The 2010s are a remarkable decade as every year seems to be a 50th anniversary for something or other that happened in that most epochal of decades (at least in terms of music and cultural change), the 1960s. Since 1965 is often considered the year that pop music truly transitioned to "rock," it only makes sense that there would be a book dedicated to the groundbreaking album released by the biggest band of them all at the tail end of that year. In this new book (with a rather unwieldy title), author John Kruth aims to delve into the Beatles' first masterpiece in terms of both songwriting and production, placing it in the context of its time as well as detailing the aftereffects of its impact to the present day.
***special thanks to Wes at Backbeat Books for sending a copy of the book to review!***
Upon starting the book and noticing that it was two hundred pages, I was a bit skeptical as to how the author was going to fill it all up talking about a single album and its two associated non-album singles ("Day Tripper" and "We Can Work it Out") that clock in at less than an hour total. The first couple of chapters were of a personal nature, with the author describing his childhood and how he got into the Beatles, as well as what was happening in the 1960s around him. However, it didn't really make a lot of sense as he was describing 1960s America which was across the pond from London where the Beatles were living and working. This US/UK dichotomy ended up being one of the most confusing and frustrating things about the book...the author used both the original UK Parlophone edition of the Beatles albums (which is how the band always intended them) as well as the bastardized Capitol US versions interchangeably. For seasoned Beatles fans such as myself it was an annoyance, but I could see how a more casual fan would be thrown off by this.
In fact, this is but one of the many small annoyances I had with this book that made it a frustrating and unsatisfying read overall. The author's writing style was not to my particular liking, coming off a bit too youthful and somewhat clunky. There were some typos and grammatical errors throughout the book, although I'll chalk those up to editors rather than the author himself. The general layout of the book after the personal introduction consisted of a couple of chapters setting up the recording and release of Rubber Soul, followed by chapters dedicated to each song. It got a bit confusing, however, in that the author included the songs from the American version of the album (arguably the only time a Capitol-altered version of a Beatles album didn't ruin it, and according to many fans, actually improved it) as well as the British version. This means that many songs from the UK Help! album are discussed, which in my opinion doesn't really make sense since those songs were written and recorded six or more months before Rubber Soul (with the exception of "Wait," written and initially recorded during the Help! sessions but not finished or released until Rubber Soul). The end of each chapter then includes a short section called "Rubber Covers" detailing notable cover versions of the particular song discussed. Most chapters include some basic session info for each song as well as the inspiration behind each song, although there was nothing new for obsessive Beatles fans and much of the source material and quoted passages were instantly recognizable as being from various books or the Anthology. There were also a lot of factual inaccuracies throughout, although how many were due to the author's ignorance as opposed to his clunky writing style I can't say. One glaring instance is where he mentions how very shortly after John met Yoko in late 1966, they recorded the infamous Two Virgins album and became a couple, leading to John abandoning his wife Cynthia and son Julian, which actually didn't happen until almost two years later. Now, it's very possible that the author is well aware of this (and he should be...it's incredibly well documented) but the way the passage is written makes it seem as though it happened mere weeks after their initial meeting. There are many sections of the book like this which became increasingly frustrating to read. Whether they were because of Kruth's lack of knowledge or his confusing writing style, either reason is unacceptable and, in my opinion, should've been corrected at the editing stage.
I had more problems with this book that I'd like to bring up, too. First, the background chapters on the 1960s and Beatles influences ended up feeling more like a general history of the decade (and of Bob Dylan in particular). While I get what the author was trying to do here and readily acknowledge the huge influence Dylan had on the Beatles (and John in particular), it began to distract from the point of the book and dragged on far too long. Second, the "Rubber Covers" sections didn't really add anything interesting to the chapters and in many cases became very repetitive as the same tribute albums and/or artists were mentioned over and over. Third, there seemed to be more of a focus on 1964 and 1966 in many of the chapters than on 1965, the year in which Rubber Soul was actually conceived and created. While I can at least see that the trends and experiences of 1964 factored into the creation of the album, 1966 and beyond had nothing to do with it. While the Beatles certainly built off of the achievement of Rubber Soul as they went into 1966 and beyond, the book didn't really need to expound as much on what they did after as it did, at least in my opinion. Finally, Kruth clearly has a lot of admiration for John Lennon, which shone through loud and clear, but while he also credited Paul McCartney for his talents, there were a lot of subtle and snide swipes at McCartney's personality, shortcomings, and his solo career. It got tiresome reading the same tired tripes about how John was the better of the two (as I've said repeatedly, they were BOTH essential) and really, in a book about an album smack dab in the middle of the Beatles' career, why is Paul's solo career being repeatedly brought up and picked at?
While a scholarly, thoroughly detailed look at Rubber Soul and its place in both the 1960s and 20th century history would be a welcome addition to the Beatles literature, This Bird is Flown isn't that book. To me, it felt exactly like I thought it would when I first started reading it: a short book about a single album that was padded with a lot of blandly-written extraneous material in order to justify its length as a book rather than a pamphlet. I will come right out and flatly say that I didn't enjoy this book and I didn't learn a single new thing from it. Perhaps being as fanatical and knowledgeable about the Beatles and their music as I am is the reason I feel this way, and I'll concede that this point may very well color my opinion. But unless one is a very casual or ignorant (in the literal, not pejorative sense of the word) Beatles fan, this book is far from essential.
This is how I like to think of John...smiling, happy, and a bit cheeky
Every year when this day pops up, I get a little bit sad. Today is, of course, the day in 1980 when John Lennon was needlessly, shockingly, and cruelly taken from us for reasons we still cannot comprehend other than the fact that it somehow made sense in the mind of a madman. I've written about how John's death (as well as George's, which was fifteen years ago this past couple of weeks ago) has affected me, but I was moved to write a little memory of it on a message board that I frequent and I thought it was worth sharing here as well.
I wrote: "I was 10 months old in December 1980, so obviously I don't remember it [hearing about John's death] firsthand, but I take solace in the fact that I was alive when all four Beatles were. I also get a bit sad this time each year knowing that I can mark how many years he's been gone by the same number of years I've been alive. I've been a Beatles fan literally from birth thanks to my parents. I remember when I was in kindergarten in 1985 and a schoolfriend told me "did you know John Lennon was shot?" I remember running into my house after school crying and telling my mum "somebody shot John!" and she had to explain to me it had happened five years before.
I try to not let the deaths of famous people that I've never met affect me, but the Beatles have touched me on such a deep level over my entire 35+ years on this planet that in the case of John (and George), it does affect me and I'm OK with that. The beautiful thing is that every time I hear his songs and I hear his voice, I feel good inside."
For me, today, as it is every year, is a day for listening to the Beatles and solo John, enjoying the music, and remembering the supremely talented, complicated, flawed, conflicted, and ultimately good man he was. Gone but never forgotten, and somehow a little piece of him belongs to all of us who love his music, his artwork and writing, and his overall message. Thanks for what you gave us, John.
