It's A Wonderful Life

RIKKI STEIN
Moving Music - The memoirs of Rikki Stein
(Wordville Press Ltd)

Band managers, promoters, fixers, record company executives …. the, money men, the organisers in the background of popular music generally get a bad press. And not without good reason. When they do enter the popular consciousness more often than not it's because they're in court being sued for vast sums by the artists whose interests they claimed to represent. In short that's why Rikki Stein, who has spent most of the past six decades fulfilling all of those roles - often many simultaneously, isn't a household name. What he was, and in his mid 80s, still is, on the ample evidence of this autobiography, is an actual enigma.

A man who progressed from teenage hustler in the late 1950s -, professional gambler, estate agent, coffee bar and night club owner. This before careering through the headiest bits of the swinging sixties and into the 1970s when a chance encounter sent him off to Morocco and a musical epiphany which led him to spend the ensuing decades fervently promoting the music of the African continent.

Think - less a roller coaster ride, more a runaway train, fuelled by the sheer adrenaline of being one of the movers and shakers in what was without doubt the most exciting time to be involved in the music business.

Promotion of this volume has focused largely on the period when in the 1980s when he was manager of Nigerian Afro Beat legend, Fela Kuti. Not without due cause - his descriptions of Lagos and the musical and political maelstrom that surrounded the Afrobeat pioneer are little short of stunning. Fela Kuti however, doesn't appear until page 149, a little over half way through - there's a lot of music and musical history to get through first.

As with any good autobiography there is a certain amount of setting the record straight, albeit more in sadness than bitterness. But that's hardly unique for such a memoir, nor does it detract from the rollicking narrative. 

The names are dropped so fast that it might actually be easier to list those who don't appear. It was Stein who persuaded the Moody Blues to continue after group leader Denny Laine quit - putting them up in France where he spent most of the 60s, while they rehearsed wheat would become the platinum selling 'Days of Future Passed' album.

He organised European tours for The Kinks and Jimi Hendrix - his first,  which helped catapult him to global stardom; The Animals, and the Yardbirds - then boasting the twin lead guitars of Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, and discovered Randy Crawford.

A period in New York is spent running a record label, while living in the legendary Chelsea Hotel alongside such luminaries as Leonard Cohen, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg. 

He winds up being both backstage, out front and tripping out of his box at Woodstock before participating in the anti-Vietnam war marches in Washington and decamping again, this time to again to San Francisco.

He survives the Rolling Stones infamous Altamont concert, helps the Mohawk tribe save their ancestral redwood forests from the clutches of an energy company before heading off to live in a hippy commune. 

More household names drift through the narrative. The Grateful Dead, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, Tom Wolfe…

It’s a relief to the exhausted reader when Stein ups and returns to the UK - but we've still only reached page 80 out of 280. And predictably within days he's back in France, this time helping organise a disastrous free festival which leaves him broke and disillusioned, until a chance meeting with an old acquaintance who bungs him a wad of notes and orders him to visit Morocco.

Epiphany
It's here in Morocco that Stein's story switches from sparkly rock and counter culture anecdotes and begins to take on something of an arc. 

A chance encounter brings him to the tiny village of Joujouka, home of the Master Musicians of Joujouka pan pipe and hand drum players whose complex, hypnotic music has been perfected over centuries. Stein experiences something of an epiphany and spends two years studying the music and inevitably, on his eventual return to London becomes involved in its promotion. With help from Unesco and other NGOs in 1980 he arranges a European tour, which kicks off at a certain Worthy Farm in Somerset.

The success of the tours brings Stein into the orbit of Peter Gabriel with whom he starts the WOMAD festival, which in turn persuades Worthy Farm's owner, Michael Eavis to re-launch his Glastonbury festival, with the help of Stein. Obviously.

The names of 60s counter culture figures all but disappear to be replaced with mentions of CND, the EarthLife Foundation, documentary films and sponsored concerts. Meantime South African DJ, and expert on African Music, Jumbo Vanreenen - later to run Virgin's Front Line reggae label, and then to establish his own Earthworks label bringing African music to the UK - has introduced Stein to the music of Nigerian band leader Fela Kuti.

Predictably, Stein is invited to become his manager. There are fabulous descriptions of his visits to Lagos, the concerts at Fela Kuti's own "Shrine" - part nightclub, part presidential palace, part camp for musical refugees. Not to mention the challenges of managing an artist whose standing in his home country eclipsed that of the country's politicians, military hierarchy and other authorities, leading to frequent arrests and periods in jail.

Tours of UK and Europe and the US are organised, documentaries are filmed and deals cut to allow the remastering of Fela Kuti's 50 album back catalogue allowing for its official release in Europe and the U.S. A mammoth task

The story doesn't stop with Fela Kuti's death in 1997. Stein continues, promoting other African artists, helps launch commemorative concerts for the music of Fela Kuti, and is instrumental in helping set up a museum in his honour. Inevitably perhaps, the narrative shifts again. Many more household names pass through, but the focus switches from descriptions of wild happenings and anecdotes about those involved to more hard nosed tales of deals cut and events organised. That though is just how it should be, it's in these chapters that Stein's real legacy lies.

His story is an absolute rollicking tale of a man who started out working for kicks and cash and somewhere along the road fell in love with the music of Africa and wound up forging a pathway into the west for the musicians and music from the African continent to reach a wider audience.

In short the story of Rikki Stein is the story of someone who has really made a difference.

OUTSIDELEFT BOOK WEEK
Billy Childish: To Ease My Troubled Mind
Alan Moore: Behind the Illusion
Shaun Hand: The Jam Pop Art Poems
Moving Music: The Memoirs of Rikki Stein