Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gents, Channel crossers, mud denizens, welcome back to season five of the good old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thanks for coming along on this journey as we time travel across the pond to 50 years ago and tag along with the Grateful Dead on their historic Europe 72 tour. We are bringing new episodes of the Dead Cast to you weekly this season. Each episode covers the shows that took place on the Europe 72 tour 50 years to the week after they happened. Visit us at our website dead.netdeadcast and explore the extra materials we have for you to devour for this episode. In fact, we release a daily dose of Europe 72 ephemera during season five for you to sample on the regular so there's new content for you constantly. Also@dead.net deadcast are all of our past episodes including the complete seasons one through four and and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen where you like to listen. Did you attend any of the shows on the Europe 72 tour? Do you know a friend who did? Well, get over to stories.dead.net and record those stories about Europe 72. We need your input and how about some Europe 72 music for your collection? July 29th will bring Lyceum 1972 the Complete Recordings Limited Edition. It's a 24 LP boxed set with four complete shows from the tail end of the Europe 72 tour available exclusively@dead.net and a remastered version of the original Europe 72 album will also be available on CD, LP and digitally. Also on July 29th this week we leave Paris, France, cross the English Channel back to the UK to play the largest show of the Europe 72 tour, the Bickershaw Festival in Wigan, England. We'll hook up with our good friends from back home in the Bay area country, Joe McDonald and new riders of the Purple Sage, along with a host of other great acts including Captain Beefheart, Dr. John and the Kinks. Hope you brought your wellies in a proper Mac. Looks like there could be a bit of weather. According to meteorologist Jesse Jarno, an estimated 40 to 60,000 people attended the three day long Bickershaw Festival in northern England in May 1972. Not all of them paid. It became a free festival at some point. And not all of them saw the Grateful Dead, who played a headlining set at the end of a long rainy weekend. But most did. It was far and away the Dead's biggest show of the Europe 72 tour, and for that matter, the biggest show they ever played overseas. It was also a handy payday on a tour where they'd been playing for far below their usual market rate during this season of the Deadcast. We've looked at the Dead through the eyes of many fans who saw them on the Europe 72 tour, usually for the first time, usually revelatory, who've given us a variety of perspectives on what it meant to be an open eared music head in Europe in 1972 and today is no exception. Except that the first of our guests today has proven not only one of music history's great listeners, but one of its great songwriters. He's almost certainly the only Bickershaw attendee with a great new album out this year on EMI Capital. Farewell. Ok, you'll be on your way, you'll be on your way. I can't go on after what you done. That was Farewell. Okay, the first song on the Boy Named if, the new album by a guest who had a most unusual path into the Dead's music and who I can't believe I'm introducing. Please welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast, Elvis Costello. I was actually raised by my mother who was a gramophone record assistant, as they called them when she Left school in 1943. So to say that I that records have a big part in my life is something of an understatement when you consider that my parents met across the counter of Record Shop, the one that my dad went into as a local jazz trumpet player. And there's this woman, that young woman there who knows about jazz and other kinds of music. So music was all the way through my life now in the late 60s, my dad, who had sung up until then in a very popular commercial dance band, singing the hits of the day and singing in different languages and strict tempo, you know, stuff as well, he sort of had a some sort of revelation and decided that he didn't want to slick his hair back. He was only in his 40s, he wasn't like an old man. He was, but he had worn a tuxedo since 1955. He'd, you know, he wore horn rim glasses like mine, but other than that he, he kind of looked like a, you know, dance band singer of the day with the hair slicked back, kind of smooth. He's only a little guy and 69. He started to grow his hair long and then that was obviously unacceptable to a band like that. And he said, and he quit and he said, I'm gonna do my own thing. I'm gonna go and sing songs of peace and love to the working people of the uk. Now you gotta understand, in those days a lot of the entertainment in the north of England were social clubs attached to factories and mines. So my dad, who by now had hair down to here and was wearing beads and a kaftan and, you know, an Afghan jacket and a silver cross and he had knee high kind of boots and a Victorian policeman's cape, he would turn up at these clubs in Durham in the north of England, very tough kind of miners clubs. He would install his liquid light projector and his little portable strobe light and he would sing Everything is Beautiful by Ray Stevens and Come Away Melinda by, you know, and all these songs that were largely optimistic. He would sing a few Irish songs, he would sing a couple of hits of the day, but once he chose and play the trumpet, which he had been, and he would play a little bit of, you know, Georgia or something like that. Georgia, Georgia. So it was very extraordinary that while I had short hair and I was still at school because you had to have short hair at school and listening certainly in the late 60s, I was listening to Motown and Stax and the Beatles still and stuff like that. One day my dad came around to see me because my parents were separated and he said, I. I've got these records that I was listening to my friend and I think he had a few young friends by then. I don't know how to put this exactly, but let's put it this way. For a while he had a little part time group and they were called the Hand Embroidered Lemon Peel and it involved a flute and a harp and my dad singing poetry. And he was going to be like the Incredible String Band, if you know that group, you know, and I think one of. I always thought, you know, when you, when you bear in mind, I was about 14, 15, I don't know whether you Remember this time when you start to see through the alibis of adults, you know, like your teachers. You start to realize they're people and they can make mistakes. With my dad, I sort of think I was just getting the inkling of what all this kind of stuff was about. I think, I think some of this, the hand embroidered lemon peel thing. I can say this now because he's been gone 10 years and everybody that cares is dead. I said, I have a feeling this is all a subterfuge to get hippie girls into bed. I don't really think that he's really on this trip for enlightenment. I started to suspect there were a couple of motives there. Maybe I was just imagining that. But anyway, he came around with these records and one of them was oh yeah, by Mingus. Another was a surrealistic pillar about the Jefferson Airplane. And the third one was the first Grateful Dead record. It was a Marvin Gaye record in that pile. And a Joni Mitchell record that was a pretty good starter kit. That was more records than I could afford with pocket money, you know. And so that's, you know, the golden road to unlimited devotion began there. See that girl, Bear Foot whistling and singing. She's carrying on Laughing in her eyes, dancing in her feet. She's a neonite. That was a mind blowing answer, wasn't it? You didn't expect that. If I'm really truthful. If I'm really truthful and I, you know, I don't think we should be too, like, everything is great. I thought it just sounded like bad out of tune blues. Because I'd already heard Howlin Wolf and Slim Harper by then because of the Rolling Stones. I didn't even buy the Rolling Stones. I was a real snob by that point about certain types of music because for the main reasons of two words, Peter and Green, you know, the real flute with Mac, never mind that other stuff with Stevie Nicks. I mean, the real Fleetwood Mac. And easily the. Easily the best blues guitar player ever. Born in Bethnal Green, or possibly in England, with all due respect to some other people who are more famous. Peter Green was the whole reason I picked up the guitar. Not sadly, Jerry, but, you know, and. And that music that they had, that they had access to things they'd learned from Otis Rush. And I got a little bit of starter course. I had one EP of Muddy Waters in Newport. And once I'd heard that, the Yardbirds, the Down Liner Sect, even the Stones early stuff when they're playing the booze, it just sounded like a bunch of Kids trying to wear their dad's clothes. Of course, five minutes later they're making Jumping Jack Flash. And it's the greatest thing you've ever heard in your life, you know, and it's. That's the thing. And I think they would probably admit that, but it was done with such affection. And now when I listen to the first Dead record, I hear the same thing. I hear how much music was feeding into that. All of it. The bluegrass, the folk blues. Was it the greatest record? Not really, but, you know, but the next one, on the other hand, now that's a record, remember, that really is out of sight. That's a mind blower. And that was the one. Skip ahead a couple of years. I'd learned to play the guitar a little bit myself by then I was starting to play in public. My mom and I went to live in Liverpool. And there was a very big adjustment because when I got to Liverpool, they asked me what music I liked. When I got to class. I was a little past the age where you had to fight your way into the school. Sixteen, you know, if it had been 14, definitely would have had to go out in the yard and sort it out. But they were mostly fairly tolerant of me, even though I was tetheri a Southerner. Didn't matter that my mother was from Liverpool. 8. I sounded like a southerner to them and that was a bit cause of suspicion. And when I told them that I liked Otis Redding and Lee Dorsey, they looked at me blankly like, nobody likes that music. What else do you like? Tamela, as we used to call it. Rocksteady. This is all the stuff I'd been going to parties and listening to. As far as I was concerned, there were only two records that you needed. Motown Chartbusters, Volume three and Titan up two, which is a rocksteady record, you know, rocksteady reggae record. I get up there and everybody's listening to the Soft machine and the awful group, what's that called? Pink Floyd. Like just this dreadful like 12 minute guitar solos and like. So I thought, well, I better get myself a group, otherwise, you know, this is peer pressure. And I told them, well, actually I like the Grateful Dead. And everybody backed away from me because they were like. They were so frightening to most people because they were, you know, let's face it, Bobby, we aside not, not really a. Like a super handsome looking bunch of guys, you know, like, like they look like they come kill you even though they didn't know anything about them. I said I'd like the Gravel Dead and The name was enough to make people back off, you know. I don't think anybody actually really ever heard them. But that was a good alibi because I was playing all sorts of music in the evenings. I was playing in folk clubs. I formed a group with my friend Alan called Rusty. And we. We played songs by Dylan and songs by Van Morrison and John Martin and CrossFit, Stills, Nash and Young. I don't recall us ever playing any Dead songs. I don't think Alan liked the Grateful Dead. He didn't really buy Do I Try to Be the As I Step Once. That was Rusty's 1972 home demo of Warm House, an early original by the artist then known as DP McManus, where you can totally hear the CSN influence. Thanks, DP. Then workin man's Dead came out, and that changed it, you know, because then you could hear. You could actually play one of those songs yourself. You can't really sit down in a bedroom and play dark style, you know. You just can't. Well, you can, but. It sounds weird, you know, but. But the minute you have things like Dire Wolf and, you know, such songs, they're songs you can pick out on the guitar. Froze 10ft beneath the ground Don't Murder Me, I Bake a Beast Please, Please Don't. They're like, in a vernacular. And the whole idea of that, like, Secret History of America that was embodied in the band and. And a lot of groups of that time. Some of Dylan's songs at that time was really persuasive. And the Countryside of the Birds, you know, was all happening at once. And I was picking up these records in the secondhand record shop. Well, independent record shop, as we call it now, called Probe, which is still in existence. And I remember there was a guy there called Jeff that. I think he owned it, and he said. I went in and I said, I've