HAWKWIND/PHILLY....tower theater 4/5/74

[DASLUD at AOL.COM]

okay, since you asked....
i'd gotten SPACE RITUAL around xmas '73; loved sides 1 & 3 but was bummed that
so much of the previous lp had been duplicated....anyway, WMMR in philly ran
spots for the hw show using "silver machine" , (which, heh heh, i never heard
them otherwise play...)   'tweren't no way my 16 yr. old self was gonna miss
that show>>>

  walked right in that night w/o trying to hide my trusty GE s***box recorder
(this was back before boomboxes and walkmans, kiddies)...   we had seats dead
center, 6 to 10 rows back....MAN opened; hadnt been overly familiar w/them but
they were cool (their set included "bananas"....three yrs later when i saw
them open for todd/utopia i kept shouting "bananas!" until one of the band
picked up an onstage banana and said "you mean like this?" but they didnt play
it>)

and finally, following the andy dunkley intro (wherein he said "for the next
two hours..." but they played just over 90 mins)...the hawks appeared..or at
least they APPEARED to have appeared; they were very hard to see all night
long, awash in the veddy trippy light show...they began w/ "lord of light" (as
they would for the next year or so) into a somewhat more developed "psych
warlords/wind o' change" than what is heard on the "1999 party" cd, which was
15 days earlier....reason "psych warlords" sounds like it does on "1999 party"
is because it was so new they hadnt really worked it out yet...
   twas a hell of a show; they probably could have gotten away with total
rubbish considering how overwhelming the light show was....but an aspect of
the show and that tour lost 25 years on (no pun intended) is that much of what
they played was NEW>>>>the stuff which would appear on "mtn. grill" (which
came out 6 mos. later)
was UNKNOWN to me and everyone else who hadnt somehow memorized it on the one
other occasion they might have heard it, when hw played philly in 11/73
(>>>>this is why i'm irritated by the canned applause on "1999 party">>>>i
wouldnt be able to know just what i'd heard/taped that night until "mtn grill"
came out...)

they were very loud, and the tower theater didnt necessarily lend itself to
one being able to determine just what was taking place  (hard to believe
perhaps but i was completely straight that night...) HIGHLIGHTS: "psych
warlords/wind o'change";
"watcher"; a great "paradox" into "better believe it"....a very loud church-
type organ showing up at the end of "master of the universe"....and NO ENCORE,
a first for me at the time, and more than one person was bitching about that
on the way out....so if you'd wondered why the "1999 party" cd didnt include
an encore, there may not have been one...
my original tape of that night was a scotch highlander c-120....the 'breaking
up"/deterioration familiar to those of you who now have that show in yr
collection
was starting within a year, unfortunately; the tape sat in a box o' stuff
until i let it out ca. '91....originally i made 9 copies from the "master",
from which all of y'all's copies are descended....the first half hour is
really good, in the context of other audience tapes  (i let mine out after
hearing how LOUSY some other HW aud tapes  from that era were>>>>)
i would meet/travel with/see hawkwind in NYC 17 years later, at the start of
the '91 tour.....

so ends "story hour" for today....time to go to work...
ja ne! >>>>>>larry b