Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  ‘Apache’ turned out to be one of those records that enjoyed a surprisingly long career. Long after the vogue for guitar groups had passed – it was this vogue that Decca’s Dick Rowe was referring to when he turned down the Beatles – it was a tune that refused to die. Following a funk version in 1973 by the Incredible Bongo Band, it ended up being quoted in scores of records by MIA, the Roots, even Rage Against the Machine. Because ‘Apache’ started life as a fantasy it could never sound anachronistic. In the twenty-first century there was even a learned essay on the subject, penned by journalist Michaelangelo Matos, entitled ‘All Roads Lead to Apache’.

  More importantly, all roads lead to Hank Marvin. There were a million young men all around the world who would never have had it in them to swivel their hips like Elvis, who would have found the idea of actually opening their mouths and singing like Buddy Holly simply too mortifying, but who nonetheless looked at this new rock-star archetype, this stolid figure with the beautiful guitar, the non-speaking role who took the lead when mere words were no longer enough, and imagined themselves in his shoes. Forty years later writer Steve Waksman described it as ‘the ideal of masculine achievement contained within the idea of the guitar hero’. Nobody would have put it in those words back then but everybody would have known the feeling. That feeling was to endure through the next decade of beat music and emerge blinking into the daylight during the virtuosity mania of progressive music.

  No form of music has been quite so closely identified with one instrument as rock has been with the electric guitar. For most of the music’s lifetime it was seen as not only the one necessary item of equipment but also the most potent symbol of the music. Whether we could play it or not, all of us at one time or another cradled a guitar in our arms, felt it awaken something within us, and had no difficulty imagining what it must mean to somebody who could really play it. Similarly we all knew what a band was and how these weapons could be deployed as one. We all felt we had some idea of what each individual member did. We joined bands in our dreams. Those instruments and the professionals’ mastery of them, the whole ritual of a band coming on, plugging in and playing, was a huge part of what we liked about rock and a huge part of what created rock stars, from the age of Buddy Holly to the time of Nirvana. When things went digital and we could no longer see where the sounds were coming from, much of the rock star’s artisan mystique began to disappear.

  A whole generation of British musicians who were only just starting their journeys at the end of the 1950s – Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Phil Manzanera, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler – got their idea of what being the guitar player could amount to from watching Hank Marvin on the TV. He was the reason they sat in their rooms and practised. He was the guitar hero of the boys who would grow up to be guitar heroes. Exceptional soloists have long been revered in different forms of music, but only rock felt the need, decades after Hank Marvin had set out the prototype, to coin the expression ‘guitar hero’; this might have been because the guitar had some of the characteristics of a weapon like a rifle or a sword. The guitar hero eventually became an idea so widely adopted that it was used as the brand name for a best-selling computer game, happily played by millions of people who have never been or even seen an actual guitar hero. It was adopted because everybody had subliminally taken on board the idea that the man given the honour of playing the lead guitar in the band is a figure of almost priestly specialness. When the time comes for his solo, he steps to the front of the stage, closes his eyes to denote his dedication to his sacred duty, and does battle with the darkness on our behalf. Every time he does that he’s standing in the shoes of Brian Rankin.

  1960 PLAYLIST

  The Shadows, ‘Apache’

  Roy Orbison, ‘Only The Lonely’

  Ray Charles, ‘Georgia On My Mind’

  Chubby Checker, ‘The Twist’

  The Ventures, ‘Walk Don’t Run’

  Joan Baez, Joan Baez

  Elvis Presley, G.I. Blues

  Bo Diddley, Have Guitar Will Travel

  Everly Brothers, ‘Cathy’s Clown’

  Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, ‘Stay’

