More from my Rock Music memoir ‘In Search of Captain Beefheart’ – Sixties Festivals

Posted on by Opher

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

FESTIVALS

I have Hat to thank for organising a lot of these. Hat’s real name was Francis Jacques but because Hattie Jacques was such a household name everyone called him Hattie and that became Hat. When I was sixteen, seventeen and eighteen Hat always knew where it was happening, who was on and how to get there.

Hat was the epitome of cool back then. At fourteen he had this bit quiff and sideburns. His hair was long enough to reach his chin. He wore skin tight jeans and Cuban heeled boots and not only that but he kept trying to nick all my girlfriends.

Hat and Booker had customised these old LD scooters by taking all the fairing off them, dropping the seat, putting a motorbike petrol tank on and ape-hangers. It created a really low-slung oddity. Hat then put a car windscreen washer on so he could go past people and squirt them. It was particularly effective against bus queues.

Hat organised us going down to Brighton camping after our O Levels. We went to the notorious Brighton Shoreline club and got thrown out. There was this big sign saying ‘WAY OUT’ and Oz thought it was an exit and was yanking at this door. Needless to say it was supposedly cool poster and not an exit. A bouncer took a dislike to Oz’s antics and threw us out.

We picked up three girls camping in the tent next to us and almost got to see Heinz and the Wildcats. It was quite a week.

Hat took me and Liz out on our first date in 1967 to see the Dream at Middle Earth. It was very weird and far out with its lightshow.

Hat organised to go to the Windsor Jazz and Blues festival. I think it was the first festival I had ever been to. I was disappointed that Pink Floyd cancelled but it was an incredible line up the Small Faces were great, the Move were incredibly loud, and Tomorrow were very trippy. I don’t remember anything about Marmalade, Zoot Money, Aynsley Dunbar, Amen Corner or Time Box. I should have paid more attention. I certainly paid attention to PP Arnold though. She performed in a white crocheted dress with black undies (or was it a black crotched dress and white undies?) anyway she was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen and was backed by the Nice. The Nice replaced Floyd and did a great show complete with knives and flag burning. I then didn’t remember Arthur Brown.

It was the final day that stood out for me. Not only were there the wonderful Fleetwood Mac but also John Mayall and Chicken Shack. Then there was Jeff Beck. On top of that we had Donovan and Denny Laine, Blossom Toes and Pentangle.

What a line-up. But it wasn’t that which sticks in my memory. Headlining was none other than the great Cream at the very height of their power. But even that was not the thing that made it so special. It was 1967 and I was 18 years old and out with a couple of mates (Hat and Booker). So we got this empty fag packet and ripped it up into oblongs. Then we wrote PRESS on them with black biro and pinned them on our jackets with safety pins. We walked up to the front and presented ourselves to the security heavies who, unbelievably, waved us through. We spent the entire day in the Press enclosure in front of the stage. We popped backstage to grab a bite to eat and take a pee. Hat had a pee next to Ginger Baker. We didn’t dare go out because we knew we’d never get back in. I got to stand right in front of Clapton as Cream did the best set of their entire lives. I watched the sweat on Jack’s brow and every expression on Ginger’s face as he worked those drums. It was the most awesome gig ever, mainly I think, not just because it was such a brilliant gig, which it was, but because we shouldn’t have been there. Stolen fruit always tastes better!

Can you imagine in this day and age of top security that anyone would wave through a few young kids with biroed name tags? Not in a million years!

Festivals were social events. You went there to hang out, meet people, rap all night, smoke and chill out. The music was as much a backdrop as a focus.

Opher circa 1971

Hat organised us to get to loads, Windsor, Bath, Plumpton, Woburn and Hyde Park. I can’t remember how we got there, who we saw, or where we stayed. I can remember meeting loads of people, sitting around talking and sharing and having a great time. The festivals were a great part of the culture of the day. The music was the backdrop, the atmosphere was brilliant and the vibe was all important.

Festivals were our celebrations when we all came together and were invigorated.

In Search of Captain Beefheart (Extract) – Bobbing Around

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Bobbing around

The discovery of another hero took time. It was like discovering a heap of dirty gold ore. You don’t know what you’ve got until you’ve teased it all out.

If the Beatles were the driving force for Rock then Bob Dylan was the Fulcrum that turned it on its head. The Beatles provided the musical genius but Dylan provided the poetry and substance that enabled it to reach its apotheosis.

I came to Dylan late. It wasn’t until his electric period that I really began to appreciate what a genius he was. For me it was a slow burner.

I was not one of the guys who might have shouted ‘Judas’ in the Albert Hall or Manchester Trade Hall. I loved his electric period and none better than the driving, searing quality that Mike Bloomfield brought to it at Newport.

My friend Mutt first introduced me to Dylan. He played me his first album but it left me cold. I still find that first album a bit of a non-entity. Mutt assured me that if Dylan released singles he’d be in the charts. I pooh-poohed that but sure enough, shortly after Mutt’s prophetic words, Dylan released ‘The times are a changing’, it made the charts and I had to eat my words.

I am sorry to say that I was one of those people who could not get on with his voice. I liked the songs but I preferred them by other people like the Byrds and Manfred Mann. It makes me squirm to say that now because I have got so much into Dylan that I know his voice is just ideal for his songs and everyone else’s arrangements tend to sound Poppy and lightweight in comparison and you don’t get much more unhip than Poppy.

My subconscious quest for Dylan overlooked him for a couple of years. I was aware of his music but I never really listened to it. Then I bought ‘Bringing it all home’ in Kingston arcade and it blew me away. The good thing about this was that it meant that I could now go back and retrospectively absorb three genius albums all at once – ‘The times are a changing’, ‘Another side of’ and ‘Freewheelin’’. What a mind expanding time I had! There was everything! – The anti-war stuff, the civil rights, the songs for the oppressed and down and out. It made you think; it raised your sensitivities; it made you question everything; it was so clever and poetic. I read the poetry on the liner notes and checked out everything I could. Dylan was just what I needed. He’d taken Guthrie’s type songs a stage further into a new dimension. He was singing about the world I lived in and the society we were grappling with and trying to get to change. No wonder everyone was feeding off him!

I adored the snarling Dylan on ‘Positively Fourth Street’ which became my favourite song of all time for a while. But there was also the exceptional ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘It’s alright Ma I’m only bleeding’.

Then there was ‘Highway 61 revisited’ and ‘Blonde on Blonde’ and the poetry exploded with Beat Poet surrealism, like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Rimbaud were recording Rock songs. At the time I was reading Ginsberg’s Howl and Kerouac’s ‘Dharma Bums’ and it just seemed to sit in there.

