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

by David Hepworth

  Rock had been spoofed before but usually by people like Peter Sellers and Phil Silvers, who may have been geniuses but didn’t really understand the thing they were spoofing. The difference this time was that Guest, McKean and Shearer knew whereof they spoke. They slid in the stiletto with loving tenderness. To them had been vouchsafed a glimpse of the overarching truth of what was now a rock industry: that it relies on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Once you’re no longer swept along by the power of its grand illusion, once you begin to question the conventions to which it clings, once the wires along which it dances are plainly visible, once you actually glimpse the desperation in the musicians’ eyes as they see some piece of on-stage business begin to unravel, once the amplification fails and you hear them barking at each other like any bunch of workmen in crisis, then you are seeing the world through the lens of Spinal Tap.

  And once you have seen the world of rock through the lens of Spinal Tap nothing can ever be quite the same again. Once glimpsed through that glass the standard bunch of rock demi-gods are instantly revealed before you as middle-aged men in unsuitable trousers. Once daylight has flooded in on magic to that degree it takes a million dollars’ worth of illusion to turn you back into a believer.

  1983 PLAYLIST

  David Bowie, Let’s Dance

  Culture Club, ‘Karma Chameleon’

  Michael Jackson, Thriller

  Def Leppard, Pyromania

  U2, War

  Paul Young, No Parlez

  Tom Waits, Swordfishtrombones

  The Rolling Stones, Undercover

  The Fall, Perverted By Language

  Jackson Browne, Lawyers In Love

  27 JANUARY 1984

  THE SHRINE AUDITORIUM, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  A superstar on fire

  BETWEEN 24 DECEMBER 1983 and 14 April 1984 the number one album in the United States remained the same. It was Michael Jackson’s Thriller. By the middle of February 1984 Thriller had already sold enough to be officially announced as the best-selling album of all time, surpassing earlier contenders such as the soundtrack of The Sound of Music. On 28 February the annual Grammy awards presentation in Los Angeles revolved around the twenty-five-year-old singer. On that night he picked up no fewer than eight awards, including the trophy for best single for ‘Beat It’, the award for album of 1983 and, together with Quincy Jones, the prize for best producer. It was the highest-rated televised Grammy awards in history. Almost fifty-two million Americans tuned in. Music had never been bigger.

  At the time Michael Jackson seemed to be bigger than the entire music business. The producers of the Grammy awards certainly appeared to think so. Jackson seemed to be permanently in shot throughout the entire ceremony as if the evening was being held in his honour. He sat in the front row, wearing mirror shades, his signature glove and what appeared to be the spangly regalia of the ambassador from the Republic of Fame. Seated next to him was the eighteen-year-old starlet Brooke Shields. His other companion for the evening was Emmanuel Lewis, the twelve-year-old star of the TV comedy Webster. Despite his age Lewis was only forty-two inches tall. Jackson picked him up and carried him around as though he was an exhausted toddler.

  What Jackson shared with his guests was an upbringing in which normal life had played no part. All three had been managed by overbearing parents. All three had had difficulty negotiating the transition from child to adult star. At the age of just fifteen Shields had been featured in a provocative ad for Calvin Klein jeans. In this she’d fixed the camera with her sultry look and said, ‘What comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.’ Lewis had been the junior spokesperson for the Burger King Whopper. Now, thanks to a deal that was far bigger than any of the agreements that had previously been reached between a music star and Madison Avenue, Michael Jackson had signed up to advertise Pepsi-Cola.

