http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6793618.ece

Will be back with more HWS concerts tomorrow and then we'll gear up for the box set. But in the meantime, I read the new Mojo magazine (or at least new for the US) last night and buried amongst the feature articles on current bands that should be soon (and deservedly) forgotten was a bit about Prefab Sprout releasing their first album in 8 years (and demos from '92 at that). I happen to be of firm belief that Paddy McAloon is the greatest song-writer of the past quarter-century and that the neglect of Prefab Sprout (especially in America – their last two albums weren't even released here) is on a criminal level equal to that of the neglect of Big Star in the 70s. They're that good. I'll let the writer in the Times make the case but if you haven't delved into the catalog yet, the comparisons to Burt and Sir Paul are well-deserved. The production sometimes is "of its era" (it's 80s-90s keyboard-based power pop – Thomas Dolby for some LPs) but it's not overwhelming. But the songs are. I obtained a bootleg recording of the band doing some live shows a few years back with just a simple guitar / keys / bass / drums band and you just listen to it and shake your head...Beautiful writing on every level.

HWS Concerts Fall 1971 Part I.

Sept. 15 Spider John Koerner. This was the first concert I booked as chairman. Basically the idea was to do an inexpensive ($500), easy (PA and a couple of mics), and low-risk (held in on-campus auditorium – at most the show would end up costing us a few hundred dollars). John showed up in a big pre-historic SUV that he'd borrowed from Bonnie Raitt (pre-environmental awareness) and did a Jerry Jeff – getting progressively hosed while rambling through a really long set. John was an early influence on Bob Dylan when Bob first left Hibbing and arrived in Minneapolis to (nominally) attend college. I wasn't aware of this at the time so Koerner was spared any line of questioning I might have had on that front. (At the time Dylan was almost in semi-retirement and I was trying to learn all I could about him.) Rookie mistake: I accidentally deposited John's check with the gate receipts so he didn't get paid that night. Didn't seem to bother him. We mailed it on Monday...

Oct. 6 ( Fall Weekend) Billy Preston, Leo Kottke. This somewhat odd double bill (in hindsight) has been on the end of quite a few "who thought that was a good idea" comments – even on blogs 37 years later. So listen up – I'm the guy who thought it was a good (not great...that idea didn't work out) idea. And here's how it all went down...

My original target for this show was Loggins and Messina. They'd just released their first album and were starting to catch on. They were touring like crazy and their fee was $4000. I also really wanted to bring in Leo Kottke, whose Takoma album was a campus favorite. Pairing the two seemed like a great double bill. I put in offers for both – this would have been in July when the booking for the Fall was really heating up. Kottke confirmed immediately and the agent I was booking through, who was doing a lot of L&M dates for colleges, thought that they would confirm fairly quickly also. But they didn't. They were getting hotter by the week, getting flooded with offers (some more lucrative), and adjusting their routing by the day. I've since learned through experience over the past few decades that the longer a date takes to be confirmed, the less likely it will happen. That's what happened here. What seemed like a sure thing fell apart when they decided to hit the West Coast. So now faced with a booked theater and and opening act I went looking for a headliner in my price range. In the HWS tradition I was wanted someone on the way up like Loggins and Messina. Two names came to the forefront: JoJo Gunne (with some ex-Spirit members – 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus had also been a campus favorite) and Billy Preston. Preston had the Beatles connection, had torn it up in the Bangladesh concert movie (like my favorite Leon Russell) and had a summer hit record (Outta Space). Given that he had worked with musicians across the spectrum, from Ray Charles to the Fab Four, in my mind I was picturing a rock'n'soul gospel show like Leon (this was before YouTube, when you could check these things out if the artist hadn't been to your town yet). What we got was something a bit off that mark.

The show did not run smoothly. It was the first date of Billy's tour and the band's equipment didn't arrive from LA. They rented equipment out of Albany and it arrived late. Billy's road manager said he wouldn't play unless the piano was tuned just before the show (it had been tuned that afternoon – today I'd play the piano myself and then tell the manager to stick it if I thought it was in tune – but one learns these things over time). I ended up having to pay a tuner (the only one available on short notice on a Friday) from Rochester $75 (big amount for back then) to come down and basically fake tune just to appease him. The show was considerably less than sold out and the audience was more polarized than you'd normally get back then. There were people there to see Preston and people there to see Kottke. Period.

