Stone The Crows!' shouted legendary manager Peter Grant, when he first heard this splendid young Scottish band roaring into action. Although it was the Londoner's favourite Cockney expression, he wasn't a man to be easily impressed. After all, he was the manager of Led Zeppelin, the most successful heavy rock band A history. Yet there was something earthy and appealing about the Crows that excited his enthusiasm and support. Rock fans were enthralled by the band founded by guitarist Leslie Harvey and featuring the passionate vocals of dynamic singer Maggie Bell. Their blues-based rock was imbued with power and an authentic flavour that sprang from their tough Glaswegian roots. Every new group expects to conquer the world. Stone The Crows was no exception. But Maggie Bell and Leslie Harvey had both been working long and hard before their latest venture took shape in 1969. They deserved the success that finally came their way. As teenagers Maggie and Leslie had worked together in a local group. Maggie (born A Glasgow, 12 January 1945) came from a musical family who supported her ambitions. Leslie was the younger brother of singer Alex Harvey, who led the Sensational Alex Harvey Band better known as SAHB. Maggie was just 17 years old when she started singing professionally in the city's glitzy Locarno Ballroom. She soon found herself earning 70GBP a week or more singing pop hits of the day under the spotlights. It was a better life than earning a pittance as a window dresser. "It was big bucks!" remembers Maggie. "I used to sing with a 15-piece big band on a revolving stage and as the stage came round for the second set, there was a rock band playing. I didn't really dig singing all the Shirley Bassey and Dionne Warwick songs, so after a year and a half I went over and joined the rock band!" In 1967 Maggie teamed up with a couple of brass players, Bill and Bobby Patricic, for a tour of American Airforce bases in Germany "It was hard work and we played five hours a night, seven nights a week. But it was a great experience and helped me to get my music together and learn my craft. I stayed there for two years." The guitar player in the band was her old mate Leslie Harvey. "We'd met even before I sang at the Locarno. He had a group called the Kinning Park Ramblers. That was in the days when his older brother Alex was doing the Star-Club in Hamburg. Leslie was just a youngster like me, and we used to go to all these far away obscure gigs around Scotland. "Anyway, we went to Germany
and earned enough to buy ourselves a reel-to-reel Revox tape recorder!" The assassination of Martin Luther King led to a tense situation on all the US bases and foreigners duly found themselves off limits. The musicians returned to Scotland and the scene was set for the formation of a new band that would eventually become Stone The Crows. In 1968 Maggie and Leslie formed Power which became a regular attraction at the Burns Howff bar in Glasgow. "We heard about a couple of guys who were really good musicians. John McGinnis was the keyboard player and Jimmy Dewar was the bass player and singer. He later went to work with Robin Trower when he left Stone The Crows."
Leslie and Maggie went along to join in a Saturday afternoon session at the Burns Howff with John and Jimmy. It went so well they decided to form a group together. Power was an instant success and this set-up lasted quite a while as Maggie, Leslie, John and Jimmy gained a strong local following. Then Leslie was invited to tour America with another Scots outfit called Cartoone, when their guitar player dropped out at the last minute. Leslie was brought in by manager Mark London and he spent two months touring the States. During his trip he jammed with the Allman Brothers band and his whole musical perspective changed. Maggie: "He came back a totally different person, with long hair and little John Lennon glasses and a fringed suede jacket. He had a new Stratocaster, too!" Leslie sat down with his old friends and told them they should stop doing covers at the Burns Howff and start writing their own songs.
"That's whe started ite music. We changed everythi from our look to our politics". Mark London then announced he wanted to bring Peter Grant up to hear them. "Led Zeppelin - what a comer' was just starting to happen. Peter came up in a big limo with his partner Richard Cole. Peter liked what he heard but I found out later they didn't really know if I could sing. The band had been so loud they couldn't hear me at the gig.
When I opened my mouth in the studio one night, they all came over and said, 'Fabulous voice!" In late 1969 Peter and Mark London signed Power and became their managers. At the same time the band changed its name to Stone The Crows and brought in drummer Colin Allen, who had previously played with Zoot Money's Big Roll Band and Mayall's Bluesbreakers. "Peter picked our new name. When he said: 'Cor blimey, stone the crows' we thought - what a name! But it stuck and people remembered it." Their self-titled debut album was produced by Mark London and released in 1970.
Rock fans were enthralle by the band founded by guitarist Leslie Harvey and featuring the passionate vocals of dynamic singer Maggie Bell. Their blues-based rock was imbued with power and an authentic flavour that sprang from their tough Glaswegian roots.
Jimmy Dewar shared some of the vocal duties with Maggie and co-wrote the material. "We recorded the album in Advision Studios in London with Jimmy Dewar and John McGinnis. Jimmy was a great singer and he sounded a bit like David Clayton-Thomas of Blood, Sweat Tears. We shared the vocals on this album and made a great a team, One of their first collective pieces is the opening cut 'The Touch Of Your Loving Hand.' Says Maggie: "That was a really melodic piece and could have been done by a big band. It's a song that could still be performed today and wouldn't seem out of place. We did it in the style of Ray Charles or Roberta Flack and it has a great guitar solo by Leslie. 'Raining In Your Heart' was by Jimmy Dewar and it is quite an up tempo thing with lots of breaks and cymbal crashes." Most of the album's material was a regular part of their stage set including the bluesy 'Blind Man, Ms Bell later re-recorded this number in 1996 during sessions for The History Of British Blues, an album produced by Pete Brown that featured an all-star line-up with Jack Bruce, Peter Green and Mick Taylor. Maggie: "'Blind Man' is a traditional number that Josh White used to perform. It's a real blues song. One of the reasons I got into Black music was from listening to Josh White." Another cover is the Beatles"The Fool On The Hill'; explains Maggie: "I always wanted to do this because it's got great lyrics. We didn't really do it like the Beatles but I remember Petula Clark once said it was the finest version she'd ever heard." The final track, 'I Saw America', lasts over 18 minutes and covered the whole of side two of the original vinyl LP. It was intended as a tribute to the home of so much wonderful music. However some US record executives thought it was a rather odd idea. Maggie: "It's in four parts and starts off with the different States we visited from the Deep South to California. We tried to describe how we felt about the different places. It's like a musical travelogue. Other members of the band had been to the States before but that was my first trip. It was a strange situation though, because the American record people said: 'But why do you want to write a song about America?' They seemed to think only Americans should write about their country!" As it turned out album sales weren't huge but as Maggie says "It did all right" and enabled them to make some more albums. After their second effort, Ode To John Law (1970), John McGinnis and Jimmy Dewar quit and were replaced by Steve Thompson (bass) and Ronnie Leahy (keyboards). Their next album, Teenage Licks (1971), proved more successful and from then on Stone The Crows were booked to play at all the major rock festivals. Maggie Bell also won the Best Female Vocalist Award in the annual Melody Maker Readers Poll. Many critics hailed her as a natural successor to Janis Joplin. Things were looking good, then just when international stardom beckoned Leslie Harvey was electrocuted and died on stage, just before a gig at Swansea's Top Rank Ballroom. It happened when he touched a live microphone and his guitar at the same time. The band was devastat and never really recovered from the blow. But for the moment they decided to carry on and Leslie was replaced by the young Scots guitarist jimmy McCulloch, who came on boar to finish off the group's last album Ontinuous Performance (1972). jimmy did his best but the group eventually decided to call it a day in 1973. Maggie went onto to release two solo - albums Queen Of The Night (1974) and Suicide Sal (1975).
Maggie has enjoyed many golden years since, singing and recor with a variety of bands and artists. But s looks bac on her early day, was our first albu and I think the music is very good for the times. When you cons all done a Iong times ago, it doesn't sound too bad!" Chris Welch, London, England 2021

Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 3 from 29. August 2011

EAC extraction logfile from 29. June 2022, 20:53

Stone the Crows / Stone the Crows (UK) [2021 Repertoire Records Remaster]

Used drive : PLEXTOR DVDR PX-760A Adapter: 3 ID: 0

Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No

Read offset correction : 30
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000
Gap handling : Appended to previous track

Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 1024 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : No
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files\Exact Audio Copy\FLAC\FLAC.EXE
Additional command line options : -8 -V -T "ARTIST=%artist%" -T "TITLE=%title%" -T "ALBUM=%albumtitle%" -T "DATE=%year%" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%tracknr%" -T "GENRE=%genre%" -T "COMMENT=%comment%" %source% -o %dest%


TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
---------------------------------------------------------
1 | 0:00.00 | 6:08.51 | 0 | 27650
2 | 6:08.51 | 5:11.01 | 27651 | 50976
3 | 11:19.52 | 5:16.06 | 50977 | 74682
4 | 16:35.58 | 4:06.55 | 74683 | 93187
5 | 20:42.38 | 17:18.37 | 93188 | 171074


Track 1

Filename C:\i said woof\Stone the Crows - Stone the Crows (UK) [2021 Repertoire Records Remaster]\01 - The Touch of Your Loving Hand.wav

Pre-gap length 0:00:02.00

Peak level 98.8 %
Extraction speed 2.3 X
Track quality 100.0 %
Test CRC 798FB595
Copy CRC 798FB595
Accurately ripped (confidence 2) [94C81232] (AR v2)
Copy OK

Track 2

Filename C:\i said woof\Stone the Crows - Stone the Crows (UK) [2021 Repertoire Records Remaster]\02 - Raining in Your Heart.wav

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Peak level 98.8 %
Extraction speed 2.2 X
Track quality 100.0 %
Test CRC 6AD6B864
Copy CRC 6AD6B864
Accurately ripped (confidence 2) [3D8ADF17] (AR v2)
Copy OK

Track 3

Filename C:\i said woof\Stone the Crows - Stone the Crows (UK) [2021 Repertoire Records Remaster]\03 - Blind Man.wav

Pre-gap length 0:00:07.10

Peak level 98.8 %
Extraction speed 1.7 X
Track quality 99.9 %
Test CRC 512E95FD
Copy CRC 512E95FD
Accurately ripped (confidence 2) [28F24FF0] (AR v2)
Copy OK

Track 4

Filename C:\i said woof\Stone the Crows - Stone the Crows (UK) [2021 Repertoire Records Remaster]\04 - The Fool on the Hill.wav

Pre-gap length 0:00:04.00

Peak level 98.8 %
Extraction speed 2.2 X
Track quality 100.0 %
Test CRC DBCB36AF
Copy CRC DBCB36AF
Accurately ripped (confidence 2) [1EF9BE2C] (AR v2)
Copy OK

Track 5

Filename C:\i said woof\Stone the Crows - Stone the Crows (UK) [2021 Repertoire Records Remaster]\05 - I Saw America.wav

Pre-gap length 0:00:04.23

Peak level 98.8 %
Extraction speed 2.2 X
Track quality 99.9 %
Test CRC 8674799F
Copy CRC 8674799F
Accurately ripped (confidence 2) [0A948624] (AR v2)
Copy OK


All tracks accurately ripped

No errors occurred

End of status report

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