From trees, tadpoles and dens to Les Cousins, Middle Earth and Abbey Road Studios. This is the story of my life in the sixties.
My 60s eBook : Goodwin, Opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
Available in 3 candid forms – Paperback, Hardback and eBook. – Feel free to purchase the full story!
Amazon.co.uk: Opher Goodwin: books, biography, latest update
Roy Harper – Live at Les Cousins – 30th August 1969
It was the end of August in London. 1969 – at the height of the sixties Underground. These were the heady days of revolution. The world had changed for ever. The old world had been swept away by a wave of youthful rebellion. These were the days of new sensibilities and attitudes; the rebirth of individuality, spirituality and political awareness, coupled with a sexual revolution. The freaks were taking over and questioning everything.
It felt like we were caught up in the great tsunami of social upheaval and creative endeavour. It was sweeping all before it. We were making up new rules. I was twenty years old and living in London, the heart of what was going on. We were young, free and wanting to taste it all. There was a great feeling of optimism.
That’s how it felt.
It is a shame it proved so ephemeral.
On that summer day it was a hot in London. Allen Ginsberg had been spotted on Charring Cross Road. Bob Dylan was playing at the Isle of Wight but I was going to a much more important event – I was off to see Roy Harper play Les Cousins.
Roy had been signed to the prestigious EMI Harvest label. They were gathering up the best of the Sixties Underground – like Pink Floyd and Edgar Broughton, and giving them carte blanche to record.
At last Roy was being recognised as a major force. He was being given the best recording facilities in the world – at Abbey Road Studio – as well as a sympathetic producer. The deal had energised Roy. He had virtually unlimited studio time, the best facilities and a great production team. Not only that but he had a collection of songs that were the equal of anything he’d written before. It felt like the bits of the jig-saw puzzle were finally coming together and Roy would at last be able to do justice to his material.
Work had begun on what was to become Flat Baroque and Berserk. Roy and Pete Jenner had hit it off, became buddies and shared musical views. There was synergy in the studio.
Roy saw ‘I Hate the Whiteman’ as the centre-piece to the album. It was a song that was full of social observation and vitriol for the plastic lifestyle of western civilisation. It epitomised Roy’s attitude at that time (and up to the present). Roy had been singing it live with great gusto and passion. It had massive impact on audiences.
When it came to recording the song for the album Roy wanted it to have all the immediacy and power of a live recording. He did not want it watered down. He felt that it was an important statement. Somehow he managed to persuade the powers that be at EMI that it was worth recording live.
Roy selected Les Cousins as the venue – the place he had started out, a warm, intimate place that felt like home to him, and arranged for EMI’s portable recording machine to be set up. This gig was to be professionally recorded on the best equipment available.
I knew in advance what was going down, so it was with a great deal of excitement that I found myself descending those steep stairs into the cellar that was Les Cousins.
The club was small; a room with a little stage in the corner with small tables and chairs scattered around. It was always dimly lit and created quite an atmosphere, particularly when filled with a lot of smoke and packed with people. I secured a place to the side and at the front and waited nervously.
Roy seemed a bit uptight to me. He was eager to get this right. I think it is one of those times when the more you try to be normal and relaxed the more you’re not. Roy launched into his set and I could see he was pouring everything into it. I lived every moment, willing it to be brilliant. The passion was electric. It was so intense that he broke a string from the sheer force he was pushing through the guitar.
When it came to Whiteman I was on edge, wanting it to be perfect, wanting Roy not to fluff a note or forget a line. It sounded pretty good to me. I thought they’d got it.
I’m not sure what happened. I heard that Roy did not think that the live recording was quite good enough and merely used the spoken introduction on the album. In any case, the track used on the album was superb.
The rest of the concert (not quite in its entirety) lay on the shelf for thirty years. Darren Crisp resurrected it and persuaded Roy to put it out as a CD.
It is quite a unique performance – capturing Roy in full flood at the height of his youthful energies. It gives a rare insight into what those early gigs were like. Roy was on fire. The songs soared and the less cynical Harper laid into the establishment with real venom. Then there was the banter in between the songs – often as interesting and important as the songs themselves.
Darren asked me to write the liner notes and I was more than happy to oblige.
Live at Les Cousins is part of history and a superb relic of an era – as well as being a musical gem.
The Beginning
Back in the heady days of 1966/67 I was free. I did what I wanted. Reckless and like a sponge, absorbing everything. At seventeen/eighteen I was technically at school – although my head was elsewhere. I was thoroughly immersed in girls, Kerouac, music and the burgeoning underground scene. No time for studies. As a volatile idealistic young fool it seemed like there was a whole world to be discovered – literature, poetry, drama, art, politics, philosophy, spirituality, love and sex. Wow! Heady days! Talk about rapid development. My brain was firing electricity like nobody’s business. They could have connected me up to the grid. Days spent sitting around with mates, smoking and listening to music and talking madly as a stream of madness came pouring out. The world was flooding in and barely being processed before excitedly gushing out. My head was exploding.