This became a show that you just wanted to get through. Kottke did okay for his fans but both Leo and the listeners had to work really hard to connect. There didn't seem to be a lot of energy in the hall. Billy Preston came out with the attitude (and the volume – really cranked up) that he was already a rock star (talk about a wig!) The set went by in a blur (that happens when you're watching a concert that isn't working out the way you had hoped) but my overall impression was that he wasn't really interested in working the crowd on an organic level – just blast them into submission. He was disappointed that the hall wasn't packed with adoring fans ready to rubber stamp his certain superstardom – which is probably one reason why despite a few more hits it never really came (the following year some guy named Bruce took a crowd the same size and sent them into orbit). The band was just there to back him up – any chemistry they shared had occured backstage. A few years later I saw Billy playing keyboards for the Stones when he literally jump-started a crowd that was enduring a lethargic Stones set (they have to be the most overrated live band of all-time) with a couple of numbers that brought the crowd to their feet mid-set and forced Mick and Keith to try to match him. (But then Mick and Keith fired him after he started showing up with his own soundman just for the keyboards.) At the end of the evening I found out that I'd underestimated how much business we were going to do at the door – in order to pay the security etc. I literally had to use the very last quarter we had taken in (tickets were probably in the range of $2.50 or something on that order) to send everyone home paid in full.

The bad vibes lingered. Early the next morning I was awakened out my slumber by a call from my faculty advisor Al Beretta who wanted to know "what the hell had happened." As it was being reported in that morning's Geneva paper, Billy had been arrested after kicking his door down at the local Chanticleer Motel. Turns out that he'd gone to the Twin Oaks (local bar), downed many shots of tequila, became progressively bummed out that there were no groupies in sight, and then took it out on the door (with his six-inch platforms no doubt).

This is the origin of why when I book an artist today the second question I ask (after the fee) is "How are they to work with?" Life is too short...

Coming up: Buddy, Junior, and bad bad whiskey...

HWS Concerts 1972 part one:

Jan. 22 Happy and Artie Traum Warm up- Cassie Culver, warm down- The Elves. Even though double and triple bills were wildly eclectic back then (check the line-ups for the Fillmores East and West), this was an odd one. It would have been even odder if we'd included the "rap session" led by Father Malcom Boyd that the school administration was pressuring us to include (he'd been booked to appear elsewhere on campus and they were concerned that no one would show up). But this one was weird enough.

Ronnie James Dio must older than Santa Claus. My older brother's freshman mixer at St. Lawrence in 1965 featured none other than Ronnie Dio and the Prophets. Somewhere along the way they mutated into the Electric Elves. And then The Elves. And then Elf. After touring as an opening act for Deep Purple, Ritchie Blackmore recruited Dio as lead singer for Blackmore's Rainbow. Nobody stays with Blackmore long and eventually Dio found himself the lead singer of Black Sabbath (touring in recent years as Heaven and Hell). You stick with something long enough and you get to be your own boss...thus we eventually got Dio. The biggest impact the Elves had in this appearance was that their roadie dragged a speaker cabinet and left a long gouge in the gym floor, making our already iffy relationship with the Athletic Director tenuous indeed. That would begin the chain of events that lead to the historic preservation of what's known today as the Smith Opera House in Geneva.

Feb. 19 Little Feat. Remember that Little Feat album I bought for a quarter (see earlier post)? Peter Labonne (without whom I never would have met Alex Chilton let alone write the book - a brief commercial message - buy it and read the improbable story) and I wore it out during the summer of 1971. When I got back to school and the concert committee started meeting I played it for Tim Yolen (not the other way around as reported in The Pulteney Street Survey) and started lobbying to book the Feat. Tim dug the record (who wouldn't) and eventually he just said, "They're your band...it's your show. Book them." So for the princely sum of $750 I booked Little Feat – the original quartet – for Winter Weekend. We somehow decided to skip the opening act and have them do two sets so the fee was renegotiated to $1250. The rider for the band was only one page long and included such precise and demanding details as "a professional sound system" (the jazz groups I book today sometimes have entire pages on their monitor requirements), twelve microphones including stands (wouldn't want to forget them), and a piano (no specification) tuned to A440. That was about it. For one of the greatest bands ever.

