POWER TO THE PEOPLE: JOHN & YOKO LIVE IN NYC

Concert appearances by John following the dissolution of The Beatles can be counted on the fingers of one hand. George was first off the mark with his 1971 show to relieve suffering in Bangladesh, by which he single-handedly invented the concept of the big rock charity show, and Paul wasn’t far behind with Wings, starting small and winding up in arenas. Ringo bided his time before launching his All Starr Band, a good-time supergroup with changing personnel and repertoire that enabled old timers to strut their stuff in the autumn of their years. 

        John, on the other hand, seemed strangely reluctant to set foot on stage, perhaps due to stage fright, perhaps because high profile stage appearance might jeopardise his uncertain immigration status in the US, perhaps because he simply couldn’t be bothered. In August of 1972, however, he topped the bill at what was called the One To One concerts, afternoon and evening shows at Madison Square Garden in New York that attracted 20,000 each, all for charity. 

        Backed by New York rockers Elephant’s Memory – christened for the occasion The Plastic Ono Elephant’s Memory Band and augmented by Yoko, drummer Jim Keltner and a second bass player – John’s sets at these shows were filmed and while various clips of varying length have been shown over the years, the whole show – or most of it – has now been turned into a 90-minute movie, the upgrading process overseen by a team headed by Sean, his son. I watched it last week at the Addlestone Light Cinema near Chertsey, a wonderful picture house where the comfy seats are huge and recline, alongside five others in a screening room that could have housed 100 or more. 

        It was not clear whether I was watching the afternoon or evening performance and it may be that what was up on the occasionally split screen was what the producers considered to be the superior song renditions from both. Either way, it was clear that John meant business. He’d put the Elephant guys through their paces over the preceding days and, in his dirty jeans, military shirt and cowboy boots, he’s the generalissimo at the head of a small revolutionary army intent on getting across an agitprop agenda in line with his soon to be released Some Time In New York City LP. 

        As the world knows, Some Time… was neither an artistic nor a commercial success, its strident lyrics about feminism, racism, Irish troubles and the Attica prison riots set to fairly basic rock and roll that somehow never reached the musical standards we expected from John, this despite production from Phil Spector who was watching over the recording process at the Garden. Nevertheless, Elephant’s Memory played with plenty of heart, especially saxophonist Stan Bronstein, who soloed prodigiously, and, to lesser extent, guitarist Wayne Gabriel. Keltner was no doubt brought on board to ensure that everyone kept proper time. 

        Yoko played an electric piano and gamely sang four songs in her customary shrieking style, a bit squeaky on the top notes, her braless chest leaving little to the imagination behind a white top adding to the rather curious nature of her unorthodox musical approach. “Open your box, open your trousers, open your sex, open your legs,” she yelled during ‘Open Your Box’, the B-side of John’s ‘Power To The People’, adding that it was banned in the USA. Not surprising really. Her other songs were equally uncompromising. 

        But it was John they’d all come to see and he doesn’t disappoint, even if many of the songs he sang from the upcoming Sometime In… were unfamiliar to the enthusiastic audience. For all but one he played a reddish-brown Gibson Melody Maker guitar worn high on his chest, Beatles-style, probably the same one I clocked on the sofa in the house he was occupying in LA in November of 1973, switching to a Gibson Thunderbird to play bottleneck only on ‘Cold Turkey’. He stuck to rhythm throughout, barring up and down his fretboard which, to some extent, he used as a conductor’s baton to marshal the band. He left the trickier guitar parts to Wayne Gabriel. It was the first (and last) band I’d ever seen with two bass players.

        It was telling that ‘Come Together’, from Abbey Road, was rapturously received – before playing it John stated it would be the only nod to his past – and after feeling his disease John sang “over you”, not “over me”. He changed the words in ‘Imagine’, too, referring to the “brotherhood and sisterhood of man”, in keeping with his newfound feminist solidarity. His readings of both ‘Cold Turkey’ and, most especially, ‘Mother’ were incendiary. Before ‘Mother’ he instructed Keltner to “keep it steady” and you could have heard a pin drop in the Garden as John intoned ‘Mother, you had me but I never had you,’ his throat searing vocals screeched as if his life depended on it. I also rather liked ‘New York City’, played at the start as an update to the 1969 Beatle travelogue song ‘Ballad Of John And Yoko’, and he certainly enjoyed himself on ‘Hound Dog’, the penultimate number of his set.  

        The combined cast of thousands – acts who’d played before John for about five hours if contemporary accounts are to be believed – came on stage to join in ‘Give Peace A Chance’, played at John’s insistence with a reggae rhythm. Among them were Stevie Wonder, Melanie, Roberta Flack, members of Sha Na Na, Spector, David Peel, Alan Ginsberg and the girls from a New York band called Teenage Lust whom I would befriend during my New York stint two years later. Realising that the melee was getting out of hand, John and Yoko disappeared from the stage without taking a final bow, their contribution over. 

        At times during the film the camera focuses exclusively on John, his face filling the screen to the extent that you can make out the individual hairs of his sideburns, his slightly pinched nose and the strong lenses in his tinted granny glasses. His command of the stage is absolute and if this footage was scrutinised by Nixon’s henchmen they would have detected the extraordinary intensity of John’s performance, communicated to an adoring crowd that, should he have wished, would have followed him anywhere, not least the Capitol Building in Washington DC, to protest against the iniquities of American’s ruling elite. It’s no wonder they wanted to chuck him out. 

