In a wicked world this is a perfect thing. Well if you like the Incredible String Band, that is. If you don’t, you might be in for a trying time.
I reIn a wicked world this is a perfect thing. Well if you like the Incredible String Band, that is. If you don’t, you might be in for a trying time.
I read this at breakneck speed because for a dyed in the wool fan this is like a huge slab of Christmas cake, or a 700 page helping of chicken tikka masala, or both stirred together with a layer of tiramisu on the top.
For those who don’t know the unique joys of this band, they existed between 1965 and 1974, and recorded 12 albums of which 2 are double albums, plus two solo albums during that time. This all adds up to them knocking out an albumsworth of material every 6 months or so for the full 9 years. Was it all beautiful, extraordinary, like nothing before or since? No, but about half of it was. Mike Heron and Robin Williamson were the two main guys, everyone else revolved around them. And they are still with us, aged 79 and 80. It’s quite extraordinary how many great musicians are 79 and 80 right now –
Paul McCartney Brian Wilson Roger McGuinn Al Jardine Bob Gaudio Sly Stone Diana Ross Mick Jagger Jimmy Page Joni Mitchell Keith Richards Randy Newman Roger Daltrey John Sebastian Gloria Gaynor
But I digress
As this book is 700 unsmall pages long no aspect of the ISB’s weird career is left unpondered. The elephant in the String Band's bedroom is addressed very frankly, which is this - after being the all time acid folk hippies they became converts to what one might describe as the polar opposite of acid folk hippies, Scientology; a cult which had a terrible reputation back in 1969 and, well, still does. Gradually, out went the inspired chaos, in came memos, rehearsal times and haircuts. Mike Heron was interviewed in 1973 and gave a poignant account of what in Krishna’s name happened :
Our communication was down, we couldn’t organise ourselves and we were hopeless with chicks [sic] and we couldn’t put anything together, from handling money to doing interviews… we were completely saturated in drugs and we realised we were screwing up and going out of our minds
L Ron Hubbard stepped in and smartened them up in no uncertain terms; so they became much happier people, and much more efficient, and their lives were back on track, and the music went down the drain. Well, it’s an old story. Miserable artists make much more interesting work than happy well adjusted artists. I get that, but still : scientology?!! Eventually they all left the cult but that was long after the band broke up.
This book is the nearly twice the size completely rewritten second version of a book originally published in 2003. The dozens of chronologically arranged articles are written by fans, for fans, and nobody is grandstanding with fancy pants prose. The only complaint I could possibly scrape up is that I really don’t like the cover! Oops! Out of all the images of this good looking group you chose a psychedelic poster from 1967 in which the artist decided to portray Robin as somebody else entirely, he never looked like that in his life. (The image GR is showing is not what's on the cover of my advance copy.)
Never mind!
This is another Xmas present alert, for any partners of ISB fans – look no further.
I think the assumption one should make when talking about rock music is that any man discussed in it is a monster unless proven otherwise. - Andrew HicI think the assumption one should make when talking about rock music is that any man discussed in it is a monster unless proven otherwise. - Andrew Hickey, music historian
**
I really did not care for RJ Smith’s showoff style – I guess it was kind of appropriate, an aggravating writer whose subject is a brilliant nasty man. Here he is on one of Chuck’s lesser known masterpieces, "Nadine":
It begins with a pat of hickory guitar, a contented little understatement that launches great consternation, Louis Satterfield’s electric bass rationalises the rhythm, and no longer are the drummer and the bassist mashing threes against fours; this becomes an organised sleazy motion, a fast, twisting hullygully tune – Satterfield hitting on the one and three, Berry scratching eighth notes on the two and four, with horns flickering all kinds of messages like the heavy eyelashes at the Club My-O-My.
It's not all like that, but now and again, it is just like that. And he likes to quote peripheral acquaintances (since Chuck had no personal friends at all, this is stated many times) saying such stunningly banal things it can give a reader whiplash.
THE SECOND ROCK AND ROLL RECORD
They used to try to find the first rock & roll record. It must have started at some definable point, right? Well, there ain’t no such thing, but this used to be a music geek question, like trying to find the source of the Nile in the 19th century. But the first rock & roll hit is more easily discovered. It looks like “Shake Rattle and Roll” by Bill Haley in 1954, but very shortly after that in 1955 Chuck was there with "Maybelline", along with Bill Haley again ("Rock Around the Clock") and Little Richard ("Tutti Frutti"). He was right there and he was absolutely crucial.
Before Chuck Berry bands were fronted by singers or singer-pianists and they had saxophones all over the place blasting away. You couldn’t find an electric guitar anywhere. It’s hard to imagine rock without the luminous centrality of the phallic electric guitar but Elvis did without one and Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino were all pianists. Chuck invented the idea of the guitar hero. He also invented the amazing idea that popular song lyrics might be witty, smart and documentary.
They furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale But when Pierre found work, the little money comin' worked out well "C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell
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When you compare Chuck with the other Founding Fathers mentioned above, he towers over them. He wrote maybe twenty great songs, all with beautiful lyrics; and numberless are the cover versions of his songs over the decades, learning his songs was for guitarists like learning the alphabet. (All this as well as being tall, handsome and charismatic.)
But he stopped, as indeed many great songwriters do. They have their golden decade and they stop - Ray Davies and John Sebastian did the same. I would have liked some insight about this and one other thing from RJ Smith but none was forthcoming. The other thing was : all those covers of Chuck Berry songs were by white artists. Black musicians didn’t go anywhere near his stuff. Why would that be?
CHUCK’S METHOD
Playing hundreds of shows a year (into his eighties) this is how it went. He would issue his contract to the club owner. They were to find his backing band for the evening. They were to pay him in cash, before the performance. He would turn up alone in a rented car carrying only his guitar and a briefcase for the cash, which when received, he counted, twice. He met the band maybe half an hour before the show. He never rehearsed. He would point at the drummer and say “play Memphis” – after 30 seconds of that, point at the keyboard player and bark out one of his other titles. He would give them a basilisk stare then leave. He would arrive on stage at the hour stipulated in the contact, on the dot. When onstage he would charm the crowd, only play hits, sometimes change keys half way through a song to mess with the band. (There was no set list. They just had to guess which song he was starting.) He would stop playing after 45 or 60 minutes, whichever the contact said. If they wanted an encore that was extra – cash upfront again. But mostly he would just leave in his rented car.
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I’VE LOOKED AT PLAGIARISM FROM BOTH SIDES NOW
1) OF CHUCK BERRY
Chuck released “Sweet Little Sixteen” in January 1958 and it was a big No 2 hit. Five years later the Beach Boys released their first big one “Surfin’ USA”. It had the exact same tune as Chuck’s song but on the label it said Brian Wilson wrote all of it. Chuck sued and now it says it’s by Berry/Wilson.
2) BY CHUCK BERRY
In 1972 Chuck released the appalling “My Ding-a-Ling” and it was his biggest hit, number one in the USA and the UK, to the terminal embarrassment of Chuck Berry fans. It was credited to Chuck but it was in fact by Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino’s writing partner. Dave had recorded it (same tune, 90% same lyrics) in 1952. Eventually, Dave sued Chuck, but he left it too long, I don’t know why, and the judge threw out the case. But Chuck’s lawyers would have been able to point out that Dave got the tune from the 1869 drinking song “Little Brown Jug”, well-known enough to have been recorded by Glen Miller. Brian Wilson shrugged – who cares? Chuck Berry shrugged – who cares?
