The first week of 1970 was busy for all sorts of reasons.
In the US, had you been at the Fillmore East in New York on 31 December and 1 January you might have seen four shows by Jimi Hendrix’s new band, the Band of Gypsys (sic). Recordings from this show surfaced later on the Band of Gypsys album, his last before his premature death, of which more later in the year.
Jimi, Purple Haze all around his brain, was a prominent survivor of psychedelia, a phenomenon which, as Rob Chapman notes in his excellent Psychedelia and Other Colours, (especially pp191 to 227 I Am The Black Gold of the Sun), was, and remains in memory, generally associated with white musicians. By 1970 Hendrix, long-familiar with John Coltrane’s music, was more Schroedinger’s Cat than hep-cat, somewhere, anywhere, a body in motion towards a future that never happened, but which might have led to Miles Davis, as so much did, picking up elements of determinedly non-white musical heritage.
If you stuck around for 2 and 3 January you would have seen another band intimately familiar with Coltrane and Miles Davis, and on a journey out of their lysergic past: the Grateful Dead. The two shows they played later appeared on Dave’s Picks Vol. 30 + bonus disc, released in 2019.
Later in 1970 the Dead released Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, both of which will feature in future posts, and these are usually said to mark a change in direction for them, at least so far as albums went, towards a kind of Americana. That point of view ignores the relative lack of rootsy Americana on their later albums, but also misses that their live shows were evolving musically, away from the Acid-Test tonalities that marked their origins and into something that became somehow more out there as they developed as musicians. Still, even as they introduced new songs to their set in January 1970, they played a version of Dark Star with Tom Constanten that remains cool 50 years later.
Over here in the UK, the big news of the first week of January was that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band had decided to split, and Michael Giles and Ian MacDonald left King Crimson. The Crims. released 2 albums in 1970, In the Wake of Poseidon and Lizard, of which more in due time.
Melody Maker gave equal prominence to Steve Ellis’s decision to leave Love Affair in December 1969, but that has been edited out of collective memory.
As with Hendrix and the Dead–and what possibilities that combination dangles in the imagination, there will be more about the Bonzos and the Crims in future posts. I also hope to expand somewhat on themes hinted at here.
Tomorrow I’ll take a look at the UK singles and album charts for the first week of 1970, but for today, here’s Pigpen (RIP) at one of the Dead’s February 1970 shows, also at the Fillmore East. Rolling Stone threw shade on this, but I like it a lot:
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