got like £4 or something. Should I buy this record or this record? And he said, it's that record. And the first record was maybe Loggins and Messina or something like that. Something quite shiny. And the other one was the New Riders of the Purple Sage. And I bought that one because it. Because it had a Dead connection, you know. First New Riders record. Of course, American Beauty was out by then, which was even more stuck. Astonishing, because of the. The, you know, this. The really supernatural kind of vocal harmonies, which I never really worked out until many, many years later, where I got to sing one of those songs. How very imaginative they were as pieces of music. I mean, they're obviously beautiful melodies. And that was really the. The deepest time for me of really identifying with the story, songwriting of particularly Hunter Garcia. I mean, I couldn't write like that. I certainly couldn't play the guitar to save my life. Still can't. There were. Those songs were very, very amazing. Phil's song, you know, Box of Rain and Broke Down Palace. I love so much that song. And they had this credible sadness to them. Very well, you will. I love you more than words can Listen to the river Sing sweet songs to rock my soul so that was the other record that fills in. I think it fills in between American Beauty and Wake of the Flood is the Garcia record, which has three or four of his greatest songs on it. I mean, Deal and Sugarree, these are things that come from a deep root, you know, you can go back and hear Elizabeth Cotton singing the original folk version of Sugarree, which Cherry would have known that for sure. I mean, that's the stuff that he came out of with the. With the jug bands and the bluegrass. And these are things that I went deeper and deeper into, partly introduced by bands like whether it was, you know, from the introduction to this world of rich American music. The band, the dead of that early 70s period, the birds, my grandparson's with them. That was a huge education to people that had really grown up on beat group music, you know, which was really largely filched from American R B, into which Motown, with its ability to communicate as pop music, completely disrupted everything, you know, in the mid-60s, when we called it Tamla, you can imagine what a shock it was to have, like, Marvin Gaye and the Temptations turn up on television, make everybody look like amateurs, you know, except the Beatles, you know. So we got our education in music because it had to travel so far. There was no Internet to look it up on. You had to wait until somebody interpreted a song. And he said, well, who's this person? Oh, that's Lee Dorsey, who wrote that song. Alan Toussaint, you know. So then I'd learn who that was. There's Dr. John. What's that music he's playing? Professor Longhair. Jerry's pulling things from, you know, Sonny Terry and Brandon McGee from Blind Boy Fuller, from all these songs, you know, and it all goes round. And you. There's so much, you. Down these roads you go, Woody Guthrie, the Leuven Brothers, you know, so much music. I went to a festival in 71, and I'd seen the Birds play acoustically. I'd seen a whole bunch of great people. Sonny Terry and Barney McGee, Tim Hardin. It was a one day event. It was magical. You know, Summer Sunday, know a bunch of people like in the English folk scene. And it ended with the Birds and James Taylor and Buffy. Sam. For me, that was from the Byrdes acoustic mini set at the Lincoln folk Festival on July 24, 1971. Ask a taper. So I was really anxious to go to another festival and have that kind of experience that was all acoustic music, as you might have noticed. But then they announced they were going. The Grateful Dead were going to play near Wigan in Lancashire. And I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe the Dead were going to play kind of 30 miles from where I lived. You know, the festival was a three day festival and you know, by now we'd seen the Woodstock film, you know, and of course that meant festivals. That's where girls take their clothes off. That looks like a good place to be. Not thinking about the fact that it rains a lot during Woodstock, but it rains all the time in England, particularly in summer. And there was not going to be any nakedness. There was going to be a lot of mud. You know, there was when you were a teenager, you're sort of thinking, this is going to be fantastic. Everybody's going to throw all caution and modesty to the wind. And heaven knows, you know what excitement will prevail. We'll get back to the story of 17 year old musician D.P. mcManus. Soon it was a big gig for the Dead in every way. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux. I've seen the Europe 72 payment fee structure for the entire tour and for the entire tour, the Grateful Dead were paid the exact same fee for every show. Whether it was Wembley or whether it was Amsterdam. They were played the exact same feat and it wasn't a lot. Which is why that album was very important to them, I think. But Bickershaw paid them eight times what they were paid for every other show on the tour. When we last left it, the Grateful Dead equipment truck had broken down en route to Lille. The band canceled their gig and chaos ensued. We got pretty deep into it in our last episode to pick up that story. We have Dennis Wiz Leonard of the Alembic recording crew. Like a lot of heads pointed towards Bickershaw. Wiz had a pretty memorable road trip. Thanks so much to Blair Jackson for this audio. So you know, like we canceled the gig near Riot happened, scrambled and got back to the hotel. And then at 5 o' clock in the morning, my phone goes off. And it's Cutler saying, get to ask down to the lobby. We got to go into town. We got in some cabs and went down to this little teeny town outside of Paris, which was where the truck was still broken down. And the pressure was on because we had to make a specific ferry to get across the channel with the gear in order to be able to make Bickershire. Pickershaw was a big guarantee. Things would have been really fucked up if we didn't make. So the pressure was on. We get down there, and there's two mechanics working on the red truck. Cutler's smoking, you know, three cigarettes at a time. Not literally, you know, like, running in and out of this little cafe, making phone calls. And he says, okay, I got a trailer coming up. It's coming with a tractor. That's not going to be the one we have, but we'll get a tractor and, you know, voila, a trailer pulls up, and it backs to. Back to the red truck. And we cross pack everything, which is really difficult because, you know, it's like a backwards pack. The truck was like a traditional English lorry with, like, a big box that was over the cab itself. And we used that for stairs and people's personal crap. And after we had, you know, gotten most of the gear into the trailer, I think Paris said, hey, Wiz, go up there and hand me down the shit and, you know, a couple cardboard boxes, because they were like, you know, people would, you know, just throw clothes up there that need to go to the laundry and, you know, like, gathering shit, putting in a cardboard box. And I grabbed a pair of jeans, and I feel moisture. And I reach into the pocket, and there's a brown glass bottle with an eyedropper. So I tighten up the top and lick my hands off and lick the bottle off. I was a really experienced voyager, man. You know, Like, I figured, well, you know, nice ride to France, to Calais. And Ramrod sees me and he says, what think? Do you. You just do. I said, this thing was leaking, and I tightened it up. It's good that you tightened it up. And I looked at him, I said, well, I might have gotten two or three drops worth. And he said, whiz. It's concentrate. And, you know, like, so that's okay. I'm going to, you know, have a nice day. Going to interject here slightly in case you didn't catch our last episode in Paris. The band had gotten a new batch of lsd, but Ramrod had miscalibrated, and it came out something like 10 times stronger than expected. It was the night Donna Jean God show ended up under the piano in a non metaphorical way. So to clarify, Wiz just accidentally on purpose dosed himself with an even more concentrated version of that. And then Cutler comes running out and says, the fucking tractor we need isn't going to make it. You know, he's freaking. And meanwhile, all of a sudden, the red truck starts up. We look at the red truck, they have like a hose stuck into the fuel tank. Blair had to flip his tape here, so we missed a few sentences. So close your eyes for a second and imagine total fucking chaos escalating. Sam Cutler smoking another pack of cigarettes in a parking lot in the French countryside. And eventually they get the red truck working and Wiz and Joe Winslow hop in. Winslow behind the wheel and start following the lead truck driver, Barry, through France en route to the ferry back to the uk and you know, we're like, you know, pedal to the metal and then we're going through western France on the way to Calais. And Barry, the English driver seems to be taking amazing chances passing people and we're having a hard time keeping up with him and Winslow and I, I'm like really fucking high. I still feel like I'm on a roller coaster. The road is undulating, but I could still talk to Joe. And we look at each other and realize, oh, he's doing that because we might not make it. So the trip across France was breakneck. We pull up, we're the last two vehicles in the queue for the last ferry that we could make the gig with. And it's just like, you know, so much time, tension and energy that I was basically straight. And Winslow, like, then looks like, you know, deer in the headlights. I said, what's wrong, Joe? He said, I can't find my passport. I said, get in the back of the truck and just hide behind the 16 tracks. Fuck this shit, we're going to England. So, you know, we sneak out, put him in the back of the truck, and you know, I'm just like inching forward, getting on the ferry, and all of a sudden I hear boom, boom, boom, boom. And he grabbed his bag and brought it back in there with a flashlight and like I jumped out. Open the door. I got it, I got it, I got it. We make it on the ferry and then, you know, to add some insult to injury, we get to English customs and we hand them posters and all the shit that we would hand out to try and smooth things. And this one customs guy wants to go through the carnet and you know, see something and the one object he picks is this fake amplifier that has a stash in it. Pull it out, we show him the serum. Okay boys, thank you very much. And you know, so it was like sigh of relief and we drove from Dover up to London. We now had time and Barry had called his, his wife. We get to London at like, you know, three or four o' clock in the morning and Hazel, Barry's wife, has made us a wonderful breakfast down in his flat. Have breakfast. And there was another truck that was delivered there because we were going to. There was two trucks actually we were replacing the big red truck with two trucks. A friend of Barry's drove one up to Bickershaw and I drove the other. This was first time I had driven on the left side of the road. And on the way out of London I took the side of a car off and never looked back. It was quite a day. You had to be able to do that. That was the acid test. I mean that's what came out of. The acid test is okay, you can sit down and meditate and chant, but can you change the tire on the bus with. And that was, you know, can you get us out of trouble with this cop? You know, shit like that, you know. And that was, that was the Keezy paradigm. You know, it's like, let's push it to the edge, you know. I think that that was essentially what, you know, the Grateful Dead was about. At the other end of Wiz's acid test was the Bickershot Festival with funds from unnamed Manchester businessmen. The organizer was an enterprising and charming young head named Jeremy Beadle. Personally, I think we're talking in terms of about 75,000, but we've laid on facilities for 100,000. At what point you start breaking even financially? I'll tell you that. After the festival, British listeners might recognize the late Jeremy Beadle as a popular BBC host in the 80s and 90s. But in 1972 he was just an ex journalist looking to make his way. Sadly, Jeremy Beadle passed away in 2008. Festival fever had hit Europe with full force after Woodstock and a festival scene was sprouting. In some ways it mirrored what was happening in the United States. But each country's scene had its own singular twists. Free festivals had taken root in the United Kingdom in a deep way, with week long solstice celebrations near Stonehenge and a circuit that was somewhere between Dead Tour and the more anarchistic Rainbow Gatherings. But there were also plenty of festivals in the Woodstock model big bands playing to big crowds from a big stage put on with the intention of making a big profit. In some ways, Baker Shaw followed Woodstock quite closely. Where does the money come from? In fact, who's backing you? I am not actually being backed. I'm working for