NASTY
Calling Chuck Berry nasty might seem harsh if you’re not familiar with the Toilet Video scandal (amongst others). Readers of this book will get all the gross details, however, and might conclude that describing Chuck as nasty is fairly restrained. This review is no place to discuss that aspect of Chuck Berry.
I read this when it was published in 2011 and remember goggling at the cover where it says "Volume 1". Wait - this book is 1200 pages long - and you'rI read this when it was published in 2011 and remember goggling at the cover where it says "Volume 1". Wait - this book is 1200 pages long - and you're telling me there's a Volume 2? Yes, there was one, eventually, in 2017, also over 1000 pages.
Johnny Rogan's Byrds mania began fairly modestly with a first version in 1980 called Timeless Flight. That was a mere 160 pages! The second edition came out ten years later and was 304 pages. Seven years after that we got Timeless Flight Revisited : The Sequel - what an ungainly title - all 735 pages of it - surely long enough to tell the story of the (complicated) Byrds? But Johnny muttered under his breath "you ain't seen nothin' yet" and carried on typing.
He was a pioneer of the epic encyclopedic strand of rock writing which, maybe, was kicked off by Peter Guralnick in 1994 with his over 1000-page two-part Elvis biography. In 2013 we gratefully received Mark Lewisohn's part-one-of-three Beatles biography - ordinary edition 944 pages, extended edition 1700 pages - years covered: up to 1962. Then a few weeks ago came The McCartney Legacy Vol One 1969-73 by Kozinn and Sinclair - 700 large pages of small print. These are just the ones I have noticed.
Is all this detail really necessary? Well, it will be way too much for some and just about right for some others. I loved the convoluted Byrds story, every page, and Johnny tells it very well. I think we live in a golden age of biography.
I do remember thinking "I won't bother with Volume 2, it's just about the dead Byrds, not so interesting". But then I bought it last month....more
First there was Timeless Flight : The Definitive Biography of The Byrds published in 1980. That was a laughable 190 pagHOW THE BYRDS GOT ELEPHANTIASIS
First there was Timeless Flight : The Definitive Biography of The Byrds published in 1980. That was a laughable 190 pages long. It wasn't definitive at all. Not at all!
Then there was Timeless Flight: The Definitive Biography of The Byrds Second edition, published in 1990. Still a very mere 304 pages long.
Seven years after that came The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited — The Sequel. Now it is up to 548 pages. Definitive yet? Nope.
Johnny Rogan surveyed his work so far and was not satisfied. The Byrds were such a great group they needed much more than a weedy 548 pages. He got to work. It took him a further 12 years. So in 2011 the world woke up to
Byrds: Requiem For The Timeless, Volume 1 – a majestic 1200 pages long
And six years later, in 2017, finally, we gratefully received
Byrds: Requiem For The Timeless, Volume 2 an eyewatering 1248 pages long.
I read Volume 1 and it was very good but I stress that people indifferent to The Byrds might find it an uphill task. But that War&Peacelike volume is at least about The Byrds. This Volume 2 is not about the Byrds. Instead it’s six biographies of the members of this very revolving-door band who had died by the time it was published. These six names do not ring down through history. Maybe people will have heard of Gram Parsons. But Kevin Kelley? Even members of the Kelley family have never heard of him.
DON’T DO DRUGS
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Gene Clark :
He didn’t look good. Extremely gaunt, his weathered face had been badly fractured in a recent car crash, a few front teeth were missing and his left ear was bandaged a la Van Gogh .
Died aged 46 from a heart attack after years of heavy drug use.
Note : this never-read-a-book-in-his-life guy produced a masterpiece called No Other in 1974 full of weird philosophical lyrics, then he collapsed back into his life of determined self-sabotage.
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Michael Clarke :
When he opened the door I almost passed out. If I’d have gone to the hospital to see him I would have walked right by him. His face was totally sunken, just like a skull that had skin hanging over it, but no real distinguishing features. From his mid-chest down, he was swollen. His testicles were the size of a basketball and he could barely walk. It was the most horrifying thing. I just stood there and he said “I guess I don’t look so hot, huh.”
Died aged 47 from cirrhosis of the liver, the classic alcoholic’s death.
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Kevin Kelley :
Plucked from obscurity to be the Byrds’ drummer for 18 months, then tossed back into obscurity. It kind of messed him up. He’d gone from lightly cynical to very cynical to miserable over a period of years. It was a slow spiral down…plus, his girlfriend situation was few and far between because he’d plumped up like a little gnome.
Another friend commented :
Man, he was a mess. He just didn’t take care of his body. He was huge…And he still had that baby face…it didn’t look right. The bigger he became the more he wanted just to stay in and drink.
Died aged 59 from a heart attack after years of heavy drinking.
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Gram Parsons :
he was suffering blackouts and seizures, while other friends noticed worrying changes in his speech pattern. On many mornings he was shaking with the DTs. Eve Babitz recalls how he needed three tequilas to steady himself.
Gram came from a rich Southern family and was a trust fund baby. So that was nice for him. Not so nice was his father committing suicide when he was 12 and his mother dying from cirrhosis of the liver a couple of years later. She was 41 and a lifetime alcoholic.
After he left the Byrds he formed the Flying Burrito Brothers. Johnny Rogan quotes this review :
Screaming pretensions and garish self-delusions reduced the potentially excellent band to a group ego-trip. Parsons’ voice is matronly and his sickly Elvis fantasies and unpleasant to watch.
Ouch. Well, he is an established cult hero now.
Died aged 29 from an overdose.
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Clarence White :
No one had a bad word to say about this wonderful guitar player. He did not do drugs or drink immoderately but fate had it in for him anyway.
Died aged 29 when a drunk driver hit him while he was loading equipment into a car after a gig.
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Skip Battin :
By all accounts a very lovely guy. He survived to the age of 69 and died of Alzheimer’s. Before the Byrds he was Skip in Skip and Flip.
Just what the world needs, another Bob Dylan biography. How many are there already? 17? 18? But this one has a pretty good excuse for existing. The auJust what the world needs, another Bob Dylan biography. How many are there already? 17? 18? But this one has a pretty good excuse for existing. The author is far and away the most reseachingest, most obsessive-fan-accurate Dylan biographer there ever was. Clinton Heylin has already written ten books on Dylan including a giant biography from 2011 which this now replaces. In the last ten years mountains of Dylan archives have been made available and Mr Heylin has mountaineered the whole lot, so this is the Last Word. Until the next Last Word.
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Mr Heylin is the best biographer Dylan has had. (Maybe that’s not saying a great deal.) But Mr Heylin is notorious amongst Dylan fans for suffering from a particular form of Tourette’s Syndrome which causes him to involuntarily type out regular insults in his books about every other writer about Bob Dylan. An example of this is right here on page 3
A former tabloid reporter aka professional dirtdigger, name of Howard Sounes, had decided to …go all National Enquirer on the man called Alias. The result : a depressingly well-trundled, semi-literate stroll Down the Highway.
