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Incredible String Band

The ISB inspires and uplifts me, still even today, more profoundly than any other individual or group of individuals that I have come across in this lifetime. I am posting some wonderful footage from a BBC documentary. I first came across it on youtube a few years ago, then one day I went to watch it again and the video had been removed. I was shocked. I searched and searched for another version of it and came up with nothing. I thought I might never get over the loss! Then, some time later, I stumbled on it again, and this time I downloaded it to my computer quick as you could say 'find the program'! At the end when the narrator (John Walters?) says: "God, I love them! I love them to this day!" it makes me cry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRegqLZvUWg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mntUCzabzo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPzF-nIXS3E


How great to find someone who loves the Incredible String Band! Thanks for these videos!
 
A bunch of us staff members from FCDC went to see them at the Cellar Door in Georgetwon one night in 1972 or 1973.

We got back into their dressing room after the concert.

The Org Officer at FCDC, Don Cooper, had done his training on the Apollo with one of the band members.

A pleasant time was had by all.

The Anabaptist Jacques

That had to have been an amazing experience! Although, I have to say, if I had ever been so fortunate as to find myself backstage with the ISB I would have rather been smoking pot with them, wearing a colorful costume of my own, rather than partying it up with a bunch of scientology staff members - including an ethics officer! Hahahahaha!
 
I thought that this album was a solo Mike Heron album.

I could be wrong.

Dart

You're not wrong. Smiling Men with Bad Reputations was Mike Heron's first solo LP. Although he wasn't totally solo, hehehe... what a crew he had along with him, including Pete Townsend and Keith Moon from The Who, Ronnie Lane from the Small Faces, Dr. Strangely Strange, and more!
 
Re: ISB

When I was on HQS at South Lake Tahoe Mission in 1972, a carload of us students piled in a car one Saturday and drove 3 hours to San Francisco to see ISB at the Palace of Fine Arts theater. We drove home immediately afterwards and slept in the following morning. They were worth it. All of us owned a few ISB albums. It was the hippy/Scientologist thing to be/do/have!

I was at that concert too!
 

Bluebell

Patron
The ISB inspires and uplifts me, still even today, more profoundly than any other individual or group of individuals that I have come across in this lifetime. I am posting some wonderful footage from a BBC documentary. I first came across it on youtube a few years ago, then one day I went to watch it again and the video had been removed. I was shocked. I searched and searched for another version of it and came up with nothing. I thought I might never get over the loss! Then, some time later, I stumbled on it again, and this time I downloaded it to my computer quick as you could say 'find the program'! At the end when the narrator (John Walters?) says: "God, I love them! I love them to this day!" it makes me cry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRegqLZvUWg


The name of the narrator is Billy Connolly.

In the beginning of clip 1 in the off he sounds exactly like the AGP - at least for non English ears

Anyway, thanks a lot for the videos :)
 

guanoloco

As-Wased
The ISB was a major influence on Jimmy Page and Robert Plant....the recorder duet in the intro to 'Stairway to Heaven' was a direct nod in their direction.

This article from Rolling Stone illustrates the fact:

http://www.sahej.com/Incredible-String-and-Led-Zeppelin.htm


To his credit, Bill Graham (Rock Impresario who opened the Fillmore East and Fillmore West) has put his 'vault' of recordings on line from those days. Registration is required, but there are some gems there, including this ISB performance from June 5th, 1968

http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/the-incredible-string-band/concerts/fillmore-east-june-05-1968.html

Not to be a Baker pendant or anything but this quote is suspect:

It you were listening attentively at the 1979 Zeppelin Knebworth gig you might have heard Plant say during his intro to The Land of Milk and Honey, "Along, long time ago, 1960 or whenever it was, me and Pagey got together at his house....and played through a load of material from the Incredible String Band."

In 1960 Plant was 12 and Page was 16 or 17...they didn't meet until '68 or something along those lines...a hell of a lot closer to 1970 than 1960.
 

Lone Star

Crusader
Not to be a Baker pendant or anything but this quote is suspect:



In 1960 Plant was 12 and Page was 16 or 17...they didn't meet until '68 or something along those lines...a hell of a lot closer to 1970 than 1960.

