by Bob Stanley
Clapton had quit the Yardbirds before the purple Indian baroque of 1965’s ‘For Your Love’ was even in the shops, dismayed by what he perceived to be a sell-out. He then joined John Mayall’s hardline, Chicago-styled Bluesbreakers. Mayall was to British blues what Ken Colyer had been to British trad jazz. His band was a photocopying exercise, with Clapton given free rein to let loose on the Freddie King lines he’d learnt down pat. To give Clapton credit, he soon tired of this, and probably regretted leaving the Yardbirds in a strop, because when two jazzers called Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker came knocking in 1966, he left Mayall to join them in a blues-jazz improv trio called Cream. Their main problem was their total confidence in their greatness – the clue was in the name. Bruce had a theatrical voice which, on heavy-weight numbers like ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ (US no. 6 ’68), was rubbery and slightly reminiscent of David Whitfield. What Cream had in abundance was volume; by 1967 they were hugely popular, and a flock of imitators – notably the super-heavy American trio Blue Cheer, whose cover of Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’ was Vanilla Fudged to the power of ten – forsook the subtleties of the blues entirely for Cream’s powerplay.
One 1969 single, in a year of albums, bridged the gap between the soft-rock adventurers and the blues-rock recidivists. Thunderclap Newman were barely a band at all; they had been put together by the Who’s Pete Townshend to get the songs of his drummer pal Speedy Keen3 on record. Their first single was called ‘Something in the Air’ (UK no. 1, US no. 25 ’69), and it was a beautiful, fatalistic, post-Grosvenor Square call to arms: ‘We’ve got to get together sooner or later.’ Keen’s voice was high, straining to be heard over the pub-piano playing of bearded GPO engineer Andy Newman and some heroic French horns. ‘Hand out the arms and ammo,’ implored Keen in his decidedly non-violent voice, ‘we’re gonna blast our way through here’ – just two years on, the flowery passivity of Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco’ was a wilted memory. Off the chart and out in the margins was another astonishing 45 by British four-piece Fresh Air called ‘Running Wild’. Buoyed by valley-bottom handclaps and a razor-sharp, dissonant guitar hook, it doesn’t deviate from 1969’s anti-urban drift, but has a proto-punk snottiness that much of the year sorely missed: ‘Young fools from greener places, flocking to rush in, light up the old man’s face with hate behind the grin. He thinks he’ll win, but we’re running wild, running wild …’ After three minutes of libertine biker roar, it dissolves into wild, wordless bellows and fierce distortion that anticipates Hüsker Dü and My Bloody Valentine’s vacuum-cleaner psychedelics in the eighties. You can dance to it, too. Both ‘Running Wild’ and ‘Something in the Air’ possibly stood out because they refused to be defeated. Neither equated heaviness with significance. After all, it’s always easier to be bleak than optimistic. These bands were trying harder.
The biggest new British name of ’68, Fleetwood Mac, were altogether more limited than Cream – which was a blessing. Drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie laid down a steady but basic beat and could have sounded like it was Ealing ’63 all over again, dated and slightly silly, if it wasn’t for their sad-eyed guitarist and singer, Peter Green, who turned out to be one of the very best. For a start, he was no purist and Fleetwood Mac soon progressed from being the best pub band in the country to Britain’s foremost progressive-blues act. Green did not cleave to classic blues forms or chord progressions. ‘Black Magic Woman’ (UK no. 37 ’68) was spiced and smoky enough to be covered almost immediately by Santana in the States; a cover of Little Willie John’s ‘Need Your Love So Bad’ (UK no. 31 ’68) was elevated by a Siamese-cat string section; ‘Albatross’ was as much influenced by Hank Marvin as it was by Muddy Waters, and was a UK number one in January ’69; and ‘Man of the World’ (UK no. 2 May ’69) was a crushingly gorgeous ballad that showed a rather fragile pop star, neither mannered nor self-pitying, but one we should probably keep an eye on. What’s more, B-sides like ‘Someone’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight’ showed they had a sense of humour, and were more likely to be on the terraces at 3 p.m. on a Saturday than quoting Ginsberg to first-year students in a smoky bedsit.