School were none too pleased with my hair, beard and coloured clothes. Who cared? Drop out! I spent a lot of time at home.
Music was the medium. I devoured albums. I’d been nurtured on the Beatles and Stones, Dylan, Pretty Things, Yardbirds, Kinks and Who but I was discovering more obscure stuff by the minute. We excitedly shared out discoveries. Jackson C Frank, Woody Guthrie and Bert Jansch were never off my turntable.
At the age of sixteen, in 1965, I bought a motorbike and was mobile. At seventeen I bought a car and could turn up places warm and dry. And what places there were to go back then. Amazing gigs. Eel Pie Island, Middle Earth, the Marquis, Fishmongers Arms, Three Horseshoes, Bunjis and the Toby Jug. There were a host of people to see. In 67 Pink Floyd was creating mesmerising madness at Middle Earth, Hendrix and Cream were playing clubs, the old Blues guys were touring (I got to see Son House, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Bukka White, Skip James and loads more). There were free gigs in Hyde Park. Edgar Broughton was ousting demons Arthur Brown Had a weird thing going with the god of hellfire. The Incredible String Band had no difficulty being incredible.
The West Coast bands were taking off – Frank Zappa, Country Joe and the Fish, Doors and Captain Beefheart. Free, Traffic, Jethro Tull and the Bonzos were playing most nights. We bounced about to Fleetwood Mac. We bopped to John Mayall. Every night they were available and the entrance fee was between 10p and 25p. 25p for Pink Floyd and Blossom Toes at Eel Pie Island! Just imagine. I later paid 25p to see Led Zep at the Toby Jug. I was skint but I could afford it.
We had one long endless party. The camaraderie between us long hair beatnik freaks was amazing. Everywhere you went it was joints and new friends. Grok? We shared a philosophy. It was decidedly anti-establishment and ridiculously idealistic, but it was magical. We had our own separate society based around sharing.
In among all the endless mayhem of gigs, parties, girls and friends I discovered this little basement club on Greek Street in the midst of all the night-time strip clubs and cafes, called Les Cousins. It was like a little refuge, a family, a dark dingy basement in which a bunch of hairy guys and colourful girls sat and concentrated, rapt and serious, entranced by the new sounds and poetry of the acoustic scene dubbed contemporary folk. Not sure where that came from. These were a bunch of new incredible songwriters who happened to play acoustically and usually about contemporary issues, topical dramas, real life. Just my thing – serious, deep, extraordinary, brilliant. I spent many a night there basking in the likes of John Martyn, Al Stewart and Jackson C Frank. Magical days. I wish I’d kept my membership card!
One night I rolled up, parked my motorbike on the pavement, bounced down the stairs into the fetid cellar and got a seat at a table near the front. I’d come for Bert Jansch and John Renbourn – two of my favourites. Sandwiched in between them was this manic guy with long blond hair a moustache and acoustic guitar. He giggled a lot and spouted whatever came into his head. I can’t remember what but it all hit me like a hail of bullets. He was mirroring my thoughts. He sang three songs. One was Goldfish and I think another was Blackpool. He blew me away. The guitarwork, the poetry but most of all that mind! That was it – short and sweet!
I’d discovered Roy Harper!
It seems that there is going to be a documentary about the fabulous Jackson C Frank entitled: Blues Run the Game: The Strange Tale of Jackson C Frank. I can’t wait. I’ve been a huge fan ever since I heard his debut and sadly, his only album in 1965. Jackson was a good friend of Roy Harper’s back then and Roy wrote the song ‘My Friend’ for him.
I was fortunate enough to see Jackson play and have a chat with him. I wrote about it in the piece I published a number of years back.
I can’t wait to see the documentary!
Jackson C Frank at a small club on Ilford High Street in 1969
Jackson C frank was a major singer-songwriter from the sixties though not too many people would know that. He was a regular at Les Cousin, partnered Sandy Denny and persuaded her to give up her job and sing full time, was a close friend of Roy Harper (who wrote the song My Friend for him) and was a great influence on all those songwriters of that era. His first album, recorded in 1965, being groundbreaking. A beautiful, melodic album of well-crafted introspective songs that are haunting.
The Contemporary Folk scene had taken off in a big way in England. Donovan had popularised it and Dylan’s success had made acoustic music a viable commercial exercise but the whole scene had blossomed underground with the likes of Davy Graham, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. It had different roots to that of Greenwich Village in America, although there was a lot of overlap.
I stumbled across this folk phenomenon via a number of sources. When I was fourteen I had been introduced to Woody Guthrie and Big Bill Broonzy by a girlfriend of mine. Then Donovan had started playing on Ready Steady Go. It seemed to fit together. Donovan at the time put the same sign on his guitar that he’d stolen from Woody – ‘This machine kills fascists’. I liked that.
