The Big Bear Ffolly

In June 1968 a new night championing ‘progressive music’ took over the room above the Crown pub on Station Street.

Henry’s Blues House took place every Tuesday night, with long-haired local support acts warming up for an impressive range of visiting blues legends including Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Homesick James and Champion Jack Dupree. An appreciative audience sat cross-legged on the floor, while 16mm Laurel and Hardy films played in the side room. Set up in tandem with a new management stable called Big Bear, the night would become an important launchpad for emerging bands - including one noisy four-piece that would go on to achieve global fame.

Jim Simpson started Henry's in order to put on a gig by one of his favourite local acts, Bakerloo. A jazz nut who grew up in the Black Country, his love of music was first given free rein while stationed with the air force in Gibraltar during the 1950s. After a blissful period playing trumpet in honkytonks for sailors on shore leave, he settled back in the Midlands in 1962, taking photographs for Melody Maker and Midland Beat while leading a jazz band called the Kansas City Seven. Eventually they became Locomotive, a group that would rattle through close to twenty members and everything from R&B and soul to ska and psychedelia during the course of the sixties.

By the summer of 1968 Simpson had packed in being a musician to manage Locomotive full time, making use of the contacts he had accumulated through gigging and photography. "The guys said to me, 'Why don't you concentrate on management?' It might have been their way of saying, 'Stop playing trumpet,' but I'll never know." He called the company Big Bear, a nickname which John Peel had apparently adopted for him. Blues-rock trio Bakerloo joined the roster and then Tea and Symphony, an acid folk ensemble who had emerged from Moseley's hippie scene and built a following with a theatrical live set combining film projections, a light show and mime artist. "They were easier to get gigs for in the beginning, because they were so weird."

The final piece in the Big Bear jigsaw had been punters at the opening night of Henry's, a heavy blues act from Aston who started life as Polka Tulk (named after a Pakistani fabric shop, or perhaps a brand of talcum powder - such are the esoteric debates that bands generate when they become massive). By this point they were going under the name Earth, and they asked Simpson if they could play a set at the Crown. In September he put them on as support for Ten Years After - as legend has it, with four Henry's T-shirts as payment - and the crowd response persuaded him to take them on.

All four bands were the products of an extremely fertile music scene. In Simpson's view, the number of ballrooms in the area helped lay the foundations in the early sixties. "Each of them had probably a 16-piece resident band, working five or six nights a week - and these weren't all Birmingham musicians, they came from all over the country." By the end of the decade the ballrooms had made way for the pub and college circuit and redevelopment had helped to scatter the audience, but the commitment to nonstop gigging endured with the support of receptive crowds. "Birmingham always seemed ready to give a band the benefit of the doubt."

The first of the Big Bear acts to make ripples nationally was Locomotive. Frontman and organist Norman Haines had developed a taste for blue beat and ska while working in a record shop just west of the city in Smethwick, and wrote a song which riffed on Desmond Dekker's 007. Rudi's In Love was picked up by one of Simpson's contacts, promoter Tony Hall, and the Parlophone release peaked in the charts at number 25 in October 1968. When Parlophone turned down the follow-up, Christmas novelty tune Rudi the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Simpson set up his own Big Bear label to release it under the alias of Steam Shovel.

In the meantime Tea and Symphony were playing Strange Days events in support of the nascent Birmingham Arts Lab, and Earth had graduated to larger gigs including support slots at Mothers. After being poached by rock flautist Ian Anderson for a week-long stint with Jethro Tull at the end of 1968, lead guitarist Tony Iommi came back down to Earth/Birmingham aware of the work ethic that would be required for success. The group were leaving behind their blues roots to develop something new; a hard, propulsive sound built around heavy riffs, and lyrics by bassist Geezer Butler which mixed the pastoral and the satanic along with elements of science fiction and anti-war polemic. A Mario Bava horror film provided the title for one of their early songs, and by the summer of 1969 Black Sabbath would be adopted as the group's name.

Before then all four of Simpson's acts hit the road for a brief package tour of the UK. "The London media were ignoring all the bands, and we just felt defiant. Big Bear Ffolly was a way of showing the world what quality music was around here." Each act had its own spot, and then the show would culminate in an extended jam which reflected the cross-fertilisation between the groups at this time. Norman Haines would go on to record early Sabbath demos of his own songs, while Sabbath's Bill Ward occasionally stood in on drums for Bakerloo, and at some point all four acts worked with producer Gus Dudgeon - better known for Space Oddity, and his work with Elton John.

