SECTION TWO
sm
COLUMN
SIXTY-SIX, DECEMBER 1, 2001
(Copyright © 2001 Al Aronowitz)
RETROPOP
SCENE:
1970 ISLE OF WIGHT DIARY
JIMI HENDRIX
(Photo by Baron Wolman)
It's
a short night from New York to London.
In
six and a half hours the sun has somehow traveled around the earth to greet you.
Leave after 9 at night and you arrive before 9 in the morning.
In between there is hardly more than three hours of darkness.
As
for me I wanted to get to England in the worst way and so I went by Air India,
bumming a ride with the Great Medicine Ball Caravan, flying through the
trans-Atlantic looking glass aboard the Hashish Express, Tom Donahue's Magic
Carpet, carrying 150 freaks who had started out in San Francisco and who now
were on their way to Canterbury.
On
the same plane were three members of Miles Davis' band and up in the first-class
cabin was Tiny Tim, all of them on their way to the Isle of Wight. Could Tiny or
the caravan have hoped for better company?
Boarding
the plane, the caravan members were completely ignored by the onlookers craning
their necks for a glimpse of Mr. Tim, who was reported to have complained at
having to travel on the same plane with so many weirdos.
The only complaint I got from Tiny's direction came from his wife, Miss
Vicki, who wrinkled her nose at my cigarette smoke while doodling rabbit faces
on a piece of paper.
Meanwhile,
Tiny talked about the old days with Hugh Romney, the Hog Farm boss, who once
played on the same bill with Tiny and Moondog at the Fat Black Pussycat in the
Village. You'd never think that Hugh used to be a comedian would you?
Now
his name was Wavy Gravy and for entertainment on the Caravan he'd fill a huge
tubful of Jell-O and invite everyone in for a dip while it steamed with vapors
from the dry ice tossed in to chill it.
Aboard
the Hashish Express the sudden dawn of England brought with it the awakening of
new fires to burn the vast quantities of evidence before the freakniks of the
Great Medicine Ball caravan had to expose themselves to British Customs.
By the time they landed at Heathrow Airport, all of them were ready to
take their clothes off and be strip-searched,
There
is a civilization that exists on the other side of the looking glass even if
people drive cars on the left side of the street.
England has long endured the high accident rate of American tourists who
look the wrong way before stepping off the curb, but a long-haired freak who
steps off the plane while carrying dope is no accident.
I
said goodbye to the caravan as quickly as I could, leaving it to find new
stashes in pot-parched London while I hitched a ride with Miles Davis' band to
the Isle of Wight.
Miles' road manager rented a limousine but we had to wait while organist Keith
Jarrett, the least likely of the whole planeload, stripped for the Customs
inspectors. Then we had to
wait more than another hour while the Immigration officials tried to find the
band's working permits.
When
we finally got to the airport snack bar, the waitress snapped at Airto Moreira,
Miles' Brazilian percussionist, telling him he couldn't sit down unless he
ordered a meal. Airto, who'd stuck his head into the mouth of the Amazon to
roam through the jungles looking for new percussion instruments to play,
grimaced like a hideously painted coconut.
"I
hate this country!" he said.
Actually, England has its advantages.
One of them was our limousine, a Daimler, one of the great British
automobile masterpieces that crowds a lot of room into a little space.
We rode south to Portsmouth past the centuries of cultivated English
countryside, past the Texaco stations and the hedgerows and the rotaries and the
Edwardian pubs with their "Take Courage" signs, while Keith, Airto and
Gary Bartz, Miles' new alto player, discussed the futility of traveling all this
distance to play just one hour-long set.
When Portsmouth, the ancient capital of England's romance with the sea, finally spread itself out below us, I told the driver to take us to the Hovercraft landing. With the Isle of Wight rising seven miles off England's bottom across a strait called the Solent, there was
The
Hovercraft came
out of the darkness and up on the beach like some monster
no
way to get to it more exciting than by Hovercraft, a ship that skims over the
water on a cushion of air.
I
had taken the Hovercraft the year before, watching it come out of the darkness
and up onto the beach like some kind of Loch Ness Monster.
I didn't know that there were two types of Hovercraft, one of them with
more emphasis on capacity than showmanship.
Naturally the driver took us to the wrong one.
Somehow our luggage got aboard it but
Airto and I didn't.
We
had neglected to buy the necessary extra ticket and we watched from the dock
while it sailed off with the three other members of our party, past an atomic
submarine coming into the harbor and a row of frigates tied up at the naval
station dock.
