Sunday, May 7, 1972

Billy Rankin, Bob Andrews piano, Brinsley Schwarz, Nick Lowe

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ

Some extended classical stuff would gently nudge me awake on Sunday morning. Then if my memory serves me well a brass band came on. Nothing very heavy to turn the head around. Next on were Brinsley Schwarz whose killer set for John Peel’s In Concert show had whetted my tonsils. An all nighter at the Lyceum had confirmed my affection when the band pitched up and played a funky early morning blow. The days of their New York bullshit debut long since purged the Brinslies were back on their rock and roll feet. In the tradition of Sam Apple Pie before them they just rocked out led convincingly by that funk angel on bass Nick Lowe. A clean crisp sunny morning and the Brinslies sounded fresh as daisies. Fond memories of cold milk, cornflakes and Nick Lowe wailing ‘‘surrender to the rhythm’’

COUNTRY JOE MacDONALD

Sometime after the Brinslies I ventured outside the walls to visit the sources of George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. I was forty years too late. By my return Country Joe was centre stage armed with an acoustic guitar and saddled by the legend that was Woodstock. Country Joe MacDonald carried the audience past repeated chants for ‘give me an F’ delivering a fine set of songs.

‘Jean Deprez’ still remains clear to me. Robert Service’s first world war elegy paired by Country Joe’s post-Berkeley politico gave edge to the poem. An audience held captive by the tale of a gun toting French boy ordered to shoot a patriot and blowing away a Prussian general instead. ‘Gimme an F’ probably did end the set but without any notes I cannot remember.

NEW RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE

Country Joe was followed by the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Sweetheart of the Rodeo/Gilded Palace of Sin inspired cowboys that space rockers may have found hard to fathom. Five bar dudes playing Frisco tinged country in the pre-flight, pre-madonna days before the Eagles took hold. Spawned from a Grateful Dead splinter band the New Rider’s had Buddy Cage’s spine tingling steel guitar gracing the cold afternoon air and cutting across the high California harmonies of Dawson, Nelson and Torbert.

Spencer Dryden played an incredibly small set of drums with great precision. A master of the shuffle rhythm and a guy who spoke volumes on the power of pace and subtlety in an era of arm flaying histrionics. I remember more of the overall impact of the set than its content. The Ashford and Simpson bar standard ‘‘I don’t need no doctor, cus I know what’s ailing me’’ gave us something to pitch around with. The warm pull of Marin County from a cold Lancashire field.

GRATEFUL DEAD

The afternoon and much of the night belonged to a bunch of Marin County cowpokes and bar band devotees.The New Riders had flown into Manchester Airport that weekend to be met by the whole Grateful Dead family on the road. After their band trucks were sabotaged at a gig in France the Dead entourage had decided to stick together and come to Manchester en-masse, all 48 cowboys and girls, band, ladies and road crew. A travelling rock and roll circus a long ways from home.

There only two camps as far as the Grateful Dead were concerned. You either loved em or you hated them. Hip journo’s and most of Camden Town had an affection for their Kesey/Keroac credentials but Ritchie Blackmore took a different view. Wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with ‘‘if the Grateful Dead can make anyone can’’ Deep Purple’s infamous guitarist reckoned that playing extended Chuck Berry riffs for a couple of hours was not a sign of gifted musicians.

Leaping to Ritchie’s side was Sounds that lightweight musical equivalent of the Today newspaper. A couple of years prior to Bickershaw they proudly headlined that ‘‘Mungo Jerry blow Grateful Dead off stage’’ at a Newcastle shindig. Maybe so but if we are going to get stupid how about Pickettywitch outjam the Quicksilver Messenger Service?

Personally I always thought Ritchie Blackmore lost it after he left Screaming Lord Sutch and that much of the early seventies heavy rock had a lot to answer for. Brandishing 90% ego and 10% groin strain those underground heroes gave birth to some pretty pathetic heavy metal attitudes in two decades of clones. As Beefheart’s bassist Roy Estrada claimed in Melody Maker around the time. ‘‘We play at half the volume than most of the bands but we’re the heaviest band on the planet.’’ And who having seen the Magic Band last night would argue with that?

Gerry Garcia and Pigpen

To Gerry Garcia, spokesperson and the smiling hippie of the Woodstock film benignly advertising roll yer own, the Grateful Dead were just ‘‘a regular shoot ‘em up saloon band’’. To me listening live to them for the first time close to the stage in a muddy field near Wigan they sounded like a bar band with class.They began ragged enough pulling the verses of that backpacker’s hymn ‘Truckin’ together with Phil Lesh’s great thundering bass riff burping and farting feedback out of the sound system.

Garcia touched the territory between Chuck Berry and Chet Atkins for a series of deftly pulled guitar licks and sang ‘‘sometimes the lights all shining on me, sometimes I can barely see, lately it occurs to me what a lonely strange trip its been.’’ Testimony to a drug bust down in New Orleans and manager Lenny Hart departing with their cash.

As Truckin bumbled to a close I noticed that the arena was filling with a collection of local residents, curious to see the sights. The opened gates had invited Bickershaw’s youngest and oldest to stroll amongst the cold and wet collection of groovers. Most seemed dressed in their Sunday afternoon walking clothes. Dads kept inquisitive children at their sides. Mums struggled with pushchairs through the mud. Even flat capped grandads had deserted their pigeon lofts for the afternoon.

