INTERVIEW WITH HERB STAEHR

WHEN DID YOU FIRST GET INTERESTED IN ALVIN LEE & TEN YEARS AFTER?

Ten Years After wasn't my first interest. I loved music from an early age, and my first record was that RCA Victor ELVIS PRESLEY album (with the big fluorescent pink and lime green letters) containing "Blue Suede Shoes", "Tutti Frutti", "Money Honey", etc. I've still got it - it says it's a "New Orthophonic" high fidelity recording, whatever that means? I think the next band I liked was Bobby Vee & The Cricketts (forgive me - I was only 13 years old!). Then of course the Beatles arrived and everybody, including me, got swept up in that. I saw them at the Boston Garden on September 12, 1964 and it was 35 minutes of shrill screaming from start to finish, I don't think I heard one note! I also went to the Beatles Shea Stadium, New York concert on August 15, 1965 as part of a World's Fair package tour. The bus left Boston for New York at 5:00 AM for a day at the fair, then on to the stadium for the Beatles concert and back to Boston - all in one day! I remember that I was hallucinating on the bus ride home due to shear exhaustion. The following year in 1966, during a trip to Europe (my parents were from Germany), I was able to visit the "Star Club" in Hamburg where the Beatles played early in their career. Little did I know that the Jaybirds also performed at the Star Club at about the same time I was there. Anyway, that is me standing in the doorway in the photo on page 4 of my Alvin Lee & Ten Years After book.

By 1967, my senior year in high school, the "psychedelic era" had arrived and people were hallucinating for different reasons. I remember seeing the San Francisco groups such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead at Boston venues like the Donelley Memorial Theater (since replaced by a parking garage) and the Psychedelic Supermarket. There were also some excellent local groups like the Ultimate Spinach performing at the time. We were still innocent (high school kids were innocent back then), but our older brothers and sisters attending college in Boston or Cambridge told us about all these great places and the bands that played there. One of those venues was the Boston Tea Party located on East Berkeley Street. This was an old theater that was Boston's version of the Fillmore East. All the top band's played there and this was where I first saw Ten Years After play just a few weeks before the Woodstock Festival. I was hooked by the energy and intensity of their performance and became an instant fan right then and there. I missed their Sunday night performance at Woodstock because the friends I went with had to be back at work on Monday. When it started to rain hard on Sunday afternoon it seemed like a good time to leave! My other "cameo" appearance in the book is on page 41, front row (third from left) on the cover of the Woodstock movie program which was sold in the theaters.

After the Woodstock film was released in May of 1970, Ten Years After was suddenly thrust into the larger venues. In 1970 they sold out Harvard Stadium in Cambridge (after playing the Tea Party earlier in the year) and by 1971 they sold out all 16,000 seats at the Boston Garden. By 1972 they were selling out consecutive multiple night appearances at the Music Hall. This escalation in the popularity of their music was not unique to Ten Years After. Other major groups of the period like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull made frequent appearances at small venues like the Tea Party before they (seemingly overnight) began to fill the stadiums. Just how much of an affect the Woodstock movie had on moving rock music from the clubs to the arenas is hard to calculate. But following the "Summer of Festivals" in 1970, rock had surely become a big business and most of the intimacy and spontaneity that had existed in the club atmosphere of the 60's was gone forever. It all happened very fast, but the five year period between 1966 and 1970 was an extremely exciting and productive period for Rock n' Roll.

WHEN DID YOU DECIDE TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT TEN YEARS AFTER?

Starting in 1970, I used to tape a lot of concerts with a Sony TC-110 "Solid State" tape recorder that I received as a birthday present. I think the first show I recorded was Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Boston Garden in July, followed by Grand Funk Railroad, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and just about everyone else - including, of course, Ten Years After. All those tapes sat in a box for a long time. Then in about 1983 I received a complimentary copy of a record collector's magazine and noticed a section in the back titled "tapes for trade". This aroused my curiosity and I sent a few people a list of the tapes I had. After several years of trading tapes with people all over the globe, I accumulated a ridiculously large number of both audio and video tapes. When Toni Franklin started up the Alvin Lee website, we decided it would be interesting to add a section listing concert dates. As a result of my tape collection, I already had a good start on this and other fans have been sending in new dates to add ever since.

After seeing similar books about other bands, I thought it would be fun to use what was in my tape and memorabilia collection to put together something on Alvin Lee & Ten Years After. I was also a bit annoyed that a band with such an interesting and important history did not have their story documented in print. So, what started out as fun eventually became work and it took four years to finish the book from conception to publication. It took a lot of effort to track down photos, because I wanted to include pictures of all the major concert events and festivals (Woodstock, Newport Jazz Festival, Isle of Wight, etc.) that Ten Years After performed at. I'm my own worse critic, and I've been too involved with the book to judge if I've done a fair and satisfactory job, but I hope other fans will get some enjoyment from it. If I've succeeded at doing that, then I'm satisfied.

If nothing else, I think Alvin Lee & Ten Years After deserve all the credit in the world for bringing their music to the people. While many other bands sat back and did one album and one big city tour a year, Alvin & TYA were constantly on the road playing what the people loved to hear. In my opinion, this is what a real rock & roll band is all about!