Unfortunately I’d missed Dylan’s performances at the Albert Hall and around. If only…………..

I did get to see him four times at various gigs. Two were brilliant, one was mediocre and one was absolute shit.

He was a difficult, complex hero to have with a veritable mine of mind expanding concepts to be unearthed. He was also full of contradictions and obfuscations designed to throw you off the scent. But the reward for perseverance was immense.

Dylan’s fabled motorcycle accident in which he supposedly broke his neck was the end of what was an incredible run of six of the universe’s best albums (I am making an assumption here – I am not yet fully conversant with musical input from other regions of our galaxy or any distant Galaxies. Maybe they have even better albums out there? – Far out, man!). But I suppose that had to be. Dylan was freaking out on speed and stress. He looked so jumpy. I guess if he had gone on he would have gone under. Maybe he did go under? Who knows? Perhaps it was just a ploy to break away from the pressure and that tag of being ‘The Voice of a Generation’.

Anyway, the post accident Dylan was very unhip.

I bought ‘John Wesley Harding’ and it was OK. We’d all thought he was easing his way back in. The Underground was going and we needed Dylan’s spark. He was the guy. The next album would be great, right? No, not right. The next album was ‘Nashville Skyline’. I was so disgusted with it, having bought it with such high expectations on the day of release, that I smashed it and threw it in the dustbin (I only ever did that with one other album and that was Neil Young’s ‘Hawks and Doves’). After that there were two more dreadful albums – ‘Dylan’ and ‘Self Portrait’. It looked like he was a brain-dead spent force. The snarling hipster who spat bullets and was the scourge of the establishment was now an awkward geeky country singer.

It was so bad that when Dylan was due to perform at the Isle of Wight I shunned it as I really didn’t want to see someone so good reduced to a sham. I’m glad I didn’t go.

I wish I hadn’t gone to the Earl’s Court in 1981. I did it against my better judgement. I was persuaded by people who’d seen him in 1978 and found him in top form so I decided to chance my arm. They assured me that the real Dylan was back. The trouble was that Dylan in the intervening time had got religion; he was backed by a gospel choir and was utterly dismal. I hated every minute of it. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it is American saccharin evangelical nutcases. The country is full of indoctrination and shoves it down your throat before you can think. I hate primitive medieval superstition. I could not believe Dylan had succumbed. It was embarrassing – from ‘It’s alright ma’ to the trite ‘God gave names to all the animals’. Seemingly he’d burned his brains out and lost his balls at the same time. Ho hum.

Fortunately he worked his way back again and I got to see him a couple more times when he was good and rockin’. But he never hit the heights of that purple patch in the 1960s when he set the pace for both lyrics and musical innovation. He set the trend for everything that followed.

I’m still mining his lyrics, reading his books, listening to his concerts and radio shows and marvelling at the scope of the guy. If only ………

But Dylan helped me grow and develop as a man. He raised my consciousness. Without him I would not have become as good. We all need people who question what society is about. We need people who question our leaders. That is because people who seek power are often the paranoid sociopaths. We are often being led by people who are mentally ill. Time after time we put the Pol Pot’s, Stalin’s, Mao’s, Thatcher’s and Nixon’s in charge and think they have our best interests at heart. It takes a Dylan to point out the absurdities. That’s what he did for me; he helped opened my eyes.

Another slice of ‘In Search of Captain Beefheart – This is Hip & Cool & Occasionally hairy

Posted on by Opher

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

This is Hip & Cool & Occasionally hairy

Some time in your life you have to make a decision whether to be hip and cool or straight.

First it helps if you know what being cool is. It is a commitment. Cool is an indefinable quality that some people have. Jack Kerouac had it, Miles Davis, all the black blues guys, the jazz singers and swingers, black culture was hip, white culture was crap. The Stones, Kinks and Prettythings were hip for a while. The Tremolos, Dave Clark Five and Hollies were never cool.

In the present time anything connected with Simon Cowell is shit. All musicals, tribute bands and chart singers are by definition shit. All things connected with the Voice and Britain/America’s got talent is shit. Abba are not cool. The North Mississippi All-stars, Tinariwen and Nick Harper are cool.

Back in the 60s the Beatles and Stones were cool. For a time during his electric period Dylan was the coolest dude on the planet with his polka dot shirt, shades and frizzed out hair complete with snarling lyrics and attitude.

In the late 60s Hendrix, Cream, Floyd and the West Coast bands were the coolest. The Monkees were not cool.

 Magic Band still cool in 2005

Being in the singles chart was not cool unless you were a Soul singer like Otis Redding or Aretha Franklin. They could get away with it.

An ingredient of being Hip is to be outside the normal boring limits of society and be individual, to have style, a philosophy and a way of life that sets you apart. It’s not about being a dork with a million tattoos, piercing and elaborate beard and hair or wearing outrageous costumes that make you stand out like a turd sticking to a white wall. If you have to try it’s wrong. That’s pretentious.

Being cool has to come from what you genuinely feel inside.

It pisses me off to see the 60s being represented on newsreels by the Carnaby Street plastic weekend Hippies.

The 60s was about a counter culture, an alternative that you either bought into a hundred percent or didn’t. You couldn’t dress up at weekends. You had to live it. It was about the rejection of the grey brigade, the 1950s straight-lace, stiff upper lip culture and replacing it with fun, colour and frolics.

Being hip was liberation from boring society without regard to the future. For a while being cool was associated with Rock culture. That is because Rock culture was so creative and out there.

Of course it was still pretentious, idealistic and doomed to fail but it was also creative, fun and produced a great deal of really great stuff. It spawned equality, women’s liberation, Green awareness and greater freedom.

In 1963 we set about, in our own Thames Delta fashion, being hip.

We started growing our hair, sideburns, beards and getting the tightest jeans we could get our legs in. We wore hipsters and Cuban heeled boots or desert boots. I had jean jackets and leather jackets.

The girls skirts got shorter and shorter, their tops tighter and their hair layered.

It caused chaos at school. I was constantly sent home for having trousers too tight, hair over my collar or sideburns below my ears. At one time I was told to go home and shave my beard of. I shaved an inch down the middle of my chin. 

‘I thought I told you not to come back until you’d shaved your beard off?’

‘I have!’ I protested. ‘These are sideburns and this is a moustache!’

On another occasion I was told not to come back until I had shaved and I stayed off. After three weeks the twagman came round to see where I was and I explained – I had been told not to come back until I had shaved and I hadn’t shaved yet!

The girls had to kneel down in assembly and had their skirts measured to see if they were too short. We all applied for that arduous job.