  25 SEPTEMBER 1961

  GERDE’S FOLK CITY, NEW YORK CITY

  A boy invents himself

  THE CLIMACTIC SCENE of the 2013 Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis takes place in a Greenwich Village coffee house. The year is 1961. Members of the audience in the coffee house have the opportunity to come up from the floor and perform. The titular hero of the film, an ambitious young man trying, like so many at the time, to make his name in what later commentators would call the Great Folk Scare, but handicapped by the lack of any special talent, doesn’t go over big. As his lousy evening culminates in a life-threatening beating in the alley outside the club, the soundtrack pulses with the sound of the man who has succeeded him on to the stage and, as we the audience instantly recognize, has achieved in reality everything Llewyn Davis dared hope for in fiction. The implication of that scene in the film is that Bob Dylan arrived in New York City in the autumn of 1961 fully formed, that his talent and originality were immediately manifest to anyone who had ears to hear and that you could no more hold back his rise to world prominence than arrest the march of time. It wasn’t as simple as that.

  By 1961 the rock and roll thing appeared to be done. The twist seemed to have taken over. Elvis Presley had come out of the army straight into an appearance on The Frank Sinatra Timex Show, appearing every bit as comfortable in a tuxedo as he did sending up his hip-swivelling past. Little Richard had done his own bizarre double by marrying and embracing the Christian ministry. Jerry Lee Lewis remained mired in the scandals of 1958. Chuck Berry was being retried on charges under the Mann Act, charges that turned on the legal point of whether he had transported a fourteen-year-old Apache girl across state lines for the purpose of rescuing her from vice or involving her further in it. The music history books recall it was the time of Fabian, of ‘Wooden Heart’ and the twist. Seemingly the only people keeping the old faith alive were acts like the Beatles who played rock and roll favourites because that’s what worked best for their German audiences on the seamy side of Hamburg. In fact, the paucity of good music in 1961 is one of those myths on which all new beginnings in pop music are invariably predicated. It was also the year of Roy Orbison’s ‘Running Scared’, Ben E. King doing ‘Stand By Me’, Ray Charles singing ‘Hit The Road Jack’, Jimmy Reed and ‘Bright Lights Big City’, Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’ and ‘Please Mr Postman’ by the Marvelettes. In a couple of years these songs would be in everybody’s act. All over the world pockets of enthusiasts kept the flame burning.

  But for the moment, in America at least, the thing that had apparently taken over from rock and roll among the kids was folk music. Songs with words that meant something. Songs that celebrated old values. Songs that helpfully pointed out where the world might be going wrong. Songs that could be best performed on simple wooden instruments that had no need of either the plastic or the electricity of the machine age. Songs that allowed the people who listened, who were overwhelmingly white, comfortably off and the beneficiaries of a college education, the feeling they were on the side of the angels. Everybody was adjusting to this new aesthetic. Even the Beach Boys, who were auditioning for record companies in California, were being asked if they knew any folk songs.

  The arrival of this movement changed everybody. At home in Hibbing, Minnesota, Robert Zimmerman had affected the classic collar-up rocker style, even going so far as to name himself Elston Gunn when playing music in a variety of local bands. He posed on the Harley-Davidson motorcycle his indulgent parents had given him to satisfy his James Dean obsession and sported a red leather jacket around town like any other teenage fantasist. Those who heard him sing at the time report that he favoured the style of Buddy Holly. In fact he had gone into mourning after Holly’s death in the 1959 crash. As well as the concern that he might be left behind by fashion, Zimmerman also understood that there w
as something to be said for joining the ranks of these new troubadours. Furthermore, his hometown experience of how tiresome it could be trying to hold together members of a band had alerted him to the attractions of performing as a solo in the folk style.

  This also suited his self-image. In years to come Dylan would explain his youthful drive by saying he always felt the world he was born into wasn’t the one he was supposed to be in. He felt Hibbing wasn’t his home. The great events of history were to him more pressing than anything in the newspapers. He was destined for greater things. He said, in fact, that he’d always seen himself as a commander in the military. He was born out of time. He wasn’t the only young man who dealt with the narrow world of the 1950s by escaping into daydreams. But whereas the hero of Keith Waterhouse’s novel Billy Liar, published in 1959, was a figure of fun for his fantastical imaginings, Robert Zimmerman, suburban kid with the standard set of insecurities, found that by turning himself into Bob Dylan, folk singer, he could command the attention of a room and direct it all to himself. What Zimmerman was about to do could not possibly have been accomplished within the confines of a band. The other members would never have let him get away with what he got away with, which was nothing less than inventing himself and also inventing a life in which he could star. Young Zimmerman would transform his daydreams into epic songs and his small problems into epic battles. Early on in his career, when a hotel clerk denied him a room because he wasn’t dressed appropriately, he went away and furiously composed ‘When The Ship Comes In’. Alone on stage, armed with nothing more than his guitar, it was as though he was wrapped in the cape of a righteous avenger.