We
waited for the next one with a queue that mixed English rock fans garbed in acid
freakiness with straight-arrow mechanics, their families and miniskirted
salesgirls off to the Wight beaches for the Bank Holiday weekend.
Airto leaned against a wooden piling, looked into the dark, murky water
and said:
"Never
again will I go anywhere like this without my woman."
On
the other side of the Solent, the others were waiting for us with taxis.
The Isle of Wight is where Queen Victoria used to spend her summers with
her children and where you can still leave the butter out all night.
Now, retired admirals and colonels live
on the Isle, both in its castles and in its newly built ranch house
developments. It is maybe the last piece of Empire that the British still own
and yet, after all these years, it is closer to Disneyland than it is to
England.
The drive over its narrow, winding
roads, through its post card villages, past its windmill and its gingerbread
cross?roads makes all the effort of getting there seem no more troublesome than
the price of a bleacher seat.
Why
would anyone want to hold a rock festival here, in one of the most inaccessible
places in all of England? We drove
to the Culver Lodge Hotel in Sandown, a block away from the English Channel,
with a great chalk cliff rising over the seascape.
The
hotel was a neat place, small and clean, but it had the feel of varicose veins,
where retired Army sergeants wounded in some dumb distant war came to spend
their pensioners' vacations and where apprentice pipefitters and their dime
store girlfriends, not yet introduced to the fast life, came to hide amid the
blandness for a shack job.
It
was maybe 3 a.m. New York time when I got there.
I took a walk down the beach, stuck a toe in the Channel and went back to
my room to sleep.
England
long ago left the continent, but if its distance, from France and the rest of
the world seems greater than ever now, the reason, of course, is that England is
on a trip. Turn on the telly and you'll find unabashed acid freaks
sharing almost equal time with the high-button faces that have survived the
Empire.
Where
else could you get Kenny Everett, in his stardust garb, with a beard that
outlines his face like a dope advertisement, certified to run one of the local
TV shows? Local? As Derek Taylor
says, all British television looks like it's coming from just down the road.
When
you watch Kenny on London Weekend, "Your Panic Station," you realize
that England's politicians are well aware that they'll now win or lose
elections on the votes of 18-year-olds and of the intellectualized suburbanites
who come home on the 6 o'clock out of Waterloo Station to be greeted by wifey
not with a cocktail but wit a big, fat joint.
What
about England, then, where the pollution from the chimneys is being challenged
by the smoke from hash pipes? Everybody
and his brother-in-law are going out on strike for some reason or another, but
if the country isn't at peace with itself it doesn't seem to have a single beef
with the rest of the world.
Britain
seems to drift further and further away, not giving a damn about the
international crises that could really send it on a trip. The country seems to
be having too jolly a time getting high to worry about the slogans France's
radical kids are shouting. Where
else is there a country so civilized that the cops don't carry guns and you can
smoke on public buses?
Even
the pimps play according to the rules in England, so you can imagine how
surprised everyone must have been, the English kids as well as promoters, when a
contingent of 600 French and Algerian anarchists showed up at the 1970 Isle of
Wight pop festival.
When Bob Dylan
played the Isle of Wight the year before, England had never witnessed so
conspicuous a pilgrimage. From Wick, at the northernmost tip of Scotland, and
from Perth, Edinburgh, New?castle, Liverpool, Sheffield, Ipswich and all the
cities to the south of Wick it was as if England's young blood was rushing
from its head to its feet.
With rucksacks on
their shoulders and bright, hopeful innocence on their faces, thousands of kids
hitch?hiked on the roadsides or crowded onto buses and railroad cars in a
pilgrimage to experience the presence of the man who had given them their ethic.
For the first time in history, the ferries across the Solent kept
operating all night.
For
the week that Dylan was in England, the press never took its eyes off him, or
him off its front pages. Reporters,
photo?graphers and cameramen camped outside the 16th Century stone farm?house
where he was quartered, trying to catch his every word and movement.
The
125,000 kids who slept in the chilly cornfields of Wootton Creek, who waited
hours in line for a moment of odious relief in the handful of filth-ridden
portable toilets, who all but starved on overpriced fish and chips--they hadn't
come for Joe Cocker or the Who or the Moody Blues or Richie Havens. In 1969, the
Isle of Wight pop festival was Bob Dylan's festival.
In 1970, the Isle of Wight pop festival was something else.
By
the time I flew in from Bembridge Airport by helicopter, landing in a rutted
field outside the stage entrance at the festival site, the battle to preserve
the integrity of the gate had already been lost. So had the battle to preserve the integrity of the festival.
This year, the festival was at a site different from the year before.
