The Bath Festival 1969-70 on CD: Not the release you hoped for

 

"You can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse." (Scottish proverb)

"The ol’ Reverend has been listening to live records for 50 years, and been collecting bootlegs for roughly 45 years and yet my ears have never been as insulted as they were by this collection." (Keith A. Gordon)

VARIOUS ARTISTS

The Best of the Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music ’69-70

(Gonzo Multimedia U.K.)

VENUE: The Bath Festival of Blues, held June 28th, 1969 at The Pavilion in Bath, England. The Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music, held June 27th-29th, 1970 in Shepton Mallet, England. 

SOUND QUALITY: Shabby audience recordings you would scrape off your shoes at the dog park. In a word, awful. In other words: abominable, appalling, atrocious, disgusting, distressing, ghastly, grungy, hideous, horrible, offensive, repulsive, ugly, and unpleasant. (Thanx to Thesaurus.com for the synonyms.)  

COVER: Three-CD set packaged in mondo-sized jewel case with minimal front and rear tray cards. Performing bands are listed on the front along with poorly-reproduced poster artwork; track listing is on the back; and the set includes a nifty 16pp color booklet with rare photos and reasonably informative liner notes.

TRACKLIST: 

DISC 1: 1. Ten Years After “I Woke Up This Morning” • 2. Ten Years After “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” • 3. Blodwyn Pig “Aint Ya Comin’ Home” • 4. Blodwyn Pig “Cats Squirrel” • 5. Taste “Same Old Story” • 6. Colosseum “Walking In the Park” • 7. Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac “Blues Jam” • 8. Fleetwood Mac “So Many Natural Ways” • 9. Fleetwood Mac “Red Hot Mama” • 10. The Nice “Karelia Suite” • 11. The Nice “She Belongs To Me”

DISC 2: 1. Donovan “Mellow Yellow” • 2. Steppenwolf “Sookie Sookie” • 3. Steppenwolf “Born To Be Wild” • 4. Johnny Winter “Guess I’ll Go Away” • 5. Johnny Winter “Johnny B. Goode” • 6. Johnny Winter “Have You Ever Been Mistreated” • 7. The Byrds “Rock n Roll Star” • 8. The Byrds “Bugler” • 9. The Byrds “Black Mountain Rag” • 10. The Byrds “Mr. Tambourine Man” • 11. The Byrds “Pretty Boy Floyd” • 12 The Byrds “Antique Sandy” • 13. The Byrds “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” • 14. The Byrds “Baby Do You Want Me To Do”

DISC 3: 1. John Mayall “It Might As Well Be Raining” • 2. John Mayall “Crazy Woman” • 3. Canned Heat “Reefer Blues” • 4. Canned Heat “Something’s Gotta Go” • 5. Mothers of Invention “Mom and Dad” • 6. Country Joe McDonald “Silver and Gold” • 7. Country Joe McDonald “Martha Lorraine” • 8. Country Joe McDonald “Fixin’ To Die Rag” • 9. Santana “Black Magic Woman” • 10. Santana “Incident at Neshabar” • 11. It’s A Beautiful Day “White Bird”

COMMENTS: British concert promoter Freddy Bannister and his wife Wendy made their reputation with shows they held at The Pavilion, a venue in Bath, England roughly 100 miles west of London. Beginning in 1963, the Bannisters promoted successful concerts by artists like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, and Ike and Tina Turner, among others. So, when they were approached by the local Bath Festival Society – which held a small annual event – to put something together “for the kids,” they hit up their Rolodex and booked the Bath Festival of Blues. 

The line-up for the June 28th, 1969 Bath Festival of Blues included Led Zeppelin (who were paid an astounding £200 for their performance), John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, The Nice, Chicken Shack, Taste (with Rory Gallagher), Colosseum, Blodwyn Pig, Ten Years After, and headliners Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac. The one-day event was a resounding success; planning for 5,000 attendees, the power-packed musical line-up attracted nearly 30,000 fans, so the Bannnisters saw the need to expand the event the following year. 

Moving to a larger location (The Royal Bath and West Showground down the road from Bath in Shepton Mallet), the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music grew to three days in June 1970 and featured headliners Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin (whose star had risen over the ensuing year; they asked for, and were paid £20,00 for their performance), as well as a slate of (mostly West Coast) American artists like Canned Heat, Hot Tuna, Jefferson Airplane, Johnny Winter, Dr. John, the Byrds, Santana, Steppenwolf, the Mothers of Invention, Country Joe McDonald, It’s A Beautiful Day, Maynard Ferguson (?!), and the Flock. A handful of homegrown U.K. artists also appeared, including Donovan, Fairport Convention, Keef Hartley, and John Mayall. The Moody Blues were booked but never performed. 

The Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music drew in excess of 150,000 fans, an unexpected surge in numbers that created more than a few logistical problems for the promoters. The picturesque country lanes in Somerset county (population around 385k at the time) weren’t built for this sort of rock ‘n’ roll onslaught and, as concert-goers began to abandon their cars streetside, the bands’ equipment trucks were delayed, which in turn held up the show (and forced Donovan to perform a lengthy acoustic set). Bad weather (Surprise! It rained in England in June!) further complicated matters. Some of the Bannister’s security people also ran off with a large chunk of the gate receipts, which is probably why the promoters never attempted to book a third festival.

