Cultural Time Travel

[Howard]

So you've hijacked the Tardis for a day but can only use it for a cultural, musical joy ride. Which gigs would you go to re-see or see for the first time? Who would you spare ten minutes for a quick chat with?

I know some of you socially conscious individuals out there would think a time machine would be better used to correct some of History's biggest blunders. But let's face it, which one of you liberal/leftie softies would have the guts and the moral certainty to put the pillow over the sleeping baby Adolf's face? Certainly not me. So let's just have some fun here. Who's first?

[antonija]

But let's face it, which one of you liberal/leftie softies would have the guts and the moral certainty to put the pillow over the sleeping baby Adolf's face?

Oh, surely not! But getting a job as his nanny and trying to talk to him...as well as to the GMO starters and some other guys...

Well,for fun I would love to see U2 concert while they were still doing clubs. Wouldn't miss Joy Division, either. To go back even more (still not deprived of fun!) – would love to talk face to face to C.G. Jung and discuss some things with him...and farther back – I have a few things to discuss with several avatars ...
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[David M]

Theres something odd going on here. A fella calling himself Howard has been signing on as a guest & leaving extremely short messages in the space reseved for the errudite lengthy works of Mr Male. Well, no matter, an answer to your question for me would be Franco at the Hammersmith Palais in 1984 which I believe Charlie was lucky enough to go too. He was billed to appear in London 3 times after this concert. The first time I had my money refunded after a cancellation. The second time he was cancelled before tickets even went on sale & finally he was billed with Kassav when he failed to show & T.P.O.K. Jazz played a rather lacklustre set & I walked out in disgust shortly after Kassav came on swearing that I would get my revenge. Two or 3 days later he was dead & I've been in therapy ever since. I KILLED MY HERO WITH NEGATIVE THOUGHTS. Well O.K. some of the above is untrue but then your not Howard Male. Or are you?

[jayne]

Howard dear, you're just a whizz at pulling in the punters...

Never mind JFK. Where were you when Bob Dylan played the Isle of Wight? I was probably trying to get my Commonwealth (or was it carnal?)Knowledge badge at the Guides.

I missed out going to the Isle of Wight Festival in 1969. In fact I didn't even know about its existence until I met my resident techie in 1974. Andy (for it is he) and I have shared and enjoyed many musical experiences, including a host of Bob Dylan concerts... but Andy went to the Isle of Wight. He told his parents he was on a cross-country training weekend and from what I can judge had the weekend of a lifetime. How I would have loved to have been there with Andy listening to Bob, even if this turned out to be my debut as the most grating ingenue of all time.

Oh and the "Judas" concert at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester comes a close second.

Regards, JB

[NormanD]

...which one of you liberal/leftie softies would have the guts and the moral certainty to put the pillow over the sleeping baby Adolf's face?

...er, is this job still open? Still seeking a volunteer?

But back to the music.... Seeing the Zimm at Newport '65 Folk Festival would have been the gig to go for. The face of pop music is changed in such a short set. And I would ask, in our conversation: "Hey, Bob. Where'd you get the shirt?"

Perhaps Joe Boyd, who was there (and I hope is a reader of this site) can fill us in with the details. Or is this all contained in his yet-to-be-published autobiograhy?

G'night
Norman

PS Howard - less of the lib/left/softie business, if you please. I'd hate anyone to think the word "condescension".

PPS I see "god" has made a reappearance on the site. So maybe we'll now see the death of god twice in one week.

[Con Murphy]

Question is could you live with yourself if you didn't take your chance to strangle young Adolf at birth?

Anyway, how about being in Bethlehem approximately 2005 years ago to see if we should really be getting so worked up about a very nice man who claims to be his god's representative on earth (says the lapsed Catholic).

Musically though, I guess I would like to go back to New York circa the first chapter of Dylan's Chronicles, with a pocketful of money to tour the cafés and concert venues soaking up the influences that made Dylan what he became.

Either that or West Africa in the seventies to witness the explosion of creativity captured by Golden Afrique Vol One.

I would also like to have caught Bob Marley at his best - maybe at that event in Kingston Jamaica (I think?) where he embarrassed Prime Minister Michael Manley and Leader of the Opposition Edward Seaga by making them clasp hands on stage. Trouble with visiting the past, of course, is that you would take with you a cynicism (and quite often sadness) born out of knowing how things would pan out.

