'twas in another lifetime - as Dylan said, that my friend Steve and I, hitched several lifts from the West Midlands to Bath, for the one day 1969 Blues Festival,which was held in the showground.
We were in our last year at school, and this was to be an adventure. No tent. No intent, other than youthful what-the-hell. We slept in a field, under a shared overcoat on the ground en-route, and again on the return journey.
I made eye contact with a local girl, on the bus to the showground, and later met up with her at the festival. I remember that we gave her £1 to get sandwiches and cider from the town, as there was no beer for sale at the festival. I can't remember what was on sale there. Not much compared to today's events I'm sure. Letters were exchnged after the festival, but of course we never met again. I still have the letters!
It is extraordinary to think of the bands who were on the two small stages that day. Suck on this ~ Colosseum,Ten Years After,Taste,Chicken Shack, Blodwyn Pig, John Mayall, Led Zeppelin,Fleetwood Mac and The Nice. And more.
Zeppelin were on stage mid-afternoon as they were a new act, with Fleetwood Mac closing. I remember Shake Your Moneymaker as the defining moment of the day. John Peel was the compere by-the-way.
The origins of a lot of things I am still driven and excited by, can be traced to that one day (June 28th 1969). I doubt if anyone who was there that day, thought that this would have lasting resonance. However, that day and the much bigger festival at nearby Shepton Mallet the following year, which we also hitched to, germinated the Glastonbury Festivals. A lot of people have posted comments online about the two Bath festivals. Clearly, I am not alone in marking them as important events in the popular cultural history of the U.K. or in the popular personal history of growing into who we are now.
Of course what is missing (other than my girlfriend for a day's letters - which I have exclusive worldwide access too, when I climb into my rock and roll loft) is documentation. In 2011, any event - electrifying or deadly dull, is on facebook and youtube within minutes, but in 1969 and 1970 we did not consider posterity,or the possibility that these events would mark a boundary and a new hope for young people and music.
There are not many images circulating fom the 1969 festival, but what is available to us, shows that we did not look like the guys grooving in San Francisco. First attempts at looking cool. A similar event now would show teenagers looking currently cool, alongside middle-aged blokes wearing larger sized versions of the clothes they wore at the 1969 Bath Blues Festival.
Oh ~ and everyone sat down on the ground to listen to the bands. No flags blocking yer view of the stage. Let alone blogging yer view.
Cordial Lemon makes a good point about the lack of documentation of certain events which turn out, with hindsight, to have historic significance (if only for a subculture of middle-aged blokes wearing ever-larger T-shirts). Isn't it the case that seminal TV shows and radio programmes were wiped and taped over as a matter of policy by the BBC because even they thought of broadcasting as ephemeral? Another curiosity are Churchill's history-making wartime speeches, some of which were allegedly recorded by an actor because Churchill was too busy, and some of which Churchill himself deigned to re-record for the BBC after the war, for posterity. I'm a terrible hoarder and have been chided all my life with phrases like "You can't keep everything". The trouble is, how can we know what is worth curating for our archives and what is worthless flotsam on the sea of human history?
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