TL-DR Dept. - Bendigo Wonglepong Struggles To Remember A Gig

Say hi! to Bendigo Wonglepong, who pops his literary cherry with this bittersweet reminiscence of a gig he's pretty sure he went to because it's in his diary.

Bendy's high school year book photo, possibly.

I’ve seen a few mismatches. Paolo Nutini supported by Marth Wainwright at the Eden Project comes to mind. I saw Sha Na Na supported by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown at the Kursaal in Southend. The Canvey Island Teds who had flocked in, apparently oblivious to the fact that Sha Na Na were at the piss-taking end of the rock ‘n’ roll spectrum, showed their disapproval of the hippie shit they were being subjected to by lobbing empty beer cans at Arthur right through his set, even when he set fire to his head.

The Irish Rovers [left - Ed.] were the only group to include Siamese Twins in their line-up  - Paddy and Pat Shellaighoighly played the banjo together.

But the Irish Rovers supported by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band probably takes the biscuit. This was at a nightclub called the Ice House in Glendale, California (DVV’s [Don Van Vliet - Ed.] home patch as it happens), sometime between June 28 and July 3, 1966, it says here. I was doing the then-obligatory 99 days for $99 Greyhound trip round the States and had wound up in Glendale staying with a GI bride friend of my mother’s. It was her daughter who (rather sulkily) took me on this pulsating night out. Not that I was expecting much anyway; I was taking a snooty view of any music that had come my way. My head was probably turned by the adulation I got from girls when I offhandedly revealed that I’d seen the Beatles, twice, and hinted that I might actually, you know, know them…Over several nights in San Francisco I had passed up the chance to see the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company on the grounds that they couldn’t possibly be as good as the Stones or the Yardbirds [Haw! Wotta sap! - Ed.].

The Captain and his crew weren’t as good as the Stones or the Yardbirds either. Noisy and shambolic, they were pretty much your basic blues covers band, with DVV channelling Howlin’ Wolf or John Lee Hooker (and Worzel Gummidge) while giving his gob iron a serious thrashing. There was some nice slide guitar, but not from Ry Cooder, sadly (this is hindsight – I’d never heard of him then). I have no memory of what they played, but it presumably included ‘Diddy Wah Diddy’, their first single, which had come out a few months before. There’s an ex-bootleg on Spotify called Live at the Avalon Ballroom, recorded around the time I saw them, which gives a good idea of how they sounded – which, I have to say, is considerably better than I remember. Their gig list at this time shows that they were already regulars at the Fillmore West and the Whisky A-Go-Go, where they were supported by Buffalo Springfield & The Doors, amazingly, and they’d even done a gig at the Hollywood Bowl with the Beach Boys. So colour me snooty, as usual…

Then, with a crashing of gears that could probably be heard in Santa Monica, the Irish Rovers. I remember them being very jolly and very Irish. Over the years I’ve re-outfitted them in my mind in white fishermen’s sweaters, but on the cover of their first album, Live at the Ice House, 1966, they are correctly dressed in green. (This is a different Ice House, in Pasadena, still going, remarkably). If the track list is any guide, they sang ‘The Irish Rover’, as well as those traditional Irish staples ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ and ‘Donald Where’s Your Troosers’. It’s an odd experience, listening to them again; what they do, they do well, but what they do is no more my sort of thing now than it was then – less so, if anything.

I don’t remember the audience rebelling at either of these acts, so perhaps the pairing seemed less weird than it does now. I kept a diary of the trip, but all that day’s entry says is ‘Saw Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band and the Irish Rovers.’ If I’d known that someone would be interested 54 years later I might have made some notes [Bless! - Ed.]. 

Recreate the heady ambience of that mythic Ice House gig in the comfort of your own yurt by illegally downloading the two - count 'em! two! - swell record albums by the featured acts!