the people who are putting the money in. And they are a group of northern businessmen. They're very nice and I like them and so does my mum. And they're faceless and anonymous. Who are they? Well, they're still faceless and anonymous. Like Woodstock, Bickershaw had a charismatic long hair up front and solid straight world money behind it. As far as I can tell, nobody has yet figured out who put in the money for the Bickershaw Festival. But it surely looks like a good proposition. Like Woodstock, it was going to be three days of music. Like Woodstock, there was a lot of mud. Did we mention the mud yet? Sorry if that spoils anything. And like Woodstock, they hired the Fillmore East Light show, then known as the Joshua Light show, now Joe's Lights, including our friend Alan Arkish. We also did a festival, the Bickershaw Festival, where it rained all weekend in the north of England. And Cheech and Chong were there and the Kinks and a lot of other people. From the perspective of the 21st century music head, it's just an incredible bill, naming just a few. Friday night included Dr. John and Hawkwind. Saturday morning was for jazz, including Annette Peacock and Paul Blay as well as Maynard Ferguson. The afternoon was for folk, including Donovan and the Incredible String Band. And Saturday night was for the Kinks, the Flamin Groovies and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. Sunday had Country Joe, the New Riders of the Purple Sage and the Grateful Dead. Like Woodstock, Bickershaw had Country Joe. And like Woodstock, they had rain. Lots of rain. Maybe we didn't do light show because of the rain. We spent almost the entire weekend in this little motorhome because it was pouring so hard and it was so cold and we had so much trouble with the electricity on the stage and getting our equipment up on the stage and down again. There was no lifts. We had to lift it up ourselves and we didn't have roadies so we would have to get there early, set up the light show, get everything working, do the show and then take it down ourselves. Like a lot of festivals, Bickershaw faced opposition, including a national so called Night Assemblies bill which sputtered out in Parliament that May before a proposed protest concert with the Rolling Stones could take place. And like Woodstock and many other Festivals Bickershaw would be an absolutely epic weekend for nearly everybody who attended. An unforgettable touchstone. Unlike Woodstock, the Grateful Ed absolutely brought it. The weather might not have held at Bickershaw, but the vibes did. Alan Trist that was the one perhaps occasion in Europe where the band really showed their festival chops, so to speak, you know, and it was a full on festival and it was great. And there weren't crowds like that anywhere else except Wembley Pool and somewhere in Germany maybe it was. The Munich show was pretty big too, I think, though the recording sounds like every other well balanced master pulled in the alembic truck. The experience in the crowd was considerably different. Surely every gig on the tour was meaningful to audiences, but Baker show was transformative for many. So let's hang with the heads, starting with Barbara Nellist. I had a group of hippie friends who were students in Durham and we sort of shared a hippie dream of all living together and having a commune and all those things were all rolling on in the. In 1972. So I kind of tagged on to their love of the Dead. A couple of them had been to Newcastle to see the Dead, who bit earlier in 72 and you know, the chance to see them again, they were. They were wanting to go to Bickershire and a couple of cars and I went with them. I'd moved to Leeds by then, but, you know, we were still close and we're still close now. Stephen Feldman I was a student at Cambridge University from 69 to 72 and I got turned on to the Grateful dead back in 69, listening to Dark Star and St. Stephen and stuff. And most of my pals at university were also Deadheads, so turned out that we must listen to some Grateful Dead tracks almost every night during those three years. When the dead came to England in 72, I was at the first Wembley gig and absolutely blown away. But when Bickershaw was announced, we knew that this was going to be the event that we had to get to. And 10 or 12 of my friends from university got together. We hired a panel van, we took all the mattresses off our beds and lined the van with mattresses stocked up with food and booze and drugs and stuff. Brian Petheram, AKA Peth, was the enterprising sort. My first Ed show was for Saturday at the Empire Pool, the 8th of April, and I certainly wanted to see them again. The next chance was at the Big Shore Festival, which was unfortunately at the other end of the country in the northwest of England. However, there was a Ticket agent in London who had a package with tickets and coach travel. So I decided as I just had my student maintenance grant to invest in hiring the whole coach, whole coach and reselling the tickets with help from a friend who had a bit of money as well. So we had 60 odd heads on the coach to sweeten the deal. Everyone had a tag of mescaline as part of the package and we had a hell of a time. It all worked like clockwork. You may remember some of these voices from our episode about the tour opening Empire Pool shows in London. Many were ready for another dose. Chris Jones yeah, as soon as I heard of Bickershaw though, I wanted to go. It had a lot of bands which I really like. Captain Beefheart, he was another one. Wasn't so big in America as it was in Europe. Adam Gottlieb, a friend of mine, had just passed his driving test and he took three of us up in his very old second hand Ford Anglia. Probably not a car that you got in the States. And in those days motorways were very limited in the uk. I can't remember how long it took us to get there, but it was an awfully long time. I guess it would have been about 300 miles, 250, 300 miles it seemed to take. Best part of a day. We got there the night before it started. Bill Giles now of the Grateful Dudes. We went up together like in a VW bus. We stopped at a fair, probably a few miles, maybe 20 miles, I don't know from Bickershaw. There was a wall of death, a wall of death, like motorbike riders who go round a circulating wall and they go up, so they end up being horizontal to the ground. So we all trooped up and we thought, I don't know how this happened. It must have been Anthony, the guy who was driving, who really was keen to see it. So we went up, we saw that and that was a pretty good, pretty spacey sort of experience. I'd never seen one of those before. Chris Jones to get to this place you had to go up to London, then get a train to Wigan station, the nearest one to Bickershaw. Wigan was a very run down northern town compared with say London, which was vibrant, hip and everything happened and it seemed such a weird place to put a festival on in a way because most of us hadn't heard of, hardly heard of Wigan. It was associated with a sort of a form of rugby called rugby league, which was strictly for northerners and in the south you played a different sort of rugby which were rugby union, which was all the posh boys at the public schools, which you would call private schools, we'd call public schools. So they weren't open to the public at all. It was very much a lower class, working class area with a lot of unemployment and stuff and back to back terraced houses. So it's a very poor thing. But you get to Wigan, then we had to get a bus to within a few miles of the campsite and then wander on from there on foot. And I remember it taking a long time to walk to the festival itself. Simon Phillips we got a bus from Manchester to the village of Bickershaw. Raining all the way. I remember that because we were really concerned about the weather. We had a tent with us, that was all. And God, it was awful. When I got off the bus, it was a industrial wasteland. It was a former mining community and it was drizzling and rainy and cold and all the figures. I mean, there's a famous painter in the uk, Lowry, who used to paint people coming out of factories all hunched over against the wind and the rain and everybody looked like that. But there were a lot of people around with long hair. So we knew that we were in the right place and made our way to the festival ground. It really was. It was like. I mean, my memory of the town is what we call a one horse town. It's just the main street and that was it. With a few shops dotted around and terraced houses. And then across the road there was a fence in the field and you were straight into the field. If you're familiar with the Grateful Dead tape trading world, you might recognize the handle sirmick. Please welcome to the Deadcast Mick Etherington. I went up Friday night with a late friend of mine, Paul. He owned a Triumph sports car at that time. We had arranged to meet three or four other friends. When we got there, the windscreen wiper on the driver's side died. Not to be defeated, Paul spent quite a lot of time out of the window trying to wipe the rain away. However, as he wore spectacles, it really served no purpose as they got wet instead. How we got there, I don't know. It was pretty late when we did get there and I can remember hearing Dr. John on stage, but we never got to see him. As we were putting our tent up and trying to get somewhere dry. While Sir Mick gets settled and other heads make their way to the festival site, we're gonna take a detour, but only a very slight one. The Friday night headliner at Bickershaw was the British band Hawk inside of someone's dream. That was Hawkwin doing Silver Machine at the Roundhouse in London a few months earlier. There's no tape of their Bickershaw set for reasons which we'll get to. In a lot of ways, Hawkwind might actually be seen as a British equivalent to the Grateful Dead. When British music fans picked up a copy of the May 12 issue of the underground newspaper Friends, they found Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir on the front cover, Bill Kreutzman on the back. British publications followed the American practice of being on the street ahead of their cover date, and it's quite possible heads may have had the issue en route to Bickershaw. Just below the Grateful Dead on the COVID it advertised Mike Moorcock's new novel. Michael Moorcock was not only an eminent British science fiction writer, but helped usher in syfy's so called new wave as editor of the publication New world starting in 1964, bending fiction into radical new forms. And later in 1972, while continuing to publish novels, he also became a contributing lyricist for an occasional performer with Hawkwind. I recently read the fantastic new book from PM Press, Dangerous Visions in New Worlds, Radical Science Fiction 1950-1985, and was compelled to figure out if Michael Moorcock also dug the Dead. I came across an interview in which he was asked what he listened to while writing. His answer, Grateful Dead, Messian Mozart, Dylan Mahler, John Prine, New John Fogarty, Revelle Schoenberg, Ives, Chet Baker, Williams Elgar, Grateful Dead, Robert Johnson, Howlin Wolf, Glenn Miller, Noel Coward, Beatles, Gus Ellen, Grateful Dead. Next question. That last one's not a group, it's an exit strategy. We are so honored to welcome to the Dead cast Michael Moorcock. I was in Hawkwind. Which was the nearest band in terms of social effect, I suppose, or ambience? I don't know. They were the nearest band to the Dead in England. I mean, we were a people's band. We did more free gigs than we did paid gigs. You know, a lot of the time we were losing money. We had the same sort of following. When I was still performing, definitely we'd get, you know, the audience follows the Dead. No matter where the Dead are performing, you've got a core audience that tends to follow the band. And it's the same with Auckland. Every gig you turn up at, there's going to be a core of the same people almost, which is a lot easier in England, of course, than it is in America. But nonetheless, it was the same thing. And we Took families with us, we took our kids with us, you know, that sort of thing. In later years, as the British festival scene evolved on its own slightly grittier parallel course, Hawkwind became known as perhaps the British festival band, with their sound evolving alongside the free festivals. In the early days, though, they were Dead fans. Nick Turner and Terry Ellis. I mean, quite a few members of the band were keen Dead fans. And they played the Dead enough in the buses. I think they saw them as fellow spirits, very much part of the same thing. I think the Dead had a more coherent vision than Hawkwind, frankly. But that's another story. I emailed an urgent follow up that I'd forgotten to ask. What about Lemmy? Mike responds, I don't remember Lemmy liking the Dead. His Persona was anti hippie. Sounds about right. In the uk, the connections between underground music and science fiction ran deep. I lived in Laborat Grove and Labboat Grove. Portobello Road were, I suppose, you know, the equivalent of Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. At the time, I