Up on stage the Grateful Dead were engaged in a tuneup. Grateful Dead retunings have encouraged bootlegs all of their own. These segways of guitar licks, short bass runs and riffs predate much of the music for airports beloved of Brian Eno et al. The group is flanked by roadies and musos, the Brinslies amongst them.

Down on the mudflats one Elvis Costello was also waiting in anticipation. A fact confirmed by the cool dude himself when he guested on the compilation of Dead songs by other artists. Few post punk prophets of song could afford to lay claim to liking the Grateful Dead. Johnny Rotten and Ritchie Blackmore forbid. Elvis came out years later with the tale of how he was ankle deep with the rest of us on the mudflats.

Meanwhile back on stage the band were pulling out of their pit stop.The highlights come and go and the set ebbed and flowed through the evening. The contrast between Garcia’s strained foggy vocals and the rockier Bob Weir gave the set and punch and roll that it required. The bar band legacy of lyricist Robert Hunter played out in country, blues and rock. It is the music of back bars, railroad sidings and truck drivers raised way out west of clean cut Nashville.

Garcia whines ‘‘Driving that train high on cocaine, Casey Jones you better watch your speed’’ and is flanked by two massive train images thundering towards each other. His guitar gives the shrill screech of the engineer’s whistle and the band pitches and grates to the rhythm of the rails.The Grateful Dead were delivering a set to savor rather than to knee tremble and be gone.

Devoid of the joined at the hips twin drumming of Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, the latter laid down drum rolls and fills deep from the territory beloved of Spencer Dryden. Clips and shuffles replaced Siamese rolling thunder. With the liquid uncharted territory explored by Phil Lesh’s bass and the probing piano chords of Keith Godcheaux the band had the makings of a fine jazz rhythm section.

Godcheaux’s wife Donna added high wispy wordless vocals up where the organ swelled. Bob Weir’s guitar chords probed and stoked the engine room and on top Gerry Garcia laid some sweet incisive guitar.Maybe Garcia ain’t the greatest technical player on the planet but like Quicksilver’s John Cippollina you can hear when he’s coming. Garcia favoured a high blues pleading crossed with the lingering steel whine of Roy Buchannon rather than any heavy metal guitar masturbation. On the longer numbers his guitar spiralled out on a flight path all of its own.

And there off to our left on stage adding subtle touches of Hammond organ was one Ronald ‘Pigpen’ McKernan. Pigpen was the Grateful Dead’s anchor. Whenever and wherever they strayed into quasi-jazz instrumental sound collages Pigpen was there to pull them back home to the blues. The kind once handed down from his disc jockey father. Trouble was, this trip Pigpen was sick, bloody sick, liver shot full of holes and drinking great quantities of Ripple and Thunderbird.

Pigpen was a shadow of the rotund honorary Hells Angel, Frisco Chapter, who taught the once innocent young Janis Joplin to drink whiskey. But Pigpen could still sing.That cold afternoon Pigpen sang Big Boss Man. The hoarse, foot stomping vocal broke across the vast Bickershaw arena and turned it into a beer parlour. Around me heads, hands and feet were boppin in the oozing mud. Dancing warmed the frozen feet and it sure was cold, bloody cold. Blue, the New Zealander handed his bottle of rum around. Going to work each day didn’t make alot of sense compared with standing ankle deep in a wet freezing field with a bunch of friends whilst a band from Marin County blew all the way down the line.

Four hours in, the stage hemmed in by the darkness and fireworks splitting in the sky was the point at which the Grateful Dead had pulled off into a Kool Aid Acid Trip with the Other One. ‘‘The bus came by and I got on and that’s when it all began, there was Cowboy Neil at the wheel the bus to never ever land’’ sang Bob Weir after the band’s exploratory soundscape had rolled back into gear.

Kreutzmann’s soft hammered cymbals had sounded clear as crystal glass in the wind during one ambient point. The Garcia/Lesh/Weir axis would turn the tune inside out and back again.As the Other One was ending Terry, Dave, Maggie and I were forced to leave for the waiting coaches to take us back to London. It must have been around midnight. We heard the strains of Johnny B Goode as we boarded the coach.

Cosmic Charlie one of the last to climb on, still wrapped in his bed cover summed it up. ‘‘Fuckin far out man . . .’’

Prologue

Bickershaw was one, if not, the last of the all night festivals. A point driven home by a BBC documentary of that year that featured footage of the festival combined with a look at the bingo playing, beer loving, social clubbing villagers oblivious to it.

Back at home my local Tory MP was putting the boot into festivals with the Isle of Wight Act. The long fine line from Bath to Bickershaw via the Isle of Wight’s was coming to an end. In future we had to go for the lights out in the dorm approach to rock’n’roll that stopped Knebworth, Reading and all short.

Slowly the free loadin’, free spirit that marked the years of psychedelia was being bumped by consumer rock. Hard to tell the difference between one day cricket and live music. Each side gets a restricted time to play and its all over by bedtime. Take one Escort Cabrioli, put a hamper in the back and lay out a wad for your ticket.

Give me a couple of cold pasties, half a bottle of whiskey and some Lancashire warmth from a corner shop any day.

One final thought. Someone recently told me that Jeremy ‘You’ve been framed’ Beadle put the Bickershaw shindig on. Misjudging the Kinks taught me that ‘You can’t judge the book by the cover’. Did you video it Jeremy? Can I see the replay?

Mike Plumbley