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

by David Hepworth

  Janis had no remorse about jettisoning the other members of Big Brother and the Holding Company. She said she thought they were the kind of people who might find other things to do. She, on the other hand, felt the only thing she could do was be a singer. In fact the only thing she could do was be a rock star. Only as a rock star could her shortcomings be repackaged as marks of authenticity. ‘They’re paying me $50,000 a year to be myself,’ she said, delightedly. The very things that might have held her back in the mainstream entertainment business were assets in this new world which was suddenly paved with gold. The lack of polish, the straining for the right note, the disarranged outfits, the appearance she gave of saying the first thing that came into her head – these were the hallmarks of a new kind of entertainment which had come out of the West Coast counterculture. In this world a certain level of wastedness was a badge of the sincerity suddenly prized above all things. Janis found herself being celebrated for being the same person everyone had despised back in high school.

  Janis Joplin never stopped trying to get acceptance from home and family. As she was beginning to make her name out on the coast she would dutifully report back to her parents by letter. They were understandably heartbroken when she claimed in print that they threw her out when she was fourteen. This wasn’t true, but it was the price you evidently had to pay for having a rock star in the family. Fans preferred the myth to the truth. She would send her parents clippings and ask whether the local paper in Port Arthur had reprinted any of the stories about her. In 1970 she got an invitation to attend her high school reunion. Amazingly she decided to accept. And she didn’t accept quietly. She announced it on TV, on The Dick Cavett Show. ‘They laughed me out of class, out of town and out of state, so I’m going home,’ she said. She even told the New York Times, ‘Man, these people hurt me. It makes me happy to know I’m making it and they’re back there, plumbers just like they were.’

  Having savagely patronized the people of Port Arthur in the public prints, she should not have been surprised the trip didn’t turn out to be the dream vindication she had hoped for. She turned up with three handsome men, one of whom was her driver. Refusing to serve as walk-ons in this publicity opportunity, her parents left town to go to a wedding. She clashed with her siblings, both of whom were sore about the way she’d airily mentioned them in the press. All the homecoming weekend achieved was to accentuate the gap between her and her contemporaries. She was engaged in a battle for prestige, a battle they didn’t seem to want to join. She actually volunteered to revisit the sites of the most painful episodes of her teenage years. Reporters asked if she had ever entertained at high school. Only when I walked down the halls, she said. At the press conference she confessed that her school days had not been happy, that she hadn’t been to the prom. Why not? Because nobody had asked her.

  By that point of the weekend whatever reservoir of booze and bravado kept her pain at bay had run out and she looked broken and heart-sick. This was no grand vindication. This was no triumph over the little people. She was caught between the life she had left and the life she’d found. Neither seemed to satisfy her. By the Sunday night her mother, tired of turning on the TV and seeing her eldest daughter inviting the audience to snigger at her family’s straight life and quaint domestic arrangements, had had enough. According to one account she said, ‘I wish you’d never been born’. If she did she probably didn’t mean it, but nothing had prepared her for the experience of being an unsympathetic minor character in a drama she didn’t recognize.

  Janis never made it home again: just seven weeks after the reunion she was found dead in her hotel room.

  1967 PLAYLIST

  The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground & Nico

  The Beatles, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

  The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced

  Pink Floyd, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

  Sly & the Family Stone, A Whole New Thing

  Love, Forever Changes

  Procol Harum, ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’

  The Doors, ‘Light My Fire’

  Aretha Franklin, ‘Respect’

  Van Morrison, ‘Brown Eyed Girl’

  15 MAY 1968

  NEW YORK CITY

  The view from Olympus

  IN 1963, WHEN still dazed by the first shock of Beatlemania, Ringo Starr had been asked what he expected to be left with once the madness was over. His expectations were modest. ‘Enough to buy a couple of hairdressers,’ he said.

  That was the scale back then. In that vanished world, successful athletes or entertainers were expected to have a plan for the day when the knees seized up or the hits stopped coming. By then it was hoped they would have accumulated a nest egg substantial enough to be able to return to the communities whence they had come and set themselves up as men of property. They would maybe open a sports shop, a bar or nightclub, some place which provided a service while allowing them to trade on a freshly famous name. Even in 1963 the Beatles’ success seemed exceptional enough for them to be able to dream slightly bigger than that. Hence Ringo was shooting for not one but two hairdressing salons for his wife Maureen to manage. It was taken for granted that he and his wife would be essentially the same people they had been before being stunned by success. They might be more tanned but they would still recognizably be members of the same human race as their neighbours.

  Five years later the old scale no longer applied. Five years later the first single on the Apple label, the record company the Beatles by now felt confident enough to launch, would be dedicated to the same Maureen on the occasion of her twenty-second birthday. It was called ‘Maureen Is A Champ’ and had been recorded (to the melody of ‘The Lady Is A Tramp’) as a special favour to Ringo by no less a person than Frank Sinatra. The lyrics had been rewritten by Sammy Cahn. Just one copy was pressed. That was the kind of grand gesture Maureen’s birthday now demanded. A few years earlier she might have been satisfied with flowers.

  Clearly the four members of the Beatles had ascended beyond the clouds on which the merely successful were perched and had now reached a terra incognita of soft power and magical prestige on which there was neither footprint nor flag. Rising so high so quickly induces a special kind of vertigo. The realization that for them there would be no going back to the world they’d known must have stolen upon the Beatles in instalments over the previous five years as they hit milestones that were at first thrilling, then hilarious, and finally intimidating. It might have truly come home to them when they had so many singles on the American chart there was scarcely room for anyone else. The moment could have come in 1965, when they were awarded the MBE by Her Majesty the Queen. It could have been in 1966, when they were forced to give up touring because they simply could no longer be heard above the loudly expressed enthusiasm of their fans. It could have been as late as 1967, when they realized that the hippy kids they bumped into on the street seemed to believe they were encountering not people but deities.

  At some stage on the journey they must have understood there never would be any going back, that this gig, this lark, this last mad shout of youth they had taken up because, back in the struggling days, it was infinitely preferable to reality, was their new permanent state and therefore they had to find a way of dealing with it.

  Hence on 15 May 1968, as an alliance of workers and students put a million people on the streets of Paris and brought the French state perilously close to breakdown, Paul McCartney blandly informed a press conference in New York City that he and his bandmates were ‘in the happy position of not really needing any more money’.

  He said this because, despite all he had been through and seen since 1963, he was still only twenty-five. He said this because, like all the Beatles and indeed like all their peers, he didn’t pay overly close attention to the details of their financial affairs and trusted the people he had in place to deal with that sort of thing. He said this because it was 1968 and the air felt full of possibilities. He said this
because it was not yet apparent that even the largest sum of money can be reduced at first steadily by too many outgoings and then dramatically by any time at all spent in the company of lawyers. He said this because he had been smoking lorryloads of weed. He said this because the band’s accountants had told them that they had a $2 million surplus which they could either give to the government in tax or spend on a project. He said this because he and John were in New York City to announce the project they had decided on, which was to be called Apple Corps.

  Lined up in front of journalists at the Americana Hotel in New York’s Times Square, he and John explained the concept. They didn’t wish to compete; they simply proposed to invent a new paradigm. Apple would be a new kind of entertainment and arts company, one that was not just looking for new talent but actively flinging its door open and asking anyone who felt they had the spark of inspiration about their person to send them their ideas, their demos and their tapes. Here, finally, they promised, was a place where they would no longer have to get down on bended knee. Here was a place where their stuff would get not just a hearing but a sympathetic hearing, and not just a sympathetic hearing but possibly even a Beatle hearing.

  Such an appeal was asking for a response that would have been difficult to contain had the request come from the members of, say, the Hollies. Coming from the Beatles it was tantamount to publishing their unlisted numbers on the front page of the Daily News. In all they placed just two advertisements asking for material, one in Rolling Stone and the other in the New Musical Express. Apple were immediately buried under an avalanche of tapes, biographies, scripts, photos, green-ink letters, eight-by-ten glossies, reception squatters and nuisance calls. They never advertised again.

  The only person who might have called a halt to this madness before it achieved escape velocity was gone. Their manager Brian Epstein, the man who had taken every bullet aimed in their direction since 1962, had died from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills the previous year. The news had reached them when they were in Bangor, north Wales, sitting at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who’d promised to teach them how to meditate their way through all their trials. Thus they appeared to have exchanged one father figure, who traditionally dealt with matters temporal, for another, who purported to restrict himself to the spiritual. During the time they spent with him in his ashram in Rishikesh earlier in 1968 they’d come to believe that he was not above the desires of the flesh, deciding on flimsy evidence that he had made advances to fellow meditating celeb Mia Farrow. Although the Maharishi had taken root in their lives when they felt the need for spiritual nourishment, they were not the kind of people content to stare into the middle distance for very long. The scuttlebutt about the Yogi’s wandering hands simply freed John, Paul and Ringo to disavow him every bit as quickly as they had taken him up the previous year.

  Now that meditation had been relegated to the mental box labelled ‘last year’, the Beatles, who were culturally obliged to have the shortest of attention spans, devoted their thoughts to the new project, which was Apple Corps. The focus of this company meant it restricted itself to films, records and electronics, which should have been more than enough. John didn’t tell the journalists that only a couple of days earlier he’d had a meeting to discuss the prospect of some kind of free school which could be run by his friend Ivan Vaughan, who happened to be a teacher. They glossed over the fact that the first product of the film division, their own Magical Mystery Tour, was being quietly buried because it had been so disastrously received when it was screened on British television the previous Christmas. They gave no indication that the Apple boutique in the West End of London, which had been opened with such fanfare the previous year, was about to be closed, having swiftly racked up losses of £200,000. The boutique had been run by John’s friend Pete Shotton and George’s sister-in-law Jenny Boyd. The A&R man of their label was Pete Asher, the brother of Paul’s girlfriend Jane Asher. One of the first acts signed to the label was George’s old Liverpool mate Jackie Lomax. The declared philosophy of Apple might have been to give an outlet to maverick talent who otherwise would have no chance. In practice they were more comfortable with the old-fashioned networking favoured by the music business they were loudly determined not to copy.

  Like all young princes who had been fabulously successful in one field they were prone to thinking they could be equally successful in others. They had not yet absorbed the lesson that when it goes well it doesn’t mean you’re a genius, and when it goes badly it doesn’t follow that you’re a dunderhead. During their months in Rishikesh they had written lots of new material which they were already recording. Indeed there seemed to be enough for a double album. Paul was producing the first single by TV talent competition winner Mary Hopkin. George’s soundtrack to the film Wonderwall had just been released. If you looked in that direction all was going well. So that was the direction they chose to look in. That day in the middle of May 1968 saw the Beatles at the pinnacle of their omniscience, calling the world to order and blandly using words that no human being had used before: ‘We’re in the happy position of not really needing any more money.’

  At the same time, though they may not have realized it, the group was coming to the end of its natural life. In their new, post-touring situation they had the leisure to think about things that previously they had never thought about. They had achieved most when they had no choices. The relentless forward motion of touring had maintained them in the upright position. Now they had to face the difficulty of having options, some of which involved other people doing the hard work and the Beatles lending their name or their image. John’s In His Own Write was being produced for the stage at the Old Vic. Paul was recording with the Black Dyke Mills Band. The animated film Yellow Submarine, in which their voices were imitated by actors, was opening in July. George was appearing in a film called Raga. There was nothing here that exactly burned to be accomplished.

  The Johnny Carson Show that May night in New York was presented not by the titular mirth-master but by professional baseball catcher turned TV personality Joe Garagiola. Palming them off with a substitute seemed disrespectful to stars of their magnitude. Garagiola made a desultory attempt to keep the conversation going. Did they still get asked about their hair? Was it really true that they’d been in Central Park and nobody had recognized them? Some girls in the studio audience screamed, which suddenly seemed inappropriate. John was asked what he wanted to do next and he said ‘films’, by which he didn’t mean what Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley meant when they said the same thing. Neither of them shared with Garagiola, or his other guest, the veteran movie star Tallulah Bankhead, who was three sheets to the wind by the time they appeared and wouldn’t have understood anyway, what was really occupying their minds that week.

  As Paul was speaking at the press conference earlier that day in the Americana Hotel at least half his attention had been on the woman sitting in the front row taking pictures of the proceedings. Linda Eastman was twenty-six at the time. She lived in New York on an allowance provided by her late mother, with her daughter from her first marriage, devoting much of her time to hanging around with and taking pictures of rock stars. She was familiar with wealth and status. Linda was born on the right side of the red rope. She had been introduced to McCartney at a club in St James the previous year. She had talked her way into the party at Brian Epstein’s flat to mark the release of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and there they’d talked further. As he was leaving the press conference in New York McCartney asked her for her number. She wrote it on a cheque. By the time she got back to her apartment he had called.

  Lennon was similarly preoccupied with his love life. His wife Cynthia was away on holiday, which meant he had the family home in Weybridge to himself for the coming weekend. He was not planning to be alone. He was making arrangements to be visited by Yoko Ono, the Japanese avant-garde artist he had been contacting off and on for the past two years. She was older than him, more sophisticated, an
d like Eastman had a child by a previous marriage. She came to the Lennon family home on the Sunday and, according to their own legend, the couple spent the night recording sound collages before marking the dawn by making love. When Cynthia arrived back from her holiday Yoko was still there. A scene ensued. John was unapologetic. Cynthia filed for divorce soon afterwards. At around the same time Jane Asher announced that she and Paul McCartney were no longer engaged.

  Neither Lennon nor McCartney was prepared for the backlash the announcements of these changes to their domestic arrangements would attract. Over the previous five years Beatle Nation had developed such a powerful identification with its favourites that any upheaval they were going through seemed bound to involve the fans as well. It was as if that nice couple next door suddenly started having rows. The fact that both of the new partners were from overseas left the United Kingdom feeling slighted, as if Britannia was no longer good enough for the boys she had nourished at her breast. The fact that neither of the new partners was as pretty and photogenic and young as their predecessors tarnished the fairy tale that was so close to the fans’ heart. People never felt the same about the Beatles again.

  McCartney didn’t get the flak that Lennon did. A lot of the attacks aimed at Yoko were racist and sexist, though neither term was used at the time. The next Beatles album would see the four individuals increasingly working on their own, using other members as they saw fit. One of John’s tracks would be a brutal sound montage that was obviously done as a Valentine to his new love. At first the other members of the group tolerated the fact that Lennon insisted on bringing her along to every session. It took them a while to realize that as far as he was concerned, if she wasn’t in the group there wasn’t going to be a group.