The actual cover of my well-worn copy of this classic book
You're probably asking yourself "another Beatles biography?" as you start reading this post. You'd be entirely justified in wondering just how many biographies on the band are really necessary. Indeed, while there have been many excellent books on the various aspects of the band's life and career, the publication in 2013 of the first volume of Mark Lewisohn's epic three-volume biography of the band almost instantly made it the definitive Beatles bio, just about relegating all that has come before as superfluous. However, the biography by Hunter Davies that is the subject of the present review is still required reading for any serious fan of the Fab Four. Why is that, you may be asking yourself? While it's quite a good book in its own right, the fact remains that it is and always will be the only authorized biography of the Beatles, done with their consent and direct input, written, researched, and published in 1968 while they were still a vibrant, active, and working band at the height of their powers. For that fact alone, it has a secure place in history; the fact that it's an interesting book and a true product of its time and circumstances enhance its standing.
Seasoned Beatles fans will know that Hunter Davies has written additional books on the Beatles in the years since 1968, notably his recent John Lennon Letters and Beatles Lyrics books, both of which have been reviewed on this site previously. However, he is first and foremost known amongst fans of the group for this biography, which has been continually in print since 1968. There have been several updated editions, all of which are worth seeking out as the prefaces and afterwords Davies has written in the intervening years are quite enlightening (and in actuality, adding the prefaces and afterwords up gives a page tally approximately equal to the original biography itself!). Much of the prefaces are taken up with describing the backstory of how he came to write the book, as well as how much editing went into the final manuscript. These are fascinating bits of information to read and worth discussing in their own right. Davies was a published author and columnist in 1966 whose novel Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush was being made into a film. While interviewing Paul McCartney in the summer of 1966 for a feature on the Beatles' upcoming album Revolver and the single from it, "Eleanor Rigby," Davies asked Paul two questions: would he compose the soundtrack for the film? (Paul was interested but ultimately passed...the soundtrack ended up featuring the Spencer Davis Group and their new offshoot, Traffic). And what would Paul think if he (Davies) were to write an authorized biography on the Beatles? Paul seemed interested in this and gave Davies permission to broach the subject with manager Brian Epstein. After getting approval from all of the Beatles, their family, and their friends, Epstein and Davies negotiated a contract in early 1967 and the project was started. Davies began by interviewing Beatles family members, friends, and associates, and then reported back to the individual band members to corroborate facts, see how it spurred their own memories of events, and conduct in-depth interviews with them. He also shadowed them for much of 1967 and 1968, both in the studio, in their homes during songwriting sessions, and as a fly-on-the-wall for many day-to-day occurrences. His involvement with the band ended shortly after their return from India in the spring of 1968 as they began work on their self-titled double album (aka the White Album).
The cover of the 1st edition, published in late 1968
The book roughly follows the lives and careers of the Beatles chronologically, starting off with their childhoods in wartime Liverpool and, in the case of John and Paul, the tragedies of them both losing their mothers while they were teenagers. From here, Davies traces the meeting of the two in the summer of 1956 and, bringing George (a childhood friend of Paul's) into the fold a year later, the origin of the band that would eventually become the Beatles. The story of how they morphed from the skiffle Quarrymen to the rock and roll Beatles, settling on a line-up that also included Stu Sutcliffe on bass and Pete Best on drums, is well known and doesn't bear further repeating here. The same goes for their apprenticeships in Hamburg at the various clubs and dive bars they played while there. However, an interesting part of Davies' book is that he did manage to interview Pete Best, who offered some rather pathetic (in the literal sense of the word) yet interesting morsels of information regarding his time in the band and his feelings about being sacked. Once Ringo entered the picture in the summer of 1962, their story is so well known that, again, I won't waste your time or insult your intelligence by repeating it here. The Beatles recording career, as the public acknowledges it, is covered in the book from 1962 through early 1968, again in roughly chronological order. First tracing their slow but steady rise to the top of the UK scene under the tutelage of Brian Epstein, Davies spends the bulk of the book on the Beatlemania/touring years of 1963-1966, with a handful of revealing tidbits from the Beatles themselves. However, it's the section of the book dealing with their lives and careers between 1966 and mid-1968 (when his interviews ended as he prepared to go to publication) that offer the most revealing insights into the inner workings and hive mind of the band. It's almost certainly with the benefit of hindsight, as no one at the time could have predicted what was to come with the band's unraveling in 1970, but there are numerous candid comments by all of them, but mainly George and John (no surprise there) at how Paul was now their defacto leader, how they wouldn't care if it all went away in a flash, and how they on one hand could see the band continuing on for a long time, yet on the other hand knowing it wouldn't last. Even those around them, such as George Martin, Neil Aspinall, and Mal Evans (all also interviewed for the book) offered some off-the-cuff remarks to the same effect. What's interesting is that the comments about Paul being their driving force post-Brian were made not in snide, accusatory tones, but with almost thankful admission. This was particularly revealing coming from John, who would later use this aspect of Paul's personality as a verbal cudgel once they commenced their very public feud between 1970 and 1973 (keeping in mind that anything John said about the Beatles and McCartney in the immediate aftermath of the band's split was said out of hurt and anger, often hyperbole, and said just to be contrarian and dramatic, as Lennon himself admitted years later).
The book is rounded out with chapters on their dalliances with drugs, Indian religion (with Davies none-too-subtle Maharishi-as-charlatan bias coming through, to which I've long agreed), and their songwriting process. The last of these chapters is interesting as he was a fly-on-the-wall for many writing and recording sessions. In the book, he documents the making of the Sgt. Pepper album and the Magical Mystery Tour film and album. While commenting on their haphazard and time consuming creative process, he also paints a rather bleak picture for Ringo, who is depicted as sitting in the studio at his drums, set apart from the others crowded around their guitars, amps, and microphones, waiting to record the backing tracks and any percussion overdubs, for which after his services are not really required. Ringo himself has confirmed as much of being rather bored with many of the sessions post-1966, but this must have been a bit of a shock for fans to read at the same time as the band were at their zenith and most perceptions at the time were of the four as constantly happy-go-lucky. The last four chapters are each dedicated to an individual Beatle. Again, nothing groundbreaking in terms of what is revealed, but there is some subtle context that once more comes through with benefit of hindsight. John comes off as proud of the Beatles, but bored with life and marriage and cognizant of the fact that the entire machinations of fame, wealth, and critical acclaim and acceptance are all a farce. Paul is painted fairly accurately as a likable yet driven, ambitious, and supremely talented musician who has been the engine of the band post-1966. Ringo is very self-deprecating and seems almost a bit lost, puttering around the house with his wife and two young sons, while George even at this stage is fairly cynical and negative about the band, their music, and the trappings of fame. However, they all do admit that they need the other three in their lives and that there is a bond that only the four of them will ever understand. This is confirmed by their wives and closest associates (Martin, Aspinall, Evans). Again, fascinating to read since we all know what happened two years later...
