Kelly’s and even princess Grace Slick herself?

CAPTAIN BEYOND

Festivals would be a dull affair if you just loved everyone. Captain Beyond were pretty ordinary. Remnants from Iron Butterfly, Johnny Winter and Deep Purple pounded away in a well worn track. I didn’t remember the Flamin’ Groovies either, San Francisco’s answer to Sam Apple Pie? Maybe.

INCREDIBLE STRING BAND/DONOVAN

The set I do remember with great clarity on Saturday afternoon came from the Incredible String Band. The Incredible’s weaved a kind of tinker/gypsy inspired magic across the darkening afternoon sky. From the other side of the marshland I could just make out the band clustered together on stage. I didn’t have any of their albums, can’t remember any of the songs just the warm glow that the set evoked. Twenty years on I still don’t own any of their albums but I wish I did. No Donovan albums either and he played one side or the other of the Incredibles.

CHEECH AND CHONG

Being a Saturday the four of us decided to go shopping. First Terry made off for his friendly neighbourhood candyman. He returned with a couple of smarties which Dave dutifully cut into four pieces. Doctor Terry placed his half on his tongue and we all followed suit. Those cool hipsters Cheech and Chong were on stage full of veiled and indiscernible patter as we wandered around stalls laden with the latest hip and hippy gear.

Terry, feeling groovier by the minute, made off into the back of a trouser shack followed by his three compatriots. I went for a highly coloured pair of flares. They now reside in my loft lagging the water tank. Terry had tried a pair on and then nearly freaked when he discovered a couple of frogs prancing around at the back of the tent. A shopping trip to Marks and Spencer’s now dulls by comparison.

FAMILY

The evening’s entertainment began with Family. The band’s power and dynamics certainly fuelled the adrenalin that night. Roger Chapman’s vocal tour-de-force bordered on the maniacal with a broken mike stand discarded by the second number. Family numbers often began like the calm before the storm. Chapman would build against a muted backing before the stage erupted into go-for-broke fury. Great chunks of Bandstand were spotlighted in this glorious set. From Burlesque via Broken Nose, Top of Hill and My Friend The Sun was my vivid introduction to the album. A corker of a set.

KINKS

Whether the smartie heightened my senses is up for conjecture. However my judgment certainly improved after the next set from the Kinks. I had mistakenly viewed the Kinks as a distant memory from my sixties schooldays. Alongside my first album, the mop tops Help, I pigeoned holed the Kinks in yesterday. Or so I reasoned at the authoritative age of 18. There was so much ‘underground’ music (man . . .) to really rate the Kinks. Somewhere I’d picked this ‘holier than thou’ message up and the Kinks were unhip. Ray Davies and the boys were about to wipe my nose in it. I became very humble and truly grateful.

On stage around nine, Ray Davies sounded drunk or delirious or both but in total control. The set was bloody magic. The Kinks completed by the Mike Cotten Jazzmen orchestra, a girlie chorus and Ray Davies resplendid in a striped punting jacket and straw boater ripped through the band’s greatest hits mixed with send-up musical-hall songs. The balance between jazzers and rock and rollers gelled and delivered the goods. On memorable numbers like the Banana-Boat song Ray Davies carried the torch for Trinder, Miller and a host of bygone vaudeville stars. Ray Davies played rock meets Leonard Sachs and I for one hungered for more. Later that same year the Beach Boys would similarly demolish my emotions and hip opinions.

Towards the end of the night I started shivering and feeling the after effects of Terry’s visit to the candyman and wished I had got drunk instead. A resolution I kept through that brain damaged decade. I don’t remember who followed the Kinks, maybe it was Al Stewart. I could hardly forget the middle of the night set from Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band.

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND HIS MAGIC BAND

The next tent over camped in front of the marshland was filled with some boogiers from Liverpool, well at least Sue was. Terry and I had wandered over and joined the party late that night. In the back of their tent a Stephen Stills lookalike was playing acoustic guitar whilst a larger than life Kerouac figure held court up front. His name was Blue and judging by his outback attire, all leather hat and thongs, he had to be from down under. The voice was softer than the Aussie whine and he told me he was from New Zealand.

It was now around three in the morning and most of the tent revellers were begging for sleep. Terry had long since ‘crashed out’ but Captain Beefheart’s set would ruin any notion that it was time to bed down. ‘‘Turn it off,’’ came a scream from the back of the tent when the Captain and his disciples were in full flight.

The pre-flight introduction had come from Mark Boston alias Rockette Morton. Shuffling on stage in a long coat Morton had strapped on a bass guitar, adjusted an amp and declared ‘‘my names Rockette Morton and I’m going to play you a toast’’. His name was really Mark Boston but who’s splitting hairs because a guitar solo with the quaint title ‘Rank and Rumbuctious’’ vented the air and effectively demolished any idea of good night campers. Morton duckwalked across stage with caged-panther like lunacy as he pulled a menacing discordant riff from his guitar.

