THE CROW ROAD
Given the musical talent on board and Led Zep’s manager behind them, Stone The Crows should have been a success story. Instead it’s one of tragic death and unfulfilled potential.
Words: Martin Kielty
ALAMY
It’s almost a bad pub-rock story –a band so good that someone said: “Stone the crows!” when he first saw them, thus supplying their new name. But since it was Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant doing the naming, it’s suddenly much more worthy.
The event took place in Glasgow’s iconic Burns Howff bar and venue in 1969. Up until that gig, the band were called Power –a fitting title for a group that featured the larger-than-life talents of singer Maggie Bell and guitarist Leslie Harvey. A forceful character like Grant was the perfect match for the young couple, who’d made a life plan based on pursuing their musical dreams.
“Saturday afternoons in the Howff were the best time,” Bell recalls. “But it felt like ‘all dressed up and nowhere to go’, because they shut at two o’clock under the local rules. It was just getting to something in there and then the door shut.”
On that particular afternoon, though, the most interesting thing happened after the clock had struck two. “Peter had turned up in this big black limousine –I think it was the Lord Provost’s, because you didn’t get many of them in Glasgow. He’d come to see Leslie; he didn’t know I could sing, because you couldn’t hear me in the Howff.”
Negotiations with landlord John Waterson were swift. “John barred the door – ‘That band’s not going anywhere!’ Then it was: ‘I’ve got a few demands…’ Peter wasn’t having it: ‘You’re the guy who cleans glasses, aren’t you?’ and he shoved him out the way. I never went back to that pub.”
Power had been formed with keyboard player John McGinnis and bassist Jimmy Dewar after engaged couple Harvey and Bell had spent time touring US military bases in Germany –a 60s rite of passage that many musicians went through. Their plan was to go to London, and from there make it to the US, and they’d been saving money to fund their ambition,buying equipment including a reel-to-reel tape recorder to help them on their way.