was editing New Worlds, which was not an underground magazine. We shared printers with it and a couple of others. There's a lot of interaction between us, you know, just naturally. And because I lived in that area and a lot of other people lived in that area, it was my, as it were, front room became one of the sort of meeting hubs, I suppose. He was truly part of the culture. In fact, Mike Moorcock had sat in for the Grateful Dead interview in the same issue of Friends that came out the same week as Bickershaw. I was sitting in my room one day. John Trucks came round. John was a seriously, I mean, not a raving fan, you know, but a solid fan of the Dead. And he introduced me to the Dead in the first place. And on this afternoon in early April 1972, John Trucks was off to meet the Dead. I said, sure, you know, I didn't have anything else to do. We just walked down to the Kensington Palace Hotel. Trucks was asking all the questions. I didn't know what questions to ask. You know, I didn't know a lot about the band as such. I just like their music. I was just there, really, I suspect to give John a little bit of confidence to have somebody with him when he went to talk to him. Talked to Phil Lesh quite a long time. He talked to Jerry quite a long time. Pigpen. I haven't yet tracked down a copy of the article, but looking forward to reading it at some point. And it's a, you know, it's a good, substantial piece with long quotes from Phil Lesh about Neil Cassidy and, you know, stuff like that. When we asked about Michael's favorite Dead music, I wasn't quite expecting the answer we got. Though I shouldn't be too surprised. I used the Dead Two Dead records to get me started. Just the two. Working Man's Dead and the other one that goes with it, American Beauty, because they're very good for getting you into a nice. A nice working mood. At least be into a nice working mood. I guess I was expecting Dark Star less because of the Outer Space lyrics and more because it might be a vibey soundtrack for writing sci fi. But who doesn't love Working Man's Dead and American Beauty? Thank you so much, Michael. If you're interested in the deep and layered connections between science fiction and the counterculture, I really do recommend the new book Dangerous Visions and New Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985, available from PM Press, also a publisher of Michael's writing. We've posted links@dead.net deadcast we'll transition back to Bickershaw now by way of the Black Corridor, a Hawkwind song written by Michael Moorcock, here performed on the BBC in September 1972. Space is infinite. It is cold. Space does not feel pain. Space does not last. It's all true. Bill Giles we got there on the Saturday evening, I think. I think probably after dark. And then somehow we got into the backstage area. So we were like behind this. This metal fence that was separating the stage from the rest of the ground. This metal fence, wire fence, thousands of people in the mud. And I mean, I had an image that it looked like something out of World War I. It wasn't, but there was just something about the nature of the number of people, the wetness and of course the fence, you know, which gave it a strange atmosphere. The young musician, then known as DP McManus and now known as Elvis Costello, had a show on Friday night with his band Rusty. So I'm playing a gig with my little band that's by now down to a two piece, but we still kept a band name and we're opening up at St. George's Hall. Little St. George's hall, right in the centre of Liverpool is this spectacular Victorian palace. Looks like a Greek building in a big Parthenon style building. Victorian monolith has a small theater in it where Charles Dickens read. So it goes way back, has some history. Me and my pal Alan are opening up for Tinder Norg, an Irish duo, and we're just the opening act. I Stick around to hear a couple of songs. And then I hit Lime street because I'm going to go to Bickershaw the next day. I come out into Lime street and there is like rain coming at about a 35 degree angle to the ground. It's like needles. And it never occurred to me that it might be a bit wet at Bickershaw. I got the bus home with my guitar, you know, it wasn't very complicated. Then next day I got up and I headed off. Bump, I'm leaving. And I got there on the Saturday afternoon. Now all I had was a pair of boots and a blanket. I had no tent. I'd not thought about the fact I'd be sleeping in a field. I hadn't thought about that. I wandered around this disaster zone that looked like behind the lines during the First World War, you know, without the blood. Well, with some blood but not a lot of mud. And it was completely a disaster. You couldn't get from one side of the field to the other because parts of it were completely submerged. People were looking miserable. People had like bits of plastic over them. It kept raining periodically. Every time the sun came out it went in again. Adam Gottlieb I don't think the rain is actually as bad as people seem to remember. The cold was awful. There was a really cold wind blowing in off the Irish Sea and that to me that was the killer. There were a lot of very smelly fires all around the festival grounds and we huddled closer but oddly enough it didn't really seem to matter that much. Barbar Nellist the year before I'd been to Glastonbury and that was really like, you know, hot sun, naked people, peace and love, all that. Bicashore was a bit hard. It was wet, it was muddy, but the atmosphere was great. It was safe and fun and you know, it was, it was really good. Lots of, lots of people there, lots of, lots of dope, some acid and there was no trouble. It was a lovely atmosphere. Although the weather was crap. The sound wasn't great. I think the weather was against us, you know, so it was more the atmosphere and being there with like minded people. The UK Dead shows also marked the beginning of the UK Dead taping scene. Simon Phillips I was very new to taping. I didn't even know there was a taping scene then, although I got into it very quickly after the Europe 72 tour. I'd recorded the first night at Wembley but I'd only bought the tape recorder that morning, so I was unfamiliar with how to get A clear line of sight to the speakers, things like that. There were five of us who lived in the house together at the university, and one of my other friends who didn't come with us. He'd bought himself a little cassette player and recorded Roxy Music a few weeks earlier. And I thought, that's a neat idea. You know, he's got little, you know, something to remind him of the show. We recorded the Wembley show because I wanted a sort of record like when you were a kid, you took holiday snaps and they reminded you of your holiday. This was very much for me, not to trade or anything, just to remind me what they played. I was really paranoid. There was no checking of bags, but I didn't know if I was allowed to do this. So there was a security guard standing maybe 10ft away from me, raised up on some steps. So I kept the microphone down on my lap, not knowing I needed a clear line between the microphone and the sound. So mine's very muffled. Yeah, but it's a muffled recording of an awesome Dead show that didn't really circulate from a good source for another 40 years. And it gave him a first round of practice before Bickershaw, Chris Jones. I spent a lot of time on my own there because I had decided to tape the show. I bought a tape recorder and I had a. What I call my crappy PI mono tape recorder with a handheld mic. And it was one of those big, bulky handheld mics, you know, really rough and ready. It was only a cheap one, and I bought cheap tapes I didn't have. I didn't know anything about it back then. My brother wanted to go, but he couldn't. So I managed to tape bits of other artists. So he was into an English band called Wishbone Ash, so I managed to tape maybe 20, 30 minutes of them. I taped a bit of Country Joe during the Fish chair, where they sang. They chanted Fuck Nixon. Rather than just, you know, fuck, that tape's long since gone. But I didn't want to use too much tape, so I wasn't sure how long the Dead were playing. I was inspired because I wanted to catch what I'd heard, and I wanted to be able to play it back again for me and for my friends. And we did. And I was living in a flat by then, an apartment and a whole bunch of hippies, and we'd play that. And, you know, it wasn't the best quality recording, but it was. It was. It was music. It was good. A few snippets of Captain Beefheart, the Kinks and the Flaming Groom is not very much of any of them. So my friend and I, and God knows where we found it, we found a huge sheet of clear plastic which we used to sit on in the mud. And we were able to pull it up behind and over us and round the sides and just keep hold so they could look out. And I seem to remember maybe it's one of the other acts, but I certainly remember pushing the microphone out through this hole, pointing him to the stage. The incredibly comprehensive site ukrockfestivals.com has attempted to collate setlists for all the performers at Bickershaw. It includes a set list for Hawkwind's Friday night appearance with the note confirmation of a tape of Hawkwind set is in existence received in April 2003. However, it appears that both this and the Wishbone Ash set have been erased by the taper's brother. Jeez, bummer. On this tape I did for my brother I taped. He had a hit record in the UK called Silver Machine and I taped that one song for him and nothing's gonna bring it back. Adam Gottlieb what was nice about it is it was mainly American bands, but the English bands who were there were buying large ones that I would like to have seen. So it felt like a nice, nice mix. The Kinks played a good set. Elvis, I remember seeing the Flaming Groovies. I remember seeing the Kinks for a minute. It all just all goes into a big mess. On Saturday I remember watching the Kinks and I'm sure they were really drunk. Not all that unusual for them, but it was enjoyable. Later in the day I attempted to tape Donovan and got a place very close to the stage. From all I can remember it didn't come out too bad, but it's long since disappeared. Also in the crowd at Bickershaw was 19 year old John Mellor. Like D.P. mcManus, he'd find his own rock and roll name a few years later when he became Joe Strummer and co founded the Clash. Later on I found out Joe Strummer was there as well. Joe was a great one for the festivals. He used to go to Glastonbury and have a big scene. I didn't really return to the festivals unless I was on the stage after that. There's a Joe Strummer quote that circulates about Bickershaw which seems to come from a letter to a friend in which he wrote Captain De Fart's set in the early hours of the morning at Bickershaw Festival. Was the best concert I ever went to in my life. Based on the memories of Heads we spoke to, I wouldn't actually doubt it. Adam Gottlie I think you'll find that anybody who's there will say the Captain Beefheart set, I mean, that was extraordinary. Fabian, a friend of mine who was with me at Bickershaw, was possibly an even bigger Beefheart fan than a Dead fan. And for him, that's the musical highlight of his life, quite literally. Zudhorn, Rolo, Everybody, Chris Jones One of the other big acts which I really wanted to see was Captain Beefheart. Being always put on a show in a way that Jerry Garcia never did. He was never a showman, but Captain Beefheart always, that was part of his appeal, part of his mystique. I recorded a reasonable recording of that. Bill Giles I remember seeing, you know, Dr. John Maynard Ferguson, sort of jazz trumpeter, and then a Captain Beefheart set that was just, just, just quite ordinary, all this weird music going on, but the guys walking back and forth across the stage. A really discombobulating experience. Barbara Nellist the beginning of May in Lancashire is cold. It's a bit miserable, you know, but I think there was a bit of a wartime spirit, you know, everybody was so thrilled to be there to, to be seeing all these great bands. We were camping in the festival. Now you kind of camp a mile away and walk to the festival where we were camping, there were fires around us, it was chaotic. We had a tent and we had sleeping bags and we had our pitch, which we went away from and came back to. So we. I can't remember being really wet all the time, you know, I think we must have had some kind of comfort. We had a pretty good tent, I think so. So we were okay as far as that was concerned. Simon Phillips so we got there before it started because we'd taken a tent with us and there was a field right next to the arena area where they allowed camping. So we had a little two man ridge tent, a little white tent, and we pitched that in the camping field. And as we came through the gate into the main arena, we looked back and we said, well, there'll be more tents later on, but we'll find it. Because it's. If we follow the line from this gate to that tree at the far side, we're bound to hit our tent. Little known that at 2 o' clock the following morning when it's pitch dark and we couldn't