We hyped the show on campus the best we could for a band with one album (Sailin' Shoes wouldn't be released for a month or two) and given that it was Winter Weekend, winter in Geneva, and nothing else to do but go to the Twin Oaks (local bar), ticket sales were good. But there was one problem. The afternoon of the show a major blizzard hit and although the Feat somehow made it into town (they had played at Amherst College the night before), getting the equipment into town and backing the trucks down the slippery hill to the gym loading dock was a nightmare. Trucks got stuck. The lights never made it. The starting time was delayed and delayed again. Finally around 11 p.m. (for an 8 p.m. show) the Feat took the stage under the glare of the gym lights before an audience that had understandably dwindled (ahhhh, the lure of the frat party). Eager to jump-start the proceedings the band started off at a really intense level. I was so exhausted that after a few songs I just sort of went numb. (Feel free to weigh in with your recollections.) The one thing I do remember clearly is hanging out with the band in the women's swimming locker room (which doubled as the band dressing room). I told Lowell that my friend Peter had had a dream in which Lowell and Fred MacMurray were serial killers. Lowell said "A lot of people have that dream." That version of the Feat was so good yet their success was minimal (Amherst by the way was a real stronghold for them – like Hobart would be for Springsteen). Roy Estrada would soon leave to join Captain Beefheart and three more would join. The band's fitful climb up (they never really made a great record after Dixie Chicken) discouraged Lowell to the point that when they finally got some serious recognition he had willed (and drugged) himself into being a secondary player in his own band. I often wonder what might have been had that original four-piece line-up had more success.

Feb. 26 Holy Modal Rounders. The annual appearance of the Rounders was a campus institution. For this show they played in a room above the cafeteria that held a few hundred people at most. By the end of the evening there were at least 15 empty kegs, countless tiles separated from the floor (a combination of spilled beer, people gatoring, and who knows else why). Totally wild. If you look up the phrase "you had to be there", this would be Exhibit A.

May 4. Ry Cooder. Cancelled. Ry was going to tour with the band that was on his just released Into The Purple Valley (including Jim Dickinson RIP - see? another Big Star connection...) But he cancelled the tour much to our disappointment.

May 5 (Spring Weekend) The Byrds. Remember that big scratch that Dio's roadie made on the gym floor? Well after a few cigarette burns were left in the floor after the Little Feat concert the A.D. gave us the boot. The problem was that we'd already booked The Byrds and there was no venue on campus that was suitable for the show. But when life gives you lemons, sometimes you can even make Vueve Clicquot. Somewhat desperate, we checked out the aging movie theater in downtown Geneva – The Geneva Theater as it was known then. What we found was a 1500 seat hall that had originally built for live performance. It was funky but you still see it's former grandeur. (Visit the website to get a sense of how cool the place was and is http://www.thesmith.org/NewFiles/main.html) Even though some students bitched about either paying the princely sum of $2.50 for a ticket or walking a mile or so off-campus, the show sold out. We had way more people than we could have ever fit in the gym.

The Byrds hit the stage with Lover of The Bayou and the crowd just locked in to what they were putting out. At the time they were near the end of a several year resurgence. There was some internal feuding going on and some members were getting restless. But that night, they were the best band in the world. The sound was fantastic thanks to the legendary Dinky Dawson, an Englishman who had established himself with Fleetwood Mac (well, at least we got someone associated with them) as one of the pre-eminent sound system pioneers in rock and was doing sound for The Byrds. His stereo WEM system sounded perfect in the hall and between the sound and the crowd, The Byrds gave one of their last / best performances ever. They even ran out of songs to play and repeated Mr. Tambourine Man as an encore. Afterwards Clarence White gave Karen Inman (WS '75) and me a demonstration of his string-bender Telecaster, an invention of his that made it possible for him to mimic a steel guitar (and now used a lot by Nashville players). Clarence was run down by a drunk driver a year later and is often overlooked as an important player in the development of the electric guitar. But just ask Jimmy Page...one of Clarence's many devotees. How great was it that within a few months we got to see Lowell and Clarence??

By the end of the year Tim had decided that I would follow him as concert chairman (even though I would only be a junior). Even though I did a double major with degrees in Pol. Sci. and Econ., my real major was concert promotion. Next post: 1972-73.

Hobart / William Smith (hereafter referred to as Hobart or HWS) concerts – Fall of 1971. (Many thanks to Zack Chaikin for the exact dates.)

Sept. 27 Jerry Jeff Walker. I think we paid Jerry Jeff $500 for a solo show in Albright Auditorium (a lecture hall). He played for a long time, getting progressively inebriated to the point of incoherence. Those who were on his plane stayed for the evening. Everyone else eventually left. I inadvertently continued the tradition of starting the year with a drunk folksinger the following year (stay tuned).

