Knebworth Festival 1974
In the 1970s the annual Knebworth Festival in Hertfordshire was one of the staple fixtures of the UK rock industry, along with its Isle of Wight and Reading counterparts.
As with all walks of life – national events, football games, whatever – there’s a weird syndrome about in which if you were to get all the people who claimed “I was there when …” at now-famous iconic moments in rock music to link arms, not only would you be counting a total of several times the actual size of the crowd but you’d be able to encircle the world with your human chain.
Take the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, for example – that’s one that was particularly famous.
It was that at which Jimi Hendrix made his last official UK appearance on stage on 30th August, less than three weeks before his death.
As a matter of fact I didn’t attend that one, nor indeed any Isle of Wight Festival. I thought about going a couple of times but have never actually made it. Perhaps I had an aversion to ferries.
However, I did go to the first two Knebworths, on 20th July 1974 (featuring the Doobie Brothers, Mahavishnu Orchestra, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Van Morrison and Tim Buckley among others) and 5th July 1975 (featuring Pink Floyd, Captain Beefheart, Linda Lewis, the Steve Miller Band and Roy Harper).
Let me take you back to the first of those.
I was 22 years of age at the time and remember it now as being a relaxed warm, sunny day dripping with both with all the positive aspects of festival-going and a touch or two of the tribulations.
I was never personally into drugs and my mates and I had simply gone along to enjoy the occasion and the music. My secondary interests on the day were to see The Sensational Alex Harvey Band (who were indeed pretty sensational), Van Morrison and the Doobies, but my biggest draw – and the main reason for our expedition – was to witness the first-ever performance by The Allman Brothers Band outside of the USA.
Being an impressionable sort of guy, I was easily seduced into hero worship by madcap tales of rock excesses, outrageous claims of musical brilliance made on behalf of certain artistes or groups and the general notion that anyone who was ever allowed to commit their doodling to vinyl for sale to the general public was either already a rock god or on his/their way to superstardom. In other words, they were not ordinary mortals like myself and my pals.
In this context, The Allman Brothers Band had certainly come from American Central Casting.
To those who already know the story of The Allman Brothers Band, especially those who know it better than I do and/or will now go and look it up on the internet, I apologise in advance for the following briefest of summaries.
Duane Allman
Duane (born November 1946, guitar) and Gregg Allman (born December 1947, keyboards and vocals) from Jacksonville, Florida, were highly musical from a young age and Duane in particular something of a prodigy.
He dropped out of high school and by the age of 21 was a leading session musician at the famous Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama where he played on records by the likes of Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett.
Meanwhile he and Gregg had formed The Allman Brothers Band, unusually featuring two lead guitarists (Duane and Dickey Betts) and two drummers (Jai Johanny Johanson and Butch Trucks) along with bassist Berry Oakley. They made two albums with little commercial success but their constant gigging began to build them a following.
At this point in the summer of 1970 Eric Clapton, who was putting together a band to play under the name Derek And The Dominoes – it went on to make the classic album Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs – attended an Allman Brothers Band concert and was so impressed by Duane’s guitar-playing that he invited him to guest on the sessions – the ‘duelling’ and inter-play between the two of them becoming one of the features of the album’s blockbuster success when it came out in November of that year.
Sadly, less than a year later Duane was dead – killed in a motorbike accident in Macon, Georgia, at the age of 24 on 29th October 1971. By then The Allman Brothers Band were becoming phenomenally successful, thanks to the unusual route of issuing what is still regarded as one of the all-time great ‘live’ albums Live At Fillmore East (recorded on 11th, 12th and 13th March 1971) – and a double album to boot. The decision to issue a ‘live’ album was a chancy but inspired one, giving those who had seen them in concert the opportunity to re-live the experience at their leisure – and those who had never heard them the opportunity to hear them at their best (they were a great live act).
I became heavily into Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs (also a double album as it happens) when it came out in the UK early in 1971 and subsequently, via magazine articles and reviews, ‘researched’ back into Duane Allman because of his contribution to it, eventually buying Live At Fillmore East when it came out.
Following Duane’s death and the announcement that The Allman Brothers Band were determined to carry on without him the legend of the Allmans grew, as did my fan-worship. Their first post-Duane album Eat A Peach (1972) was a mega-success but then on 11th November 1972 – exactly a year and thirteen days after Duane’s death – bass guitarist Berry Oakley, heavily into drink and drugs by then and still struggling to come to terms with Duane’s passing – was killed in a motorbike accident just three blocks down from where Duane had suffered his fatal one.