see the tree, there's now about 500 little white tents in the field. And we never did find the tent. We ended up sleeping in a marquee that slept about 100 people. So my tent may still be pitched in the field. In British English, marquee means a large tent with open sides. This gringo learns something new every day. Elvis Costello A miracle prevailed. I was wandering around the site and I heard my name, somebody called my name, and I turned around and there was this lovely couple who had run folk clubs in Liverpool that I'd played for Vinnie and Jen, very kind of warm, kind of hippie couple that ran the. He paid me the first money I ever got paid for playing music. £1 50 to play, opening up at the bottom of the bill in the basement of the St George's project in Liverpool on the edge of Chinatown. And they said by now I had bought a human size messenger bag which some enterprising person was selling, you know, like a jiffy bag, as we call them, like a giant paper bag, a disposable sleeping bag it was. And they said, you're gonna die if you sleep out here in the middle, you know, in the middle of this field, even in that cardboard, you know, bag, paper bag. And they let me sleep at the end of their tent, sideways. Which of course, given the fact they'd been there already a day, I had their feet in my face. Adam Gottlie yeah, we bought tents, but I don't remember sleeping that much, to be honest. It was kind of like, yeah, I mean, the tents were wet and So I was 17, 18. You don't worry too much about those kind of things at that age. I woke up at about 2 o' clock in the morning and I thought the Martians had landed because there was this distorted noise and it was Captain Beefheart and he was yelling through, I guess a Shaw bullet night. I want a boodle I you I want to boogalize you baby I'm gonna v. It's like in the middle of this set, the music by the, as you can probably guess, was not on a very tight schedule. Sleeping quarters varied. I think we sort of crashed in the. In the vw. I think we got a lot less wet than an awful lot of people there. There was a big field. Big. It was. It must have been an old farm or something. And the stage at the front and then a big pit, loads of people at the front. And that's the area which I think got really, really mucky. I stayed at the side, stayed at the back and around the side there were these big concrete cattle sheds and they cleaned them out. And that's where I slept each night in one of those. I taken a rucksack with a sleeping bag and stuff, so I slept there. They could sleep up several hundred, three or four hundred people, probably each of these big barns. I don't know, I mean, I didn't count them at the time, but they were just huge. And there were a lot of people crashing there. Yeah, and I was fine, kept dry and went out during the day and recorded. So Sunday arrived and the organisers decided to let in the locals for free. Quite a few of them wandered around in their Sunday best, looking at us poor muddy soles. For them it was probably like a visit to the zoo to see what the hippies got up to. Simon Phillips I remember on the final day a lot of the locals came in because it was just free then and you turn around and you had all these middle aged people watching behind you. ET and we woke up on the Sunday and by this point now the audience has had it with this sight, you know. And Brincy Schwartz went up. Nick Lowe's band, they played. I was a huge fan of theirs. I played all Nick's songs, me and my pal Alan. That was half our set. Nobody knew the songs. So I think half the time they thought we'd written these good songs, you know, so we didn't tell them and. And we were playing in pubs and things. Sometimes they'd be asking for things out the charts by T Rex or something like that. But they had knew nothing about this American music that we like. I wanna know where my country girl goes Back when the green grass used to grow I feel at ease with my country girls yeah, she knows how to grow. No tapes of Brinsley Schwartz at Bickershaw seem to survive, but that was Country Girl, one of the Nick Lowe songs covered by rusty from a 1974 show released as Live at Sheffield a few months later. Elvis would use the Bickershaw set as a conversation opener with Nick Lowe beginning a long friendship. Sometime early on Saturday, the Grateful Dead and the New Riders of the Purple Sage and their extended family rolled onto the site. A news crew cornered Jerry Garcia for a brief interview backstage. Jerry Garcia, it's pouring with rain up here. Yes. What does the site look to know? Well, Muddy, of course. You're still going to play? Oh, yeah, I think we're gonna play, yeah. What you can do for a thing like rain or cold is, like, questionable, you know? What can you really do? Not really much. And like at Woodstock, the light show didn't happen. But Alan Arkish got some hang time. Everyone was complaining about how cold it was and their fingers. I remember the New Riders being there at Donovan, okay, And it just poured. And they must have drank a million bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale because it was just ale bottles and mud. And then I don't remember. I don't have any memory of that show except because it was raining Mountain Girl. I had my camera, I took pictures. What a blowout. Oh, my God. And I can't even tell you about the sanitation there. I mean, this is a family radio show, right? It was a mud hall beyond mud holes. And there was so many people there, it was just jammed. And it had obviously been raining for some time. And then the ground was like, you know, six inch deep mud. It was one of those. It was a mud hole. Those are the things I remember about Bickersaw. Those are the things that stick in your mind. I just remember going and sitting in the bus at Bickershaw because there was no place to put your booty down. You know, you couldn't. You wouldn't dare. You couldn't. You had to hold on all your. All your stuff, not let it touch the ground. It was a rough one. Do you think they failed abysmally in this particular instance? Well, I haven't been here enough to really determine in my mind. Most of the people, I think are, you know, sort of accepting what's going on. I mean, it doesn't seem to me that. That anybody is really super uptight. But like I say, I'm not really 100% in touch with the whole thing, you know, So I can only give you, like my own fleeting impressions. And there was a huge crowd out there. I mean, it was a really big crowd. We were stunned at how big. How many people were there? Conservative estimates have it around 40,000, but we're no conservatives. And others put it closer to 60,000 either way. As Arlo Guthrie put it, lot of freaks. A lot of people want to put restrictions on festivals in this country. That's the size and magnitude of open air festivals. Do you think festivals like this should have rules? Well, that presupposes that I think that there should be festivals. Touche Garcia. Janet Fuhrman of Alembic. We did an outdoor festival. I think it was called the Bickershaw Festival. That was in England. It was kind of a little mini Woodstock. I think it rained muddy. That was a fun show because it was a lot better being on stage than being out in the crowd. If you look at photos of the festival it seems like everybody in their commune maid are crammed into the wings on the giant stage. Back to Wiz, we had, you know, a bunch of caravans back behind stage, and Cutler got someone to go out and get us a bunch of steaks. And we had, you know, a steak lunch. John Morris, who'd helped build the tour with Sam Cutler, came up for the festival. The first time I discovered that there were, in fact, Winnebagos in England. We'd done some stuff in the States with Winnebagos, and we needed, you know, a place where you could have a bathroom, sit down, make a meal. We cooked these great steaks in the Winnebago. But that's not all I remember. But if you were working, it was quite a different story. Weather was fucked. You know, it was just a festival and everybody was glad to get there and get it over with. The one memorable thing is, you know, they had a huge PA and we put the alembic PA up anyway. Steve Parish thing about Bickershaw was we were way up in the north of England. It was a big, big scene, man. And the stage hands they had were coal miners from Newcastle, and they were rugged, boy. And they didn't like our attitude. We didn't like theirs. And so came almost came to murderous blows, man. This guy came up to me, he said, if there's any throats can be cut, we'll be cutting them here. I want to tell you that, you know, I talked to Robert Newton here, Captain, why no. Or somebody like that, you know. But a pirate. It sounded like a pirate or a whaler. And these guys were fucking really, really tough. Alan Trist. It rained and then it didn't rain. I think it was on and off raining. And I do remember that Healy was very concerned about the generator, which wasn't properly grounded in the rain. That could become a real danger to musicians on stage. You know, there have been incidents. So I remember he. He had me going back and forth to talk to the promoters about making sure that this was probably grounded or the band wouldn't play. And, you know, so it was a big. A big kerfuffle over that. But the road crew taught the locals some new tricks. You know, we would roll our joints in those days exactly like a Camel cigarette, because we found that to be safer than smoking what looked like a joint in some of the places we were in. It brought attention. We could get away with it. We didn't. So we had our joints rolled like that. And this one guy, he wouldn't believe it. That it wasn't a cigarette. So I let him smoke one and he got kind of out of his mind. They had to take him out in a stretcher, you know, because he used to smoking our strong weed, which we had. And that would happen occasionally in other places, too. Our weed was always strong. And don't forget, weed is a psychedelic in those days. The powerful weed that we had, the Mexican weed grown in the mountains of Mishrakhan Sinaloa, is what we brought. And it was beautiful lime green with these red sea caps. I can see it right before me right now. Till Nixon started with Intercept on the Border. But we had those seeds, went to a lot of places and started whole new crops and new kinds of strains. Anyway, why do you guys want to know so much about weed for? We'll ask the questions here. Parrish. Adam Gottley. I seem to remember there were some clowns at one point, and it was kind of like it was a sort of very old fashioned, kind of in the nicest possible way sort of show like that. It wasn't just the music on the festival poster. There's also a whole docket listed under Theater Arts. And unlike Joe's lights, it seems like they did perform despite the weather. Bill Giles. There was a high diving act, like right at the side of the stage and this enormous bloody ladder, you know, so miles up, and then you're sort of diving into like, you know, like a sort of a paddling pool, you know, that your kids might play in. And that happened sometime on the Sunday before the Dead played, if I remember rightly. Basically there were these sort of big tanks on either side of the stage. They were climbing up sort of like steel ladders to the top of them. There must have been a little platform, I guess, and they were just diving off into this. It was a bit weird. Sir Mick There is one event which is burned into my memory. There was a high diver who climbed up a ladder maybe 50ft high, then dived into a pool which didn't really look big enough. Anyway, he was successful and everyone cheered. If you look online, there's some shaky home movie footage of the pool. Not only does one of the performers climb the scaffolding above the stage, but somehow somebody lights the pool on fire and the dude jumps into a tiny swimming pool full of flames. Later on, the contents of the tank were emptied onto the ground in front of the stage and we got more mud. Oh, yeah, there were bonfires. The fences all disappeared. I mean, the fences, I think, probably got sold for scrap metal. It was A funny area. It's an old sort of derelict mining area. But there was lots of scrub wood around an old derelict wooden building. So there was plenty of material to set fire to. Please welcome back to the Deadcast Alex Allen, proprietor of the Essential dead lyric site whitegum.com we must have set off pretty early from Cambridge. As far as I remember, it is right across the country. Cambridge is in the east of England and Bickershaw's in the northwest. So it must have been at least three or four hours. I had a couple of friends who we drove up. I had an old Mini Cooper. We drove up through driving rain and got there. We only went up for the day, just Sunday. I didn't go for the whole festival. It was incredibly wet. I mean, I'd been incredibly organized. And I had a lot of plastic sheets. I mean, a whole watch of them. So you could sit on one, have another one over your head while you were watching. And then, you know, when that got softened or things like that, I could sort of roll them up and put out another