But fashion is not cool. Some cats have an’ some cats ain’t. But we bought in to the black culture. That was cool. They might be exploited but they knew how to let it all hang out, dress up and have fun. Everyone started to adopt this rather phoney American Black slang, man.

By the latter part of the 60s my hair was down my back, my jeans had frayed out tassels, bell-bottoms and I wore an assortment of stuff that was bright and colourful. I felt good. My parents weren’t too keen. They thought it affected my employability. I didn’t give a shit. I was reading Kerouac, Ginsberg, Rubin and Cleaver. It was the revolution, man.

Rock was cool. West Coast and Underground was hip. Careers and straight society was square.

We looked to our hip Rock bands to show us the way. It doesn’t feel as if there’s much hipness left in Rock culture these days. There’s too much money; too much phoniness. The big labels took it over and sanitised it; they overproduced the crap out of it, marketed it and came up with a product designed to make money.

There doesn’t feel to be any hipness left in the world anymore. It’s all fashion, pretension and froth.

All is phoney.

Life was there for the cool and hip to live, discover and enjoy. Life was there for straight culture to endure.

The 1960s rebellion was a revolt against the grey, class-ridden, over-bearing, claustrophobic culture of the 1950s. We wanted fun, exploration, colour, meaning, and a reason why! ‘Because we say so’ was not enough.

Death to the joyless machine! Long live the right to experience! Opher circa 1967

Extract from ‘In Search Of Captain Beefheart’

Posted on by Opher

This is another extract from my Rock Music memoir. I was there at the beginning – from the early blues guys, the rock ‘n’ rollers, the 60s underground, the 70s punk and New Wave, Grunge, Indie, Reggae and all parts between.

I saw all the best bands – Hendrix, Cream, Doors, Captain Beefheart, Roy Harper, Led Zep, Lee Scratch Perry, Ian Dury, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall – playing in small clubs. The best singer-songwriters – Dylan, Harper, Martyn, Jansch, Frank, and tens more!

I was always searching for acts that would blow my mind!!

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

Thanks for all the likes and reviews! They make or break a writer!

Here’s another extract:

Authenticity from the Delta – the Blues

At the same time that my ear was getting attuned to the wonders of Mersey and Beat my friend Dick Brunning, who was evidently utterly immune to the marvels of Pop Music, seemed keen to introduce me to authentic Chicago Blues. I have no idea how Dick got into what was such an obscure thing as Chicago Blues. In 1964 it was still largely unknown and certainly not popular. It wasn’t even by some eccentric word of mouth as he did not seem to know anyone else interested in Blues. He was, like me, fourteen years old and living in Surrey. Yet he’d developed an obsession with Blues.

Dick was one of that small group of people who you might find wandering around clutching a Blues album under his arm. This was how Mick Jagger had met up with Keith Richard. If Dick had lived in the right place and been on the correct railway platform he might have ended up playing in the Rolling Stones – but then he probably would have needed to have mastered a musical instrument and I don’t remember Dick having any musical abilities or interest in playing any instrument.

Dick lived some way off in Aldershot so it was quite a bike ride to his house. Therefore, whenever I went, he had a captive audience. We sat on his bed while he extolled the virtues of various Blues Artists. His favourite was an album of Lightnin’ Hopkins called ‘Lightnin’ Strikes. It had an echoey quality as Lightnin’, unaccompanied, played highly amplified electric guitar and had nailed bottle tops to his shoes so that he could accompany himself by tapping his feet. I kinda wished he wouldn’t.

At first it was a noise. I couldn’t make out a word the guy was singing and it was raw and unsophisticated. After many hours during which I politely showed interest I began to get more attuned and had a revelation as I started to make out that it was actually being sung in English even if it was not quite the variety I was used to.

Lightnin’ sang in a rich, black, broad Texas drawl that seemed to deploy a novel approach to the English language. In fact it appeared that he was attempting to create a whole new grammar as well. I found it quite intriguing. Out of sheer boredom I graduated to carefully listening to the guitar. I liked electric guitar but had never listened to anything that was remotely like this. Lightnin’ was playing loud with a great deal of distortion. As my ear tuned in I gradually grew to love the type of fluid runs he was putting together. That was all it took. The door had opened.

It did not happen overnight. It took Dick many months of hard work to get me hooked but get me hooked he did. I grew to love it. I have since hunted for that old vinyl album of Lightnin’s (He released a whole slew of albums called Lightnin’ Strikes) but have failed to locate it. I got its sequel ‘Dirty House Blues’ but it’s not as good. I have all the numbers on CD but they don’t sound the same. Somehow I imagine that even if I tracked it down those sounds are trapped in Dick’s bedroom over fifty years back and it could not possibly have the same magic.

Dick went on to introduce me to Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Moaning in the moonlight’ and Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed and a host of others. I am eternally grateful.

On one occasion I can remember we were at his local record shop and they miraculously had a John Lee Hooker EP in featuring ‘Dimples’ and ‘Boom boom’. Dick was debating as to whether he could really afford it while I was extolling the virtues of  ‘Ferris Wheel’ the new Everly Brothers single that had just been released. He ignored me and bought the Hooker.

On another occasion I found an old 78 of Muddy Water’s ‘Honey Bee’. I was really proud of it. Dick conned it out of me – promising me that he knew a place where he could get me a replacement. There wasn’t any such source but Dick was so insanely in need of the 78 that I let him have it. He still owes me.

Because of Dick I got into a lot of the Blues before the Beat groups brought out their versions. That didn’t stop me loving them though. I loved the way the British Beat bands did their often freaked out versions of old Blues. They made them different.

So there I was playing my Lightnin’ Hopkins in my bedroom along with my Searchers and Beatles. It seemed to make sense to me.

A strange thing happened to Dick at some future point in time. He was at a crossroads at the top of a hill leading down into town and edging out to go down to the shops. A car came careering along, tried to get round the bend and ended up rolling over twice and ending up in a field. Dick sat there open-mouthed. The driver of the crashed car kicked his door open and clambered out. He staggered across to Dick. Dick thought that he was going to say something like ‘Did you see that?’ and wound his window down. Instead the driver simply thumped Dick right in the face and knocked him out. Dick slumped forward, his foot came off the brake and he rolled down the hill.

He came round with his car in a great heap of tinned baked beans and a copper slapping his face. Seemingly he’d gone straight down the hill and through the front of a supermarket, right through the tills and into the beans. Fortunately, miraculously, nobody was hurt.

My love of the Blues blossomed and I ventured out into acoustic and also discovered the wonders of slide guitar. I was on the trail of Son House and I did not even know it.

