After the Grantrush

Anywhere looks good in the sunshine. My first, indeed my only, visit to the Victorian majesty of downtown Bolton, Lancs took place on a bright, sunny Saturday in the late Autumn of 1970.  The picture of its imperious town hall still sparkles in my memory.

In those days, students with cars were few and far between.  A peripheral mate with a fourth-hand Ford Anglia was persuaded to hack up the A666 with me to  Boots in Bolton.   He negotiated an appropriate consideration with me in order to forego the pleasures of an extended Friday night bedroom session with his girlfriend.  A quarter page ad in the Manchester Evening News had alerted me to the fact that an emporium, then more or less exclusively known for selling health products and stuff that women smear on their faces, had a special offer on a rather smart looking all in one stereo record player with detachable speakers.  Thirty-two quid was a serious bargain and I had started to plan accordingly.

While I spent every spare penny on accumulating LPs, the sound freaks invested wages from summer jobs on poncey components that together made up state of the art stereo systems.  Finely calibrated turntables and fancy amps with German names were connected to massive speakers by tangles of wiring that pumped out vast numbers of ‘watts per channel’.   Many of these early technology geeks owned little in the way of listening material; perhaps worn copies of ‘Axis Bold as Love’ or ‘Disraeli Gears’ and maybe even  ‘A Hard Road’.  On the other hand I was still using my now ancient Elizabethan mono player that was doing little justice to endless plays of ‘Live Dead’ and ‘In The Court of the Crimson King’.

When my sixth form school mates started toiling away at Oxbridge entrance exams, much to my parents’ chagrin, I hadn’t joined them.  In revolutionary counter-culture mood, my decision was to eschew the allure of the glittering spires and head for the red-brick realism of Manchester.  Serendipitously, I had learned that Manchester awarded scholarships based on the results of competitive exams that were strikingly similar in scope and difficulty to those required by Oxbridge.  Competing with 500 others – mainly pupils from top grammar schools scattered across the north of England - I confounded the expectations of my schoolmates and teachers.  I won one of six open scholarships, the Schools Major Award, which was worth £100 a year.  It was a lot in those days when the maximum annual student grant was a mere £420.

In applying to Manchester, I had indicated a preference to live in Quaker-run Dalton Hall.  Dalton then offered various privileges to University Scholars including an additional £50-a-year bursary.  Owing to the quirks of the grant system, I couldn’t take that bursary in cash.  Ted Fox, Dalton’s amiable Principal, stipulated that I had to spend the money on ‘books and items of cultural interest’.  ‘The Who’s culture’ opined a chum.  Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to take a receipt for ‘Live at Leeds’ or ‘Who’s Next?’ into the University Cashier for reimbursement.  In three years I never bought one record with that Bursary.  Generally, it was used to equip myself with all the expensive law books I needed to get myself through my degree course.

After discovering the Boots advert I remember rushing up to the Bursar’s Office housed in the bowels of the University Administration Building.  Before I laid out the unfeasibly large sum of thirty-two quid and organised the logistics of transporting a large box from Bolton to Manchester, I needed to be certain that a Boots bargain stereo qualified as an ‘item of cultural interest’.  The kindly gent behind the desk disappeared into another room to check with someone more senior – perhaps even the invisible Bursar himself – that I might proceed.

Following a relatively uneventful trip to sunlit Bolton we returned to Manchester mid-afternoon.  I rewarded my chauffeur and schlepper for the day with the price of a couple of pints, or perhaps something more exotic, and reimbursement of petrol costs.  He dropped me off at Dalton with my large box and retreated to his girlfriend’s flat.  There was still time for me to race down to Marshalls’ record store in Rusholme, before it closed, to buy a couple of albums.  Clearly I had to have something new with which to anoint my first stereo. 

Frank Zappa’s ‘Hot Rats’ was soon booming out of my room.  One irate third year student working in the Hall library at the other end of Bottom Corridor stormed through my double doors to complain about the volume.  By the time he did, five or six other music fans were sprawled around my room nodding in time.  Alerted by the opening drum roll and grand piano chords of 'Peaches en Regalia’, they had come into assess my new purchase; they were already in full flow playing an array of air instruments - guitars, drums and even keyboards.  Our irate hall mate less than reluctantly abandoned his Pure Maths theorem to start plucking an air bass - a Fender of course.  ‘Little Umbrellas’ and ‘The Gumbo Variations’ filled the room – and indeed the corridor and beyond - in glorious stereo.  The album’s highlight is perhaps ‘Willy the Pimp’ which features a guest vocal by the otherwise dubious talent of Captain Beefheart.  We sang along word perfect even if insufficiently experienced of life to imagine the grubby reality of the ‘little lady (who) walk that street, telling all the boys she can’t be beat’.

Once the lads finished congratulating me on my purchase which, even without an obscure German name, clearly met with their approval, I shut the door.  I slipped the second album onto the now no longer virgin turntable.  Neil Young’s ‘After The Goldrush’ seemed an appropriate song to describe the events of that week:  ‘Well I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships lying in the yellow haze of the sun’.

A Ford Anglia was hardly a spaceship, but the sun had shone on Boots in Bolton, Lancs.  I turned out the lights, lay back on my bed and bathed in the warm sounds of the West Coast on my all-in-one stereo with the detachable speakers.

‘Hot Rats’ by Frank Zappa and ’After the Goldrush’ by Neil Young are both original vinyl pressings as are ‘Live Dead’ by the Grateful Dead and ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ by King Crimson.  The Who’s ‘Live at Leeds’ and ‘Who’s Next’ are both CD re-issues the former with bonus tracks added to the content of original early-70’s vinyl release. I have never actually owned either Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Axis Bold as Love’ or Cream’s ‘Disraeli Gears’ albeit that I have always enjoyed both.  I once ended up in unwitting possession of a borrowed copy of ‘Disraeli Gears’ for some months without knowing its provenance before eventually locating its rightful owner to whom I returned it.  In recent times I endeavoured to buy a CD copy of John Mayall’  The Bluesbreakers’  ‘A Hard Road’;  the reason I didn’t may be a suitable theme for a subsequent blog.