This
year the festival site was alongside Afton Down, on the Southwestern coastal heights of the
island, where a 16-year-old kid tripping on LSD could fall 200 feet down a cliff
if he took just one misstep.
This year, the stage was bigger.
The arena enclosure was bigger. There
were more food stalls and a greater variety of foods.
Some of the dressing room trailers even had water closets, a non-existent
commodity backstage the year before. If
it was Bob Dylan's festival the year before, this year it was the festival's
festival.
I ran into Jan Hodenfield, the Rolling Stone
correspondent, who seemed to be always outraged by success.
"There are a lot of sharks in the music
business," he said. "But
this is a festival of minnows."
Where were all those respectful English kids who had
waited with such awesome silence the year before for the heavens to open up
while Bob Dylan descended on a golden staircase? Who's to say he didn't?
Even this year, they weren't quite ready for those
French and Algerian anarchists who came equipped with duplicating "machines and
lorries to cart away stolen kitchen equipment away. They also came with Maoist
harangues, recited as if someone had robotized them with transistorized tape
equipment in their heads.
They
had come prepared to destroy the festival, as if it already weren't poised to
do itself in. Listen to 24-year-old Ray Foulk, one of the festival promoters:
"It
doesn't matter how much we give in to them, they still keep looking for a fight.
They don't want free music, they just want to cause enough of an uproar
so that police or troops will have to be sent in."
By
the time I got there, the French and the Algerians, aided by the British White
Panthers, The British Hell's Angels and American radical splinter groups, had
already won the battle of Devastation Hill, the 80-foot-high ridge which ran the
length of the arena and which provided a free grandstand view of the stage.
An attempt by the festival security force, equipped with Alsatian police
dogs, to clear the Hill was beaten back by the thousands camped there.
Some fans were bitten. Others, said to be Americans riding on motorcycles, fired back at the dogs with air rifles. When the promoters tried to fence off the ridge with a 10-foot-?high corrugated metal barrier, the freaks on the ridge carried off the material for
Everybody
who
was anybody
was there the year before
use
as lean-tos. The promoters' secret
weapon---high-powered searchlights to beam up into the eyes of the campers on
the ridge---also ultimately failed.
The
year before, just about every music celebrity who happened to be in England
crowded into the press enclosure at the foot of the stage to hear Dylan.
Three of the Beatles were there, sitting as sort of a guard of honor.
Of the Beatles this year, only George's wife, Pattie, attended.
The difference between last year's Isle of Wight festival and this
year's Isle of Wight festival was the difference between shopping on Fifth
Avenue and shopping on 14th Street.
Backstage,
a pop festival is like a performers? convention. I think about my days as a
police reporter, remembering some roped-off street in front of some blazing
block of buildings, where I would hobnob with the mayor, the councilmen, the
chaplains, the Salvation Army canteen staff and the police and fire department
brass, all of whom I otherwise would never see gathered together at any other
type of occasion.
A
pop festival is like an eruption, like a tidal wave, like a battleground, a
historic moment of spontaneous emergency, exploding, inevitably, on some least
likely geographic location, engulfing all with panic and with heroism, with
legend and with dung. No matter how
well laid out, a pop festival can always get out of hand.
Can you really enjoy a disaster? All
that remains is to relish the excitement.
Backstage,
it was like a party in the midst of a plague.
Woodstock was a year gone and 3,000 miles away, but England was trying to
re-live it. I must admit there were pleasant similarities. There were vibrations
that reminded me of the happy bantering and roaring reunions that took place
amid the tables in the performers' pavilion between rainstorms up on Max
Yasgur's farm.
At
the Isle of Wight, for instance, I remember the simple joy of passing a bottle
around with John Sebastian, Roger Daltrey, Robbie Krieger and Jim Morrison, who
had flown to the festival to perform during a weekend break in his obscenity and
morals trial in Miami.
With
the five of us getting drunk amid the tents and trailers behind the big wooden
ramp leading to the stage, Jim talked about how it was to be at the defense
table listening to the testimony unfold as if it were a story being told about
someone else.
"At
first I thought maybe I was guilty." Jim said, "but now I'm beginning
to think I wasn't."
I
remember sitting in the chill Wight darkness around a campfire of two metal
garbage burners along with the Apple contingent, headed by Terry Doran, George
Harrison's right-hand man, while two roadies dressed as skinheads played Frisbee
off to the side.
But
there was something strange in this temporary city of light, blazing like a
cataclysm in the middle of a rural black nowhere. There was something uneven about the magic of this isle.
You would be having fun and then suddenly you would not.