  Under the terms of this agreement Michael would lend the singing and dancing skills that had made him the biggest star of MTV to a video that would adapt one of his songs to sing the praises of the drink that was allegedly the choice of a new generation of young people. It was at Michael’s suggestion that they took the chorus of the song ‘Billie Jean’, a song inspired by a real-life case of his being on the receiving end of a paternity suit, and changed them to ‘You’re the Pepsi generation/Guzzle down and taste the thrill of the day/And feel the Pepsi way’. His team had only settled on a deal with Pepsi after they had failed to get the sum of money they wanted out of Coca-Cola, for whom he would have been just as keen to shill. It was made clear to Pepsi that because of his strict diet Michael would not at any stage be seen actually imbibing their drink. His enthusiasm for the product was a matter of form, not substance, and even his form was strictly rationed: in the commercial he restricted the appearance of his face to just four seconds. He told the producers it would be perfectly possible to suggest his presence via closeups of his shoes and the outline of his silhouette. He had designed himself as a brand. He expected to be similarly recognizable.

  Like a major athlete using his muscle to renegotiate his contract, Jackson preferred to see people’s affection and respect expressed in a way he could understand: in greater sums of money than had ever been paid to an entertainer before. He thereby hoped not only to continue to finance a lifestyle of unprecedented lavishness, but also to show his elder brothers, now reduced to minor players in his circus, his tyrant of a father, who insisted that he do one last tour for his brothers’ sake, and all the other superstars such as Paul McCartney, Barbra Streisand and Stevie Wonder that he had achieved what they had never achieved and had done so on his own.

  By January 1984 Michael Jackson had climbed as high as any star had climbed in the years since Elvis Presley. He was selling records in quantities nobody had ever sold them before. Furthermore, because he had negotiated higher royalty rates than anyone else, he was making more money out of them than anybody had ever made before. He had signed a million-dollar deal to do some kind of book which was to be edited by another national icon, Jackie Onassis. He was the acknowledged master of a new form of entertainment which brought together music and movement into a seamless whole. He was reaching beyond the usual base of a popular entertainer for the simple reason that he was black (although he had already had plastic surgery to accentuate his cheekbones and give him a Disney nose, he was still almost his original colour) and therefore he reached into communities in the United States and beyond that had never really been penetrated by the Beatles and Elvis Presley. This made him the presiding superstar of a world that seemed to be getting bigger all the time.

  Several years later I was driving across Ethiopia in the company of an English-speaking Ethiopian who had travelled overseas. In the course of a long discussion about popular music I found myself having to explain who the Beatles and Elvis Presley were. This young man had literally never heard of them. Michael Jackson, of course, he knew. He was a citizen of Michael’s world – a good indication of how the world was beginning to bend away from rock in the middle of the 1980s and move in the direction of dance music. At the time Michael Jackson was in his imperial phase. This is the most dangerous point in anyone’s career. It’s the time when things work in such a way as to make you think they will work that way for ever.

  On 27 January 1984 Michael Jackson was in the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles to shoot the Pepsi commercial. The director was Bob Giraldi, a big name in TV commercials who had directed his clips for ‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’. Giraldi was in a dressing room at the venue with Jermaine Jackson when they heard a piercing scream which was clearly emanating from Michael. Fearing that some potential Mark Chapman figure had somehow penetrated security, they dashed to the star’s dressing room. They found Michael staring horrified at one of his signature white gloves. He had dropped it in the lavatory and was screaming for some minion to come and get it out. This delicate operation was eventually accomplished by a prop man with a wire coat hanger.

  At 6.15 that evening he was on stag
e at the Shrine performing in front of a three-thousand-strong audience that had been bussed in to lend authenticity. Jackson’s dance movements were often accentuated with special effects the better to emphasize the superhuman discipline of his dancing. On this occasion he was to emerge from a burst of flames and then sashay his way to join the band in his characteristic motion, which was a combination of combat soldier and pimp. People who were there that day still argue about where the responsibility lay. What’s certain is that Jackson got too close to the flame effect. A spark landed on his head, which ignited his hair. With impressive professionalism Jackson continued to dance for a few seconds with his hair fully aflame until technicians and security men came to his aid with blankets to put out the fire and hurry him away. He was taken straight to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where it was noted that he had sustained ‘a palm-sized area of 2nd and small area of 3rd degree burns’. He was prescribed Darvocet, a painkiller that was subsequently removed from sale of any kind in the United States. Here is where Jackson’s long descent into addiction to prescription painkillers began.