This one and only authorized Beatles biography is a time capsule of an age gone by, one that was changing at a rapid pace yet was still more innocent, fun, and naive than the present. Hunter Davies did an admirable job capturing this essence and really humanizing the Beatles, who at the point he got them were already viewed as gods removed from the rest of us by fans, critics, and academics alike. The book did a great job in stripping away a lot of the myth in order to show them as they really were: four very young, very talented, very successful men who got to where they were by skill, sheer hard work and determination, and smatterings of luck along the way. It also froze them in place and time as they never would be again; in mid-1968, John was married to Cynthia, George was married to Pattie, Ringo was married to Maureen, and Paul was engaged to Jane. Within less than six months of the book's publication, John was with Yoko, Paul was with Linda (both of whom the two Beatles would respectively marry in early 1969 and remain married to until Linda's and John's deaths); within five years Ringo and Maureen were separated and headed for divorce, as were George and Pattie. Combined with the chaos of Apple Corps., the arrival of the wicked Allen Klein, the eventual bitter lawsuits, the acrimony, and the sniping in public and private between the four of them, the entire Beatle empire began to crumble to dust around them almost as soon as this book was released. Indeed, Davies' postscript, added to the 1985 edition, is along these same lines and is as valuable and worthy an addition to the book as anything originally in it. Speaking of that, while there are some surprisingly candid admissions throughout (such as Cynthia Lennon admitting that if she hadn't gotten pregnant, she and John wouldn't have gotten married), Davies laments the censoring he had to agree to after finishing the manuscript in order to appease the four Beatles, or in reality their families. Unsurprisingly, the two most difficult thorns in his side were John's aunt Mimi and Brian Epstein's mother Queenie, both of whom wanted their respective son's lives whitewashed, facts be damned. In Mimi's case, she took issue with John's recollections of his bad behavior at school and with his friends during his childhood, while in Queenie's case any mention of Brian's homosexuality was off limits. Davies did leave in some daring and rather cheeky references to Brian as "gay" in the original book, playing off the original connotation of the word as a synonym for "happy" while still making it obviously clear in context what he really meant. But the mores of the time, as well as the need to please everyone involved, meant that some major cuts needed to be made. Because of this, I've long hoped for an unedited original manuscript of the book...Hunter, if you're reading this, how about it?
The book is very readable and enjoyable although it does tend to read as a series of Davies' shorthand notes fleshed out into sentence and paragraph form, at times the prose coming across a bit stilted. There are also several small errors, mainly in dating certain photos or events. However, he achieved some real coups for the time, such as tracking down and interviewing Pete Best, Richard Starkey (Ringo's estranged father), and Fred Lennon (John's estranged father). Apart from the errors and the rather repetitive nature of several passages, the book holds up remarkably well and must be resonating well enough to remain in print continuously since the first edition almost fifty years ago! Essential reading for any Beatles fan, Hunter Davies book is a slice of life directly from the Beatles that chronicles their story from (mostly) their own recollections, catching them at their peak when the possibilities seemed endless and the successes effortless. Like the band, the book is of its time yet also timeless. It also holds up well to repeat readings, something I can personally attest to. While he was rather self-deprecating in his forward, Davies should hold no regrets with respect to his achievement with this book, although somehow I think that deep down he must know what the rest of us do when it comes to The Beatles: nothing has changed. Just as the prevailing thought in 1968, the Beatles will go on forever in some form or another, and so will this book.
Today I'm very pleased and very excited to bring you the following interview with Ray and Caroline Foulk, authors of the fantastic new book When the World Came to the Isle of Wight, Volume 1: Stealing Dylan From Woodstock. I reviewed the book earlier this year and Ray and Caroline were kind enough to answer my questions regarding the second Isle of Wight Festival in 1969, what is was like booking Bob Dylan for the festival, and much, much more. Before we begin, how about a little background on the authors?
Ray Foulk, now based in Oxford, has fostered many passions since his early days as a promoter. After the dizzy heights of the Isle of Wight Festivals and stadium events in London, the Foulk brothers were head-hunted by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation to help plan the leisure content of their new city. Through this, Ray brought the inventor/scientist/designer Buckminster Fuller to the project, embraced his environmentalism, and eventually trained as an architect himself at the University of Cambridge. Combining design, education, and promotion he spent much of the nineties and noughties as an environmental campaigner, and led the ambitious in-schools project, Blue Planet Day, rekindling the satisfaction, and more, that the festivals had brought to his youth. Recent years have been dominated by environmental architecture and writing.
Caroline Foulk has worked with her father, Ray, for many years, researching, writing, and co-promoting the schools environmental project, Blue Plant Day. Recently, together they have completed a screenplay for the cinema about the invention of modern art. Caroline trained and worked as a teacher and lives in Oxford with her husband and three children.
RNRChemist: First off, can you give us a bit of background on you? How did you come to settle on the Isle of Wight? What year was that and what were the circumstances? How did you like living there?
RF: After the relatively sudden death of my father in 1956 it was no longer practical for my mother to keep up a large house in Derbyshire with 5 young children to bring up. We moved to the Island because my Uncle already had property there. Also my aging grandmother lived there. It suited Uncle Ronald to encourage Mother to move.We were disappointed in some respects with the island, especially the house we relocated to, which was parochial and small compared to the amazing mansion house we left behind. Sutton Rock had seemed such a marvel to my father’s family who had lived for generations as coal miners. I think we had an overall general feeling of immense loss, but the seaside was a plus.
RNRChemist: What was the impetus for you and your brothers to decide to stage the first festival in 1968? Why did you decide to do that?
RF: We put on the first IOW festival because my brother Ronnie got involved in raising funds for a local charity – IWISPA, whose remit was to raise money for an indoor swimming pool for the IOW.
RNRChemist: That first festival seems to be the forgotten one of the three you promoted...looking back on it, what are your thoughts on it?
RF: The first festival seems almost a little embarrassing in retrospect. Although it was put on with a degree of professionalism, the stubble field was painful to sit on and we made wild claims about the national significance of the event, for instance we put it about that the Beatles would attend, (little did we know that they really would come the following year). We were disappointed that only about 10,000 attended. My brother Bill had assured us of the importance of Jefferson Airplane, Arthur Brown and the various underground bands. The island felt like a hopeless place for events.
RNRChemist: What did you have to go through to get Jefferson Airplane to headline that first one? How was their performance?
RF: My brother Ronnie had to keep plugging away for Jefferson Airplane. He was casting around for any big names really. He had little knowledge of the contemporary scene and was turned down many times. He had no track record as a promoter and had to rely on his abilities as a salesman to finally convince the Clayman Agency that we were really serious contenders able to host an event worthy of an international band like Jefferson Airplane.
When it came to playing the Airplane were on form. Although it was freezing cold they brought rock genius into the night and lifted everybody’s spirits. They made everything seem worthwhile even though their light show was constrained by the dusty conditions.
RNRChemist: When you decided to plan the festival for the following year, what sort of things did you feel you needed to improve upon from 1968?
RF: The IOW festival ‘mark one’ had seemed makeshift in many ways. We definitely wanted to make our festival-goers more welcome and comfortable – to go bigger and better in every way. It was important that we found a decent grassy site with proper facilities. Probably the biggest difference was that we styled it a ‘Camping festival’, which was unusual at this time. Because we were on an island we wanted people to have enough time to travel. Trench type toilets were replaced by cubicles and we appointed staff, often friends, to different departments overseeing every aspect of festival necessities. Everything was more designed from the tickets, to the programmes, posters etc. to the stage. We tried to address everything with excellence.
RNRChemist: Why Dylan? What made him your top choice as headliner for the second festival? Did you think you had a realistic shot at booking him? Was it more a "shoot for the moon" type thing?
RF: It was obvious that we needed the biggest names to draw people across the water. Jefferson Airplane hadn’t been able to do this – the task of finding somebody with enough clout seemed daunting. Dylan really was the holy grail in 1969, he had acquired a god-like status due to his influence upon a whole generation. He was more than an ordinary musician, whether he liked it or not.
