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

by David Hepworth

  Tom Petty was only thirty-five but he also had responsibilities. His marriage to his teenage sweetheart Jane, who had been at home having babies while he was enjoying his ride to fame, was coming apart. They had both found that far from solving all their problems, success and money would be only the beginning of them. Throughout their marriage she had battled mental illness and substance issues. These are the kind of problems an artist is half-expected to have. If they’re happening to the artist’s partner the machine has trouble coping. Even within such an apparently sane rock and roll band as the Heartbreakers painful issues were never far from the surface. There was always tension between Petty and the drummer Stan Lynch. The bass player Howie Epstein was already using heroin. Bands get more complicated as they get older. Secrets are built on secrets.

  The other secret Dylan didn’t share with anyone at the time was that he was going through his first bout of writer’s block. The songs of Knocked Out Loaded were either retreads of old rhythm and blues tunes, tracks salvaged from older sessions or collaborations with writers who didn’t even know they were in a collaboration. It was poor. He knew it was poor. Despite the fake enthusiasm of all the musicians at the sessions it was plain that it was poor. He was having a crisis of confidence as a performer. He could no longer find his voice. Years later in his book Chronicles he described going missing at this time and taking himself off until he found a bunch of old jazz musicians playing in a bar. He was impressed by the way the singer was singing with power but the power wasn’t coming from his voice. Next time he sang he found he could do the same thing, as long as he concentrated but didn’t think, which is the athlete’s knack.

  He was actually planning to retire at the end of the tour. This was the year after he had closed out Live Aid with the most anti-climactic performance anyone had ever seen. He was still sore about the critical response. He didn’t think he was getting any more popular. They were on the last leg of the tour, in Locarno in Switzerland, when, as he explained years later, he changed the way he sang. ‘I just did it automatically out of thin air, cast my own spell to drive out the devil. Everything came back and it came back in multi-dimension.’ When the tour finished ‘I saw that instead of being stranded at the end of the story, I was actually in the prelude to the beginning of another one’. At the age of forty-five Bob Dylan was getting a second wind.

  He couldn’t have picked a better time to think about his comeback. In the middle of November 1986 CBS released the Bruce Springsteen live album the market had been awaiting since his record-breaking tour the previous year. Within a day public demand was so great that the stores were having to reorder it on vinyl, on cassette and also, most profitably, on the brand-new CD format which was clearly going to take off. As it did so it would render the old mathematics of the music business null and void and make the rock stars of the future richer than any who had come before. Yes, no better time for Bob Dylan to start again.

  1986 PLAYLIST

  Pet Shop Boys, ‘West End Girls’

  Berlin, ‘Take My Breath Away’

  The Rolling Stones, Dirty Work

  Hüsker Dü, Candy Apple Grey

  Queen, A Kind Of Magic

  Crowded House, Crowded House

  Bob Dylan, Knocked Out Loaded

  Paul Simon, Graceland

  Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Live/1975–85

  Beastie Boys, Licensed To Ill

  1 AUGUST 1987

  GREYHOUND BUS STATION, HOLLYWOOD

  Looking the part

  AXL ROSE HAD first come to Hollywood in 1982, when he was just twenty years old. After five years of hustling he was given the rare privilege of being able to turn his life into myth when Nigel Dick, the director of the first Guns N’ Roses video ‘Welcome To The Jungle’, took him back to the bus station at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine to film him making his arrival all over again. To drive home the point that Axl had landed in Gomorrah from the land of Parks and Recreation, he actually had him chewing a straw as he alighted from the bus. Following two brief encounters on the street, one with a drug dealer and the other with a hooker, he catches sight of himself on a screen in a TV store window playing with his band. Now his hair is the full pompadour, his T-shirt is slashed to reveal his tattoos, he’s wearing leather pants and he’s winding his hips in the direction of the admiring girls in the audience. When Axl came to Hollywood his dream was to cross over from the ordinary, everyday life he had been condemned to back in Indiana and live the dream life of a rock star in the city of dreams. Now here he was, starring in a little film about that very transition, a film that was destined to excite the next generation of fourteen-year-old dreamers.

