Alvin Lee, RIP

The music lists are full of notices about the death of guitarist Alvin Lee, whose greatest claim to fame was probably 11 minutes of guitar pyrotechnics in the film 'Woodstock'. David Hepworth was quicker on the ball than I to write about this.

My major connection with Lee was in December 1969, only a few months after Woodstock, when I went to see his group, Ten Years After, along with Blodwyn Pig and Stone the Crows. I've written about this before, but from the outlook of BP. I was familiar with some of the TYA material - I had heard their album 'Sssh' and had sniggered over the lyrics of 'Good morning, little schoolgirl' - and was to understand the connection between the riff and rock music from TYA.

A few months later, I was to buy their next album, 'Cricklewood Green' and even the one after that ('Watt'), but the writing was already on the wall: all the songs sounded the same and they were all based on the twelve bar blues. In my defense, I will note that I was only 13 at the time of the concert, and 13 year olds were much more callow in the late 1960s than they were in the late 2000s. 

That period was climaxed by their single 'Love like a man': one side of the record played at 45 rpm whereas the other side (a live recording from the Fillmore East, IIRC) played at 33rpm; this live recording was about seven minutes long. The single version was actually an edit from a longer, studio, version which appeared on 'Cricklewood Green', but I think that the live version was the best of all three. I have a memory from about March 1970 of fixing a pickup onto a cheap acoustic guitar whilst listening to this song (along with 'Hot Rats' by Frank Zappa) and learning how to play it.

I read an article a few days ago which was written in response to the death of Kevin Ayers; the author was writing about the different generations of rock musicians who were dying. He noted sardonically that soon it will be the turn of the punk rockers - and unfortunately the only thing which I share with them is a similar year of birth: John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten, the Sex Pistols, is six months old than I am [A few days later, I remember that John Lydon also liked Van der Graaf Generator, which means that we have something else in common]