West Bruce & Laing / Free / Dr Hook & The Medine Show

Woof Nov 08, 2023

Dr Hook were absolutely awful. They were a joke. I’d been looking forward to seeing Free, but when they came on stage, Paul Rogers announced that the guitar player was not going to appear. “He’s very sick.” Loud boos followed and they stumbled through maybe four tunes with Rogers playing keyboards and singing. West Bruce & Lang came on and I was a big Jack Bruce fan. We were maybe 15 feet from the stage looking up at him. They were very loud and at one point Bruce was coaxing feedback from his bass. Laing had a heavy playing style, regularly breaking a stick and smoothly grabbing another. I’d never seen a drummer like that and I was like a deer caught in the headlights. Heavy is the word for Lesley West. Bruce announced that Lesley was “-the greatest guitar player in the world!” Incredulously, I said out loud, “Better than Clapton?”
My first concert and I audio recorded it on my little mono Craig cassette machine. (To my absolute horror, the recording was later destroyed without my knowledge.) I went with my GF. It was “festival seating” and the place was jam packed. It was a rowdy crowd and we were standing on the dance floor -stage right, right in the middle of it. At one point, somebody fell (or was pushed) off the balcony and it was a long drop to the floor. Later, someone was throwing cherry bombs or some other really loud firecrackers into the crowd. My GF started crying and we (I) reluctantly left during W,B & L doing “Playing With Fire”. As we went around back to the parking lot, they were video recording (single fixed b/w camera -from stage right) with a mobile truck parked right up close to the back of the venue.