1969 1: Spooky Tooth, Liverpool Scene and Adrian Henri, Rolling Stone
Most of the recent forty year anniversaries – Man on the Moon, Stonewall, Manson, Woodstock – have been well-represented in the media, often by thoughtful documentaries. (Even the recent Linda Kasabian drama/doc had its moments). It was an incredibly compressed year, as the whole momentum of the sixties accelerated towards some kind of climax (or, as Rolling Stone preferred, The Apocalypse): coming up next, The Isle of Wight through> Altamont. I turned 16 in September 1969, so it was a pretty heightened time for me. It was the year that I started going to rock concerts, for one. I saw the Who that August in a tiny Assembly Hall in Worthing, down on the South Coast – about ten days before they played Woodstock. It was a warm-up date for the Plumpton Festival, so they’d brought their full festival gear. They came on the stage in this beautiful old panelled room, plugged in, did the riff to I Can’t Explain and from then on it was an onslaught, a perfect storm of amplified noise. My ears were still ringing three days later.
It was also the year that I started buying Rolling Stone. At the time it was a major break from the British pop press – still hamstrung (as we would have thought it then) by having to be pop. How could you reconcile Des O’Connor – high in the charts with Dick A Dum Dum – with the Archies, the Plastic Ono Band and Jethro Tull? Would you want to? In place of Derek Johnson’s lame singles reviews in the New Musical Express or Jonathan King’s irritating column in Disc and Music Echo you could read very early Lester Bangs (when he was still young and open, before the schtick had taken over), Greil Marcus, Edmund O. Ward and long articles about youth movement politics, the underground press, Groupies, and the MC5. It was us and them time: a generational war between young and old.
I was clutching a copy of RS issue number 30 (American Revolution 1969: the cover pic showed a cop holding down a bloodied protester with his baton) when I went to my first ever gig somewhere in Central London that April. Spooky Tooth were headlining over the Liverpool Scene. I was extremely self-conscious about my short hair: having been reliably informed that hippies would slip LSD into your drink when you weren’t looking (the Rohypnol scare of the day), I also spent most of those couple of hours with my hand over the polystyrene cup that contained a luke-warm coke. To my untutored eyes, both groups were brilliant: the Tooth were loud, hairy and blues-rock monolithic. The Liverpool Scene were far more random, a happening pulled together by disparate personalities, but they played their doo-wop pastiche, The Woo Woo (featuring Bobby and the Helmets), and an endless version of Love Is…., with Adrian Henri flinging himself around the small stage. ‘Love is feeling cold in the back of vans, Love is a fan club with only two fans…’ ad infinitum.
Both groups had albums out at the time. Both are still available. Spooky Two still sounds great, an acquired taste to be sure, but they set up a mood and never let it go. The cover is classic early 1969: they’re getting it together in the country (mud on the Kings Road gear) – an idea pioneered in the UK by Traffic – and the whole thing screams peak period Pink Island, with a gatefold cover and Jimmy Miller as producer bringing in his gospel patch. The group appear cheerful on the sleeve, but the lyrics begin with those old blues tropes, explore various states of heartbreak and end up in a gothic place with the final cut, Hangman Hang My Shell On A Tree. Punk blues misogyny rears its head on the nine minute Evil Woman but the rest is a fine mixture of psychedelia (Lost In A Dream), monster riffage (Better By You, Better Than Me – excerpted on the You Can All Join In sampler) and, on Waiting For The Wind, a killer breakbeat from Mike Kellie – later to join the Only Ones.