And on page 6 we have a comment about Ian Bell’s Once Upon a Time
Never in the history of biography has someone done less research for more poundage… it would barely qualify as sufficient for a college freshman’s first essay on pop culture
But once these savage lunges are out of the way there are no more of them, so that was a relief. Ah, yes… until he gets on to the subject of Joan Baez
Joan Baez, who could pierce the walls of Jericho with her contralto at twenty paces. Thankfully, she arrived too late to sing her party piece “We Shall Overcome”
THIS BOOK IS ONLY ABOUT 1961 – 1966
Dylan changed his songwriting, his singing voice and his personality every six months or so during this period, casually inventing entire new dimensions of popular music as he went along, leaving everyone out of breath and intimidated and maybe even hiding. So this is the great purple period. From Woody Guthrie imitator with a strong dash of Charlie Chaplin to absurdist acid rocker on a world tour in five years flat. Heylin demonstrates quite chillingly that Bob started out as a very likeable 20 year old wannabe and ended up as a character-assassinating entitled hateful supercilious hipster king surrounded by an entourage of sneering indoor sunglasses wearers. As the music got better and better, which it did, Dylan got worse and worse. And realising that, he bailed out by staging a fake (or extremely hyped) motorbike accident in mid 66.
(I’m happy to say that the likeable version resurfaced later, as anyone who’s heard Theme Time Radio Hour with your host Bob Dylan can confirm.)
IF I WALK TOO MUCH FARTHER MY CRANE'S GONNA LEAK
Now maybe it was me but I kind of got the impression that Mr Heylin started to drown in all these archives, especially the drafts upon drafts of early versions of lyrics which we are continually being told are located in the Tulsa Museum of Bobness or were sold at Sotheby’s for two million dollars. The last chapters are stuffed with this horrible melange of half-thoughts and unlyrical scraps. Look! Here is a fragment that is the missing link between Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues and Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window… pardon me for not being gripped. And while Mr Heylin was entranced by all these previously ungoggled-at details he seems to miss framing some of the more dramatic moments in a familiar can’t see the trees for the wood problem that besets those too close to their material.
But heck, you can skate past this aggravating stuff, and what you’re left with is a helter-skelter tale of one of the two or three most significant figures in popular music during the most significant six years of his life. Greatness strikes where it pleases.
This was definitely a case of What Was I Thinking when I Asked for This For Christmas??
In 2013 a guy named Tom Doyle wrote an excellent book Man On thThis was definitely a case of What Was I Thinking when I Asked for This For Christmas??
In 2013 a guy named Tom Doyle wrote an excellent book Man On the Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s. He took 285 pages to cover the whole decade. Now two other guys Kozinn and Sinclair have produced this FIRST volume of a series in which they take 700 much larger pages containing quite tiny print to cover the years 1969 to 1973. So you don’t have to be Mr Spock to deduce that there will be cataracts, geysers and torrents of brain-killing detail about every action or contemplated action performed by Paul McCartney and his immediate circle on each and every one of these 700 pages. Not all of which will be especially interesting.
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Typical of the sort of stuff you will encounter here :
Some of the mixing had been done along the way, so at the April 12 session Paul put the rest of the preliminary stereo mixing in Eirik’s hands, along with tasks like joining the still separate “Uncle Albert” and “Admiral Halsey”, and executing Eirik’s idea of splitting “Ram On” into two section, one for each side of the LP. A few days later Paul returned to check on Eirik’s progress and to do some tweaking of his own (countermanding Eirik’s idea of putting the flugelhorn solo in “Admiral Halsey” in a bed of ambient reverb, for example).
You like that? There is so much more. Our authors move smoothly from granular studio microdetail
Paul was finally pleased. Four hours of mixing yielded eight attempts, RS10 to RS17; RS14 was sent for mastering (and assigned the matrix 7YCE.21692.)
to some treacly banalities about cosy family life:
Cousin Ian Harris, son of Paul’s Aunty Gin, hosted the McCartney clan in New Brighton, where the family gathered around a burning pile of scrap wood with baked potatoes and sausages for a backyard firework display.
Or what about page 585
Their Labrador, Poppy, gave birth to seven puppies. The McCartneys kept one, which they named Captain Midnight, and gave the others to friends, including Brown Meggs, named for the vice president of Capitol Records, and the liveliest of the litter, which they named Jet, for his solid black colour.
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SHOCK AS REVIEWER CONFESSES TO LIKING THIS DRIVEL
But actually, most of the time I seem to have enjoyed this book in a weird woozy zoned-out guilty-pleasure where did all the time go kind of way. Every now and then the authors would lob something at me which caused boggling of eyes and short burst of mirth and startled me awake, as on page 459 when they tell us that having accepted the commission to write the title song for the new Bond movie Live and Let Die Paul got to work immediately :
Being a fan of Fleming’s work, Paul was already familiar with the novel, but on the weekend of September 9 he read it again, refreshing himself with the narrative’s finer points. Four chapters in, Paul fell upon a first flash of lyrical inspiration.
This was a passage of dialogue in which one character says ”Our policy with Mr Big is live and let live.” And the other character says “I have another motto. It’s live and let die.” Yes, Paul stumbled on the title of the novel he was reading! And this inspired him to write a song with the same title! Which was also the title of the film! Brilliant!
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THE MCCARTNEYS COULD GET ON PEOPLE’S NERVES
The authors are scrupulous in keeping their own feelings to themselves, leading to a general feeling of efficient impersonal fact-gathering busyness about this book. But they let their interviewees vent forth their anguish to the point where if our authors see McCartney coming down the street they might be best ducking down an alley until he’s gone. Here is David Lucas, New York studio owner, on Linda in 1972:
She was annoying, a complete pain in the ass… I watched Paul go way beyond acquiescing. He was subservient to this rude, indulged, entitled woman of very little or no talent.
Then there’s Glyn Johns, the producer of the second Wings album. He wasn’t impressed, and he told the unfamous members of the band
If you think because you are playing with Paul McCartney that everything you do is a gem of marvellous music, you’re wrong. It isn’t. It’s shite. Frankly, it’s a waste of tape and it’s a waste of my energy.
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MCCARTNEY’S STRANGE CAREER
After a decade of unique commercial and artistic success, praised by everyone as a pop genius and everything turning to gold, for Paul McCartney it all fell to bits in 1969. We know the unhappy story of the chaotic fractious end of the Beatles, and we know the depression that came crashing down on McCartney. He was the one it had all meant the most to, and he was the one who had to sue the other three to legally terminate the Beatles. So for a time he was Suspect Number Two (after Yoko Ono) in the hunt for the person who broke up the world’s favourite musical combo. And not surprisingly maybe, his pop genius seemed to desert him.
He thought it was a cute idea to play all the instruments on his first album, and it was, but the songs were thin and weedy*. The critics trashed that album. So he thought okay, next one will be highly produced & played by top sessionmen and will feature an impressively eclectic range of styles. This was Ram. The critics hated that one even more. Then he formed a band because he wanted to be in a band - this was a brave move, the other Beatles never did any such thing – but he recorded the first Wings album when they’d hardly had chance to say hello to each other – half of the album was based on studio jamming. No surprise, the critics hated that one too. And when you listen to it, you have to say that if there was any justice this band would never have got signed. They would have said come back when you’ve got some decent songs.**
So this most curious part of PM’s very long career is like the story of a guy having made it in the music business now trying to make it again in the music business. He tries this, tries that, one step forward, two steps back. And nobody has the nerve to tell him not to issue Mary Had a Little Lamb as a single. All the bad press of 1970-72 would have made a lesser egomaniac give up. But not this egomaniac.