RNRChemist: I'm assuming you were expecting to be turned down outright by Dylan's management when you first called? What was your reaction when they didn't immediately say "no?"
RF: I don’t think we set out believing that we had a chance to get Dylan. The fact that Dylan’s management didn’t dismiss us out of hand was a green light to us. We resorted to scheming over what might make the difference, bearing in mind that we had very few resources at all.
RNRChemist: Can you describe in more detail what the process was like for dealing with Block and Grossman as you warmed Bob up to the idea of coming to the island?
RF: We had less dealings with Al Grossman than with Bert Block owing to the demise of the Dylan-Grossman contract. Dylan was in the process of distancing himself from Grossman. During my visit to New York for the signing when I dined with Grossman and the lawyers almost immediately at a Chinese restaurant (something I’d never experienced before). And after the signing when we visit Grossman’s flat at Gramercy Park. It was there that Al skinned up a joint to celebrate the deal (to my alarm). Al was like a presence but not so much involved. He came to the festival with Michael Lang and seemed more interested in seeing the Who than Dylan.
I mostly dealt with Grossman’ partner, Bert Block. We developed a good rapport, over the phone initially. Sometimes Bert wrong-footed me. When he said ‘bring the dollars’ (in preparation for my trip to meet Dylan) I really had to think about what he meant. I looked after him whenever he visited the Island. I made it my mission to make sure Bert was okay and therefore Dylan was okay. Bert seemed a really good old timer, kind of avuncular, though he probably wasn’t that old in reality. I recall I scared Bert a couple of times with my driving, but he always had faith in our abilities as promoters. As for the process of dealing with Block and Grossman it was pretty smooth, apart from Rikki Farr’s little indiscretion. They were decent, friendly and business-like. We knew we had to present ourselves in a business-like way at all times, especially in order to surmount our youthfulness and it paid off. I had too much to think about to be too overawed by their stature as managers.
RNRChemist: How was it traveling to New York to meet with Dylan and his management? Can you describe how that whole trip went?
RF: Travelling to New York was a lot of fun. I hadn’t been abroad before of course. Once I had my passport, visa and the guarantees for at least most of the performance fees I could almost sit back and enjoy the ride. A downside was Rikki and his antics. He was a loose cannon and wont to step in claiming he was the organiser, which he patently wasn’t, as well as louse things up, but I had the benefit of his demeanour as a bonafide show producer. We needed to be a convincing duo and Rikki certainly helped.
RNRChemist: After you got Bob, how did you guys feel? I'm guessing it was relief mixed with the immediate pressure of "now how are we gonna make sure it all goes smoothly?
RF: Securing Dylan was unbelievable but the time period (5 weeks) between him signing and the festival itself was so short that there was really no time to do anything but get organised as rapidly as possible. Ticket sales were the priority. We had to raise enough cash to meet the contracts and build a city. But it wasn’t like a relief it was more euphoric than that.
RNRChemist: Why choose Dylan? Why not the Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, someone else? What about Bob made you want to go for him above all others?
RF: Dylan was a way bigger draw than the Stones or Hendrix at this point. The Beatles would have measured up to Dylan but they were in the process of their break up and hadn’t played live in eons. Elvis’s name even came up, but we couldn’t imagine him playing in a field. We were after one of the big three. Dylan was the only viable option. It’s easy to underestimate how big Dylan was at this time.
RNRChemist: You mention that you and your brothers weren't promoters, you were businessman...how did that gibe with trying to put on these massive festivals?
RF: Although we were businessmen rather than promoters I was pretty heavily into some of the issues of the time and was active with the IOW CND and labour party. In fact I set up a CND group in the West Wight. So although I was making a living in business my heart was with the counterculture. The same is true of my brother Bill who was a student at the Royal College of Art. It’s true that my musical education was lacking at the time of the first festival. Bill was easily able to point us in the right direction groups-wise. But it suited us well to have a business-like approach to the festivals. The organisation of the two large events was very complementary from the viewpoint of those that mattered, ie. the health authorities, police and bulk of the audience. It just wouldn’t have been possible to host such large numbers without a budget, plan, capable staff and their departments, at least not without creating a disaster area.
RNRChemist: You mention that you were a late convert to Dylan and weren't necessarily a huge rock fan at the time...what were your listening habits like in the 1960s? Did they change after putting on these three festivals?
RF: My musical taste changed dramatically. Above all I persisted with Dylan and soon became a genuine fan. We were fully incentivized to get familiar with as much current music as we could find the time to listen to it. It was soon flooding in too with demos coming at us from all quarters. Before this time I was a Johnny Cash fan, I liked the Beatles, trad jazz and knew about (by then) old hat stars like Adam Faith and Billy Fury.
RNRChemist: Can you give us a little flavor into how it was organizing this massive festival out of your house, and with 1960s technology to boot! I'd bet most young people today couldn't even imagine how much harder it was than it would be now.
RF: In some ways organising the massive Dylan festival was easier than it might be nowadays. We had less technology available, but those were the days when the fixed line telephone really worked. People tended to answer reliably and it was easier to make contact even with celebrities. In the case of going above people’s head a person-to-person call would often do the trick. Social media nowadays can take up a lot of time and work. Being restricted to largely paper publications, telephone, radio and television for advertising actually meant concentrating on the job would have been easier in some ways. We employed messengers to deal with some of tasks now taken care of by email and text. Conditions at Mother’s house were hardly consistent with a world-class rock festival but we did make use of a suite of rooms on the upper floor, which became workable office space. Of course dining tables doubled as desks etc. as far as furniture was concerned. Mother was fairly self-contained in a separate wing of the house, but would help on occasion by answering international phone calls in the middle of the night, or providing voluminous quantities of good home cooked food for whoever might be staying.
RNRChemist: What were some of the most difficult parts of the entire festival for you in terms of planning and execution?
RF: Raising funds was always the most problematic planning issue from the moment that Dylan agreed to sign especially in the early stages when potential backers just really wouldn’t believe that an event headed up by Dylan would happen. Without funds nothing could happen smoothly, but once Dylan had signed of course tickets were selling like lightening, which freed us up to concentrate on other vital matters like building the arena and finding Dylan and co. places to stay. One of the hairiest moments was when Dylan disembarked from the QUEII following his son‘s accident on board. Everything was riding on Dylan’s appearance. We suddenly realised how vulnerable we were.
RNRChemist: What was it like meeting the Beatles and other titans of the music world in 1969?
RF: It was quite surreal meeting famous people like the Beatles and other rock titans but to be honest I wasn’t interested in hanging around such people too much. There were plenty of others ready to do that. We were so consumed by the operation at hand that you could only take it in your stride. We were there to do a job and we had to concentrate hard on the necessities of keeping the thing together.
RNRChemist: What was Dylan like as a person? How about George Harrison? The other Beatles? The Who? Other rock musicians you met at the festival?
RF: My first impression of Dylan was that he was quite shy, probably shyer than me even. He was very ordinary, a regular down to earth kind of guy, polite and well spoken. He was dressed in jeans and a leather jacket and I suppose he appeared smaller than I expected, not that he is especially small but anyone with that big a name you kind of imagine to be larger.