Then Robert Ede and Neil Furby played a part in my education. They were two school-mates. Neil nicked one of my girlfriends but he introduced me to Bert Jansch and John Rebourn, so I suppose that was a fair exchange. Bob had bought the Jackson album the day it came out (he was way ahead of the game) and lent it to me. I loved it. I was hooked right from that first hearing. It was perfect – the voice, guitar, melodies and lyrics all gelled for me. I immediately went out and bought my own copy.
So contemporary Folk Music became a big part of my life.
The final culmination of that time was to discover Roy Harper in Les Cousins with his first album. That blew them all away. But that’s another story.
Back in those halcyon days of the mid-sixties, 1965-66, prior to the advent of Roy, I spent a lot of time in my room with my old dansette record player, playing those first albums by Bert and John. I just loved the passion, integrity and guitar. But the album I played most was Jackson’s. Those songs were absorbed into my being. I knew them inside out.
For over three years I enjoyed that album. When I went to college I met up with Pete and we roomed together for two years. It was a delight to discover that he not only also adored Jackson but could play all his songs. Pete was an outstanding guitarist.
Most of the time in London I never saw Jackson advertised anywhere though he did play the folk scene and was a regular at Les Cousins where I went quite often. I looked out for him without success. But there was so much going on in the Folk and Rock scene that it was not foremost in my mind.
Then in 1969 Pete and I discovered Jackson billed at the Angel in Ilford High Street. The Angel was a pub with a room above it for small music events.
We arrived early. It was set out with a number of round tables with chairs around them. We purloined a table at the front. There were only about thirty people in the Audience. Jackson was quiet and softly spoken, very laid back. He played his songs faultlessly. They were all the songs from that album with nothing new. We clapped each rendition madly. It was brilliant to see him in the flesh. His playing was faultless. His personality shone and those songs were sparkling diamonds.
I would have loved to have heard some other new songs as well though. We were hungry for more of these extraordinary compositions. It was not to be.
After the concert everybody else left but we stayed behind and chatted. Jackson was very friendly and appreciative. He told us that there was no fabled second album or live performance. He said he had not written any other songs but that turned out not to be quite true. The song Golden Mirror, which has just been discovered from a TV programme, is from that period. I do not think he had the confidence in his new material.
Jackson left Pete and I with the sense of a really warm and shy character who was very approachable. We both thought he was a genius.
The next week he was supposed to have turned up for a guest appearance (the only guest – an honoured spot) at Roy Harper’s fabled St Pancras Town Hall gig. He never showed up. I asked the guy he had been with in Ilford, who did turn up to the Roy gig. He informed that Jackson would have come but he was unwell.
I never saw him advertised again. He seemed to evaporate into the night.
I spoke to Roy about it much later and he sadly shook his head and told me he had not seen him again either.
It was only long afterwards when the CD, with those later recordings, came out in the 1990s that I became aware of his tragic fate.
I remember Jackson fondly. He was a sweet, pleasant man, full of emotion and compassion. He wrote songs and music that were so touching and beautiful that they still haunt me.
I think he suffered. He was too kind and vulnerable. Fears robbed him of his potential. The terrible memories of that High School fire in which he was burnt and his girlfriend and fourteen others died, haunted him. It created a mental anguish that he never recovered from. Nobody deserved to suffer the way he did. He was a genius who impacted on the music and songwriting of so many others – including Roy, Sandy, Bert, John and the Fairports. He should have been lauded to the rafters. Instead he is largely forgotten.
I’ll never forget that night in Ilford. That might have been his last gig.
Telling it like it was – the liner notes for ‘Live at Les Cousins’
I’ve just reread the liner notes I did for the Les Cousins CD and I think it stands up as a summary of life back then in 69. It’s worth another spin.
‘1969 was a good year whichever way up you look at it. There was something in the air – probably ghanga. Everyone was suffused with an optimistic outlook. Everything was imbued with change. All the old crap was being jettisoned – ideas – thoughts – careers – suburbia. The world was new. The world was new. People sat up all night enthusiastically discussing the creation of the universe, the size of infinity and the intensity of the human spirit. Hair sprouted out of every available orifice – well – almost. People actually shared things with each other.
You could buy OZ and IT and read about Kerouac, Mao, Che, Ian Anderson, Captain Beefheart and Cochise. Everyone was dropping out into more meaningful existences that involved creativity and positive life forces as well as hugely wonderful esotericosities. You could spend hours discussing the obvious fact that T.S. Elliott would definitely have been straight while Shelley would probably have been a Freak. You enthralled to the tales of Black consciousness as epitomised by the Black Panthers, who had emerged from the Civil Rights Movement campaigns, Vietnam draft dodgers and utopian dreams of perfect societies based on freedom, creativity and harmony. There were free concerts, sit-ins, marches, demonstrations, happenings, love-ins and a whole range of other consciousness-expanding activities.
