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

by David Hepworth

He felt he might have the germ of a song fresh enough to make an impact in 1974 but also classic enough to live alongside the fifties hits pulsing on the soundtrack of the recently released movie American Graffiti. It was a song that could both soundtrack and celebrate young America’s profound need for movement. It could magically transform him into something more than the sum of his influences. He wrote and rewrote its words endlessly, trying to put into it everything he felt he had to offer while also leaving it spare enough to become a hit. Landau’s advice had been to take note of how classic movies made their point. Springsteen was particularly keen on the way B-pictures haunted the imagination while wearing their implications lightly. His song ‘Thunder Road’, which he was developing at the same time, has a title from an old Robert Mitchum movie and an opening line that might have come from a screenplay. Some of the lyrics of this song betrayed the amount he had riding on it. ‘We’ve got one last chance to make it real’ was ostensibly about the young innocents in the song but at the same time about someone no longer young trying to make music that didn’t collapse under the weight of its own self-consciousness. He also prayed it might become that one thing in the pursuit of which all sins of taste and plagiarism are forgiven, that eternally retreating mirage in exchange for which all artists, regardless of their pretensions, their background or their haircuts, would sell all they had – a real hit single.

  The song was ‘Born To Run’. It took the best part of six months for Bruce Springsteen to finish it and record it. He and his manager/producer Mike Appel had booked time in August at a studio in Blauvelt, an unlikely location north of New York City which had the advantage of being affordable. They did the basic track quickly. The drums, which were thunderous, were played by Ernest ‘Boom’ Carter. It was the only time he recorded with Springsteen. The keyboards, which provide the record’s lyricism, were played by David Sancious, who left the band soon afterwards. Months were then spent in the studio over-laying guitars, keyboards, backing vocals, even strings. By then it had acquired the density of a Phil Spector record. Heard at a certain angle it sounded like some lost masterpiece that had been awaiting discovery for decades. It was the sound of lost youth. It was so dense that when he played it to his old friend and fellow guitar player Steve Van Zandt the latter could no longer hear the fact that at the end of the signature riff he bent up to the major note, which had been his intention. Springsteen recorded it again to make it clear. They played it to the record company, who made the suggestion they felt was expected of them, to boost the vocal. They tried to do that but found it couldn’t be done without sacrificing the titanic thrust of the original track.

  They were so thrilled with it that foolishly they released it to college radio, which ensured that the shine had come off it by the time they were ready with the rest of the album, in the summer of 1975. Eventually it was a hit. It was never as big a hit as ‘Pretty Woman’ or ‘Be My Baby’ or any of the records that inspired it but in many senses it was a wholly new kind of hit, the kind that lasted for years.

  Landau’s review of Springsteen’s live show had said that ‘every gesture, every syllable adds something to his ultimate goal – to liberate our spirit while he liberates his by baring his soul through music’. Reading that repeatedly as he clearly did must have had a transformational effect on Springsteen. It told him who he was, how he already came over to people, and hinted at what he could hope to achieve. It gave this most self-conscious of rock stars one kind of validation. The other validation came from the four and a half minutes of the record he had just spent months labouring over. ‘Born To Run’ was the record that justified Landau’s review. Now Springsteen had to live up to the record.

  When the album came out, Springsteen was famously on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. This was unheard of for a relative unknown. At that time the so-called ‘straight press’ was only just getting comfortable with the idea of featuring the people who played loud music. They preferred to cover this story as a cultural phenomenon. The cover line on Time promised a look at ‘the making of a rock star’. That was how it was. It was a process, rather than some magical accident. So that’s what he was now. A rock star. He found the attention terrifying because he knew what he expected a rock star to be. He didn’t see playing the rock star as an art project. He saw it as something more like a sacred duty. He wanted to build on what he’d seen in Roy Orbison, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Creedence Clearwater Revival. He wanted to be able to tell the whole story. He wanted an act that encompassed politics as well as romance, drama as well as dancing, sermons as well as sex. His vision of a rock star stood on the shoulders of all the rock stars that had gone before.

