Michael Gray's Blog, page 3
August 28, 2015
BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL: A VIDEO
Here's a neat little video created by The Forum Tunbridge Wells to promote my BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL gig there on Sunday Sept 20 at 8pm.
But just a reminder that I'll also be giving this 1-man-show-type talk with loud audio and rare footage at...
An Lanntair, Stornoway, Sept 9
Halifax Square Chapel, Sept 11
Civic Theatre, Barnsley, Sept 12
Artrix Studio, Bromsgrove, Sept 13
Kitchen Garden Cafe, B'ham, Sept 15
Swindon Arts Centre, Sept 16
The Flavel, Dartmouth, Sept 19
Stamford Arts Centre, Sept 22
Colchester Arts Centre, Sept 23
Norwich Arts Centre, Sept 24 and
Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal Sept 25...
But just a reminder that I'll also be giving this 1-man-show-type talk with loud audio and rare footage at...
An Lanntair, Stornoway, Sept 9
Halifax Square Chapel, Sept 11
Civic Theatre, Barnsley, Sept 12
Artrix Studio, Bromsgrove, Sept 13
Kitchen Garden Cafe, B'ham, Sept 15
Swindon Arts Centre, Sept 16
The Flavel, Dartmouth, Sept 19
Stamford Arts Centre, Sept 22
Colchester Arts Centre, Sept 23
Norwich Arts Centre, Sept 24 and
Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal Sept 25...
August 7, 2015
FACING UP TO FACEBOOK
Yes, after being urged by so many people that an author "needs" a Facebook page, I've succumbed:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Michael-Gray/886444541429784
and hope you'll have a look at it from time to time, for news & pictures.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Michael-Gray/886444541429784
and hope you'll have a look at it from time to time, for news & pictures.
July 30, 2015
UPDATED BOB & ROCK'N'ROLL POSTER!
Due to circumstances beyond my control, one of my September UK dates (the one in Dorset) has been cancelled. I believe it's the first time in 15 years that any of my gigs ever has been. So here's the updated tour poster, kindly revised by its brilliant designer,
Jon Wainwright
:
July 14, 2015
TERRIFIC TOUR POSTER FOR MY SEPTEMBER UK DATES
design by Jon Wainwright
June 2, 2015
THE STAVES: WHITE TEETH & PLEASANT HARMONIES
I don't know why I can't an official video to go with the single of The Staves' 'Teeth White' - it's a pity, because I think it's better than this live version - but here they are on French TV. I like them because they remind me of that early Kate & Anna McGarrigle sound:
May 23, 2015
May 22, 2015
BIG FRONT YARD: A MEMOIR
There was a Birmingham (UK) based band at the start of the 1970s, Hard Meat, that released two albums on Warner Brothers Records, though being on that major label did them no good at all so far as sales were concerned. The core of the band was the Dolan Brothers, Mike (or Mick: people chose which to call him and he took no offence either way) and Steve.
In their post-Hard Meat days I knew the Dolans very well. Mike Dolan died last year, on August 2nd, from brain cancer, having survived the throat cancer he had fought against a few years earlier. Steve, the younger brother, died 15 years ago today - May 22, 2000.
I met the Dolans in 1973 when we all lived around Malvern, Worcestershire. They played a few local gigs with a changing assortment of other local musicians; I met them by going to one or two of these gigs.
At some point in 1974 they became Big Front Yard (another bad name? – anyway, taken from a sci-fi short story Mike admired) and I became their manager. They got nowhere.
When exactly they became Big Front Yard I’m not sure, but it was fixed only after Mike & his wife Sue (whose sister lived in the Napa Valley in California) went to London, supposedly for a week, so that he could rehearse with, and join, a group named Forsyth... but they came home a few days later, Forsyth having broken up. They paid Mike off with £30. This was in March 1974.
Mike Dolan in my West Malvern garden, June 1973
© Michael Gray, 2015
£30 was about the amount Big Front Yard were being paid for most of their gigs: £30 to be shared between the band, roadie Phil, me and the petrol for one gas-guzzling old van after another. They played all around the Birmingham area, on average once a week. It was that weary period punk soon abolished, when groups had to be fine musicians with loads of heavy-maintenance equipment just to be able to play in a pub for next to nothing. The best-paying gig was the one we promoted ourselves every couple of weeks at the Foley Arms Hotel in Malvern.
