All Right Now: One Fan's Discretionary History of Rock 'n' Roll in the 1960s & 1970s (Part 4)

Gigs, concerts, festivals, tours.

It was not until the late 1960s that rock 'n' roll duly came into its own as one of the performing arts. With manifold advances in sound and lighting, bands now had a formidable array of special tools that permitted them to showcase their music in a more impressive manner than ever before. Bill Graham, an ambitious, forward-looking promoter in San Francisco, became the preeminent mover and shaker in the rough-and-ready business of musical presentation, admittedly making lots of money for himself, but also toiling diligently for the benefit of musicians and audiences, thereby raising rock 'n' roll above its earlier, lower standing as a dodgy, dishonest, fly-by-night operation. At the Fillmore West (his flagship) in San Francisco, the Fillmore East in New York City, and at other venues, the concerts and the tours (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, George Harrison, Bob Dylan) promoted by Bill Graham were always regarded as being the summit of excellence in live music. Many performers counted themselves as extremely lucky to have Bill Graham in their corner, brashly exercising his irascible shrewdness on behalf of their dreams, doing his utmost as their ally and their patron, nurturing their potential and boosting them into fame.

Some of the best performances of rock 'n' roll in the late 1960s happened at festivals. On a weekend in June, 1967, the KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival, held atop Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, featured music by The Byrds, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Grass Roots, The Merry-Go-Round, The Seeds, and others. A week later, also in California, the Monterey International Pop Festival presented three days of music, with The Mamas and The Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, The Who, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Eric Burdon and The Animals, Otis Redding, Big Brother and The Holding Company, The Blues Project, Lou Rawls, Johnny Rivers, and Laura Nyro among the many performers. In August, 1969, at a rainy site near Woodstock, New York, dozens of bands, including The Who, Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Mountain, and Santana, played to 400,000 bedraggled hippies, who listened while affably mired in acres of mud. On December 6, 1969, The Rolling Stones hastily (and foolishly) staged their own makeshift festival (free to all comers, with 300,000 fans showing up) at a remote speedway in northern California, but it went violently awry, turning nasty and devilish and murderous, and was roundly condemned as a bad trip by everyone concerned.

After The Beatles went through a fraught breakup in 1970, turning on each other, getting into angry disputes over business matters, and grievously dismaying their fans, the musical void that they left was ably occupied by other performers. The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Eric Clapton, Jethro Tull, and Pink Floyd all raised their game during the early 1970s, undertaking hefty, lucrative tours which caused their albums and singles to sell at a staggering pace. Together, they were perceived as belonging to a new upper crust of rock 'n' roll: a lofty club of snooty, highflying musicians whose enviable lives of wealth and luxury were far removed from the less prosperous lives of those who bought costly tickets to see them strut their stuff on the huge stages of arenas and stadiums. The inevitable drawback of performing on such a grand scale was that musicians were more apt to become full of themselves, more apt to lose touch with their audiences, and, even worse, more apt to misuse their talent. In the meantime, all four ex-Beatles were still creating music, each of them making their own records. (Paul McCartney, craving a return to the buzz of playing a gig, even formed a new band, Wings, and took to the road.)

Living near San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s meant that I had an opportunity to attend outstanding performances (most of them promoted by Bill Graham) by many of the most famous musicians of that period.* I usually preferred to see British musicians, partly because of my own British background, and partly because of their obliging readiness to fully engage with an audience: they went out of their way to offer unashamed displays of overt showmanship, conveying much excitement. (They also tended to have the best hair and the best clothes, courtesy of the hairdressers and the boutiques that lined the King's Road in Chelsea.) American musicians, while having an unarguable abundance of talent, were generally less flashy as performers, being loath to do anything that might be construed as having surrendered the unvarnished purity of their music to the degrading obligations of "showbiz." Whenever I saw British musicians perform, however, I always went home knowing that I had been given all my money's worth, allowing me to take away the glowing conviction of having seen something to be remembered and treasured.