The underground created an instant identity. You were either a Freak or Straight. It had something to do with the length of your hair as well as the ideology you identified with, and the drugs you were using. Freaks were pacifist sexual explorers embarking on chemical research and human, spiritual, political and environmental investigations. The ‘Revolution’ was just around the corner. In many ways, it had already happened. Straight society was already superfluous. We had our own Press, music, fashion, drugs, lifestyle and culture. Our language was permeated with Black hipster slang, man. Our dreams were megalomaniacal. I have my own theory that the planet just happened to pass through a cloud of hallucinogenic dust that only infiltrated certain young minds.
Of course, it was all a hugely naïve and pretentious bubble that could not hold its breath too long and subsequently produced a litany of disasters and chemical casualties. Still, even with the power of retrospective sight, it was wonderful to have been there and been part of it even if it was not a very smart career move for many of those involved. One is also forced to acknowledge that for most of the pseudo-freaks it proved to be little more than just another fashion statement, a passing phase which was fun at the time and got you laid. Sadly, the idealism went over their heads. Even so, it was an age of re-evaluation and individuality that engendered huge creativity in dress, thought, art and music and was the genesis and spawning ground for a lot of things that did not bear fruit until much later.
The most important thing about it was that it was so incredibly energetic and vital. There was so much to do, so much stimulation, so many places to be, people to meet, thoughts to share. All the doors were open. The 60s was a huge university and the curriculum was open-ended.
London was the driving force of the counter-culture. You could drop acid and do the Tate Gallery, 2001 or the Bonzos.
The club scene was alive and diverse. There were bands on tap every night with Blues from Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack and John Mayall – Folk with Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Jackson C Frank – Psychedelic Rock with Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Traffic, Nice, Cream, Family, Free, Tomorrow or Jethro Tull – West Coast Acid Rock with Country Joe, Captain Beefheart, the Mothers and the Doors – black blues with Son House, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmy reed – Old Rock ‘n’ Rollers like Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. It was all mixed up with Jazz, Indian and pseudo-classical as with the Third Ear Band. Not only that, but it was ridiculously cheap. You could regularly see bands like Pink Floyd and Edgar Broughton for free. Hyde Park was a regular freebie. The festivals were three days for £1.50p. A gig was often 15p. Led Zeppelin at the Toby Jug was a staggering 25p –rip off or what? I could go on and on and get even more grotesquely nostalgic. Aye lad, when I were young. Them were the days.
There was no time to think – you were too busy doing stuff. The Incredibles at an all-nighter – Eel Pie Island bouncing up and down on the rotten floors to the flames of Arthur Brown. – giving demons hell with the Broughtons – at the Marquee with the guitar histrionics of Alvin Lee and Ten Years After – Hendrix smashing ceilings at Klooks Kleek – killing unknown soldiers with the Doors at the roundhouse – the Nice knifing organs at the UFO club – The Who smashing amps and Mooney driving his Roll’s and Lincoln Continental into swimming pools and ponds.
The Moving Being Dance Group naked and cybernetics at the ICI – it was all too much. Too much so that it was far out, man. Somewhere to the side, Straight society was landing on the moon but that was a side issue – we’d already visited other universes.
Even though the politics were getting out of hand in Grosvenor Square and Kent State, People’s Park and Chicago, where the Yippies put up a pig for president and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin went to court in war-paint and jesters costumes, it was great.
Life and theatre had become confused.
Obscenity was on trial and was let off with a caution.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, there was this acerbic fiend who was putting vitriolic poetry to music and playing acoustic guitar at colleges and Folk Clubs – in fact anywhere that would have him. His name was Roy Harper and he had a sharp wit, quick mind and a maniacal laugh. He ranted, railed and played a mean guitar. His voice was good and his songs were excellent.
I first caught him playing three numbers sandwiched between Bert Jansch and John Renbourn at Les Cousins in early 1967 and I was hooked. I made it to three concerts a week and at least one had to be a mandatory Harper gig. I had discovered someone who was articulating the thoughts that were buzzing around my own head. He was painting my own pictures for me.
An early Harper concert might well meander through a few hours of thoughts and interjections with the odd song thrown in. The subject matter, targets and degree of vitriol depended on the mood and substances consumed. It was rarely dull.
Roy has never been a ‘performer’. What you see is what you get. He treats the stage like his front room. It’s not so much a performance as a dialogue that he enters into. You get the full contents of his mind – often mid-song and with no holds barred. No areas are taboo. For many, who are not quite on his wave-length, who may have come along for the songs, it is a frustrating experience. For those of us who like to mentally walk through the sundry realms of possibility, it is a voyage through your own thoughts and a highly stimulating process. Of course, that is not to suggest that the songs are not brilliantly good, too, but he ain’t no Cliff Richard or Paul Simon.