Mike was the leader of the group, lead guitarist and lead vocalist. He and Sue lived down a winding hill just outside West Malvern, in a cottage that had once been a country pub and was still called The Bell, with Jesse, their very Just-William little boy. (Sue and Jesse both live in California now.)
The first drummer, I believe, was Alan Mennie, always known as Min, and he was older. If he’s still alive, he’ll be 74 now. My then-wife and I had a house on a hill, with two storeys at the front but four at the back, and these extra layers were flats we rented out. In 1974 Min and girlfriend Dot had one of them. Min and I played chess together from time to time. I can’t remember when he quit the group, but it must have been at some point soon after February 1975, when he was playing (and speaking) on the recording session they did at Birmingham’s commercial radio station BRMB .
Min gets credits on albums by King Crimson and Pete Sinfield, and was always somewhat jazz-oriented. Many years later – in the early 1990s – he and Dot co-owned a house in a little village in Turkey with Mike Dolan and his girlfriend Glenn, and I remember calling in there once on a family holiday and seeing Mike emerging from the sea with his surfboard, looking far healthier than he’d ever looked in the 1970s of his youth.
Min seems to have disappeared without trace now, along with Dot and the son they had called Jamie. We’ve googled till we’re blue in the face but cannot find them.
There were a couple of drummers after Min – the dark, handsome one whose name I’ve forgotten: Rob Mason? - in the "official" photo from mid-1975 (below) - and then Keith Baker, a local postman who in 1976 also became a tenant of a flat at our house.
Keith had known the Dolans forever, and had played music with them in earlier incarnations; he's here at the back in a photo from 1965 (which I've no idea how I acquired):
Front: Mike Dolan; Back, left to right: unknown; Keith Baker; Steve Dolan
At one point, early on, the band had also included an organ player, and he’s to be heard to good effect on ‘Mad John’s Dream’, the B-side of their one single. The A-side was ‘Money-Go-Round’. It was recorded in a nearby barn, and issued on Rampant Records, a label formed by my then-wife and I specially to release their record.
Around the end of 1974, BFY lost the organist and added a second guitarist, Sam Sun (Keith Sampson), who is on the BRMB sessions and the A-side and was a long-time stalwart of their gigs. He was a likeable, sensitive man, full of pain, who drank far too much horrible Barley Wine. He’s dead now too. I believe he killed himself.
Mike Dolan, Sam Sun, Rob Mason (?) & Steve Dolan, early 1976
Live and on record, Big Front Yard sounded pretty much like Hard Meat – which, impressively, the Dolans rarely mentioned afterwards. Big Front Yard played a couple of London gigs (eg Newlands Tavern, Peckham, Feb 19, 1975: fee £20) which we hoped A&R men would come to, but none did. We sent a demo cassette to John Peel. Nothing.
Mike also had a little home studio at The Bell, and there produced, and played guitar on, a couple of tracks by a childhood friend of mine, Peter Harrison – whose splendidly politically incorrect stage name was Huge Black Gussie Watson – which I still have on a home-made CD. (Peter died in 2007.) Steve played bass on an unissued track I wrote and produced in 1981 and have yet to give up on... Mike went on to achieve a great deal in the latter half of his life . Steve died too young for us to know what he might have done.
I last spoke to Mike on the telephone when he was living in Cornwall in another relationship that broke up subsequently. In his last two or three years he spent half his time in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, with his final partner Jackie, and half his time, also with her, in another little village house in Turkey, having quarrelled irretrievably with Min & Dot over their previous shared Turkey house. I was able to get to Steve's funeral but not to Mike's, nor to Sam Sun's.
Here's another picture of the late-75-and-76 line-up, all posed with their dilapidated Renault 4s outside The Bell in summer 1975:
It's disturbing to me that of these four, all younger than me, only one is still alive (Keith Baker, on the left of the picture).