Oct. 25 Edgar Winter’s White Trash and Grin with Nils Lofgren. The first concert decided on by the entire committee. Edgar's band included Rick Derringer and the late Jerry LaCroix - basically the same band on the Road Work album. They were rough and tumble guys. When Tim Yolen (concert chair) asked Rick how long he'd been on the road, Derringer replied "My entire life." They got paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $2500 and put on a rousing performance. Nils and Grin had gotten a big boost from Nils being on After the Gold Rush. But in concert, as on their records, there was something missing that kept them from going over the top. In 1976 I saw Nils (with some of the same bandmates) in a bar on Lake Erie south of Buffalo. They were on tour in support of Nils's first two albums on A&M (the first is a classic if you've never heard it). A Tuesday night – probably a fill-in date for gas money. They just set up on the floor in the corner and then leveled the place. I was with Kathy Burton (WS '77) and she prevailed upon the committee to bring in Nils a few months later to Bristol Gym (opening act....38 Special). But whatever magic they had night apparently couldn't be duplicated again. Reminds me of something Jerry Garcia once said – that on any given night, any given band could be the best band in the world. Doing it more than once, let alone with any regularity, is the trick...

Oct. 30 Peter Yarrow. I skipped this...probably was off seeing Jethro Tull somewhere. People forget that in the early 70s they were on a level of popularity with Zeppelin and The Who. A band that could be the best band in the world night after night. A tangential story: After I graduated from college in '74 I went to NYC to try to land an entry level job in the music biz. One possibility floated my way was being road manager for Mary Travers. PPand M weren't my cup of tea but they had been a major act and I wondered why such a position might be entrusted to a novice like me. It turned out that no one else would take the gig. Among your supposed duties was to carry a supply of her preferred toilet paper, anticipate whatever facility she might be compelled to use and then rush in and swap out the inferior brand for the good stuff. I passed.

Nov 5 Planned concert with Fleetwood Mac cancelled. This would have been the Bare Trees / Kiln House band. Booking English bands was always more challenging given the tour logistics. I tried to book them a few years later (along with the King Crimson Lark's Tongue In Aspic group) and came up short.

Nov. 5 ( Fall Weekend) Boz Scaggs. For $2750 (or something close to that), we booked Boz as a replacement for the Mac. He was touring in support of the Boz Scaggs and Band album (Boz's first three Columbia albums remain hard to find on CD but are all excellent). He had the full band with horns and they were just great. The only problem was the audience was largely apathetic to the point that even after doing Somebody Loan Me A Dime (how can you not respond to that song???) they didn't get an encore (pencilled in as Dime A Dance Romance from Steve Miller's Sailor album). Afterwards the band was disappointed and to this day that performance had the biggest disconnect between quality (high) and audience reaction (low) that I've witnessed. I recently got a soundboard recording of the band done within a few months of this show and it backs up my memory of how good they were...

Dec. 5 The Kinks and Snake Drive. Chairman Tim was determined to land the Kinks, even if it meant a 4 p.m. Sunday show right before the start of exam week. Which it did. It was a strange atmosphere – people definitely weren't in a party mood with exams looming the next day. But with English bands, you had to fit their schedule and they were playing LeMoyne college in Syracuse the night before. They were touring in support of Muswell Hillbillies and did the exact same (short) set, except we got an encore of one their early hits due to a small group of diehards who wouldn't quit cheering and somehow touched the heart of the otherwise grumpy Ray Davies. It was the last day of their tour and they were probably back in England by the time we started sweating through our first exams...(I have no idea who Snake Drive were - probably a local band - but R.L. Burnside had a song of the same name and there's a killer version of it on the first Panther Burns album with Alex Chilton - there's your Big Star connection for this post, however tentative)

http://www.rhinohandmade.com/browse/ProductLink.lasso?Number=521305

The deluxe Rhino Handmade 2-CD version of Chris Bell's I Am The Cosmos is now available. If you've heard it, please post a review. Or at least let us know if it's essential, interesting, or for completists only.

Hobart and William Smith concerts 1970-71 (Big Star fans see August 5 post for explanation of this detour). Like a lot of kids back then, the most important part of what I took to school for my freshman year was my box of LPs. To this day whenever I hear After The Gold Rush, John Barleycorn Must Die, or Alone Together, I'm instantly transported back to my little single room in Hale Hall. Colleges and universities today tend to spend their budget for concerts on one or two big shows, usually overpaying through the nose (agents commit the equivalent of robbery when dealing with colleges) for a handful of big name acts. But beginning at the tail end of the 60s and going into the early 1980s, colleges were a key touring circuit for artists. Colleges were a vital source of gigs that unfortunately has largely dried up. They presented lots of concerts throughout the year – big name artists (if you could afford them), up and comers, older legends – all kinds of music . A concert committee was expected to present shows throughout a semester and, as a result, the students were savvy bookers. They knew enough not to blow their entire budget on Akon (or the equivalent). Just from my limited experience I can name quite a few college promoters from back then who went on to become prominent in the industry. The kids who were into music lobbied to get on the concert committee. It was the hottest position in student government.

