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

by David Hepworth

  On 19 March 1982 the Blizzard of Ozz tour party had just driven all night following a show in Knoxville, Tennessee. Their bus driver, the thirty-three-year-old Andrew Aycock, took a detour to Leesburg, Florida. His plan was to go to the headquarters of the bus company and get a faulty air conditioner fixed. Ozzy and Sharon were asleep in their quarters at the back of the bus. Aycock, who was accompanied on this stage of the journey by his ex-wife, had been doing cocaine. There was a small commuter air strip adjacent to the property of the bus company. Aycock was a qualified pilot with a lapsed licence, and he decided to take a Beechcraft Bonanza up for a spin. He neglected to seek the owner’s permission.

  There was no other way to keep themselves amused so Aycock invited various members of the touring party to come up with him for quick joy rides. On the last of these circuits his passengers were Randy Rhoads, the elfin twenty-five-year-old Californian guitar player who was the star of Ozzy’s new band, and Rachel Youngblood, the fifty-eight-year-old African-American woman who was subsequently described variously as make-up artist, hairdresser, wardrobe assistant and cook. She was the help, Sharon’s live-in maid from back in California. She had joined the tour to help Sharon be Sharon while she was making it possible for Ozzy to be Ozzy. Neither Rhoads nor Youngblood were keen fliers but somehow on that sunny morning they were persuaded into boarding the Bonanza, a later version of the aircraft in which Buddy Holly had perished twenty-three years earlier.

  In an attempt to either wake up Ozzy or tease his ex-wife, who was watching from below, Aycock repeatedly took the Beechcraft low enough to buzz the bus. On his third pass he miscalculated, clipped the bus with a wing, hit a tree and ploughed into a nearby mansion, where the plane immediately burst into flames. The initial impact with the bus woke Ozzy and Sharon who stumbled outside to be confronted by the sight of flaming wreckage. There were body parts strewn across the ground. All three who were on the plane died instantly. They had to be identified from their medical records.

  After their deaths it was said that none of them had wanted to be on the tour in the first place, that what Randy had really wanted was to go to university and study classical composition, that Rachel had signed up for one last tour so that she could raise the money to buy an electric typewriter for her church, and that it was particularly surprising that they should perish together because she didn’t like Randy and in fact had called him a little white bastard. Clearly the accident was the bus driver’s fault but it seems the kind of grisly, pointless tragedy that could only have occurred in the course of a rock and roll tour. If the passengers had been members of a sporting team on their way to an away game or a touring theatre company en route to a festival it seems unlikely that reluctant fliers would have allowed themselves to be cajoled into getting into a small aircraft to go nowhere in particular with somebody they barely knew.

  There is a disorientation in the atmosphere around a rock band on tour which brings about a certain detachment from the elementary laws of physics and chemistry governing normal life. Even if none of the protagonists are particularly unhinged or suffering from the need to test the limits of their own mortality there is a tendency to do the ill-advised which would only rarely arise in everyday life. This was particularly the case in 1982 when artists didn’t yet employ people whose primary job was to protect them from themselves. The world in which these people lived and moved was attuned to extremes. Nobody was yet suggesting that exercise and abstinence might be the secret to surviving life on the road. They were all prone to thinking themselves indestructible. The touring life was sustained by drugs and drink. Very few didn’t partake. All these people were moved to go beyond the red line, to hang themselves over the precipice, with predictable consequences.

  1982 was a year rich in examples of similar recklessness. The day before the tragedy in Leesburg, Teddy Pendergrass, the black Elvis, was involved in an accident in his Rolls-Royce while speeding in Philadelphia. In June, James Honeyman-Scott, the guitarist with the Pretenders, was found dead of heart failure in a girlfriend’s flat. ‘Cocaine intolerance’ was blamed. This was only days after he had agreed that bassist Pete Farndon should be fired from the same group because of his own addiction to heroin. Farndon would be found dead in his bath less than a year later.

  Greater experience didn’t bring with it any greater wisdom. In March the forty-year-old David Crosby was arrested after crashing into a guard rail on the San Diego Freeway while driving and simultaneously trying to roll a joint and take a hit from a pipe. The policeman at the scene noticed a pistol poking out of Crosby’s bag and ran him in. A month later he was arrested again at a frowsy club in Dallas where he was playing a gig to get cash money for drugs. The police came upon him freebasing with his gun at his side. ‘It gave him quick money to put in his pocket – and then in his pipe,’ said a friend. ‘It kept him going between royalty cheques that came in quarterly. Quarterly is a long time to a doper. Tomorrow is a long time for a doper.’ Crosby had already mightily tried the patience of his fellow musicians – a star-studded intervention at his Marin County home the year before was rather spoiled by his being discovered halfway through in the bathroom sucking on a pipe – but Stills and Nash took him back on the road, albeit with his microphone turned down and his parts sung by another singer in the wings.

