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Daddy Long Legs Funky, Country, Blue

ROLLING STONE OCTOBER 18, 1969

Pop, never so stagnant for years, drastically needs a total renewal The current movement towards re-formation in the pop world has led to many new styles being evolved in an attempt to remedy this situation. Daddy Longlegs, a trio of hill-billys that Tim Sharman, who already manages “Andromeda” has brought to Britain, may have the long-awaited answer.

All three of the members -- Steve Hayton, lead guitar and vocals; Kurt Palomaki, bass and vocals; and Cliff Carrison, drums and vocals - have had previous experience in the States before joining together as a group.

Steve and Cliff were once "flower children" in the Haight-Ashbury, while Kurt has played with such top U.S. groups as Blues Project.

Daddy Longlegs have been leading a nomadic life together for the two years they have existed as a group. They toured the States like minstrels, stopping and playing where they felt like it. Basically country boys, they have lived on a farm in New York State, a cave in Portrero Box Canyon , New Mexico, and a wood in Oregon, apart from a short spell in a New York City apartment.

Their European trip is the start of commercial ventures for them. They are about to set off abroad and gain a following there prior to joining the college circuit here.

Their sole appearance - at The Roundhouse for free on September 14th -drew a fifteen hundred strong crowd - who gave them an enthusiastic welcome and shouted for more.

Musically, Sharman sees them as a heavier Crosby, Stills and Nash, others call them a funky band, and blue grass boys. Negotiations are under way for a recording contract, and doubtless everyone will soon be able to judge the group for themselves.

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Excerpt from “Le Bourget Festival” Friends

May 15, 1970

More fiasco on Monday meant that Trees and High Trade opened early in the day to a small audience, though they were down in the programme for Sunday night. Cochise, also billed for the Sunday gig, were so pissed off that they travelled down to Rouen to offer their services at The Open Circus. The Circus was supposed to be a travelling gig doing a couple of nights in Rouen, then moving up to Paris. The second day in Rouen East of Eden and Quintessence played to an audience of eighty people, so the Circus packed up and split. Cochise are doomed never to play in France. Bridget St. John came and went, Formerly Fat Harry played better than ever, and then Daddy Longlegs, who spent the whole time 'being happily stoned and making happily stoned friends. Edgar Broughton was well pissed with the gig, so Moe (Daddy Longlegs' amazing singer and good vibes man) invited Edgar to join in. They went on pretty loose, joints and bottles of Vin Ordinaire passed from hand to mouth, and for a while everybody felt good for a while. A whole gang of freaks were up onstage with them, dancing about and hitting empty bottles with French coins, and that was too much like anarchy to the straight French students etc., who were officiously 'policing' the event. ‘J’ai mes ordres' they shouted, and they hustled all but the band from the stage, and the set came to an end. Daddy Longlegs' first album on Warners is due for release on April 24th. It has much of the looseness of the Paris performance, although Moe arrived too late to add much of his singing and vitality. The balance is between Steve's downhome country songs, and Kurt's fuller, rocking tunes, and is a good indication of a bunch of guys who don't give a shit except to play music and make people happy. They get it down pretty well, and their audience should be satisfied with both their live performances and the album.

To quote a line from 'High Again',

'Smokin up a reefer
Underneath the stars above,
Couldn't be much happier
If a kilo fell on my head.'

Kevin Ayres was to have closed the show, but he and his group played earlier, much appreciated by those who remembered his fine guitar on the Soft Machine's Volume One album. His Joy For A Toy was a gas, and the next album Clarence in Wonderland, promises to be even better. According to Ayres it should be released 'as soon as possible', or about July. His band played early because the Pink Floyd was a last-minute addition. The audience had grown again, up to the region of eight or nine thousand, and the Floyd were restrained and not over-enthusiastic, and played exactly what they knew the audience would dig. And they did.

In the chaos that followed their set, Edgar Broughton and his men began to play to a dwindling crowd. The charter plane was ready to take off for Gatwick, and those who wanted to get back to sanity split in a hurry, leaving behind an Easter weekend in Paris, full of fantasy and nightmare.

—D.L.

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Le Bourget

The real story of the first major festival of the year, held in Paris over Easter (1970), centers around the bizarre happenings at the local Hilton Hotel, temporary home for over a hundred of London’s best-loved freaks, much more than it does to the music, which was never able to overcome the terrible building in which it took place and the obvious inexperience of the organizers.

Now it is all over and I am, to my amazement, safely home, it is difficult to believe it actually happened, although to remind me I still have a swollen lip caused by a French security office who punched me in the face when I went to the aid of my photographer, Linda, who was in danger of being pushed from the stage by these small and dangerous youths.