Amazing Adventures Of… by the Liverpool Scene is less homogenous. Produced by John Peel, it has a gate-fold sleeve with the band members – Adrian Henri, Mike Hart, Mike Evans, Percy Jones and Brian Dodson (I can’t see Andy Roberts) grouped together with their mates outside O’Connor’s Tavern in Hardman Street. (Thanks to Paul du Noyer for info: check out his book on Liverpool music past and present, Wondrous Place). There’s a long, loose impressionistic number (Tramcar to Frankenstein), a blues, a folky Liverpool travelogue (Gliders and Parks), a pure slice of Peelian whimsy – Andy Roberts’ Percy Parslow’s Hamster Farm: a very English country idyll – and Adrian Henri’s briliant Batpoem. Mike Evans’ live reading of The Amazing Adventures of Che Guevara – ‘The real Che Guevara emerges in Snowdonia….’ – weaves in and out. It’s a good record of a particularly British moment – that mixture of hippies with happenings, of poets with pop musicians – that has been largely forgotten.
Ten years later I spent a lot of time with Adrian Henri at his home in Mount Street, Liverpool. His then partner, Carol Ann Duffy, was writing scripts for Margi Clarke, appearing on Granada TV as Margox. I was her researcher: that was the connection. The house was (and still is) a beautiful early Regency building filled with books, pictures and High Victorian ephemera – the epitome of a certain kind of sixties taste. If you were staying there, there was one big drawback: the toilet was in the basement, three floors down. You’d stagger down there at 3am in whatever altered state, only to be confronted by a life-size photo of the very severe Doris Speed, who played Annie Walker, the landlady of the Rovers’ Return in Coronation Street. It was very disturbing. When I visited Liverpool in 2007, I met Adrian’s partner Catherine Marcangeli, who very kindly showed me round the house: it had hardly changed, a total time capsule, a shrine to a remarkable person. Adrian was unfailingly generous and patient with all the mania going on around him: a perfect gentleman and, in his gentle way, a real educator.
To end with, here are a couple of 1969 playlists, all from original 45′s — A lot of blues rock, but that’s the way it was…
1969: Year of the Rooster, Part 1
- The Emperor of Wyoming – Neil Young
- Superman – The Clique
- Petrol Pump Assistant – Fat Mattress
- Badge – Cream
- Good Times Bad Times – Led Zeppelin
- I’ve Got A Line On You – Spirit
- The Loner – Neil Young
- Creeping Jean – Dave Davies
- Days of the Broken Arrows – Idle Race
- Dear Jill – Blodwyn Pig
- The Games People Play – Joe South
- Get Back – The Beatles
- Waiting For The Wind – Spooky Tooth
- Man Of The World – Fleetwood Mac
- Living In The Past – Jethro Tull
- Rock Me – Steppenwolf
- Goo Goo Barabajagal – Donovan and the Jeff Beck Group
- Crosstown Traffic – Jimi Hendrix
- Walk On Gilded Splinters – Cher
- Pinball Wizard – The Who
- King Kong – The Kinks
- Wham Bam Thank You M’am – The Small Faces
- Someone’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonite – Vince Earl and the Valiants
- I’ll Be Creeping – Free
- Peace Loving Man – Blossom Toes
Part 2
- The Ballad of John and Yoko – The Beatles
- Born To Be Wild – Steppenwolf
- Better By You Better Than Me – Spooky Tooth
- Well All Right – Blind Faith
- Green River – Creedence Clearwater Revival
- Something In The Air – Thunderclap Newman
- The Boxer – Simon & Garfunkel
- Honky Tonk Women – The Rolling Stones
- Old Brown Shoe – The Beatles
- Comin’ Home – Delaney And Bonnie
- Lie To Me – Kaleidoscope
- Kick Out The Jams – MC5
- Communication Breakdown – Led Zeppelin
- Cold Turkey – Plastic Ono Band
- Rain – Hard Meat
- A Salty Dog – Procul Harum
- If You Can’t Learn From Your Mistakes – Moby Grape
- No Mules Fool – Family
- Dark Eyed Woman – Spirit
- Darkness Darkness – The Youngbloods
- Oh Well Pt 1 – Fleetwood Mac
- Can’t Find My Way Home – Blind Faith
- Jesus – The Velvet Underground