  1982 seemed short on new rock stars but it was long on people who wanted to act like them. Rolling Stone’s cover stars for that year were mostly actors and TV people – David Letterman, Robin Williams, Mariel Hemingway, Matt Dillon, Timothy Hutton and Warren Beatty – all affecting the casual drag and ‘we mean it’ looks of rock stars. On 5 March the comedian and actor John Belushi was found dead in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, having ingested a speedball, a cocktail of heroin and cocaine. The woman who administered it to him, Cathy Smith, was a former associate of three members of the Band and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, a woman who had turned from using to dealing. In January of that year Belushi, who had made his name playing an amateur musician in The Blues Brothers, had appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone to accompany a feature saying that he had changed and was not the self-destructive hell-raiser of yore. In Hollywood the bigger the lie the higher it flies. An inscription on Belushi’s tombstone, on Martha’s Vineyard, read ‘I may be gone but rock and roll lives on’. His widow subsequently arranged for him to be reburied in an unmarked grave to avoid attracting fans who wished to sit alongside this message and drink. In one of the interviews she gave she said, ‘I wish somebody had ruined John’s career by writing about his cocaine use.’

  The death of Belushi confirmed a feeling that had been gaining ground, that in the entertainment business cocaine was a currency as well as a stimulant. Robin Williams, who at the time was holding down a drug habit as well as a prime-time role on Mork and Mindy, recalled, ‘The Belushi tragedy was frightening. His death scared a whole group of show-business people. It caused a big exodus from drugs.’ A BBC news report at the time by Robin Denselow confirmed that cocaine could be used to compensate poorly paid employees in a recording studio or to grease the wheels of a movie deal. It also made people who were prone to doubting themselves achieve the feeling of omnipotence with which they liked to go about their work. In October the New York Times published a major report on the rise of cocaine use in Hollywood. Lloyd’s of London was apparently refusing to insure certain stars because their cocaine habits made them bad risks for movies trying to hit completion dates.

  These weren’t the only heirs to the throne of James Dean. Despite the actor having rolled his car several times in the middle of Beverly Hills, the agent of Richard Dreyfuss said, with affronted professional pride in his voice, that as far as he knew his client had never been a cocaine user. Dreyfuss, who dates his sobriety from that incident, later told the truth. ‘By the time of the crash I had become a board member and probably chairman of admissions for the Assholes Center,’ he said.

  On 30 April Lester Bangs, the rock critic whose words were as impressive in prin
t as their author was unimpressive in person, whose reviews were a plea for acceptance from musicians and hipsters who wouldn’t spare him the time of day, who liked to say that rock and roll wasn’t so much a music as a way of living your life, finished the final draft of a new book he called Rock Gomorrah. His idea of celebrating completion was to take a number of Valium pills together with a strong cold remedy. He never woke up. He was thirty-three.

  Meanwhile, far away from Hollywood, far away from this gilded high society, something stirred. The most significant musical moment of 1982 was the release of ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. This would prove to be as significant in its time as ‘Tutti Frutti’ was in 1955. Writing about it in Rolling Stone in September, Kurt Loder described it as ‘the most detailed and devastating report from underclass America since Bob Dylan decried the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll – or, perhaps more to the point, since Marvin Gaye took a long look around and wondered what was going on.’

  In the immediate wake of the Leesburg tragedy, Ozzy took to the bottle. He said he wanted to retire. Sharon knew there was no question of him doing that. How could they go back to normal life after this? What else were a pair of show folk to do?

  Three weeks later they were auditioning replacement guitarists.

  1982 PLAYLIST

  Iron Maiden, The Number Of The Beast

  Sonic Youth, Sonic Youth

  The Clash, Combat Rock

  Roxy Music, Avalon

  Yazoo, Upstairs At Eric’s

  Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, ‘The Message’

  Kate Bush, The Dreaming

  Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel

  Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska

  Prince, 1999

  31 SEPTEMBER 1983

  THE CONTINENTAL HYATT HOUSE, HOLLYWOOD

  The absurdity of rock stars

  IN 1983 ROB Reiner, who had made his name as an actor on the TV comedy All In The Family, got together with comic actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, begged a small amount of money from a film fund headed up by Lew Grade and began shooting a modest film. The film they made was to do for the anonymous rock band trying to make a living what Dont Look Back did for Bob Dylan. It had no script; they made it on the fly and improvised the dialogue. The notional band played their own music. Their repertoire featured such self-composed tunes as ‘Big Bottom’ and ‘Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight’. Where possible they shot in real-world rock locations. They filmed at Elvis Presley’s graveside. The end-of-tour wrap party was shot around the pool on the roof of the Continental Hyatt House in Hollywood. This was the rock and roll boarding house that had been known in the days when Keith Moon stayed there as the Continental Riot House.

  The fictional subjects of the documentary This Is Spinal Tap were Spinal Tap, a band of prog rock plodders from the English provinces. In the film they were embarking on an American tour in support of their new album, Smell The Glove. The three members who mattered – a succession of drummers had all met with unfortunate ends – were David St Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls. All three looked like classically unmemorable members of rock’s army of anonymous foot soldiers. Their faces were slightly too old for their haircuts. These were men with nothing notably wild and untamed about them, men who for the most part lived standard lower-middle-class lives of blameless tedium, interrupted only by the occasional call to go out on the road and play the rock star for the benefit of the concertgoers of Moose Droppings, Ohio. Once there they would be temporarily decanted into a pair of spandex trousers in order to perform an overheated number in praise of their amatory member or their girlfriend’s bottom. Clearly, it was no job for a grown-up. Nonetheless it was the only job certain grown-ups could do.

