At sunset, candles and small fires appeared in the crowd and torches were lit along the top of the hill. It seemed a sight from a distant century (a past one, let’s hope). The first raindrops started to fall while Baez was onstage. As at Newport four years before, there was a small tarpaulin strung between poles keeping no more than a fraction of the stage dry. The band’s days as an acoustic duo were long past. Rose’s bass needed an amp, Mike played electric guitar on several important songs, and oriental instruments were amplified through pick-up microphones. We huddled with our friend John Morris, one of the festival producers, and talked about what to do if it didn’t clear up.
I am generally immune to regret, but I find it painful to write about what happened next. As the rain came down more heavily, Morris offered us a spot the following afternoon. Faced with the prospect of radically altering their set and trying to play through the rain, and with reports of clearing weather to the west, the group opted to stay over then race to New York, where we had a gig the next night. To my eternal chagrin, and against my instincts, I went along with the plan. We were vaguely aware of the cameras and the recording truck parked beside the stage, but we couldn’t know that Melanie would step into our spot, revelling in the downpour and transforming herself into a star. Nor could we know what Saturday would be like.
There was no way off the site that night (the helicopters stopped flying at dusk), so the six of us slept in a cramped tent with John Sebastian, Melanie and her boyfriend. At dawn, we were ’coptered out to a motel in Monticello to wash and get a few hours’ sleep in a real bed. When we returned and looked out at the crowd, our hearts sank. It was sunny all right; the hillsides were baking in the heat. The sylvan beauty of the hippy crowd the day before had changed beyond recognition; now it looked like a battle zone. Everyone was caked in mud, many dancing crazily in the dust, out of their heads. Following the thunderous boogie of Canned Heat, the ISB were the last thing anyone wanted to hear. The group were exhausted and the set fell flat.
Having given up trying to collect ticket money, the organizers had run out of cash, so dozens scrambled for a few seats on the last ’copter flight before the charter company took their unpaid bills back to Albany. Licorice was pushed off, Robin got off to stay with her and Walter got off to look after them. Somehow, they made it out with a driver who knew a dirt track through the woods and we got to New York just in time to go onstage. We knew we had blown it: the extent of the error became clear in the months to come as the Woodstock film reached every small town in America and the double album soared to the top of the charts. Had they played in the rain that night, would they have made the cut in the film and on the record? I had nightmares about the might-have-beens: the ISB gloriously recapturing the acoustic spontaneity of their early years, their songs and voices perfect for that magical first night, their careers transformed by the exposure. It was a phenomenon and, like that last helicopter, we had failed to hold on to our seats on board.
Economists will tell you there is no such thing as stasis: if you aren’t going up, you’re going down. Their next two albums had some strong tracks, but overall they were no match for the earlier ones. They moved a group of dancers and Scientologist friends into the Row and created a pageant called
U
. I tried to discourage them: with a cast of ten plus sets and costumes, it was going to be very costly to tour. The lyrics were even more obscure than their opaque masterpieces of the past and the tunes weren’t as good. Promoters who had been happy to book the ISB were dubious about
U
. Guarantees were reduced everywhere, putting the group financially at risk.
Scientology is not designed to engender timidity. Confidence flows from the belief that you are eliminating the weak points in your personality. The group refused to contemplate the notion of failure and
U
went ahead full- speed. The fact that it was a disaster artistically, critically and financially failed to dent their confidence, but it hastened my search for new challenges. The Incredible String Band carried on into the ’70s with ever declining audiences and less and less interesting records. Rose escaped back into a normal life, got married and had a daughter. For a while in the ’90s, she was the girlfriend of the chairman of Aberystwyth town council and took on the role of Lady Mayoress. Dressed in the sensible tweeds befitting her status, she sat with me in the audience at an ISB reunion concert in London in 1997. Licorice disappeared somewhere in California and is presumed dead. Mike and Robin went their separate ways; both eventually left Scientology. Robin tours the world reciting bardic tales and playing the Irish harp and the fiddle. A recent reunion – including Clive – has served primarily to rekindle old feuds.
