The Magic's in the Music: The Strawbs

Typically, in the world of rock music, the memory of most bands fades as their music slips off the charts or their albums gradually fall out-of-print. For British folk-rock legends the Strawbs, however, the years have been kinder. Since 2001, founder David Cousins has toured regularly both in Europe and the United States with a shuffling line-up of former band members as both an acoustic trio (Acoustic Strawbs) and as a full band (Electric Strawbs), performing a mix of new and classic Strawbs material. The band's amazing performance at the 2004 Nearfest Festival in Pennsylvania helped introduce the Strawbs to an entirely new generation of progressive rock fans.

Forty years after the band first came together, the Strawbs are not only fondly remembered by their original fans from the '60s and '70s, but they continue to pick up young new fans. "I am astonished and flattered that people still remember us," says Cousins. "I think that it shows the longevity of the music that we did, the songs that we played at the time. I think that maybe they were too complicated for the pop charts of those days, but I do believe that people nowadays...what has happened is that people have passed their record collections on to their kids, and they're picking up vinyl albums and they're not picking up the new stuff."

The band's recent appearance in Holland is an indication of the band's lasting appeal. "People were coming up and asking for autographs," says Cousins, "asking me to sign Hero And Heroine or Bursting At The Seams. By the same token, young kids were coming up and saying 'will you sign an autograph for me?' and they can't have been any older than ten or twelve."

The reaction of the fans, both old and new, to material created decades ago is gratifying to the band. "We'll never be rich or famous," says Cousins. "We'll never be U2, we'll never be Bob Dylan, we'll never be the Rolling Stones...but we've always been the Strawbs. I believe that there will always be an audience for us, how ever be it small, but it's an audience that appreciates the atmosphere and the emotion that went into the writing that we did at that time."

THE CURRENT TOUR

The Strawbs kick off a seven-night US tour in Rochester, New York on Thursday night, June 21st, including dates in Boston and New York City. What brought about this regional mini-tour for the British band? "It started out that we were doing a Canadian festival, up in Nova Scotia," says Cousins. "It's the Stan Rogers Festival - we did it about three years ago, had a fabulous time, so this time they invited the entire band back. So we had to put some shows around it, so we put some shows in the United States in advance and then followed it up to end up in Toronto and Kitchener before coming home."

What can Strawbs' fans expect to see during this string of performances? "You're going to see the exact line-up from 1974," says Cousins. "Nobody's fallen off a cliff, nobody's in rehab...did I just say that...it's myself on guitar and vocals, Dave Lambert on lead guitar, we've got John Hawken on the keyboards, Chas Cronk on the bass and Rod Coombes on drums. It's the 1974 line-up that did Hero And Heroine and Ghosts. That particular line-up, to me, is the classic Strawbs," Cousins adds.

IN THE BEGINNING

The roots of the Strawbs lie in the Strawberry Hills Boys, a bluegrass-oriented trio that kicked around Southwest London during the early-to-mid-60s. "It started in school with my pal Tony Hooper," says Cousins. "We were young guys looking for something to play. We heard Lonnie Donegan on the radio and we bought guitars, we started playing music...we were interested in the music that Donegan played, which was 'skiffle music,' and then suddenly Ramblin' Jack Elliott turned up in London. We went to a folk club and sat at his feet and listened to his flat-picking style, the stories that he told, and he talked about Woody Guthrie. We were so enchanted, we went and started looking for the records by people like that."

For Cousins, seeing Elliott perform was an inspiring moment that led him in the direction of folk music. "I'm sure that it's exactly the same process that Bob Dylan was going through at the same time," says Cousins, "we were doing the same thing, but here in London, one step removed. I got into the Harry Smith collection (the Anthology of American Folk Music) and listening to the music of Doc Boggs and Elizabeth Cotton, and gradually it came together in an acoustic field. I started listening to Muddy Waters and those Howlin' Wolf records, but I couldn't play an electric guitar and they didn't feel right to me. Curious enough, it all goes back...I'm getting very philosophical now...to the Harry Smith collection that influenced Jack Elliot to go find Woody Guthrie, it inspired Bob Dylan, and it inspired us to go out and try that music."

The Strawberry Hill Boys - Cousins and Hooper along with bassist John Berry - became well-known in a short period of time, appearing on several BBC radio programs and performing in venues such as the Royal Festival Hall and the Fairfield Hall. Dave Cousins also became an in-demand session player and back-up musician, appearing on television shows accompanying artists like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Mary Travers. By 1967, however, intrigued by the prospects of writing their own material, the band shortened its name to the Strawbs and began to pursue more of a folk-rock style. Berry left the band, to be replaced by bassist Ron Chesterman.

