by James Wyllie
More mainstream service will be resumed at half past seven, with a solid set of foot-tapping boogie provided by CANNED HEAT, enlivened by the high falsetto blues of lead singer Bob Hite on “Going Up the Country” and “On the Road Again”. Midway through the set a rogue member of the audience will clamber up on the stage and embrace him, before the pair share a cigarette and dance together. MOUNTAIN, on at nine, will be offering straight-ahead rock. You, like the band, will be beginning to battle the drizzle that is turning into rain, but hang in there: at half past ten THE GRATEFUL DEAD are coming on. The band have spent the last two hours embroiled in a gigantic row over getting paid in cash upfront, during which time the stage has morphed into one vast puddle. Certainly when recollecting the night the group will not claim it to have been their finest hour, but for many the oddball noodling, jamming and riffling amongst short-circuiting electrical equipment seems a pretty standard night out with The Dead. Things will come to an abrupt halt during their fifth song, “Turn on Your Love Light” when the amps will overload and switch off.
The rain will calm down for the rest of the night, allowing an amazing succession of artists to take the stage in the early hours of Sunday morning. Do not miss CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL performing a storming set of their Louisiana swamp blues – it won’t feature on the movie of the festival, as the band refuse to be filmed. JANIS JOPLIN AND THE KOZMIC BLUES BAND will be clearly the worse for wear, having consumed an enormous quantity of champagne, but Janis’s slurred blues howl on the encore “Ball and Chain” will be electrifying. Half-past-three brings SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE, California’s freewheeling multi-ethnic alchemists of soul, psychedelic rock and funk. You will notice by now that the vast majority of the crowd have curled up, flaked out and gone to sleep, in their sleeping bags, if they have them. However, the band’s ecstatic and literal performance of “Gonna Take You Higher” will get even the most comatose on their feet and dancing. THE WHO are up next at 5am, as ostentatious, bombastic and loud as befits a set built on their rock opera Tommy. Look out for Abbie Hoffman, who will take the stage just after “Pinball Wizard”. He will grab a stage mike and deliver a rambling speech about the imprisoned leader of the White Panthers. Pete Townshend, The Who’s guitarist, will smack him with the back of his guitar and knock him off the stage.
The dawn will break to the accompaniment of the eerie, eclectic sound of San Francisco’s trippy-dippy JEFFERSON AIRPLANE. Guitarist Paul Kantner will recall, ‘The crowd was into it once they were awake. There were just a lot of people sleeping-bagged out. People were crashing and burning.’ So do try and wake up before their closing number “White Rabbit” sends you off into a surreal wonderland of half-sleep and dreams.
SUNDAY, 17 AUGUST
On Sunday morning you may find yourself and your neighbours a little slow to get going. The stage will follow suit, with nothing until 2pm when JOE COCKER AND THE GREASE BAND will appear. First the band, all tripping on LSD, will be loosening up with a few instrumentals and then the stuttering shambling Cocker will join them. They will amble through Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” and “I Shall be Released” but hit their peak with a sensational heartfelt take on “With a Little Help From My Friends”. You should probably stay right to the end of the set, but be alert: slate-grey storm clouds will be gathering behind the stage. As the applause rings out, the winds and the rain will arrive. They are going to lash you and everyone else for the next hour or so. If you do stick around, you can enjoy the forlorn attempts of the MC and the crowd to turn back the elements chanting, ‘No Rain, No Rain’. There is also the opportunity of some serious mudslide lunacy at the top of the hill.
REMEMBER WHAT WE SAID ABOUT NOTING JUST WHERE YOU LEFT YOUR CAR? YOU DON’T WANT TO RELIVE THE WHOLE ’70S, DO YOU?.