  The most impressionable group in society are teenage boys. They have a touching readiness to believe that somewhere nearby a bunch of young men only slightly older than they are and certainly no more exceptional are living a life larger, louder and more licentious than any in human history and are getting paid a fortune for doing so. Ever since heavy metal unilaterally declared its independence from the mainstream of popular music in the early eighties, round about the time of the launch of the British magazine Kerrang!, the first publication to define its area of operations in terms of sheer volume, hard rock has been a world in which each new generation has hoped to exceed the excess and double down on the debauchery of the one before.

  In the early eighties the centre of this world was a small area of Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard where Tower Records sat close to the Whisky, the Roxy, the Troubadour and the Rainbow Bar and Grill. Here on a Saturday night a succession of big-haired men wearing tight leathers accompanied by their equally big-haired girlfriends would alight from limos to disport themselves in front of enthralled young onlookers. These men might be the members of Mötley Crüe, Ratt, WASP, Stryper, Quiet Riot or any of the other Los Angeles-based bands who played the combination of hard rock and pop that was known disrespectfully as ‘hair metal’. The enthralled onlookers might be kids drawn from the San Fernando Valley by the prospect of proximity to this new star system. They might be showbiz kids like Saul ‘Slash’ Hudson who were handing out fliers to get people to come see their hopefully up-and-coming band. They might be from further afield, like Bill Bailey, who had come from Lafayette, Indiana, adopted the name Axl Rose, and was spending his time star-spotting on the Strip in between dealing drugs in the parking lots behind the clubs.

  The two of them, plus Izzy Stradlin (a friend of Rose’s from home), Steven Adler and Duff McKagan, who had been in a failed band with Slash, came together in 1986. The talent scout who spotted them told David Geffen that they could sell as many records as the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and that they were the greatest rock and roll band in the world. This was stretching it a little because they didn’t have a sound of their own and the drummer couldn’t play. What they did have was a look. The golden rule in music is that the more people protest that it’s all about the music, the more certain it is that it’s all about something else entirely. The thing that mattered most in hard rock was not the rock or the hardness thereof; it was looking the part. And Guns N’ Roses did. They combined glamour and danger in just the right proportions. This is the quality that was impossible to contrive. This had been evident when they first turned twenty-one and could finally enter the clubs rather than rubberneck on the sidewalk. Rose and Stradlin went in one night with such mad aplomb that the members of Mötley Crüe, who were in the VIP section, leaned over to see who they were. They must be rock stars because they looked like rock stars.

  As individuals, Guns N’ Roses were authentically impossible. All five members of the band came from homes where the parents split up when they were young. They were all in trouble with the authorities as teenagers, and it wasn’t the authorities’ fault. Their primary interests were drugs, alcohol and fornication. They were interested in rock stardom too because it promised to increase their opportunities for those three things. When Geffen signed them the company had the greatest difficulty g
etting anyone to manage them, so bad was their reputation. It was a reputation built on their record of substance abuse and the ethical shortcuts they had been prepared to make to pursue that substance abuse. At the time three of them were enthusiastic users of the Iranian heroin that had come into the USA in the wake of the Islamic Revolution, and the bass player was an alcoholic. Axl Rose was the most sober member of the band. He made up for this by being psychologically unstable.