In the States, a bunch of Bay Area bayou-obsessed guys in plaid were 1968’s biggest new act, concocting a Southern fried boogie sound that – in less talented hands – would become a hard-rock staple in the seventies. Creedence Clearwater Revival, though, were thrilling, and had a rabid work ethic. Led by the moptopped John Fogerty, they released an unfeasible number of albums – six between ’68 and ’70 – and scored a run of tight, loud, instant-classic hit singles, something almost no one else managed in those years: ‘Proud Mary’, ‘Bad Moon Rising’, ‘Green River’, ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain’, ‘Up around the Bend’, ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain’, ‘Long as I Can See the Light’, all Top 5 American hits.4 Fogerty’s voice channelled Little Richard (check that ‘yeeeeah!’ on the end of gospel rocker ‘Long as I Can See the Light’), and solos were Nashville-tight. Improv, if that’s what you fancied, was reserved for album workouts like ‘Keep On Chooglin’’ and a cover of ‘I Heard It through the Grapevine’. As America’s hottest act of 1969, they headlined the year’s biggest festival, Woodstock; unfortunately for Creedence, this meant having to follow the jam-crazed Grateful Dead and they ended up playing at three in the morning, by which time most of the crowd was asleep. They worked far too hard – one of their albums was called Cosmo’s Factory to reflect their incessant schedule – and they acrimoniously fell apart at their peak in 1971; brothers John and Tom Fogerty never spoke again.
‘I can’t help it ’bout the shape I’m in,’ sang Peter Green on 1969’s ‘Oh Well’ (UK no. 2). ‘I can’t sing, I ain’t pretty and my legs are thin.’ If much of the new blues rock/hard rock was ugly, this was because music that spoke to its audience in painful and ugly times necessarily reflected and exhibited ugliness and pain. One facet of this was to look as unpretty and unpop as possible. Mac looked entirely attainable to girls, no question. A lot of the new bands in town had formulaically unattractive names, including Hard Meat, Toe Fat, Creepy John Thomas and Fresh Maggots. The sweaty likes of Joe Cocker and Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson looked like men you’d see on a park bench, the kind your mother would lead you away from at speed.
Pop mags didn’t know where to turn.5 No wonder people put leather-lipped Mick Jagger on a higher pedestal than ever. The Stones, riding a wave, now broke the traditional bond between performers and audience, the one that fed both parties’ needs and wants; they turned the pop concert into a battlefield. The aloofness of their early days had hardened by 1969 into something more directly sexual but also more vicious – the incendiary ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’ seemed torn from the Aleister Crowley book of demonic Albion. Playing with fire, the band’s strange new game seemed to permeate the atmosphere post-Grosvenor Square and My Lai: it seems queer that Charles Manson’s murderous set discovered hidden messages in Beatles songs as unambiguous as ‘Piggies’ when the Stones had released ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ in the same month.
All around, the mood grew black in ’69: ‘The way things are going they’re going to crucify me,’ sang John Lennon on one of the Beatles’ chirpier cuts that year; Creedence delivered the ominous ‘Bad Moon Rising’, an old-world warning, just as Neil Armstrong took a giant leap for mankind; Jethro Tull sang, ‘Nights of winter turn me cold, fears of dying, getting old,’ on their melancholic number-one album, Stand Up, spokesmen for the state of pop in 1969. Playing a private party at a castle in rural Germany, Peter Green caved in to bad acid and mental demons, an event borne out in the ultra-heavy, cackling terror of 1970 single ‘The Green Manalishi (with the Two Prong Crown)’: it would be Fleetwood Mac’s last hit for years, as Green left, retired from music to grow his fingernails, and wandered the streets of Richmond, Surrey, unshaven, unwashed and unrecognised for years. The rest of Mac, in need of solace, initially switched to playing sweet Buddy Holly covers – and things infinitely more gentle than ‘Oh Well’
or ‘The Green Manalishi’ – on Kiln House (1970). Drafting in American guitarist Bob Welch they made a fresh start with the prophetically titled album Future Games in 1971 – their time would come again.