As Rockette Morton wound down a sequence of spellbinding chords the rest of the Magic Band assembled behind him. There was a tall skinny guitarist decked out in a greatcoat called Zoot Horn Rollo alias Bill Harkleroad, a rotund bassist named Orejon (Spanish for Big Ears) alias Roy Estrada, a drummer with ladies pants on his head known as Ed Marimba alias Artie Tripp III and the truly weird doctor strangely strange Winged Eel Fingerling aka Elliot Ingber on guitar. Why Don Van Vliet, affectionally known as Captain Beefheart, had renamed them was puzzling. Surely their real names would have sufficed?

Rockette Morton and the Captain on stage at Bickershaw

Rockette Morton had swopped his bass for a guitar as the band choreographed into a boogie that sounded like it was raised in Mississippi, honed in Chicago and delivered via outer space. With the Magic Band duckwalking and dancing all over the stage, madcap drummer Marimba hitting everything in sight, a becaped and bearded Captain made it out to centre stage. He stepped to the central microphone, pulled it from the stand and began to snarl with all the venom of Howling Wolf moanin at midnight. Between verses the Captain wailed mouthfuls of southside Chicago harp. Behind him the band’s choreographed slapstick dance veered somewhere between Elvis Presley and the Marx Brothers. To me it sounded as though Don Van Vliet and the boys had got fired up drinking with Son House and Willie Brown on the Delta and had tapped those primitive forces.

Like most introductions to Beefheart, mine mostly came through John Peel’s radio shows. As early as 1969, however, a school friend and I had sneaked into his brother’s bedroom, placed a Beefheart album on the player and scorched the walls with side two of Trout Mask Replica. Beefheart on record was pretty unique. Live he was astounding.

The early morning set was culled from Don Van Vliet’s five album onslaught on teenage ears. From the Wizard of Oz meets slide guitars of Safe as Milk, the extraordinary ‘diamond in the mud’ that was Strictly Personnel, the outpourings of Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off Baby and finally to the blues of the Spotlight Kid. Delivered by the caped crusader and his maverick pals serenading the blackness of the night.

On record the Spotlight Kid needed turning right up to capture the magic but live the raw menace of When it blows it stacks, Click Clack, the loping train boogie lament to lost love and Winged Eel Fingerling’s stinging guitar anthem Alice in Blunderland took on another dimension.

Half way through the set Don Van Vliet decided to give the cold Lancashire night a taste of the Mississippi Delta. An unaccompanied wailing tribute to Son House in the shape of the bluesman’s Black Snake Moan. The air was bitingly cold, mist hung around the stage and alone centre stage Beefheart growled ‘‘there’s an old black snake sleepin’ in the shade’’ with all the power of the Delta bluesman’s vision. I clearly remember Beefheart stopping to acknowledge a dog wailing at the moon off in the night. With a clear grasp of Notting Hill Gate speak Frendz newspaper would nominate it as ‘‘a motherfucker of a set’’. It was.

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band were like beacons from Mars to the record industry. The Captain was either weird or unfathomable. Sigh’s of relief all round when the first music journalist of Spring nominated the Spotlight Kid as ‘the Captain’s most accessible album to date’. Van Gough didn’t paint by numbers and until the Virgin debacles, Don Van Vliet didn’t write by them either.

Long hairs misread Frank Zappa’s old school mate as well. The assumption held was that anyone who could sing ‘‘the dinosaur cries with blood in his eyes and eats our babies for our lies, you may die but he’ll rumbling through your petrified forest,’’ was a full time space cadet. The music business and the eternally stoned trippers fed off the same illusion. They had the blues loving dadist poet come painter horribly wrong. If you’ve got ears you had to listen and understand that Don Van Vliet’s grasp of American music went deeper, was wilder and refused to frequent the stretch limo cocaine sleeze of Laurel Canyon.

Beefheart’s stimulus sounded like it was sourced from the acorn gospel of the Mississippi Delta, the wrong side of the Chicago tracks and the jazz lofts of New York. That foggy Bickershaw night his free form assaults on soprano saxophone wailed and screeched like the ghost of Albert Ayler. Saxophonist Ayler, found face down in the Hudson River two years earlier, gave jazz be-boppers the kind of swift kick up the arse that punk delivered to rock dinosaurs fifteen years later. The Captain’s grand entrance was five years premature for Johnny Rotten and his pals.

There may have been other sets that night but after a mindblower from Don and the boys, the hour close to four or five, those huddled together at the tent flap went to sleep.

Mike Plumbley