Personnel replacements followed and with the issue of Brothers And Sisters (1973), containing on it the tracks Ramblin’ Man and Jessica (the latter subsequently used as the BBC Top Gear programme’s title music) The Allman Brothers Band hit the heights of its reputation and commercial success.
Cue the Knebworth Festival of 20th July 1974.
The things I recall best of their set that evening were firstly (and naturally) the hour and a half gap between their scheduled start and when they actually took to the stage.
Secondly, by the time they did, the extraordinary sense of mounting excitement that we in the audience were collectively feeling at the prospect of seeing them.
Then came the moment it happened. The stage was bedecked with Confederate flags, the band were known to be good ole Southern boys with a pronounced fondness for alcohol and drugs. There’d been not a few instances of slow hand-claps breaking out during the extended wait … all of which came to nothing. And then suddenly the lights went down and a huge anticipatory cheer erupted.
Another two minutes or more passed in darkness. The odd cat calls, whoop, holler and scream from the crowd could be heard.
Suddenly the PA system sparked into life and the DJ introducing the acts built it up: “Ladies and Gentlemen … will you please welcome …. playing their first-ever concert outside of the United States of America … THE LEGENDARY ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND!”
Pandemonium broke out – a huge roar of sound enveloped the countryside – and then it took at least a minute for the entire band to reach their instruments. Over on right of the stage as we looked at it, still in semi-darkness – at the keyboards – was the navel-length blond mane of Gregg Allman.
Out of the darkness came his deep, Atlanta-based slow southern-accented drawl:
“Yeah, and we gonn’ play all night lawng …..!”
More pandemonium.
And you know what? They near as hell did.
What followed was a strange beginning to a concert, completely unlike anything I’d previously experienced.
The Allmans had a then-unusual reputation for extended tracks – Whipping Post, one of their classics, took up the whole of side four of their Live At Fillmore East album and came in at 23 minutes – but this was on a whole new level.
Their first song was Wasted Words, first track on the Brothers And Sisters album. It began slowly, ever so slowly, and kept going. After about twenty minutes I was looking around at my companions in semi-disappointment. It was if the seven or eight musicians on stage were playing separate tunes, out of synch and/or randomly. They were all over the place. I’d go further and state it wasn’t very good. At all.
But then something almost magical occurred. I kid you not, it began coming together. Gradually, ever so gradually.
By about forty minutes in they had become as tight as a drum (well, both of them since they had two drummers). They were really cooking – funky, slick, together – and the effect was fabulous.
I’d like to say that opener last well over an hour in total, but it was probably more like 50 minutes. However, it set the scene for the entire set, which soared and took us to places we’d never been before with its trademark shuffling beats leavened by blistering riffs, guitar solos, runs on the organ and occasional rhythm changes. Looking back now, part of the cause of their ragged beginning may well have been that they were all stoned out of their heads, a rabble, but then their intuitive musicality, rhythm and group ‘oneness’ slowly took over.
It was a truly great concert. They ended with four encores and things only drew to a close when the powers-that-be finally switched off the electricity.
Gregg Allman, who died last month on 27th May aged 69, had a long and not untroubled life after The Allman Brothers Band split – live albums of varying (and sometimes no) success, a showbiz marriage to Cher that lasted only three years, endless alcohol and drug problems and yet to the end he remained true to his origins, playing country-tinged rock and blues.
His brother Duane was the ‘star’ of the two Allman brothers but – because of his early and untimely death – nobody will ever know ‘what might have been’ had he lived longer, even right up to the present day. Maybe it’s better not to speculate – the actuality had he lived might have been sensational and it might just as easily have been anti-climax coupled with the disappointment of promise unfulfilled.
Stuff happens.
My post today was borne of the fact that on Tuesday last week I went shopping in Kingston, chanced upon an HMV record store and decided to purchase a copy of the re-issued (50th anniversary) CD of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band.
Idling time away as I went through the CD shelves – half-reminded of Gregg Allman’s death by the fact I was in the ‘A’s and ‘B’s – I decided to see if there was a copy of Live At Fillmore East amidst them.
There was and I bought it.
I drove to the coast yesterday, shoved it into my dashboard CD player and listened to it at volume 11 all the way down. It was a warm and nostalgic experience.
Let me sum it up this way. You probably won’t ever find me getting into the habit of playing it end to end every week, but I’m very glad it has now been added (for the third time) to my CD collection.