  At the time any kind of descent seemed impossible to imagine. Michael Jackson’s domination of a market that was in the process of expanding dramatically was causing people to redefine what success meant. By 1984 Thriller had already sold a difficult-to-credit twenty-five million copies. Jackson was clearly amassing money in quantities that surely nobody would ever be able to spend. At the same time as he was breaking all sales records nobody pointed out that the leader of the last group to sell records in unprecedented numbers, Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, was already filing for bankruptcy. Fleetwood had expanded beyond even his considerable means during the fat years and now he was paying the price. But it seemed inconceivable that anything similar could happen to Michael Jackson.

  Jackson never claimed to be a rock star. After careful consideration of what category he thought he could boss he came up with the idea that he should be called the King of Pop. He instructed his PR handlers that he would only talk to organs of the media that were happy to refer to him as such. He did, of course, have an acute understanding of how he might reach out to the rock demographic. He wooed it by getting Eddie Van Halen to contribute a neuralgic guitar solo to ‘Beat It’. His success certainly changed the expectations of rock stars. After Thriller, every record company wanted a record similarly full of crossover potential. They were prepared to cover any studio bills provided the artist was prepared to make sure the record included a country duet or something for the dance crowd. Michael Jackson changed the business for everyone. After Thriller, everyone had to be some kind of dancer as well as a singer. Even Bruce Springsteen, who had up to that point been all about the sweat and the grit, hauled the young actress Courteney Cox out of the audience and danced with her for the shoot for his 1984 breakthrough hit ‘Dancing In The Dark’. He thus set in place a ritual that would be reenacted with hundreds of different partners in hundreds of different locations all over the world as an ever-larger audience came along to see what they had already seen on the TV but on a massive scale. Springsteen had written the song, with its mulish insistence that ‘you can’t start a fire without a spark’, when his manager Jon Landau had told him that his new album Born In The U.S.A. needed a hit. Once he’d done the grunt work of the album he felt he could allow himself the indulgence of a disco-friendly party single. The next thing he knew he was up on stage dancing like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, twirling this gorgeous thin girl around like a pop star. Or at least a pop star’s idea of a rock star.

  There were just five number-one albums in the USA in 1984 – an indication of how deep the sales went. None of the people who put out those records ever did quite as well again. Michael Jackson never again sold as many records as he did in 1984. Nor did Bruce Springsteen. Nor Prince. Nor Huey Lewis and the News. In 1984 people were just crazy for records. In September, a new Sony plant in Terre Haute, Indiana opened for business with great fanfare. This was going to manufacture an exciting new product, the compact disc. The first CD to come off their production line was Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A., which was manufactured in the USA, albeit for a Japanese-owned company. Although most people didn’t have the kind of hi-fi set-up that enabled them to appreciate the improved dynamic range they did respond to the idea that these new sound carriers were as robust and easy to use as cassettes and bought them by the million.

  At the same time there was also a strong singles market, particularly in the UK. In 1984 Frankie Goes to Hollywood became only the second act to have their first three singles go to number one in the UK – the first group to achieve this feat since another group from Liverpool. That group was Gerry and the Pacemakers, the mere mention of whose name should serve as a corrective for anyone entertaining delusions of grandeur. In Britain the year 1984 climaxed with the best-selling British single of all time. It was a record that over the subsequent year would do more than any other to change the perception of who rock stars were and what they could do.

  1984 PLAYLIST

  George Michael, ‘Careless Whisper’

  Cyndi Lauper, ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’

  Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ‘Relax’

  Bruce Springsteen, Born In The U.S.A.