  Springsteen was sitting around the pool at the Sunset Marquis in Hollywood when he first saw those covers. It was twenty years since ‘Tutti Frutti’, twenty years since Little Richard had invented being a rock star and now the responsibilities of the role seemed heavier. Years later he recalled his feelings. ‘I was just going to have to be good enough, as good as I promised, as good as I thought I was, for all this to make sense.’

  1974 PLAYLIST

  Steve Miller Band, ‘The Joker’

  Joni Mitchell, Court and Spark

  Van Morrison, It’s Too Late To Stop Now

  David Bowie, Diamond Dogs

  The Beach Boys, Endless Summer

  Neil Young, On The Beach

  Jackson Browne, Late For The Sky

  Gram Parsons, Grievous Angel

  Bob Dylan, Planet Waves

  The Eagles, On The Border

  18 JULY 1975

  THE LYCEUM, LONDON

  The best rock isn’t always rock

  THE BOOKS OF rock history, which were just beginning to appear in numbers in the music’s third decade, have tended to agree that not much was happening in 1975. It didn’t feel like that at the time.

  In 1975 I was working in a record shop in London’s West End. Most weeks brought some kind of event. In January there was Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks, which was widely regarded as a return to his glory days. In February there was John Lennon’s Rock ’N’ Roll, a reverential re-run of the music that had inspired him twenty years earlier, made so that he could pay off a debt to the shady publisher Morris Levy, whose properties he had misappropriated for tracks like ‘Come Together’. In the same month Led Zeppelin released a double album containing ‘Kashmir’ and ‘Trampled Under Foot’, which were at least as good as anything they had yet done, and David Bowie put out Young Americans, which would give him his first bona fide hit in the USA. Over the summer these were joined by Fleetwood Mac, Rod Stewart’s Atlantic Crossing, the Eagles’ One Of These Nights and Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years, records which were to linger longer than most. If those came from the easier-to-listen-to end of the spectrum they were more than matched by Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night, Patti Smith’s Horses and Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, which provided all the red meat one could require.

  Steve and I worked at HMV in London, at the time the biggest record shop in the world. We saw some special shows in 1975. In January the Warner Brothers Music Show came to town and we went to see it at the Rainbow on a Sunday afternoon. The headliners were the Doobie Brothers but most of the two thousand in the theatre that afternoon had come to see the support act, Little Feat, at the time the most fashionable band among those of us who considered ourselves taste-makers. Stumbling jet-lagged on to the stage at a most unlikely time of the week, anticipating no more than a perfunctory run through their set before getting back on the bus and yielding the stage to their senior label mates, the six Californians were met with a crowd who were already standing and roaring their approval before they had played a note. An hour later, when they were brought back for their third encore, their leader Lowell George surveyed the cheering throng, shook his head and said, ‘You people are crazy.’ He’d come halfway round the world with no expectation of being anything but a supporting player, found himself in the curious position of be
ing unrecognized on the street, unplayed on the radio and unreported in the press, and yet here he was being acclaimed as some kind of a rock star.

  The rock music industry was now big enough to boast many mansions. It could accommodate cult stars as well as superstars. It could find room for many different versions of the standard rock star. In February we went to see the last night of the Naughty Rhythms Tour, which was a tongue-in-cheek name for a line-up that was in itself a tongue-in-cheek version of the package tours of the previous decade. The final act was Dr Feelgood, a wilfully retro beat band who performed as if the year was 1962 and the place was Hamburg. Their clockwork-mouse guitar player Wilko Johnson was a new kind of rock star for people old enough to get the retro gag. Dr Feelgood were nothing if not self-conscious, and in that sense they were the UK equivalent of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band (still getting ready to release, at last, the album Born To Run). Beneath it all there was a feeling that rock might be running out of new heroes in new moulds, that there was no longer a ready supply of people who were charismatic and self-invented, who stood for something others might want to emulate, could come up with songs that everybody could sing and might also work on the big stage.