(Screen grabs courtesy of Lisa Pettibone, aka Mrs C.)

THE BRINSLEYS & THE BAND

In September 1974 The Band rehearsed for a Wembley Stadium show at the farmhouse in Beaconsfield owned by Brinsley Schwarz who had lived there together for almost three years. It was keyboard player Bob Andrews who set the wheels in motion, calling a publicist he knew to ask if he could meet The Band’s Garth Hudson. Sure, said the publicist, but do you know anywhere where the Band could rehearse while they’re in the UK. How about our farmhouse, replied Andrews. 

The story of how Brinsley Schwarz hosted their idols is told in Graham Parker’s Howlin Wind by Jay Nachman, published last year by Tangible Press, a copy of which the author mailed to me recently after I helped with his research into UK pub rock. 

“We were wildly excited, if you can be wildly excited and stoned at the same time,” Brinsley Schwarz told Nachman when he heard that The Band were on their way to Beaconsfield.

“The Brinsley Schwarz members were starstruck when their musical idols climbed out of their limo,” writes Nachman. “Using Brinsley Schwarz’s gear, The Band set up in the barn and began to play. The members of Brinsley Schwarz crammed together on the steps outside, and for approximately two hours they were treated to a private concert.”

“They sounded exactly like they did on the records, which is another quite extraordinary thing about them,” said Brinsley. “They sounded just like The Band.”

What’s more Hudson stayed behind after his four fellow Band members left and for about 20 minutes played “every genre under the sun on Andrews’ Lowie organ, from classical music to rock to Southern rock and more. The members of Brinsley Schwarz stood behind him in awe. “He would subtly change the sound he was laying,” said Schwarz. “And then he would change the playing to suit the sound. He would evoke Southern states’ music. He pulled up images of Virginia and the War of Independence and all of that stuff. He would just hold a note or two, he’d just change a few switches and things on the organ and suddenly you’d be into Mozart. It was mind-blowing. His mastery of the instrument was better than sensational.”

“At one point I said to Garth, ‘You’re the best keyboard player in the world’,” Andrews recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, time to go’. I blew it. It was the thrill of lifetime to be that close to somebody who you’d been admiring for years.”

“Schwarz, a devoted fan of The Band to this day, regards Robbie Robertson as a favourite guitarist,” writes Nachman. “After Hudson left, the Brinsleys wandered back into the barn to play ‘The Weight’, ‘The Shape I’m In’, ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ and other Band songs. Hoping to capture Robertson’s sound, Schwarz plugged his guitar into his amp, the same one Robertson had played through, using Robertson’s cable, which the guitarist had left behind. Out came nothing but a discouraging lesson.”

“I plugged into my amp,” said Brinsley, “I had a look at the settings, which were almost exactly like mine, and played and it sounded like me, very annoyingly, and not like him at all. I thought, ‘How does he sound so much like himself and I can’t even sound remotely like him?’ That is one of the things about guitar players who are always searching for this magical sound that they have in their heads.” 

Both Brinsley Schwarz and Bob Andrews subsequently joined The Rumour, Graham Parker’s backing band, whose story is told in Howlin’ Wind, alongside that of Parker who was interviewed at length for the book. Here’s a link: https://grahamparkershowlinwind.net/

BOWIE ODYSSEY 76 by Simon Goddard

There was only ever one picture for the front cover of Bowie Odyssey 76, the coolest mug shot ever taken, this one on 21 March in Rochester, NY, after he and others were busted for drugs at the Americana hotel. As is the way with touring musicians, members of his entourage had invited a pair of likely looking girls back to the hotel, perhaps to enjoy a post-gig romp, only to discover they were plain clothes cops out to bust that notorious drug abuser David Bowie who was bound to have a sack of cocaine on his person.

In the event all they found was a bag of marijuana but it was still a pickle that David could do without and it wasn’t the only pickle that David found himself in during 1976. There was a cash-flow problem stemming from his fall out with ex-manager Tony Defries, an ongoing dispute with wife Angie, now largely absent from his life and soon to be shown the door, and an alarming pre-occupation with all things Nazi which, unhappily, coincided with the rise of the English National Front whose cause was championed by a bigoted bus driver called Robert Relf. 

All of this – not least the trials and tribulations of Mr Relf – are covered in forensic detail by Simon Goddard in this most recent episode of his fly-on-the-wall Bowie Odyssey series. As with the previous six books, it’s another eye-opening read, no quarter given as David’s topsy-turvy life is exposed as not quite as wonderful as it might seem to those outside the glass bubble in which he exists. Only two are permitted inside: Coco, his indispensable, devoted handmaiden who tends to his domestic requirements and diary, making sure he’s where and when he’s supposed to be and maybe warming his bed if no other candidates are available, and Jim, aka Iggy, brought on board as a playmate and musical foil, with whom Coco doesn’t necessarily see eye to eye. 

It’s the year of the Thin White Duke, the black and white tour that promoted Station To Station, which is a roaring success and fills empty coffers, and resettlement in Berlin where, having grown an unsightly moustache, David can mingle without being recognised, some of the time anyway. Romy Haag is lurking, England stinks of right wing dung, the punks are waiting in the wings and aside from a pre-occupation with that loathsome Relf fellow, Odyssey 76 is, like 70 to 75, riveting stuff.  