AND IN THE END
Mr Kozinn and Mr Sinclair may be assured that if, as scientists believe, the Planet Earth has another five billion years to go before the sun transforms into a red giant and extinguishes all life, no one in that five billion years will have any chance of writing a more thorough account of Paul McCartney’s life between 1969 and 1973.
3.5 stars
*except for Maybe I’m Amazed **Once again, there’s one great song, Dear Friend...more
There was always something sucky on a Simon & Garfunkel record, a terrible song about a rich guy who committed suicide (“Richard Cory”) followed immedThere was always something sucky on a Simon & Garfunkel record, a terrible song about a rich guy who committed suicide (“Richard Cory”) followed immediately by a terrible song about a poor guy who committed suicide (“A Most Peculiar Man”) – two suicide songs one after the other! (Side two of The Sounds of Silence - I don’t think that would be allowed anymore) – then two very sucky singles "Homeward Bound" and "I am a Rock" - then on the colossally better Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme album we have "Silent Night/7 O’Clock News" where the idea is to sing Silent Night and then fade up the evening news full of horrors like Vietnam and Richard Speck the mass murderer so that the horrors drown out the pretty carol, geddit? – and on the next even better album Bookends Artie was inspired to go and record some miserable shuffling old people in a home and make it into the very non-musical track "Voices of Old People", I bet that doesn’t get many Spotify streams, and finally on the last and best album Bridge over Troubled Water everything was very unsucky until the very last one "Song for the Asking" which is so plaintive that it falls into suckiness to my ears.
But they tried hard and they were earnest and Paul Simon could write gorgeous tunes. So it’s all good.
WHAT’S IN A NAME? A GARFUNKEL BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SING AS SWEET
In 1964 when they were signing to Columbia Records Simon was already recording under the name Paul Kane. When Artie joined him for gigs that year they went under the name Kane and Garr (!?) – then Simon and Garr – then Artie said no, I want to use my real name but Paul said no, they would be mistaken for comedians or tailors – what about Simon and Garfield? The label said hmmm… what about Paul and Artie? No, there was already an act called Art and Paul. Wait, what about…. The Catchers in the Rye! That got a big laugh. Finally Tom Wilson, the great producer, said come on, it’s 1964, you are allowed to be Jewish, Simon and Garfunkel it is....more
A DISTURBING BUT ULTIMATELY UPLIFTING REVIEW OF THE EXPANDED EDITION
I want to give you an idea of the true comprehensiveness of this vast book, and thA DISTURBING BUT ULTIMATELY UPLIFTING REVIEW OF THE EXPANDED EDITION
I want to give you an idea of the true comprehensiveness of this vast book, and then I want to talk about cripples. The entry for John Lennon in the index is divided into several sections including Banjo, Relationships, Songwriting, and so on. The first section is Appearance, under which we find glasses, hands, hair, tough look, Teddy Boy, picking his nose, fingernails, attitude to wearing suits, and so forth. And there is one entry entitled
“cripple” act
And here are the pages that describe this nasty sounding thing :
Yes, there are a whole lot of references to the “cripple” act. So what exactly was it, you will ask. The answer may fill you with dismay. This great book exactly, beautifully describes English working class culture and you know the phrase warts and all, well, here are the warts.
So began John’s strange and prolonged obsession with deformities, one that dovetailed with his need to rattle on about anything that marked anyone out as different – blacks, Jews, queers and more… at any time now, John would contort his face up into that of a cripple or spastic, or “crip” and “spaz” – the commonly used words of the period, voiced without thought of offence by adults as well as children. He’d thrust his tongue inside his bottom lip, make “spaz” noises and limp along the street – and the stage – hunching his back and dragging a leg like Quasimodo … while John’s crips made some people nervous or uncomfortable…they often made others laugh and join in with him.
He would do this making fun of disabled people act on stage, quite frequently, for example while Paul McCartney was singing one of his corny old ballads like "September in the Rain" or "The Honeymoon Song". John got quite impatient with those.
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Okay, well – John Lennon growing up was quite an unpleasant piece of work in many ways. Even up to the point when they were a proper band he was doing this "crip" stuff. But wait, it carried on
This is from 1964, in the middle of Beatlemania. Watch it and cringe. Pretty grisly. And there’s a lot of that kind of mockery in his little books too.
But the thing is that he completely changed. From 1964 to the bedins for peace in 1969 there was a some kind of personality transplant. Acid and Yoko had something to do with it I’m sure. He demonstrated that you're not condemned to be the straightjacketed mocker of the disabled that you began life as. You can change for the better.
Well, hmm, this is a book review of the expanded edition of Tune In not a public apology for John Lennon. As you can see, the expanded edition of 1633 pages (plus 65 pages of index) is really detailed. Imagine all the references to John Lennon's nose, for instance, or Pete Best's moroseness.
There’s a whole 738 more pages than the teensy one volume version.
I wanted to get this mighty beast when it first came out but it was too expensive. So I waited for the price to come down. And waited. It never happened.
He was a nasty piece of work, the usual boring stuff, coercive controlling wife beater, violent drunk, cokehead, abandoner of his children, wrecker ofHe was a nasty piece of work, the usual boring stuff, coercive controlling wife beater, violent drunk, cokehead, abandoner of his children, wrecker of lives, but I have a ton of his music, most of which is so gentle and beautiful, exquisite melancholy foggy slurrings, heartfelt soulful folky electronics, a unique blend, I recommend it all (up to 1982, ignore the rest) and of course the contrast between the beauty and this beast, the great music and the terrible human who made it, is another restatement of the same dilemma we all come up against all the time. Should we avoid these bad people and their lovely art? (And also avoid reading those old books with their casual racism and sexism?) There’s no answer. I really don’t want to hear that as in some repetitious replaying of a romantic myth it was their “demons” that at the same time allowed them access to their creative fires, that you couldn’t have the gorgeous songs without the wifebeating, that kindness leads to blandness.
So, goodbye John Martyn, it wasn’t nice knowing you, but it was great listening to you for these many years.
This is as good a short sharp biography as JM deserves. Might be a very painful read for any fan who doesn’t know what he was like. ...more
Well, this is pretty strange. In the previous Dusty biography by Penny Valentine (Dancing with Demons) on page 139 it says
It was here that she met FayWell, this is pretty strange. In the previous Dusty biography by Penny Valentine (Dancing with Demons) on page 139 it says
It was here that she met Faye Harris, the small, smart film journalist she would live with for the next six turbulent years.
The years being 1972-78. In this second biography by Lucy O’Brien, Faye Harris does not get a single mention. It’s true that this new bio skirts around Dusty’s private life, names are not named, and the times Dusty ended up in psychiatric institutions are glossed over, but really, if a person lives with another person for six years, that person deserves a mention in a biography, I would say.
I don’t like to carp and moan about this book but really, it wasn’t great. I could tell Lucy’s great love of and fascination with Dusty but I have to admit this whole thing was repetitive in the extreme. Lucy O’Brien tells us about how difficult it was to admit to being gay in the pop biz of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s about a billion times. She reminds us that Dusty never said she was but instead said she had a lot of gay friends and now and then said she was bisexual about a million times.
And also - this goes for all pop biographies - it does not help that your book is going to be made up in large part of interviews with many persons who have had their brains impaired by massive drug intakes. This does not make for elegant reading.
