He prowls all over the stage in slow-motion. Chuck Berry, handsome smiling face, these days with long flowing black hair, playing his guitar with jerks of the forearm as if he were drawing water from a well, playing a boogie to blow Bill Haley's mind. He ends the set with a triumphant "Go, Go Johnny, Johnny B. Goode" and is gone waving his guitar.

From Chuck Berry, again appropriately, to Terry Reid, the latest staggering import from England. At 19 Reid runs one of the most well-honed combos around: drums, organ and himself singer-guitarist. His group's polished, gleaming-hard sound has all the taut excitement that one associates with the best rock. In a sense Terry Reid, with his towering individual talent for arranging and composing and leading, is very much a Chuck Berry figure. He has the same inventive rock 'n' roll ear, the ability to make original driving music out of the simplest basic elements, all presented in an overpowering whole through flamboyant and charming showmanship.

The musical structure that he favors is basically one of tight bursts of packaged melody--made up of a stinging organ sound, precise drumming and his own jabbing giutar, between intervals of his own singing which is acute and stormy. He also seems to have a nice sense of balance and discretion, rarely overstepping into excess. "Tinker Taylor," for example, has a pleasant original riff and this is milked in the song just about as far as it will go and no more--not pounded to death as some American groups are prone to do with their own minor creations. Within the limits in which prediction is possible in rock Terry Reid is definitely a find.

Fleetwood Mac, yet another of the English blues groups, is built around two Mayall proteges and the influence of the master shows very clearly. Peter Green on lead guitar plays an authoritative and firm role with his sinuous guitar lines, insistently and sympathetically guiding the group to put out the refined and fluid sound that is so typically Mayallian. The other presence is that of John MacVie (also ex-Bluesbreaker) who contributes a strong and uncluttered and incredibly well-felt blues-bass throughout. This kind of restrained and delicate watered-down imitation of the Chicago sound is a valid method of interpreting the blues classics and of creating new blues material. It is the other side of the, equally legitimate, Clapton-Beck style of English blues which produces radical guitar-oriented re-interpretations of the old material.

Given these two successful and fruitful approaches to white blues-playing, one is at a loss to understand where the blues style of Pacific Gas & Electric (another West Coast group at the Festival), with its amorphous bag of drum solos, wanton guitar effects and indifferent singing, fits in. I suspect it doesn't and I fear again that this is a malady common to too many American groups, born of half-assimilated influences from jazz and Cream.

The Grateful Dead took the field midway through the second day. After much exacting tuning and preparation they began--and played without stopping for 45 long, and sometimes short, minutes. The music was essentially freeform or no-form jamming. If you put any bunch of talented musicians on stage and have them improvise for an hour it is inevitable that they will get it together a few times. For all that, it is clear that progressive rock is not instantly exalting the way supreme unvarnished rock 'n' roll (Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Who, etc.) is. Rather the Grateful Dead came into their own as superb environment musicians--when the environment is right, for example, on the grounds of Columbia for free during the insurrection. In front of a grandstand, however, despite the easy accommodation induced by the open sun and silent clear sky, the mediocrity of conception of the Grateful Dead's music was too apparent for comfort.

I would love to love the Grateful Dead and the other West Coast groups. They are part of the Revolution, they have a social consciousness, they give free concerts and feel with us the injustices and restrictions against free living. By contrast Terry Reid is nothing more than an engaging young hedonist out to carve a niche for himself in swinging London by selling himself to as many Americans as possible. Nevertheless I cannot help but acknowledge that it is Reid who produces the gifted rock and roll and the Grateful Dead the insipid rock.

This paradox can perhaps be resolved if we recognize that rock and roll is basically a working-class, lower-class art form (all the greatest American music has come from blacks while the English groups are, nearly without exception, staffed by urban lower-class kids) and much of the working class is not interested in revolution. In America today the main impetus for social change comes from alienated middle class kids. Some of them, the musically inclined, turn to rock music, but they retain the musical values they were brought up with, those of classical music. No wonder that their rock comes out genteel, and cerebral, framed within long-drawn out set pieces.

The Iron Butterfly discover a pleasant riff and instinctively they begin to give it the full treatment--toying with it pretentiously for about thirteen minutes, padding it with irrelevant organ solos and guitar solos and the mandatory drum solo (with extensive use of the bass drum yet!). This music is very different from, and inferior to, the concentrated, strictly organized, but striking sound of early black rock and roll of the Chuck Berry-Fats Domino-Little Richard variety--a sound which had its greatest impact among the swaggering, brash young British proletariat. When the white working classes in America finally shake off their acquiescence and become rebels against society I will expect to hear them produce rock to equal British rock. Till then we must see to it that music masquerading as rock and roll does not come to dominate the American scene.

Not that we should exaggerate the chances of vigorous rock and roll being submerged under the pseudo-heavy "sound" music of the more pretentious West Coast groups -- the Miami Pop Festival had enough talent on display to keep one's fears tiny. Country Joe and the Fish, say, who came on unprepossessing but grow in stature as they assert their calm and confident rapport with the audience all building up to that staggering moment when they launch into "Fixing to Die"--in such a way does rock and roll gell musical and spiritual elements to produce instants of screaming intensity.

Or, Richie Havens, unimpressive on records, enthralling in person, a man who manages, from the depths of his black being, to add another cutting edge to songs like "Blackbird" and "Just Like a Woman," those wrenching classics of our time. He pulled off once more that, by now legendary, feat in which he hums the whole of "A Little Help From My Friends" with the band going behind him. The hypnotic effect of the easily-remembered melody combining with Haven's encouragingly timed grunts and moans, accumulates till the entire audience is forced to sing-along without him but with him.

And then there was Canned Heat who elicit the same hushed and tense quiet from the audience that Havens does, but by beating it into submission as if through the brute impact of a natural force, sound system bursting, the drums hammering out the rigid boogie beat, guitars searing loud, and climactic. If Havens sends spiny threads to each individual listener pulling them close to him, Canned Heat throws out a broad blanket of all-enveloping sound to huddle under.

There were so many more, Steppenwolf and Jose Feliciano, Joni Mitchell's tart beauty, and the Charles Lloyd Quartet's tingling and dignified rhapsodies, but one special word about Procul Harum. They played two flawless sets on successive nights in front of the maedow. I remember them illuminated by the silvery-pink lights of the light show in the dark heat of the night crashing out their rapturous blend of music. Gary Brooker's expansively soulful singing, Robin Trower's eerie guitar, B. J. Wilson's deftly brilliant drumming, Fisher's streaking organ, and above it all the presence of Keith Reid who writes all the words, an enigmatic intricate personality, quite possible a troubled genius. Procul Harum are sobering and transcendental, allying glittering jewels of musicianship with their message of melancholia and self-doubt, one of the Sticking Greats.

If they hold the Festival again next year, as they probably will, you should go, though I may as well warn you the experience tends to make Reading Period worse not better.

Salahuddin Imam edits a weekly feature on Radicalism in the CRIMSON