THE WHO: Playhouse Theatre 1967

Still unable to resist the allure of a Who LP I hadn’t seen before, I gave in to temptation the other week and parted with £15 at a record fair in Cranleigh for this 12” vinyl disc on the Expensive Woodlands Recordings label. It comprises 12 tracks purported to have been recorded live in 1967 at the 1,200-capacity Playhouse Theatre on Northumberland Avenue close to the Embankment tube station in Central London. It was probably a mistake. 

        No such gig took place, at least not according to Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere by Andy Neill & Matt Kent and the (almost as reliable) Who Concert File by Joe McMichael and ‘Irish’ Jack Lyons, though the theatre was used by the BBC for recording radio sessions between 1951 and 1976. This led me to believe that the songs that appear on the LP were recorded for shows on Radio One or its predecessor the Light Programme, as confirmed when I played the record which, as it happened, was more than somewhat warped, though by no means all were recorded at the Playhouse Theatre. No details beyond the song’s titles appear on the disc or its sleeve, which is a gatefold featuring this group shot, photographer unknown, on the front cover and photo taken on stage at the Monterey festival across the fold-out interior. 

        From side 1, ‘Run Run Run’, ‘Boris The Spider’, ‘Happy Jack’ and ‘See My Way’, were recorded at the Playhouse (on 17 January, 1967), and are followed by ‘Pictures Of Lily’ and ‘A Quick One (While He’s Away)’, recorded at De Lane Lea Studios on 15 October, 1967. All six tracks are included on the BBC Sessions CD released in 1999. 

        Side 2, however, features six tracks recorded for the BBC not included on the Sessions CD, though one of them, ‘Happy Jack’, is a repeat, albeit a slightly different mix. The remainder I heard before on a cassette tape I was given many years ago by George McManus, then the back catalogue marketing manager at Polydor, who was seeking information from me about The Who’s BBC tracks, and which I wrote about here: https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-who-bbc-sessions_17.html

        The other five on side 2 are ‘I Can’t Reach You’, ‘I Can See For Miles’, ‘Summertime Blues’, ‘So Sad About Us’ and ‘My Generation’, none of which were included on the Sessions CD, no doubt because – as I reported in that post of 17 July, 2015 – they are virtually identical to the studio recordings. The performances are exemplary, as you would expect, and there are some slight changes to the mix, including a more prominent bass here and there, which suggests John might have been asked to oversee remixing the tracks for BBC use. The reasons for this are explained in my earlier post. 

        I still have the C90 cassette that George, who died in 2014, gave me, and it includes all the tracks on this LP, which means I spent £15 on something I already had – not the first time in regard to The Who. Still, it looks nice alongside my other Who vinyl records of questionable legality. 

DEAR BOY: THE LIFE OF KEITH MOON

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW 

ABOUT HOW THE BOOK CAME ABOUT

Of all the many hundreds of books I commissioned and edited for Omnibus Press during the 33 years I worked as the company’s Managing Editor, none gave me greater personal satisfaction than Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher. There are many reasons for this. Firstly, it was a best-seller, spectacularly so by rock book standards; secondly, it was an exceptional book, beautifully written, researched in enormous detail and very long, especially bearing in mind that its subject died at the age of only 32; and thirdly – and perhaps most importantly – it treated the highs and lows of Keith Moon’s extraordinary life in equal measure, truly a ‘warts and all’ biography of the highest quality, as was reflected in innumerable positive reviews. 

There was one other reason, of course. The book would focus on The Who, the rock band I admired more than any other, about whom I had written two books myself and for whom I had worked as an archivist sourcing tracks for their 1994 box-set and subsequent upgraded catalogue CDs. Also, I had known Keith and interviewed him at length for Melody Maker back when I was a staff writer on the paper. My relationship with The Who might therefore have led some Who fans to assume that Dear Boy was in some way my initiative but it wasn’t. First and foremost, Dear Boy, the title and everything else, was Tony’s idea. 

        It was in early 1994 when Tony presented me with his lengthy proposal, a list of potential interviewees and how he was going to set about the project, complete with timeline, chapter breakdown and word count. It was his idea to publish it in the first week of September 1998, almost exactly 20 years to the day after Keith Moon’s death. Tony assumed, correctly, and I agreed, that this anniversary would stimulate media interest that might help promote his book but in order for this to happen it had to be delivered in plenty of time for it to go into production and be available in bookshops on the requisite date. To this end it was contracted four years before we planned to publish, Omnibus acquiring UK and Australasian rights, and Avon, under their Spike imprint, publishing in the USA where it was titled Moon: The Life & Death of a Rock Legend [1]. Now published in the US by Harper Collins, there are also German, French and Brazilian language editions, as well as a graphic novel, and 2026 sees its 28th year in print across different editions [2], the latest an Omnibus title in their ‘Remastered’ series due for publication on April 9. 

The US Edition

Back in 1995, the book’s meticulous advance planning gave Tony two years in which to complete his research; around 130 interviews with people who knew Keith, fellow musicians, Who staff, friends and lovers, music journalists, anyone and just about everyone whose paths crossed with that of The Who’s mercurial drummer. Naturally, his first port of call was the group: Entwistle said yes [3], Daltrey no [4], Townshend dithered, ultimately declining as he felt that dredging up memories of Keith might jeopardise his newly-found sobriety [5]. Former co-manager Chris Stamp said yes, as did Bill Curbishley who took over the Who’s management from Stamp and Kit Lambert in the mid-1970s. Perhaps more importantly, the three people who had lived with Keith as an adult – ex-wife Kim, subsequent girlfriend Annette Hunt, then Annette Walter-Lax, and personal assistant/driver Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler – all said yes.