  What started the change in his personal style was going to the University of Minnesota in 1959. It wasn’t the education that brought about the transformation so much as the traditional opportunity afforded by university life to lie massively about himself. He dropped out of classes after a year. He abandoned his old rocker form of dress, adopting instead the fustian of a gentleman of the road. Dylan wore work clothes even though it was clear he had never done any hard work. This was something he shared with Bruce Springsteen, who was to sing about the working life despite never having done a hand’s turn of it himself.

  Like the teenage Elvis back in Memphis, Dylan’s act started long before he got on stage. Dylan was acting when he was simply walking down the street. In Minnesota he developed a new way of talking that was designed to make himself seem deep in an unschooled sort of way. His answers to standard questions would be either nebulous or maddeningly specific. He smiled to himself as if he had been entrusted with some truth about human behaviour that hadn’t been extended to others. He didn’t go to classes. What university provided him with was a society of people his own age on whom he could work his unique genius for sucking in styles and then presenting them as his own. He was not above larceny, actual as well as aesthetic. The man on campus who knew more about folk music than anyone was Paul Nelson. The young Dylan borrowed Nelson’s apartment while he was away and helped himself to twenty albums. These were never to be returned but were to help shape his style. The other lesson he was learning, the same one that lots of students learned in the days before Facebook, was that college is one of the few opportunities life affords to make the world accept your past life as whatever you wish it to be. By the time he arrived at his next stop, New York in 1961, he was well on his way to creating a comprehensive framework of legend for himself.

  A large part of that legend was borrowed from others. It was Buddy Holly’s music that had excited him. What excited him about Woody Guthrie was a life. He contacted the seriously ill Guthrie in hospital in New Jersey and said he was going to come out east to see him – a hint of his presumptuousness. He pored over Guthrie’s autobiography Bound for Glory with its accounts of places visited, roads travelled and hard lessons learned; he patterned himself after the older man. Guthrie had ridden freight trains, worked in the fields, roistered and rambled and drunk all over the land. Zimmerman, by now calling himself Bob Dylan – his old cowboy handle Bob Dillon altered for no greater reason than it looked better on the chalkboard outside the basket houses where he could play – didn’t bother actually doing that. He merely said that’s what he had done and figured word would get around.

  Bob Dylan was every bit as driven by the need to be someone as Elvis Presley had been, and similarly inclined to find the idea of settling for ordinary life intolerable. In fact, as he broke his journey to New York in Madison, Wisconsin he actually came right out and told a perfect stranger, ‘I’m going to be bigger than Elvis Presley.’ This was a large claim for a nineteen-year-old chubby-faced kid to make. It was a large claim to make when even Elvis Presley had only been Elvis Presley for a few years. But what Elvis had done was put the idea of rock stardom out there. What James Dean had been for Elvis, Elvis subsequently became for a far larger group of people. The success of Elvis in the fifties lit a fire in people who had no particular affinity for his music but who saw in him an escape from the ordinary. This worked just as powerfully on the educated middle class as it did on the dead-end kids. In the world of American folkies at the time, hundreds of people were obsessed with making it. Each one knew they had to be prepared to step on the neck of their brother or sister to get the break that might lead to it. Even the apparently pure-in-heart Joan Baez, who had already made enough of a career for herself to be able to earn more than $1,000 for one appearance and had invested her portion of Mammon in a Jaguar sports car, had pinched a lot of her act from a girl she was with at college. She justified it to herself by reasoning that whereas the other girl didn’t have a lot of ambition, Joan was going to take the material and do something with it. Nobody becomes a star by accident. They have to want it.