ON A RAINY FRIDAY afternoon in August 2002, I left London and headed for Fairport Convention’s annual Cropredy Festival in Oxfordshire, an event I honour with my admiration more than my presence. There are real ale stands, a
Mojo
-sponsored CD stall and a cartoonist’s dream of beards and anoraks. When I arrived, the hoods were up and the face furniture dripping wet, but over 15,000 stood in the soggy pasture to hear a reunion of Fairport’s earliest line-ups. Barring occasional feuds, current and former members participate on a rotating basis, while Richard Thompson, star that he is, gets invited every year.
That evening they played songs that hadn’t been performed since the M1 crash. Curiosity and nostalgia propelled me through the downpour to hear Ian Matthews and Judy Dyble singing with Richard Thompson, Simon Nicol and Ashley Hutchings again on ‘Time Will Show The Wiser’ and ‘Jack O’ Diamonds’. With ex-Fotheringay drummer Gerry Conway taking Martin Lamble’s seat, the understanding between the three old friends from Muswell Hill was as instinctive as it had been thirty-five years before and the originality of their take on American ‘folk-rock’ as clear that night as it had been in the summer of 1967. Hearing them through a great PA system, with every detail sparkling in the chilly air, reminded me what a wonderful group they were and what a future was lost along with their friends in the crash. After an hour exploring the first three albums, Dave Swarbrick was assisted onstage with a tank of oxygen beside his wheelchair and they started in on the music created by the new line-up in a Hampshire farmhouse that mournful summer of 1969.
As they pondered the future that spring, the record on all their turntables was
Music From Big Pink
by The Band. It had thrown down a gauntlet:
You want to play American
music? Well, try playing something as American as this!
It was a revolutionary record: their schooling in the Southern roadhouses with Ronnie Hawkins followed by their work as Dylan’s backing group meant they were at once both source and emulators. Fairport couldn’t face going back to the pre-crash repertoire and they felt
Big
Pink
meant that a return to their trademark style wasn’t an option. They decided to pick up where ‘A Sailor’s Life’ left off and create a repertoire as English as
Big Pink
was American – to turn a rebuke into an inspiration.
First they added Swarbrick, then found drummer Dave Mattacks in a ballroom dance orchestra. Mattacks’s strict-tempo schooling was a perfect foundation for their reinvention of English traditional music. He has been endlessly – and depressingly – imitated, but no folk-rock drummer has ever trumped what he conjured up in his first months with the group. Ashley Hutchings spent weeks trawling through the Cecil Sharp House archives, consulting sages like A. L. Lloyd and assembling a set of ballads that would lend themselves to Fairport’s approach. In August, after two months of rehearsal, we were in the studio, and by November
Liege and Lief
was out and selling better than any Fairport record before.
Making English folk music fashionable was an extraor- dinary accomplishment, pushing against the historic diktat that nothing could be less hip. But the team didn’t stay together long enough to enjoy the acclaim. Sandy loved what they were doing but wanted to be in a band that would perform her new songs as well. She had also fallen in love with a man known for his roving eye and was reluctant to leave him unchaperoned while Fairport was on tour. When she refused to board a plane to Copenhagen for a TV appearance, the implications were clear.
Ashley, on the other hand, had the passion of the newly converted. Traditional songs may have been old news to Sandy, but he had a vision of transforming English folk music and bringing it to a wider audience. Even with Sandy gone, he knew Richard wouldn’t want to be tied to a strict repertoire of traditional material. He persuaded Martin Carthy and Maddy Prior to join him in forming Steeleye Span. Two wings of Fairport had broken off.
The remaining members loved the road, couldn’t wait to tour the new material and were dying to get to America. Richard and Swarb could handle the singing; all they needed was a bass player. They indulged the folkie Swarbrick when he insisted on an audition for his Birmingham mate who played stand-up bass with the Ian Campbell Group. Throwing him in at the deep end, they took ‘Mattie Groves’ and ‘Tam Lin’, with those impossible bass lines of Ashley’s, at breakneck speed. Dave Pegg blinked and tore into what Swarb had warned him to learn by heart. I watched from the doorway as Fairport’s future took shape in front of me. Pegg played everything they threw at him with a hooligan edge that Ashley could never have matched. The legendary rhythm section that would grace albums by so many different artists had just been formed.
