Part 3 in the article series about blues rock in 1970 focuses on four bands from the British Isles, all releasing fantastic albums that year. We start with a band that included one of my all-time favorite guitar players, who unfortunately parted ways with the group in 1970.
In December of 1969 Fleetwood Mac started a US tour that zigzagged across the country and included performances at prestigious venues such as the Fillmore East and West, and two engagements at the Boston Tea Party. The club opened as a rock music hall in January 1967 and became a staple venue for local and international rock bands. In 1969 you could catch many of the era’s best groups including Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Chicago, The Who, Procol Harum, Grateful Dead, Spirit, Santana and many others. Fleetwood Mac were near the end of their US tour when they reached the club on February 5 1970, engaged to play for three nights with James Gang as the opening act.
The band was in turmoil at the time, with its leader guitarist Peter Green deeply struggling with an LSD habit and distancing himself from the rest of the band. Drummer Mick Fleetwood remembers: “He took to wearing robes, caftans, and a huge wooden crucifix. He grew his hair and beard very long and when he spoke to the press he would only discuss his search for God.” Listening to the performance sets that were recorded at the Boston Tea Party, you can’t tell that this is a band at a crossroad. They play a mix of blues numbers, original songs and long jams that showcase everyone’s chops and none more so than Peter Green, undisputedly one of the best blues rock guitar players that ever was.
One of the songs the band started playing at the time, which closes their first set in Boston, is ‘The Green Manalishi (With the Two Prong Crown)’. Fleetwood recalls in his autobiography how Green wanted his bandmates to donate all their income to charity causes to support the poor and needy of the world: “Peter grew more disillusioned, more sensitive, and increasingly hurt by the suffering he saw all around him. On tour I’d find him in his hotel room crying at the evening news and at one point he gave £12,000 to various charities. Then he approached the band and asked that we give all of our earnings to charities of our choosing.” This of course did not bode well with the rest of the group. The Green Manalishi was written when Green experienced a dream after taking LSD. In his dream a green dog barked at him from the afterlife. He took it that the dog represented money. “It scared me because I knew the dog had been dead a long time. It was a stray and I was looking after it. But I was dead and had to fight to get back into my body, which I eventually did. When I woke up, the room was really black and I found myself writing the song.”
Mick Fleetwood adds more details about the origin of the song: “The tune is about the devil, the darkness within, and the alluring temptation of descending into madness. He wrote it one night after waking from a nightmare. Gripped with terror and paralyzed by dread, Peter was unable to breathe. When he was finally capable, he grabbed his guitar and a pen and paper and wrote out the chords and lyrics. The song came out of him in a feverish sweat and we recorded it just as it was written, changing nothing.”
The Green Manalishi is a tour de force blues rock psychedelic performance. The recording at the Boston Tea Party is the first documented performance of the song, in an extended form. Notice the great hi-hat work by Mick Fleetwood, about which he talked in his book: “What I would call my first proper solo used to come at the end of ‘Green Manalishi’ when Peter would do long six-string bass improvisations. They would sometimes last twenty minutes and begin with just me on hi-hat, and eventually some drums. That same hi-hat style is there in what I do today, because I play one all the way through ‘World Turning’ which is a part of my solo section today. When we did it on ‘Manalishi’, it served as an intermission of sorts, and that moment has remained in the band’s live show in one way or another ever since.”
Shortly after the tour ended the band recorded a shorter version and released it as a single in May 1970. Just weeks later Peter Green left the band for good. In an interview to Beat Instrumental magazine in June 1970 he said: “I have started to give away some bread. I’m giving away the money I don’t need and which I’ll never use. As long as I’ve got the instruments and equipment I need as a musician, I don’t need any flash houses and cars.“ Many years later Peter Green was asked if he still listens to his old records. He said: “No I don’t. It took me so long to record those things that I really know them quite well.” Pressed to name a few songs, he cited Green Manalishi as one that endures for him.
Peter Green – guitar, vocals, six string bass on Green Manalishi
Jeremy Spencer – guitar, vocals, piano, percussion
Danny Kirwan – guitar, vocals
John McVie – bass guitar
Mick Fleetwood – percussion, drums
In 1970 Ten Years After were at the peak of their success, following their performance at Woodstock festival in August 1969. Despite electric shocks from the rainwater that had soaked their equipment, they managed to give an epic performance of their tune ‘Going Home’. The Woodstock film was released in March 1970 and a month later the band released their fourth album, Cricklewood Green. The album includes the hit ‘Love Like a Man, their only single to reach the top 10 in the UK charts.