From his home at the time in Manhattan, Tony, along with his then-wife Posie and their six-month-old son, moved to the UK for six months in 1996 so he could better conduct the European research. He travelled up and down the UK interviewing everyone he could get hold of, went to Ireland to meet Oliver Reed and visited Stockholm, twice, to interview Annette (who initially asked for payment, ultimately declined). Quite late in the day, back in the States, he spent a weekend in Austin, Texas, where Kim lived with her second husband, Faces/Small Faces keyboard player Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan. This was the only interview that Kim, who died in 2006, ever gave to anyone. Quite a few noted musicians were also interviewed, among them, in alphabetical order, Mick Avory, Ginger Baker, Jeff Beck, Alice Cooper, Ian Dury, Dave Edmunds, Bobby Elliott, Steve Ellis, Chris Farlowe, Steve Harley, Roy Harper, Bob Henrit, Bruce Johnson, Howard Kaylan, Jim Keltner, Corky Laing, Carlo Little, John Otway, Reg Presley, Viv Prince, Noel Redding, Dave Rowberry, John Sebastian, ‘Legs’ Larry Smith, Zak Starkey, Mark Volman and Joe Walsh. From the acting world came Ann-Margret, Larry Hagman, Karl Howman and Oliver Reed. Tony even tracked down all the members of The Beachcombers, the group for whom Keith played before he joined The Who. 

His research complete, Tony spent the best part of a year in the writing, delivering his manuscript 10 months before publication date, thus enabling me the luxury of ample time to edit and do whatever work was necessary before handing it over to our production department. He had hoped to finish the book by the summer of 1997, at which point he had a UK holiday booked, but when this didn’t happen I asked to read the chapters he had written thus far. So keen was I to read what Tony had written about Keith that I took a draft of this home on the Friday night after it arrived which, as it happened, ushered in the same weekend that Princess Diana died. I’d stayed up late glued to our home computer screen on Saturday night and well remember our five-year-old daughter Olivia waking me quite early on Sunday morning to complain that the cartoons she wanted to watch on TV had been supplanted by the sad news from Paris. That day we took Olivia and her two-year-old brother Sam to a sparsely-attended London Zoo where the name-plate on the cage of ‘Diana the Gorilla’ was covered over by a dark cloth to avoid offending royalists with tender sensibilities. 

But I digress. Once the complete text was delivered to me on Halloween, I quickly realised that Tony had produced something very special and decided to go all out on editing and production. I suggested one change to the chapter structure to which Tony complied [6] and brought all my reserves of Who knowledge to bear in making subtle changes here and there. I commissioned Richard Evans, the Who’s go-to graphic designer, to design the book’s jacket and Tony, Richard and myself spent an afternoon visiting big London bookshops to inspect covers of biographies that we thought the retail trade regarded as prestigious. The big seller at the time was Diana: Her True Story In Her Own Words by Andrew Morton which featured on its cover a black and white picture of the late princess against a white background, so we opted for something similar with a head and shoulders portrait of Keith [7] and an embossed title in gold lettering. For the insides I commissioned an artist friend of my wife to create a postage-stamp sized drawing of a snare drum flying over the moon to use at the start of each chapter, and a tiny jester’s hat, drum and wine bottle to indicate breaks in the text where asterisks are normally placed. Once the manuscript was typeset I commissioned my friend Johnny Rogan to prepare an index and, being the English language and rock scholar that he was, he suggested further amendments to the text to polish what I knew would be a jewel in Omnibus’ crown. 

I didn’t stint on the photo research either, and between them our staff researcher Nikki Russell, Tony and Richard came up with everything we needed; childhood pictures, Keith in pre-Who groups, Who shots, Keith with Kim and many others and several that illustrated particular instances in the text, 51 pictures in all across three eight-page sections. I also communicated my enthusiasm for the book to everyone else at Omnibus, not least sales manager Frank Warren, his PA Hilary Donlon and our Contracts Manager Andrew King, all of whom readily jumped on the Dear Boy bandwagon. “You were like a record company when it’s flying,” says Tony. “You had the set-up that would make writers want to be on your label. I recall a lovely publication lunch for all the staff at the restaurant where the Marquee used to be. You allowed me to order a Chateauneuf-du-Pape blanc that was both rare and expensive, and you’d have okayed a second bottle but that was the only one they had. I think we downgraded.”

Our hunch about the 20th anniversary of Keith’s death proved correct. In the month of Dear Boy’s publication Mojo magazine featured Keith on its cover, and our Rights Manager Helen Donlon somehow achieved serialisation in the Sunday Mail. Charles Shaar Murray’s extensive review occupied the whole of the front page of the Daily Telegraph’s arts section. In the week of publication we threw a launch party at The Borderline in Soho where we gave away Dear Boy t-shirts, and among those who attended were Dougal Butler, Richard Barnes (Pete Townshend’s one-time flatmate who coined the name ‘The Who’), former Who tour manager John ‘Wiggy’ Wolff, Doug Sandom, the drummer in The Detours whom Keith succeeded in the spring of 1964, and Paul Kemp, the drummer in Who tribute band Who’s Who. A spitting image of the real Keith, Paul managed to get a group of revellers thrown out of an after-hours bar later in the evening. “Keith would have approved,” notes Tony, who was among them. 

