RICHARD BURTON
In 1978, Chris Spedding was a key musician in one of the most ambitious concept albums of all time (and the best selling British concert/cast album ever), Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds. Actor Richard Burton handled the narration, and the musicians are a virtual Who’s Who of the British rock scene of that era: Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann, Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, bass guitarist Herbie Flowers (that’s him playing the prominent bass line on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”), David Essex (“Rock On”), and actress/vocalist Julie Covington; she and Essex had been appearing together in early performances of the rock musical Evita. The album tells the story pretty much as The War of the Worlds was written by H. G. Wells (much of Burton’s narration is word-for-word from the novel) decades before Steven Spielberg’s film basically did the same; I consider War of the Worlds to be one of Spielberg’s best movies and certainly his most disturbing. (November 2011) * * * In 1969, Mick Farren “liberated” the earliest large-scale rock concert in the U.K., the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival by encouraging the fences to be torn down. This concert – which took place the month after Woodstock (and with many of the same acts) – featured the Who, the Band, Free, Joe Cocker, and the Moody Blues. But the real excitement was caused by the inclusion on the bill of Bob Dylan, who had been little seen since his near-fatal motorcycle accident in July 1966. When Dylan took the stage, audience members included three of the Beatles, three of the Beatle wives, three of the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, Jane Fonda, Roger Vadim, Syd Barrett, and Elton John. One of the main reasons for the location of the original Woodstock was to lure Bob Dylan out of hiding – the idea was to throw a huge party practically on his doorstep that surely he couldn’t resist attending. Woodstock is the name of the town where Dylan lived (and also members of the Band); the festival itself was in Bethel. But resist he did; Bob Dylan instead signed up to appear at the Isle of Wight Festival and set sail for England on August 15, 1969, the day that Woodstock opened. (March 2014/1) |