As an old Zep Head I'd like to indicate that your facts are correct.
 

Free Will

Patron with Honors
They played a gig at Stonelands, the UK main SO berthing building, at the end of 1972, just after I had joined. I saw it, but don't remember much about it.

Paul

Yes, Paul, this was a major experience for me, having just recently joined the Sea Org, and having followed the ISB since The 5000 Spirits all the way through dope, LSD, Tibetan Buddhism (Robin studied at Samye Ling in Dumfriesshire) and into Scientology. I was impressed by 2 double-page interviews in Melody Maker or NME where Robin said he had always been shy towards women and that Scn had finally handled this for him.
The gig in the ballroom was electrifying, as they were major icons in the hippy movement.

Unfortunately, their management had been taken over by Suzie Watson-Taylor, who was steering them towards electric rock as more commercial, but far less suitable for them than acoustic. Malcolm Le Maistre was being pushed forward as the main focus. I wasn't impressed by him.

I remember Robin said, either at the event or later that while playing he had exteriorised and watched the band from the other end of the room, where I was standing. That, and his personal audience with Hubbard, of course got me more hooked into Scn - even though I had felt their music had been deteriorating since their musical "U". I think Scn ruined them.

Years later, 1990, when I was living in Oxford, I met Robin and his wife Janet on a zebra crossing (he is still a cult figure in Celtic acoustic music circles) and was delighted when he smiled and said Hello as though recognising an old friend.

Sometimes I wish we'd all just stayed on the acid and weed. :yes:
 
Yes, Paul, this was a major experience for me, having just recently joined the Sea Org, and having followed the ISB since The 5000 Spirits all the way through dope, LSD, Tibetan Buddhism (Robin studied at Samye Ling in Dumfriesshire) and into Scientology. I was impressed by 2 double-page interviews in Melody Maker or NME where Robin said he had always been shy towards women and that Scn had finally handled this for him.
The gig in the ballroom was electrifying, as they were major icons in the hippy movement.
I knew them briefly - I met Likki in the New York Org HGC where she was getting her power processing - she was writing poetry. I saw some great concerts at the Filmore east - they really could hold a crowd's rapt attention. Later, I ran across Robin and Janet at AOLA and introduced them to Greg Heet (who invented the E-Bow). Greg was an inventor of electronic musical instruments, and one of them - the voice sitar (a precursor of the E-Bow) the ISB used in their double album U. Mimsey's claim to fame!

I played the grooves off The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and Wee Tam and the Big Huge my favorite ISB albums.

Mimsey

[video=youtube;nu0brlGGQ2Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu0brlGGQ2Y[/video]

E-Bow in action

[video=youtube;UsiQgRp5bfQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsiQgRp5bfQ#t=66[/video]
 

Uk-86

Patron
LZ trivia

I recall Ms Frazer saying that when she approached one of the guys from Page & Plant - 1994 version that the response was:

'you're not a fucking Scientologist are you?'

Denial was strong and l hear she backed off.
Wonder how Hossam Ramzy kept it quiet from them as l think he toured with them!?
 

Veda

Sponsor
[?!], below, added.

Yes, Paul, this was a major experience for me, having just recently joined the Sea Org, and having followed the ISB since The 5000 Spirits all the way through dope, LSD, Tibetan Buddhism (Robin studied at Samye Ling in Dumfriesshire) and into Scientology. I was impressed by 2 double-page interviews in Melody Maker or NME where Robin said he had always been shy towards women and that Scn had finally handled this for him.
The gig in the ballroom was electrifying, as they were major icons in the hippy movement.

Unfortunately, their management had been taken over by Suzie Watson-Taylor, who was steering them towards electric rock as more commercial, but far less suitable for them than acoustic. Malcolm Le Maistre was being pushed forward as the main focus. I wasn't impressed by him.

I remember Robin said, either at the event or later that while playing he had exteriorised and watched the band from the other end of the room, where I was standing. That, and his personal audience with Hubbard [?!] , of course got me more hooked into Scn - even though I had felt their music had been deteriorating since their musical "U". I think Scn ruined them.