And also, the melancholic trajectory of Dusty’s life was in itself repetitive. After the catherine wheel of the 1960s, when everything was made of gold, the pattern was – make an album with tremendous difficulty, many tantrums, much heartache – which when released (finally) is ignored – do little or no promotion – retire for another few years – repeat.
My habit of reading music biographies has to stop. It’s so often the same old story – take Dan Hicks, Tiny Tim, John Fahey and Dusty Springfield – four fairly different musicians. Early scuffling days are followed by success (to one degree or another) – inspiration cascades and spouts around like it will never run out – then come the wasted years, ugh. A lot of those. Followed in due course by the grim reaper.
Before I end I must mention this. On page 209 Lucy is discussing the problems of being a lesbian in the pop biz again. She says (this is Lucy talking, not an interviewee) :
It’s a received truth in the business that male record buyers need to feel that the singer to whom they’re listening is available for seduction. If they know she is a lesbian the spell is broken.
I’m really not sure about this received truth. She is saying that male pop fans in the 50s would listen to Doris Day and think yeah, she’s a fabulous star and all that, but she’s available for seduction. Or Aretha – fancy anyone thinking she would be available for seduction. Lucy is saying that a guy would think oh yeah, that Dusty Springfield, she’s one of those lesbians, so I don’t care how great her records are, since she’s not available for seduction, I’m just not going to listen.
I would be most interested in the opinions of any male pop fan who happens to read this.
2.5 stars rounded up because I'm trying to be nice....more
Original, unpredictable, a nearly perfect career, 8 studio albums and 2 live albums, only one clunker (True Stories), but two masterpieces (More SongsOriginal, unpredictable, a nearly perfect career, 8 studio albums and 2 live albums, only one clunker (True Stories), but two masterpieces (More Songs about Buildings and Food, Speaking in Tongues). Plus one great film, Stop Making Sense directed by Jonathan Demme.
Another great thing about Talking Heads : when they were gone, they were gone. They didn’t keep coming back.
This book is catty, gossipy, eyerollingly smirky, arch, knowing, waggish, spiteful, namedropping and borderline insufferable, and confirms that probably the least you know about your musical favourites the better.
My Top Ten
1. Nothing But Flowers 2. Listening Wind 3. Found a Job 4. Once in a Lifetime 5. Girlfriend is Better 6. Life During Wartime 7. Thank You for Sending me an Angel 8. Cool Water 9. Television Man 10. Making Flippy Floppy
Inspirational lyric:
I see the states, across this big nation I see the laws made in Washington D.C I think of the ones I consider my favorites I think of the people that are working for me
Like meeting one of your heroes and finding they’re a boring angry drunk. Not a very nice experience. There must be around forty albums of which I knoLike meeting one of your heroes and finding they’re a boring angry drunk. Not a very nice experience. There must be around forty albums of which I know every nuance of every note of every song and Dan Hicks made two of them:
Striking it Rich!
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and Last Train to Hicksville
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This memoir is so beautifully produced with such bejewelled high quality paper and so many lovely pix, it’s clearly a labour of love for all who put it together after Dan’s death in February 2016. It should be great, full of the warmth and stylish wit the songs themselves radiate. Dan was a prince amongst hep cats – at the time everyone else was turning their amps up to 11, he was assembling a band consisting of reincarnations of Django Reinhardt, Stefane Grappelli and the Andrews Sisters – this was The Hot Licks (featuring the Lickettes). But really, that phase of Dan’s life only lasted around five years. After the band fell apart he turned to being a full time aggressive abusive drunk and stayed that way for ten years, then spent another ten years in a half-way house and - finally - got straight enough to have a last golden decade at the end. So, all his memories are soused, sour, blurry and barely articulate. I think Dan Hicks fans would be better off picking this up, looking at the photos and putting it back on the shelf and moving right along....more
Biographies are quite dangerous books, they can turn on you just like that, take a whole lump out of you before you can say wait, I didn’t want to knoBiographies are quite dangerous books, they can turn on you just like that, take a whole lump out of you before you can say wait, I didn’t want to know that. Don’t tell me. Please. No.
I like biographies of people I don’t care too much about, like the Marquis de Sade, or Kathy Acker or H P Lovecraft or Marlon Brando. I get nervous when they’re about people who I love or think I love like Nina Simone or John Fahey or Joni Mitchell. But I want the information; I’m so greedy.
Joni was everything they said she was – a terribly twee impossibly fragile folkie; a wannabe jazz bore; a high and mighty queen of the nasty putdown; and a fruitcake who thinks she has shamanic powers. Also a little bit of a genius; perhaps more than a little bit, perhaps a lot of a genius. Well you know, you gotta take the weft with the woof and the coke with the zen. It’s all part of life’s rich porridge.
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Some biographies are in love with their subjects, and the authors are trying to perform some hideous reverse-engineered Single White Female move, creepy to the max (Norman Sherry on Graham Greene). Some start in worship and end up hating their subjects with a deep and deadly hatred (Roger Lewis on Anthony Burgess).
This one…. well, you might think David Yaffe is Joni Fan No 1 – I think he even thinks he is Joni Fan No 1 - but I dunno. The stuff he quotes from his hours and hours of interviews is quite often not conducive to the concept of Joni Mitchell as a pleasant or even a reasonably balanced individual. You might think David Yaffe is smiling with his face and stabbing with his keyboard, or perhaps just innocently stepping aside and letting Joni stab away at herself.
If you don’t cringe at many of the pages of this hapless biography, you’re cringe-making days are over I think. Here’s Joni on some of her gentleman acquaintances:
Chuck Mitchell was my first exploiter, a complete asshole.. the guy was a talentless nobody who hooked on to a tremendously talented girl
Jackson Browne was a leering narcissist… just a nasty bit of business
Larry Klein (husband of 12 years) : puffed-up dwarf
Leonard Cohen was the high priest of envy.
David Crosby : he was paranoid and grumpy. He was paranoid about his hair. He was unattractive in every way and overlording.
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(David Yaffe tries his best to be evenhanded here – he interviews Crosby, Klein and even Chuck Mitchell to get their comments on her comments.)
Now here is Joni on how uncannily talented Joni is :
I can usually interpret my own dreams easily, because I am in touch with my own symbolism.
My own parents are color-blind and I’m color acute.
I’m a fine artist working in a commercial arena, so that’s my cross to bear.
I had a column in the school paper called “Fads and Fashions”. I started fads and I stopped them. I knew the mechanics of hip.
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And sometimes you may be cringing or could be guffawing at observations made by Professor Yaffe himself :
By the 1980s, Joni felt deeply, Nietzsche’s prophecy had become fate. If Nietzsche was disgusted by Wagner, what would he have made of Hall and Oates or Phil Collins?
(Sure, but don’t stop there. What would Nietzsche have made of the Spice Girls?)
So these are the very dubious aspects on display here (and let’s not forget Joni blacking up on the cover of her album Don Juan’s Reckless daughter).
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Oh, plus, I might add, we get more than several tiresome pages of vaporising jazzbo muso-talk. When this professor is interviewing with his musical gods he leaves his bullshit detector at home. It all goes down on paper uncritically. Oh boy.
But, and this is the big but, he has the goods. David Yaffe tells the whole long story of Joni from polio in Saskatoon to the brain aneurysm in Bel Air with the 19 studio albums in between all given full treatment, even the disrespected no-selling synthy 80s ones (Wild Things Run Fast, Dog Eat Dog, Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm) - to the point where I thought I had myself cruelly ignored these three and have now ordered them.
