Daily Mail (13.6.15)
Bob Dylan was getting angry. The trailer he’d been given as a changing room didn’t have a loo. His pregnant wife, Sara, had mentioned it first, and now, as he waited a two full hours while a problem with the sound on stage was fixed, pre-show nerves were making him uncomfortable. He now needed the bathroom.
Outside two hundred thousand fans, who’d trecked from all over Britain to witness the Second Coming of the songwriter they then saw as the coolest man on the planet were also getting fractious.
This, therefore, was not the time for Dylan be told that the only loo for artists was somewhere out in the dark across the field. In his newly pressed, crisp white stage suit he didn’t like the sound of that.
In the end, he couldn’t wait any longer. Getting up, he relieved himself out of the window of the trailer, and then triumphantly took the stage at the Isle of White Festival of Music…
That night, August 31, 1969, is now remembered on nerdy lists as one of the most epoch making rock music nights ever. Was it? Well, I was there, and in some ways it was. But not because of the seventeen songs Dylan sang.
The fact that he was there at all, resurrected, as it were, from his three years of self-imposed isolation following a motorcycle accident, was what made it special, and what had acted as a magnet, not only to his fans, but also to British rock aristocracy.
There they all were paying homage just below the stage: a couple of Rolling Stones, two Pink Floyds, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Stevie Winwood, three Beatles and their wives – along with Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Roger Vadim, Lionel Bart and other assorted celebs of the time. Some of them had blankets wrapped around them, which was understandable because it was freezing cold.
Today, when we think of rock festivals, we envisage hi-tech, digitised Glastonbury events, where everything is televised, where thousands of mobile phones twinkle in the blackness, and where the stars are cossetted in state-of-the-art, en-suite trailers.
But, back then, rock festivals were in their infancy, and the midwives to this one were two young brothers on the Isle Of Wight called Foulk who’d had a crazy idea.
Which was: why don’t we invite the biggest singer-songwriter in the world, the man most difficult to reach, to be the headline act at a rock festival on an island off the south coast of England of which he’s probably never heard. The fact that they did invite him, and that he came, is what made that moment in August 1969 special.
It really was a mad idea. Why would any New York manager even bother replying to the organisers, two young brothers in their early twenties, whose experience of business was, at best, limited?
How could these boys ever get such a vast undertaking together? And whoever heard of anything big, new or exciting happening on the sleepy, genteel little Isle of Wight?
The Foulk brothers themselves, Ronnie, aged 24, and Ray Foulk, 23, didn’t know the answers to any of these questions, nor dozens more they asked themselves daily – not least, where, exactly, they were going to find the money to even begin their venture?
But, with the innocence of youth, they pursued their dream, discovered the name and address of Dylan’s manager in an Underground newspaper, and wrote their pitch. They may not have been sharp elbowed music businessmen, but they had one great thing going for them. Timing.
It was the end of Sixties, and they were both imbued with the boundless, youthful optimism of that time which said that anything was possible for those who tried – even if you lived in the back of beyond.
The story of how they achieved their dream has now been told by Ray Foulk in a memoir of sheer get-up-and go enterprise. Whatever the Foulk brothers lacked in experience, they made up for in energy – and maybe a little cheek, too.
Having both left their fee-paying boarding school in 1961 without an O-level between them, and been put to work, Ronnie in an estate agency, and Ray as an apprentice printer, six years later Ray had his own little print and design firm, a wife and twin daughters.
And, as both chairman and secretary of the West Wight CND since his teens, he knew all about organising events – albeit only jumble sales and dances. Nevertheless, it had been useful experience, and by 1968 he and his brother were ready for bigger things. Neither of them knew much about pop music, but slowly the idea of organising a little pop happening began to take shape.
So, convincing a farmer to mow a field of barley, the remaining stubble of which would prove painful to the bottoms of the festival goers, and them rent them the space, by August 1968 they’d put together their first trial run of a festival. With Jefferson Airplane, Fairport Convention and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown on the bill it attracted ten thousand fans, which was pretty impressive for what turned out to be a rehearsal – even though, as some ticket agencies didn’t pay them, it lost money
Dylan, a year later, would be the real thing. Hardly expecting a response from his management they were astonished when they weren’t rejected out of hand. Call us in another month, they were told.
They did. This time offering the great man an all expenses paid voyage on the maiden voyage of the QE2, a limousine, a manor house to stay in, a chauffeur, a cook and a governess for the Dylan children.
Bob wants to know more, came the reply. So, fibbing about their youth by adding two years each to their ages, they printed a whole brochure, displaying the delights of visits to the home of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Queen Victoria’s Osborne House, and mentioning some of the British groups who had already agreed to be at the festival – the Who, Joe Cocker, the Moody Blues.