It was like falling off one of the chalk cliffs that overlooked the
English Channel.
When
I arrived, it was Saturday and the festival was already three days old.
There was Zal Yanovsky sitting at a table beneath a beach umbrella in the
beer garden. Inside the cafeteria
tent, Lord Montague, an avid fan of pop stars, was busy making up a guest list
for a party aboard his yacht. Wearing
a sweater, Steve Leber, the No. 1 agent at William Morris, was presiding over
the servicing of all his clients.
Pop
photographer Jim Marshall was threatening to murder a balding, dark-suited
festival official who kept calling for guards to throw the man out.
Bert Block, who had booked all the American acts, was busy with promoter
Ray Foulk in a backstage tent, counting out English banknotes from a paper bag
into piles arranged on the ground so they could pay off one of the performers.
One
of the first to greet me was Kris Kristofferson, who had played earlier in the
week to a barrage of empty soda pop cans from the radicals in the audience.
"Have
you been out front yet?" he said. "I
just took a walk through the crowd. Man
it's a real down trip!"
A
hand grenade had been thrown at the turnstiles at the main gate to prevent the
collection of tickets. Undercover police were scouring the hillside looking for a
pusher they called "The Acid Man." They also were raiding tents full of
pot smokers.
I
talked to Lewis Chester of the London Sunday Times. He had just filed
this report of a conversation between promoter Ron Foulk and the head of his
security force, who had rushed up to tell about an assault being mounted on the
South gate:
Foulk: Well, transfer
men from the North.
Security Man:
Hopeless. They're up there too.
And it's our most vulnerable section.
I've got all our dogs and most of our Land Rovers up there.
Foulk: How about from
here, then?
Security Man: Daren't risk it. (Some of the unaccredited are apparently contemplating storm trooper tactics to make an assault on the Press enclosure.)
Foulk: Well, if it
gets too bad there's only one thing you can do.
Security Man: What's
that?
Foulk: Dial 999.
Nine-nine-nine,
of course, is England's 911---the number to dial to get the police in a hurry.
According
to the Foulk brothers, this would be the last Isle of Wight festival.
Who wants to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to sponsor a
disaster?
As
for the music, it came almost non-stop, except for the long set changes, with
the Saturday night show lasting past the dawn Sunday morning.
I remember Sly Stone waking up the audience of some 500,000 kids, give or
take a hundred thousand, making his entrance with the 7 a.m. sun.
He had wanted to go on in Melanie's time slot, about 5 a.m., when the first light of dawn hit the ridge at Afton Down. Through his agent, Steve Leber, he even tried to buy
Most
of the crowd
was asleep by the time
Melanie got onstage
Melanie's
turn, Steve was her agent, too, but Melanie had been there for days, waiting to
go on, rearranging her future bookings and postponing her European vacation each
day that her own performance was set back.
"I
wouldn't sell for a million dollars," her manager said.
By
the time Melanie went onstage most of the crowd was asleep.
She worked valiantly to be remembered.
When Sly appeared, he refused to be filmed even though Murray Lerner,
with the contract to shoot the Isle of Wight Festival movie, pleaded with him.
"You
can't buy light like this for a million dollars," Murray kept saying.
Sly said he would come back for another show that night but never did.
The bottles and cans thrown at Kris Kristofferson
was an undeserved reception for one of the best songwriters of the 1970s. That
prompted Procol Harum to come on with a rocker set rather than dwell on the Whiter
Shade of Pale tempos that characterized most of the rest of their repertory.
"It's too cold to play anything slow," lead
singer Gary Brooker explained. Chicago
had dominated its evening. Cactus
ended the Friday night show at 3 a.m. Saturday, with the audience in bedrolls.
Did you ever sleep with the radio on all night?
Can you imagine the radio to be live music?
The
weekend kept building. Miles Davis
astounded the audience with music that refused to be jazz, refused to be rock,
refused to be anything but Miles. At
the age of 44, he remains more avant-garde than anybody.
David Bromberg astounded himself. He
kept being called back for encores, thinking everybody was putting him on.
There
was Ten Years After, there was the Doors, there was Richie Havens, there was
Leonard Cohen, there was the cast of thousands. But for me the high point was
Jimi Hendrix.
Ironically,
this would be his last major public appearance---an epic two-and-a-half-hour
set. He sang in a voice that was louder, stronger and that had more style and
self-assurance than I had ever heard from him.
And yet there was also something strange about his performance at the Isle of Wight.
Something
discordant and yet beautiful, something alarming and yet pure.