All the performances that I attended in those days gave me a thrill, leaving me with a store of priceless memories, but some of them were truly unforgettable. The Beatles, making their final, frantic appearance onstage at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, in August, 1966. The Byrds, alighting on Mount Tamalpais, heralding the Summer of Love with their smooth vocal harmonies in June, 1967. The Rolling Stones, rocking their hardest while hurling themselves over the edge and into a caldron of mayhem at the Altamont Speedway in December, 1969. David Bowie, a lithe, orange-haired, unearthly apparition, brazenly seducing an awestruck crowd as Ziggy Stardust in October, 1972. Led Zeppelin, battering the willing ears of their fans (and the unwilling ears of everyone who lived in the surrounding neighborhood), with a storm of clamorous sounds at Kezar Stadium in June, 1973. Sandy Denny, gracefully leading Fairport Convention, blessing the evening with the rare beauty of her dulcet voice in November, 1974. Alex Harvey, his face adorned with a sinister grin, mischievously prowling from one side of the stage to the other, doing whatever it took to provoke his audience in April, 1975.

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Throughout the years under discussion, I was in a musical trance, completely enthralled by the glory and wonder of rock 'n' roll. I took pains to discover, and to hear, as much music as I could, I studiously read publications (Melody Maker, Sounds, New Musical Express, Rolling Stone) that covered the latest happenings in rock (scanning them with the faithful seriousness of a cloistered monk examining holy texts), and I talked (knowledgeably and, perhaps, a bit long-windedly) about music with friends and acquaintances. Rock 'n' roll gave me a driving motive, an unconfined creed in which I found sanctuary, a propitious justification for pushing myself onward from one dreary dawn to the next, when the youthful mutability of my day-to-day life was less than conducive to a beneficial prospect of confidence and satisfaction. Even today, my enduring love of rock 'n' roll continues to be a reliable antidote to the dismal threat of stiff, gutless conformity, and sustains me in my ongoing battle against the vexing snarl of injurious tribulations that inevitably ensues when one tries to be a rational human being amid the shrill madness of an irrational world.

The rock 'n' roll of my youth embodied a tempting promise of musical salvation. It had a seemingly infinite capacity to subvert and transmute, to swiftly thrust a pliant listener from one sensibility to another: from weak to strong, from passive to active, from broken to whole, all within the fleeting space of an unbeatable song. I submit that, if hearing "Any Way You Want It" by The Dave Clark Five, or "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" by The Bryds, or "7 and 7 Is" by Love, or "That's the Way" by The Kit Kats, or "Sweet Blindness" by Laura Nyro, or "Victoria" by The Kinks, or "Speed King" by Deep Purple, or "Brown Sugar" by The Rolling Stones, or "Baba O'Riley" by The Who, or "Suffragette City" by David Bowie, or "Metal Guru" by T. Rex, or "Mama Weer All Crazee Now" by Slade, or "Dancing Days" by Led Zeppelin, or "Boy Blue" by The Electric Light Orchestra does not cause a spark of unguarded joy within a listener, does not rouse a person into a feverish condition of unfiltered awareness, does not awaken a numb citizen from the blank servitude of their walking slumber, does not incite an adamant, desperate resolve to throw off the slippery delusions that pollute the depraved mainstream and flee, without waver or delay, from the woeful stupor of blithe convention, then nothing can.