It felt like a conflict with no rules and no aims had been gradually stoked by the Stones, and the grisly, public denouement at Altamont speedway stadium was a logical conclusion. Looking desperately around for some positive news, half a million people attended the 1969 Woodstock festival. Musically, it was nothing compared to Monterey, but optimists saw it as the turning of a page rather than a full stop on the hippie era. The highlight was John Sebastian’s acoustic set, gently reviving the Lovin’ Spoonful’s seemingly lost-forever goodtime sound. People were already nostalgic for the sixties, and they hadn’t yet ended.
Woodstock was mimsy. Altamont was hell. It was where the Stones’ vision of America, gin-soaked ballroom queens from Memphis and the like, met with harsh reality. Brian Jones’s body had finally given in that summer, and the Stones had played a free tribute show in Hyde Park. They had hired local Hell’s Angels as security. These heavy-looking hairies had ‘Hell’s Angels’ written on their leathers, in case you couldn’t tell who they were meant to be – they were pure panto compared to the American variety, who were mostly Korea and Vietnam war veterans, yet the Stones went ahead and booked the Angels to man the crowds at their last American gig of the year, at Altamont, on December 6th 1969. The Frisco and Oakland chapters would flank their Satanic Majesties on stage.
I love the notion of myth in pop, and I’m guessing Jagger and Richards do too. But this was the cruellest way to dispel the myth of California, heartland of surf music and endless summers. Altamont was the climax to something John Phillips had unleashed at Monterey – the manufactured Utopia of classlessness. ‘The Rolling Stones are still a little bit in 1965,’ reckoned David Crosby; ‘to them an Angel is something between Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.’ In reality, they were combat-hardened killers. First, the Angels knocked the Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin unconscious while his band were on stage. After dark, as the Stones played ‘Midnight Rambler’, their security guards killed a black kid in the crowd called Meredith Hunter. Altamont, a valley in the desert full of dead cars, was where the sixties pop dream ended. It was a self-made trap. It was stupid and awful and captured in Gimme Shelter by the Maysles brothers, who less than six years earlier had filmed the Beatles’ first trip to the States. A witness to the horror, Chris Hillman of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, described Altamont as ‘the worst scenario you could imagine. I thought that day was the end of the 1960s – it had come from the wonderful innocence of the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers to this.’
The Rolling Stones kept their heads down, re-emerging in 1971 with ‘Brown Sugar’ (UK no. 2, US no. 1), another party anthem, and the saucily named Sticky Fingers album. They now had a corporate logo, designed by Andy Warhol. Heavy vibes were banished. Nearly four decades later they are still a party band, have barely changed, give or take the odd foray into disco. It’s only rock ’n’ roll. You wonder if Altamont still preys on their minds, if they remember their naivety, their belief in their own power crumbling so horribly, so finally in front of them, with Jagger’s words sounding useless, feeble, trembling over the PA: ‘Brothers and sisters, why are we fighting?’
For modern pop, Altamont was a decisive break – the end of innocence. There was a darker side, we knew it to be true. One group picked up on this and, rather than look as ugly as possible to show their commitment to the devil’s music, they decided to cloak their lyrics with Hobbitry, their artwork with pagan symbols, and dress up like sex gods. Girls didn’t fancy Ian Anderson or Peter Green much, but they sure as hell fancied Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Led Zeppelin also happened to play harder and heavier than any other band in 1969, with a pummelling, punishing drummer in John Bonham. Genuinely, they were scary. With bombast, Celtic mythology and blouses undone to the waist, Led Zep cleaned up while the Stones were still white-faced with post-traumatic stress. It was no coincidence that in 1965 Page had replaced fun-hating Eric Clapton in the Yardbirds, where he honed his electric dreams via their string of white-hot hit singles. And it was also no accident that, in Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin had the most clued-up, unyielding manager in pop since Andrew Oldham. Everything about them – their aura, their instrumentation, their artwork, their manager – was the heaviest. ‘I must admit I haven’t listened to it straight yet,’ said Rolling Stone’s John Mendelsohn, reviewing Led Zeppelin II – ‘I don’t think a group this heavy is best enjoyed that way.’
1 By 1971 John Lennon was funding ultra-leftist organisations and dressing in military fatigues. Mick Jagger was a tax exile, wining and dining the Nicaraguan model Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias. Both were still seen as figureheads to the underground, whose blind faith in rock stars was boundless.