  On Thursday, 18 July, after drinking two pints of Young’s in the Marquess of Anglesey on Bow Street in Covent Garden, Steve and I crossed the road, handed in our tickets, made our way into the throng and witnessed the best show either of us had ever seen. Because the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio recording truck was parked outside, the concerts were captured for a recording which made the argument for us: Live!

  Like many of the best venues for amplified live music the Lyceum was not designed for the purpose. It had previously hosted everything from Victorian productions of Shakespeare to the glory days of the dance bands. That night’s entertainment emanated from the intersection of high and low culture. There was no seating in the place for the evening, which was just as well because it would’ve been out of the question to remain still in the presence of the music Bob Marley played that night. The crowd included curious rock fans, volatile rude boys, London scene-makers and middle-aged Africans all in unaccustomed proximity. Although the music being played spoke of unity and transcendence the experience of being in the audience was spiced with danger, as gig-going so often was in those days, when things could go off at a moment’s notice. There was certainly more at stake in this music than we were used to. It was there in the titles of songs like ‘Burnin’ And Lootin”, ‘Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)’ and ‘Get Up, Stand Up’. It was there in the words: stern, unbending school-room words like ‘hypocrites’, ‘tribulation’, ‘curfew’, ‘brutalization’ and ‘sufferation’. It was there in the way the music of the rhythm section seemed to be redistributing massive columns of hot summer air around the Lyceum. It was there in the way the figure of Marley, high-stepping on the spot like the leader of his own guerrilla infantry, his dreadlocks rolling back and forth, seemed to sway suspended in the strobe light’s glare. This was the night when Chris Blackwell’s plan came to pass. The boss of Island Records wished to reposition a form of music previously regarded by smart opinion as good only for novelty hits and skinhead dance parties into the stuff of serious rebellion, and at the same time anoint Bob Marley as the first rock star of the Third World.

  Some say Elvis Presley was the invention of Sam Phillips; that he was looking out for a white boy who could sing in the black style and that he knew that when he found one he would be able to write his own cheque. He may have entertained the thought, but it’s most likely it was just one of many that went through his mind as he found himself with a huge hit on his hands and wondered just how long he could hang on to it before handing it on to somebody bigger. Few grand schemes survive first contact with the enemy. This applies in show business as much as it does in battle.

  In the post-war years the West Indies, seen from the point of view of most in Great Britain, was the sun-kissed source of many of the world’s greatest cricketers and a great deal of London’s bus conductors and railway porters, who had arrived in the city in the fifties and sixties in search of a better life. Chris Blackwell was a smart, polished, handsome, connected young man from Jamaica’s white ruling class, a class that had prospered on the back of a slavery-driven economy which in its time was even more savage than the one that prevailed in the southern United States. Blackwell set up Island Records in order to sell records from Jamaica’s small but vibrant music industry to the Caribbean diaspora in London. He believed talent needed to be moulded. He found the fifteen-year-old Millie Small and signed on as her guardian in order to bring her to Britain. She was given elocution and presentation lessons before cutting ‘My Boy Lollipop’ in Forest Hill in east London. It was an enormous hit and gave him the money to set up Island as Britain’s premier independent label, and position it to take advantage of the rock album gold rush of the late sixties and early seventies. Thanks to Island’s success with King Crimson, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Free, Blackwell knew how to sell records to longhairs. When he signed the Wailers in 1972 his plan was to sell their records not to Jamaicans living in London, who knew about their hits in the Caribbean, but to white college students in Europe and the United States.

  He was warned off signing them. Everybody in Jamaica knew the Wailers were trouble. There was always fighting in the captain’s tower, between Marley, Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh. They had entered into loose arrangements with every company in Jamaica’s legendarily loose record business and now didn’t trust anybody. Their Rastafarian beliefs meant they regarded all commerce as the devil’s work and made them duty-bound to spend their waking hours in a marijuana miasma, couching their words in a patois that few but initiates could comprehend.

  Blackwell didn’t waste his time trying to change their behaviour. He gave them some money to make a whole album in Jamaica. They sent the tapes to him in London where he sweetened them with instruments reassuring to the rock ear. He excluded one track in order to make the LP just nine tracks long, as befitted a rock album. Then he burst the budget packaging Catch A Fire in a cover in the shape of a cigarette lighter, which announced that for the first time this music was being treated with just as much respect as the prog rock of King Crimson or the art rock of Roxy Music. They toured overseas to support the record but Bunny Livingston wasn’t keen so he was eased out. After the next album, Burnin’, Peter Tosh went off and took his hair-trigger temper with him. When Natty Dread appeared in late 1974 it was credited to Bob Marley and the Wailers and the front cover was dominated by a painting of Bob as a super-hero, the rough planes of his face replaced by a comic-book sheen. Blackwell’s plan was to make him the first rock star of reggae.

  In the Lyceum the Wailers lined up in front of a picture of Haile Selassie, the recently deposed head of the Ethiopian state revered by Rastafarians as the living son of God. The rhythm section of Aston and Carlton Barrett meted out rhythms you could rest your drink on, American guitarist Al Anderson pealed off phosphorescent leads, the I-Threes, including Marley’s wife Rita, who felt her presence on tour might control some of her husband’s tendency to spread his seed like a sovereign, chanted back every line, while Marley, the man at the centre of this maelstrom, hit all his marks, despite giving every appearance of broadcasting from the furthest reaches of a trance-like state of abandon. I’ve still never seen a better show.

  This was the thing about Marley. He had drive that nobody else around him did. Something back in his childhood, possibly back in the days when the other children made his life difficult because his father had been a British army captain, had equipped him with the discipline it takes to drill a band so that they can play at the top of their game without apparent effort. He had the ear to know what was a catchy tune. He had a flair for slogans. As Chris Blackwell realized, his voice was on the right frequency to cut through the airwaves, which was what made him not just a master of the long-form album but also the hit single, of which the version of ‘No Woman No Cry’ recorded at the Lyce
um that night was one of the first.

  Within the small, febrile world of Jamaica he was a very big man indeed, one upon whom politicians danced attendance, one who could click his fingers and have any woman come running, one whose disdain for earthly wealth didn’t prevent him announcing that he wanted a new BMW because the initials stood for ‘Bob Marley and the Wailers’, one whose patronage every other musician on the island desperately sought. He was a player. The stakes he played for would prove to be very dangerous indeed.

  Steve and I went home from the Lyceum with our senses humming. For days afterwards those songs crowded out everything else in our heads. Their biblical sentiments had smuggled themselves into our consciousness via the songs’ earworm properties, the combination of their most militant urgency with springy rhythms that were the apotheosis of soon-come. We also had the unique sensation that we had been present when something of great significance had come to pass. Furthermore it had gone past at the right speed to allow one to take full note. We had never previously heard reggae played with such divine heaviness. We had never before seen such a figure arise as if from out of Israel to smite the unrighteous with the rod of correction. We had certainly never heard anyone arrive with this many new ideas enshrined in this many memorable tunes. Bob Marley wasn’t a mere reggae star. He was actually the biggest rock star since Bob Dylan plugged in.

  A bare month after the Lyceum concert, when Marley was back in Jamaica, the news of the death of Haile Selassie was announced from Addis Ababa. The former Ethiopian ruler had been deposed in a military coup a year before and had been in custody ever since. Some loyalists believe he was murdered. More likely his captors didn’t make the efforts they might have made to save this inconvenient, elderly man. Thanks to Marley and other Jamaican musicians Selassie’s fame was about to grow in the years following his death. Marley, in whose belief system this frail old man was a living deity, did not believe that death would be the end. His view, expressed in ‘Jah Live’, the single which he swiftly recorded and released on hearing the news, was as trenchant as the world had already come to expect. It promised that, now that the enemies were scattered, Selassie would arise from the dead. Nobody laughed.