Still, The Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music offered concert-goers a number of innovations such as a state-of-the-art PA system; video projections of performing bands on screens beside the stage; and on-site tents for people to sleep in as well as larger tents which played movies like King Kong through the night. The Bannisters contracted with film companies Gentle Ghost and Paradise Films to document the festival on film and videotape, but the B&W footage was lost for years and is reportedly of poor quality. Different people have scraps of video from the festival, but as nobody can agree on who owns the copyright, it’s unlikely that any film of the festival will ever be released.

As such, I was happy to find that Gonzo Multimedia was releasing The Best of the Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music ’69-70, a three-disc set comprised of performances from the 1969 and 1970 festivals. The U.K. label specializes in “eclectic and unique” releases (according to their website), including a lot of rare live shows. They deem themselves a “label for connoisseurs,” but they really should be ashamed for releasing this mess. It has long been rumored that high-quality soundboard recordings of the festival exist but, folks, this ain’t them. To put it in a jargon more familiar to our British readers, the sound on these discs is ‘shite’.

The first disc is comprised of performances from the 1969 festival and, truthfully, I’d rather have a root canal from the homeless guy that lives under a bridge on the edge of town than to listen to these performances again. This is the worst sort of “audience” recording…the taper(s) was miles away from the stage, the bands all sound like they’re playing at the bottom of a deep pit, there’s constant crowd chatter and ambient noise, and the overall sludgelike sonics of each plodding performance blend together into a droning, migraine-inducing morass. Ten Years After, Blodwyn Pig, Taste, Colosseum, Fleetwood Mac, and The Nice have all been done a severe disservice by these recordings, and decent live albums can be found for many of these bands.

Discs two and three offer performances from the 1970 event, and they sound only slightly better than the abysmal first disc, more like somebody sharply poking their thumbs in your ears than an icepick colliding with your eardrum. Donovan’s single song (“Mellow Yellow”) is slightly brighter-sounding than anything that came before, and represents a small part of his two-hour performance to a largely bored audience waiting to ‘rawk’! Performances by Steppenwolf and Johnny Winter more closely resemble the horrible listening experience of disc one, and while Winter’s guitar cuts through the haze somewhat, overall you’d get the same effect by pouring thick, gooey mud straight into your ear canals with a funnel. Only the Byrds’ six-song set resembles anything close to a respectable recording, with discernable vocals and instrumentation so, by comparison, they sound almost tolerable.

With promising performances by John Mayall, Canned Heat, the Mothers of Invention, Country Joe McDonald, Santana, and It’s A Beautiful Day, the third disc is full of disappointment. The unhappy sonic sludge, wind noise, and audio artifacts of the second disc also infects these performances – the distortion dominating the Mothers’ single song is matched only by a maddening warble, which sounds like the tape reel is about to leap off the recorder to its death beneath the feet of thousands of fans. Suicide would be too good for this recording of It’s A Beautiful Day’s otherwise ethereal “White Bird,” which is plagued by a screechy yet horribly muted sound that is the audio equivalent of sticking your head in cardboard box and hitting it with a hammer. Are any of these artist’s performances ‘good’? Who can tell, really? 

The 1970 festival is notorious for its promiscuity, with literally dozens of audience tapes floating around the trade-o-sphere. The Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd sets have been released frequently as vinyl and CD bootlegs through the years, and the festival itself was released as a three-disc set by the U.K. label Grow Music in 2004. Featuring expanded performances by the Mothers, Santana, and Steppenwolf as well as songs by Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Jefferson Airplane, the Grow CD release presumably features the same shitty audience recordings as this Gonzo set. Gonzo seems to have sourced these performances from a number of different tapers, and my guess is that they didn’t want to cough up the cash necessary to license the readily-available Zep and Floyd performances.

Interestingly, according to the U.K. Festivals Archive website, at least three distinctive tapers have been identified as recording portions of the festival. One guy used a Phillips reel-to-reel deck but couldn’t make copies of his tapes for years as the odd speed of his recorder could only be duplicated by special equipment, so his recordings didn’t begin circulating until the late ‘90s. Still, he reportedly captured decent-sounding performances by Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane. A second taper caught approximately half of Donovan’s two-hour set (the only known recording) and Zeppelin’s entire two-hour set as well as scraps of other performances. Whomever recorded the Byrds’ set was doing yeoman’s work as it’s the only (relatively) bright spot in an otherwise dismal listening experience.

With the full authorization of the Bannister estate, Gonzo has gone all out in offering a limited edition 50th anniversary deluxe box set with the three CDs, reproductions of the festival programs and tickets, concert posters, and a 16pp booklet with text originally written by Freddy Bannister priced at $96 U.S. The ‘plain jane’ three-disc set that I pre-ordered back in November cost $24 plus shipping from the U.K. But, believe me gentle readers, you don’t want to spend a penny to hear these recordings. The ol’ Reverend has been listening to live records for 50 years, and been collecting bootlegs for roughly 45 years and yet my ears have never been as insulted as they were by this collection. Save your money and invest in the new Jason Ringenberg album instead. You’ll thank me in the end. (Rev. Keith A. Gordon)   

For a fascinating history of the Bath Festival of Blues & Progressive Music, check out the U.K. Festivals Archive website: http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/bA1.html

"Bonus" listening: