When this reviewer first saw the Woodstock movie at a midnight showing in the summer of 1970, the wildest reaction from those crammed into Bromley’s Astor cinema came not as Hendrix, Sly Stone and The Who exploded across the screen but when Alvin Lee announced, “This is a thing called ‘I’m Going Home’… by helicopter.”
A machine-gun burst of notes flew from his cherry red Gibson, and by the time the screen split into triplicate with close-ups of Lee’s fingers flying over the frets at the speed of light, we were all headbanging in the aisles.
Perhaps it was because Ten Years After were so relatable. We’d seen them just down the road at the Greyhound in Croydon, and their 1968 live album Undead, which included the first recording of “I’m Going Home”, captured them not in front of a half a million people in upstate New York but in a tiny club above the Railway Hotel, West Hampstead, from whence going home meant the last train on the Bakerloo line.
Tearing through the song like a rock’n’roll tornado, Lee incorporated “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” into 10 breakneck minutes of tumultuous sturm un drang which sound as visceral today as they did that night in a Bromley cinema.
What we were unaware of at the time was the drama behind TYA’s performance. Having taken a flight from St Louis at 5am on Sunday, August 17, 1969, they were due to play after Joe Cocker early that afternoon. However, their appearance was delayed by a torrential rainstorm, and by the time they finally took the stage seven hours later than scheduled, it was getting dark and the humidity had gone through the roof, causing their instruments to go out of tune and resulting in several false starts.
The sound recording also malfunctioned and the drums on “I’m Going Home” had later to be overdubbed in the studio. Happily, by the wonders of digital jiggery-pokery, the quartet’s full set has now belatedly been restored and remixed from the original two-inch multitrack tapes, and some 55 years after we finally get to hear TYA’s set in full for the first time.
“Hello beautiful people, a fair old blues to warm us up,” Lee tells the bedraggled crowd, who by now had been on site for three days. Backed by bassist Leo Lyons, keyboardist Chick Churchill and drummer Ric Lee, they launch hesitantly into Howlin’ Wolf’s “Spoonful” with a jazzier take than Cream’s version, and which almost manages to stay in tune.
However, when they follow with “Good Morning Little School”, the song soon shudders to a halt, not once but twice, and it’s obvious they’ve got problems. “We’ve forgotten how to play,” Lee deadpans. “We’re gonna get tuned up. See you in a bit.” He returns with an embarrassed “I wish I was dead”, and we finally get a complete seven-minute performance at the third attempt.
It’s all still a bit of a train wreck but the crowd is up for it and continue to shout their appreciation through a tedious seven-minute drum solo called, for no apparent reason, “The Hobbit”, as the rest of the band indulge in yet more frantic retuning.
Things finally improve as they charge off on Blind Willie Johnson’s “I Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes”, a song recorded on their eponymous 1967 debut with a moody Al Kooper arrangement. In concert it had developed into an extended jam for Alvin to prove he’s the fastest guitar-slinger in the west, and the epic 17-minute version here finds him quoting from “Sunshine Of Your Love” and essaying some Hendrix-styled warp-speed pyrotechnics.
Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Help Me” is another standard that had featured on the band’s debut album, and is rendered as a slow, atmospheric blues that builds into a barrage of heads-down blues-rock boogie. The crowd ecstatically demand more; cue compere Bill Graham calling them back for their career-defining encore on “I’m Going Home”.
The song’s inclusion in the film turned them into stars but Lee, who died in 2013, struggled to cope. Complaining that “14-year-old girls started showing up to our gigs with ice-creams”, he hated audiences yelling repeatedly for “I’m Going Home” and ruefully wondered “what the rest of our career would have been like if the Woodstock movie had used another song.” By 1974, Ten Years After were history.
There would be various reunions and a version of the band continues to tour to this day. Yet although their Woodstock performance was in many ways a chaotic mess and there would be countless gigs where they would play with greater aplomb and control, for better or for worse it remains Ten Years After’s landmark moment.
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