For this motley bunch of revivalists with neither a Top 50 hit nor a successful LP to their name, and at the biggest and most legendary ‘60s Hippie festival of all, played their set of nine old ‘50s covers not early in the day, but high on the bill of the last night, sandwiched between new superstars Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young 3 and Jimi Hendrix, whose performance concluded the entire three-day event! It was only 104 days until the ‘70s began, and the band second from the top of the most legendary ‘60s fezzy ever was going down a storm playing ‘At The Hop’, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘Teen Angel’. 2 But surely the greatest evidence of the Counter Culture’s outright N E E D to cosy up with the recent past was the appearance at Woodstock of Teddy Boy group Sha Na Na. ‘When Alice Comes Back to the Farm’ sounded as though it had been fed through a Phil Spector or Joe Meek filter, while the Move’s 1970 single ‘Brontosaurus’ featured ‘50s elements that were performed so pointedly and slowed down to such a crawl that they even rivalled the sludge-trudge of fellow Brummies B. The Move’s Roy Wood threw off his 1968 obsessions with Love, Buffalo Springfield and the West Coast Scene, greased back his long flowing hair, and proceeded to barf forth his own radically Futuristic versions of ‘50s Rock’n’Roll in a style that was sultry, alien and brand new. And where the Beatles went, so the Beatles Watchers followed. And whilst John Ono Lennon still flew the freak flag with his 1969 Yoko-inspired avant-garde projects, even the Beatles themselves returned to the safety of their raw rock’n’roll roots for their post-WHITE ALBUM recordings, John and Paul even daring to record one of their own early originals ‘One After 909’ for their final LP. Truman’): all was jettisoned in favour of calling their 1969 album (get this!) ROCK & ROLL… talk about abandoning ship! Indeed, within months the Vanilla Fudge rhythm section had formed Cactus, whose gasoline guzzlin’ repertoire included stomping versions of Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘You Can’t Judge a Book By Looking at the Cover’.
In 1969, Prog Rock behemoths Vanilla Fudge abandoned entirely their 1967/68 classical pretensions (example titles: ‘Variation on a Theme from Mozart’s Divertimento #13’, ‘Beethoven’s fur Leise and Theme from Moonlight Sonata’) and spectacular cultural conceits (my fave title has to be ‘Voices in Time: Neville Chamberlain-Winston Churchill-Franklin Roosevelt-Harry S. New megastars Led Zeppelin – inspired no doubt by the Jeff Beck Group’s wild stomping strung-out version of the King’s ‘All Shook Up’ – regularly included their own live versions of Elvis songs, whilst Black Sabbath included a jaunty version of Carl Perkins’ ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ among their live set’s knuckle-dragging blues epics. As the heroes-of-choice for teenage boys, the gentlemen of NASA temporarily eclipsed even our beloved Rockstars because they were just as mysterious, wore even wackier outfits, controlled bigger budgets, and they were pushing humanity forwards in a highly visible manner… and boy, were they using technology! 1 And so, knee-deep in the carnage of ’69, all the freaks looked back for inspiration, seeking brief sanctuary in revivalist performances of the wild original 1950s Rock’n’Roll which had set them on the road in the first place. For poets and singers of the new myth, our polluted and post-atomic world was apparently dying before our very eyes, and space exploration was to be humanity’s saviour. But 1969 was the year the freight train hit the bumpers, the year in which even Rock’s hardiest experimentalists ceased to proceed exclusively forwards… the murders, the cash-ins, the hypes, the rip-offs… where in Hell was this so-called Alternative Society headed? Instead, adventurous rock’n’rollers in need of a Utopian goal sought solace in that summer’s first NASA moon-landing.
#Argent god gave rock and roll to you tabs free
Pushing forwards, ever onwards into new territories of Avant-Garde Psychedelic Rock, the practise of Free Love, and Student Protests & Riots against Anti-Capitalism: all had been de rigueur across the world throughout -68. Note: Hopefully, nothing too obvious appears in this compilation because I wanted it to be highly listenable and to bring forth something new and out of the ordinary, a little Astral Glamour right here in gloomy old Feb.īy late 1969, those murders perpetrated by the Hell’s Angels at the Rolling Stones’ infamous Altamont Festival, and by the Manson Family out in the Hollywood Hills, were taxing the Utopianism of even the most idealistic Hippies.
GLAMROCKSAMPLER was constructed by Julian Cope for the purposes of this review, and has never been released.
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