  When Frank Zappa, speaking of the Mothers of Invention back in the sixties, had said ‘we’re the kind of band that if we moved in next door to you your lawn will die’, the statement was in the nature of a rueful apology for the necessarily sloppy standards of musicians when it came to matters of grooming. When Guns N’ Roses talked about how they were creatures of their appetites it was a flat-out boast. There was nothing about Guns N’ Roses that was not calculated to offend right-thinking people and thereby attract the support of fifteen-year-old boys. Before they adopted their name they actually toyed with calling themselves AIDS. Rose was arrested by police for throwing a fifteen-year-old girl out of their rehearsal space and into the street without her clothes. Their first proper interview with an LA music magazine resulted in them destroying the reporter’s tape recorder and then insisting the magazine run the piece with a rambling letter from Rose in which both his lack of formal education and his staggering arrogance became clear. ‘We are our own political party within a government just as any small business,’ he said. Guns N’ Roses didn’t feel their first album Appetite For Destruction was complete until they’d added the sounds of one of their camp followers having sexual intercourse with Rose in a sound booth at New York’s Mediasound Studios. They were rock stars such as might have been invented by an over-excited movie producer, with all the elements brought to the surface, where they really counted.

  While their music celebrated the liberation of doing actual things with actual girls in actual places, the new hard rock acts owed their popularity to television just as much as Mary Tyler Moore. Whereas the progenitors of these bands, acts like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Aerosmith, had been invisible to anyone except those who bothered to buy a ticket to see them, this new regiment of overstated hell-raisers were beamed into living rooms by MTV. Therefore their clips had to be not simply a visual depiction of their new song; they had to be advertisements for the lifestyles those songs were supposed to celebrate. Because this new, younger audience had grown up with multi-channel TV and didn’t regard music as anything particularly special in itself, the bands that ministered to them realized that they needed to organize their stage acts so that the impact was as much visual as musical. In the wake of Tipper Gore’s successful efforts to get the record business to sticker its potentially controversial products with Parental Advisory notices, the arrival of Guns N’ Roses was a calculated affront to all that was decent. Their rise signalled the end of the Hollywood scene they had spent so much time trying to elbow their way into.

  It didn’t happen immediately because MTV took time to come on board. In 1987, as their reputation grew and their album started to chart, Guns N’ Roses were booked as support on tours headlined by senior bands, the kind of bands they could easily show up, the kind of bands that relied on special effects to make up for their own charisma deficit. One of them was Mötley Crüe. In 1987 Mötley Crüe were touring the United States. Their show began with lights playing on crimson curtains, which then dropped to reveal a bare stage on to which three levels of amplifiers were raised by pneumatic lifts, then drummer Tommy Lee would appear already playing in a forklifted cage. In a rare fit of modesty they had abandoned the plan to make their entrance from between a woman’s legs, but their opening song ‘All In The Name Of …’ reassuringly concerned a girl who was only fifteen and assured the listeners that ‘for sex and sex I’d sell my soul’. It made ‘Midnight Rambler’ seem like Schubert.

  The Crüe act was the perfect example of what was starting to happen to live performance as the technology involved grew more capable and audiences increasingly assessed value for money on the basis of spectacle and sensation rather than anything else. The high point came when the cage containing Lee did two complete revolutions as the drummer continued to thrash away at his kit. Earth, Wind & Fire’s act had a similar trick at the time but their drummer didn’t introduce it by announcing ‘I had a fucking dream. I wanted to play the fucking drums upside down.’ This in itself was an instructive example of Crüe’s modus operandi. It obeyed two iron rules: the first was that the f-word had to be included in every sentence spoken from the stage, and the second that there shouldn’t be the minutest departure from the agreed script, every word of which was written in Magic Marker and attached to monitors prior to the performance. The impression of mayhem, like the impression of sincerity, was something clearly too important not to be faked.

  By 1987 the rock tent was big enough to accommodate very different visions of what rock stars were supposed to be about, some of which were in direct opposition to others. If you sided with Peter Gabriel, U2 or Tracy Chapman, who were all enjoying career high points that year, the point of being a rock star was to nudge mankind in the direction of virtue. If, on the other hand, you sided with Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister, WASP or Poison, the point was to sleep with strippers. The interesting thing about this wave of bands, who favoured big hair and wore their guitars around their crotches, was their apparent determination to be so much like each other. The visual shorthand of MTV demanded that hip hop acts look a certain way, country acts another and hard rock acts another again. Within their niches the only differentiation they accepted was that of competitive sport, whereby you achieve prominence by kicking the asses of all the competitors, either by playing louder than them, selling more records than them, carrying off their womenfolk or outstripping them in matters of excess.