By 1969, Roy had progressed from street busker to songwriter supreme. We’d been regaled with Sophisticated Beggar and Come out fighting Ghenghis Smith and had our appetite whetted by the raw brilliance of Folkjokeopus. He was rampant and at his most aggressive. On stage masterpieces like ‘McGoohan’s Blues’ and ‘I Hate the Whiteman’ poured napalm on the claustrophobic society, we were all railing against. In was the sort of exhilarating invective that caused Melody Maker to accuse him of not coming up with any panaceas. I guess that before you can identify the answers you have to explore the problems. Roy was the octagonal peg who refused to be slotted. You got the idea that he was none too fond of Christianity and not a great admirer or respecter of rules and regulations. His ideal existence would have been a little more unrestricted.
We’d all heard a lot of songs live and were living in a great sweat of expectation. Roy had signed to the new prestigious ‘Underground’ label – Harvest – the same as Pink Floyd, Edgar Broughton and a host of others – and at last he was going to be properly produced. It was all going to do justice to the songs – and about time too! Peter Jenner was going to produce it at Abbey Road studios and he was a great guy who was sympathetic to the mood of the moment and the idiosyncrasies of the loony who hadn’t yet found his bus.
I was fortunate enough to attend many of the sessions and there are legendary episodes involving unwanted American ‘guests’ and vending machines. Still – that’s another story. However, to cut a long story short – Roy did not want ‘White Man’ sanitised in the studio. He had this vision of it raw and dripping venom. He wanted it spat out live in front of his audience, in a small club.
The idea was that ‘White Man’ was going to be the focus of the next album and it was going to be recorded at Les Cousins where he first started out. It was Roy’s second home – an intimate and totally familiar environment in which he could relax with the nucleus of his now considerable following and give full vent to his emotions. There was to be no holding back.
The news got out that the gig was going to be recorded and it was consequently heaving.
Dylan was playing to vast crowds on the twee Isle of Wight, while Harper held court in the sordid backstreets of Soho. It seemed somehow appropriate.
The place was hot with packed freakdom and the air was heavy with sweet-scented smoke. You went down these steps into this underground darkened cellar. EMI had brought its mobile recording equipment and the whole concert was recorded for posterity. I remember Roy being slightly more manic than usual and breaking a string on the first ‘take’ of ‘Whiteman’ so that he had to do it again. I guess it was the tension of being recorded and wanting to make it a good one or else just the way he was trying to put everything into it. Maybe it was the heat generated by the faithful?
It wasn’t just the guy striking the match – we were all on the album. We sat enthralled in the darkness, hanging on every note, willing it to be right and mentally holding it together.
It was one hell of a gig. We emerged into the streets of Soho with big smiles on our faces. The moon shone – the pavement echoed and we dispersed into the night bubbling.
In the event, they recorded the entire evening though only four reels of tape of the gig were found. It had sat on the shelf in EMI right up til now – a neatly packaged bit of history – vintage Roy Harper in his full potency when it was all new and looking to change things – snarling fit to shake the world!
The strange thing is that Roy Harper has never lost it. He’s still as crazy and still ranting against the system, trying to change it. You’d think he would have learned something in the ensuing quarter of a century!
Thank shit he hasn’t!
It’s a dirty job and someone has to do it – stick their head above the parapet and have the squealers, snouts deep in the trough, pass their judgements and make their superior snide remarks. If it wasn’t for a few torches in the darkness, we’d all be lost and slotted up our own arses by now. Maybe we are?
He may be crazy but he still makes a lot more sense than all the tribes of grey mediocrity who seem to be shaping our destiny.
Here’s to the next twenty-five years of insanity!
Opher 12.10.95
Hmmm – not a lot has changed since then. It seemed appropriate that a 69 concert should get released in 96 – as I said in the original – whichever way you look at it.
I’ve been indulging in a bit of nostalgia. I bought this great debut album way back in 1965. I was just sixteen. I used to carry this around under my arm with along with John Renbourn, Snooks Eaglin and Howlin’ Wolf in the vain hope of attracting and impressing girls. Needless to say they were not easily impressed. They were more interested in the Beatles.
Fortunately I liked the Beatles too!
Bert really made an impact on me. In particular I loved his anti-war songs – Do You Hear Me Now and I Have No Time. His guitar playing was exceptional. I couldn’t understand why the girls weren’t bowled over.
Later, in 1966, when I bought my motorbike I’d head off to Greek Street and Les Cousins (Wish I’d kept my membership booklet) to see Bert, John Renbourn, John Martyn and many more. That’s when I first saw the immaculate Roy Harper!
Bert Jansch – Strolling Down the Highway – YouTube
Bert Jansch – I Have No Time – YouTube
Bert Jansch – Running From Home – YouTube
Bert Jansch – Dreams Of Love – YouTube
Bert Jansch – Veronica – YouTube
Every time I play this song it takes me right back to Les Cousins and that day in 1969 when Roy had gathered the faithful to make a live recording for the album. I can still feel the nervousness and expectation as I sat at that little table and waited. I so wanted it to be perfect. I’m sure I was eaten up with nerves more than Roy was – although he did break a string in the course of the performance due to hitting the guitar too hard.