Furthermore – and much to our delight – on the Sunday before it arrived in the shops we were able to sell it at a Who fan convention held at the Astoria Theatre in central London, which 11 years later would be demolished to make way for a Crossrail station. The date was September 6, the day before the 20th anniversary of Keith’s death, and in many ways the convention acted as a tribute to him.

The queue of Who fans snaking past our trestle table to snap up Dear Boy remained in place throughout the entire afternoon. While UK fans who bought a copy got it one day early, many American fans who flew over for the convention got theirs three months early as the US edition wasn’t published there until the following January [8]. In the event many US fans bought several copies as Christmas presents for their Who fan friends back home, blithely overlooking how its weight might impact on their baggage allowance. Tony was on hand at the convention to read extracts from the stage and sign copies of his book, as did Kitty Moon, Keith’s mum, who also turned up, accompanied by Lesley, the younger of Keith’s two sisters.

CC and Tony at the convention, 

and a pile of empty boxes that once contained copies of Dear Boy.

In all we sold 400 copies of Dear Boy at £20 a throw directly to fans that day, and late in the evening – after the Who’s Who tribute band had performed – I took the tube home to Shepherds Bush clinging on to a plastic bag containing the best part of £8,000 in £10 and £20 notes. It was a fantastic result, a precursor to the book’s ongoing success, and dumping that bag of cash on my boss’ desk the following morning was as satisfying for me as everything else connected with Dear Boy, not least the subsequent realisation that it eventually outsold Thatcher’s official biography. 

And so we come to the 2026 edition, published as a pocket paperback, though at almost 600 pages it’s a bit too chunky to fit into anything but an XXL pocket. At the start there’s two new forewords, one by Tony and the other by Keith Moon’s daughter Mandy, now Amanda De Wolf. Mandy, who became a grandmother in 2023 and now lives in California, admits that she was only eight when she last saw her father and never really knew him, only his life and legacy as detailed in Dear Boy. 

        It’s slightly bizarre to realise that, had he lived, Keith would have become a great-grandfather at the absurdly early age of 77 – but then again absurdity clung to Keith Moon like moss to a stone – and evidently continues to do so 48 years after the Dear Boy’s death. 

------------------------

[1] The US publishers felt the title Dear Boy might lead some to believe it was a book aimed at a gay audience. 

[2] In 2005, Omnibus published a revised trade paperback edition with a new 20-page Afterword comprising material Tony gleaned from interviews with acquaintances of Moon who contacted him after the book’s initial publication.

[3] John gave Tony one his frankest ever interviews, revealing not only his love of Keith but his deep frustration at the stop-start nature of The Who’s career following Keith’s death, for which he blamed Townshend. 

[4] I don’t believe Roger grasped the scope the project. No doubt assuming Tony was planning to write a brief, sensationalist paperback full of scandalous stories, he was approached and declined several times and was probably shocked by the eventual appearance of a 576-page hardback that in his opinion didn’t portray him as he would have preferred. In an interview with Record Collector magazine shortly after Dear Boy’s publication he suggested the book was merely the recollections of ‘alcoholics and drug addicts’. This prompted me to write to Record Collector pointing out that of the Who’s inner circle of six (Townshend, Daltrey, Entwistle, Moon, Lambert and Stamp), he was the only one who wasn’t an alcoholic or drug addict at one time or another. It later transpired that Roger felt its publication might impact unfavourably on his commercial interests in a film he planned to make about Keith, a film which, incidentally, has yet to go into production despite having gone through multiple scripts and prospective directors and lead actors. Incidentally, Dear Boy was optioned almost immediately on publication as source material for a movie, and when Roger was interviewed by Sky News some years ago a copy of Dear Boy was prominently displayed on a shelf behind his head. 

[5] Pete faxed Tony to the effect that he, ‘no longer had anything to say about Keith that is kind’. Shortly before the book went to press Tony heard that Pete apparently regretted his decision, which is exactly what those close to him intimated would happen. A few weeks after its publication, backstage at the Shepherds Bush Empire following a solo show, Pete told me that Tony ‘should be very proud of the book he had written’. 

[6] The dramatic opening to Chapter 27 was initially towards the end of Chapter 26. I felt it warranted a more prominent position. 

[7] The photograph of Keith on the cover of Dear Boy was taken by David Magnus in 1965. 

[8] The US publishers actually requested that I delay our publication so that it coincided with theirs, but I was having none of it.

(Thanks to Tony for help with this post. tonyfletcher.substack.com )

KEITH ALTHAM - PR TO THE STARS

The music writer and PR Keith Altham, whose death aged 84 was announced yesterday, was a fixture in my life for over 50 years. He’d seen it all and done it all, and no one I know, probably no one in the world, had a richer fund of hilarious stories – many of them salty and unflattering – about the music business and those who toil within it. I never came away from spending time with Keith without a smile on my face.