‘Love Like a Man’ features one of the best-known riffs in blues rock history. Bass player Leo Lyons, who came up with that signature riff: “It was a piece of luck. The riff came out of the air and my fingers fell on it. I played the idea to the band during a jam session and we made it into a song. It’s not technically difficult or an unusual musical sequence but I guess it hit a spot.”
The full version of the song that was released on the album features wonderful electric guitar playing by Alvin Lee. For listeners familiar with his work this was not unusual. Lee has been known to play extended, energetic solos at live performances. The single release, however, was shortened by cutting off the whole solo. Lee commented on this when he spoke to Melody Maker in September 1970: “The single isn’t very relative to us. It was cut off the album, the solo was chopped out, and all it was for the States as an advert for the album. I’d like to think that the reason it was a success over here is that the B-side was a live cut.”
Interestingly, the B-side of the single features the longer version, with the solo as captured during a live performance at Fillmore East earlier in the year. In order to fit a lengthy recording on a single, the B-side was to be played at 33 RPM as opposed to the traditional speed of 45 RPM on the shorter A-side. Ric Lee recalls a funny episode, writing in the sleeve notes accompanying the 2002 CD release of the album. He was sitting with other band members at a pub having a drink when, “A couple of locals walked up to the jukebox, chose a tune and started dancing. Part way into the track we realized it was Love Like a Man. But not the A side. Our two dancers were merrily boogieing to the B side. Recorded at 33 RPM but played at 45 RPM.”
The band was invited to perform the song at Top of the Pops, notoriously known for miming and lip syncing all performers at its shows. The band refused. Alvin Lee commented at the time: “We have made a point of not doing that because I think that is a very, very poor program. It’s unprintable, what I think about it. It’s just a conveyor belt. We have been approached, they wanted us on, but we can’t represent ourselves miming or even playing live to a two-minute number. All we would be doing then would be selling to the nation something that does not exist. We need at least eight minutes to do something that is relative to what we play.” Indeed – and here is the full version:
Alvin Lee – guitar, vocals
Leo Lyons – bass
Ric Lee – drums
Chick Churchill – organ, piano and harpsichord
Ten Years After had interesting meaning to the titles they chose. The band’s name is in honor of Elvis Presley. The band was found in 1966, ten years after Presley’s most successful year, 1956. The title of their 1970 album Cricklewood Green has a story as well, as told by Ric Lee: “One of our crew was a keen horticulturist and lived in Cricklewood, North London. In the large back garden at his parents house, our crew man cultivated some green plants which grew so incredibly high. Apparently the seeds from these plants when dried, crushed and added to roll-ups, have fantastic holistic hallucinatory properties. We were often given gifts of this stuff by our man and although we didn’t know that it was, it came from Cricklewood and was green, hence the album title.”
In 1970 Humble Pie, in its second year of existence, signed up with A&M Records after the collapse of their original record label, Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records. With the new label and a new manager, Dee Anthony, the band moved away from their hybrid acoustic/electric albums and live sets to music with a harder edge.
The band was made of four extremely talented individuals and was labeled a super group. All members came from other bands: guitarist Steve Marriott from Small Faces, vocalist and guitarist Peter Frampton from The Herd, former Spooky Tooth bassist Greg Ridley and a 17-year-old drummer, Jerry Shirley, from The Apostolic Intervention. Peter Frampton said of his early experience with the band: “The first day we got together, in Jerry Shirley’s mother’s living room, I think, we were doing songs off The Band’s Music From Big Pink. We were just having a lot of fun playing. And I think both Steve and I realized that we could do anything we wanted. It wasn’t that good for Humble Pie’s long-term direction, because we did everything – acoustic, country, you name it we did it, all the way up to full-on rock ’n’ roll.”
But that versatility did not work for the benefit of the group. In 1970, in preparation for their third album, famed engineer and producer Glyn Jones was hired to supervise the recordings. Peter Frampton remembers: “Glyn got us all together and said, ‘Look, you’re too diversified. It’s all very well that whatever somebody writes you record.’ He said, ‘I think what you have to do is look at your best points and make a meal of those.’ The list of things we had was, Steve was one of the world’s all-time greatest singers so he should be the singer. I was the lead guitarist that did a bit of singing. Greg was the bass player, did a little bit of singing. Jerry was the drummer. That was it. These were our jobs. Now let’s make a record. It went over great with everyone. As far as I was concerned it was a necessary direction that we needed to take because no one could blast it out like Steve could on vocals.”
Humble Pie’s self-titled third album was released in July 1970. It features a guest appearance by gifted pedal steel guitar player B.J. Cole, then at the very beginning of his fantastic recording career. He remembers a session with Humble Pie that penned his nickname: “When I entered the studio one day, Steve shouted down the talkback, Hey B.J.,’ and nobody had called me that before. Up until then I was known as Brian, and he didn’t know my initials were B.J. So after that the B.J. stuck. Who knows how he came up with that? Probably something rude.”