George had all eyes for Dylan and clearly set about resuming the relationship he had been building with him after he had visited the Dylan’s home some months before. I enjoyed very much standing there and listening to them harmonizing beautifully to some Everly Brothers hits. That was a truly special moment, like a private concert.
The Beatles were very charming and seemed relaxed either hanging out at the farmhouse or backstage. They were keen on talking between themselves and were apologetic, saying that they didn’t get much chance to talk shop. John and Yoko were quite clingy as I remember.
The Who? We developed a good relationship with them which continued after the 1969 and 1970 festivals with Rock at the Oval in 1971. It has been said that the Isle of Wight gigs were the events of the Who’s career, which I’d be inclined to agree with. They could only have been pleased by their performance, reception, everything worked like a dream for them.
RNRChemist: What was your relationship like with your two brothers, Ronnie and Bill? How about with Rikki Farr? He certainly seemed to have had a knack for saying the wrong thing at a most inopportune time!
RF: The relationship between my brother Ronnie and I had always been close and inevitably under the circumstances we pulled together. Ronnie is a visionary. I would endeavour to bring in to reality whatever the latest idea was. We worked well as a team and developed ideas together around the clock. Our brother Bill was younger and away at the Royal College of Art some of the time. He was a very important advisor to key decisions such as what acts to go for, what type of festival we were putting on aside from his general duties on site and stage design.
Rikki was a mixed blessing. He was loud, gregarious and amiable. We had a good working relationship with him though he could be unruly. He would breeze in from his Portsmouth menswear shop as something of a VIP but he really wasn’t around on the Island that much. Most of his input came to the fore at the festival itself. He could be a liability in terms of saying the wrong thing, at other times he was able to pull us out of a difficult spot and had valuable experience to add to our credibility. It was said that he took after his boxer father using his mouth like other people use their fists!
RNRChemist: How did you feel about things heading into the moment when the festival was actually about to start? Confident? Nervous? Terrified? All of the above?
RF: There were so many balls to keep in the air there was barely time to think about whether we felt nervous or terrified. In reality there were moments of feeling overawed by the event – like the first time stepping on to the stage at Woodside Bay and seeing that immense crowd – that was quite something.
RNRChemist: Who were your favorite acts from the entire weekend?
RF: Dylan was the favourite act for me that weekend. It was only during his set that I really sat down in the wings and listened without distraction. The Bonzo Dog Band were certainly amusing as I recall, The Band were stunning and Gary Farr did well. There were many great moments. Ronnie was really excited about the Who, though sadly he heard them only from a great distance away.
RNRChemist: What was it like to see a crowd that size? How do you remember them? Overall, were they well behaved?
RF: Generally the crowd was well behaved (with certain exceptions like towards Mr and Mrs Thackham, with their bungalow adjacent to the stage, or suffered a minor insult). We never expected otherwise. In fact there was earnestness in the demeanour of most folks, like they really came to hear the music – that was what they were there for. Generally nobody stood up during the acts. Etiquette was that you would sit and refrain from obscuring the view of your brother or sister in front of you. Otherwise you might find yourself pelted with coke cans.
RNRChemist: What was going through your head when the Band were delayed for a couple of hours and Dylan was getting antsy?
RF: We were not overly worried about the delay to see Dylan. It wasn’t as if the crowd was going anywhere and 10pm would have been a rather early finish. Of course it did cut out the likelihood of Dylan playing on longer, which would have been a bonus and certainly knocked out the possibility of a jam with the Beatles or Stones. Of course that was never really going to happen anyway. We were most aware of the discomfort and general scrimmaging in the press arena. We didn’t really intrude on Dylan during his preparations so we weren’t really too aware of his level of discomfort.
RNRChemist: Dylan's set: your thoughts? How do you think it went down then, and how do you feel about now with hindsight (and being able to listen to it in full via his recent release of it)?
RF: I enjoyed Dylan’s set immensely. Sure he was different. He sounded for the first time like he could really sing well. It was a well-constructed set, the Band were perfect in sync with what he was doing. There were quiet moments and raucous moments. It was great music. The digital release of recent times bears out the quality of the gig and it is a joy to hear it in its remastered form. The audience listened attentively rather than reacted in raptures and calls for encores continued for 20 minutes. There is no doubt that he was well received. For all those expecting the wired rock poet of 1966 they would have been disappointed. Dylan had leapt ahead in with his stage persona. Many were left behind wondering where the old Dylan was.
RNRChemist: How accurately (or not) do you feel the press covered Dylan's set, as well as the whole festival, afterward? It certainly seemed that both you and Bob weren't too keen on what was printed!
RF: Positive press reports were widespread. There was negativity expressed afterwards in certain quarters of the UK gutter press regarding Dylan cutting short his set - which of course was not true, but perhaps this might have been a reaction to the pre-festival hype predicting a super-jam with the Stones and the Beatles. Others were casting around for something to write – a peaceful trouble-free festival was really not exciting enough. The negatives were easily outweighed by the positives, but it was significantly damaging to Dylan for him to reflect uneasily on playing in the UK afterwards although initially he had seemed delighted with the event. Comments were as varied as George Harrison’s words reported in the Daily Mirror ‘I could go on talking about Dylan for eight hours. He’s unlimited in what he’s doing…’ to the Daily Sketch’s ‘Dylan cuts it short after midnight flop’ For us the flimsy complaints were irritating to say the least but by and large we were very happy. Reporting in general ranged from generally accurate to accounts laden with descriptions of debauchery and depravity, some of which could be quite funny.
RNRChemist: After the festival, can you describe how you felt? How did you think things went?
RF: After the festival and the initial exhaustion, we felt elated combined with a huge sense of relief for having pulled it off. We were astonished at how well it had gone really. We were completely inspired to repeat the event, if not to surpass it.
RNRChemist: What was the festival site like after everyone left? How long did it take to clean up and return to normal?
RF: The festival site was awash with rubbish as far as the eye could see. As you might expect, but there was no permanent damage other than minor damage to the catering tent, which had been used as a vantage point by Bob-spotters. It took three or four weeks to restore the site to its former condition.
RNRChemist: Any folks in particular that you want to single out as being particularly helpful throughout the whole festival, from planning to execution to wrap-up?
RF: There are certain individuals who were particularly helpful throughout the festival. Turner Smith on site was a powerhouse of a man, strapping and strong and willing to take on any task. He had good knowledge of construction and general engineering matters. Electrician Harry Garrood was similarly around from the beginning. He was very skilled and kept with us. Another older gent Dr Quantrill was willing to stick his neck out for us in influencing the authorities to have faith in us and to dismiss scurrilous health scares as ridiculous.
RNRChemist: What was the local reaction before, during, and after the festival? RF: Local reaction to the oncoming festival was not initially as great as you might think. In fact a large number of Isle of Wight residents simply had no time to really contemplate what was actually arriving on the Island. Obviously there was great excitement among the youngsters. Some of this was evidenced on site when youths would come by and offer to do any job, sometimes without pay. Older people expressed dismay at the prospect of the Island being flooded with festivalgoers – perhaps our slogan ‘Help Bob Dylan Sink the Isle of Wight’ didn’t help there. During the festival itself there were stresses on certain resources for instance provisions in local shops -but others saw the festival as a great opportunity and set out their stalls, literally! The reaction afterwards was similarly mixed. On the whole young people were very much in favour of the festival while those of the older generation who objected were wild with antagonism and would express their hostility in extreme terms.
