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Fariña’s ‘Reno, Nevada’ that afforded Thompson the ample opportunity to stretch out and play an extended solo on the guitar that - for sheer inventiveness and musicality - put to shame everything else that had been ripped from a fretboard that weekend. He was seventeen years old.
    1969 was another fine year to be a teenaged middle-class bohemian wannabe. That was when I read Kerouac’s On the Road and started hitch-hiking hither and yon, mostly to Brighton. On weekends I’d use my dad’s train card and travel to London, where I’d haunt One Stop Records in South Molton Street and Musicland in Berwick Street - the only two outlets for American imports in the city. They were also the first places to ever stock copies of the San Francisco-based fortnightly publication Rolling Stone in Great Britain.
    Summer meant more festival-hopping: I first made it down to the Plumpton Jazz and Blues Festival. It was a glorious weekend marred only by reports that were circulating via the daily press available on the site that the actress Sharon Tate and several companions had just been sadistically executed in Roman Polanski’s
Hollywood homestead. It would still be some months before the culprits - Charles Manson and his repellent Family - were caught and revealed to the world at large. The shock of seeing longhairs capable of cold-blooded murder would send a bullet ricocheting into the heart of hippiedom.
    But that was all in the immediate future. For the moment, young people were still merrily uniting in benign displays of mass bohemianism centred around live music without fear of being ripped off and brutalised by their own kind. The Isle of Wight Festival that year was the key UK event of the season. The promoters had even snagged an appearance by Bob Dylan, his first paying performance in three years, and this was a most significant turn of events for we new-bohemians who’d been praying for his return to active music-making and getting only bad country music like Nashville Skyline as an occasional response.
    When he finally arrived on stage flanked once again by the Band, he looked very different from the ghostly apparition who’d almost deafened me back in 1966. He was fuller in the face and wore a bulky white suit that made him look like a character from a vintage Humphrey Bogart gangster film set in Panama. He wasn’t stoned either - at least, not so that you would notice. He looked more apprehensive than anything else. He had a right to be because it soon became apparent that he was a changed man vocally as well as imagewise. He sang every song in a whimsical croon that was light years removed from the amphetamine shriek of yore. You almost expected him to break into a yodel at any moment. Like the Band themselves, it was an exercise in old-school musical Americana that couldn’t be faulted for its pioneering spirit and woodsy finesse. But it was about as sexy as kissing a tree.

    I loved the Band’s first two albums like everyone else but had issues with their collective fashion sense and penchant for extravagant facial foliage. They were just too hairy for my taste. Of course, this probably had something to do with the fact that I still couldn’t grow facial hair to save my life. But the Band turned almost everyone in the rock milieu into budding Grizzly Adamses practically overnight. Look at photos of Paul McCartney during the Let It Be sessions. Or Jerry Garcia at the end of the sixties. You’re confronted with more hair than face. These people were just disappearing behind a forest of their own testosterone. That’s why the Stones were always the best-looking rock act of that era. Five members and yet no facial hair whatsoever. They always had their priorities well sorted.
    Now it was 1970 and I was bored. Time weighed too heavily on me too often. I only felt grounded in the moments when I was listening to music or reading a worthwhile piece of literature. My mother had always made sure I was a reader. She