Within the grounds of a stately house in Hertfordshire, on July 20, 1974, £2.75 purchased you almost 12 hours of leisure. It was offered by the Allman Brothers Band, Van Morrison, the Doobie Brothers, the Mahavishnu Orchestra that includes John McLaughlin and Jean-Luc Ponty, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, and Tim Buckley. The event was the Bucolic Frolic, in any other case generally known as the first-ever rock competition at Knebworth.
The all-day Saturday live performance marked the primary time that the house of Victorian novelist Edward Bulyer Lytton had been opened to the general public for such an occasion. For greater than a decade to return, enormous multi-artist reveals turned de rigueur on the location, which has once more reverberated to the sound of summer season concert events in newer years.
An estimated 60,000 individuals confirmed up for this flagship event. Who higher to headline it than one of many hottest rock bands in America? Whereas the Allmans had solely made a really tentative chart impression within the UK at that stage with the Brothers and Sisters album, British rock cognoscenti had been properly conscious that the LP had spent a mighty 5 weeks at No.1 in America the earlier September. The knew that the ABB had a status for epic, prolonged dwell performances, as marketed by their nice At Fillmore East dwell album of 1971.
Many festival-goers in Knebworth’s designated tenting space arrived in the course of the course of the earlier afternoon and night. The day of the live performance was greeted with high quality climate, and probably the most hanging settings ever seen for a UK rock occasion, with large oak bushes across the grounds. The viewers had been entertained by means of the day by the acoustic introspection of Buckley, the free-form jazz musings of Mahavishnu, the endearing antics of Alex Harvey and his band, the west coast rock of the Doobies and Morrison’s much-admired poetic depth.
However none of that would have ready the group for the reportedly record-breaking 60,000-watt PA system of the Allmans. Hardly ever off the highway, that they had been in Europe for a couple of days earlier than, arriving at Knebworth from a present on the Summer time Competition two days earlier than in Hilversum, Holland.
They roared into their set with “Wasted Words” (heard above a couple of months earlier, as with “Jessica” earlier than it, at Winterland in San Francisco) and Elmore James’ “Done Somebody Wrong” and “One Way Out.” Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts led the road because the band’s music unfold by means of the Hertfordshire countryside. Gregg introduced to the group that they had been going to play “every song we know.”
He was true to his phrase. The second set kicked off with “Statesboro Blues” because the present prolonged to some three hours in size. Muddy Waters’ “Trouble No More” led into the band’s instrumental anthem ‘Jessica,’ then two prolonged encores concluded with an enormous “Whipping Post” to ship the group house, or again to their tents, exhausted however pleased.
Purchase the Allman Brothers Band’s music on vinyl or CD now.