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He fills in the strange encounter with the dying Charles Mingus, one of the most detailed sections , and all completely unknown to me. Fascinating stuff.
Perhaps the part he most glaringly evades or tactfully skates round is the 1997 re-union with Joni’s daughter Kilauren Gibb, who she’d given up for adoption in 1965. It was clearly not the most cloudless of relationships and we don’t get any interviews with Ms Gibb to balance Joni’s wounded account. And why should we – even in this immodest age some things are quite rightly still private.
So I think this book has a few major problems but Joni fans surely need it badly.
Just to be crystal clear if it should be in doubt : Joni Mitchell has written two of the greatest ever albums (A Song to a Seagull and Blue) and on top of that two further fistfuls of the greatest songs of the 20th century; plus, she had one of the most beautiful ever voices, in spite of a 4 packs a day habit, which only caught up to her in the 1990s, and then just made her sound beautifully damaged as opposed to just beautiful. So given all that, you might say she can be as cranky, rude and ungracious as she feels like, who cares.
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I could drink a case of you And I’d still be on my feet I would still be on my feet...more
I don’t play for fun much. I don’t like to hear myself that much. I guess that makes it easy for people to say “We don’t either!”
*
There were three thiI don’t play for fun much. I don’t like to hear myself that much. I guess that makes it easy for people to say “We don’t either!”
*
There were three things wrong with this damn book :
1) I think they think they’re being funny and smart when they write this kind of stuff but it makes me feel ill :
In Laurel Canyon, ten miles and seven spiritual dimensions away from the breadhead toxicity of Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Pacific Palisades, the folk/acid/rock splifferati were bonding and parting like quarks in an atom smasher, moving into fancy bungalows and dreaming of a white picket kid and maybe a couple of fences running around in the yard, getting their shit together, putting it to music, singing it in high harmony and learning to rodeo-ride the frequent bouts of paranoid hysteria like they were unbroken lizards.
That’s probably the worst example but that ghastly hip happening humour pops up at least once per page, enough to make you flinch every time.
2) The writers acknowledge right there on page v, which is before page 1, as you book nerds will all know, that Randy Newman has not led an interesting life. They quote Orson Welles talking about the concept of a Cole Porter biopic :
What will they use for a climax? The only suspense is will he or won’t he accumulate $10 million.
So this is an irritatingly-written but gentle tour through the career of Randy Newman. Along the way we get to find out he’s been married twice, got five kids and is a bit of a grump.
3) After 1989 Randy Newman mostly wrote film soundtrack stuff and was showered with Oscar nominations for them all (20) and won two. So the last 100 pages is a boring plod through all of these many many movies. Some of them great, of course, like the Toy Story trilogy – I completely forgot that Rand wrote the heartbreaking song Jessie sings in number 2 “When She Loved Me”. I defy any of you to see that sequence and not baww. Even just thinking about Jessie under the bed makes me baww.
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*
Well – you don’t need the Staffords to tell you how great Randy Newman can be and you don’t need me neither. But here’s one of my top favourites
You're still the same girl you always were Still the same girl you always were
A few more nights on the street, that's all A few more holes in your arm A few more years with me, that's all
Still the same girl
The same sweet smile that you always had The same blue eyes like the sun The same clear voice that I always knew Still the same girl that I love ...more
We live in a dangerous, cold, hateful, Godforsaken world. And I’m against that.
* Look at sheep. They don’t brush their hair, and look how much they havWe live in a dangerous, cold, hateful, Godforsaken world. And I’m against that.
* Look at sheep. They don’t brush their hair, and look how much they have.
* The good Lord could have created me as a lamp, a foot, or a white cloth bag… I am not an ashtray and an ashtray is not me.
- Tiny Tim
*
First, he wasn’t tiny, he was 6 foot 1 inch tall. His real name was Herbert Khaury, father was a Lebanese Christian and mother was a Russian Jew. He was born in 1932. They were poor. They lived in Manhattan.
The pre-Tiny Herbert
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He was obsessed by old music – say 1900 to 1920. He was a human jukebox. He knew all the lyrics, all the record labels, he could reel off matrix numbers should you require them, he was an old pop music encyclopedia. He was also obsessed by wearing cosmetics and growing his hair long. This was before Boy George. This was about 25 years before Boy George. How Tiny managed to stay out of the intensive care unit before he got famous is a mystery.
He did all these talent shows and he would sing this ancient stuff in a shrill falsetto, just in case the long hair and white make-up wasn’t strange enough. By the early 60s he had stumbled along to the Greenwich Village folky clubs, and they were the first to think that he might have something, although a lot of people thought that what he had was a mental illness.
He would trip onto the stage carrying a shopping bag holding his cosmetics and his ukulele. He would blow kisses to the audience at every opportunity. And he would fish his ukulele out of the bag and shrill his voice to the rafters.
Village hipsters liked him and he met Bob Dylan, and Lenny Bruce, of all people, became a friend, just before he died. Peter Yarrow put him in a trippy underground movie about the hippies called You Are What you Eat, during which he got to record with The Band. He was signed for Reprise records and just about then he was spotted for a new TV show in late 1967 – they were looking for freaks. This was Laugh-In, and he tiptoed through the tulips for the American public, who were gobsmacked. What was that?
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He transitioned almost immediately from being reviled and outcast and mocked to being a slightly beloved TV guest. By mid 1968 Tiptoe was in the Top 20 and his album God Bless Tiny Tim was No 7, and he was meeting people like Tuesday Weld and Warren Beatty and he was being endorsed by John Lennon in interviews, was 2nd on the bill at the Newport Pop Festival, and was visited in the studio by Frank Sinatra, and met George Harrison, who taped him doing a falsetto “Nowhere Man”.
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By the year end he was on Bing Crosby’s TV show.
*
He met a 17 year old girl called Vicki and they decided to get married. He was 37 at the time but no eyebrows were raised, except when he decided they should get married live on the Johnny Carson TV show, which they did on 17 December 1969 with an audience of 40 million, which was Johnny’s highest ever.
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So this couldn’t sustain, right?
Right.
The marriage was a disaster. One thing, Tim and some producers insisted that him and Vicki do duets on shows because it would be cute, and this mortified her because she couldn’t sing.
Vicki :
They played it back. I said “Oh that’s horrendous, can you just take me out?” They said “No no no… they said we’ve heard a lot worse. You should hear Linda McCartney.”
Anyway, it all ended in tears and divorce, because, you see, Tim did not stop being very strange when he got off the stage, he was like that all the time. Praising Jesus and spouting anti-Women’s Lib and pro-Vietnam War opinions right and left, but in this fey, bashful way, in between choruses of “On the Good Ship Lollipop”.
After his three years at the top, if that’s what it was, the next 26 years were a succession of grotty clubs with dwindled audiences, a never ending tour before Dylan’s.
One musician recalls a late night incident:
We hear this tremendous argument next door, screaming and yelling. We hear this woman screaming, with this man screaming! Boom! Stuff is hitting the wall. Larry says “That’s Tiny’s room isn’t it?” We ran down and knocked on Jimmy’s door and said “Something’s going on in there!” He said “No no, don’t worry about it. That’s Tiny having an argument with himself.”
Channeling Norman Bates!
