The Rebirth of a Classic '70s Band

A Book Review of Eyes Wide Open

True Tales of a Wishbone Ash Warrior

By Andy Powell with Colin Harper

In the fall of 1973, when I was a freshman at St. Olaf College, I learned that my favorite band, Wishbone Ash, was playing in my hometown of Fargo, North Dakota, 300 miles away. At the time, I didn’t have a car. I didn’t even have the money for a bus or train. Moreover, the concert would take place in the middle of the week, when I had classes.

As an 18-year-old guy, I didn’t consider those major obstacles. Instead, I collected my cash, planned to skip two days of school, and walked out to highway 19 on a cold January day, where I stuck out my thumb and hitchhiked to Fargo.

No backpack. No change of clothes. Not even a toothbrush.

Knowing my parents wouldn’t approve, I didn’t stop at home. I showed up on the doorstep of a high-school girlfriend and asked her if I could spend the night in her basement. Her mother reluctantly agreed, and that night I witnessed my first Wishbone Ash concert. The next day I hitchhiked back to Northfield, and my parents and teachers were none the wiser. The trip had been more than worth it.

Back at school, I felt a bit silly to learn the band was coming to Minneapolis, only forty miles away, a short time later, but it did give me the chance to see them again.

After all these years, I still remember the opening number, “The King Will Come.” A strumming guitar and snare drum came out of nowhere in the dark arena, sounding like a medieval army marching closer and closer, then a guitar singing like a clanging sword. At last there was a burst of light perfectly timed with a crescendo of power chords and the appearance on the stage of the four warriors. In my whole life, no concert moment has yet to match that spine-tingling experience.

When I tried describing it to my father, a few months later, he stared at me—with my long red hair and devil’s goatee—as if aliens had captured his son and reprogrammed his brain.

Sad to say, the following spring, one of the guitarists, Ted Turner, left the band. Without him, Wishbone Ash began to move in new musical directions. Moving on as well, I began paying less attention to music, focusing on my fiction writing and later, my family. Gradually I lost track of the band. I knew they made a few albums after Ted Turner left, but I’d quit buying music by then and eventually I got the impression they’d died a quiet death like so many other bands from the ‘70s.

Jump forward in time almost forty years. One day, a YouTube search turned up a video of a band who called themselves Wishbone Ash. Three of the four musicians were much too young to have played with the original band, and the lead singer had a shaved head and a beard like Ernest Hemingway’s. Who was this guy? Could that be Andy Powell, who along with Ted Turner was listed in Rolling Stone magazine as one of the top 20 greatest guitarists of all time? A quick bit of research confirmed my hunch, and I soon learned that Powell had kept Wishbone Ash alive, in one form or another, for the last 45 years. Incredibly, they were still around, still writing great music and performing at a level, in my view, superior to their concerts in the ‘70s—albeit now for much smaller audiences.

Musically, I had a lot to catch up on. And doing so has been a great pleasure.

Then in 2015 Andy Powell published his autobiography, Eyes Wide Open, which covers the band’s entire 45–year history. The whole story is there: the heady years in the ‘70s, when the band was packing stadiums with acts like Aerosmith, Kiss, and Bruce Springsteen opening for them; the reunion of the original members in the late ‘80s; the lean years in the ‘90s, when the band stopped touring and nearly disappeared; and its current Phoenix-like incarnation under Andy Powell’s leadership.

The book also covers a dark period in the band’s history when Martin Turner, the original bass player formed his own version of the band, Martin Turner’s Wishbone Ash. To keep the Wishbone Ash name, Andy Powell ended up suing his former bandmates Martin Turner, Ted Turner, and Steve Upton, all of whom had long since left the band but were trying force a reunion. I, like most Wishbone Ash fans, found this phase disturbing, given the amazing music created by the original lineup, but Eyes Wide Open makes it clear there really isn’t anyone to blame for the breakups or the court battle. Keeping a band alive and profitable is a daunting job, especially given today’s music industry, and the personal struggles of band members can’t be glossed over and forgotten by fans. Just like the rest of us, they have to make their own choices based on their own personal needs, and regrettably, in this case, those choices carried the band members apart.

Throughout the book, Powell tells the history of Wishbone Ash with a keen, objective eye. He never pulls punches, yet he always seems fair. He’s not afraid to criticize, but he’s also willing to praise his detractors when they deserve it. His past drug use and wild years on the road haven’t clouded his thinking. Neither did his success in the ‘70s go to his head, perhaps in part because he endured so many cycles of bust and boom. In fact, the book gives you get the impression of a man much like the rest of us—someone fighting to keep his dreams alive while working hard to pay the bills and keep his family happy and safe. In that way, there’s something universal about the adventures and trials described in the book, and they make the term “warrior” in the title sound not so far-fetched.

After all, somewhere deep down in our breasts, we all have a little warrior in us.