Lastly, here are the Dolans onstage at the Foley Arms, Great Malvern in 1976:
It's a long time ago (so any corrections will be welcomed), but it was a distinct part of my life in that pre-Thatcher world, in which I'd not long given up my dayjob (teaching English in schools) on the strength of signing my first book's US deal (1972) and had moved to the Malvern hills with wife, young son and high hopes. By the end of the long hot summer of 1976 I was on social security and by the start of 1977 I'd taken a job as Head of Press at UA Records in London, where self-styled punk artistes were telling 30-year-old Old Hippies like me that we ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. Mike Dolan's response would have been to turn the other cheek. Steve's would have been to throw a punch.
Footnote: I'm pleased to say I shall be revisiting Big Front Yard's general area on my own September tour of gigs : I'll be at Artrix in Bromsgrove on the 13th and then at the Kitchen Garden Cafe in King's Heath, Birmingham, on the 15th. I'm hoping Keith Baker might come along...
________
In their post-Hard Meat days I knew the Dolans very well. Mike Dolan died last year, on August 2nd, from brain cancer, having survived the throat cancer he had fought against a few years earlier. Steve, the younger brother, died 15 years ago today - May 22, 2000.
I met the Dolans in 1973 when we all lived around Malvern, Worcestershire. They played a few local gigs with a changing assortment of other local musicians; I met them by going to one or two of these gigs.
At some point in 1974 they became Big Front Yard (another bad name? – anyway, taken from a sci-fi short story Mike admired) and I became their manager. They got nowhere.
When exactly they became Big Front Yard I’m not sure, but it was fixed only after Mike & his wife Sue (whose sister lived in the Napa Valley in California) went to London, supposedly for a week, so that he could rehearse with, and join, a group named Forsyth... but they came home a few days later, Forsyth having broken up. They paid Mike off with £30. This was in March 1974.
Mike Dolan in my West Malvern garden, June 1973 © Michael Gray, 2015
£30 was about the amount Big Front Yard were being paid for most of their gigs: £30 to be shared between the band, roadie Phil, me and the petrol for one gas-guzzling old van after another. They played all around the Birmingham area, on average once a week. It was that weary period punk soon abolished, when groups had to be fine musicians with loads of heavy-maintenance equipment just to be able to play in a pub for next to nothing. The best-paying gig was the one we promoted ourselves every couple of weeks at the Foley Arms Hotel in Malvern.
Mike was the leader of the group, lead guitarist and lead vocalist. He and Sue lived down a winding hill just outside West Malvern, in a cottage that had once been a country pub and was still called The Bell, with Jesse, their very Just-William little boy. (Sue and Jesse both live in California now.)
The first drummer, I believe, was Alan Mennie, always known as Min, and he was older. If he’s still alive, he’ll be 74 now. My then-wife and I had a house on a hill, with two storeys at the front but four at the back, and these extra layers were flats we rented out. In 1974 Min and girlfriend Dot had one of them. Min and I played chess together from time to time. I can’t remember when he quit the group, but it must have been at some point soon after February 1975, when he was playing (and speaking) on the recording session they did at Birmingham’s commercial radio station BRMB .
Min gets credits on albums by King Crimson and Pete Sinfield, and was always somewhat jazz-oriented. Many years later – in the early 1990s – he and Dot co-owned a house in a little village in Turkey with Mike Dolan and his girlfriend Glenn, and I remember calling in there once on a family holiday and seeing Mike emerging from the sea with his surfboard, looking far healthier than he’d ever looked in the 1970s of his youth.
Min seems to have disappeared without trace now, along with Dot and the son they had called Jamie. We’ve googled till we’re blue in the face but cannot find them.
There were a couple of drummers after Min – the dark, handsome one whose name I’ve forgotten: Rob Mason? - in the "official" photo from mid-1975 (below) - and then Keith Baker, a local postman who in 1976 also became a tenant of a flat at our house.
Keith had known the Dolans forever, and had played music with them in earlier incarnations; he's here at the back in a photo from 1965 (which I've no idea how I acquired):
Front: Mike Dolan; Back, left to right: unknown; Keith Baker; Steve DolanAt one point, early on, the band had also included an organ player, and he’s to be heard to good effect on ‘Mad John’s Dream’, the B-side of their one single. The A-side was ‘Money-Go-Round’. It was recorded in a nearby barn, and issued on Rampant Records, a label formed by my then-wife and I specially to release their record.