Years later, 1990, when I was living in Oxford, I met Robin and his wife Janet on a zebra crossing (he is still a cult figure in Celtic acoustic music circles) and was delighted when he smiled and said Hello as though recognising an old friend.

Sometimes I wish we'd all just stayed on the acid and weed. :yes:


Two posts that follow are from the other Incredible String Band thread, started as there were so many no longer functioning videos on the old thread.

I had mistakenly assumed that the ISB were exposed to Scientology before or during the creation of Big Huge and Wee Tam. I knew that Robin Williamson had been audited by Bent Corydon at St. Hill after Hubbard had left to become the Commodore of the floating insane asylum (as John McMaster called it) of the Royal Scotsman, a.k.a. the Apollo.

[?!] Free Will's comment that Robin Williamson had a "personal audience with Hubbard" is something I hadn't heard before. Did Robin visit the "flagship" as a paying public pc? Curious as to any further details on that. :)


Wee Tam and the Big Huge won't help with that argument, though, as it was written, recorded and in the music stores before they first encountered scientology.

They were publicly performing songs from it by March, 1968, and recorded most of it during the first three weeks of the following month. Douglas Traherne Harding was recorded on April 30, and was being performed publicly by May 13. (Some of the songs, such as The Iron Stone, had first been recorded as early as January '67, but weren't released until after they were re-recorded for WTatBH.) As the liner notes to their 5 June '68 concert recording state,

The remaining work on Big Tam and the Wee Huge was completed in June-July, with engineers polishing it in August, and it would be released in November. As their manager, Joe Boyd wrote, ISB first heard of scientology "one evening in the autumn of 1968, following a sell-out concert in New York."*
FME681127-HB.jpg

Their first scilon album would have been the logically named Changing Horses.

More Joe Boyd, talking about that period: "Another thing that worried me was the music. Slowly, over the two years following their encounter with Simons, ISB's output lost its inventiveness, its charm and the wild beauty of its melodies. They were more efficient in the studio, but there were fewer moments of surprise and inspiration. Songs began to sound much the same. Was this a natural decline after years of tremendously original output? Or was it Scientology?"
(Full Boyd interview at http://cosmedia.freewinds.be/media/articles/grn040197.html)

Since The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and Big Tam and the Wee Huge are usually singled out as their two greatest albums, and even Mike Heron prefers pre-Changing Horses material lately, I'd argue that Joe Boyd had reason for concern, since they never rose to that musical level again in their scilon period.
-----
*Some people have gotten confused, and decided that they must have been recruited after the much better known Fillmore East show of June 5th, but Boyd's detailed recollection of events shows that that's an error. "The first inkling I had of the events that followed came when the band's US agent telephoned me at my LA hotel. He wanted my approval to give the group all the cash that was due to them from the mini -tour of the east coast which we were just one concert away from completing. The request puzzled me. After all, I'd already given them what they had asked for as spending money, the hotel bill was taken care of, and we had agreed that the balance would be sent to the group's UK bank account. I called the Chelsea Hotel, where the band was staying, but could not find them." If you look over their tour schedule (http://rateyourmusic.com/list/koeeoaddi_there/an_incredible_string_band_timeline_/1/), that fits for their November 27 show, matching Boyd's recollection that in was in autumn, and their next-to-last show of an East Coast mini-tour, and inconsistent with their June schedule, where their Fillmore East show was the end of their US jaunt.

The deterioration in the music began with 'Changing Horses', which was the fifth album. As late as the autumn of 1969 they were still happily performing the (1968) music of Big Huge and Wee Tam and, at that time, did not seem to regard it as "mixing practices" or "R6 bank dramatization," etc. So, even though exposed to Scientology by then, the negative effects had not fully kicked in yet.

So you may be right about the date. I was under the impression that Robin Williamson was audited at St. Hill around 1967, but I could have been mistaken. Perhaps it was a little later.



