MY JERICHO
Ray Foulk
The wild party
This meeting was held on March 04, 2020
For those of us just too young it was like the noise of a party in the distance that lasts for days: a disgrace, it should be stopped, though one was sort of sorry not to be there. Loud music and bowel movements in the sedate setting of the Isle of Wight.
An utter disgrace.
There were in fact three Isle of Wight Festivals: 1968, ’69 and ’70, organised by Ray Foulk, now of this parish, and his brothers. Commemorated in film and recordings and a series of books.
The first festival in 1968 “had a decent bill but drew only ten thousand people”. This led the Foulks to realise they needed one of the top musical acts in the world to draw people “across the water”.
That meant Elvis, the Beatles or Bob Dylan. All semi-recluses by 1969. Despite the tantalising 40-minute rooftop performance that appeared in the film Let It Be, it was Bob Dylan who was lured out of semi-retirement in Woodstock in Upstate New York to be the headline act at that year’s Isle of Wight Festival.
Ray Foulk’s brother had to go to London’s Charing Cross Road to buy an underground newspaper to discover the name of Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. Having obtained Grossman’s telephone number in America from international directory enquiries, they simply rang him up and over a period of months worked out a deal that involved the singer crossing the Atlantic on the QE2 with his family, staying in a manor house, playing onstage for an hour.
The hour-long set was about the only element of the deal literally delivered. Mr and Mrs Dylan flew the Atlantic without their children. He didn’t jam onstage with the Beatles.
Ray Foulk and his brothers were only in their twenties. Their intention was avowedly commercial though they were able to operate in an evolving market where there were few rules.
“It was amazing to be treated as serious people.”
There is a BBC news item here about this coup
The following year, 1970, the Isle of Wight Festival was even bigger, by some estimates attended by 600,000 people, one percent of the population of the British Isles. Though Ray Foulk seems sceptical about this figure.
The headliner was the plangent guitar god Jimi Hendrix who played for several hours in the Isle of Wight only to die of a drug overdose 18 days later in London.
The 1969 deal with Grossman had been £38,000 (equivalent to £750,000 today) for a job-lot including Dylan, The Band and Ritchie Havens. The following year the Foulks paid £10,000 for Jimi Hendrix.
The 1970 Festival didn’t just run into trouble from locals, but French anarchists and the countercultural left who believed music festivals should be free. At the end of the festival the Foulks stopped trying to sell tickets and the wall around the site was torn down.
After this they moved on to events at the Oval and Wembley Stadium in 1971 and ’72: “sites with ready-built walls”. The Oval pitch had to be covered by two acres of coconut matting.
“To be honest, my work as an environmental campaigner has been more important to me than the Isle of Wight Festivals.” Writing the books in conjunction with his daughter Caroline brought it all back to him.
There were a thousand objections to Ray Foulk’s converting the old Globe pub in Cranham Street to houses. But the resulting eco-houses proved very successful. “In the end the council gave us an award.”
At the culmination of Lindsay Anderson’s film If…. Mick Jagger assassinates Harold Macmillan with a bullet though the forehead. Reality has been different if no less piquant: the daughter of one dated the grandson of the other.
Mick Jagger and Ringo Starr got knighthoods, Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Ray Foulk most recently co-authored a novel, Picasso’s Revenge, with his daughter, speculating about the origins of the first Cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Picasso, like Dylan, was blessed with longevity. “Both complete gamechangers.”
Wow! As Bill Clinton would have said.
Report by: Roger Howe
John Mair and Ray Foulk
My Jericho offers a series of independent events organized by Jericho resident John Mair. Many are at at St Barnabas. Others are streamed on YouTube.
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