Stereo dead but not yet broken . . .

[Ian A.]

(Charlie - this may be in the wrong section - by all means move it!)

Since this Forum seems to reach into the wormholes that others don't, I thought I'd try a long shot and see if I can unearth some long-ago people through its resources.

What it's all about is that to my utter amazement (because they went missing in the early '70s) the master tapes to my debut album (Ian Anderson's Country Blues Band: Stereo Death Breakdown) recently turned up preserved in tin boxes in EMI's vaults (it came out on Liberty/UA in spring '69, having wended its way there via Guy Stevens & Island and a run-in with the management of a band containing my namesake).

It's going to be 40th anniversary re-issued in January – so Japanese collectors can stop playing very silly prices for it. So I spent the weekend engrossed in old scrap books and files in order to write the notes for it. Which got me remembering the crazy year of the band's escapades, and the rate we got through great harmonica players, almost like Spinal Tap had drummers (except ours survived - I think).

Now, I know the rough whereabouts of Chris Turner - he's in the States – and I know that the legendary Mox has been in France for years. But does anybody who has kept more in touch with the blues scene than me know what has happened to Paul Rowan or Dave Jeffs? Both really good harmonica players.

Pete Hossell from the Panama Limited Jug Band came along and played jug and whooped and hollered on a couple of tracks on the album. Does anybody know his whereabouts now? He was one of the rare black musicians on the UK blues scene in those days: later joined a band called Screw who played on the Stones Hyde Park free concert. I can find one Google ref to him being in a band called Something Blue, but nothing else.

But the biggest enigma of all - Annie Matthews. I'd love to know what happened to her. Here's what I just wrote for the sleeve notes. "A couple of weeks before the session, I was playing at a regular haunt, Les Cousins in Greek Street. A slim young woman in her late teens, who sometimes worked behind the coffee bar, had got up to jam on harmonica. She was a good player, but when she opened her mouth to sing, everybody was astonished. I immediately asked her to come and sing a track on the album and that’s how ‘Harmonica Annie’ got to be featured on Lonesome Day. I hope she took it as a compliment that many mistakenly assumed her name was a nom-de-disc for Jo-Ann Kelly.

Surely people that good can't just disappear? If nothing else I'd like to get them copies of the CD when it comes out.

[CantSleepClownsWillGetMe]

This link has an 'Anne Matthews' as a member of the Panama Ltd (Jug Band), along with Pete Hossell, around 1970 ..?

http://www.alexgitlin.com/npp2/pltd.htm

June

Late Edit: This next link will take you to a forum where Anne Matthews has posted (in March 2008) about her time with Panama Ltd. You may be able to contact her through the forum:-

https://www.headheritage.co.uk/headtohe ... 6738/flat/

PS No I didn't stay up late to do this, I'm painting the kitchen! :-)

[DavidM]

Ian A. wrote;

Since this Forum seems to reach into the wormholes that others don't...

Ha ! Charlie's Army of Musical Termites. No corner too dank, no finial too baroque: Specialists in All Styles !

[Ian A.]

Late Edit: This next link will take you to a forum where Anne Matthews has posted (in March 2008) about her time with Panama Ltd. You may be able to contact her through the forum:-

June - I'm astounded. How can you paint with one hand and Google with the other? (Chorus of "I'm A Woman, W-O-M-A-N . . . ")

Anyway, I posted on that forum - a Julian Cope board, of all things - and hope that the trail hasn't gone cold since March. As I said there, how did we ever manage before the internet . . . ?

[Alan Balfour]

Paul Rowan I saw at a gig in Southampton a decade ago, he was performing under the name of Little Matthew and the Intentions. Try searching the web under that, he was living in Stoke Newington. We were good buddies and I'm ashamed to have lost touch with him.

Later thought: Roger Trowbridge has probably kept in touch with Paul, send him a message via his super Cyril Davies web site:

http://www.cyrildavies.com/

[garth cartwright]

Great story, Ian and I look forward to hearing the reissued album. Amazing how when a musical scene has a certain energy it sweeps up all kinds and you get talent popping out from all kinds of places (behind coffee machines and such).

Interesting that you mention your masters getting mixed up with your namesake. I wonder if anyone has ever seen our Ian and Tull's Ian in the same room at the same time? Considering they must be around the same age and come from a similar British blues background I'm wondering if they are not the same person - you can imagine the Who's Who entry: "when not filling US stadiums Ian relaxes by running a magazine that never mentions his day job but allows him to enthuse about his musical loves." If this is true how about raising the fR word rate, ay?

[Ian A.]

I wonder if anyone has ever seen our Ian and Tull's Ian in the same room at the same time??

Big room, but yes. Me, third left, second row with Stevie Winwood looking over my shoulder. Him: middle back, grinning like a man about to get up to mischief.