RNRChemist: Why did you decide to jump right into planning the next one? How much time did you take to relax and bask in the afterglow of the '69 festival before starting to plan for '70?
RF: After just a few days or weeks of reflection, recuperation and taking stock our thoughts gravitated towards another festival. It was inevitable. There was no question of basking in an afterglow for very long. There was just too much to do if we were to repeat the festival only go one better.
RNRChemist: What's your overarching memory of that year and what you and your colleagues accomplished with the 1969 Isle of Wight festival?
RF: It was a staggering realisation to have accomplished what we had set out to do. It was life changing. It felt like we could do anything or that anything was possible, once the finance was organised.
RNRChemist: Ray and Caroline, thank you so much for your time and insight. You've got me looking forward to volume two even more and I hope we can continue our discussion after that book is published. In the meantime, to my readers, I can't recommend Stealing Dylan From Woodstock enough...if you're a fan of the era and/or any of the acts that played the IOW in 1969, you'll definitely enjoy reading about how it all came together. Britain's answer to Woodstock was bigger and in many ways better, and incredibly they topped it the following year, but the story of how that happened will have to wait for volume two...
The first things that come to mind for almost anyone in the world when you ask them why John Lennon is famous are most likely the two words "Beatles" and "music." While these are certainly true and these two words describe his most meaningful and lasting contributions to our culture (the word "music" also encompassing his post-Beatles work), he always thought of himself first and foremost as an artist. Now, whether or not this was just his way of being the iconoclast he always was is open for debate: in his own words, music was just a way for him to make money, while "art always came first." Regardless, art was a hugely important part of his life from childhood to his dying day. We all know he published two books of his fantastical and unique wordplay and drawings, 1964's In His Own Write and 1965's A Spainard in the Works (two books which I've read several times and greatly enjoy), but from his youngest days John produced a large volume of drawings. Some of them were displayed in his infamous exhibit "Bag One" in the late 1960s and early 1970s (with the accompanying police raid on the grounds of obscenity occurring on the second day), but the majority were done mostly for his own peace of mind and enjoyment.
***special thanks to Samantha at Insight Editions for sending me a copy of the book to review!***
In John Lennon: The Collected Artwork, Scott Gutterman has organized and curated a collection of John's drawing and grouped them into distinct chapters which place them in their proper context during the various periods of John's life. These range from his early childhood and pre-music years to his Beatles years, as well as chapters breaking his art into sections pertaining to his relationship with Yoko, his home life during the 1970s, and the years he, Yoko, and Sean traveled to Japan where John learned the Japanese sumi ink drawing technique and tried to learn the Japanese language as well. One thing that is evident throughout the entire book is that John was a very talented artist whose range spread across a variety of styles and techniques. Included in this book are examples of his work ranging from rough sketches and doodles that are almost of stick-figure simplicity to very realistic, detailed drawings, with many other styles in between. While at first glance some people might look at the drawings and find many of them to be little more than scribbles and doodles, it becomes clearer upon really studying them that there was a method to his madness, so to speak. One of the biggest criticisms levied at John and Yoko was that they self-importantly chronicled every bit of their lives on record and film in the narcissistic belief that the public wanted to know all about it. John did much the same with his drawings, the difference being that he kept almost all of them to himself.
Starting off with his childhood drawings, the book shows many examples of the highly detailed and imaginative drawings of John's youth. Done mainly in pencil, many of them colored in by John after drawing them, the subject matter ranges from typical young boy fare like football (soccer for my fellow Americans) to battles between knights and warriors (the clashes between the Normans and Saxons from Ivanhoe were a popular source for the young Lennon). Even at this early age it was evident he was quite talented. The drawings encompassing the 1960s and the Beatles years are mainly drawn from his two books, both of which I own and have read numerous times; thus, I'd seen them all before. However, when stripped of the accompanying writings of the original books, the pictures and their humor hold up surprisingly well on their own. Moving on to the art he made from when he first started dating Yoko in 1968 to the last days of his life in 1980, the subject matter is more broad. Many of the drawings focus on his marriage to Yoko with all of its ups and downs. There is the infatuation phase of 1968-70 where John draws numerous pictures of them hugging, kissing, their faces merging into one, and a series of logos where the letters of their names are intertwined in a crossword puzzle-like fashion. This last one in particular was interesting... it was quite a surprise to see that a 28-year old famous Beatle was drawing these logos the way lovesick high school kids used to draw them on their book covers like we did in my school days. There are also several pictures depicting the bad times, including when they were separated during John's 18-month "Lost Weekend" of 1973-75. He drew many pictures throughout his life musing on his fame and what it all meant, as well as his enjoyment of the simple pleasures of city living in New York like walking down the street with Sean and Yoko, passing colorful characters, flying kites in the park...it shows John's contentment with his life and that, at the same time, he was a keen observer of the hustle and bustle going on around him. Many of his drawings are quite realistic and detailed while others are a bit more abstract and consist of little more than scribbled lines, yet somehow when placed together, they work. Perhaps the most interesting section for me was the chapter devoted to the work inspired by his immersion in Japanese culture during the many trips he and Yoko made to visit her family in Japan. John was intrigued with the sumi style of Japanese drawing and created several pieces using this style. In addition, he was trying to learn Japanese and incorporated many of the language's characters and phrases into his work. Some of them were done in a humorous way while others are attempts at learning how to speak and write it properly that wouldn't be out of place in a schoolkid's textbook. For instance, there is a series of drawings he made of Japanese faces making different facial expressions, each labeled with the appropriate descriptor: sweet, salty, bitter, and so on. It's fascinating to think that this world-famous musician was struggling to learn a new language just like the rest of us would...in a sense, his artwork humanizes him and plants his feet more solidly on the ground. I like to think that that's one of the main reasons John remained so dedicated to his craft, even as a hobby, throughout his life.
There are a few of things that are slightly lacking with the book which I'll go through one at a time. The first and most obvious one is that there is a lot of blank and/or wasted space. Each of John's drawings is reproduced quite beautifully on the high quality paper of the book, but there are far too many pages that are left blank opposite one of the drawings, or are filled with a portions of his handwritten song lyrics (many of which are to songs that have nothing to do with either the year or theme of the adjacent drawings). It seems a shame that so much page real estate was wasted in this way when it could have been utilized to include even more art. My second criticism concerns the accompanying text that precedes each chapter. Gutterman does a nice job explaining the themes and messages of each of John's drawings and placing them in the proper context as far as what was happening in his life at the time he created each of them. However, if you knew nothing of John Lennon or the Beatles before reading this book, you would think John was a single guy up until 1968 when he fell in love with Yoko before they got married in 1969, and you would think John had one and only one son, Sean, born in 1975. Obviously, as any Beatles and Lennon fan knows, this isn't the case as John was married to the late Cynthia (Powell) Lennon from 1962-68 and she is the mother of his oldest son Julian (born 1963). It's been a complaint of many Beatles fans, as well as Cynthia and Julian themselves, that they have been all but written out of John's life by Yoko and many Lennon fans and scholars, and this book is a prime example of that unfortunate phenomenon occurring yet again. There is but one mention of Julian, at the very end of the book, and no mention of Cynthia, which is glaring (at least to me) since many of his earlier drawings (including all of them coming from his two books) were done during his marriage to her. In fact, if one has also read the John Lennon Letters, you'd see that there wer many intricate or whimsical drawings he made during his early twenties that were done specifically for Cynthia. Really, my issue is just that this very real and vital part of John's life and creative process wasn't given the due it deserves. I realize this is par for the course with how Yoko has handled John's estate and his image since his death, but just because she engages in historical revisionism doesn't make it true. And before anyone says anything, I am not being "anti-Yoko" in saying this...more I'm being "pro-facts" than anything else!