Around the end of 1974, BFY lost the organist and added a second guitarist, Sam Sun (Keith Sampson), who is on the BRMB sessions and the A-side and was a long-time stalwart of their gigs. He was a likeable, sensitive man, full of pain, who drank far too much horrible Barley Wine. He’s dead now too. I believe he killed himself.
Mike Dolan, Sam Sun, Rob Mason (?) & Steve Dolan, early 1976Live and on record, Big Front Yard sounded pretty much like Hard Meat – which, impressively, the Dolans rarely mentioned afterwards. Big Front Yard played a couple of London gigs (eg Newlands Tavern, Peckham, Feb 19, 1975: fee £20) which we hoped A&R men would come to, but none did. We sent a demo cassette to John Peel. Nothing.
Mike also had a little home studio at The Bell, and there produced, and played guitar on, a couple of tracks by a childhood friend of mine, Peter Harrison – whose splendidly politically incorrect stage name was Huge Black Gussie Watson – which I still have on a home-made CD. (Peter died in 2007.) Steve played bass on an unissued track I wrote and produced in 1981 and have yet to give up on... Mike went on to achieve a great deal in the latter half of his life . Steve died too young for us to know what he might have done.
I last spoke to Mike on the telephone when he was living in Cornwall in another relationship that broke up subsequently. In his last two or three years he spent half his time in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, with his final partner Jackie, and half his time, also with her, in another little village house in Turkey, having quarrelled irretrievably with Min & Dot over their previous shared Turkey house. I was able to get to Steve's funeral but not to Mike's, nor to Sam Sun's.
Here's another picture of the late-75-and-76 line-up, all posed with their dilapidated Renault 4s outside The Bell in summer 1975:
It's disturbing to me that of these four, all younger than me, only one is still alive (Keith Baker, on the left of the picture). Lastly, here are the Dolans onstage at the Foley Arms, Great Malvern in 1976:
It's a long time ago (so any corrections will be welcomed), but it was a distinct part of my life in that pre-Thatcher world, in which I'd not long given up my dayjob (teaching English in schools) on the strength of signing my first book's US deal (1972) and had moved to the Malvern hills with wife, young son and high hopes. By the end of the long hot summer of 1976 I was on social security and by the start of 1977 I'd taken a job as Head of Press at UA Records in London, where self-styled punk artistes were telling 30-year-old Old Hippies like me that we ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. Mike Dolan's response would have been to turn the other cheek. Steve's would have been to throw a punch.
Footnote: I'm pleased to say I shall be revisiting Big Front Yard's general area on my own September tour of gigs : I'll be at Artrix in Bromsgrove on the 13th and then at the Kitchen Garden Cafe in King's Heath, Birmingham, on the 15th. I'm hoping Keith Baker might come along...
________
May 19, 2015
LORD JANNER & CO.: TOO ILL TO TESTIFY, TOO ILL TO STAND TRIAL
What a shame none of these widely-admired people were well enough to face the courts...
