27 May 2017 - 12:39 AM in Ohio

Since 11 PM on the 26th, I've been listening to a CD of live tracks from 2002 performed by Dave Pegg, Simon Nicol, Ric Sanders, Chris Leslie, and Gerry Conway. As the clock hit midnight, John Gaudie was underway -- and so begins my celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first gig by Fairport Convention (which on 27 May 1967 had a rather different lineup including Shaun Frater on drums).

I'll spend part of this holiday reflecting on how I caught the Fairport Convention bug in 1988, when I was 17 years old and a couple of slightly older friends played a cassette of In Real Time: Live '87 in the car whenever we drove anywhere in our native Northeast Ohio. I heard Matty Groves blasting late one night as we sped down a deserted suburban street, and in those few minutes I became transfixed by the gestalt of the timbres of Pegg, Nicol, Sanders, Dave Mattacks, and Maartin Allcock. Such a simple chord structure -- such engrossing lyrics. I got my own copy of In Real Time, soon acquired Gladys' Leap on CD, and 29 years later have shelves packed with CDs and tapes of many configurations of what rapidly became my second-favorite band (eclipsed until 1999 by Jethro Tull). When I heard The Wood & The Wire album, I realized that my passion for Ian Anderson's oeuvre was fading while those folk-rock dudes in FC were creating fresh, exciting, diverse material that stimulated my imagination and often contained lyrics that stirred my soul. (I still quite like the 1999 Jethro Tull CD [J-Tull Dot Com], and I still rotate some Tull into my gonzo self-prescribed music appreciation hours, but ultimately Ian Anderson is but one man, albeit always backed by other musicians who work magic on their instruments, but still -- Fairport Convention is much more than one man, one songwriter, one flutist on one leg.)

The output of Jethro Tull ceased in 2011, and eventually Ian Anderson will fall silent. I rather like Simon Nicol's quotation on the inside back cover (page 169) of the marvelous book from the FAIRPORT unCONVENTIONal box set: "Why shouldn't there be a Fairport Convention in fifty or a hundred years?"

Why shouldn't there be, indeed. Here's to the next five or ten decades, Fairport Convention.

To the Fairport of the year 2117, I implore you: should you read this century-old message, please rock jaw-dropping renditions of Sloth as often as possible.