SANDY & THE STRAWBS

One of the tales that has become part of the Strawbs legacy is the short-lived involvement of British folk icon Sandy Denny with the band. It was happenstance that Cousins should meet the singer, as he explains. "I was very interested in folk clubs, and went down to a club one night, in central London, that was called The Troubadour. There was this young girl sitting there...I'm not exaggerating in any way whatsoever...with a white dress on, a big white hat and playing a Gibson Hummingbird guitar. I was absolutely enchanted by her voice. After she finished playing, I went up to her and said 'hey, you want to join a group?' in some sort of flippant way and she said 'who are you?' I said 'the Strawbs' so she said 'alright.' It was quite as simple as that," says Cousins.

"So I called our guitar player, Tony, and said 'we've got a girl singer!' We went 'round to Sandy's flat and we rehearsed, we swapped songs, we literally sang all night,' says Cousins. "We made some demos in the studio, actually at the Cecil Sharp House, headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society in London. They were picked up by a friend of mine and taken to a record company and we got signed as 'Sandy and the Strawbs,' the first proper record contract that any of us ever had."

The band subsequently recorded a full-length album in Copenhagen. "We made just one record," says Cousins of the Sandy and the Strawbs, "we made it in Denmark for a Danish record company, and it was my job to go and sell it around London. I tried to sell it, and I ended up with a company that had big hit records on the charts; Sandy got scared stiff at the idea of being a pop singer and went off and joined Fairport Convention before the record ever came out."

Undaunted by the defection of their singer, Strawbs carried on. "A&M were very interested in our group at the time, A&M Records in Los Angeles. They sent the money over for us to make a single. Sandy was already gone, but we made a single and they signed us up." The first British band ever signed to A&M Records, the Strawbs released its self-titled debut album in 1969. It was only later, after the band had already made a name for itself with five albums under their belt, that the Sandy and the Strawbs album came out. "Six years later that record came out and nobody knew where the heck it came from," remembers Cousins.

LED ZEPPELIN & THE FIRST U.S. TOUR

"It was the first time that we'd ever visited America and we didn't know what on earth to expect," says Cousins of the 1973 Strawbs' tour of the United States in support of Grave New World, the band's commercial breakthrough. "We flew into Los Angeles and saw palm trees...we're not used to palm trees! We were picked up in a stretch limo by the record company. My God, it was outrageous! We ended up at this hotel, and Led Zeppelin had the whole top floor. We were on two stories down below, with a few rooms." The hotel was the infamous Continental Hiatt House in LA, known in rock & roll folklore as the "Riot House," with a pool on the roof and a steady stream of nubile young groupies coming through the door.

"It turned out that our manager used to manage Robert Plant and John Bonham, in a group that they had in Birmingham, before they became Led Zeppelin. So we were invited up to the 'holy of holies,' met John Bonham, and Bonham's favorite song was a song that I'd written called Martin Luther King's Dream. We were playing at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go for a whole week and every night, after their shows, Led Zeppelin flew back into to LA and came along to catch our late show at the Whiskey. Suddenly, people were saying 'what the hell are Led Zeppelin doing seeing the Strawbs?' and 'who are the Strawbs?' They came to see Led Zeppelin, rather than us, just sitting in the audience."

"Nonetheless," Cousins continues, "we took a dart board with us, because we were mad, mad English blokes who enjoyed a beer and a game of darts at the pub. We took our own dart board, and then we challenged Led Zeppelin to a game of darts. Nobody knows who won...because nobody could keep count of the score. Nobody was capable of counting the score; the darts went everywhere but in the dart board."

As the game got out of hand, something was thrown through the window of band member John Ford's room. "The result of that is that Led Zeppelin picked up the whole bill, for the damage to the room," remembers Cousins, "which included setting fire to the bed." After the melee, says Cousins, "all A&M acts were banned from the Continental Hyatt House forever and a day." Concluding the story, Cousins adds, "the Strawbs were not the quiet gentle folk that you think we might have been."

RICK WAKEMAN & THE EVOLUTION OF THE BAND

It's a little-known fact; save by prog-rock aficionados, that Rick Wakeman was once a member of the Strawbs, performing on several of the band's albums, including Dragonfly (1970), Just A Collection Of Antiques And Curios (1970) and From The Witchwood (1971). It was around this time that Chesterman left the band, replaced by bassist John Ford and drummer Richard Hudson, recruited from fellow British band Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera.

"Rick was with us for nearly two years," says Cousins. "He was introduced to the band by (noted producer) Tony Visconti. We had to do a BBC session to promote our first album, which had a song called The Battle on it. This young guy came along with long blonde hair, mid-way down his back, and we immediately clicked in the studio, we enjoyed one another's company. We had a few beers, and immediately became great friends."