The whole gig was recorded and later came out as Live At Les Cousins. A great slab of history.
He wanted a fiery live version for the album. As it turned out Roy wasn’t satisfied with what had come out of the gig.
I Hate The White Man
Just as ‘McGoohan’s Blues’ is the centre-piece to Folkjokeopus, ‘I Hate The White Man’ is the guts of Flat Baroque And Berserk. Like ‘McGoohan’s Blues’ it is an extremely powerful statement of a song.
Roy was very much aware that it had been hard to generate the required passion for ‘McGoohan’s Blues’ when he recorded in an empty studio. He wanted the ‘White Man’ to be a live recording in front of his own audience and what better place than Les Cousins, the small intimate club where he had started out that became his second home. Amazingly EMI agreed and their mobile recording studio was set up in the club. That is incredible because we now have a recording of the entire show – which later surfaced as Live At Les Cousins.
The decision to leave the spoken preamble on the record was a dubious one. Roy always likes to talk about the lyrics and explain the ideas within his songs. He wants the inherent meaning to be understood but once you have listened to the introduction a few times it begins to pale. Roy knew that with a title like ‘I Hate The White Man’ it would be easy to mistake what the song was about and he felt the lyrics required explanation. Perhaps that was best kept for the liner notes or the live album?
This song features Roy and his guitar without any other backing yet he creates a full and complex piece of music. Roy has reverted to normal tuning. The chords are powerful and the voice is clear and pure. As the piece progresses passion builds and builds until it is storming along with Roy hitting those strings with real venom.
The poem has nothing to do with skin colour. It is all about an attitude. It concerns the empty culture, hypocrisy and arrogance of western society with its violence, avarice and inherent racism. Roy detests the destructive nature of western values. His central premise is that this so-called civilisation took away a natural hunter-gatherer way of life and replaced it with concrete and shackles.
‘The land of look and see’ refers to America and Native Americans prior to the arrival of the Europeans.
Roy is hankering after a simpler life away from this plastic society of drunkenness, guns, teargas and unfulfilling lifestyle. His fury is aimed at the establishment and the lust for power and wealth that not only creates war, enslaving us and taking away our freedoms, but destroys the planet in the process.
This ‘attitude’ is not confined to those with white skin. There are plenty of our brown, yellow and black skinned fellow human beings who worship the same gods of arrogance and greed, whose media propaganda feed the same lies and maintain the same fallacies.
Roy envisions a tragic nuclear finale to our violent culture which in the face of the evidence from history will inevitably perish. At the end of the song ‘the shooting star has summoned death’s dark angel from his night’.
Phew!! Has there ever been a more powerful song filled with such meaning?
A four or five minute version of this song could have been a hard-hitting single! It should have been Roy’s ‘Working Class Hero’. It’s a far better song than Lennon’s but with a very similar arrangement and chords. His first opportunity missed I think.
As an eighteen-year-old, Les Cousins was the place where I first heard Roy sing (and talk) but the journey to get there started a long time before that.
I had to first discover acoustic folk and blues and then the fabulous contemporary folk singer-songwriters. But I’m jumping ahead. I’ll start at the very beginning.
Way back in 1960 when I was around eleven-years-old there was an older girl down my street who was a bit of a beatnik. I remember black polo necks and medallions. She was called Daphne and she introduced me to Joan Baez by endlessly playing Joan’s first album of traditional folk songs. That was a departure from the Buddy Holly and Everly Brothers I had been listening to (along with Adam Faith and the Shadows). I enjoyed the Joan Baez but wasn’t completely bowled over.
A year or so later my friend Charlie Mutton introduced me to Bob Dylan’s first album. I quite enjoyed the rawness. It was very different. But I was not convinced enough to buy the album (money was tight). That happened about the same time that Dick Brunning turned me on to Blues and I started listening to the likes of Robert Johnson’s great acoustic stuff.
By late 1964 Donovan started appearing on Ready Steady Go and released the single Catch The Wind in early 1965. By this time I’d been getting into Dylan (his next few acoustic albums were inspirational) and Donovan seemed related. I had a girlfriend – Viv Oldfield – who was really into Donovan and she had an elder brother who was mad on Woody Guthrie and Big Bill Broonzy. So my musical adventures were going all over the place with the discovery of new singers – Sonny Terry Brownie McGhee, Sleepy John Estes, Snooks Eaglin and Big Joe Williams. Phil Ochs rocked my head with his hard-hitting anti-war and civil rights songs – only second to Dylan. Paul Simon’s first album (The Paul Simon Songbook) had quite an effect. I loved that. Then there was a plethora of others from the Greenwich Village folk scene – Buffy St Marie, Richard and Mimi Farina, Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and the Native American Peter LaFarge. I enjoyed hunting out people my mates hadn’t heard of.
At the time records of Blues and Folk artists were really hard to come by. I used to hunt through the second-hand record bins for obscure Folkways records or a cover that took my fancy.