Who else? Free, Fairport and some other Tulls I recognise of the artists who were on the album. My 60s rock star recognition is rather on the blink these days. Probably Nigel would know. Just remember it was bloody chilly!

Anyway, since you seem to like these stories, here's the not quite finalised note I've written for the Stereo Death Breakdown reissue (Fledg'ling, January). Obviously it rather crosses over with the Matchbox Days ones - only so many brain cells left.

----

It’s a strange but nostalgic experience listening to this album again, so long after its making. It’s older now than the scratchy old blues 78s which inspired it were at the time it was recorded, yet back then they seemed to come from a strange, other-worldly place, unimaginably far in the distant past. It seems such a bizarre notion now, that a teenage lad in Weston-super-Mare could have got the idea that he could turn, practically overnight, into an ancient country blues player from the deep south of a country he’d never visited. But that’s what I did, quite unaware that around the UK in the mid-1960s there were a few other people doing the same thing. I’m sure it all seemed quite reasonable then: now, it’s intriguing trying to reinhabit that earlier head…

First turned on to country blues by hearing a Muddy Waters EP, saving up to buy a guitar from the spoils of a summer job, inspired to perform live by seeing my early (and still) hero Spider John Koerner in action, driven to play bottleneck guitar by encountering Mississippi Fred McDowell in concert, I had a mission.

By 1966 I was living in Bristol, playing the local folk clubs in a trio with guitarist Al Jones and harmonica player Elliot Jackson. In 1967, whilst the world was listening to Sergeant Pepper and wanting to be in San Francisco with flowers in its hair, I was hunched over a record player absorbing Big Joe Williams, Charley Patton, Sleepy John Estes, Tommy McClennan, Garfield Akers, Tommy Johnson, Son House, the Memphis Jug Band and many more.

By then I’d run into Mike Cooper who in turn had introduced me to other English country bluesers like Dave and Jo-Ann Kelly. I started the first specialist country blues club in Britain, and began getting gigs around the country with the help and encouragement of Alexis Korner. In early 1968, after having made a couple of EPs, I worked with Bristol label Matchbox to produce a compilation of the fast-growing UK country blues scene.

Titled Blues Like Showers Of Rain, it came out in the summer of 1968, just as the big UK blues boom – centred on electric bands like John Mayall, Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack – was hitting. The blessed John Peel played it to death on Radio 1, having many of us do sessions for his show, and Melody Maker went to town on the scene. The major labels promptly sensed commercial possibilities and swarmed around with offers. There was a friendly race between Mike Cooper, Jo-Ann Kelly and myself to see who could be the first with an album release.

I was approached by producer Sandy Roberton, whose credentials included Liverpool Scene – later he’d work with other artists from my Bristol contemporaries like Al Jones, Keith Christmas and Shelagh McDonald. He liked my idea of a trio with harmonica and bass guitar to make things more lively. Elliot Jackson wasn’t up for a pro music career, so I rehearsed with Chris Turner, then around 18 years old, from the Missouri Compromise, and Bob Rowe from Bristol’s Deep Blues Band. On a Saturday in November 1968, we went into the studio, inviting pianist Bob Hall and three of the Panama Limited Jug Band to join us. Five hours and a fair amount of drink later, we’d recorded all of Stereo Death Breakdown, mostly in first takes! Listening now, Chris Turner’s playing seems extraordinary, inspired.

A couple of weeks before the session, I was playing at a regular haunt, Les Cousins in Greek Street. A slim young woman in her late teens, who sometimes worked behind the coffee bar, had got up to jam on harmonica. She was a good player, but when she opened her mouth to sing, everybody was astonished. I immediately asked her to come and sing a track on the album and that’s how ‘Harmonica Annie’ got to be featured on Lonesome Day. I hope she took it as a compliment that many mistakenly assumed her name was a nom-de-disc for Jo-Ann Kelly.

The following months were mayhem. I’d helped organise a long club tour for Mississippi Fred McDowell and we went on the road to support him on many of the dates. Bob Rowe was the bass anchor, and as Chris Turner wasn’t available, other fine harmonica players came and went with regularity. From then on, live it was mostly Paul Rowan or sometimes the enigmatic Mox, whilst on the next (and final) Country Blues Band studio session in April ’69 it was Dave Jeffs.

The legendary Guy Stevens, then doing A&R at Island Records, licensed Stereo Death Breakdown for February 1969 release. But fate did its bit after the Island artist roster assembled in Hyde Park to be photographed en masse for the cover of their soon-to-be No.1 sampler album, You Can All Join In. Another band featured a musician with the same name as me and their management threw a wobbler about the confusion that might be caused, so Guy had to organise me a swift transfer. Andrew Lauder at Liberty/UA came to the rescue and the delayed Stereo Death Breakdown came out in May 1969, unfortunately missing all the tour dates and pipped to the post by Mike Cooper and Jo-Ann Kelly’s debuts. But Crazy Fool Mumble made the Top 30 on Liberty’s Son Of Gutbucket sampler, so technically it remains my greatest hit!