"We made a second album called Dragonfly," says Cousins. "I got Rick to overdub some piano on it and he adored it. I put his name on the record sleeve and he wrote me a letter and said, 'Dear Dave, thanks ever so much. That's the first time I've ever had my name on a record sleeve.' I phoned him up and said 'can we meet up for a drink on Friday?' We met in the pub, he was with his fiancé, and I said 'do you want to join the group?' He said 'yes, when's the next gig?' I said, 'well, next week.' 'I'm getting married next week.' So I asked him, 'where are you going on your honeymoon?' He said 'I can't afford to go on a honeymoon,' so I said, 'our gig's in Paris, come to Paris on your honeymoon.' So Rick Wakeman's honeymoon was with the Strawbs, playing in the Rock'n'Roll Circus in the center of Paris, a big top with rock bands accompanying circus acts"

Recalls Cousins, "the highlight of our appearance there was that Salvador Dali came on stage during the middle of our show, waved at the audience, the audience went crazy. Rick said 'who the hell is that?' I said 'Salvador Dali.' He said 'get him off; I'm in the middle of my solo.' After that, Rick stayed with the band for two years and we had a most amazing time together. We're still the best of friends." Wakeman left the band when offered the opportunity to join rising prog-rock stars Yes, where he made a name for himself on the albums Fragile (1971), Close To The Edge (1972) and Tales From Topographic Oceans (1974) before leaving Yes to pursue a solo career. Cousins and Wakeman later reunited in 2002 to record the album Hummingbird.

OVER THE YEARS

After Grave New World, the band's fifth album, Strawbs co-founder Tony Hooper, who was dismayed at the band's move towards a more rock-oriented sound, left the band to pursue a career in music production. He was replaced by guitarist Dave Lambert, from the British band Fire, who took the Who's Pete Townshend as his musical template. Along with keyboardist Blue Weaver, Richard Hudson and John Ford, this is the Strawbs line-up that recorded Bursting At The Seams (1973), which proved to be an even bigger commercial success than Grave New World.

Friction within the band that began in the studio carried over to the subsequent U.S. tour and afterwards, Hudson and Ford left the band to pursue more of a pop-oriented direction, with Weaver following closely thereafter to join with first Mott The Hoople and later the Bee Gees. Cousins recruited keyboardist John Hawken, bassist Chas Cronk and drummer Rod Coombes and, along with Lambert, this is the classic line-up that recorded Hero And Heroine (1974), perhaps the critical and commercial high point of the band's career. A&M fully backed the album and the band toured with the likes of Aerosmith, Santana, Blue Oyster Cult, ZZ Top, Joe Walsh, the Eagles and even Frank Zappa.

By the time of 1975's Ghosts, however, Cousins was weary of recording (seven albums in six years) and touring constantly and he had become seriously ill. Musicians would come and go constantly throughout the latter half of the decade, but the band still recorded four more albums, with diminishing results, before Cousins himself would pull the plug after 1978's Deadlines. Offered an executive job with one of the UK's first commercial radio stations, Cousins gladly accepted.

"I took a 20 year sabbatical," says Cousins. "I worked in the radio business and I hardly ever played. I did the odd week-long tour or two-week tour here and there, but it was essentially when I was on holiday from my day job. I still made a couple of albums during that period, but essentially I left the business, never thinking that I'd come back to it again. In 2001 I started playing again and now I can't blinking stop!"

Part of what prompted Cousins to get back into music was the thirtieth anniversary celebration of the band that took place during the summer of 1998 on the grounds of the Chiswick House in West London. Former Strawbs bandmates like Tony Hooper, John Ford, Richard Hudson, Dave Lambert, Blue Weaver, Chas Cronk, Rod Coombes and others joined Cousins on stage for an open-air concert. That same year, remastered versions of the bands six most successful A&M albums were reissued on CD, prompting many fans to "rediscover" the band.

Since restarting the band in 2001, Cousins and various line-ups of the Strawbs have recorded a number of albums of both old material and new songs, including Blue Angel (2003) and Deja Fou (2004) as well as the Acoustic Strawbs albums Baroque & Roll (2001) and Full Bloom (2004). Two live albums were also released in 2005 by the band's Witchwood Records label, Live At Nearfest 2004 and Painted Sky.