Bear in mind that at this time I was also really into the beat bands – Beatles, Stones, Yardbirds, Pretty Things, Who, Downliners Sect, Small Faces and Measles, as well as the old Rockers – Chuck Berry, Bo Diddly, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly – plus Electric Blues – Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Sonny Boy Williamson and Elmore James – but that’s a different story. I’m focussing on the acoustic. Safe to say that music dominated my mind. I never stopped playing it.
Anyway, I became besotted with Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan because of the lyrics. I’m a lyric guy. Then a mate called Robert Ede lent me this fabulous album by Jackson C Frank which blew my mind. I couldn’t stop playing it. Another mate called Neil Furby, sold me the Bert Jansch and John Renbourn debut albums and they opened my mind. Neil also played me Anji by Davey Graham and that opened up new horizons. The British contemporary folk scene was exploding and I was in at the beginning.
By 1967 I was really immersed in the contemporary folk scene and was listening to a wide range of American and British singer songwriters. I was also into psychedelia, Blues, R&B and West Coast. No wonder my studies weren’t going well. I had trouble fitting it all in. The Incredible String Band reared their head – a friend called Gary Turp was mad on them and dragged me off to a gig or two.
It was spending my evenings at the Toby Jug in Tolworth, Eel Pie Island in Twickenham and Middle Earth, The Marqui and UFO clubs in London as well as a number of smaller clubs and college venues. Not much time for sleep.
Then a long lost friend called Jeff (with the white plastic mac) told me about this fiery singer who was ranting about the same stuff as me. He told me I had to go and hear him.
By this time my interests in the folk scene had taken me to the Barge, Bunji’s and Les Cousins. I’d turn up on my motorbike, pay a few shillings and get a fabulous evening/night of entertainment from Bert, John, Martyn, Al and hosts of others. Then, one night, between Bert and John, that fiery force of nature took the stage for a short set of three numbers and some gab, and altered the universe!
That was the start.
It’s hard to describe the early concerts in those two years as they weren’t really concerts like people were used to. They were events, gatherings, exchanges, sharings.
A concert was a performance. A singer/band would take the stage, present their songs, the audience would applaud, they’d introduce the next number and the musical performance would be appreciated. Roy’s gigs were not like that.
Roy would arrive with his battered guitar case, having hitch-hiked or arrived by train, (depending on where he was coming from and going to), set up on a stool, take his guitar out and begin. He used the house PA. There were no sound checks. No introductions. No appearing out of the wings (there usually weren’t any wings in those little clubs). No showbiz performance to build up tension or expectation. Roy was just Roy.
When he’s got himself together, played about with the tuning, he’d look up to take in the small gathering. He never treated them like an audience, never approach it like a professional performance. Roy would usually start with a little maniacal laugh and then proceed into some tale about an event that had happened on the way to the gig or something that had caught his attention, with an occasional strum and giggle.
Yes, there was a musician on a stage, and an audience, usually seated on uncomfortable wooden chairs in a small drab hall, but this wasn’t exactly a recital. Sometimes he would be performing at an intimate club like Les Cousins, at other times the back room of a pub, or folk club, a college venue or dreary, austere room. Most nights of the week he’d be on somewhere. Where-ever they would have him.
Where-ever it was, Roy treated all his venues as if they were his front room and his audiences as if they were a bunch of friends who had just dropped in. He talked to us as if we were sitting around a table together, whatever came into his head. He explained his poems, talked about current events, thoughts and feelings. Then he’d play a song. Even once he’d started he might stop partway in to share a thought that had come floating into his consciousness demanding to exit via his tongue.
That’s not to say that the songs and music were not valued. They obviously were. He crafted those songs and filled them with the seething emotions and thoughts that filled the inner turmoil of his skull. They were distillations of what he was thinking and feeling as well as being musical creations of great depth and skill. It’s just that he was consumed with communicating the full extent of everything; to explain and share what was going on in his head at the time, as it manifested itself, what was the grist for the poetry; what had stimulated his mind in that very moment. There was no holding back; no filter system. Consumed by a compulsion to fully share everything, it came tumbling out, often mid-song, sometimes in a torrent, an aside or an anecdote. He shared. It might be a relevant insight into the writing of the song or the circumstances that had led to its creation or it could be a completely novel idea or thought that had come into his head while he was singing. There was no knowing. Reality intruded. Roy was prone to distractions. These asides were often humorous, loaded with social insight, and often straying into areas that others might be wary of, pushing the bounds of the acceptable.
Some found this approach frustrating. They had come for the songs, not to hear Roy waffle on. They wanted a more professional performance. They did not appreciate the flow of a song being interrupted by one of Roy’s thoughts, no matter how meaningful or pertinent. The songs were brilliant. They just wanted to hear the songs. They felt they had paid for a performance. They found the interruptions infuriating.
