It was cheap so took a punt, flicking past the usual boring 60s into 70s acts – Joe Cocker, Jethro Tull, Grateful Dead, Blood, Sweat and Tears – I pulled up short when the VU caught my pop-eye. The unimaginative use of the 3rd album sleeve is given a bit of a boost by the editor spinning the William Faulkner quote Jean-Luc Godard had used in Breathless (À bout de souffle). He topped that with the best downer of a recommendation for the band I’ve read:

Everything in a Velvet Underground song is gray, agonized, drab and inexorable. But what they lack in hope and passion, they make up for in chilly perfection and basic rock, a good reason to accompany them down the razor-blade of life.

The book is organised into ten thematically arranged sections, the Velvets located in ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’. Further on toward the end is the Marshall McLuhan influenced ‘The Medium Is The Message’ chapter which is where, good lord, the Stooges are found; all three pages of ‘em and all new to me . . . Photographed by James Roark at the Fun House sessions by the look of things – sax man Steve McKay is front and centre. The image of Dave Alexander might just be my favourite pic of him; the one of Iggy Stooge is none too shoddy either. Scott Asheton is MIA.

Rock is sex and violence. . . Rock is revolution. Rock is ceremony. It is the Stooges. . . It is Iggy Stooge, the latest high-energy uni-sex symbol, a second generation Jagger and Morrison.
The Stooges are what rock is about – stuck-up, overbearing, formless, insane, driving, intense
The Stooges: they’re wiggy.

The book ends with a dedication to John Cage and to noise and silence while Little Richard looks on – Nik Cohn would approve . . . Awopbobaloobopalopbamboom!

Unintentional, no doubt, but finding the Stooges in this context, among all the dross acts, is, I think, akin to unsuspecting record buyers discovering the band in the cut-out racks just a few years later; a chance encounter that turned the mundane into the marvellous.

Written by Michael Ross and with original photography by James Roark – the book was published by the Los Angeles based Petersen Publishing Company in 1970, which would make the Stooges pix of the moment. If I’ve got the right man, Roark was best known for his sports photography. Ross I know nothing about.

I’ve eaten a good many meals in Rutherford Dining Hall, the idea of Led Zeppelin playing there, as rumour had it, seemed as fanciful as them playing the even smaller venue Bridge Place Country Club (now a restaurant) in a village near to Canterbury. I’ve been there once and I can’t figure out where they would have played – all the rooms seem entirely inadequate for a rock band. . .

The Who had played Eliot Dining Hall the year before, which is the same size as Rutherford, holds approximately 600 bodies, but then, as it turned out, the event took place in the Sports Hall and not where I bought chips and beans.

The gig was part of Zeppelin’s ‘Back to the Clubs’ tour and their sixth UK jaunt, the idea was to reconnect with their audience. . . . which Robert Plant, at least for this reviewer, singularly failed to do . . .

Back when they played in Bridge in December 1968, Zeppelin were billed locally as ‘The Yardbirds’, possibly the last time they were promoted as such in Britain.

Before the three original Yardbirds up and quit on him in the Spring of 1968, Jimmy Page had played alongside Keith Relf, Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja for the University’s Summer Ball, 1967 . . . Their performance was slammed in the student paper InCant.

No Ball!
NOT AGAIN! YES, AGAIN I’M AFRAID – ANOTHER ASTERICK-AWFUL DANCE!
The really significant word in the above statement/exclamation is ‘Dance’. Friday the 2nd of June was to be the University of Kent at Canterbury Summer Ball. What we actually got was a rather upper-second-rate hop.
What price non-culmination? About £200 in the red! Much of this debt probably due to the £300-odd paid for 50-minutes’ ‘worth’ of un-danceable Yardbirds.

To cap it all, the buffet served day-old lemon mousse . . . . the horror

In defence of The Yardbirds, there were complaints about nearly every band subsequently booked for freshers week or the end of year ball. You couldn’t dance to any of them and they were always too loud and money was inevitably lost . . . Of all the bands who played the University in the 1960s and first half of the 1970s – Manfred Mann, Kinks, The Move, Procol Harum, Ten Years After, The Who – only Fairport Convention, twice, turned a profit. University gigs were subsidised and always ran at a loss, but lemon mousse, at least, was never again on the menu . . .