COUSINS' SOLO WORK

Aside from his primary role as the vocalist, rhythm guitarist and songwriter for the Strawbs, David Cousins has also recorded a pair of solo albums, the newest one to be released this month. "It's called The Boy In The Sailor Suit," says Cousins, "it's a deeply personal album. It's written about my mum and my dad essentially, and 'the boy in the sailor suit' is my father. He died late in the war, in a submarine. I didn't know him, I've got a photograph of him hanging on the wall, and he is the inspiration behind the whole album. It's one of the best things that I've ever done. I used Miller Anderson playing guitar, who played on my first ever solo album back in 1972. It's taken me 35 years to make another album...I like to think about it."

Cousins recorded his first solo album, 1972's Two Weeks Last Summer, during a brief between-album hiatus for the Strawbs, working with Anderson, future Strawbs' guitarist Dave Lambert, keyboardist Rick Wakeman, bassist Roger Glover of Deep Purple and drummer Jon Hiseman of Colosseum. "What prompted it were arguments within the band," says Cousins of Two Weeks Last Summer. "I'd written a very long song called Blue Angel, and the band didn't want to do that song. They said 'we want to do pop songs, that's our market' and I said 'to hell with that, I'll go and make my own record and do this song.' It was the most daft thing we ever did, because the Strawbs should have recorded Blue Angel, and the whole band might have taken a different turn."

CLASSIC STRAWBS ALBUMS

I thought that it would be fun to toss out the names of some of Strawbs albums from the '70s and see what Cousins' memories of them were. Here we go....

Grave New World (1972)
"Our first really significant rock album, if you like. Although there's no electric guitar on it, our whole philosophy was moving towards rock. Blue Weaver played much more rock keyboards than Rick Wakeman. Although Rick is a rock keyboard player, Rick is a classical keyboard player. Blue came from very much a rock background."

Hero And Heroine (1974)
"Hero And Heroine is, to me...side two...I'm talking vinyl...that is the pinnacle. However, it's a very bleak album. It was written as I was separating from my wife, I was involved with another woman. I had children going on, here there and everywhere. I had two very young kids I left behind, and the whole album is extremely bleak and extremely personal. It's very, very powerful."

Ghosts (1975)
"Ghosts was a much more difficult album for me. We'd been touring very heavily. I had to look back at some songs to bring them to the era of the album. For example, You And I (When We Were Young), was one of the earlier songs that I'd written, although it appears on that album."

"It was a difficult album to make because I was exhausted with touring and I was diagnosed at the time - believe it or not - with having a brain tumor. I had collapsed in the studio, went to the hospital, and had a lumbar puncture. It turned out that I was suffering from overwork and the strain. It was difficult because the songs were sung while I was lying on the floor of the studio, sitting up to sing a line and then lying down again, until the next line. That was when the band began to change...."

Burning For You (1977)
"In my mind, probably the least Strawbs, and probably our weakest album of all time," remembers Cousins.

Considering the overall quality of the band's albums during its roughly fifteen year run, does Cousins have a "favorite child?" He says, "for sound quality, I would pick Deep Cuts, because I think that the album sounds tremendous. The songs aren't necessarily as good as the others. I think that the second side of Hero And Heroine as an album fares better than the first side, but if I had to choose just the one album, I'd have to choose Hero And Heroine.

FINIS

Is there a chance that we'll see an album of new Strawbs material anytime in the near future? "We're working on that at the moment," says Cousins. "There's a company in the UK that's very interested in doing it. It's a whole new project," he says of this new label, "geared to the 'over 50s' and it involves what are now being designated 'heritage bands,' so look for the Strawbs as a heritage band!"

The band will continue to tour and perform at festivals as long as audiences (and promoters) will have them, and the band's appeal stretches across musical genres. "Our band is the only one that I can think of that can headline a prog-rock festival one minute, and a folk festival the next," says Cousins. "I don't think that there's any other band that can do that."

With a foot in each of these worlds, Cousins hastens to add, "sometimes the ice flow separates and you have to stretch a bit." Have no fear, however, for the Strawbs has successfully pursued a balancing act between British folk-rock sensibilities and progressive rock adventuring for the better part of four decades, satisfying fans on both sides of the line with intelligent and exciting music.

UPCOMING STRAWBS TOUR DATES

June 21 The German House, Rochester, NY
June 22 The Regent Theatre, Arlington, MA
June 23 Towne Crier, Pawling, NY
June 24 Sellersville Theater, Sellersville, PA
June 25 Stephen Talkhouse, Amagansett, NY
June 26 The Strand, Lakewood, NJ
June 27 BB Kings, Manhattan
June 30 The Stan Rogers Folk Festival, Canso, Nova Scotia
July 1 The Stan Rogers Folk Festival, Canso, Nova Scotia
July 3 Hugh's Room, Toronto, Ontario
July 4 Hugh's Room, Toronto Ontario
July 5 Centre In The Square, Kitchener, Ontario