Finally came the crunch. Money. Bob would come, but he wanted his musicians, The Band, to be with him, as well as singer-guitarist Richie Havens. In all, with expenses, that would cost $87,000 dollars, which, in today’s money would be around £470,000. Furthermore Bob wanted to meet Ray Foulk in New York – with his American lawyer.
Foulk didn’t even have an English lawyer, not one who knew the vagaries of showbiz, anyway. But even worse than that. He didn’t have a passport either. He’d never been abroad. Yet, somehow, by working the phones and his friends, he got both within three days, the local bobby countersigning his photograph to take to the Passport Office in London.
As for Dylan, he was as pleasant and quiet at the meeting as could be imagined. The only nervous moment came when Dylan’s manager suggested to Foulk that it was ‘time for little pot’ and offered him a joint.
Ray Foulk may have been about to put on Britain’s biggest rock festival ever, and he may have been 23 years old in 1969, but he was from the Isle of Wight, and he had never encountered drugs before in his entire life. He said ‘no thank you’.
They’d already rented the site of the festival near Wootton Bridge, so, now, back on the island, all Ray and Ronnie Foulk had to do was to find the money to pay for it all, to arrange the building of the stage, the hiring of the sound system, the fencing around the arena, the lights, the phone wires, the buses to ferry the fans to and from Ryde, the lavatories, the food concessions, the security, the insurance, the St Johns Ambulance people, and a hundred other things.
The design of the tickets and the advertising they left to their younger brother Bill Foulk and his enthusiastic friends from the Royal College of Art. Throwing themselves into the spirit of the project, the students came up with a motif of a King Kong gorilla with fairy wings on what looked like a psychedelic juke box with female bosoms on the front. Well, it was the Sixties!
At the end of the day they knew that ticket sales would pay for Dylan and the other acts, but until the ticket agencies paid up, investment had to be found to cover the guarantees. They got it of course, when the company hired to print the programmes decided to invest as did the printer’s rich next door neighbour, their mother and some friends.
With the first man landing on the moon in July, and the murders of Sharon Tate and company in Hollywood in mid-August, the summer of 1969 was quite an incident filled time. But the Foulks could have been forgiven if the only news story that was gathering their full attention was the US rock festival at Woodstock (not far from where Dylan lived) which occurred just
two weeks before their own extravaganza was launched.
The Woodstock organisers had secretly hoped that Dylan would suddenly turn up there. The Brothers Foulk had feared it. But by ignoring Woodstock in favour of Wootton Bridge, Dylan did what he most liked to do – the unpredictable. It also meant he didn’t get wet, Woodstock being famously remembered for days of torrential rain and mud. Although it was a bit nippy on the Isle of Wight, the rain kept off.
Not everything went according to plan, of course. The Dylans missed the maiden voyage of the QE2 and had to fly from New York, the grand house they’d been promised during their stay became unavailable so that stayed at a more modest but homely cottage type farmhouse. Nor did a top chef materialise for them, so they were fed on porridge, pies and plum crumbles.
They didn’t complain. On the contrary they seemed very happy there, with Dylan and John Lennon taking on George Harrison and Ringo Starr in a game of tennis – a sport none of them knew much about. And Dylan and George Harrison cementing their friendship by playing and singing the old Everly Brothers hit All I Have To Do Is Dream.
Meanwhile all roads led to Wootton Bridge as the Isle of Wight ferries and hovercrafts disgorged thousands upon thousands of fans, their sleeping bags and tents on their backs, some with bands around their heads, as they’d seen in the TV news from Woodstock.
Ever since then we’ve become accustomed to seeing the English lanes filled with festival pilgrims, all blushing with youth. But in 1969 the sheer numbers of them, with their jeans and hair, so much long hair, was new, and somehow exhilarating. It was all so harmless.
In those days before there were huge screens at festivals, most fans would have been too distant to see anything more than a tiny spec of a guy in a white suit on a stage a hundred yards away. And the songs the minstrel sang almost certainly sounded better on the records they had at home.
But that wasn’t the point to the fans. What was important was that they were there with their friends on the night Bob Dylan made his comeback on the Isle of Wight.
The show ended at just after eleven. And, as Dylan left the stage, outer fences were suddenly pulled down and free souvenir festival copies of the Evening Standard, which I’d written earlier that week, were used as kindling paper as little bonfires were lit, around which satisfied fans huddled to keep warm.
The Foulk brothers didn’t get rich out of their 1969 festival, although this time they didn’t lose money either. They did something better than that. They had the craziest dream and they made it come true.
(Stealing Dylan From Woodstock by Ray Foulk – with Caroline Foulk is published by Medina Publishing at £22.95)