one. So I was. I was very organized, I remember. And we got up. Must have got up there quite early because I remember the earlier acts, there was Brindley Swartz and then Country Joe. It was cold and very wet and muddy. Oh boy, was there a lot of mud. Woodstock had nothing on this. I got to see who I wanted to. And I spent a lot of time under a sound tower trying to stay dry. By Sunday afternoon I was starting to feel a little tired. I didn't get a lot of sleep for the whole three days. Then Fabian announced before the concert he was going to go backstage to meet Garcia. Did I want to come with him? And I said, no, don't be ridiculous, you're not going to get close to him. And Dave went with him. And I've still got the photographs of Fabian and Garcia talking. Dave has become an extremely good photographer, but even then he was quite good. And he discovered that there was a hole in the stage. And he managed to somehow climb up to the hole and take photographs of the dead and the new riders from virtually point blank range. I know this is going to sound odd. I got the impression that the audience were there out of curiosity rather than there being huge numbers of Deadheads. And yet the opposite was true at Bickershaw, where it was quite clear everybody was there to see the dead. Nobody left and the weather conditions dictated that people should leave. But nobody left. Everybody was still there on the Sunday night. Remember Stephen Feldman, who'd come up in the van. Through some strange quirk, we managed to get the van backstage where all the people working on the gig were. I think one of my friends had a contact or knew someone who knew someone. So we were there backstage and able to walk right to the very first front of the stage to watch. The gig started off that night. It was a Sunday night and it started off with the New Riders. The New Riders came on and I remember at least the rain easing when they came on. There are only audience tapes. Please welcome back to the Dead cast David Nelson of the New Riders of the Purple Sage. No, we were lucky to get on the thing. We were at it at the last minute. Sam Cutler and Jesse Milliken talked them into it. They were all ready to go and everything. And there was some kind of meeting or talk and everything. And they said, okay, you guys, you're on for Europe. So at the Bickershaw Festival, the New Riders of the Purple Sage launched a Europe 72 tour all their own. It's not quite as documented as the tour we're currently following, but our good buddy Cory Arnold has been doing his best to rectify that over at his Hooteroln blog. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast for at least one new rider, singer John Marmaduke Dawson, it was an excellent day at Bickershaw, where he met his future wife. The Riders would play a few more shows in England, then hit the Continent, perform at a few more enormous festivals with the likes of Pink Floyd, the Faces and others, and reconvene with the Dead in London. They'd even tape an appearance on the Beat Club in Germany, just like the Dead did. But for audiences at Bickershaw, it created the full experience. Sometimes billed as An Evening with the Grateful Dead, a set of the New Riders followed by a full Grateful Dead blowout. Elvis Costello. Then the New Riders played, and they were only great. And I thought, well, what's gonna happen now? You know? Are the Dead going to play for 20 minutes? It's getting on late, and I don't know, you've probably got a record of how long that set lasted, but I remember it being about four hours long. I mean, is it possible they could have played for that long? It is, actually. I remember the incredible sense of anticipation. And I don't just mean mine. You could just feel it in the crowd. I can't remember who was on immediately before the Dead, but it seemed to be a very, very long pause. It was the Sunday night I was going to turn 18 at midnight and I was desperately hoping the Dead would be playing. And they came on at half past seven. And I thought, oh God, there's no way they're going to play in this weather for four and a half hours. But boy, was I wrong. The contract for the festival was not only generous in its payment, but seemingly had some unusual provisions. Grateful that archivist David Lemieux. It's an amazing fee structure and part of it. Well, I don't know if it's part of it, but as part of the Bickershaw contract. And Remember, contracts in 1972 were not 55 page legal documents. They were one page. It was like, yeah, you got to show up, you play from this time to this time. And one of the things in the Bickershaw contract was that the Grateful Dead would play, obviously not their entire repertoire, but a complete overview of their recordings to this date. So point was, they would play a long show and two sets, a couple hours each. And to me, that specific line item in their contract to me is why it was the only show on the tour that got both a Dark Star and, and another one. And they're both complete, they're both half hour long. I've always kind of figured that that's why they did the two is because they were getting paid so much money and they'd specifically been requested, similar to Bill Graham at the closing of Winterland, saying, look guys, you know you're going to play what you want, but know that this is a show where people are going to be expecting and wanting you to play some things. And they played Dark Star and St Stephen. We bid you good night. So they did. They busted it out for Winterland. And I think the same thing happened here where every night on the Europe tour was either Darkstar or the other one like Clockwork, except at Bickershaw, where they played both. The advance hype for the show definitely included mentions of the Dead's extended set time and promised to go deep into their catalog. Simon Phillips. So the papers were saying they were going to leave it open ended for the Dead to play as long as they wanted. I mean, there were rumors they could play for up to nine hours, which was ridiculous, but. So I actually took enough tape just in case they did play nine and a half hours. And it was a shitty little tape recorder, a Philips one, one of these that's, I don't know, 10 inches long, maybe 6 or 8 inches wide, and a little handheld microphone I knew to take spare batteries. Tour architect Sam Cutler. The Grateful Dead have always, they've Always brought a slightly different quality to their trip outdoors. So they shone there. It was wonderful. They loved playing outdoors. And it was special. It was special for the audience. Again, this is the audience who's been raised on, you know, Pink Floyd and all kinds of psychedelic bands in England, you know. And so the Picochore Festival was far out. And tour architect Sam Cutler. Hey. For all our Muddy friends, the Grateful Deep, Adam Gottlie. As soon as the Dead came on, the sun came out for the first time in three days. And that really did happen. That really did happen. And I think we all thought there was a certain inevitability to that. Alex Allen. And then when the Dead came on, actually, you know, it dried up and the sun came out. It was magical. But I mean, it was still pretty. It's still. It was still. It was incredibly wet and muddy still. You know, you could actually sort of stand up and not get soaked and watch them play or listen to them play. Both. And then, just as the sun was starting to go down, the Dead came on stage and immediately got into their best run. And I think of all the Grateful Dead gigs that I've seen, and I've seen every single one that they played in the UK and a couple in the us, this was the best ever gig they did. Of course, the mescaline may have helped. What I do remember right from the word go, they started off with a really lively version of Trucking. And it just got the audience going. Everybody was dancing in the mud. It was fantastic. Yeah. I mean, I think even the first set was about to hours long. Something like Trucking was, you know, I knew from American Beauty, but actually hearing it live was a completely different experience. And that was true of several of the songs that the live experience just was. You know, the studio albums, Working Man's Dead in American Beauty, they're perfect, but, you know, they're nothing like the live performances. And the live performances have an energy that the studio performances are beautiful but don't have the same energy. Mountain Girl, as I recall, they were playing really, really well. The worse the conditions, the better they played. Also, you got to think this is this the arc of this tour. They had a chance to talk to each other for hours on end between the gigs because we're all riding on the same bus. So I think the communication in the band was at a real high peak at that point. And, you know, they wouldn't have anybody else to talk to, really, except Steve and Kid, and their girlfriend, unfortunately, threw out some horrible fumes, which we could Smell down below the stage. So it must have been pretty awful on the stage. But they cope with it. I mean, Weir moaned about the weather, but he often does. I do remember there was a jet, like sort of a jet engine type thing, an industrial heater on stage because it was cold and it was blowing. And indeed, you hear. I think at some point, you hear Weir talked about, you know, he's being hit by jet breath. I think that got turned off at some point because it must have been really unpleasant. Sort of like the sort of kerosene type smell. And seeing against that, you see, all the time we're playing here, we got about old 20, 30 knots and about 90, 100 degrees of jet breath coming in on us from these space heaters over here. They smell like burning kerosene and make you dizzy and make a guitar go out of tune. But without them all, this would not be possible. I mean, Bob Weir talks about it on stage, but I remember this huge space heater that they had on stage because they were so cold. And I think he calls it Dragon Breath. But I remember seeing that it was a huge thing, like a cannon, like an old medieval cannon. But despite the adverse conditions, things were going fairly smashingly. There were new songs left and right from all three of the band's lead singers. The Black Throated wind Keeps on pouring in with its words of a lie when nothing is new wow. Mother America, the Garcia first solo album had come out before that, but I don't think the Bob Weird Ace album had come out. The Garcia tracks like Sugary I were familiar with, but the Weir tracks like Black Throated Wind were new to me at the time. They were playing stuff I hadn't heard, but it was, you know, this sheer number of songs, I think that that was a surprise. Elvis Costello. The most shocking thing about it was it was the debut of that richer seam of Hunter Garcia songs, as far as we're concerned. You know, people, I guess, had come with the idea, those that had had this dream of the kind of, you know, the hey, Ashbury kind of band that was gonna freak out and everybody would go into outer space with them. That wasn't really what was happening, you know, that what was actually happening in the first set, as I remember, was like, one after another, really great, tightly composed song. And it had this kind of what we now would call Americana, but in a really open way. It was very recognizably them. But I think I'm right in saying you've got the record so you can contradict me. Tennessee Jed, you know, Ramblon Rose, Jack Straw. Hearing those all in a line was pretty shocking. They weren't back to back in the set. But it all gets kind of jumbled up in a way because it was such a transporting thing. The Ramble On Rose from Bickershaw is one of Wiz's favorites. The Ramble On Rose in there, it's like one of the best recordings of the band I've ever heard. And you know, it's the quintessential. We're howling between verses and you know, I know everybody's high at every gig. You listen to Jerry's lyrical delivery and you can see the smile on his face. Plus Jerry was playing just about as great as you can play. I mean he was doing these endlessly unfolding solos and things like tennis, he, Jed. And it would just be a lot of these quick chromatic movements and. And it would just be. You would be. You couldn't believe they kept stepping up in intensity. Cuz the tempos weren't very fast. They were sort of like. It had a groove, it really had a groove. There's an anecdote that goes around that says that when Elvis Costello saw the Dead at Bickershaw, he was inspired to start his own band. But Elvis already had his own band in 1972, Rusty, which we heard from earlier. It didn't come up when we spoke, but we followed up and he confirmed that the story is nonsense. But it was still a mind bender. But it was very, very wonderful. It was a revelatory experience for audience and band alike. Donna Jean GodShow McKay had a particularly flash filled time at Bickershaw. The Deadheads were just like they were in America. That blew my mind. You know, they get it, they get it. There's this ocean between and they totally get it, just like they do in America. And that stunned me. I don't know why I wasn't expecting that. It stuck out because that's where I really got the. The flash, the real, okay, these people in Europe don't even have to understand what the words are to the songs because the music is speaking. And I, I just got the. The whole concept of music is a universal language. And it just blew my mind. I had never really thought about it. I'd never been out of the country before. And so I had. I never had those kind of thoughts. And I remember, especially at that large outdoor gig of just getting that realization how huge and important that concept was that music is universal. There was a little business to take care of from stage by the way, folks, we got a birthday boy with us tonight. That's our drummer, Billy. And I'd sure like it if you all aid in helping, helping me, helping me. And all of us wish a great big happy birthday to Billy. Statistically speaking, this is the extraordinarily rare instance of Bob Weir wishing a happy birthday to Bill Kreutzman on stage, when it was actually Bill Kreutzman's birthday. And it goes like this. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Happy birthday to. Ben Haller of the lighting crew got his own perspective on the festival. Bickashaw was. It was so freaking cold, and yet there was an area in front of the stage and there was, it was a big puddle of water and there were naked English kids splashing around in the water. And we're, we're all, you know, we've been on this nice tour and just wore nice shirts and maybe a light coat or something and suddenly going, where's my downtown? I wish I had a down jacket. Lille and Bickershaw and maybe one other place was daytime. And that's a relief for me. Generally what would happen is I'd have to go over and, you know, there'd be some, some electrical problem, which I could suss out. You don't know how many times I've gone from the stage following the snake out through the audience. And, and there's a whole structure the way the audience is, because in front of the stage was a lot of recording people, you know, with all their little weird recorders. Right behind the mixing booth would be all these couples making love, you know. And so depending how the snake went from the stage to the mixing booth, you had to fight first with the recording people. And then you're, you're moving naked bodies so you can get to. Please don't drive my connectors into the mud, you know, Come on, you know, make love next to the cable, not on top of the cable. The chaos was continuing to unfold in the pit. Adam Gottlieb during the day, I went right down to the front of the stage and that was an absolute morass of mud because they'd had these, I'm sure you know about these, these high divers. And they just emptied the pools that they'd been high diving into off the edge of the stage. So it really was muddy there. It really was muddy, but it was fun. Chris Jones the water tank broke open or something. It all splashed down. 10,000 gallons splashed out all over the, all over the place. And of course, not Being used to being a taper, I would sing along in the song on the words I know. So you get, you know, the odd. Riding the train to Kyle, coping. And you know that ocean just calls my. They finished the first set with Casey Jones and Fabian and I were doing the twist in the mud. Believe it or not, I think he got down to about his knees. Just seemed the right thing to do, just cross the ground and, you know, that notion. There were some ways it was totally like Woodstock. Sam Cutler to the mic. One, two, one, two. Listen. You remember the country. Joe McDonald was saying all that stuff about the tower. Well, there's now too many people on the tower again, so those people who know who they are, get off the tower. There's good folks. Thank you. You don't want to cause a blooming catastrophe, so get the fuck down. Bickershaw had its own pyro display planned, but heads weren't exactly waiting. Watch your heads. I think that was a bad chop. In the future, we'll want to aim those a little higher. Whoever's doing that. It had got dark, I should think about halfway through the first set. But it was completely dark. Yeah, well, started what I with what I still think is the greatest, greatest story I've ever heard. I just think it's an absolutely brilliant version. I don't think we even knew in Britain that the God shows existed until the dead arrived here. And then to hear Donna's genes singing on the Greatest Story, I thought, oh, wow, this is going to be a real asset to the band. But as Elvis and all remember, it was time to jam. I guess in the second half, we did go into the outer space element, which that was perhaps harder because by then, as the band is taking off into, you know, Dark Star, we are gradually sinking into the UN underworld, literally, you know, our boots. And I'm now up to my ankles in mud. To navigate us through the mud and space, please welcome back musicologist Graham Boone. We're going to moon shoot our way into the first Dark Star jam. A lot of open space in this jam. Each player in the band is doing something different. Jared gets into a little bit of tiger jamming, but then goes beyond it. Always interesting to listen for the colors, not just the notes, but the colors of sound, especially in these spacey jams. And then Phil coming in with his Dark Star riff. The middle of the spacey sound, Bob settling into a major. It's like the spaceship lands. By the time the sun went down, audience members could see one of the festival's other Innovations screens on either side of the stage. Peth it was the first time I'd seen a big screen, so it was wonderful to see the concentration on Billy's face during Darkstar. Things like that. It was beautiful. After the first verse in chorus here, they're settling into this very open space. Moving to E minor, but with sustained notes, flourishes, rich growling sounds from Phil, feedback from Bob. Notice the switch from notes to colors. You can feel deep space coming into view. Playing with feedback. It's like being surrounded by cosmic light. Wide open, free playing Bill's drums start to take center stage. Chris Jones the thing about Picashaw was this huge dark star and the huge firework display and that was. That was superb. It really was. I mean, the atmosphere. I mean, people say it was a muddy festival. I don't think it rained while the Dead were on. I don't think it rained while the New Riders were on. I was able to stay dry. I wasn't one of those people who get right up to the front and get in all the mud and things. I like to hang back and so I can take in the whole thing. And then this fireworks, amazing fireworks came while playing Dark Star and, ah, it was just absolute heaven. Absolute bliss. From the sounds of things on the circulating audience recording the fireworks begin midway through the drum break by birthday boy Billy Kreutzman. We've got Simon Phillips to thank for the circulating audience tape, so thank you, Simon. You can't hear them on the board tapes obviously, but all I recall is rockets going up just over the. Over the stage and everybody looking at and like children, you know, do when they see a pirate. Okay, so fireworks are a bit hard to convey on a podcast. My dad was really big into fireworks, so it took a lot to impress me and this impressed me. So I can't remember the details of it, but it was good. Not only were they cool fireworks, they were heady fireworks. Please welcome to the Deadcast the designer of the Bickershaw fireworks artist Peter Luttner. In 1964, I shared a flat with Roger Waters and Nick Mason of a Pink Floyd. Though of course this was before the Pink Floyd existed. Our landlord was the architect Mike Leonard, who taught some of the Floyd architecture at the Central London Polytechnic and was the presiding genius of the Light Sound Workshop, which I joined when I started at Hornsey College of Art. The Light Sound Workshop pioneered abstract light projection on multiple screens, a forerunner of rock light shows, and incorporated radiophonic sound. Members of the Floyd would occasionally improvise in our studio to the Light projection. Later, in the 60s, I belonged to a group of young artists with a freewheeling agenda, supported by two older artists with established reputations, which helped us book venues and get publicity. As a group, we rejected the prevalent view of art as a commodity, typified by the gallery system. They created events around the Middle Earth Club in London. We expended immense creative energy on our ephemeral art events. The show would begin at 8pm and last about two hours. There might be a piece with a man dressed in black spraying a woman dressed in white with water. Or there might be a sequence with a pair of robots gliding around a space with flashing lights, and they were sort of humanoid, so they could raise their arms and so on. And for one show I engaged a Hyde park orator. That's from People's Corner in Marble Arch. This is a very famous British institution where people can just get up and say whatever they want to the passing crowd. And this man was just an absolute master. He just held well, he harangued the audience, but he raised, really held them spellbound. And he agreed to come along to one of our events. And sure enough, I mean, the audience just loved him. And he harangued them too. As things did, and as they hopefully still do, they got a little more expansive. Later, we took our events out into the streets, bringing our work to where people were, because when they came to the Middle Earth, they were coming to a venue. They were making the journey to get there just as the same as if they were going to an art gallery, an exhibition. So by going out into the streets, the people were there anyway, so they could involve themselves or not, as the case may be. But the main thing was they didn't have to make any effort to experience what we were doing. At the time, public firework displays were uncommon. I was fascinated by marine and drainage smoke signals, which were carried over great distances. Great plumes of orange and yellow smoke, very, very dramatic phosphorus flares were the most brilliant illumination. I mean, you could see the brilliance in daylight. And parachute distress flares, which lit up a huge surface area as they descended to the ground. All these were obtainable from ship's chandler stores, and I used them as solo effects prior to Bigashaw. At smaller music festivals. The display was devised to accompany the Grateful Dead, who were the headline act. I networked over the phone from a huge contact list. So once I undertook to provide the display, I had to find people to qualify to carry it out. And I couldn't use firework display businesses because of the cost. So I hit upon the idea of asking special effects guys from the film industry who are good with that sort of thing. A contact put me in touch with a terrific guy called Pat, who was about my age. He was a special effects expert and he loved the idea of a firework display at Bigashaw and roped some mates in to join him. From memory, there were probably three in the crew. I remember that it was extremely muddy underfoot, typical for a pop festival in a farmer's field in the UK summer. The band would have indicated when they wanted the display to begin. It must have been after the drum solo. And I remember marvelling at Dark Star. It was such a radical thing to do. Rock improvisation. I listened to it again the other day and it was just amazing. Even on the audience tape, it's hard to tell when the fireworks are going. There are occasional whizzes, but it's too loud to hear any ooing and ahhing, so you'll just have to imagine that. I think it lasted for between 10 and 15 minutes. The aerial fireworks were set up away from the audience, behind the stage. The waterfall was a spectacular effect, familiar to the special effects guys, which is now an essential feature of large public displays in Australia, but would have been unheard of then. It was strung between sound towers, with the Dead having the best view of it from the stage. I'm sorry to have to tell you that front of mind for me during the display was hoping that the promoters would pay the balance of the fee. On the night, there were numerous instances of promoters ripping artists and contractors off. You can imagine me not wanting to tell the special effects guys that I couldn't pay them, and not unfairly. By Sunday night, it was pretty clear that the festival had undersold their estimates, despite being a success on a lot of other levels. But as far as we can tell from this vantage, everybody did get paid. I was also anxious to know what the Dead thought of the display, hoping that they weren't pissed off. It was a huge relief when Jerry Garcia told me how much he liked it. Adam Gottlie, Weird other one. At one point, they almost stopped and I think must have been retuning, which I guess is inevitable in that cold weather. But it was. It was another one that got right to me and got to a lot of other people, people you can see by the audience reaction. There was a fireworks show during the other one and everybody was just dancing like crazy. The atmosphere was fantastic. Bill, the