But for me, and the others like me, who cottoned on to the whole unique experience, this was gold dust. Roy’s mind, his thoughts and feelings were every bit as fascinating and insightful as the songs. His ramblings and incisive dissections shone a searchlight of the songs and the events, feelings and thoughts that had led to the creation of the poetry. He was analysing and illuminating society and life in a way that nobody else had ever attempted. Mind blowing. There was nobody like this. Nobody did this. Roy was the Lenny Bruce of his day. He transcended the limitations of his chosen field. As with Lenny, who regularly exceeded the boundaries of comedy, taking his ‘performances’ beyond the realm of political satire into an exploration of reality, Roy was pushing back those barriers. This was not so much a performance as an expedition into the workings of a mind and exploration into the world in which he found himself. Roy was shining a searchlight into his mind and the society in which he found himself marooned as a horrified spectator. The songs were only one part of the experience.
This had a profound effect on the crazy rebellious youth I was at the time. I too felt myself to be a horrified outsider trying to make sense of an insane world. Roy was illuminating thoughts and ideas that had been floating around in my own head. It felt like he was clarifying and solidifying my own inner world. Nobody else had done that.
The ideas and exchanges not only explained the poems, and gave greater meaning and importance to the lyrics, but they sent tendrils of thought out into all aspects of the world around us. His mind was electric and electrifying. Roy’s mind was on fire, flitting here and there, dissecting, expanding and questioning.
No two concerts were ever the same. They depended on his mood. Sometimes there was more banter than song, other times more of a performance.
A Roy Harper gig was more of a sharing than a gig; an insight into a unique mind, a mind-expanding illumination of the social experiment we were prisoners in.
I think a number of us lived in dread that he’d ‘be discovered’ or become ‘famous’. If some promoter/manager took him on board and tidied the act up, removing the banter and making it ‘more professional’, we lose that relaxed sharing.
Not to say that the musical performances were not intense and incredible; they were.
I remember sitting in awe as Roy performed McGoohan’s Blues for the first time. It was an awesome slab of epic social commentary to the most rousing musical energy. It blew us away. The power and intensity; the sheer scale.
Dylan was the only one who came close (I always saw It’s Alright Ma,(I’m Only Bleeding) as being the only song that was similar in scope and impact). And how Roy railed against Dylan. He detested the way the music business clumsily put all the singer-songwriters into the same bracket as if they were Dylan protest clones. Roy had totally different roots, extending back to the Beat poets with shades of jazz, classical and English folk. He was not to be brushed off as a Dylan clone.
But those early renditions of the majestically powerful McGoohan’s Blues were spine-chilling and alone was surely worth the entrance fee? How could anyone complain?
For me, the St Pancras Town Hall gig in early 1969 felt like the end of that era. Roy had become much more successful. The queues went around the block. The venues were bigger. It had become increasingly difficult to maintain that informal intimacy. Though Roy did not change, the nature of the events, size of the audience, and distances involved between Roy and the audience, created more of a ‘performance’ element. Roy had graduated into a performer, not by choice, by sheer popularity.
Things changed.
Sadly, I’ve never heard any recordings from those early two years. No bootlegs surfaced. They reside in my memory. And, of course, our memories are imperfect, constantly reinvented, inaccurate and prone to subjectivity. In my mind those early gigs were monsters that shook me through to the core. There was no choice. I had to get to know this mad demon.
‘My Friend’
On this acoustic track, Roy demonstrates his finger-picking style, along with the use of harmonics. The song was written for Jackson C. Frank: a ground-breaking New York singer/songwriter who had a tragic past. He suffered horrendous burns in a school fire when a number of his friends were killed, including his girlfriend. Many years later, in 1964, after receiving a financial settlement, Jackson came to England on the Queen Elizabeth, with a Native American girlfriend. He is reputed to have written a superb set of songs on the journey, including ‘Blues Run The Game’. But this is open to debate as many of the songs were possibly written previously.
Jackson rapidly assimilated into the Les Cousins folk scene, along with fellow American Paul Simon. Jackson’s songwriting style had a profound impact on other musicians. He recorded only one album – simply titled Jackson C. Frank. Paul Simon produced it, with Al Stewart on second guitar. The album was a milestone for other folk singers and is now a classic.
Jackson and Roy became friends. They would hang out, getting stoned, laughing and pondering the meaning of life into the early morning hours. But Jackson was profligate with money and soon found himself penniless. Suffering stage fright and writer’s block – and with his mental health deteriorating – he eventually returned to New York.
‘My Friend’ is a heartfelt farewell and reminiscence of Roy and Jackson’s close relationship. The gold and silver of the lyric are the opening words of Jackson’s ‘Milk And Honey’: a song about leaving.
Roy sings with a mellow sadness as he recounts the depth of their friendship and the laughter they shared. He embellishes his poetic lyrics, creating a melancholic, affectionate melody over a bed of intricate guitar notes.
Roy Harper,Jackson C Frank,My Friend,Sophisticated Beggar,Friendship,great song,sad,Les Cousins,Greek Street,