  Prince, Purple Rain

  U2, The Unforgettable Fire

  Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense

  Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Welcome To The Pleasuredome

  Madonna, ‘Like A Virgin’

  Van Halen, 1984

  13 JULY 1985

  WEMBLEY STADIUM, LONDON

  From dumper to sainthood

  IN THE MID-EIGHTIES I was working in London on music magazines. Many of these tracked the comings and goings of the UK market for pop 45s. Among the professionals who worked on these magazines, who liked to affect the armour of the hard-bitten, it was common to refer to any pop star who had passed the point of being in peak demand for interviews and could no longer get played on the radio or featured on the weekly TV programme Top of the Pops as being ‘in the dumper’. While observers of the pop scene might have differed on many things, the one they could all have agreed on as the autumn of the year 1984 slipped into winter was that the foremost inmate of said dumper was the lead singer of the Irish group the Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof. Indeed had the citizens of the dumper been electing a mayor in late 1984 then Geldof would have been odds-on favourite. His group’s string of hits had come to an end in 1980 and there was no indication of it being resumed, making Geldof’s fabled garrulousness his one remaining claim on public attention.

  Bob Geldof made a perfect target for that peculiarly British meanness that likes nothing more than to see last year’s star reduced to the ranks. Geldof had opinions about everything and seemed incapable of keeping any of them to himself. He was the pop star every TV producer called on when he needed a talking head with a modern haircut. He had been a newspaper journalist for a while, which meant he was inclined to think he could do the job of the writers sent to interview him better than they could do it themselves. Plus he was married to Paula Yates, the flirty cohost of the music television programme The Tube. Together they had children they seemed to delight in giving provocatively cute names. His band was on the point of releasing their fifth album, and the fact that this release was being eagerly anticipated by absolutely nobody seemed only correct and proper. Geldof’s place on the covers of magazines had been usurped by Boy George, Annie Lennox and George Michael. It all appeared to be over. The game was clearly up.

  This changed on 24 October when Geldof saw a report on the BBC news by Michael Buerk, who was in Korem in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. In that vast area a combination of drought and civil war had forced tens of thousands of famished people from hundreds of miles around off their land and sent them to Korem’s Red Cross feeding station – their only hope of saving their children from death by starvation. This was in the days before satellite and cable news when there were just four television channels in the United Kingdo
m and therefore any major news event galvanized the public in a way that was soon to become inconceivable. Moved by the suffering he saw in the report, as many people were, Geldof decided to do something. The only thing he could do was write, record and release a record. If it sold well enough and everything went in its favour, he reasoned, it might generate a five-figure sum which could be contributed towards famine relief.

  He started with the musicians he knew, Midge Ure, Sting and Duran Duran, all of whom agreed to take part. Then he moved on to the ones he didn’t such as Wham! and Culture Club. Wherever possible he contacted the artists directly. They all agreed they would be there to record their contribution if they could. Then he contacted the managers of the ones he couldn’t get through to directly. Many of these people declined as decorously as they could. But by the time the recording sessions came around, Sunday, 25 November, he had that most valuable of political tools, a following wind. He was also perfectly prepared to accuse anyone who didn’t come on board of colluding in the deaths of innocent children.

  When I arrived at Sarm Studios in Basing Street, Notting Hill that Sunday morning to cover the session I was as surprised as anybody else to be confronted with Wham!, Paul Weller, Sting, Status Quo, George Michael, U2, Kool and the Gang and Paul Young. What was even more surprising was that this array of A-list talent had been marshalled by somebody whose star seemed in every other respect to have crashed to earth. Bob Geldof was a more effective politician than he was a rock star. Lyndon Johnson became one of the most effective Presidents of the United States not because he could charm but because he could cajole, torment and even bully. These were the same talents Geldof used to get everyone together to make the Band Aid single happen. When it was finished he played further hardball with the bosses at BBC to make sure that the video could be debuted in a special slot cleared from the schedules just before Top of the Pops, as if it were some kind of message from the sovereign. When the record came out it sold 320,000 copies a day. It sold so many that all the pressing plants in the UK had to be put into production. It went straight to number one and earned £3 million for famine relief.