        Keith was already a seasoned music business insider by the time I reached Melody Maker in 1970. He began his career writing for Fabulous in the early 1960s, then graduated to NME, and he interviewed and wrote about everyone, Beatles, Stones, Who, you name them. When he branched out into PR in 1971 his client roster read like a Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. He was down to earth and practical, and didn’t stand for any prima donna behaviour from anyone, no matter how famous they were. His 1999 book No More Mister Nice Guy! is series of letters to those clients of his, 37 in total, and he doesn’t mince words. It’s one of the funniest music books you’ll find anywhere.

        At various times Keith represented the two groups, The Who and Slade, with whom I became the closest during my years on Melody Maker, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that the only two stars who come of out of No More Mister Nice Guy! smelling of roses are Pete Townshend and Noddy Holder. He and I tended to think alike. 

        His escapades with Keith Moon could fill a book, and I can still recall spending a hair-raising afternoon in 1971 with the two Keiths and ‘Legs’ Larry Smith at the Chertsey Agricultural Show. Quite why Moonie and Legs had decided to enter the ‘tossing the hay bale’ competition no one knew, or cared, but they did and Keith Altham was on hand to ensure that the local papers got all the photos they needed. When his great pal John Entwistle died, Keith wrote, knowingly: “His dexterity and imagination on the bass guitar – often considered a basic and pedestrian instrument in other groups – was an integral part of the Who’s classic wall of sound, so much so that that the three instrumentalists and one vocalist on stage often sounded like a full orchestra on the charge. John’s complex rhythms always provided an explosive cannon at the rear.”

        As for Slade, it was Keith’s suggestion in 1969 to turn them into skinheads and their manager Chas Chandler, always keen to generate publicity, good or bad, leapt on the idea. Years later, when I was researching my Slade book Feel The Noize! Keith was enormously helpful, and we spent three days together in Walsall, spending time with Noddy, Jim Lea, Dave Hill and the group’s tour manager Graham ‘Swin’ Swinnerton. He was particularly close to Chas and in 1996 we took a train to Newcastle together to attend Chas’ funeral in Cullercoats on Tyneside where Keith gave a eulogy, mentioning – to everyone’s astonishment – that at one time Chas had plans to link Perth to Sydney by canal. 

        Keith was always happy to share his memories with anyone and everyone. In 2018, he and I were among guests who attended the premiere of a movie entitled Should Have Been There, a documentary about Melody Maker in the 1960s and 70s that focused on the work of our photographer Barrie Wentzell. I took along my son Sam, then aged 23 and a massive admirer of Jimi Hendrix. Aware that Keith had known Hendrix well (it was Keith who’d suggested Jimi set his guitar alight at the London Astoria back in 1967, and he was the last journalist to interview him in 1970), I steered them both to a pizza restaurant in Leicester Square when the film was over and for the next hour he delighted Sam, who was spellbound, with stories about the great guitarist. 

This photograph was taken following the movie premiere I refer to above. Keith is second from the left, in a hat, and I'm stood just behind him, alongside Chris Welch and his wife Marilyne. Barrie Wentzell is in the centre, and my son Sam is second from the right. 

        For the past 20 years or so Keith and I met twice a year at the Bull’s Head in Barnes where a group of music industry veterans gather together to reminisce about how things were before big business and computers ruined everything. It was always a pleasure to spend time with Keith, even though in recent years his health wasn’t what it was. Four years ago, Keith’s daughter Nancy asked me contribute to a book to be presented to Keith on his 80th birthday. Here’s what I wrote: 

Lines of the occasion of KA’s 80th

(With apologies to Pete Townshend)

People try to put him down

Just because he gets around

He’s a prince among his peers

Hope he lives for 100 years

This is Keith Altham

Keith Altham, baby

Why don't we all kneel and p-p-pray

To wish our Keith a happy birthday

I’m not tryin’ to cause a big s-s-sensation

Just tryin’ to give him v-v-veneration

This is Keith Altham

This is Keith Altham, baby

He ain’t gonna f-fade away

‘Cos we all like what he has to s-s-say

I love him ‘cos he loves The Who

An’ if you don’t dig that well screw you too

Talkin’ ‘about Keith Altham

Keith Altham, baby

RIP old pal. 

PUNK AT 50

Dear Mojo Editor

PUNK AT 50 – HOW IT CHANGED EVERYTHING screams the strap line on the cover of last issue of Mojo, with Johnny Rotten, eyes ablaze, alongside. Well did it? 

In 1976, the year the Pistols began to make waves, over 100,000 fans turned up to watch the Stones at Knebworth. Bowie played six nights at Wembley Empire Pool, Paul McCartney’s Wings three. In 1977, Pink Floyd played five nights at the same venue. Heavens only knows how many fans turned up at Knebworth in 1979 to watch Led Zep, well over 200,000 anyway. And that same year The Who played Wembley Stadium, around 80,000 I guess. A glance at the best-selling LPs for those years – step forward Abba, Rod Stewart, Floyd, Zep, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Bee Gees, etc – reveals a remarkable dearth of punk acts. And let’s not even bother with the situation in America. 

All of which leads me to conclude that the ‘punk revolution’ was created largely by staff writers from the hawkish weekly music press baying for the blood of the dinosaurs and not by the overwhelming majority of fans. To a degree, this is reflected on pages 26 and 27 of this same issue of Mojo where an in-house ad features 24 covers, only one of which – the current Sex Pistols issue – can be said to feature a ‘punk’ act, unless you count Paul Weller who wouldn’t be seen dead in a torn tee-shirt. 14 of those covers feature acts that predate punk, most of whom released their first records in the 1960s. 

