IT’S A MIGHTY LONG WAY DOWN ROCK’N’ROLL
Episode 3: Dick Jones – the Beads & Kaftan Years…
This authentic depiction of hippies on the loose turned up in the back of a drawer the other day. Studying the unlined faces & the faraway eyes, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The scene illustrated took place 36 years ago & yet, if I blank out the faces & ignore the antique amps, the photo could have been taken yesterday. So long a personal journey since that time & yet so little change in the rock’n’roll landscape.
It was the strangest gig that The Nervous System had played in its brief but active career thus far. We’d done a couple of late night sessions in a club, Happening 44, in Gerrard Street in Soho. Up to midnight the claustrophobic little cellar was a low-end strip joint. As we struggled down the narrow staircase with our gear we’d pass the performers on their way up to catch last buses & tubes. Clothed & out of the range of the cheap coloured bulbs they looked like tired school dinner ladies off home to their families.
The guy who did the light show at Happening 44 (oil & water slide projection & some pre-war porn films) took a shine to us. He was a Californian & since nearly all our material was lifted wholesale from the respective oeuvres of The Byrds & Love this charmed us greatly. He chose us from amongst the tired, poor & huddled masses of the other bands that played for peanuts at the club to do a rather special gig up near St Albans in Hertfordshire. It was way outside our usual territory south of the Thames & he was a little guarded about the precise nature of the occasion. But it paid well & we were flattered to the point of fantasising from it a future of fame & (pious anti-materialism being a little thinner than skin-deep) untold riches.
Initial band success in those days had little to do with musical prowess. It stemmed largely from such factors as someone’s dad having a garage to rehearse in, finding a drummer who actually had a full kit, or having access to transport larger than a bicycle & more appropriate than the bottom deck of a bus. We had a van. It was a very old mail van, painted bright yellow. It belched smoke from places where smoke shouldn’t ever be found & none of the doors locked. But it got us through London & onto the A1 within 5 hours &, as the summer afternoon waned, we fetched up somewhere outside St Albans at a set of huge ornamental gates. We knew that the name of the venue was Fiveacres but nothing more so we had decided that it must be a regency manor house owned by an eccentric film director. A large, shameless notice told us otherwise. It said: Fiveacres Nudist Colony (Strictly No Callers).
By this time we had more than fulfilled the narcotic obligations attendant on band membership in the ‘60s. Anything from someone farting loudly to a major traffic accident would have induced hysteria. But the sight of a quartet of elderly tennis players clad only in shoes & socks volleying & lobbing did for us completely. Our emotional state wasn’t helped by brightly painted notices on the walls of the large hall in which we were to play. The occasion was, it would seem, a fancy dress ball.
We set up, sound checked & sat around waiting in the empty hall for the festivities to begin. When the doors finally opened wide we scrambled onto the stage, picked up, plugged in & turned to face our public. Each one of them, from mewling infant to energetic pensioner was dressed as a vintage Hollywood Red Indian. Tiny breechclouts & demure buckskin waistcoats protected their modesty & enormous feathers adorned heads bald & abundant. We played as we had never played before & bosoms heaved & groins rotated. In the small hours of the morning we took delivery of £100.00 in new notes &, unusually silent, we headed down south to a calmer, saner land.
I’ve long since lost touch with Dave French (left of the photo on guitar) & vocalist Bob Meadows. But I’m sure that for them, as for me, the old myth that if you were part of ‘60s sub-culture you won’t be able to remember a thing will be confounded by crystal clear recollections of that brief time out of the world in the summer of ’67.