Let Justin Martell elegantly summarise the last 25 years of Tiny’s career :
His revolving door of managers, producers and female companions, as well as a fickle fan base, bloodthirsty media cohorts, and a largely unsupportive family, frequently left Tiny adrift and lonely.
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Most frequent sentence in this book : “nothing from these sessions was ever released”.
Tiny’s managers seemed mostly to be mob-related; one was a grotesquely fat cocaine addict. His demise is worth quoting :
His body was discovered by a bee-keeper and a US Forest Service Officer in a canyon 65 miles north of Los Angeles; according to a report in the Los Angeles Times he had been shot almost two dozen times and for good measure dynamite had been inserted into his mouth and lit.
Love that bee-keeper, what a wonderful detail.
*
Every so often, Tiny would encounter some fan who thought he was a genius and who would arrange some sessions and try to get Tiny back in the charts, and every time it failed. This book is kind of like the latest of those remarkable acts of love.
This is a beautifully-produced book with a nice (but skimpy) photo section but I am thinking – 478 pages about Tiny Tim? I will be the only person who will read this!! And I thought it was 150 pages too long! But if you want to get all the details of Tiny’s obscure single “Santa Claus has Got the Aids” or his role as Mervo in Blood Harvest (1987) (IMDB : he manages to deliver a troubled-childlike creepiness with depths to his character. Dressing him in a clown costume was a masterstroke from the scriptwriters).
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Or his non-stop singing marathon world record or his relocation to Des Moines Iowa, it’s all here, right up to his death on stage at the age of 64.
A very remarkable, exhaustive and exhausting read. 3.5 stars. ...more
THE P BRYANT RIDICULOUS PARODY OF THE MAKING OF TROUT MASK REPLICA
24th March 1969.
JOHN FRENCH'S DIARY
I woke to hear the sound of padlocks and strong THE P BRYANT RIDICULOUS PARODY OF THE MAKING OF TROUT MASK REPLICA
24th March 1969.
JOHN FRENCH'S DIARY
I woke to hear the sound of padlocks and strong chains being removed from the front door of the Trout House. It crashed open to reveal a burly man. Don was back. The Magic Band cowered in fear. “So, boys, what have you got for me today?” “Please master, food, food” we cried, “or at least drugs and new guitar strings” “You know the rules! No food and absolutely no drugs until you give me more songs! Now! Cmon! French – what have you got for me hmmm?” Don unlocked my handcuffs. “We made up lots of songs, boss – all based on those telepathic thoughts you’ve been sending us!” I moaned. “We got one called about a tourist in Italy called “It’s too much for my lire” “What baloney!” shouts Beefheart – “change it to..hnnn ‘She's too much for my mirror’” “Genius idea!” bleated Rockette Morton. "and we got one called ‘The 1010th day of the Magic Band’s Cruel Incarceration’ – you wanna hear that one?” “Naw , save that one for later." Beefheart turned a deaf ear to my feeble attempt to ameliorate our plight with humour. "Now cmon, is that all? Two songs in three days? You know it’s gonna be a DOUBLE ALBUM doncha? So you better git crackin” Beefheart whirled around, kicking Jimmy Semens on his recently healed arm and opened the single door to leave but remembered to cuff me back to the piano before he did. “Doin a good job, John, but remember – it might look as if I have it easy living in five star hotel in the superior part of Sunset Strip up to my neck in acid and connubial bliss, but it’s me sending you all of these telepathic thoughts to turn into these songs – you better remember that.” As he leaves he tosseS the starved band a couple of loaves of white sliced bread and a jar of gherkins. “I’ll be back in two days. Remember – DOUBLE album.”
****
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AND NOW SOME ACTUAL QUOTES FROM THIS REAL BOOK
Ex-member: He could talk endlessly about nothing and make you feel you were conversing with the gods.
Beefheart told English journalist Barry Miles that he was a better poet than Allen Ginsberg, a better painter than Willem De Kooning and a better sax player than John Coltrane. Miles commented : "There was no irony there... I was quite shocked"
Then there was the tale of the sleigh bells he ordered, twenty sets in total. Herb Cohen (manager) asked him why he needed so many as even if he, the group , the producer and the engineer all played two sets there would still be six sets left over. His answer came back that they would overdub them. . “I got him 20 sets of sleigh bells. I couldn’t argue with that logic.”
Beefheart: A nude man is not very interesting – believe me, I’m a man and I’ve been nude and seen what it looks like and it doesn’t look anything like a dolphin.
Friend of the band quoted in 1972 : They were walking on stage every night and playing to these people and they’d been promised money and food and clothes and they had nothing. They had hardly a stitch of clothing between them and they had no real possessions.
Beefheart : I mean, if they were concerned about being puppets they should have spoken up instead of leading me on to believe otherwise. But then again, who the hell’s a better puppetmaster than me? Huh?
Mike Barnes (describing Big Eyed Beans from Venus, the last track on Clear Spot): The only way to deal with such thrilling intensity is to roll around on the floor, mindlessly barking like a dog.
Beefheart: is everybody feeling all right?
Crowd : YEAHHHH!
Beefheart : That’s not a soulful question, that’s a medical question. It’s too hot in here.
****
Here is a very solid account of the troutrageous Captain Beefheart’s wonky-donkey zapped-fly career in music and then in proper grown-up high art painting. This guy lived on the edge and then built an extension edge on that one. He couldn’t play guitar or piano. He could whistle. So with the whistling and the ferocious browbeating hypnotic personality he took real musicians and made them play exactly what he had in mind. There were several Magic Bands between 1966 and 1982 and not one of them made any money. (There was also a Tragic Band but we shouldn’t talk about that one.)
There’s one other substantial book about Beefheart which is by John French, the on-off drummer. It has to be read to be believed. I never saw anything like it. Student rock psychiatrists could write entire theses about dependence and father issues and the horror of cults (The Magic Band was at times like a five man cult). Mike Barnes’ book blows some cool air into these tortuous tales.
From “Hey Garland, I Dig your Tweed Coat”
Teeth let go, tobacco juice, an oiled balloon, brown eye in an egg white, black tar bubbles and stripes. A straw hat squeaked on the brim of a feather. Newsprint thumbed through nicotine fingers, a dark olive was turned on. Its small pulp speaker burst into a scream. One large tomato was immediately peeled skin red. It bled into a red "O" and smacked behind accepted fangs. Quick eyebrows danced cutely above a mole. The bridge held a large gold pair of spectacles. The front was smooth. It slightly gathered and wrinkled at the holes. A dark wooden moustache deposited below above Chinese red varnished lips that dented slightly into the evening. "It's gotten quite cold. I've decided I can't sell you my coat."
Why the hell aren’t these guys dead? Look at this :
Fats Domino – hits 1955-59 – 87 years old, still goin strong Chuck Berry – hits 1955-61- 88 years ol Why the hell aren’t these guys dead? Look at this :
Fats Domino – hits 1955-59 – 87 years old, still goin strong Chuck Berry – hits 1955-61- 88 years old, still goin strong Little Richard – hits 1955-58 - 82 years old, still goin strong Jerry Lee Lewis – hits 1956-7 - 79 years old, still goin strong
Four of the original wild rockers. They took it all, drank it all, shagged it all, tore it all down and lived to a remarkable old age! Now surely that wasn’t in the script? It just ain’t rock and roll. Having read the story of Jerry Lee Lewis I have a new respect for the durability of the human body. The shit you can do to yourself and live! Keith Richards didn’t invent it. But, er… don’t try this at home kids.