This would seem to confirm the view that, try as they might, the idea that the punks slaughtered the dinosaurs is a myth. 

This is not to say that punk didn’t blow away a few cobwebs that needed blowing away, or that several acts carried along in the same momentum didn’t produce some great records. But let’s not get carried away. Punk didn’t change everything. Nothing much changed in the long term. It just created a new(ish) rock genre.

Great Miles Davis CD, by the way.

Regards

Chris Charlesworth

EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert

Baz Luhrmann caught the Elvis bug while directing his 2022 blockbuster biopic that starred Austin Butler as the star and Tom Hanks as Col Tom Parker, his scheming manager. In the course of his research for that film – reviewed here (https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2022/06/elvis-movie.html) on Just Backdated – he discovered a cache of largely unseen concert and rehearsal footage of Elvis that he’s brought to the big screen for what is not just the most impressive screen presentation of Elvis on stage but also, in newly discovered interview footage and voice-overs, the most revealing.

It’s now over 70 years since Elvis exploded out of Memphis which no doubt explains why Luhrmann felt it necessary to preface the on-stage material with an express train ride through his early career for those too young to know, but anyone who’s taken an interest in Elvis will already be familiar with the footage from his early B&W TV appearances and movies, as well as conscription into the army which shaped his career thereafter. Once that’s through we see Elvis rehearsing with his core band, location unknown, during which he sings ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’, ‘Runaway’, ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Something’, quite beautifully too, at least when he concentrates. 

Although the precise date is not made clear, these preliminaries lead up to a show at the Las Vegas Hilton, presumably one of the earliest, probably in 1970. We see him in his all-white jumpsuit lingering at the side of the stage as the band begin. He looks a tad nervous, his leg twitching. Then someone draws the curtain aside for him and he steps out… BOOM. This is what we’re here for. Elvis grins, then zips into a fast-paced ‘That’s all Right’, and he sounds marvellous, as does the band, fat and punchy with enormous drive, and in the cinema it’s very loud, deep thumping bass and crackling lead guitar. 

        This is Elvis before the fried banana and bacon sandwiches took their toll and he looks and sounds terrific, the most handsome, sexiest man on the planet who can sing like no one else. No wonder those watching – we see them all in the crescent-shaped supper room, tier after tier, row on row of elegantly dressed customers, mostly female – go potty. Then he’s into ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Polk Salad Annie’, ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’ and a phenomenal segue back and forth between ‘Little Sister’ and The Beatles’ ‘Get Back’.

        Elvis entertains as well as sings – in one of the interviews he describes himself as “an entertainer”, which I thought was revealing – and he can be cheesy. He enjoys fooling around with the women at the front, kissing them, touching them, and at one point completes a song with what looks like a dark blue bra on his head. Some of this tom-foolery might be designed to show that he’s human after all, and not the godlike superstar his fans adore, but it detracts from the act, even if it amuses the band and his back-up singers.        

        The concert footage is cleverly interspersed with rehearsal footage of the same songs – they switch back and forth – and though from time to time there’s an issue with the lip-synching, it doesn’t really matter. In between we get the interviews, some from a 1970 press conference at the Houston Astrodome – the first venue outside of Vegas where Elvis performed after his 1969 comeback – and some from the 1972 conference in New York prior to his Madison Square Garden shows that year. Still more, as voice-overs between songs, have evidently been sourced from hitherto unreleased interviews suppressed by Parker who was notoriously reluctant to allow Elvis ever to speak to the press. Parker, incidentally, is seen occasionally throughout, invariably in unflattering situations, occasionally flogging tat. 

        Among other things Elvis disparages his movies from the Sixties, sounding almost apologetic, talks about his background in gospel music and expresses a desire to perform in Europe. He sounds humble, as if the direction his life has taken still puzzles him, and he sometimes seems to have difficulty explaining himself.

        But it’s the music that matters and although later footage in the second half of the movie – probably from 1972 when he was beginning to tire – doesn’t quite hit the spot as much as the earlier material, we get an all too brief ‘I Shall Be Released’, from a rehearsal, ‘Burnin’ Love’, ‘Love Me’, ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’, ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’, ‘You Were Always On My Mind’, ‘Oh Happy Day’, the hymn ‘How Great Though Art’, ‘Big Hunk Of Love’, ‘In The Ghetto’, ‘Walk A Mile In My Shoes’ and a stupendous ‘Suspicious Minds’. The curtain comes down after ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love With You’. 

        No review of this movie would be complete without showering praise on Elvis’ superb band, mostly notably James Burton on lead guitar, Jerry Scheff on Fender bass and Ronnie Tutt on drums. All of them play as if their lives depend on it. Shamefully, they are not even mentioned in the closing credits. 

SLADE & STEELY DAN – AN UNLIKELY PAIRING

For reasons that continue to baffle their fans, Slade and America were uneasy bedfellows during the period when they achieved their greatest success in the UK. My theory is that it was simply bad timing. In 1973, the year they first visited the US, the counry wasn’t prepared for Noddy Holder’s showmanship, the ‘audience as part of the show’ style that subsequent rock acts, most notably Bruce Springsteen, employed, or, quite simply, the clothes they wore. Instead of being too little too late, they were too much too soon.  