2 Proto-hip hop, but it’s impossible to sample unless you want to spend hours screwing about to make Charlie Watts’s drums ’n’ cowbell hit the beat. Another record it kept at number two which pointed to future rhythms (though it was yet another with a dark and deathly aura) was Robin Gibb’s ‘Saved by the Bell’, the first hit record to use a drum machine.
3 Keen had written ‘Armenia City in the Sky’, the mindblowing opening track on The Who Sell Out.
4 Creedence never had a US number one, with no fewer than five of their singles stopping at number two, though ‘Bad Moon Rising’ spent three weeks at number one in Britain.
5 For a brief period girls’ magazines like Jackie, and even music mags – notably Fabulous – largely abandoned pop, focusing instead on actors like Robert Redford, Pete Duel and Jack Wilde. The Monkees, as late as 1970, were still valid pin-up material in spite of their ever slipping chart positions as there were so few newcomers to replace them. The glossy pop monthly Rave folded in 1970; the following year, the weekly inkie Sounds was set up as a ‘left-wing Melody Maker’ by former MM writers Jack Hutton and Peter Wilkinson. The trend was for things that looked like the news, like something significant, not for pin-ups and hot gossip.
25
BUBBLEGUM IS THE NAKED TRUTH: THE MONKEES
The twin promise and tragedy of the sixties was the emergence of a modern pop field in which anything was possible. Some time in 1967, its radical unity had broken down, and the extremes had begun to harden in opposed camps – the idea of progress began to define itself against the idea of mere manufactured pop.
The Monkees are one of pop’s greatest conundrums. They are seen as the first boy band, but they could (after a fashion, and to varying degrees) all play instruments and write songs. They were the Pre-Fab Four, a deliberate copy of an existing group, but that was only in their scripts. They became a cog in a multinational machine, broke free to create hits entirely on their terms, but were eventually brought down by the hipsters they so wanted to be seen on a par with. They were blamed for ruining pop’s innocence, yet their best songs are its quintessence.
Ultimately, they affirmed the Brill Building – and, tangentially, Motown – as the secret motor of the best sixties pop, and also showed Monterey to be the decade’s great fulcrum of failure – dethroning the Mamas and Papas (despite their role in setting it up), destabilising Brian Wilson, and putting in their place all kinds of self-satisfied, underachieving acts.
Let’s start with some statistics. Between the end of 1966 and the spring of 1968 the Monkees were the biggest pop group in America, if not the world. Their albums spent thirty-seven weeks at number one in the US, and they scored both 1967’s biggest-selling US single (‘I’m a Believer’) and its third biggest (‘Daydream Believer’). More of the Monkees is still one of the twenty best selling albums in America. Outside of the States, things barely let up. In Britain, ‘I’m a Believer’ was number one for seven weeks in early ’67; in Japan, they outsold every non-Japanese act in the sixties, then pretty much repeated the feat when they had a revival there in the seventies. Although they only made records for three years –
cramming in nine albums, plus dozens of unreleased tracks – they had a huge pop presence until the mid-eighties, and that was all because they had their own TV show.
Already I’m tripping myself up. The Monkees didn’t have their own TV show, The Monkees was the TV show. They were four actors, and they were playing a band who aspired to be the Beatles. Micky Dolenz had been a child star – as Corky he was the main attraction of US TV show Circus Boy. By September of 1965 he was struggling to find work as a young adult when he answered an ad in the Hollywood Reporter from Raybert Productions. ‘MADNESS!! AUDITIONS Folk & Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new tv series,’ it read. ‘Running parts for 4 insane boys, age 17–21.’ When he got there, Dolenz was faced by a desk lined with Coke bottles; behind them, almost totally obscured, sat TV producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider. Dolenz looked at the producers, raised an eyebrow, then carefully, slowly, moved one of the bottles along the table. ‘Checkmate,’ he said, and got the job.
The ‘four insane boys’ hand-picked by Rafelson and Schneider – Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork – were chosen because the series was ‘about the guys we were looking for. They didn’t have to play the roles – they had to be themselves.’ For the young actors, this blurred fiction and reality dangerously: imagine if the characters in Star Trek were named William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley – how would this have affected the actors psychologically? As far as the public and most critics were concerned, the group wasn’t a TV construct, the group was as real (and as instantly famous) as the Beatles.