First I had to discover Robert Johnson who I loved. Then I stumbled on Elmore James and I lit up. Elmore was a revelation. Those searing guitar runs and cracked up voice were explosive and I adored him. Dick had Lightnin’, Muddy, Jimmy and Howlin’ but Elmore was all mine. I discovered him!

I remember driving past Dobell’s on my motorbike and noticing two Elmore James albums in the window. They were like gold dust and the first I’d ever seen. Unfortunately the place was shut and I had to go back. It took me best part of a day to buy them. I had to drive all the way up to Charing Cross Road. It was like breaking into Tutankhamen’s tomb. The place was a treasure trove. I spent ages picking through the racks of American Blues. There were albums I’d never dreamed of! I had severely limited funds but came out clutching a handful of precious albums. I might not eat much for a few weeks but my ears were going to get nourished!

Unfortunately Elmore died before ever playing to a white audience so I never got to see him. Supposedly he had a heart attack in the recording studio in the early 60s. I always imagined that somewhere out there is a tape of Elmore crying out in pain and expiring. But that’s just me and my bad taste. I adored Elmore.

Later, because of the Blues boom, I got to see a number of the great Blues guys. I got to see Jimmy Reed play in a small London club. He had his son on bass and brilliantly slurred his way through a set of all his immaculate songs. But then he’d always sounded permanently drunk and the show was spot on.

I saw Muddy Waters three times with Otis Spann and his late 60s band. He was great but I think he’d toned down his act for white audiences. I would have loved to have seen him in one of those steamy Chicago clubs doing his full on act with all the women screaming at him, when he used to put a coke bottle down his trousers and get ‘em all going with ‘I’ve got my Mojo working’ and then flick the top off of the bottle and spray the audience at the crescendo. I think he felt that white audiences might find that a bit too raunchy. He may have been wrong.

That’s what Blues meant to me. It was dirty, dangerous and full of sex – a million miles away from sanitised white Pop music. You could see how it had fed into early Rock ‘n’ Roll. There was something seminal and real about it. It didn’t skirt the subject. It didn’t play for a gentile audience. It hadn’t been over-produced. It was still authentic and earthy. Where Sinatra sang of ‘Moon in June’ McKinley sang ‘I just want to make love to you.’ It was direct and honest.

They brought these Blues packages across in the late 1960s and I was privileged to see two of them at the Hammersmith Odeon. It gave me the opportunity to see many of my heroes before they slipped away. Many were at the end of their lives but still managed to give great performances, revitalised by the adulation of white audiences in Britain. They’d been dug out of obscurity and put back on the stage for a second career.

One package was Mississippi artists. I was really looking forward to it. I loved Bukka White, Skip James and Big Joe Williams and they did not disappoint. There were lots of them on the bill and they each got a twenty minute set. Big Joe Williams went down so well that he wouldn’t leave the stage and in the end they had to physically drag him off. Skip and Bukka were both ill and nearing the end of their days. Skip died shortly afterwards. But they both were great and their honest performances brought tears to my eyes. You wouldn’t have known how ill they really were.

Towards the end there was this guy Son House. I’d never heard of him. He was old and frail – in his late seventies. He shuffled on stage trailing his steel guitar behind him and we all wondered what on earth they were serving up. This guy looked well past his sell-by date. He sat on a chair, somehow lifted his guitar in his lap and began mumbling into the microphone like Hillbilly Bear (A cartoon character of the day). There was a muffled set of laughs. It was embarrassing.

Then he started to strum the opening to ‘Death Letter Blues’ the years dropped off him and the power radiated out. It was so powerful that it blew the whole audience away. The bottle-neck National Steel guitar was the most strident and forceful guitar-work I had ever heard. His voice was rich and expressive and he sang from the heart. By the end everyone in the hall was up standing on their seats bellowing for more. He shuffled off dragging his guitar behind him. The noise went on and he came back on without guitar. He stood there, clapped and stamped and sang a cappella.

I had discovered him.

I had found what I did not know I had been looking for. Son House had entered my life.

It is one thing to discover something but quite another to fully understand it. That is something I have been pursuing to this day. It is only with the advent of CDs that much of the material has come to light and is available. Back in 1967 there was only one album that had been released entitled ‘Death letter blues’. I played it in the shop in a tiny listening booth and it was every bit as strident and powerful as I remembered. I snapped it up.

Now I have 26 CDs of Son house material – including his early ‘field’ recordings and a number of live concerts.

Son House was playing at the time of Charlie Patton and those other early itinerant Mississippi blues musicians. He is fabled to have taught Robert Johnson to play. As such you could say that he was the focal point for all that was to follow! Rock music might not have existed without him.

You could say that my quest had led me all the way back to the beginning.

The beginning is a good place to start. Once you have the beginning you’ve got a cornerstone to build the rest of the story on. I consider myself fortunate to have seen the man who started it all. He was as awesome as his reputation.

In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Mirrors and Venom

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In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

Mirrors and Venom

Now we are in the heady days of 1967 and I am seventeen and eighteen and amid the huge experimentations and excitement of the times the quest gathers force. I am intoxicated by the hunt and buzzing with energy. It is driving me on to search in the clubs and second-hand record stores. I am always searching for something that will provide me with all the answers and sate my appetite.

All thoughts of education and careers are relegated to the box marked ‘incidental’. Life’s too full of life to waste. There is so much to be learnt, investigated, found out, appreciated, loved, experienced and enjoyed and you can’t find it in schools, answer it in exams or read about it in textbooks. There were too many people to meet, sights to see and mad conversations to be had. I was a madman. I scorched through life absorbing and burning up energy. It was like a chocoholic being let loose in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory!

My hair has grown and is bleached with peroxide. It looks like straw and contrasts with my dark beard. I never went in for hippy beads, keeping myself simple with shirt and jeans. I had met Liz and dragged her around with me. We enjoy dancing and one of our gigs is usually soul based, but we bounce around to Mayall, Floyd and Fleetwood Mac just as happily. We are to be found frolicking in the Marquee, Middle Earth, Toby Jug, Klooks Kleek, UFO or Eel Pie Island and are just as happy with the Psychedelic, Blues or Progressive scene.

I have already discovered Dylan and Guthrie and have gorged myself on their inebriating offerings. They will both continue to inform and sustain me. But still I am not content. I want more. The Underground is a glut that provides me with a happy hunting ground. I am a student and free in London and am about to launch myself headfirst into five years of musical gluttony.

But today is special. This is no ordinary faire but I had no inkling of what was in store for me.