  Dylan arrived in New York on Tuesday, 24 January 1961, having got a lift in a 1957 Impala. He was not yet twenty. The mean temperature on the day he arrived was 20°F, which was thirteen degrees lower than usual. The weather up and down the eastern seaboard had been so severe that it had almost caused the cancellation of JFK’s inauguration, which had taken place the Friday before. There was a feeling in the air that, as Kennedy had put it in his speech, ‘the torch has been passed to a new generation’. If he had heard this speech, Dylan took its message literally. The city of New York certainly seemed to open up for the few people fearless enough to turn up there and demand admittance. Dylan was playing a song at the Cafe Wha? that night and already starting to spin stories about who he was and where he came from. Within a few months of arriving in New York he had networked his way around Greenwich Village, via Fred Neil at the Cafe Wha? and Izzy Young at the Folklore Center to Jac Holzman at Elektra Records, through Carla Rotolo to the folklorist Alan Lomax; he made sure he met everybody worth meeting and established a pattern he maintains to this day. Dylan has never been afraid to knock on a stranger’s door and ask for what he wants. He wasn’t then and he isn’t now.

  If we’re to believe his memoirs, which he wrote forty years later, Dylan spent his spare time in the Village reading heavyweights like Faulkner, Graves and Machiavelli. This is exactly the kind of reading list a college drop-out might wish to have read. He was also remarkably successful with girls. He had the two main qualifications: he looked as though he needed mothering, and he wasn’t afraid to ask. He did his first recording session playing harmonica for Texan singer Carolyn Hester. Hester had made her first record back in Texas with Buddy Holly’s producer Norman Petty; indeed Holly had taken some pictures of her in the studio. Through his association with Hester, Dylan came to the attention of John Hammond of Columbia Records.

  Dylan had a talent for attracting the patronage of older people. One such was Albert Grossman, who had run a club called the Gate of Horn in Chicago. Grossman knew there was money to be made in the folk boom, either by taking this talent out of the college towns and on to the nightclub circuit or, more significantly, from music publishing. Grossman had moved to New York because that’s where the talent was. He had merged three solo a
cts into Peter, Paul & Mary and was in the process of making a lot of money with them. Grossman took Dylan on as a client. According to the account in David Hajdu’s book Positively 4th Street he first took a little of the uncertainty out of the star-making process by buying Dylan on to a bill at Gerde’s Folk City and making sure that his tame journalist Robert Shelton, a staffer at the New York Times who had been writing about folk music for several years, covered Dylan’s appearance. Shelton was certainly one of those people who blurred the line between commentator and talent-spotter to the extent that his own fortunes were tied to those on whom he chose to put the spotlight. He was on Dylan’s team from the early days.

  Dylan divided opinion in the Village. Things could have gone either way for him. The older folk singers couldn’t see what the fuss was about, which probably meant they could plainly see what the fuss was about but didn’t like the competition one bit. The money men like Grossman and publisher Artie Mogull smelled the possibility of profit. Lou Levy of the Leeds Music Publishing Company signed him up on the basis of one of his very few original songs, ‘Song To Woody’. Mogull also signed him on the back of ‘No More Auction Block’, an old negro spiritual which he had modified just enough to pass off as his own.

  Dylan played his historic show at Gerde’s Folk City on West 4th Street on 25 September 1961. He was second on the bill to the Greenbriar Boys but the publicity announced him as ‘the sensational’, indicating the star-making machinery was at work even in these apparently humble surroundings. How it went down with the audience isn’t recorded. Only Robert Shelton’s reaction counted. Shelton didn’t simply cover the performance. Within the context of a small review in that Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, which at the time sold almost one and a half million copies, he managed to put this twenty-year-old, who hadn’t been in the city for a full year, on the map in a way that an expensive PR effort would have had to work hard to match.