Those complaints of mine aside, John Lennon: The Collected Artwork is a wonderful book that will be very enjoyable to anyone who is a serious Beatles and Lennon fan;.if you happen to be an art lover, all the better but I don't think that's necessary in order to get a real appreciation for the meaning of John's art. As the John Lennon Letters has done, in presenting his artwork this book helps to humanize and demystify John Lennon. Stripped of the protective shell that was his celebrity, the real man emerges and we get a chance to understand who he was and how he saw the world around him. I'd like to think that were he still alive, John would be very satisfied all these years later people are still as interested in his art as they are his music. For that reality, this book makes a significant contribution.
When it comes to 1960s music festivals, there are three that are iconic and forever ingrained in the collective memory: Monterey Pop in June 1967, which was the coming-out party for the 60s counterculture during the Summer of Love; Woodstock in August 1969, "three days of peace, love, and music" that featured some of the biggest names in rock music and the largest gathering of hippies, music fans, and countercultural figures on American soil (at the time); and Altamont in December 1969, a poorly organized, chaotic, and violent festival headlined by the Rolling Stones which culminated in the stabbing death of a drug-crazed fan, all captured on film and signifying for many the death of the 1960s dream. There were, of course, many other rock festivals toward the latter part of the 1960s and beyond, but two of the most significant of them all have flown under the radar for the past forty-five years: the 2nd and 3rd Isle of Wight Festivals in August 1969 and 1970, respectively. There has been a lot of mythology and misinformation surrounding the festivals over the intervening years...luckily, for the first time one of the men who was at the forefront of organizing these legendary gatherings is finally telling the real story behind them. When the World Came to the Isle of Wight is a two-volume set, and Volume 1: Stealing Bob Dylan From Woodstock will be out in June 2015 and is the subject of this review.
***special thanks to Guy at Medina Publishing for sending me a copy of the book to review!***
The Isle of Wight is a diamond-shaped island immediately off the south coast of England in the English Channel, a short ferry ride across the Solent from Portsmouth. As a county within England, it's home to ~130,000 people and has historically been a vacation and retirement destination for the affluent and well-connected. However, thanks to the big dreams and hard work of a family transplanted from Derbyshire, for a brief moment in the late 1960s the island became a mecca for rock music fans from around the world. Hailing from a multi-generational family of coal miners in the Midlands, the Foulk family made their way to the Isle of Wight and settled there. While the four brothers and their sister were of the right age to be part of the 1960s generation, as author Ray Foulk puts it, on the island they were fairly insulated from the wider youth counterculture and would do some major catching up, especially as they eventually planned their festivals. The three brothers central to the story, Ray, Ronnie, and Bill were all young middle-class businessmen in when the idea of promoting a music festival on the island was first thought up in the late 1960s. Using their business sense, some fortuitous connections, and their own hard work and industriousness they staged the first Isle of Wight Festival in August 1968 with Jefferson Airplane headlining. It was a one-day affair and drew a respectable ~25,000 concertgoers while going off fairly smoothly. The brothers (as well as their other brother, sister, and mother...truly a family affair!) were successful in raising local funding and advertising, befriending a local farmer who offered use of his land and saving money by using Ray's connections and career as a printer to make their own tickets and posters. While they lost money on the endeavor, they gained valuable insight into what to do (and what not to do), and the idea was planted to stage another festival the following year. However, this second one needed to be bigger and better in order to draw a larger crowd and gain more exposure. They intended to achieve this by making the whole experience grander: spreading the festival over the three-day August Bank Holiday weekend and booking bigger groups as a draw to get fans to come across the water to the island. The first major headliner they booked was The Who; other big acts like the Moody Blues, Free, and Joe Cocker were added to the bill, as were many smaller bands who filled out the bill across the weekend. However, with the Who headlining the Saturday an even bigger name was needed to headline Sunday night and close the festival. While the Beatles or Rolling Stones would have been obvious choices, the Foulks didn't think they had a shot at either one of them and neither would have made sense in any event: the Beatles hadn't performed live since 1966 (apart from the rooftop concert in January of '69) and the Stones were just getting back onto the road in the wake of Brian Jones' death in July 1969 (their legendary American tour of 1969 would start two months later in October of '69). On a lark, one of the Foulk brothers (who were operating their promotion company under the name of Fiery Creations) suggested Bob Dylan. This was an interesting and ambitious idea for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that Dylan had been a recluse since his motorcycle accident in July 1966 and had only made a couple of cameo live appearances at benefit concerts since. Figuring that they had nothing to lose, the Foulks made tentative overtures to Dylan's camp. When they weren't rejected outright, they kept the dialogue open and eventually warmed Dylan to the idea of playing there. Much of it had to do with the Isle being the former home of Tennyson, whom Dylan greatly admired and whose Farringford House remained a shrine to the poet's devotees. The negotiations went back and forth for several weeks and involved a lot of work on the part of Fiery Creations until Dylan finally accepted. Then came to daunting task of raising the required funding, as requested by Dylan's managers Bert Block and Albert Grossman, in time for the festival. Though it wasn't all smooth sailing, a combination of incredibly hard work and several lucky breaks led to the money being raised. A suitably larger festival site was secured and set up, a house and support staff were rented for Bob and his wife Sara, and the festival was able to stay on schedule and open on time.
Some 150,000 people swarmed the Isle of Wight from the UK, America, Australia, and Europe for the three day festival that followed hot on the heels of the more famous Woodstock Festival of two weeks prior. In fact, the histories of these two festivals are more entwined than is known...certainly more than I knew, at least. Even though the Woodstock festival took place some seventy miles away in Bethel, New York, promoter Michael Lang made a deliberate effort to name the event Woodstock for two reasons: he wanted to use the town's name and notoriety as Dylan's hideaway to attract attention to his festival, and he hoped to entice Dylan out of seclusion to return to the stage at the event. However, it served to have the opposite effect, irritating Dylan to the point that there was no way he would consider appearing. Much of this was down to the fans who made the pilgrimage to Woodstock and harassed Dylan and his family at their home by stalking them and hiding out on their property. Thus, the escape to England to play the Isle of Wight held additional appeal to Bob and Sara. On the whole, the festival went off without a hitch and the atmosphere was enhanced by several giants of the rock scene who were in attendance, from Keith Richards and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones to Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton of Cream, and most notably three of the Beatles: John, George, and Ringo (Linda McCartney had given birth to Paul's daughter Mary days before and so they didn't attend). All three Beatles and their wives were Dylan's constant companions during the weekend with George acting as unofficial host. George and Dylan had gotten to know each other the previous November in the aftermath of the White Album sessions and would continue their friendship until George's death in 2001. Ringo was a friend as well, whereas Bob's relationship with Lennon was always a bit more complex. Both admired each others talents and had known each other for years, but John was alternately in awe of and paranoid of Bob. However, even though the Beatles didn't perform at the festival, their presence at the event loomed large and gave a stamp of credibility to the entire affair.