The rains will let up after five o’clock. By six the sun will be shining again, and if you are hawk-eyed you will see a small bespectacled figure, pipe in hand, walking up to the microphone. MAX YASGUR’S SPEECH is one of the highlights of the day. The assembled multitudes will feel an immense wave of good vibrations and love as his voice rings out with the words ‘I think you have proven something to the world – that half a million kids can get together have three days of fun and music and nothing but fun and music. And God bless you for it.’ Then it’s back to the music, with COUNTRY JOE AND THE FISH rehashing Joe’s set from Saturday lunchtime, this time as a band. Just after eight o’clock the pace will be cranked up by British blues rockers TEN YEARS AFTER, with a pumping version of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning Little School Girl”, and the manic but articulate guitar of Alvin Lee on “I’m Going Home”.
You may well be flagging at this point, so it is good to know that the mood is about to become more sedate and reflective. THE BAND, who have recently made their first album without Bob Dylan, put in a strong folk-rock set, notable for “The Weight” which everyone knows from the Easy Rider movie. JOHNNY WINTER’s blues-rock guitar starts on the midnight hour and this albino Texan axeman should carry you through to the spacey jazz rock of BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS at half past one on Monday morning. Stamina will be further rewarded when at three o’clock the recently formed CROSBY, STILLS AND NASH sit gingerly on their high stools and open with an immaculate version of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” with soaring pitch-perfect harmonies and sweet and melancholy melody. After their own acoustic set they will be joined by the enigmatic, bad-tempered but extraordinary NEIL YOUNG, first playing a duet with Stephen Stills before they all play a short electric set including the haunting “Long Time Gone”.
Dawn is coming. You have been lulled into an ethereal dream by the plaintive harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash. You may be simply mud-caked, rain-battered and exhausted, but there are still five hours to go and the PAUL BUTTERFIELD BLUES BAND is going to get you there. Starting at six in the morning they will be serving up a set of uptempo Chicago white-boy blues, with talking guitars and wailing harmonica. If that isn’t enough musical caffeine for you SHA-NA-NA’s maniacal set of retro pop classics should be. Their all-singing all-dancing covers of “Jail House Rock” and “At the Hop” are unfeasibly upbeat for eight o’clock in the morning.
There is then an hour’s pause – for whatever you want man – before the finale. At just after 9am JIMI HENDRIX and a five-piece band will open with “Getting My Heart Back Together Again”. Two hours of wild psychedelic rock later, the amphitheater will feel like an abandoned battlefield. The crowd will have shrunk to less than 50,000, leaving a landscape of abandoned possessions, piles of rubbish and smouldering fires. In the midst of this Hendrix will announce that he is ‘just jamming’ before unleashing his extraordinary version of the “Star-Spangled Banner” and closing with a spine-tingling rendition of “Hey Joe”. You are witnessing musical history.
PART TWO
MOMENTS THAT MADE HISTORY
The Execution of Charles I
TUESDAY 30 JANUARY 1649 LONDON
THE DAY KING CHARLES I WALKED TO THE scaffold and put his neck on the chopping block was a truly momentous one. For centuries, a monarch’s claim to absolute power had rested on the Divine Right of Kings – their authority rubber-stamped by the Almighty, placing them just below God and making them untouchable by their subjects. Charles’s execution definitively demonstrated that this was no more than a spurious excuse for an individual to lord it over everybody else purely because of their genetic inheritance.
Of course, Charles was not the first monarch to meet a violent end; sibling rivalries, dynastic feuds, foreign interlopers, warfare and plain old coups d’état accounted for many a royal. But he was the first since ancient Rome to be killed in defence of a political principle – that principle being the sovereignty of Parliament and, by extension, the people who elected it. So began a process that would lead inexorably to the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution soon after, shattering the illusion of monarchical power and bequeathing a world where kings no longer rule the roost.
On this 24-HOUR TRIP y
ou will join the crowds at the place of execution and witness a moment that sent shock waves through European society. You will also get to sample the charged atmosphere of a city on the edge of the unknown; some dreaming of the end of this world and of a new improved one, others fearful of what was to come.
