Hollywood music festival
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The Hollywood Music Festival was notable for being the first performance of the Grateful Dead in the UK and also for the triumphant performance of the band Mungo Jerry (of In the Summertime fame. The festival was held at Leycett near Newcastle-under-Lyme on 23rd and 24th May 1970 in the grounds of a farm and featured such other notable bands as Free, Ginger Baker's Air Force, Colosseum, Family, Black Sabbath and Traffic. The company who was responsible for the festival was Red Bus, and the promoters were Ellis Elias and Elliot Cohen
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This was the first of the major festivals held in the summer of 1970 and was unusual in that it was held in Northern England. Unlike many other Moreover, what was REALLY unusual was that it did not rain , as almost all of the rock festivals held north of Coventry in the 1970s were rained out ( see Bickershaw, Great Western, Krumlin ).
Part of the festival was supposed to be filmed by the BBC but the crews were allegedly dosed with LSD by the Dead and they ceased to function as a working unit soon after. The Deads’s set climaxed with a cosmic Dark Star which wowed the converted, but the Dead's weird mix of psychedelia ,R&B and country rock just confused those whose idea of rock music was confined to bands with catchy riffs.
Wild rumours circulated in the music papers about the supergroup that Lord Sutch was supposed to be fronting, Clapton, Lennon and others were supposed to join in a super jam, but none of these luminaries showed up, along with scheduled acts such as The James Gang and the legendary Flying Burrito Bothers which tended to dilute the overseas offerings to a large extent.
Although the festival has generally tended to be eclipsed by the larger, more well known festivals of 1970 such as the Isle Of Wight and Bath, due to its smaller crowds and less well known line-up, it deserves to be remembered for its excellent organization and lack of hassle as well as a great deal of memorable music . Traffic, Jose Feliciano and Airforce more than made up for the no shows and overall around 40,000 made the pilgrimage to Leycett to witness the inflatable breasts and penis that adorned the side of the stage and to hear some great music by some of the eras best UK and US bands.
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