From the middle of the 1970s, rock 'n' roll started to change again, and it was a change for the worse. Worthwhile music could still be heard, but too much fast money was being harvested, by musicians and by other, less deserving people, which made rock 'n' roll more and more corrupt, turning it into a vile, corporate industry, a grubby racket run by ruthless creeps who knew, and cared, little or nothing about music. Every album was treated, by gaggles of greedy, unprincipled executives, as a gold mine to be stripped, as a pit of riches into which they could plunge their foul, filthy hands (as bitingly described in Pink Floyd's "Have a Cigar," a track from their album, Wish You Were Here). Every album had to sell millions and millions of copies, or else be totally written off as an abject flop. Later came disco (which I hated), punk rock (The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, The Jam, Elvis Costello, The Ramones, and Patti Smith, all of whom I greatly liked), and reggae (which I also liked). Rock 'n' roll soldiered on through the 1980s and 1990s, losing ground to hip-hop and electronica, declining and foundering, ending up irreparably diminished and on the sidelines by the close of the 20th century. The best years, the years when rock 'n' roll was at its shining zenith, were those that fell between 1965 and 1975.

I am now in my late sixties, warily glancing ahead to the advent of my seventies, getting forebodingly older with every passing day, but my lifelong obeisance to the vigorous allure of rock 'n' roll is as deep as ever. I can still get carried away by the unruly sound of guitars, keyboards, and drums being played with abandon. I still listen to the music that seized my green spirit when I was a much younger person, and I am happy to report that, notwithstanding my indelicate slide into elderly ruin, it still has the invaluable ability to summon a positive response from the creaky wasteland of my gnarled, worn-out essence. When I hear the imperishable songs that fostered my unfledged mentality in the 1960s and 1970s, it does not, of course, cause me to become physically young, but it never fails to stir the faint remnants of the wide-eyed stripling that I briefly was, the unbowed contender that I used to be, during those distant, irretrievable decades. (Which, in the case of listening to something along the lines of say, "Zabadak!" by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, can be, at the very least, mildly confusing.) To sum up, putting it as succinctly as I can: I still believe in rock 'n' roll.

*The 30 best performances that I saw in my younger days (arranged chronologically):

1. The Beatles, The Ronettes, The Cyrkle, Bobby Hebb, The Remains (Candlestick Park, San Francisco, 1966)

2. The Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplane, The Seeds, The Sopwith Camel, The Music Machine, The Royal Guardsmen (San Francisco Civic Auditorium, 1966)

3. The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, The Seeds, The Grass Roots, The Merry-Go-Round (KFRC Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival, Marin County, 1967)

4. Judy Collins/with Stephen Stills (Berkeley Community Theater, 1969)

5. The Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Jefferson Airplane, Santana (Altamont Speedway, Livermore, 1969)

6. Jeff Beck, Argent (Berkeley Community Theater, 1972)

7. Faces/with Rod Stewart (Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, 1972)

8. Pink Floyd/Dark Side of the Moon (Winterland, San Francisco, 1972)

9. David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust (Winterland, San Francisco, 1972)

10. Traffic, Free, John Martyn (Winterland, San Francisco, 1973)

11. The Kinks (Winterland, San Francisco, 1973)

12. Humble Pie, Slade (Winterland, San Francisco, 1973

13. Procol Harum, The Strawbs, Terry Reid (Winterland, San Francisco, 1973)

14. Led Zeppelin (Kezar Stadium, San Francisco, 1973)

15. Jethro Tull/A Passion Play (Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, 1973)

16. Elton John (Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, 1973)

17. Mott the Hoople (Winterland, San Francisco, 1973)

18. Mark-Almond, Wishbone Ash, Robin Trower (Winterland, San Francisco, 1973)

19. The Moody Blues (Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, 1974)

20. Emerson, Lake & Palmer (San Francisco Civic Auditorium, 1974)

21. Hawkwind, Man (Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, 1974)

22. Yes/Tales from Topographic Oceans (Winterland, San Francisco, 1974)

23. Genesis (Winterland, San Francisco,1974)

24. Alan Price (Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, 1974)

25. Cat Stevens (Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, 1974)

26. Eric Clapton (Cow Palace, Daly City, 1974)

27. George Harrison, Ravi Shankar (Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, 1974)

28. Caravan (Keystone Berkeley, 1974)

29. Fairport Convention/with Sandy Denny (Berkeley Community Theater, 1974)

30. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band (San Francisco Civic Auditorium, 1975)