I had made a new friend at college by the name of Mike. He was quiet and shy but extremely cool in his white plastic jacket with long corkscrew black hair. He tells me of this guy he has seen who he thinks I would be mad over. He tells how he is insane and full of energy just like me and that I have to go to see him.

I made a mental note. I stash it away. I forget about it.

I am heading for Soho, for Les Cousins on Greek Street. It is a small club in the basement. You go down these steep steps into an underground cellar where you are packed in among the crowds, seated and focussed towards a small stage in the middle. It was dark and intimate.

Les Cousins was no ordinary folk club in the traditional sense. There were no sing-alongs, no traditional songs with hands behind the ear. It was really a place that showcased the work of the new acoustic singer-songwriters of the day who were loosely termed contemporary folk singers. These included the wondrous Jackson C Frank, Paul Simon and even Dylan had made an appearance. I had gone along to catch Bert Jansch and John Renbourn.

They played and I enjoyed it. I can’t remember too much about it because those memories were blown out of my mind.

In the intermission there was a twenty minute slot and they put this new up-and-coming singer-songwriter on. He played three numbers and talked a lot about the songs and what was in his head.

It was the guy that Mike had been telling me about.

What he was saying was intelligent, sharp, funny and illuminating. More importantly was that it was like I was holding up a mirror and seeing my thoughts projected. There was immediate empathy. It felt to me like I was listening to my own self – except, of course, that this one could actually sing and play an instrument.

I was blown away.

I felt like I had found what I didn’t know I had been looking for. I had stumbled across Roy Harper the greatest British song-writer, social commentator, poet and auto-career sabotager of all time.

That was a meeting that altered my life.

Opher 1969

In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Nowt so weird as Folk – From the Dust bowl to the Thames Delta

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Nowt so weird as Folk – From the Dust bowl to the Thames Delta

1965 was a hell of a year. Ready Stead Go ruled the TV and a non-ending stream of Beat bands took over the charts and the world.

It was the year I turned 16 and got a motorbike which meant I could finally get around and get to gigs.

Donovan appeared as a resident on Ready Steady go complete with his cap and sign on his guitar that said – THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS – both of which he nicked from Woody Guthrie. I liked Donovan and I had this girlfriend Viv who had his album which she later gave to me. I used to go round her place and play the Donovan album.

Viv had an older brother who was in to Big Bill Broonzy and Woody Guthrie. I’d never heard of Woody Guthrie but I was soon getting in to him more than the Donovan. The albums that Viv’s brother liked were Folkways things where Woody is playing fairly safe songs like ‘Springfield Mountain’ with Sonny Terry Brownie McGhee and Leadbelly. There was something about them I liked and I started seeking out other Guthrie stuff and soon found some Guthrie songs that were meatier – ‘The Dustbowl Ballads’

I loved the lyrics they weren’t love songs. Woody Guthrie was writing songs that meant something, that were poetic with an intellectual and political importance. They told stories. They were about people and disasters, organising and putting things right. I loved it. My mind buzzed with them. I soaked them up.

I had discovered someone who I felt sang real songs about real injustice. He was immediately one of my heroes and has never ceased to be.

I bought all his Folkways albums – his ‘Dust Bowl Ballads’ and ‘Columbia River Collection’.

Guthrie was the poet that put balls into the Folk movement. He not only inspired people like Seeger in the 1950s but was the whole basis behind the emergence of Dylan and later influenced Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg and a host of others.

Billy Bragg was straight out of the Guthrie mould and burst upon the scene with his rousing political anthems such as Leon Rosselson’s (another singer-songwriter I love) ‘World turned upside down’ and Seeger’s ‘Which side are you on?’ lapsed into more Poppy stuff but re-emerged when he’d been asked to put some Woody Guthrie lyrics to music and record them. He and Wilco recorded the memorable Mermaid Avenue.

Fairly recently I went on pilgrimage to Mermaid Ave in Coney Island New York. The house was no longer there but you could still walk around and pick up the feel of it with its Funfair Park and tackiness. I could feel him there and I breathed his air.

 Coney island 2010

Back in 1965 I’d discovered Woody and I’m still investigating to this day. I always go back to Guthrie. He is a legend.

For Rock to come of age it had to grow out of the love songs and teenage focus of early Rock ‘n’ Roll and start dealing with real issues in a sophisticated manner. The music had to become more sophisticated and complex and the lyrics had to expand. That’s where Woody came in. Almost single-handedly he raised the art of song writing and added humour and a social dimension through a poetry that was insufficiently rewarded.

Woody was a genius. I had found him and been moved by him but my quest was not over.

Woody got me into Folk and Folk, post Dylan, was undergoing a resurgence of interest.

There were two ways it could go. There was the contemporary field with singer songwriters like Bert Jansch and John Renbourn or there was the traditional with the Young Tradition.

It seemed to me that traditional Folk was stilted and set in the past while contemporary Folk was of the moment. Inspired from the roots of Guthrie and then Dylan they were creatively writing songs about the world I was living in. They were telling my stories.

Viv had got me into early Donovan and then two other people got me going into contemporary acoustic Singer-songwriters who were largely masquerading as Folk singers just because they played acoustic guitar.

Firstly Robert Ede leant me the wonderful Jack C Frank album. I immediately bought it and played it to death. It is one of those rare albums that are just perfect with beautifully crafted songs.

I loved Jackson he was a lovely gentle man with a great mind and welcoming smile. I got to meet him in 1969 in Ilford High Road at the Angel pub. It was a great little gig although there were only about twenty people there. Jackson stayed back and we sat and talked with him and told him how great he was.

Jackson had a really tough life. He’d been badly burnt when his school caught fire. Many of his friends had been killed. He’d come to England with the compensation looking to buy classic cars. He’d recorded the one fabled album, performed some gigs, got together with Sandy Denny and then was gone. He later ended up on the streets in New York, got his eye shot out and died penniless of pneumonia.

He didn’t deserve that. He was a lovely talented man.

Supposedly Jackson was meant to be performing with Roy Harper as a guest at Roy’s big break-through gig. He never showed up, never did another concert and faded away.

Then Neil Furby introduced me to Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. I loved Bert’s first and second albums with all the political stuff like ‘Antiapartheid’, ‘Do you hear me now?’ and ‘Needle of Death’. I liked the stuff I could get my teeth into. Folk brought that social bite.

It was the liking of Bert and John that led me to Les Cousins on Greek Street in Soho. Having a motorbike enabled me to get there. It was there that my quest took me to Roy Harper but that’s another story altogether.