Both Bakerloo and Tea and Symphony had Dudgeon-recorded albums in the pipeline on EMI's Harvest label, recently set up to accommodate the explosion in progressive music. (Another early Harvest release was Pink Floyd's Ummagumma, which featured a live set recorded at Mothers.) By the time Bakerloo's LP came out the band itself had broken up, while Tea and Symphony's debut achieved the kind of mainstream acceptance that you would expect from an album called An Asylum for the Musically Insane. A lysergic, vaudevillian wigout, it offers some idea of the band's mixed-media stage shows and has since been rediscovered as a proto-prog milestone with original pressings of the record fetching hundreds of pounds. Locomotive's first album We Are Everything You See spent all of 1969 in limbo, victim of a stand-off between Parlophone and the band who refused to retain the ska template of their solitary hit and instead recorded two sides of jazzy psychedelia. When it finally came out on 1 February 1970, it disappeared without trace.

Two weeks later on Friday 13th, Black Sabbath's eponymous debut was released and went straight to number 8 in the UK album charts. Recorded the previous autumn in a single day, it captured the stripped-down sound which the group had perfected through endless touring, and its doom-laden atmosphere seemed to chime better with the zeitgeist than the work of their trippier stable-mates. Fourteen labels had turned it down before Vertigo took it, and apart from a session on John Peel's Top Gear radio show it had received limited media exposure. In interviews Simpson emphasised the organic, homegrown nature of the band's success, an implicit dig at their more carefully constructed contemporaries Led Zeppelin.

Having a hit required a change of approach, the manager no longer driving the group back from gigs but instead staying in the office at home to field a growing volume of international calls. "They were queueing up to buy off me... I thought [the band would] understand that we were going places." However, Sabbath became convinced that Big Bear could only take them so far, and that summer they were wooed by former Don Arden associate Patrick Meehan with promises of big money deals and breaking America. In September 1970, with their second album Paranoid about to reach number one and two years after they had first played at Henry's, Black Sabbath sacked Jim Simpson.

By the end of the year the original Ffolly foursome had either disbanded or - in Sabbath's case - defected, but there was one more record to emerge. Although An Asylum... had not been a big seller, Tea and Symphony were able to release a follow-up on Harvest. Jo Sago - A Play on Music was a concept album, its first side a song series narrating the misadventures of a young man from the Caribbean living on Balsall Heath's Ladypool Road: "His world isn't where it should be - it's somewhere in between." The sleeve notes described the changes wrought to the neighbourhood by immigration, changes which "drove the less adaptable residents and their Colonial memories away from the parish, and overnight their scuttled mansions became adventure playgrounds for Jo Sago, his friends and others like him." Like Rudi's in Love, it's an example of how Birmingham's white, male rock scene absorbed and appropriated black influences - not just from the Deep South or Chicago, but from their own doorstep.

In the seventies Big Bear would shift their focus away from rock, mounting a number of UK tours for American blues performers including Lightnin' Slim, Eddie 'Guitar' Burns and Doctor Ross - many of them consigned to obscurity and low-waged jobs at the time. Later the company would establish a jazz festival in Birmingham which was about to mark its 35th edition when I visited their offices on the Hagley Road. Down an alley, through a rusty metal door and up a winding staircase, this is an authentic time-capsule piled high with the remnants of half a century in the music business. Among the commemorative bow-ties and contact sheets, a scrapbook of Black Sabbath cuttings documents the evolution from Henry's to cocaine mania, including a 1973 article in which Patrick Meehan shows off his new sports car. (The band subsequently spent some years pursuing Meehan through the courts.)

For all of Big Bear's other achievements Simpson will forever have 'Black Sabbath's first manager' near the top of his CV, and he remains a little wistful when talking about them: "like losing your best girl." As we pull this book together, an exhibition devoted to the band and their enduring influence is being installed at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, while Sabbath lookalikes and soundalikes seem more numerous than ever. Heavy industry will always get a mention in the band's origin myth - particularly the well-worn tale of Tony losing two fingertips in a sheet-metal press - but it's clear that the musical ferment of late sixties Birmingham also played its part in producing this unlikely, world-conquering export.

This blog post is a chatper from the book This Way to the Revolution by Ian Francis. Copies are available from the Flatpack shop.

Henry’s Blues House still takes place every Tuesday, now at Snobs on Broad St.