[Howard]

I prefer Antonija's solution Norman. And anyway - now who's rising to the bait? Needless to say I'm as soft a liberal/leftie as the rest of you.

And Mr M, I confess I am Mr Male. The rather prosaic explanation for turning into a guest in my own domain is that my computer died the day before yesterday, and took with it my password to get into CG's Feedback section. However, this doesn't explain why in my new identity (or non-identity) as 'guest' 'Howard', I've started to write short messages - maybe it's that Spring is here, and I'm less inclined to hunch over my computer keyboard. Or, maybe, in this instance, it was because I quite frankly couldn't be arsed to give you my favourite gigs - seen and not seen, and who I'd most like to have a brief chat to - until some of you lot had told me what yours were first! As you well know, I've fallen into that trap before - opening my heart on my sleeve (to overlap metaphors) with embarrassing confessions of dodgy lapses of taste etc. Only to then watching the virtual tumble weeds blow past in the eerie silence of this virtual world. In other words this was a case of - you show me yours and then I'll show you mine.
The other reason was although I'd thought of the question I'd not thought of my own answer. But now the thing seems to up and running, here's where and when I'd go, and who I'd say hello to.

To a certain extent, there are so many possibilities that it simply becomes the first acts one thinks of. For example all those musicians only glimpsed in tantalising, one minute, grainy black and white clips on History of Pop documentaries - Billie Holiday, Louie Armstrong - there's hundreds of them. So maybe I'd start by going back exactly thirty years to the Motown Revue tour of the UK in 1965. According to several recent newspaper articles the shows were badly attended, so at least I'd have no trouble getting a good seat. And to see youthful, full colour, sequin-delineated Diana, Martha and little Stevie, performing live all those extraordinary songs, would be akin to witnessing Greek Gods and Godesses in the flesh. Could I survive the bliss of it all?

And then I'd have to jump forward a dozen years - how quickly and dramatically the musical landscape used to shift back then - to revisit the Cambridge Corn Exchange to see the Clash for the first time. Just to experience again, the moment of knowing that this wasn't just another punk band.

OK, how much time do I have left? I only ever so Bowie live after his creative peak, so I must at least look in on the Ziggy or Diamond Dogs tours, or maybe even the night he and Roxy Music played a pub in Croydon in 1972.

And on the way back, I must touch down in Battersea Park in 1984(?) To rediscover African music by hearing Thomas Mapfumo for the first time. It would be interesting to hear what it would have sounded like if I hadn't been completely stoned.

Right - nearly home. Just before putting on the breaks - I don't want to end up at Britney's twentieth comeback tour - I must land the Tardis closer to the front at last years Tom Waits concert. It was great, but he was so small - so far away!

And my ten minute chat? As I probably wouldn't have time to make any additional diversions, it would have to be with that bunch of pseudo-queens at that Croydon pub - Bowie, Ferry and Eno. Maybe I'd ask them what they think they'll be doing in the year 2005. It would also be fun to see what looks they were getting from the locals.

I hope that's long enough to convince you it is me, Mr M.

[Con Murphy]

Ooops, I think I was a bit generic, wasn't I? Specific gig - I'd have liked to have seen The Clash a couple of years earlier than I did, I too had tickets for that first Franco cancellation and never got to see the man, there's the aforementioned Marley, maybe Dylan in New York in the early sixties as hinted earlier, Elvis '55 anywhere, Oumou Sangaré in the Festival in the Desert (she seems so much more relaxed there) are all contenders, as would be dates on the Stax and Stiff revues.

However, for a specific gig, I guess I'd have Mrs Murphy as my lovely Dr Who-style assistant and whisk her off to see The Rat Pack in Las Vegas. I can't think of anything she would enjoy more.

The 10-minute chat would be with Ian Dury probably. Might be more like 10-minutes of dumbstruck silence, though.

[Howard]

I like the way you've casually added another dimension to my elaborate fantasy Con - the Doctor's assistant. Though, for a minute I was trying to figure out who this Mrs Murphy was - one of Eddy Murphy's presumably gorgeous ex- wives perhaps? Then I realised she wasn't a fantasy, she was a reality. So I hope your wife is suitably flattered that even though the world was your oyster you decided to take her along. I would also have my lovely wife as my companion. She would undoubtedly be rescuing me rather than the other way around, and she would also, I'm sure, be more adept with the sonic screwdriver.

[Charlie]

I've never bothered with imagining gigs that happened in towns or times too far away for me to have been there. The ones that itch are the ones that happened across the street, more or less, but I still didn't (bother to) go.