Folk changed Rock by adding substance to it. You can see its influence in the Beatles later work. By the end of 1965 I was listening to Beat music that had begun to get more experimental and was getting into Blues and now Folk. The mid 1960s was a nascent period that was about to explode again and I was poised to become more active in my quest. A number of goals were about to be achieved.

In Search Of Captain Beefheart – Authenticity from the Delta – the Blues

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Authenticity from the Delta – the Blues

At the same time that my ear was getting attuned to the wonders of Mersey and Beat my friend Dick Brunning, who was evidently utterly immune to the marvels of Pop Music, seemed keen to introduce me to authentic Chicago Blues. I have no idea how Dick got into what was such an obscure thing as Chicago Blues. In 1964 it was still largely unknown and certainly not popular. It wasn’t even by some eccentric word of mouth as he did not seem to know anyone else interested in Blues. He was, like me, fourteen years old and living in Surrey. Yet he’d developed an obsession with Blues.

Dick was one of that small group of people who you might find wandering around clutching a Blues album under his arm. This was how Mick Jagger had met up with Keith Richard. If Dick had lived in the right place and been on the correct railway platform he might have ended up playing in the Rolling Stones – but then he probably would have needed to have mastered a musical instrument and I don’t remember Dick having any musical abilities or interest in playing any instrument.

Dick lived some way off in Aldershot so it was quite a bike ride to his house. Therefore, whenever I went, he had a captive audience. We sat on his bed while he extolled the virtues of various Blues Artists. His favourite was an album of Lightnin’ Hopkins called ‘Lightnin’ Strikes. It had an echoey quality as Lightnin’, unaccompanied, played highly amplified electric guitar and had nailed bottle tops to his shoes so that he could accompany himself by tapping his feet. I kinda wished he wouldn’t.

At first it was a noise. I couldn’t make out a word the guy was singing and it was raw and unsophisticated. After many hours during which I politely showed interest I began to get more attuned and had a revelation as I started to make out that it was actually being sung in English even if it was not quite the variety I was used to.

Lightnin’ sang in a rich, black, broad Texas drawl that seemed to deploy a novel approach to the English language. In fact it appeared that he was attempting to create a whole new grammar as well. I found it quite intriguing. Out of sheer boredom I graduated to carefully listening to the guitar. I liked electric guitar but had never listened to anything that was remotely like this. Lightnin’ was playing loud with a great deal of distortion. As my ear tuned in I gradually grew to love the type of fluid runs he was putting together. That was all it took. The door had opened.

It did not happen overnight. It took Dick many months of hard work to get me hooked but get me hooked he did. I grew to love it. I have since hunted for that old vinyl album of Lightnin’s (He released a whole slew of albums called Lightnin’ Strikes) but have failed to locate it. I got its sequel ‘Dirty House Blues’ but it’s not as good. I have all the numbers on CD but they don’t sound the same. Somehow I imagine that even if I tracked it down those sounds are trapped in Dick’s bedroom over fifty years back and it could not possibly have the same magic.

Dick went on to introduce me to Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Moaning in the moonlight’ and Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed and a host of others. I am eternally grateful.

On one occasion I can remember we were at his local record shop and they miraculously had a John Lee Hooker EP in featuring ‘Dimples’ and ‘Boom boom’. Dick was debating as to whether he could really afford it while I was extolling the virtues of  ‘Ferris Wheel’ the new Everly Brothers single that had just been released. He ignored me and bought the Hooker.

On another occasion I found an old 78 of Muddy Water’s ‘Honey Bee’. I was really proud of it. Dick conned it out of me – promising me that he knew a place where he could get me a replacement. There wasn’t any such source but Dick was so insanely in need of the 78 that I let him have it. He still owes me.

Because of Dick I got into a lot of the Blues before the Beat groups brought out their versions. That didn’t stop me loving them though. I loved the way the British Beat bands did their often freaked out versions of old Blues. They made them different.

So there I was playing my Lightnin’ Hopkins in my bedroom along with my Searchers and Beatles. It seemed to make sense to me.

A strange thing happened to Dick at some future point in time. He was at a crossroads at the top of a hill leading down into town and edging out to go down to the shops. A car came careering along, tried to get round the bend and ended up rolling over twice and ending up in a field. Dick sat there open-mouthed. The driver of the crashed car kicked his door open and clambered out. He staggered across to Dick. Dick thought that he was going to say something like ‘Did you see that?’ and wound his window down. Instead the driver simply thumped Dick right in the face and knocked him out. Dick slumped forward, his foot came off the brake and he rolled down the hill.

He came round with his car in a great heap of tinned baked beans and a copper slapping his face. Seemingly he’d gone straight down the hill and through the front of a supermarket, right through the tills and into the beans. Fortunately, miraculously, nobody was hurt.

My love of the Blues blossomed and I ventured out into acoustic and also discovered the wonders of slide guitar. I was on the trail of Son House and I did not even know it.

First I had to discover Robert Johnson who I loved. Then I stumbled on Elmore James and I lit up. Elmore was a revelation. Those searing guitar runs and cracked up voice were explosive and I adored him. Dick had Lightnin’, Muddy, Jimmy and Howlin’ but Elmore was all mine. I discovered him!

I remember driving past Dobell’s on my motorbike and noticing two Elmore James albums in the window. They were like gold dust and the first I’d ever seen. Unfortunately the place was shut and I had to go back. It took me best part of a day to buy them. I had to drive all the way up to Charing Cross Road. It was like breaking into Tutankhamen’s tomb. The place was a treasure trove. I spent ages picking through the racks of American Blues. There were albums I’d never dreamed of! I had severely limited funds but came out clutching a handful of precious albums. I might not eat much for a few weeks but my ears were going to get nourished!

Unfortunately Elmore died before ever playing to a white audience so I never got to see him. Supposedly he had a heart attack in the recording studio in the early 60s. I always imagined that somewhere out there is a tape of Elmore crying out in pain and expiring. But that’s just me and my bad taste. I adored Elmore.

Later, because of the Blues boom, I got to see a number of the great Blues guys. I got to see Jimmy Reed play in a small London club. He had his son on bass and brilliantly slurred his way through a set of all his immaculate songs. But then he’d always sounded permanently drunk and the show was spot on.

I saw Muddy Waters three times with Otis Spann and his late 60s band. He was great but I think he’d toned down his act for white audiences. I would have loved to have seen him in one of those steamy Chicago clubs doing his full on act with all the women screaming at him, when he used to put a coke bottle down his trousers and get ‘em all going with ‘I’ve got my Mojo working’ and then flick the top off of the bottle and spray the audience at the crescendo. I think he felt that white audiences might find that a bit too raunchy. He may have been wrong.