From the opening ceremony on Friday night to the final note of Dylan's set late Sunday evening, the entire festival went off, for the most part, without issue. There were issues with inadequate restroom facilities, food vendors prices gouging festival goers, and the noise levels bothering a farmer and his wife whose house immediately butted against the backstage area, but overall it ran smoothly. There were only two big crises, both of which happened behind the scenes: the Who's helicopter made a harrowing landing in the backstage area when the updraft from the rotors blew the plywood boards that acted as a platform all about (luckily no one was hurt although one struck the tail rotor and almost incapacitated the chopper), and the biggest crisis of the night: the two-hour delay preceding the Band's set. One of Dylan's stipulations when he agreed to appear at the festival was that his backing group, The Band, would have a set of their own immediately preceding his own. His record company also insisted on recording Dylan and the Band's show for a possible live album. The two-hour delay was due to technical issues in setting up the additional recording equipment, but it agitated Dylan enough that the Foulks were nervous it might all fall apart at the last moment. However, as soon as the Band finally began their set, Dylan calmed down and he went on to deliver one of the most unique sets of his career. Now singing in the affected country croon he'd adopted on his most recent album, 1969's Nashville Skyline, as opposed to his famous nasal whine, he eschewed almost all of his most popular songs and instead focused on the pastoral songs culled from Skyline and his 1967 album John Wesley Harding. By this point in his life, Dylan was married with five children and enjoyed the quiet domesticity of his home life; this is reflected in his albums during his reclusive period as well as in his set list at the Isle of Wight. Playing for around an hour, his set was rapturously received by those in the crowd although the press reaction was mixed, with history generally agreeing with those who savaged his performance. Indeed, Dylan was so dispirited by the reviews of his performance when he got back home to New York a few days later that he didn't play another concert, save for an appearance at George Harrison's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, until 1974.
In the meantime, the Foulks were left in the afterglow of the successful festival while facing the daunting tasks of cleaning up the festival site and starting their planning to do it all again next year. While they didn't make much money from the festival, they made enough to pay off the bills they accrued in its planning and execution and learned a lot about what they could do better in 1970. The great thing about this book is how Ray Foulk, who was at the center of the whole enterprise, describes all of the behind the scenes planning, negotiating, and maneuvering that was required to pull the whole thing off. As he makes plainly clear, he and his brothers were not hippies or tuned-in rock impresarios; they were simply young businessmen who happened to also be music fans who thought it would be cool to stage a festival on their little island. The Foulks wore suits and ties to work each day, didn't do drugs, and tried to run their business and turn a profit, the last of which damaged their credibility in the eyes of more left-leaning music fans and critics. Indeed, Ray mentions how they were criticized for not putting on a "free festival" (a criticism that would be even louder the following year) while making a great point that not only did somebody need to pay for the concessions, restrooms, and festival site infrastructure, but the artists themselves weren't playing for free! Indeed, as the highest-paid performer on the bill, Dylan took a lot of flak in the press for how much he was paid (his total, including travel and lodging expenses, amounted to some £80,000), with one tabloid referencing his "million-dollar" payday. Foulk is also refreshingly candid about many of the people he worked with in those days. Two of them in particular come instantly to mind: compere Rikki Farr, whose fast-talking and hip manner (not to mention his being the son of famous boxer Tommy Farr) was both an asset and a liability, and Judy Lewis, hired as housekeeper and cook for the Dylans at their rented house. While Lewis was good at her job, she also tried to get a bit too close to her famous guests and began inserting herself into situations that she was not intended to be involved in when she was hired...this eventually led to her dismissal. Foulk is by no means vicious in his recounting...in fact, he's exceedingly fair and in some spots, probably too kind given some of the situations that resulted from these actions (I'm thinking in particular of the poor press coverage they got after Farr insulted several reporters from the stage prior to Dylan's set). The goal with these two books is to set the record straight and tell the real story of how three brothers, with help from their family and friends, were able to stage two of the biggest music festivals in history. Stealing Dylan from Woodstock was a stunning achievement but it also meant that they had to do something even bigger and better the following year. As for how they topped that, the final chapter is a lead-in to the forthcoming second volume discussing the biggest live act of 1969-70 (and noted Dylan devotee) Jimi Hendrix. Indeed, the 1970 festival would be Hendrix' final UK appearance as he would tragically die in London a few weeks later.
While the book may seem like it's too specific and too England-centric for a non-Brit (such as myself) to enjoy, I don't feel this is the case. True, I'm a student and fan of the era and its music and also a lifelong Anglophile, but I feel that anyone who is a fan of those times will enjoy the book. In particular, Dylan fans should read this because of the interesting way Ray Foulk places the event in the context of Dylan's career. The Isle of Wight Festival in 1969 was his only headlining concert appearance in the span between July 1966 and 1974 and found Dylan at a point in his life where he was eschewing social commentary in his songs, shunning fame, and embracing being a husband and father. As such, his set at the festival remains unique in his history and the book manages to capture the spirit of the times and of Dylan's life and career at that very moment. Beyond merely being a book about a festival, Foulk does a masterful job in telling the true story of what it took to get Dylan on the bill and what it all meant for all involved. The text is accompanied by photographs of the various artists on stage and in attendance as well as many fascinating behind the scenes pictures. There are candid shots of Dylan, the Beatles, and other various famous faces in attendance. Scans of the original tickets, posters, and promotional materials prepared for Dylan in order to entice him to accept their invitation are included and do a nice job showing the amount of care and detail that went into the promotion of the festival...truly artifacts from a time long gone. The biggest (and really, only) complaint I have with the book are the numerous typos sprinkled throughout the text, as well as a couple of miscaptioned photos. These are minor, however, and don't detract from the impact or enjoyment of the book. It's clear that the authors did a lot of research to fill in the gaps of Ray Foulk's own story as evidenced by the numerous footnotes throughout the book as well as lengthy list of cited source material at the end of the book.
(Links to the rest of the Who's set at the festival can be found on YouTube in the above videos)
Beyond placing the event in the proper context of its time in the history of popular music and Bob Dylan's career and telling the true story of the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, the biggest impact Stealing Dylan From Woodstock had on me was that it did the impossible: it made me finally become a Dylan fan. I've long respected and acknowledged his influence but I've always maintained the position that the best versions of his songs were covers by other artists. I had heard many of his songs and even enjoyed several of them but I just couldn't get into his music, or rather I should say that I never put in any real effort to do so. However, over the course of reading this book I decided to make a concerted effort to listen to his music and to my shock and surprise, I found that I really loved it! So even if the book was no good, I would forever be indebted to Stealing Dylan for at least opening me up to a whole new world of music from one of the great artists of our times. Thankfully, as I've written above that isn't the case: this is a great book and I commend and thank Ray Foulk for telling his story and doing it as well as he did. The only difficult thing now is waiting for Volume 2 to be published...