When he came onstage, dressed in the garish flamboyance that always made
him look like an off-duty buccaneer, he turned toward the audience and said:
"It'd
be better if you stand up and start singing for your country.
If you don't, fuck it!"
Now,
looking back, it seems as if he said it with a snarl.
Immediately he began playing England's National Anthem, God Save the
Queen, but with the same sound effects that he had played The Star
Spangled Banner at the Woodstock festival, sound effects that made you hear
dive-bombers and explosions and machinegun fire and children crying.
He
played the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and he
played Bob Dylan's Along the Watchtower, introducing it as "another
song we did in the year of 1833, and I think it's pretty true today."
He
played with a loudness and a fierceness that seemed to surpass all of his
previous predilections toward those qual?ities, and in the enchanted night of
that quaint Victorian island, with a smoky haze coming offstage and drifting low
over the crowd, you felt as if you were in some kind of inferno of sound, with
smoke literally coming from the amps.
Some
people began to leave. There were women who said they were frightened by Jimi.
Onstage, Jimi had amplifier trouble.
"It's
taking a little time to get into it because we haven't got it all together,?
Jimi said. "But I'm gonna stay here all night until somebody boos."
By
2 a.m., with three acts still waiting to go on, the festival officials were
threatening to cut off Jimi's power if he didn't finish his set.
Jimi had promised to get off at the first boo, and that was it.
When
Jimi finished, one of promoter Ray Foulk's own hired hands set off a magnesium
flare atop the corrugated metal roof of the stage as part of an environmental
display and firemen had to be called, putting Foulk in further trouble with the
island government. As he stood watching the blaze with his jaw dropped he said
he would never do another festival again.
"I've
lost all faith," he explained.
Foulk
had managed to stage the show after strong opposition from various factions on
the island, mostly from the retired admirals and colonels. Twice he had to
change the site and in the end there
were only three weeks left for him to build his tiny city.
The
24-year-old promoter, who spent more than a half million dollars putting the
festival together, said he was going to lose money on this one, financed for the
most part with the profits he earned from Dylan's appearance the year before.
Some estimates of his losses ran
as high as
$62,000 but Foulk was hoping to recoup the money from the recording rights and
from the film that Murray Lerner was shooting. They
had overrun the refreshment stands and the food stores, ransacking some and
setting others on fire. By
destroying this festival, they had destroyed any future festivals.
It
was when they cut the tele?phone wires that I left. I was on a deadline and I
had to phone in a story. Joan Baez
was singing as I drove away.
On
a road banked by high hedgerows with a name that even the taxi driver didn't
know, riding past centuries-old stone houses with thatched roofs that proclaimed
all history to be straw, I looked back into the darkness and saw the lights
against the sky rising like a halo over a nation of children, another city built
right in the middle of nowhere for five days, another army of the young encamped
in a field in the name of music.
0n
both sides of the road, they were pouring homeward now, walking the 22 miles to
the ferry esplanade at Ryde like an endless procession of refugees, sticking
their thumbs out at the passing cars without even bothering to turn around,
feeble gestures for rides they knew they wouldn't get. In the blackness I
wondered how many of them were going to be run down before daylight.
The taxi driver honked his horn.
"They
won't bloody move, will they?? he, said.
In the end a
festival is just a party. I thought
of all the trouble it takes to get to the Isle of Wight and I looked at them
walking with their rucksacks on their backs, with their tents and their
bedrolls. They were too impatient to wait with the other thousands queued up for
buses throughout the day in mile-long lines, or too broke to pay the fare.
Was
the sound of Joan Baez singing The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
ringing in their ears? Back there
under the halo, she was still on stage, her flawless voice pleading for justice
with the night while the diehards lay wrapped in blankets beneath the smoky haze
and thousands of others were still lined up for fish and chips at the rows of
concessionaire stalls.
I
am weary of all this and I am disgusted with festivals and yet I can still feel
the magic in the air. I look out
the car window at the disintegration of this pilgrimage and I remember driving
over the same roads the year before with drummer Levon Helm of the Band, riding
through the early morning dark?ness to see the same throng of kids walking with
the same-rucksacks and I remember how Levon, overwhelmed by the hardship these
kids were willing to go through to hear him play, suddenly rolled down the car
window and cried out:
"They're
beautiful."
And
he made the driver stop and he started handing out food that he had bought to
bring back to the other members of the Band trapped in their hotel room.
And
now, on the taxi's radio, there's Levon singing All La Glory.
Yes, I am weary and I look out the taxi window at the walking kids and I wonder to myself what is the point of it all? And then I realize there is no point except these are our children. ##
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