That’s what Blues meant to me. It was dirty, dangerous and full of sex – a million miles away from sanitised white Pop music. You could see how it had fed into early Rock ‘n’ Roll. There was something seminal and real about it. It didn’t skirt the subject. It didn’t play for a gentile audience. It hadn’t been over-produced. It was still authentic and earthy. Where Sinatra sang of ‘Moon in June’ McKinley sang ‘I just want to make love to you.’ It was direct and honest.

They brought these Blues packages across in the late 1960s and I was privileged to see two of them at the Hammersmith Odeon. It gave me the opportunity to see many of my heroes before they slipped away. Many were at the end of their lives but still managed to give great performances, revitalised by the adulation of white audiences in Britain. They’d been dug out of obscurity and put back on the stage for a second career.

One package was Mississippi artists. I was really looking forward to it. I loved Bukka White, Skip James and Big Joe Williams and they did not disappoint. There were lots of them on the bill and they each got a twenty minute set. Big Joe Williams went down so well that he wouldn’t leave the stage and in the end they had to physically drag him off. Skip and Bukka were both ill and nearing the end of their days. Skip died shortly afterwards. But they both were great and their honest performances brought tears to my eyes. You wouldn’t have known how ill they really were.

Towards the end there was this guy Son House. I’d never heard of him. He was old and frail – in his late seventies. He shuffled on stage trailing his steel guitar behind him and we all wondered what on earth they were serving up. This guy looked well past his sell-by date. He sat on a chair, somehow lifted his guitar in his lap and began mumbling into the microphone like Hillbilly Bear (A cartoon character of the day). There was a muffled set of laughs. It was embarrassing.

Then he started to strum the opening to ‘Death Letter Blues’ the years dropped off him and the power radiated out. It was so powerful that it blew the whole audience away. The bottle-neck National Steel guitar was the most strident and forceful guitar-work I had ever heard. His voice was rich and expressive and he sang from the heart. By the end everyone in the hall was up standing on their seats bellowing for more. He shuffled off dragging his guitar behind him. The noise went on and he came back on without guitar. He stood there, clapped and stamped and sang a cappella.

I had discovered him.

I had found what I did not know I had been looking for. Son House had entered my life.

It is one thing to discover something but quite another to fully understand it. That is something I have been pursuing to this day. It is only with the advent of CDs that much of the material has come to light and is available. Back in 1967 there was only one album that had been released entitled ‘Death letter blues’. I played it in the shop in a tiny listening booth and it was every bit as strident and powerful as I remembered. I snapped it up.

Now I have 26 CDs of Son house material – including his early ‘field’ recordings and a number of live concerts.

Son House was playing at the time of Charlie Patton and those other early itinerant Mississippi blues musicians. He is fabled to have taught Robert Johnson to play. As such you could say that he was the focal point for all that was to follow! Rock music might not have existed without him.

You could say that my quest had led me all the way back to the beginning.

The beginning is a good place to start. Once you have the beginning you’ve got a cornerstone to build the rest of the story on. I consider myself fortunate to have seen the man who started it all. He was as awesome as his reputation.

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

In Search of Captain Beefheart – A Memoir

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The Blurb

Blurb

The sixties raged. I was young, crazy, full of hormones and wanting to snatch life by the balls. There was a life out there for the grabbing and it had to be wrestled into submission. There was a society full of boring amoral crap and a life to be had in the face of the boring, comforting vision of slow death on offer.

Rock music vented all that passion.

This book is a memoir of a life spent immersed in Rock Music. I was born in 1949 and so lived through the whole gamut of Rock.

Rock music formed the background to momentous world events – the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, Iraq war, Watergate, the miners’ strike and Thatcher years, CND, the Green Movement, Mao and the Cultural Revolution, Women’s Liberation and the Cold War.

I see this as the Rock Era.

I was immersed in Rock music. It was fused into my personality. It informed me, transformed me and inspired me. My heroes were musicians. I am who I am because of them.

Without Rock Music I would not have the same sensibilities, optimism or ideals. They woke me up!

This tells that story.

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

In Seach Of Captain Beefheart – A rock music memoir – The Preface

Posted on by Opher

This is the first half of the preface to my rock memoir. This has proved to be one of my best selling books.

Preface

Jack White launched into the searing riff that was the intro to ‘Death Letter Blues’. It shot me straight back to 1968 and the thrill of seeing and hearing Son House. Son’s national steel guitar was more ragged than Jack White’s crystal clear electric chords, and nowhere near as loud, but the chords rang true and the energy and passion were exactly the same.

Meg pounded the drums and the crowd surged forward.

It was Bridlington Spa in 2004. White Stripes were the hottest thing on the planet. The place was packed and the atmosphere electric. I was right near the front – the only place to be at any gig – the place where the intensity was magnified.

It was a huge crowd and they were crazy tonight. I could see the young kids piling into the mosh-pit and shoving – excited groups of kids deliberately surging like riot cops in a wedge driving into the crowd and sending them reeling so that they tumbled and spilled. For the first time I started getting concerned. The tightly packed kids in the mosh-pit were roaring and bouncing up and down and kept being propelled first one way and then another as the forces echoed and magnified through the mass of people. At the front the crush was intense and everyone was careering about madly. My feet were off the ground as we were sent hurtling around. I had visions of someone getting crushed, visions of someone falling and getting trampled. Worst of all – it could be me!

For the first time in forty odd years of gigs I bailed out. I ruefully headed for the balcony and a clear view of the performance. I didn’t want a clear view I wanted to be in the thick of the action. It got me wondering – was I getting to old for this lark? My old man had only been a couple of years older than me when he’d died. Perhaps Rock Music was for the young and I should be at home listening to opera or Brahms with an occasional dash of Wagner to add the spice. I had become an old git. Then I thought – FUCK IT!!! Jack White was fucking good! Fuck Brahms – This was Rock ‘n’ Roll. You’re never too old to Rock! And Rock was far from dead!

The search goes on!!

We haven’t got a clue what we’re looking for but we sure as hell know when we’ve found it.

Rock music has not been the backdrop to my entire adult life; it’s been much more than that. It has permeated my life, informed it and directed its course.

From when I was a small boy I found myself enthralled. I was grabbed by that excitement. I wanted more. I was hunting for the best Rock jag in the world! – The hit that would send the heart into thunder and melt the mind into ecstasy.

I was hunting for Beefheart, Harper, House, Zimmerman and Guthrie plus a host of others even though I hadn’t heard of them yet.

I found them and I’m still discovering them. I’m sixty four and looking for more!