BRIEFING: THE ENGLISH CIVIL WARS
Early on the morning of 6 December 1649, Colonel Pride and a regiment of foot soldiers congregated around the HOUSE OF COMMONS in Westminster. Pride held in his hand a list of parliamentary MPs who were to be barred from entering the building. He and his men excluded around 180 MPs (100 had already fled the capital) and arrested 45 of them.
Eighteen months previously England’s first Civil War had ended in victory for Parliament’s New Model Army. However, King Charles, despite being their prisoner, had not given up hope of regaining his power and nor had his supporters, who engineered a series of regional revolts, known to later historians as the SECOND CIVIL WAR; this lasted from May 1648 until the end of August when Colchester, the last Royalist outpost, fell after a long siege. Nevertheless, Charles still believed he could come out on top, encouraged by the fact that a majority of MPs favoured a compromise settlement.
But THE ARMY had other ideas. Some 40,000 strong, it was the most radical force in the country and saw itself as the guarantor of the revolution. It also viewed Charles as a criminal, responsible for the 200,000–300,000 lives lost in the wars. When Parliament refused to discuss its bill of rights, the GRAND REMONSTRANCE, 7,000 troops marched on London and occupied it on 2nd December.
Parliament refused to be bullied and on 4 December, after an all-night session, it voted to continue negotiations with the King. The next day, a meeting of senior army figures led by HENRY IRETON, Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law, decreed that Charles had ‘betrayed the trust reposed in him and raised war against the nation to enslave it’. To enforce their will, they decided to remove the MPs that stood in their way. PRIDE’S PURGE, as it became known, left only 80 MPs – THE RUMP – in the House of Commons. They could be trusted to toe the party line over the King’s fate.
CHARLES IN THE DOCK, FACING THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE, WESTMINSTER PALACE, JANUARY 1649.
From then on, things moved fast. On 13 December, negotiations with the King were abandoned. On 2 January, after the House of Lords had rejected Charles’s impeachment, the Army padlocked the Lords’ Chamber and proceeded without them. The Rump then voted for the King’s trial to proceed.
The trail began on 20 January. Charles’s defence rested entirely on the DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS: ‘no earthly power can justly call me, who am your King, in question as a delinquent … on the contrary, the authority of obedience unto Kings is clearly commanded in both the Old and New Testament’. After three days during which he persistently refused to plead or recognise the legitimacy of the court, Charles was removed. There followed two days of witness testimony – thirty individuals who all attested to the King’s direct involvement in the bloodshed of the Civil Wars.
After further deliberation, the verdict came on 27 January: Charles was found ‘guilty of all treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs to this nation, acted and committed in the said wars’, and sentenced to death ‘as a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good people of this nation’.
THE TRIP
You will arrive at 2pm on Monday 29 January 1649 at your lodgings on ST MARTIN’S LANE, about half a mile from the Parliament building. You’ll have a few hours of daylight to explore your surroundings.
MONDAY 29 JANUARY
Apart from the execution, there will be not be much in the way of entertainment to be found. The theatres have been shut for seven years and, even though four reopened briefly at the New Year, they were quickly shut down again by the Army, who arrested any actors that resisted. Other common recreational pastimes – wrestling, archery, shooting and animal baiting – are all proscribed, too.
Walking the city streets, you will notice the effects of the precipitous decline in living standards caused by the war; prices are sky-high and wages are low. The exodus of Charles’s court, his Royalist followers and the nobility in general, is reflected in the lack of luxury items in the denuded shops – gold and silver jewellery, ornate clocks, silk and satin garments have disappeared from view – and the barren state of the usually bustling markets. The disruption of food supplies is currently chronic; much of the countryside is laid to waste and there are shortages of beef, fish and dairy products.
OFF WITH HIS HEADS! CHARLES IN TRIPLICATE BY ANTHONY VAN DYCK.