  Between them Spinal Tap had but three facial expressions: hubristic over-confidence when pronouncing what they were about to do, burning embarrassment when it became evident that the plan wasn’t working out, and stammering anger as they thrashed around afterwards for somebody to blame. The performances of the three lead actors, Guest, Shearer and McKean, were such note-perfect depictions of passive aggressivness that ever since we have been unable to imagine rock bands trying to solve their differences in anything other than the same wounded suburban register. They dressed like rock stars. They sounded like three men trying to fix a lawn mower.

  This Is Spinal Tap is not a film that improves the more you watch it. It was shot on 16mm and then blown up to twice the size, which adds to the feeling of a project on which the budget is about to be exhausted. It doesn’t have many finer points to be appreciated on repeated viewings. All that matters is that first viewing when you recognize that you are watching how generic rock bands behave at a particular point in their career arc. It doesn’t focus on how they might be at the moment they were just starting to happen, which is the traditional point at which you freeze the pop process and depict it. Instead what the notional director Marty Di Bergi – ‘enough of my yackin’, let’s boogie!’ – unwittingly captures is the moment at which a band that has been going for years realizes it’s never going to be quite as good as it was ever again – a realization that was stealing up on many sixties and seventies bands in the early eighties.

  No matter how their manager Ian Faith paints it – ‘it’s not that we’re less popular, it’s just that our appeal is becoming more selective’ – Spinal Tap are on their way down. The bands they once looked down on are now playing venues they can only dream of playing, nobody turns up to their album signing, the budget for everything gets smaller, the limo turns into a van, nobody takes their calls and they are clearly hurtling back to the position where they started from, where the only people they can rely on are each other and their relatives and the only thing they can hope for is that it’s a controlled descent and that the occasions on which they’re brought face to face with how far they have fallen can be kept to a tolerable minimum.

  Comedy and tragedy are often the same story told at different speeds. Tom Waits says he cried the first time he saw This Is Spinal Tap. The film certainly captures many aspects of the rock and roll experience with a brutal candour not seen in more serious films. One of them is the group dynamic. Bands are like small political parties, presenting a united front to the outside world while a low-level internecine war is being perpetually waged within, a war in which nothing is forgiven or forgotten, nothing is openly discussed, and any person brave enough to propose a change of direction suffers the fate of being openly derided for doing what so clearly needs doing. This Is Spinal Tap captures the imperceptible heightening of tension and meaningful sidelong glances that greet any member apparently seeking the approval of anyone outside the group. It captures how the one pliable member, in this case bass player Derek Smalls, is caught in the crossfire between the would-be alpha males who write the songs and come up with the ideas. It captures the grenade-rolled-under-the-door effect of the arrival on tour of David St Hubbins’ girlfriend who graduates from supportive onlooker in the wings to the person who’s clearly operating one member remotely, who even takes over management of the band, at the exact point when nobody else in their right mind would take the job. She is last seen achieving her ultimate wish, which is to be on stage with the band, rattling a tambourine. She will clearly go on to sleep with the band’s other leader. In time her memoirs will be privately published. She will eventually marry an arms dealer and run a yoga retreat.

  This Is Spinal Tap also captures the absurdities of the rockumentary format, which was burgeoning at the time in step with the growth of music TV stations looking for rock content. It has all the elements: the individual interviews in which members advertise their special interests, the hardware sequence in which Nigel explains that his amplifier goes up to number eleven and therefore is clearly one louder, the camera that tracks the band through the labyrinth below the stage as the distant cheers of the audience begin audibly to flag, the dressing-room tantrum sparked by the fact that the slices of bread are sligh
tly too small for the slices of ham. Everything that can fall apart falls apart. As it does so the camera refuses to avert its eyes. All the lines that seemed a good idea at the time, all the would-be profundities and witty retorts that the protagonists wished they could take back, are there on the soundtrack. ‘What’s wrong with being sexy?’ ‘I rise above it. I’m a professional.’ ‘There’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.’ See the finished film once and lines like that remain in your head to be reawakened at the slightest prompting.

  Although the film makers stated that the misadventures of Spinal Tap were not based on any particular group, many real-life bands fell over themselves to claim that they inspired it. It was in 1983, when the film was being made, that Black Sabbath found that the Stonehenge set they had ordered was too big to fit on the stage. The British blues band Foghat were adamant that their management had once been taken over by a girlfriend of one of the members who insisted on planning their tour schedule according to numerology. They half-jokingly accused the film makers of having bugged their tour bus to get pointers. Every band wanted to own certain scenes. Everybody talked about the time they got lost going to the stage or when their amplifiers picked up the transmissions of a local car firm. Eddie Van Halen insisted on ordering an amp that went up to eleven. That was all part of their way of reassuring us that they were in on the joke. But the core joke of This Is Spinal Tap, that bands keep going long after they should stop because stopping is the very thing they don’t dare do, is too bitter a pill to swallow.