The album cover features the illustration The Stomach Dance from Salomé by artist Aubrey Beardsley, the English illustrator and author best known for his erotic illustrations. His work can also be found on Gabor Szabo’s album Dreams and Procol Harum’s self-titled debut.
My favorite track on the album is the opener, ‘Live With Me’. Peter Frampton: “On the Beardsley cover album, Steve’s vocal on Live With Me is so good. Live With Me was me switching to organ; I didn’t play guitar on that at all. Steve plays the guitar solo and it’s so cool.” Years later Frampton recalled the moment they finished recording the song: “When we walked into the control room, I remember saying to Steve, ‘This is a phenomenal song’. It was a group composition and when he added the vocal it was like a religious experience. Still is. I get goose bumps when I hear it now. At moments like that, you realized you were actually working with a genius.”
Steve Marriott – guitar, keyboards, vocals
Peter Frampton – guitar, keyboards, vocals
Greg Ridley – bass, guitar, vocals
Jerry Shirley – drums
And we finish this review with one of the finest guitar players of that era. Rory Gallagher founded his power blues rock trio Taste in Ireland in 1966. Two years later, with a new lineup, the band moved to London, released their self-titled debut and established themselves as one of the top acts of the genre. They were exposed to wider audiences after they participated as the opening act in Cream’s Royal Albert Hall farewell concert in November 1968, and later on their first tour of the US as an opening act for Blind Faith in 1969. In August of that year Gallagher told Beat Instrumental magazine: “Being just a trio is no problem. Our music is fickle and unpredictable – I might change tempo mid-way through a chorus. There’s a tint of loneliness about being in a trio and I like that.”
One of the trio’s unique attributes was the high level of improvisation in their live and studio performances. Gallagher commented on their tendency to stay away from well-treaded paths: “We don’t have a style or a tag, although we are blues based, roughly speaking. I call our style ‘unpredictable’. If we recorded an album last night it would be out of date today.” The high level of improvisation was a natural progression that came with the three musicians’ interest in jazz. In addition to his brilliant guitar playing, Gallagher also demonstrates his skills on the saxophone. He was influenced by free jazz sax player Ornette Coleman, of whom he said, “At one point in my life, Ornette Coleman was like my hero. I just admire his free spirit, his sound and his ideas. You can apply some of it to the guitar to an extent.”
In January of 1970 Taste released their second and final studio album, On The Boards. It remained a favorite of Gallagher, who later said: “It was a nice collision, because we were moving towards little jazz-tinged touches, and I was playing bits of saxophone.” Later in the month Gallagher told Melody Maker magazine: “We listen to jazz but we’re not wrapped up in the jazz thing. The sax, which we used on the album, just fitted in to the context of the songs, it just happened. Obviously the numbers are becoming more complex, but that doesn’t stop me from taking up the bottleneck and taking it back to something very traditional and simple.”
CREEM magazine touched on Gallagher’s jazz influences in its November 1970 issue: “Although Gallagher indicates how fast he really is on guitar, he doesn’t resort to Alvin Lee speed freak riffs to prove it. His restraint, along with some bass work that walks right through the entire number, makes this one of the finest jazz stylings I’ve ever heard put down by a rock band.”
Drummer John Wilson summarized it well when he said he only remembers two rehearsals during his tenure with the band, and when they met there were no big discussions, simply an exchange of ideas to see what might happen. He later said of their approach to music: “We were more of a jazz band than a blues band.”
My favorite track on the album is the title track On The Boards. Marcus Connaughton writes in his book Rory Gallagher: His Life and Times that the track, “is reflective and a paean to the solitary nature of music and of life itself. It is freeform in style and highlights, in particular, the understanding between each member of the trio. As John Wilson remembers, ‘on certain nights on stage the band reached great creative heights and were transported’. This track also stands out because of Rory’s superlative sax playing, and dominates the album as the longest track at just over six minutes.”
In February 1970, shortly after the album’s release, Beat Instrumental magazine wrote in its review of the album: “For sheer variety alone, the album is first class, and should make a substantial contribution towards giving Taste the success they deserve.” By the end of that year Taste was no more.
Rory Gallagher – guitars, vocals, alto saxophone, harmonica
Richard “Charlie” McCracken – bass guitar
John Wilson – drums
Sources:
Do You Feel Like I Do?: A Memoirת by Peter Frampton
Rory Gallagher: The Man Behind the Guitar, by Julian Vignoles
Rory Gallagher: His Life and Times, by Marcus Connaughton
Categories: A Year in Music