Forget your faith, hope and charity – give me Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll and the greatest of these is Rock ‘n’ Roll!

I was a kid in the Thames Delta, with pet crow called Joey, 2000 pet mice (unnamed), a couple of snakes, a mammoth tusk, a track bike with a fixed wheel, a friend called Mutt who liked blowing up things, a friend called Billy who kept a big flask of pee in the hopes of making ammonia, and a lot of scabs on my knees.

My search for the heart of Rock began in 1959 and I had no idea what I was looking for when I started on this quest. Indeed I did not know I had embarked on a search for anything. I was just excited by a new world that opened up to me; the world of Rock Music. My friend Clive Hansell also had no idea what he was initiating when he introduced me to the sounds he was listening to. Clive was a few years older than me. He liked girls and he liked Popular Music. Yet he seemed to have limited tastes. I can only ever remembering him playing me music by two artists – namely Adam Faith and Buddy Holly. In some ways it was a motley introduction to the world of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

I was ten years old which would have made Clive about twelve or thirteen, I suppose he could even have been fourteen. That is quite a lot of years at that age. We used to got off to his bedroom, sit on the bed and he’d play me the singles – 45s – on his Dansette player. He’d stack four or five singles on the deck push the lever up to play and we’d lean forward and watch intently. The turntable would start rotating; the mechanism clunked as the arm raised, there were clicks and clunks as the arm drew back and the first single dropped, then the arm would come across and descend on to the outer rim of the disc. The speaker would hiss and crackle and then the music kicked in. We watched the process intently every time as if it depended on our full attention.

The Adam Faith singles were on Parlaphone and were red with silver writing. The Buddy Holly was on Coral with a black label and silver writing. We reverentially watched the discs spinning and listened with great concentration to every aspect of the songs. It was a start.

Yet Rock ‘n’ Roll was by no means the only quest I’d started on. I was an early developer. I’d hit puberty at ten and can imagine myself as the scruffy little, dirty-faced kid who climbed trees, waded through ditches, got covered in frogspawn and lichen and was suddenly sprouting pubic hair – very confusing.

Life was going to change for me. I was in a transition phase.

My friend Jeff has a photo of me from this age that seems to sum it up very nicely. I was briefly in the cubs before they chucked me out for being too unruly (they – ‘they’ being the establishment – also chucked me out of the scouts and army cadets!). I went to cubs with my mate Jeff. Jeff lived at the end of the road and I used to go and call for him. It was only about 400yds away. I set off in plenty of time, did my thing on the way and arrived at Jeff’s house. His mum obviously did a double take and went for the camera.

Oblivious to any underlying motive on Jeff mum’s part I innocently posed with Jeff. The resultant picture, which shows the two of us proudly standing to attention doing the two fingered cub salute (very appropriate I always think), showed Jeff immaculate with creases in his shorts, flashes showing on his long socks, cap, woggle and scarf all perfectly aligned, and me not quite so sartorially presented. To start with I am utterly begrimed with green lichen, having shinned up a number of trees; one sock is around my ankle and the other half way down my calf; my scarf and cap askew, and my jumper and shorts a crinkled, crumpled mess. It looked like a set-up but was probably par for the course.

Looking back I can see why Clive liked Buddy and Adam. Buddy Holly was a genius. In his short career of just three years he wrote tens of classics of Rock music with hardly a dud among them. He was highly prolific, innovative and talented. I think of him as the Jimi Hendrix of his day. He was far ahead of Elvis. His mind outstripped all the others. I think Buddy’s death, along with Jimi’s, John Lennon’s and Jim Morrison’s, was the greatest tragedy. Out of all the early Rockers he was the one with the musical ear, the melody and adaptability to have really progressed when the music scene opened up in the 1960s. The other Rockers all got caught in their own 1950s style or went Poppy. I would have loved to have seen Buddy interacting with the Beatles. My – what we missed out on!

In many ways Adam Faith was Britain’s answer to Buddy. The arrangements of the songs were cheesy covers of Buddy and Adam did his best Buddy warble. Britain hadn’t quite got it right with Rock music, the production and direction from management (Larry Parnes the old-fashioned British Impresario has a lot to answer for as he guided his Rockers into a more ballad driven, family safe, Pop sound that he figured would make him more money) was all a bit twee. Even so, back then, Adam Faith sounded good to me. In Britain in the 1950s we were starved of good Rock ‘n’ Roll. The good old Auntie Beeb, with its plumy DJs did its best to protect us from the dreadful degenerate racket created by the American Rockers.

In Search of Captain Beefheart: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781502820457: Books

In Search Of Captain Beefheart – a rock memoir

Posted on by Opher

This tells the story of my life in rock music right back to when I was a kid of ten through the sixties up to White Stripes and beyond. It’s been quite a trip.

This appears to be a perrennial in that it is the one of my books that continually sells. People seem to like it.

The title is perhaps a bit misleading. It’s not focussed on Capatain Beefheart. He just happened to be one of the great bands that I discovered and loved. There were many. I could easily have called it In Search of Roy Harper (or Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Elmore James, Jimi Hendrix, Son House…………) I lived the life, saw all the bands, loved every minute and I’m still there at the front!

In Search of Captain Beefheart.  

Pete & Opher circa 1971                                                                                   Copyright Opher Goodwin     By   Opher

Self Portrait – 1973


In Search of Captain Beefheart, Son House, Roy Harper, Woody Guthrie & Bob Dylan   By   Opher  

Blurb  

The sixties raged. I was young, crazy, full of hormones and wanting to snatch life by the balls. There was a life out there for the grabbing and it had to be wrestled into submission. There was a society full of boring amoral crap and a life to be had in the face of the boring, comforting vision of slow death on offer. Rock music vented all that passion. This book is a memoir of a life spent immersed in Rock Music.

I was born in 1949 and so lived through the whole gamut of Rock. Rock music formed the background to momentous world events – the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, Iraq war, Watergate, the miners’ strike and Thatcher years, CND, the Green Movement, Mao and the Cultural Revolution, Women’s Liberation and the Cold War. I see this as the Rock Era. I was immersed in Rock music. It was fused into my personality. It informed me, transformed me and inspired me. My heroes were musicians. I am who I am because of them. Without Rock Music I would not have the same sensibilities, optimism or ideals. They woke me up! This tells that story.

  Painting by Opher

Painting by Opher
Foreword   Fight for what you believe with passion not violence. Be prepared to take some heavy blows!! 

Liz & Opher walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Boston 1971 – featured on the front page of the Boston Evening Globe

In Search of Captain Beefheart eBook : Goodwin, Opher: Amazon.co.uk: Books