In 1970, Fairport toured as widely and as often as we could find bookings. On the night of their American debut at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, Linda Ronstadt cheered them from the audience. When they ran out of encores, they invited her to join them. ‘I don’t know any English songs,’ she shouted. ‘That’s OK, we know all of yours,’ said Simon. Pushed onstage, she nervously sang the first a cappella notes of ‘Silver Threads And Golden Needles’, then heard Fairport enter on cue, re-creating her arrangement perfectly. When Richard took an expert James Burton-esque solo, she almost fainted in astonishment. The set lasted another forty minutes, covering songs she had forgotten she knew. On another occasion at the Troubadour, Led Zeppelin (old Birmingham buddies of Dave Pegg) turned up and Jimmy Page and Richard jammed on R&B numbers. John Wood and I were recording the show that night and the tape reveals Plant’s vocal being louder than any of the amplifiers, Page trying to keep pace with Richard on jigs and reels and Zep manager Peter Grant at a front table cursing and abusing the waitresses.
From the moment Sandy left the group, she and I did nothing but argue. I could get a big advance from A&M for a solo LP, but she wanted to form a group with boyfriend Trevor Lucas. Successful women in show business often have trouble maintaining relationships. Or rather, men have problems dealing with a star performer. Many women solve the problem by ending up with their lead guitarist/ producer/manager/musical director or by casting their (usually unqualified) man in one of those roles. Fotheringay, as she wanted to call the group, after Mary Queen of Scots’ prison, would be a castle built on false foundations. The money keeping everyone on salary was Sandy’s, but she made me write the contract for the egalitarian benefit of all. Blackwell, A&M and I were clear about what we wanted: a record of Sandy’s songs, sung by Sandy with Sandy’s name in big letters on the cover. (She was voted ‘best female vocalist’ in the 1971 and ’72
Melody Maker
polls.) But she was determined to make Trevor her equal. The record we made includes some of her best performances: ‘The Sea’, ‘The Pond & The Stream’, ‘Winter Winds’, ‘The Banks Of The Nile’; but the rest of the album is filler.
Fotheringay hurtled through Sandy’s advance, buying a huge PA system (nickname: ‘Stonehenge’) and a Bentley to get around in. The musicians earned higher salaries than Fairport could afford to pay themselves. Sandy was bankrolling the group without having the power to lead or the money to keep going much longer since she refused American tours because of her fear of flying. Her relationship with Trevor was turning her into a nervous wreck. I turned over the managerial role to Roy Guest.
Fairport’s first all-male album,
Full House
, with hilarious liner notes by Richard, was far better than I could have hoped. The only cloud on the horizon was a variation of the problems appearing all over the Witchseason realm. Inexperienced musicians recording for the first time need a producer’s guidance and are grateful for it. By the fourth or fifth album, the process has been demystified and many become less willing to be told what’s good and what isn’t. With only one track usually available on the old eight-track tapes, Richard had always let me decide whether to keep or retake a guitar solo; now when I wanted to keep one, he insisted on erasing it and vice versa. Discontent stalked the land. Many of them had been seemingly successful for a few years and didn’t have much to show for it. If I was such a great manager and producer, why weren’t they rich?
In 1970, I finished sixteen LPs: I was working myself to a frazzle. In Charlotte Street, the financial wolves were circling; we owed money in every direction and the more success we achieved, the more we seemed to spend. Break-even was a horizon that kept receding. I started thinking about radical solutions.
IN THE LATE SIXTIES, John Sebastian’s ex-wife Lorey settled in a Hertfordshire cottage with her remarkable record collection. One evening, I brought some tapes and acetates of things I was working on plus some records I thought she wouldn’t know and we reminisced and took turns playing DJ. When I played her an advance copy of
Five
Leaves Left
she went crazy, telling me how wonderful it was and how big a success it was going to be.
Listening to Nick Drake led to a search for ‘Sunny Girl’, an English-language single by a Swedish outfit called the Hep-Stars. Lorey had gone to Stockholm with the Spoonful a few years earlier and someone took them to hear this local group perform their new hit, an obvious copy of Sebastian’s ‘Daydream’. She thought it was a clever tribute and she adored the lead singer, who had broken his ankle skiing and performed on crutches. Lorey gave me her extra copy of the record; she was right – the lead voice did remind me at times of both John Sebastian and Nick Drake.