By the time I arrived, Hobart had already begun to establish a reputation as a school that was a step ahead in concert promotion. My freshman year role was confined to being an eager member of the audience. Concerts were held in the small gym on a foot-high stage. Fall Weekend featured Leon Russell, just starting out as a solo artist after his stint with Joe Cocker and Delaney and Bonnie. He started his concert with a mesmerizing solo version of Wild Horses (RIP Jim Dickinson) and then went from there, adding the Shelter People (Leon's second album was mixed by John Fry at Ardent). It was a fantastic performance and made me eager to see him again when he performed at a converted bowling alley in Buffalo the following August (with opener Freddie King). On that blistering hot summer night, just a few days after the Concert For Bangladesh, Leon gave one of the most astounding performances I've witnessed (still one of my top five all-time). I went to see him a bunch of times after that hoping for a repeat of the deep soul he showed at Hobart or the intensity in the bowling alley but Leon never came close.

Music snobs like to brag that they saw a band before they got big, begrudge them when they have great success, and let everyone know that "they were really much better way back..." It's really obnoxious. But, the arc of Leon from Hobart to the bowling alley made me realize that there is really something magical about experiencing artists when they're still on their way up. There's the aura of mystery and discovery that vanishes once an artist becomes established. There's a feeling that the artist and the audience are in some sort of experiment together. There's an unspoken invitation: "I'll keep driving up this road trying to find out who I am as an artist and you come along for the ride if you like what you hear." For the best artists the ride up can be long and dazzling (Beatles, Dylan, even Springsteen). Others hit the plateau pretty quickly. But cherishing that climb up is not just about rock snobbery – it's really an unforgettable experience.

The key of course is latching onto artists who are going somewhere. That's a tricky business that seems to elude most of the record companies today. But for quite a few years, the people who booked concerts at Hobart had the knack. We couldn't afford Elton John but if you wanted to see some news band from Boston whose first album was coming out on Atlantic in a month or so (The J. Geils Band), the Hobart gym was where you wanted to be. To experience a band that good without ever previously having heard a note of theirs, let alone have any preconceptions of what they did was truly mind-bending.

Near the end of spring semester two pivotal events took place. I was recruited to be on the Concert Commitee (thanks to a strong plug by the late George Callahan to chairman Tim Yolen) and I bought a pile of Warner / Reprise promo albums that the college radio station had received multiple copies of. Back then, the Warner / Reprise label was almost a guarantee of quality so for 25 cents apiece a pile of records by artists like Norman Greenbaum, Turley Richards, John Simon, and some band named Little Feat seemed worth the gamble.

AUGUST...I'm going to take a bit of detour for the upcoming month.  As I've alluded to elsewhere, I produced concerts at Hobart and William  Smith College in Geneva NY in the early 1970s.  We were a small school, unable to write out big checks for artists like Jethro Tull, the Grateful Dead, or Elton John as nearby schools like Syracuse and Cornell were able to.  But we had a student population that was intensely interested in music and supported whatever the concert committee presented.  As a result, we were able to focus on relatively unknown or upcoming artists as well as veterans who didn't necessarily have a hit record at the time.  Some of the concerts at the school during this period have become legendary and whenever I go back to school for a reunion, that's all people want to talk to me about.  To the extent that I am remembered, I'm introduced to spouses as "the guy who was responsible for all those concerts I've told you about"...and then the spouse duly rolls his or her eyes, having heard the stories umpteen times.  I wasn't the first nor last in a string of student promoters who put together the series of shows (three of us actually went on to be in the concert business at one time or another) so I can only tell my part of the tale.  Last year the alumnae magazine did a cover story on the concerts of yore.  As cool as it was, it was riddled with factual error.  So for the next few weeks I'm going to travel chronologically through the shows.  For those of you who weren't there, I'm going to try to put the events in the broader context of what was going on in the music business back then and how it differs (monumentally) from today.  As far as any connection to Big Star, there isn't one.  Except that it will become readily apparent that if I'd heard a Big Star record when they were first released, I would have booked them at Hobart at the first chance.  There would have most certainly been a date in Geneva during the Radio City tour plugged right in between Boston, Syracuse and Niagara Falls.