As I mentioned in my write-up yesterday to an Al Stewart set from this same concert, Bob Matthews was a long-time sound engineer for the Grateful Dead and related bands from about 1966 until the mid-1980s. He died in 2021, and now, in 2026, another person named Charlie Miller has his collection of unreleased music and is in the process of making it public. It seems Matthews almost entirely worked in the San Francisco Bay Area, but there was a rare exception of him going to Britain to help record this concert for reasons I'll explain in a minute. So that's why we now have this recording.
This concert was part of an unusual music project called the "Medicine Ball Caravan." It was conceived by radio DJ Tom Donahue. Even though his DJ career began way back in 1949, he was sympathetic to the growing "hippie" counterculture movement in the late 1960s. For instance, he helped pioneer "underground" rock played on FM stations starting in 1967. He came up with an idea to get a collection of rock bands, and various associated hippies, and have them travel around the U.S. performing concerts in unusual places, and possibly clashing with mainstream America. The entire thing would be professionally filmed and made into a movie. At the time, the "Woodstock" movie had just been released and was doing very good business, so a movie company agreed to fund this project.
Originally, the headlining band for this tour was supposed to be the Grateful Dead, which would have been amazing. However, they backed out at the last minute and the much less well known band Stoneground took its place. But Bob Matthews (the one mentioned above with the treasure trove of bootleg recordings) was a sound engineer for the Dead at the time, so that's how he came to be involved.
The concert tour went ahead as planned, but it was a fiasco. The film crew was French, and they barely spoke English, so there were a lot of problems with that right there. But it seems they also were hippies who soon discovered LSD and other drugs. Apparently, they were high and incompetent nearly the entire tour. The film the shot was a mess. Martin Scorsese was brought in to try to make something out of the footage. He would later go on to become a very famous movie director, but his movie career was just getting started. He was chosen because he'd been an editor on the "Woodstock" movie mentioned above. He tried his best for many months, but the original movie was so bad that there wasn't much he could do. The movie came out in 1971 under the name "Medicine Ball Caravan," but it was a flop and was quickly forgotten.
A soundtrack came out at the same time, but it was rather short, with a mix of live versions from the tour and some previously released studio versions. It had a few good moments, especially a couple of live songs by B.B. King, but it lacked big names. It was a quickly forgotten flop as well.
However, the tour definitely had some musical highlights. As far as I can tell, there were only about half a dozen concerts across the U.S. But in addition to Stoneground, each concert tended to have other musical acts join in. Some acts that played sets at one of the concerts include Van Morrison, B.B. King, Doug Kershaw, Hot Tuna, and Alice Cooper. Some accounts say Joni Mitchell played a set, but I haven't seen any evidence of this at the official Joni Mitchell website, which has thorough details of all her concerts. So I'm not sure of that, but it's an exciting possibility. Furthermore, just today as I write this in mid-September 2026, the person releasing the Bob Matthews bootlegs released the Van Morrison set from a concert in Ohio that was part of this tour. That suggests to me that Matthews was involved in recording part or all of the whole tour, so we may have other great previously unheard music from it to look forward to.
That finally brings me to this concert. For some reason, after having a few concerts across the U.S., the idea was to have one final Medicine Ball Caravan concert in Britain. Stoneground came over from the U.S. to play in it, but most of the other bands were British. In my opinion, it was a pretty impressive line-up: the Faces, Al Stewart, Mott the Hoople, Edgar Broughton, Caravan, Shawn Phillips, and some lesser known bands like Daddy Longlegs, Silver Meter, and Formerly Fat Harry. The headliner was Pink Floyd! Already as I write this, sets from the Faces, Al Stewart, Mott the Hoople, and Stoneground have been released from the Bob Matthews collection in recent days. Apparently, most of the rest exists and is coming soon (with only two missing reels), including the Pink Floyd set! The curator of the collection, Charlie Miller, has posted a photo of all the Pink Floyd reels. That's very exciting for Pink Floyd fans because there are no known audio recordings of this Pink Floyd set, not even any with terrible sound quality. But this recording will be a pristine soundboard!
This entire concert was "professionally filmed" in order to be used in the movie. Although it was done by the same French film crew mentioned above, so I use the word "professionally" very loosely. However, for some reason, none of the footage from this concert made it into the movie. Perhaps the bands didn't give their permission and/or the film crew completely messed it up. I wonder if the footage still exists, and if so, will it ever be made public. (So far, there's no mention of the Bob Matthews collection containing video, only audio.)
Here's a good article about the entire Medicine Ball Caravan story:
https://ultimateclassicrock.com/medicine-ball-caravan/
And here's a fan site that has collected accounts about this concert by people who attended it:
https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/medicine-ball-caravan.html
From that, I learned only about 800 people attended the concert, despite the impressive line-up. In part, that was due to the fact that it took place on the same weekend as the 1970 Isle of Wight concert, which had many more big name music acts and was attended by about half a million people. But I don't think that disappointed the people who put on the concert very much, because they chose a venue that only held about 1,500 people anyway. I think their main intention was to get good film footage, not sell a lot of tickets.
It's great that we have this previously unknown and unheard Faces recording, because there are very few concert recordings with this sound quality from this early in their career. They had only released one album so far, "First Step." Lead singer Rod Stewart wasn't a big star yet. In fact, they were so little known that they were still billed as the Small Faces for this concert, even though they'd changed their name and lead singers in 1969.
Here's what one attendee said about this Faces performance: "The big surprise was The Faces. They stumbled on stage dressed in their purple velvet suits. I think Rod Stewart's suit was white velvet. Within ten minutes they tore the place apart with a truly brilliant set."
This recordings sounds fantastic, but it had one big problem: very little of the audience cheering could be heard. Luckily though, there was some there, just very quiet. I used the MVSEP program to split the songs into crowd noise and everything else, then I massively increased the volume of the crowd cheering at the ends of songs. It sounds like normal crowd responses now, although you can still tell they were playing to a pretty small crowd.
I'm going to keep posting all the good music from this festival as it comes out. The Mott the Hoople set is coming next. I don't know the order of the music acts, nor do I know just what still might come out. Perhaps when it's all made public I'll rename them a bit and put them in some chronological order.
This album is 42 minutes long.
01 I Don't Want to Discuss It (Faces)
02 talk (Faces)
03 Maybe I'm Amazed (Faces)
04 talk (Faces)
05 Devotion (Faces)
06 talk (Faces)
07 Around the Plynth (Faces)
08 Gasoline Alley (Faces)
09 Around the Plynth [Reprise] (Faces)
10 talk (Faces)
11 It's All Over Now (Faces)
12 I Feel So Good (Faces)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/25Gbqoib
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/il9Vw8oTy3M1p4C/file
The cover image is from an unknown concert in 1970. We can tell it's not this one though, since the clothes don't match the description of the eyewitness account mentioned above. The original was in black and white, but I used the Ask Gemini program to colorize it. From right to left: Rod Stewart (he's crouched way down in light blue pants), Ronnie Lane, and Ronnie Wood.
Floyd and Caravan sets in good quality from 1970 sounds like a dream come true.
ReplyDelete