So, the burst of creativity preceded Scientology involvement, but Scientology's minimal influence at that early stage - and with the ISB being pampered celebrities - may have been a stabilizing factor in allowing the group to work harmoniously together.

However, of course, under the continued and increasing influence of Scientology, the deterioration of the creative work continued.

Thanks for the additional info about the time lines. :)
 

Veda

Sponsor
-snip-

his personal audience with Hubbard, of course got me more hooked into Scn -

-snip

Hi Free Will,

Don't know if you'll see this, but I've found no evidence that Robin Williamson met with Hubbard. I think someone was pulling your leg, probably in an attempt to encourage you further in to Scientology.



 
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Free Will

Patron with Honors
Hi Free Will,

Don't know if you'll see this, but I've found no evidence that Robin Williamson met with Hubbard. I think someone was pulling your leg, probably in an attempt to encourage you further in to Scientology.



[video=youtube;2xgBs4RNXFA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xgBs4RNXFA[/video]

Hi Veda,
I finally saw it!
It was the String Band who basically led me into Scientology (in 1972).
I know Robin went to the flagship.
I joined the SO at Saint Hill October 1972 (bringing my brother Alistair and 2 other acid-tripper friends, all ISB fans).
Sometime soon after that I saw a photo of Robin sitting at a dinner table with Hubbard on the Apollo. Robin looked in total awe of Hubbard, like in the presence of God. I believe he had cut off his hippy long hair (like I did). It's a faded memory now but I believe he played some music for "Source".
He wasn't much active in Scn after that. When I saw him at SH he looked unhappy, seemed to be getting PTS treatment. Same as Licorice, who had to do amends filing invoices in my accounts files in Treasury. She was very unhappy. I always wondered why no-one advised her to get her rotting teeth sorted.
But I'm pretty sure there's a photo somewhere of LRH patronising Robin, probably he was informed how many UK scinos idolised Robin.
I also remember at one point after he had gone solo, Robin came over to Stonelands to show a female auditor (name escapes me) some tricks on ther mandolin or similar stringed instrument, as I got to hear the cassette tape.
Scientology wrecked the ISB.
There's a possibility the photo was in one of the magazines.
Back then, all celebrities were used heavily in promotion and then quickly dumped when they (inevitably) lost interest.
 

Veda

Sponsor
Hi Veda,
I finally saw it!
It was the String Band who basically led me into Scientology (in 1972).
I know Robin went to the flagship.
I joined the SO at Saint Hill October 1972 (bringing my brother Alistair and 2 other acid-tripper friends, all ISB fans).
Sometime soon after that I saw a photo of Robin sitting at a dinner table with Hubbard on the Apollo. Robin looked in total awe of Hubbard, like in the presence of God. I believe he had cut off his hippy long hair (like I did). It's a faded memory now but I believe he played some music for "Source".
He wasn't much active in Scn after that. When I saw him at SH he looked unhappy, seemed to be getting PTS treatment. Same as Licorice, who had to do amends filing invoices in my accounts files in Treasury. She was very unhappy. I always wondered why no-one advised her to get her rotting teeth sorted.
But I'm pretty sure there's a photo somewhere of LRH patronising Robin, probably he was informed how many UK scinos idolised Robin.
I also remember at one point after he had gone solo, Robin came over to Stonelands to show a female auditor (name escapes me) some tricks on ther mandolin or similar stringed instrument, as I got to hear the cassette tape.
Scientology wrecked the ISB.
There's a possibility the photo was in one of the magazines.
Back then, all celebrities were used heavily in promotion and then quickly dumped when they (inevitably) lost interest.

Thanks for the information.

IMO, Robin never fully recovered from his involvement in Scientology.

Their music was unique and magical and, ultimately, Scientology hurt them.

Thank heavens we have the pre Scientology recordings, ending with Wee Tam and Big Huge.

There's another thread on the ISB. Between the two threads, the topic is pretty well covered.

Any new information is appreciated.
 

Veda

Sponsor
Mike Heron 2003:





"Mike Heron called his long term involvement in Scientology 'silly', because he should have seen, "that the control it exercised over me was stronger than anything I could have learned from it."
 
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