It’s not for me to say whether what we all did back then has any value. To me now, it seems that in trying and failing to become something else, we accidentally created something peculiarly local, of its time. It’s definitely like listening to another person: it was mostly noisy, good time, stomping, carefree music, but to quote Dylan, I suspect that “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now…â€

[will vine]

Whoops I've done it again! I'm always doing it. I can't help myself. I'm talking about buying up new (cd) copies of records I used to dearly love way back when - records that no matter how much I had loved them I had actually disposed of......reassessed...given up on. Yet here I am not merely willing but eager to make the same mistake again. It's not as if there isn't more than enough good new stuff around.

The mention of The Panama Limited Jug Band is timely, for their first record has been an object of reacquisitional desire probably ever since I discovered Amazon, and only last week I found it and ordered it. After ordering it I just aimlessly read the reviews posted on the Amazon page.
Someone had noted that he and his mate used to collapse in hysterical laughter listening to the record back in the 60s because of the woman's voice which he described as off-key and alarming. I hadn't remembered it like that but it was with considerable trepidation that I shoved the cd into the player for the first time this very morning. Well, he was not wrong, though I might characterise her voice as forceful, distinctive, incoherent, drunken, unhinged perhaps. The record also cannot remove itself from the "Can white men sing the blues arguement?" But, the playing sounds great to me and apart from the producer getting carried away with echo effects, and the whole thing is well, at least a bit of a party.
So, the girl singer credit is Liz Hanns - no mention of Harmonica Annie, and there is a staggering lack of information about the group or their projects. Were these guys you knew Ian?

[Ian A.]

So, the girl singer credit is Liz Hanns - no mention of Harmonica Annie, and there is a staggering lack of information about the group or their projects. Were these guys you knew Ian?

According to the link that June Clowns posted earlier - http://www.alexgitlin.com/npp2/pltd.htm - Liz H left after the first album and was replaced by Annie on the second. There she is!



That ref says "They shortened their name to Panama Ltd. for a second album by which time Liz Hann, their vocalist, had left and been replaced by Anne Matthews. On this better second album their early jugband sound was replaced by a brand of Captain Beefheart - influenced rock."

I think I'd like to hear that!

I only knew the pre-Harvest band when they used to play our club and recorded the tracks for Blues Like Showers Of Rain/ Matchbox Days. Back then they did very impressive Memphis Jug Band/ Gus Cannon etc covers, with a good singer called Chris Anderson who I think emigrated to Australia. Pete Hossell then joined them from the Missouri Compromise, and presumably this Liz Hann/ Hanns/ Hanna. I've never heard the Harvest albums, and had no idea until today that Annie had joined them later.

[davidt]

I used to see Dave Jeffs in the mid-1970s when I was living in Oxford. He often played the local folk clubs solo or with his wife Sue. They did a great version of Leadbelly's "Jean Harlow" as I recall. I have an audience cassette tape of him from that era. he was a tall guy but played the smallest Epiphone acoustic guitar (Cortez model they were called) that looked like a toy but certainly didn't sound like one.

But it was all a long time ago now. No idea where he is today.

David

[davidt]

This seems a good place to hang this one too...

A couple of other Blues like Showers of Rain/Matchbox Days artists who are still going strong after all these years are friends of mine: Fran McGillivray and Mike Burke.

http://franmike.com/

Enjoy.

David

[Ronald Needes]

some famous person said that "any band worth its salt, should have done at least 1000 hours playing live"
I think we had cracked that when 2 weeks prior to our recording at Abbey road, Sam Cutler, stage manager of the Rolling Stones pinched my much beloved singer!
offering him a house in Wimbledon, a rehearsal studio, a mercedes van and 2 girls to perform housework and the likes.
This was a complete bombshell for me, as not only were we a "tight band" and we worked well togeather. To be honest the recording on harvest labelwas ruined because of this selfish jesture.
Pete Hossel, was on a scholarship at Dulwich college, along with alot of high rankers, hereditary piers etc . .
I recal the band screw inviting me to a coming of age party at Lord Arbuthnott's Manor in Scotland, there was a lot of wealth about probably the cause of Sam Cutlers dastardly deed.
I'm in constant touch with Brian Strachan who is in Montreal, and I last heard from Pete Hossil 7 years ago he was in Sao Paulo.
I have tried on many occassions to get in touch with Ian Anderson, but am not much of a dab hand at computer communique, maybe perhaps this is a long winded way to get in touch.

Ronald Needes of ( Panama Limited Jug Band)
email
rmneedes@hotmail.com