1974: Richard Nixon, Watergate cover-up
1987: Janet F. McKinzie, forgery & fraud charged re collapse of North America Savings & Loan Assn
1989: President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines, corruption charges
1992: Newport Beach Police Chief Arb Campbell, rape and sexual discrimination charges
1993: Erich Honecker, treason, corruption and abuse of power charges
2000: Margaret Thatcher’s friend General Pinochet, “too ill to stand trial” (Jack Straw)
2000: Former Indonesian President Suharto, corruption enquiry
2005: Former taoiseach Charles Haughey, to the Moriarty tribunal into dodgy deals re property and tax
2005: Dr James Lennox Kane, accused of maiming women in bungled operations
2006: Convicted racketeer Rick Rizzolo, tax evasion & racketeering, Las Vegas
2008: gangster Charles (Charlie Moose) Panarella, labour racketeering, NYC
2008: Pakistan President Zardari, corruption charges
2009: Colin Cope, independent school head accused of sexually abusing five boys
2011: Jacques Chirac too ill to stand trial for embezzlement
2011: Khmer Rouge social affairs minister Ieng Thirith, too “aged” - ie 69
2011 & 2012: Hilary Clinton, twice avoiding giving congressional testimony re murder of US ambassador & three others by Islamists in Benghazi
2013: Marcus Schlosser, head of an international investment scam
2013: Henry Assumang, in trial re his deliberate HIV infection of 2 women UK
2014: Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic trial
2014: Former Chicago Mayor Daley, police torture & his 30-year cover-up of it
2015: Leo Barnes, accused of double murder in UK
April 2015: Lord Janner, child sex abuse (9 days after signing letter wanting to continue to be in the House of Lords)
May 2015: Oskar Groening, Auschwitz bookkeeper in murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews trial
______
1974: Richard Nixon, Watergate cover-up
1987: Janet F. McKinzie, forgery & fraud charged re collapse of North America Savings & Loan Assn
1989: President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines, corruption charges
1992: Newport Beach Police Chief Arb Campbell, rape and sexual discrimination charges
1993: Erich Honecker, treason, corruption and abuse of power charges
2000: Margaret Thatcher’s friend General Pinochet, “too ill to stand trial” (Jack Straw)
2000: Former Indonesian President Suharto, corruption enquiry
2005: Former taoiseach Charles Haughey, to the Moriarty tribunal into dodgy deals re property and tax
2005: Dr James Lennox Kane, accused of maiming women in bungled operations
2006: Convicted racketeer Rick Rizzolo, tax evasion & racketeering, Las Vegas
2008: gangster Charles (Charlie Moose) Panarella, labour racketeering, NYC
2008: Pakistan President Zardari, corruption charges
2009: Colin Cope, independent school head accused of sexually abusing five boys
2011: Jacques Chirac too ill to stand trial for embezzlement
2011: Khmer Rouge social affairs minister Ieng Thirith, too “aged” - ie 69
2011 & 2012: Hilary Clinton, twice avoiding giving congressional testimony re murder of US ambassador & three others by Islamists in Benghazi
2013: Marcus Schlosser, head of an international investment scam
2013: Henry Assumang, in trial re his deliberate HIV infection of 2 women UK
2014: Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic trial
2014: Former Chicago Mayor Daley, police torture & his 30-year cover-up of it
2015: Leo Barnes, accused of double murder in UK
April 2015: Lord Janner, child sex abuse (9 days after signing letter wanting to continue to be in the House of Lords)
May 2015: Oskar Groening, Auschwitz bookkeeper in murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews trial
______
May 13, 2015
April 29, 2015
BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL: 2 MAY GIGS
Pleased to say I'm making two live appearances next month - one in Dorset and one in Suffolk. Details:
Friday May 15, 7.30pm
BLANDFORD FORUM
BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL
Coade Hall, Bryanston School
Blandford Forum, Dorset DT11 0PX
tel: 01258 484623 or boxoffice@bryanston.co.uk
admission free but please book
Sunday May 17, 7.30pm
BURY ST. EDMUNDS FESTIVAL
BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL
The Hunter Club Main Hall
6 St Andrews Street South
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk IP33 3PH
tel: 01284 758000 or
https://www.buryfestival.co.uk/whats-on/event/1443/bob-dylan--the-history-of-rock-n-roll
£12 but only £5 for under-25s; Festival Friends get discount
Friday May 15, 7.30pm
BLANDFORD FORUM
BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL
Coade Hall, Bryanston School
Blandford Forum, Dorset DT11 0PX
tel: 01258 484623 or boxoffice@bryanston.co.uk
admission free but please book
Sunday May 17, 7.30pm
BURY ST. EDMUNDS FESTIVAL
BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL
The Hunter Club Main Hall
6 St Andrews Street South
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk IP33 3PH
tel: 01284 758000 or
https://www.buryfestival.co.uk/whats-on/event/1443/bob-dylan--the-history-of-rock-n-roll
£12 but only £5 for under-25s; Festival Friends get discount