drummer, takes a long pause, long enough to walk briskly to the local pub, have a drink and come back if there wasn't a crowd in the way. And then you had that sort of fantastic sort of last. What was it? Last hour with Sugar Magnolia Love. Like going down the road feeling bad not fade away one more Saturday night Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I mean very good versions of all of them. Apart from Bobby making a right mess of one verse of Sugar Magnolia, which makes me laugh every time I hear it, because as I said, I was going to turn 18 at midnight and I thought there was no chance. And I think they still had half an hour left in them. I mean, it was love like they were playing when. Which was brilliant from my point of view. When midnight came, it just went on and on. It was. It seemed like that they were really getting into it as well. After an hour long sequence involving Dark Star, the fireworks, the Other One, and Merle Haggard's Sing Me Back Home, there was still another segment launched by Turn on youn Love Light. More than a decade later, Bob Weir would encounter Joe Strummer of the Clash in a Philadelphia hotel and the Clash guitarist would pledge allegiance to Pigpen, presumably won over by his own solid night at Bickershaw, which could constitute an entire single LP of its own were one so inclined to compile it. In the end, there was four full hours of stage time, not counting the set break. One of the longest Dead shows in history. Bill Giles. That must have created more Deadheads in the uk, I think, than any other event, because a lot of people would have gone to Bickershaw to see other acts. The Grateful Dead would have been a mystery and they will have discovered the Grateful Dead there. It was a pretty key event in UK Deadhead history, if you like, Chris Jones. I remember it taking a long time to walk to the festival itself and then a fair bit of time when we came back. Well, I don't know, you see, coming back after that high and I was still on cloud nine after that. I mean, I did consume a lot of substances, not all of it legal. And so I was still pretty out of my box all the way home. And I was just on a high for the whole thing. It was the festival, the music, the setting, the substances, and seeing the Grateful Dead, I mean, play that song. I mean, just amazing to me that anybody could play for that long. It really was Adam Gottlieb. We were covered in mud, we were wet, we didn't care. I think what we did from my memory is we struck camp and we sort of all slept in Chris's car for a few hours, maybe three or four hours and then headed home because as I said, it was my birthday by this point. It was also my mother's birthday, so I was quite keen to get home. And I remember, I think we arrived that early afternoon, something like that. She was absolutely appalled to see the state of me covered in mud. Alex Allen we drove up early in the morning and drove back late at night. We must have got back very, very late. But I mean, you know, student days, you don't think about that too much. Barbara Nellist we were pleased to be getting out of the mud as the weekend progressed. You know, it's been really safe in the festival, there's so many people. And it was then we all left and the guy who picked me up from Leeds, he was going back up to Durham so he dropped me off on a roundabout to hitch back to Leeds. And as soon as he dropped me off I was terrified. I'd never hitched on my own but I was feeling so chilled out and everything and then suddenly I was, I was in this situation for having to hitch an hour down the road, which nothing happened. It was fine, but it was a bit of a shock having been very in a cocoon of like minded hippies and then suddenly I was on a major road, you know, all alone with my thumb out. The local newspapers were quick to jump on Bickershaw as a failure with horrible weather conditions compounded by a lack of facilities and expensive amenities. But many also acknowledged that people actually did have a great time. Fans love it. But festival cash flopped. Read the headline in the Yorkshire Post. And that's pretty much what our conversations show. Charles Scharr Murray snarked in the magazine Oz Bickershaw Nation is still hilariously unlikely and tens of thousands of freaks are still scraping large parts of Lancashire off their boots. Yeah, well, maybe. But Murray's review also cops to missing the performances by Captain Beefheart and the Dead. And I suspect if you went to the Bickershaw Festival to see Captain Beefheart and or the Grateful Dead, you probably had one of the most memorable weekends of your life. And thanks to our friends the Tapers, it was possible to relive it quickly. Chris Jones I record a bit. To me that was a memento afterwards. So I was one of the early Tapers, if you like. It wasn't quite to Owlsley's Standard, but nevertheless it was fun listening to that afterwards. It was another experience for me. And again then later on, of course I didn't know there was this big taper scene and didn't know anything about it. And then suddenly I was exposed to the big taper scene and suddenly my little tapes were of some value, if only as a historic document of what the actual set lists were. For Simon Phillips, the Bickershaw tape taught him a classic Deadhead lesson. One tape can beget many other tapes. I don't recall anybody being interested in my Wembley tape, but I had a reasonably listenable version of Bickershaw. And a few weeks later, in a trade paper, music paper, in the classified ads, somebody was advertising a recording of the Tivoli show from Europe 72. So I had no means of copying tapes and he lived about an hour away. So I contacted him, drove to his house with my tapes and my hi Fi recorder, not the little tape deck, and we copied each of the tapes. So I came away from there having got the Bickshore tape and Tivoli tape and obviously Tiddly was a step up. It was an AM recording, but it was better quality than my big show. And then I seem to remember somebody. My next take was definitely the Harding Theatre broadcast from late 71, the radio broadcast. So I got that one. I can't remember the exact trade, but suddenly I had three really good ones and that was in stereo. And then suddenly I saw it just took off. I suddenly saw. I ended up in 73 trading with people like Les Kipple, Jeff Tamarkin, Bob Minkin, the photographer, Ken Janetti over in. Ken just sent me box after box of tapes, you know, wasn't even trading, it was just his generosity, sending stuff over to me, you know, the closing Winterland 78 Years Eve. I was listening to that in the UK on about the 4th of January, you know, just arrived in a box at unasked for, you know, so generous to some of these traders. But, yeah, so sorry. Baker Shaw was the start of my tape trading and that carried on right through the 70s. Elvis Costello also had some takeaways from Baker Shaw. I don't think I even ever attempted to clean those boots. I think I just took them out in the back garden and burnt them, you know, along with. I think, in fact my mother burnt all my clothes when I got back, you know, because it was so disgusting. But it was, you know, a magical thing, you know, the thing with those, with that thread of songs, if we can just be serious about it, was a very inspiring. I can find old lyrics of mine I can see on the page. I. I don't even. I've got notebooks from that period. There are A few recordings of songs I wrote in that time, very few, but I have got notebooks full of lyrics that I can see the way they run on the page. They're imitating Hunter and I've. No. I don't even remember. I've long since forgotten the songs. But there's little paradoxes and things which he likes in his lyrics. And I became completely like immersed in the next few records. You know, they were not too regular. I went to Alexander palace to see I Saw the Dead twice in Alexander palace, unbelievably. And the first time was around the release of From Mars Hotel. I can't now remember whether it was before or after the record came out. It might have been before because I seem to recall I went home with the same experiences as Europe 72. We had to wait until all that tour was finished and for that record to emerge. There was Scarlet Begonias from September 9, 1974 at the Alexandria palace in London. Elvis Costello's connection to the Dead was hardly finished. I had a great friend and educator in John Goddard, who ran Village Music for many years. From my first trip to mill Valley in 77, that was my first stop when I went to San Francisco. Bear in mind, I stayed in the Hojos in Mill Valley. The first time I ever stayed in America, first night I ever slept in America. So it was pretty close, but not walking distance. And I would go there on every. Every available afternoon to go through the racks of John's Place. And I knew that, you know, people in the Dead orbit went there, you know, and I played this. He had an annual party at Sweetwater, a great tavern in the center of Mill Valley. And he surprised me. John hired me to do the annual party, invited me to do it. Then he got Nick Lowe to come play with me. Then he got James Burton to come play with me. And you know, there's other people. My friend Austin delone is playing on piano, Charles Brown at a set and then suddenly Jerry was there. So we had myself, Jerry and James Burton all on the stage together. But at this point it had been sort of somebody would hand a guitar to somebody, you play on this. And at one point James was playing my Martin and. And I. And I was playing James's tally for some reason. And I had a Jerry, my jazz master, which has my name up the neck. And I remember that he looked at it like. And where is the fifth fret on this? Because, you know, I mean, if you look at some of his guitars, he had guitars with incredible inlay on them. But like anything, you get used to your guitar. And I think he played one number on my guitar. Then we got him on James's Telecaster and then everything was fine. We only did a couple of songs. I think we did three songs or something. But it was one of the thrills to stand next to him, like in a little club, I mean, and not playing bluegrass or something. It wasn't like, you know, olden in the way it was like we were playing, you know, we were playing. You win again Just trust in you as my Greek each. I just can't go. You win again. Take it, Jerry. There's a whole video of the the April 24, 1989, Sweetwater Jam online, the late 80s Elvis and Jerry Bromance also included a joint interview and shared front cover on Musician Magazine. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast it was fun. It was fun. I'm sure it sounded awful because it was like nobody knew the beginning and ends, but it didn't matter. It's supposed to be like that. It was lovely. That's a really cool memory. Yeah. Yeah. And there was a lot of drinking going. There was a lot of drinking going on. And there was, of course, Elvis's great cover of Ship of fools on the 1991 dedicated tribute album, plus a few other tunes that have shown up in his live repertoire every now and again, including a collaboration with Robert Hunter. Only played live once. Believed you Now I cannot share your laughter. You know, quite near the end of his life, I found myself staying in a bungalow in one of those hotels that, like, have separate bungalows near San Diego. And I think the Dead were playing up the road the next night. And I was just coming back from my gig and I saw him either coming in or out, and he came in and we had a cup of tea, and it was the loveliest thing, you know, somebody I stood in feet of mud to hear play. And he was such a kind of human with me, you know, gentle, really. And it was. And that is. That's the beginning of the end of the story, really, from my dad giving me that record to saying goodnight to him that night is a very funny feeling to have, you know, because I know how lucky I was to have that time with all the people that revere him, some of them in kind of frankly insane ways. Feeling seen, Elvis? Feeling seen. See you next time. Thanks very much for tuning in and huge thanks to our guests in this episode, including Elvis Costello, Michael Moorcock, Mountain Girl, Donna Jean Godshow, McKay, David Nelson, Steve Parish, Sam Cutler, Alan Trist, Janet Fuhrman, Ben Haller, John Morris, Alan Arkush, Peter Luttner, Alex Allen, Chris Jones, Bill Giles, Barbara Nellist, Simon Phillips, Stephen Feldman, Brian Pertharam, Adam Gottley, Mick Etherington, David Lemieux and Graham Boone. Also special thanks to David Ganz and Blair Jackson for providing archival interview audio. Did you travel over to Europe to catch any of the shows in 1972? Well, don't forget to go to stories.dead.net where you can record yourself telling a tour story. Spread the word to your friends. There's still time to get it in. Please don't forget to like and subscribe and leave us a review. Wherever you listen to this podcast, it really helps. Thank you. Well, have you ever been to Rotterdam? Make sure your passport is handy because we're going to meet you there next week. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.