        Reading my Just Backdated memoir not so long ago, Don Powell, Slade’s indefatigable drummer, came across a quote from Steely Dan’s Walter Becker that implied Slade weren’t among his group’s favourite acts. “How they ever managed to get enough money together to come here and tour is a miracle,” Becker told me when I interviewed him and his partner Donald Fagen in April of 1974. 

Slade, of course, were pals of mine in those days and I’d done my best to promote their interests in the columns of Melody Maker, mostly on the strength of their live shows. Now MM’s man in America, I had waited ages for an opportunity to interview the notoriously reticent Steely Dan men, and thought it best not to come to Slade’s defence lest Donald and Walter walk out on me. 

        “Steely Dan doesn’t have a, nice word to say about us, do they?” Don emailed me earlier this week. “I remember when they supported us. I think, they experienced the wrath of our notorious road crew.”

        In the event Slade were amongst a host of acts Becker and Fagen didn’t much like, among them Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. They described Black Oak Arkansas and “absolute trash” and grudgingly admitted that Yes and ELP were skilled musicians, even though their music was not to their taste. “I will grudgingly admit that English bands are more polished performers,” said Becker. “Their recordings are more carefully made… but I can’t understand how that is.”

        My email exchange with Don on this matter prompted him to do a bit of research that unearthed the promotional advert at the top of this post and also that on May 5 & 6, 1973 Slade appeared on a three-act show, in between bill toppers Humble Pie and openers Steely Dan, at the Winterland Arena in San Francisco. Although Humble Pie and Slade seems like a reasonable mix to me – both boasted fantastic guitar playing singers – whoever though it was a good idea to have Steely Dan open up this show needed their head examined. Clearly this would have been the Slade gig at which Becker and Fagen watched from the wings, horrified at the antics of Noddy and his boys. 

        Slade’s American adventure, especially the period when they lived in New York, roughly between 1975 and 1977, is generally dismissed as a something they’d prefer to forget. They slogged their guts out on the road for scant pickings, failed to generate much in the way of record sales, lost a good deal of money and returned to the UK with their tail between their legs. 

But America wasn’t entirely indifferent to Slade, as the advertisement above – albeit it a concert from before they went to live in the US – demonstrates. In those days the Philadelphia Spectrum held around 18,000, and Slade topped the bill there over the Eagles and others “quite a few times”, according to Don. It's interesting to note that Lou Reed, of all people, opened the show. Another city where Slade drew big crowds was St Louis where I saw them twice, and you can find my report on an early 1974 show here: https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2014/08/slade-ambassador-theater-st-louis-mo.html

DONNA SUMMER

A four act show always runs the risk of dragging, even when the organisation is as meticulous as it was last Saturday at New York’s Radio City Music Hall when Archie Bell & the Drells, Donna Summer, Bobby Womack and the Temptations all appeared in one of a series of concerts promoted by black WBLS disc jockey Frankie Crocker.

But the use of two stages, one at the rear and one at the front which rose as the curtains closed on the rear, kept the show moving with the kind of precision that every road crew must dream about. Apart from a ten-minute break before the Temptations, there was no delay at all, Summer following Bell and Womack following Summer so quickly that their respective songs almost segued into one another.

My most particular interest lay in Womack and Ms Summer, as did that of Mick Jagger who, I was reliably informed, was closeted up in the balcony of this massive ancient theatre chatting before he went on with Womack who wrote ‘It’s All Over Now’, one of the Stones’ biggest early hits.

Donna Summer has had a massive disco hit in the US with ‘Love To Love You Baby’, and her album of the same title, the first side of which contains a 16 minute and 30 second version of the same song, is also a hot seller. Her act is based entirely around this song, although she sang two other numbers besides, one of which was a dead ringer for ‘I’m A Man’, the Steve Winwood classic recorded by the Spencer Davis Group. 

Entering the stage rather as Cleopatra entered Rome, carried by a couple of hunky guys and wearing a gold hairpiece, Donna opened with a brief version of ‘Love To Love You’ accompanied by a couple of dancers and a biggish back-up unit called Smoke. There followed the two other songs and a five-minute spell of instrumental funk noodling before she reappeared for a final, lengthy reprise of ‘Love To Love You’, on which she was joined by six dancers, three amorous couples, and plenty of dry ice.

While Ms Summer warbled the lyrics and cooed in the orgasmic fashion of the record, the dancing couples, all dressed in skin tight, flesh-coloured garments that gave the impression of nakedness from where I was sat, simulated various sexual positions. It all seemed a bit Benny Hill meets Carry On Up The Khyber to me and the audience, bored rather than shocked at this massage parlour display, responded limply. 

        It took Bobby Womack and his excellent band to stop the giggling and bring back the music. Most of Womack’s material was new, up-tempo funk. He pushed it along with hoarse vocals, and was perpetually prodding at the band to get the most out of them, especially the three-piece brass section. Looking rather like a Cuban revolutionary in his beret and khaki clothes, he strapped on a Les Paul during his final two numbers and sounded remarkably like Hendrix.

He was good but rather anonymous. He didn’t play ‘It’s All Over Now’ – I was rather hoping Mick would join him for this as an encore – but he didn’t get one, even though I thought he deserved one. Both Bell and his Drells and, most especially in the light of their hit-strewn back catalogue, the Temptations delivered traditional black soul, complete with fancy steps, nice vocal harmonies and, in the case of the Drells, some Kung-Fu action.