That was on Saturday night, when the Pretty Things, Wild Angels and Air Force played to an audience of a couple of thousand, which filled only a quarter of the vast concrete and glass exhibition hall situated right next to the runway at Le Bourget Airport. The acoustics were as bad as the stage management, and I am sure that it was not only Atomic Rooster who never even got on stage.

Those that did were rewarded with applause that seemed more polite than enthusiastic, but maybe this was due to the near freezing conditions in the building. Sunday was fractionally warmer, and this time the music came from Procol Harem, Renaissance, High Tide and a jam session with a band of roadies fronted by Moe Armstrong and Daddy Longlegs.

It seems that one reason many bands did not play was that Radio Luxembourg was recording the event and they needed about an hour between bands to set up microphones and get a balance. When the music finally ended we were then faced with the task of getting ten miles back to the hotel, and this never proved easy.

On Monday morning a coach arrived at the hotel and took us to the festival, where the usual chaos reigned. First band on was Kevin Ayres, featuring that fine sax man Lol Coxhill, and they were followed by Formerly Fat Harry, who are obviously worth listening to under better conditions, Bridgit St. John, and Daddy Longlegs, who managed to play only by occupying the stage and starting to play before anyone could do anything about it, and it was their shuffle rhythms that finally had some of the crowd, plus about fifty people on the stage, dancing.

They just had time for about three extended numbers before the PA was switched off to make way for Pink Floyd on the adjoining stage. The Floyd are already well-known in France, and although they did nothing that was not expected of them, with the crowd finally warmed up after camping out for four days, they went down very well.

The basic mistakes committed by this festival were having the wrong venue on a weekend when half the local students were out of town for the holidays and I dare say the price of £3 15s for the three concerts was rich even by French standards. Still, as far as I know, all the bands got paid, which does not always happen.

—Tim Sharman

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PERFORMANCE

Daddy Longlegs

WARNER REPRISE certainly has its tongue in cheek in writing the current promotion ads for Daddy Longlegs. Because rather than being just another unknown band, the quartet has picked up a large following of new friends since its arrival in Britain from the U.S. just before last Christmas.

And to know the music of Daddy Longlegs is to know its people. The music is that direct, it is that open and warm.
Some 60 people witnessed Daddy Longlegs' antics at the Marquee Club May 31 on one of those Sunday evening sessions organised by Tony Stratton-Smith, and were thoroughly enchanted with the band's home-grown humour and stomping rhythms.

But despite the fun and zaney appeal of lead singer Moe Armstrong, lead guitarist Steve Hayton, bass guitarist Kurt Palomaki and drummer Cliff Garrison, when they get down to playing music they do mean business.

In fact, many people prefer the band's hard-hitting blues tunes such as 'Bad Blood Mama' which hit at the marrow of man-woman relationship. And even though the lighter tunes such as 'New Mexico Song', 'Whisky Moan' and 'Getting High Again' have a free-flowing frivolity, equal care is given to their instinctive performance.

For all that, Daddy Longlegs is primarily a jamming band, able to sustain a strong flow of musical ideas through long lines of improvisation, at the same time inviting all who are present to join them.

This is a band which lives on its own high spirits, and shares an optimistic, uncomplicated attitude towards life. Individual talents are formidable, but it is the group humour and self-enjoyment - both highly contagious element - which have earned them the blessing of admirers. Their first album on Warner Bros, is titled simply 'Daddy Longlegs' (WS 3004), from which a single 'Getting High Again' will be released shortly. Daddy Longlegs has already developed into something of a musical cult in this country.

Sharing the bill at the Marquee Sunday night was a new band from Newcastle called Brethren, which is expected to be soon signed to the Charisma label and Roger Ruskin-Spear, former saxophonist and chief mad inventor of the Bonzo Dog Band who regaled the audience with a highly articulated wit and his amazing electro-mechanical people contraptions.

—Brian Blevins

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WILD IN THE COUNTRY AND DOWN ON THE FARM

by Robert Partridge
Rercord Mirror, December 6, 1969
Center page

NEW MEXICO and Hertfordshire have one thing in common—seclusion. And it's that seclusion which has attracted Daddy Longlegs.

The three members of Daddy Longlegs have lived together for three years. They've live in an isolated farm in New York State, in the foothills of New Mexico and now, in a tiny village in the midst of Hertfordshire.

It is a solitude which, they claim, has broadened their music. The months together has made their playing instinctive. And now they've come to England. Recently they've moved from a cottage in Somerset to one nearer London but still far enough away to escape the urban way of life.

Their cottage is 500-years-old and it is complete with stream, hump-back bridge, thatched roof and wishing well. The only way it has changed recently is that its thick, white-plastered walls are now assailed by the electric sounds of guitar amplifiers in the front room.

