Dicing with the shaman-huckster

LONDON – One of the first rock festivals in the UK to result from collaboration between independent radio and local media is underway in Birmingham.

It is a three-week, eight-concert event sponsored by BRMB radio and the Birmingham Evening Mail newspaper. Called "Brumrock '76", the festival is centred at Birmingham's 3,500-seater Ringley (sic) hall.

Among the name acts involved in "Brumrock '76" are the Runaways, girl rock team from the US, Budgie, Mott, Long Star, Gong, Alan Price, and Marvin Gaye. One concert was devoted to four Birmingham-based groups, Bandy Legs, Slender Loris, Magnum, and City Boy.

Promoter is rock journalist Karl Dallas, who says: "It is the first time an event on such a scale has been organised with a specific purpose to spotlight the wealth of talent on the local rock scene. The collection of bands rivals and possibly surpasses the London pub-rock scene."

Billboard magazine, October 9, 1976

Dicing with the shaman-huckster

The phone rings.

There is a collect call from a Mr Kim Fowley in Los Angeles, USA. Will you accept the charges?

Tell Mr Fowley that I am here and prepared to speak to him if he cares to call me. But I will not accept the charges.

I knew about Kim Fowley's reputation for long-winded collect calls. There's a salutary moment in the rather sanitised film version of Cherie Currie's take on the Runaways story, when the band complain about having to play for nothing at an early gig.

Yeah, replies Fowley. But I ran up a huge phone bill there they'll have to pay for.

I'd not even known of Fowley's involvement when my friend, the mod photographer Steve Sparkes, suggested we bring the Runaways over for their first foreign tour. It was the high and low point of my attempt to move from journalism into concert promotion.

I'd had so much success with organising benefits for organisations as different from each other as the African National Congress and Sam Wanamaker's Globe Playhouse Trust, that I thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that I could apply the same talents to the commercial world. How wrong I was! And not just because I didn't have the required killer shark instinct that could make me a successful businessman in the capitalist world another part of me was dedicated to overthrowing.

Musically, I think my events worked. I recall that when I had the audience standing on their seats and cheering Alan Price to the echo, he asked me in some mystification: How did you do it, Karl? They hate me here.

"Here" was Birmingham, home not only to my friends in the Ian Campbell Folk Group, but of Black Sabbath and (later) Duran Duran and UB40 (which was to include two of Campbell's sons). I'd been approached, by what James Joyce called a commodious vicus of recirculation, by the Birmingham Post & Mail, who were seeking a use for the near-derelict Bingley Hall, which they'd booked for their "Ideal Homes" exhibition before deciding to move it to the newly-opened National Exhibitions Centre, down the road and off the M42.

This was going to be the big-time! But this, also, when I suffered the crisis of self-confidence that, ultimately, was to scupper the whole enterprise, and my career as a promoter.

What, after all, did I know about big-time festival promotion? I'd been at Isle of Wight, when my friend Mickey Farren and his band of anarcho-fascists had trashed the fences and turned it into a financial and social disaster. Woodstock? No, but I had talked to dozens of people, from Arlo Guthrie and John Sebastian down to Mike Wadleigh, director of the movie that made more money than the event it was recording, and the logistics were quite beyond me. Or so I thought.

(Many years later, I was to lecture business students at Liverpool University on whether the music business was an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.)

But I had friends, didn't I? Notably, the aforesaid Sparkes, with whom I formed the foredoomed Ragnarok Productions, forgetting (if I ever knew at that time) that the Ragnarok myth depicted the end of all things in the twilight of the gods.

Steve had HIS friends, so I recruited them all to look after things I knew nothing about, like negotiating with the bands I wanted booked, sound and lighting, security. But, as the saying goes, with friends like them who needs enemies? I was shafted so many times I discovered I had orifices I didn't even know about. Would you believe that my security staff were selling counterfeit tickets to my big bill-topper, Marvin Gaye, around the pubs in the town?

Gaye was someone I booked, when most of the acts the "experts" came up with (Budgie?) couldn't have filled a parish hall, never mind the 3,500 seats I needed to sell just to break even. Too late in the day, I started ringing round. Steeleye? Fairport? Arlo Guthrie? Country Joe? Zappa?

If we'd known earlier, Karl, we could have fitted in a gig, but now it's too late.

The whole thing ended up in threats of legal actions, suits and counter-suits, which never came to court because we were all, basically, penniless.

Anyway, back to Kim Fowley.

Steve Sparkes came up with news of this sensational all-girl band he'd heard about, and I persuaded the Post & Mail to spring for an air ticket for him to fly over to whatever godawful gig they were playing at that early stage in their careers.

When he returned, waving a contract, it became clear that Steve's ambitions were to go into management on his own account, stealing them from the redoubtable Fowley, who had more or less manufactured them, just as he had manufactured the Hollywood Argyles (Alley Oop), B. Bumble & the Stingers (Nut Rocker), and other such ephemera. Actually, at that time, the only thing I knew about him was that he had sung on Frank Zappa's Freak Out album (Help I'm a Rock), since his creations weren't really my scene.

It was a strange deal, bearing in mind the band's growing reputation as a bunch of rebels. The contract's rider was that their mums had to accompany them as chaperones (where were the dads? I didn't care to ask), so any ideas any of us might have had of getting into Cherie Currie's whaleboned corset were absolutely out.

They took one look at Birmingham's then burgeoning rock scene (my main reason for taking an interest in the whole deal) and decided it wasn't freaky enough for the image they were creating in that pre-punk world at the time. In those days I'd taken to drinking with Tony Iommi, Ozzy, and the rest of the Sabbs, and could probably have got them some useful work.

The thing about the Runaways was that, contrary to their reputation, these chicks could actually play! Dave Pegg, Fairport's bass-player, stared at drummer Sandy West in amazement. "Close my eyes and she sounds just like John Bonham," he opined.

Steve, by this time, was acting the grand impresario, even locking me out of my own caravan when I need to get to the phone. So when Fowley came on the line, threatening doom and destruction (ie Ragnarok) for anyone who got in his way, I was so pissed with the whole deal that I let him ramble on, then put the phone down on him.

I had troubles of my own.

Steve, who knew of Fowley's reputation for dabbling in the black arts – and, of course, any successful huckster has got to be at least part-shaman – said that if he tried any of that not-quite nonsense on him, he knew how to construct a magical mirror to make the black karma rebound upon its creator.

Or something.