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Hooray for Hollywood
Bob Colover was at the Dead's first ever UK appearance.
Movie camera, and tape recorder, to hand...

24th May 1970, the day after my 17th birthday. Hollywood Festival, outside
Keele near to Newcastle under Lyme. I had heard Live Dead a couple of times:
my friend's brother living in the States sent import LPs over. We had hung
round One Stop and similar record shops in the West end, I could never
afford to buy imports, but my friends had. We'd seen Pink Floyd and Fairport
Convention [with Sandy Denny] weeks after What We Did On Our Holidays came
out, at our local hall at Bromley Tech , and had been to see Dylan at the
IOW in 69, but this was the first big gig of 1970.

Also we had got fed up with paying for tickets. The scam went like this: imagine
a fledgling rock magazine, imagine calling it 'Offshoot'. Imagine press tickets
coming free for us as offshout journos getting press passes to see the Dead.
It all came true. No one ever asked to see a copy of the magazine, if anyone asked
we were collecting material for our first issue. I caught a night train out of
Euston to Stoke on Trent and walked the 7 miles past Keele to the campsite
laden down with a reel-to- reel recorder and a Standard 8 cine camera. We got
into the site early on the 23rd. Saw Screaming Lord Sutch, Family, Mungo
Jerry and Ginger Bakers Airforce.  Good time had by all.

Sunday 24th: Quintessence, Colosseum as a warm up. We had been taking advantage
of the press passes and hooked up with a local radio person. We had also wangled 10
minutes with the Dead for an interview in their backstage caravan. Ridiculous really for
a non-existent magazine represented by two spotty 17 year olds[just] and no street cred,
but plenty of bluff.  Ridiculous questions:

What sort of bands do you think are up and coming?
Jerry : I don't know, I don't keep up with other bands
What sort of questions do you hate being asked?
Jerry:  All of them....

(Etc etc. ) A dream turning into a wasted opportunity nightmare... I was star struck from the
first second. A short afternoon set and they were gone ...having payed Dark Star and The
Other One.The evening finished with Mungo Jerry again, and Jose Feliciano!

Best memorabilia: putting the Standard 8 film on video and having 3 minutes of  that first Sunday
afternoon [no soundtrack though] available for posterity. The full interview was printed in
Spiral Light 27, and mighty embarrassing it is!

(c) images and text Bob Colover 1970/1998
 

More at the ever-excellent British Rock Festivals site, where the
Hollywood page  has more of Bob's stills.

Eyes of the World
billpannifer@easynet.co.uk