These deprivations will add an edge to a city gripped by feverish political and theological debate over the King and what the future will be like without him. Walk into any TAVERN and you will be entering a hotbed of argument and discussion. Before you do, we suggest to get right up to date with the issues and how they are being perceived. The easiest way to do this is to buy a NEWSPAPER. There are six established licenced weeklies, plus three new pro-Army papers – A Perfect Summary, The Army’s Modest Intelligencer and The Kingdom’s Faithful Servant – which have been rushed into print in the last few weeks to meet the public’s insatiable appetite for news. The mostly widely read rag is A Perfect Diurnall, out today. It is cautiously pro-Parliament, with a circulation of around 3,000 copies.
To get a more radical perspective, look out for the latest edition of The Moderate, edited by GILBERT MABBOT, who was appointed chief censor by the Army in 1647; it supports THE LEVELLERS, a loose conglomeration of agitators demanding a thorough levelling of society that will eradicate inequality and give everybody the vote. Their ideas are popular with soldiers, craftsmen, artisans, apprentices and London’s labouring poor. The Moderate also contains the most detailed reporting of the King’s trial. You may also find yourself being handed a copy of one of the three illegal ROYALIST PAPERS – Mercurius Melancolicus, Mercurius Elemticus and Mercurius Pragmaticus – whose editors are all fugitives. Each copy is secretly printed on small, movable presses and distributed by a network of hawkers who risk being whipped if caught.
To hear these views expressed out loud, make your way to ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, where the Presbyterian preacher OBADIAH SEDGEWICK will be delivering passionate sermons in defence of Charles. Alternatively, over in Whitehall, you will see HUGH PETER, the populist Army chaplain, promoting the Republican cause. On most street corners you will also find PAMPHLETS expressing both sides of the argument; two of the most representative are John Goodwin’s pro-Army Right and Might Well Met, and the Royalist Might Overcoming Right.
Everywhere you go, it will be hard to avoid the BEGGARS clogging up the streets – destitute rural workers who have flocked to the city in search of sustenance, limbless veterans, and war widows with their starving orphans. Also hard to miss will be signs of the Army’s presence; COVENT GARDEN PIAZZA, home to exclusive mansions that were built for the elite during the 1630s, is now being used as an open-air stable for the cavalry’s horses, all tethered up to ‘the doors of noblemen’s, Knights’ and gentlemen’s houses’.
CLOTHING, ROOMS AND FOOD
Your choice of clothes is political. CAVALIER FASHIONS – elaborate ruffs, extravagantly designed satin tunics, expensive accessories and flowing locks – are a no-no, unless you want to be labelled an ungodly Royalist. To fit in with the crowd, you will be dressed in the simple, plain outfits associated with the PURITAN MOVEMENT (contrary to received wisdom, black is not the predominant look: black dyes were prohibitively expensive and faded quickly). WOMEN TRAVELLERS, your hair cut short and covered by a linen cap, will wear a MURREY (mulberry) coloured high-necked woollen smock, a wide white collar with a subtle hint of lace embroidery and Dutch-style wooden clogs. MEN will wear a dull-green, ankle-length thick wool jacket, a black top hat to conceal your cropped hair, and suitably worn-in brown leather boots.
ROOMS
We have rented you a room in a lodging house at CECIL COURT off St Martin’s Lane, and a tabling contract has been si
gned which obliges the resident servants to prepare you at least one meal a day. To keep your room warm and the winter chill at bay (it’s so cold the Thames is frozen over), we have managed to get some highly sought-after coal; due to the war it is a rare commodity. Most folks are relying on wood to keep the home fires burning, but even though the Royal Forests have been stripped bare, there is not enough to go around. People are so desperate they are taking timber from wherever they can find it; you will notice missing doors, posts, seats, benches and railings.
DINNER
DINNER is at 6pm. Given the food shortages, don’t expect anything fancy. You will be served POTTAGE, a primitive stew that is the main source of nourishment in these difficult times. Made by boiling grain in water to create a thick gruel, your pottage will include a small amount of beef, acquired with some difficulty, and some root vegetables that may well have seen better days. A loaf of bread – supplies are currently adequate, though fear of famine is mounting after a series of bad harvests and an exceptionally wet summer – will help mop it all up.