Oh, and they all had similar very brief and pretty unremarkable chart success, in spite of how their names ring out down the years.
Fats : 9 top ten US hits, only one in the UK Chuck : 5 top ten US hits, 3 in the UK Little Richard : 4 top ten US hits, 5 in the UK Jerry Lee : 3 top ten hits, same in the UK
Compare that pitiful record with any successful act from today – lets pluck Rihanna from the many we could name – and we find that so far she has had 19 top ten hits. Soon she’ll have racked up more by herself than Chuck, Fats, Little Richard & Jerry Lee combined. Well, sometimes success is influence, and that can’t be measured.
**
Nick Tosches gives us a propulsive story of the usual sorrowful mess that uneducated people make out of the blowtorch success and consequent clifftop plunges intrinsic to the life of the popular musician. A couple of features impinge themselves over the hubbub of whiskey drowning, spousal abuse and near-perpetual derangement. As is well known, Jerry Lee scored two big hits in a row – Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On and Great Balls of Fire – then just as he could have been the white rocker to take over from Elvis as Elvis was schlepped off to the army in Germany, scandal wrecked his career & he was stopped dead in his tracks.
Turns out that this was an interesting case of culture clash. What was normal in Louisiana, what good Christian folk thought was just ordinary high-spirited living of life, gave first Britain and then the rest of America a screaming morality fit. It went like this. Jerry was invited to Britain in 1958 for a wild rockin’ tour. First question from the journalists was : Who’s the girl? This is my wife, says Jerry. How old are you?? was the next question. She said “I’m 15”. After a couple of transatlantic phone calls the journalists found out that little Myra wasn’t 15, she was 13. And she was Jerry Lee’s third wife. Another couple of calls discovered that he may have married this’n when he wasn’t quite un-married from t’other’n. So the tabloid press went to town on Jerry Lee and the audiences couldn’t take it either. It was too much like great balls of paedophilia, but down in Louisiana, shoot, most gals got married pretty young. Nobody thought nothing about it. What they making such a fuss about? Lotsa guys get divorced. And lotsa guys marry 13 year olds, don’t they? Well, Jerry Lee had to wait 7 or 8 years after that to get back into any kind of success, which was as a country singer. That lasted a few years before he upended everything a second time.
The other thing was that every so often Nick Tosches suddenly drops into this weird, outrageous manner of phraseology which just has to be quoted to be believed :
On marital discord:
She caressed Jerry Lee and soon told him she was pregnant. He told her that it was no seed of his that had rendered her so. They lifted their hands in anger anew.
On Jerry and his fans:
And he shut his mouth and pounded the piano, and as he pounded it he saw that women were pressed against the stage, their ripe, cinctured breasts heaving synchronously with his pounding. He saw that their mouths were more open than closed, and that stray curls were stuck to their foreheads with dripping sweat: and he saw jealousy in the young redneck faces of the Arkansas boys. He pounded faster and harder, his fingers talons of ravishing puissance, and he felt the rush of neon gas shoot from his lungs and he saw those girls, quivering and wet, following him to hell with their painted mouths open.
More:
He paused, let his eyes sweep across the eyes of the girls. He could smell the serpent that slithered among their narrow ankles, and he could smell the odor of their oblation. He howled. He left the stage as a godlike man, and he drank from the weaker vessel and cast it to the ground, and then went south to Dallas.
On rock and roll:
It inspires boys to reinvent themselves as flaming new creatures and to seek detumescence without ruth.
On Myra:
The sight and scent of her drove Jerry Lee wild, and his mind was like a tremulously held knife at the knot of her intact virginity.
**
This book was published in 1982 when Jerry Lee has just recently buried his second son and shot his drummer. All of his possessions had been seized by the IRS and he was again looking at a void of horror. He was 47 years old. He had at least another 33 years to live. As I finished this book I was glad I didn’t have to read about them. A thoroughly unpleasant individual but an excellent bio. 3.5 stars.
ps - unpleasant? A little harsh?
"How did you react to Elvis Presley's death?" the man from the country music magazine asked him. "I was glad. Just another one outa the way."
We now have around 90 years of recorded music – before 1925 it’s not that good, partly due to the poor songs ("Don’t Dilly Dally on the Way", "My WordWe now have around 90 years of recorded music – before 1925 it’s not that good, partly due to the poor songs ("Don’t Dilly Dally on the Way", "My Word you do Look Queer", "Ma He’s Making Eyes at Me") but mostly because they had to yell down a horn to record anything before 1925.
The way popular Anglo-American music evolved over the decades was fast. Genres were borned, fizzed awhile, then phoenixed into something newer. I see this as a spectacular collaboration between Scottish, Irish and English people, black American people and white American people – five distinct cultures (along with a jillion subcultures) colliding, stealing, joyfully re-stealing, enhancing, rewriting, improving and getting impatient with and changing around each other’s music.
Folk into hillbilly, string band, bluegrass, old timey, morphing into Nashville countrypolitan, and outlaw and newgrass, meantime race records, the original name, umbrella for gospel, jubilee quartet and country blues which citified and somewhere decades later anglified into blues rock and heavy metal – whilst at the same time race rechristened rhythm & blues became soul; jazz beginning with Dixieland getting fancier with swing and druggier with bebop, and god save us from free and fusion; black music doesn’t stand still for long, look at all the microgenres of dance music (hardcore handbag! Trip hop! Ambient frog! Terrorcore! Only one of those is made up!).
The Carter Family were like the bedrock laid down as a place to stand for all the other musicians to leap off of, like the Beatles of country music if the Beatles had been mostly women singing glum religious songs and laments about mothers dying in little log cabins and children in train wrecks and the United States Postal Service wrecking people’s lives by misdirecting mail. Don’t buy a ticket to ride from the Carter Family. It will end in tears. If they want to hold your hand it will be because they’re going to be hanged tomorrow and you’re their whitehaired mother who’s a thousand miles away. Their antique, starchy but for all that moving and lovely songs reached back into the previous century as AP Carter mostly stole them from Victorian songbooks.
I thought a graphic novelisation of this curious story would be a blast, and it kind of was, but there was one big pain in the neck which I must call attention to: phonetic speech. Like when you pick up Wuthering Heights for the first time and are confronted with the outrageous Nellie Dean :
‘“T’ maister nobbut just buried, and Sabbath not o’ered, und t’ sound o’ t’ gospel still i’ yer lugs, and ye darr be laiking! Shame on ye! sit ye down, ill childer! there’s good books eneugh if ye’ll read ’em: sit ye down, and think o’ yer sowls!”
I imagine many a reader has dropped this classic like a rat mistaken for a chihuahua after a few pages of that. In this graphic novel we get :
Put thet out! It’s pyzen! It’ll roon y’r fine singin’ voice!
You ever flied in an airplane?
No, but I been on a motersickle.
‘S this all y’do when I’m not here? Just lollygag around pickin’ daisies?
Thing is, it kinda makes ‘em sound a bit like dim-witted-hillbillies, which no-one wanting to read this book wants to think like. Shore, it were a artistic decision, but I warn’t tickled pink ‘bout it, no sirree.
If you’re thinking of writing a novel, don’t do phonetic speech! It’s never good!
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The Carter Family - they didn't smile much....more
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