Steve Hayton is the lead guitarist, Kurt Palomaki plays bass guitar and Clif Carrison is on drums. All three have let their hair grow past their shoulders, and they haven't shaved in years.

Said Clif: "We met three years ago in New York. We owe it all to him" - he pointed to a picture of someone with shoulder length hair on the wall - "He's a wealthy Chicagoan who travelled around trying to find the best musicians in the country. He found Kurt in New York when he answered an ad for a bass player. He was asked to play as many rhythms as possible using only two notes - he made it when he passed twenty.

"Then in San Francisco he heard about Steve from someone - Steve was playing in an Indian curry restaurant at the time."

Clif himself was working in Chicago Slim's Blues Band. Brought together - with an organist who has since left - they went to live in a New York farm. But management hassles brought an end to the project and the group split from their backer. Clif and Steve went to New Mexico, followed later by Kurt.

There they lived on the slopes of the national forest and played exclusively acoustic music.

"We were asked back to Chicago some time later," said Clif," that was for a film. It was called ‘CryAngels' -- Kurt did all the film score dubbing sessions. In fact Kurt and Steve do all the writing for the group, but when they bring out one of those song books like they do for the Beatles, I'm going to have one all to myself full of drumming."
But after the film it was back to New Mexico where they played drums, banjo, dobro, guitar, bongoes, mandolin, and guitar. But they reverted back to electric guitars soon after.

"We went electric because it was necessary to hold us together," explained Clif. They moved to Denver before deciding to come to England.

Next year they have their first album out on the Warner Reprise label and they've already had tremendous receptions at London's Speakeasy Club. Their music is an eclectic mixture of rock and blues with — of course, a mixture of country music. It's the country where they are at home.

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DADDY LONGLEGS

PRE-RECORD

'THERE seems to be an increasing number of groups who take themselves off to a cottage in darkest Surrey to do the proverbial 'getting it together', before re-emerging to stagger the musical world, but there can't be many groups who have got their music together while living in tents in the New Mexico mountains:

That, however, is exactly what Daddy Longlegs were doing at one stage in their career. Now, the group are comfortably resident in Fulham and their music is reaching a wider audience than the occasional inquisitive squirrel.

Daddy Longlegs are three American musicians who came to this country last July. Before this, the group had been together in the States for two years, living first on a farm in New York State, later in New Mexico, and finally in Denver, Colorado.

In all, the band completed only 30 gigs in those two years, “and even that became a bit. much at times,” added bass player Kurt. “We don't like playing in cities,” he went on to explain. “The country is better for playing in fact, better for anything.” That explains why Daddy Longlegs spent several months in the mountains with their drumkit in a field.

Another reason—one gig they played, at Chicago's Palace Theatre, ended in a. riot. “The greasers didn't dig what, we were playing,” said Kurt. Eventually, however, the group came down from the mountains to go electric again (they'd been playing acoustic because they had no electricity), and soon after they arrived in England, where they promptly settled, in a cottage in Somerset for three months to rehearse.

Now, for the past five months. Daddy Longlegs have been playing the college/club circuit with the same three-man line-up. Lead guitarist is Steve Hayton, whose style is a mixture of country finger picking, Indian raga, and straight rock, Clif Carrison, drums, who once played with, Chicago Slim's Blues Band, and Kurt Palomaki, on bass, clarinet, and sax, go to make up the other four legs of the band.

The group have already built up a strong following through their personal appearances, and seem to be one of the top bands in South Wales, where they recently played a festival at Newport. One of the reasons for their popularity might just be that, as their name suggests. Daddy Longlegs are a group you can dance to. “We like playing music that people can move to,” said Kurt. “When the audience is sitting down, the only energy around is mental; when they're dancing you can pick up the energy and put it back through the amps.”

In fact, we might be witnessing the beginning of a return to dancing, as opposed to sitting and staring. Kurt certainly feels that dancing has been too long neglected. “Complex, well worked-out music is only one branch,” he remarked, “it's concert music, for sitting at home or in the concert hall and listening to. Dance bands don't play as well technically, but that isn't where it's at as far as we're concerned.”

With a country guitarist, a blues drummer, and a jazz bassist, the music of Daddy Longlegs is peculiar to themselves. They write their own material, and besides producing sounds that are danceable they also play them at a volume noticeably below that of the usual rock band. “You can't play complex music loud, and you can't hear the words either,” continued Kurt. As an afterthought, he added that amplifier sales in the States are falling rapidly enough to cause concern around the directors' tables of the big amplifier companies.

With gigs going well, Daddy Longlegs seem set to stride ahead. They played at the Paris pop festival at Easter, and they have an album out on Warner Bros. on April 24th. If their live performances are anything to judge by, there'll be plenty of floors cleared for the occasion.