  The need of these men to live up to the rock-star image they so energetically promoted rebounded on them. As the Mötley Crüe/Guns N’ Roses tour wound down in December, Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe decided he would pay tribute to Slash, the member of Guns N’ Roses he had befriended during the tour, by turning up at his hotel in a limo with presents of a gallon jug of Jack Daniel’s, an antique beaver-fur top hat and a few bags of heroin he had picked up earlier that evening. He then did too much of the latter himself, turned blue, and his life was only saved by the timely intervention of an ambulance crew.

  In the sixties and seventies bands had argued that they weren’t anything like as bad as they might look. Bands like Guns N’ Roses, on the other hand, were determined to prove that they were every bit as bad as they looked. And the way they looked was every bit as important as the music. It remains the case that when fashion editors think of a rock star they think of Axl Rose in 1987. Nobody has ever looked more the part.

  1987 PLAYLIST

  U2, The Joshua Tree

  Prince, Sign O’ The Times

  Public Enemy, Yo! Bum Rush The Show

  Guns N’ Roses, Appetite For Destruction

  Def Leppard, Hysteria

  Twisted Sister, Love Is For Suckers

  George Michael, Faith

  Pet Shop Boys, ‘It’s A Sin’

  Madonna, Who’s That Girl

  Pink Floyd, A Momentary Lapse Of Reason

  9 SEPTEMBER 1988

  SOTHEBY’S, LONDON

  Clearing the closet

  WHEN REG DWIGHT was born in Pinner in 1947 the diaries of Anne Frank had yet to be published. It was only two years since she had died in a concentration camp. Homosexual acts were illegal, even between consenting adults in private. There were no players of colour in Major League baseball. Pakistan was yet to become a nation, Princess Elizabeth was not yet married.

  At the time of writing Reg Dwight is no longer simply Elton John but Sir Elton John. He is married to another man. They are raising a family. He has been famous for almost fifty years. He has been a prominent participant in state occasions. He has owned a front-rank football club. He has raised
millions for charity. He remains a curiously restless figure.

  He began his restlessness early, rejecting the route that was open to him to make his name in the world of legitimate music in order to play the piano in a rock and roll band. His entire life in the spotlight has seemed like a struggle to overcome what he sees as his physical limitations – his stature, his weight and, most notably, his hairline. He is capable of conducting himself in a cultivated enough way to walk with kings but is equally capable of displays of surprising vulgarity and aggression. He has made massive contributions to charity but sometimes has an unkind tongue which he finds impossible to keep on the leash. A succession of duets with pop sensations du jour suggests he worries about being seen as what he is, a seventy-year-old rock star. All the most painful episodes of his private life – his addictions, his squabbles with those closest to him, his search for a partner – have been acted out in public for all to see. Elton John’s life is the classic journey beloved of the producers of contemporary television.

  He grew up in an age of austerity, an era of cleaning your plate, doing your homework and keeping whatever problems you had bottled up inside; he has, by accident or design, become the symbol of a new age of therapy, where you avoid doing anything that makes you unhappy, share your innermost feelings at the drop of a hat and design your own life as a succession of new beginnings. The year 1988, which is roughly halfway between the beginning of his career and the present day, was the occasion of one of those new beginnings. The year before he had turned forty. This event had been celebrated with a party at his manager John Reid’s mansion. Three hundred and fifty guests attended. Renate Blauel, the recording engineer he had puzzled the world by marrying four years earlier, was not among them, despite this being the event at which they were supposed to appear together and put paid to the stories that their marriage was a sham. Elton rose above her non-appearance to entertain his guests that day, who included two Beatles, Bob Geldof and the Duke and Duchess of York. The day after the party a statement from Reid’s office announced that Elton and Renate would continue living apart but there were no plans for a divorce.