I was living in Bristol at the time that the Motown Revue went to town, but I stayed at home.

Hard to explain, since I loved the records of the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas and especially the Miracles.

I think the main reason was that I had become frustrated with going to see package tours where the audience screams were louder than the singers.

This was before the days of powerful PAs, when the guitar amps on stage were the only amplification for instruments, and the vocies came out of small speakers designed for comedians.

It didn't cross my mind that there would have been so few people, they would have been unable to outshout Smokey Robinson or Diana Ross. Strangely, Adam White wrote about that very gig at Colston Hall in yesterday's Independent - he recalls there being less than 200 people, in a venue that could seat about 1,500.

I belatedly caught up a year later, going to see Smokey and the Miracles headline another Motown package at the Apollo in Harlem. Unforgettable, to see them in a place where I was one of maybe twenty white people among a sell-out audience of black teenagers. It was a surprise to find that the Apollo showed movies in between each live music 'set' . You could sit through it and watch the whole show again if you wanted to.

By the way, Howard, this was all forty years ago, not thirty.

[David Godwin]

I guess that nostalgia is off-message on this site, but can't resist saying that I used to be a regular attender at the Colston Hall in the sixties. The first gig that I saw was Brenda Lee, supported by Del Shannon. The cheapest seats were five bob, actually at the back of the stage, but behind the singers. I've never forgotten how small Brenda Lee was - and was Del Shannon the very last of the honourable company of yodellers? My biggest mistake was missing Dylan, immediately before the famous "Royal Albert Hall"concert. This was the first (and, I think, the only other time) that he played the exact sequence of songs that he would play at Manchester, although without the same audience reaction. I was studying for A-levels at the time. Boy - what a mistake.

[Guest]

I knew it was forty not thirty years ago, honestly I did Charlie! Hense the fact of mentioning how dramatically the music landscape had changed in 'a dozen years' by 1977. I hate making silly errors like that which I know are wrong in the first place - why does the human brain do stuff like that to us?! Please don't answer that retorical question anyone - unless of course you have a definitive answer.

[Howard]

Another silly error when I knew what I should have done - I didn't put an ID on my post.

I was also going to mention that I saw the piece in the Independent yesterday and it prompted me to mention this show (or tour) as an event so swathed in an aura of marvelousness which could only be fully appreciated by someone travelling back in time to see it, with all the knowledge one has of these acts and their music now. That doesn't mean I wouldn't have loved to have been there at the time too. I suspect you didn't go Charlie because of the 'uncoolness' of Motown at the time - in relation to Stax - which has come up elsewhere in Feedback. But it's great to hear some more incidental details about prices etc. And the prosaic reality that a crappy PA might have made the event a disappointing part of my Tardis trip.

Funny also Charlie, that elsewhere today in Feedback, you are complaining about gigs today being too loud. No pleasing some people!

[Martin_Edney]

I would choose a concert I was lucky enough to attend. In 1984 as an impressionable teenager I cycled along Walworth Road to get to the free "Jobs For a Change" concert in the County Hall car park, put on by the GLC at the height of its nose snubbing to our beloved Conservative government of the time across the Thames.

The line up included Billy Bragg, Hank Wangford, The Redskins and The Smiths (who I'd gone to see), but Misty in Roots were the real revelation for me, and so started a musical oddysey that shaped my tastes to what they are today.

Memory mixes this day up with a similar free concert at around the same time in and around the Fesitval Hall, where I had the pleasure of first hearing Ivor Cutler, but a quick web search reveals that this was a different event.

As for the gig I wasn't at but would like to have been - too many to mention, but maybe all the ones where I decided to have a quiet night in instead and heard afterwards how great they had been. Chief amongst these was missing Augustus Pablo playing in New York when I was living in New Jersey - he died not long after and I rued my missed opportunity and mourned his passing.

[Con Murphy]

I would choose a concert I was lucky enough to attend. In 1984 as an impressionable teenager I cycled along Walworth Road to get to the free "Josb For a Change" concert in the County Hall car park, put on by the GLC at the height of its nose snubbing to our beloved Conservative government across the Thames.

I too attended this event, and The Smiths just about peaked at that point IMVHO. I agree, Misty in Roots were superb. But if I took the virtual Tardis back to that day, I'd make sure I landed it on the neo-nazi scumbags who brought the Redskins' performance to such an ignominious close.