please come and
How two cheeky British public schoolboys bamboozled rock’s greatest stars to play at their very own Woodstock
to Foulk that it was ‘time for little pot’ and offered him a joint. Ray may have been about to put on Britain’s biggest rock festival yet, and he may have been 23 in 1969, but he was from the Isle of Wight, and he had never encountered drugs. He said: ‘No thank you.’
They’d already rented the festival site near Wootton Bridge, so, back on the island, all Ray and Ronnie Foulk had to do was to find the money, arrange the building of the stage, the hiring of the sound system, the fencing around the arena, the lights, the phone wires, the buses to ferry the fans to and fro, the lavatories, the food concessions, the security, the insurance, the St John Ambulance people, and a hundred other things. The design of the tickets and the advertising they left to their younger brother Bill and his enthusiastic friends from the Royal College of Art.
Throwing themselves into the spirit of the project, they came up with a motif of a King Kong gorilla with fairy wings on what looked like a psychedelic juke box with female bosoms. Well, it was the Sixties!
AT The end of the day, ticket sales would pay for Dylan and the other acts, but until the ticket agencies paid up, immediate investment had to be acquired to build the festival site. The company printing the programmes decided to invest, as did the rich next-door neighbour, their mother and some friends. With the first man landing on the Moon in July, and the murders of starlet Sharon Tate and company in mid-August, the summer of 1969 was an incidentfilled time.
But the Foulks could have been forgiven if the only news story that was gathering their full attention was t he U. S. r ock f estival at Woodstock (near where Dylan lived), just two weeks before their own extravaganza.
The Woodstock organisers had secretly hoped that Dylan would suddenly turn up there. The Brothers Foulk had feared it. But by ignoring Woodstock in favour of Wootton Bridge, Dylan did what he most liked to do — the unpredictable. It also meant he didn’t get wet — Woodstock is remembered for torrential rain and mud. Although it was a bit nippy on the Isle of Wight, the rain kept off.
Not everything went according to plan, of course. The Dylans missed the maiden voyage of the Qe2 and had to fly from New York, the grand house they’d been promised became unavailable so that they stayed at a more modest but homely cottage-type farmhouse. Nor did a top chef materialise for them, so they were fed on porridge, pies and plum crumbles.
They didn’t complain. On the contrary they seemed very happy, with Foulk catching a rare moment when he caught Dylan and George Harrison sitting together with their acoustic guitars and playing the everly Brothers’ hit All I Have To Do Is Dream.
Watching Dylan and John Lennon taking on Harrison and Ringo Starr in a game of doubles tennis must have been something to see, too.
Meanwhile all roads led to Wootton Bridge as the Isle of Wight ferries and hovercrafts disgorged thousands upon thousands of fans, their sleeping bags and tents on their backs, some with bands around their heads, as they’d seen in the TV news from Woodstock. In those days before there were huge screens at festivals, most fans would have been too distant to see anything more than a tiny speck of a guy in a white suit on a distant stage away.
But that wasn’t the point to the fans. What was important was that they were there with their friends on the night Bob Dylan made his comeback on the Isle of Wight.
The show ended after 11pm. And, as Dylan left the stage, fences were pulled down and free souvenir copies of the evening Standard, which I’d helped write earlier that week, were used as kindling as little bonfires were lit.
The Foulk brothers didn’t get rich —but they didn’t lose money either. They did something better than that. They had the craziest dream and they made it come true.