Isle of Wight – a Beautiful Dream That Became a Monster
- Place – Isle of Wight Festival
- Time – August 1970
- Artist – Kris Kristofferson and John Sebastian
Of all the bans that played at the Isle of Wight Festival, in my opinion the real stars of the weekend were Kris Kristofferson and John Sebastian.
Kris Kristofferson
Kris Kristofferson was comparatively unknown in the UK and did the first of his two performances on the Wednesday.
His set was filled with his dry humour and wonderful songs that would go on to become classics.
Unfortunately the live sound crew were indifferent to the talent of Kris and his band and, through the sound system, they sounded awful!
So too were the audience and they were unfairly hostile towards him. Not fazed and being the true professional he continued to play his set.
A few people from the audience were shouting for him to play what they wanted to hear, namely other people’s more well known songs .
He answered very respectfully with,
“We only play the songs that I wrote, so maybe someone else will be along later and play that for you.”
At one point between songs he was tuning his guitar, when the ringing of a telephone could be heard from the side of the stage, Kris remarked down the microphone
”Will someone get that, or do I have to do everything around here?”
Towards the end of his set, speaking over the intros to one of his songs, he said,
“I can’t believe I’ve been singing now for twenty minutes, but I bet you can.”
Fortunately on the following Sunday he returned to face a slightly more receptive audience.
John Sebastian
John Sebastian arrived on stage on the Saturday morning to sing a few songs.
The solitude of a single guy with a guitar performing to such a huge audience meant he could have been so easily dismissed as a quick stand-in act.
However the charisma of Sebastian exploded into the crowd before the first song was over.
His magnetism allowed him to carry the audience through twenty-one, mostly classic songs, resulting in nearly three hours of pure magic.
At one point he asked, “Can you hear me way up on the Mountain?”
The audience, so vast, extend way back and up the hill. With a delay of about two seconds, they answered with what sounded like a whisper came back from the hill, “YEAAAAH.”
Sebastian finally left the stage after three encores, totally exhausted and with the audience was still screaming for more.
The Isle of Wight festival was an amazing event and by the Friday the crowds had grown to an estimated six hundred thousand.
With the day to day population of the island being less than one hundred thousand, it’s a wonder the island didn’t sink.
Ron Foulk’s Monster
On the Monday morning the festival’s promoter Ron Foulk said,
“This is my last festival, enough was enough, it began as a beautiful dream but it has got out of control and became a monster.”
My recollection of the festival, luckily being back stage, side stage and in the front enclosure, was that, if there was one, then the monster had passed me by.
I was eighteen years old and being paid to work at a festival where rock legends were performing and where I was honoured to see the newcomers of the next decade, Tony Joe White, Kris Kristofferson and Emerson Lake & Palmer and the like.
It was a privilege to have witnessed the end of one era and the beginning of the next.
At the end, after five days of glorious weather, the rain started to fall as we were de-rigging and packing up the trucks.
We were all totally exhausted so to find we had a puncture on our truck was a bit of a bummer to say the least.
Nev and I set about changing the wheel whilst Vic and the rest of the crew carried on loading the other truck.
Nev and I were getting to it, when we heard a friendly voice say,
“Hi would you like a hand?”
Looking up we saw a large man with a beard standing before us, it was non other than Kris Kristofferson. Before we could answer Kris was down in the mud, helping us change the wheel.
After fixing the puncture on the truck we headed back to our hotel to get some rest before the drive back to London on the Tuesday. None of us had actually had any proper sleep since the previous Friday.
In our truck was me, Tony Carey and Neville who was driving. Tony and I were asleep within minutes of leaving the exterior gates.
Asleep at the Wheel
Somewhere along the journey I opened my eyes, I looked round at Tony who was fast asleep and then over then over at Nev who was, to my horror, also asleep.
His head was pointing to the floor, his eyes were closed and his hands tightly gripping the steering wheel.
Instead of responding to the imminent disaster, for some inexplicable reason I just closed my eyes and went straight back to sleep. The next thing I was awoken when the truck ran off the road onto a grass bank.
Somehow we made it back, I’ll never know how.
I recently contacted Neville to ask him of his recollection as to what happened next.
His account is as follows:
“The drive back to the hotel, that is quite vivid in the memory. My exact vision to this day, is suddenly waking up because as I dozed off as the van had drifted off the road to the left and travelled along a raised grass bank.
The noise, as the truck somehow rumbled along the grass, bought me back to life and I recall fully waking up, just as we were leaving the bank and rejoining the road.
I looked over and both of you were still asleep, so I just carried on. All in a mobile day’s work!”
On arriving back at the hotel, breakfast was being served, even though we were all hungry, everyone just headed for the rooms and went straight to bed.
We all slept until the Tuesday Morning, when we returned to London to drop the one hundred and eight reels of tape back to Pye.
Over the next few weeks we all used down time (empty studio time) to remix and make copies of our favorite acts from the concert.
I would like to thank Neville Crozier for his help with these Isle Of Wight posts.
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