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

by David Hepworth

  We who live ordinary lives often dream of living the larger life of rock superstars. Those same rock superstars often fantasize about living ordinary lives. In both cases it seldom turns out happily. We like our domestic routine too much to wish it to be disturbed by sudden upheavals. They are too fond of their sudden upheavals to be able to tolerate domestic routine. The touring musician phones home from the road, pining to hear the sound of his children’s voices. Once he’s been home from tour a few days he finds the company of those same children palls and longs to set off again.

  Elton John’s marriage to Renate Blauel was based partly on his genuine affection for her but mainly on his mistaken belief that she could provide him with a home and hearth to return to at the end of his working day. This was never going to work, if only because he felt, as rock stars are wont to feel, that domestication could enhance his existing life without his having to give up any of the key elements of that life. When everyone in his immediate circle was an employee it was possible to insist on silence at breakfast. When the person over the breakfast table was his wife this was less easy. For her part Renate was as lost in his house in Windsor as any heroine of a nineteenth-century novel who wakes to find she has married one of those men who insists things should remain as they were before the marriage.

  In 1988 there was no open discussion of the sexuality of rock stars. Even Boy George, who had been the most famous musical figure in the world for a year in 1982, had been able to deflect any enquiries by saying he preferred a cup of tea. Early in 1988 George Michael was at the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with ‘Faith’. It would be another ten years before he came out as gay and that followed his arrest in Los Angeles for ‘engaging in a lewd act’. But by the mid-eighties the climate was already beginning to change. The death of movie star Rock Hudson in 1985 from AIDS made the epidemic into a front-page story and had allowed some sections of the British press to conceal malicious gossip behind a mask of public concern. Elton John had spent much of 1987 involved in legal fights with the Sun and the News of the World over stories about his cocaine use, alleged participation in gay orgies and a fantastical claim that the dogs patrolling the grounds of his house in Windsor had had their voice boxes cut to ensure that they could fall upon any intruders without warning.

  In the summer of 1988 he released his first new album since having surgery on his own voice box in Australia. The title of the record, Reg Strikes Back, was a reference to the name he was known by when he first began singing in public at the Northwood Hills Hotel back in Pinner. The cover was given over to a display of the various hats he had worn in concert over the years. Here were boaters, baseball caps, beanies, berets and boas; here were Stetsons, orange fright wigs, Uncle Sam stovepipes and even the peaked hat of an admiral in a Ruritanian navy; here, he seemed to be saying, are all the selves I have been and will no longer be. He began a tour in October. The American leg included five nights at Madison Square Garden, a record for an artist at the time. Interviewed backstage by Rolling Stone, he said, ‘I want to run with the George Michaels, the U2s and Bon Jovis. To do that you have to keep yourself mentally fresh. I’ve stopped drinking. The costumes had to go. I found being Elton John suffocating.’ But being Elton John had made him rich. His contract meant he made very little from his first few albums, but from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on he was one of the biggest earners in an expanding market. That market had grown once again in the mid-eighties when CDs meant it was suddenly possible to sell people the records they already owned and charge them double for the privilege.

  At Madison Square Garden a New York property developer who was in the business of making himself famous visited Elton backstage and had his picture taken with him. Donald Trump and his wife Ivana had not previously been noted for their interest in music. Suddenly, in the new equality of celebrity, the most unlikely people were clustering around rock stars. Elton’s celebrity even extended to his possessions. When Renate had first arrived in Old Windsor she had been intimidated by the fact that his house felt like a cross between a five-star hotel and a museum for those of a shorter attention span. Elton had kept every outlandish artefact that attached to his career, from the high-rise boots he wore in Ken Russell’s Tommy to the glasses that spelled out his first name, and had then impulse-bought a staggering array of real art, including a Rembrandt self-portrait, pre-loved tat such as the plastic guitar that played ‘Love Me Tender’ as it revolved, showbiz souvenirs such as the camisole worn by Judy Garland in Meet Me in St Louis, all manner of art nouveau and art deco plus enough expensive trinkets to turn heads at an Essex wedding. He had a pair of Cartier silver baskets. He used them as soap dishes.

  And now he was going to sell it all through the venerable auction house Sotheby’s. Just as the Yorks felt there was something to be gained by showing up at the fortieth birthday bash of this former pub singer and a vulgar millionaire like Trump thought it was worth some grip-and-grin time backstage at Madison Square Garden, so the formerly snooty denizens of St James’s and the guardians of classical culture were now only too keen to profit by the idea that a bunch of stuff that happened to be owned by a mayfly rock star was in fact a good deal more than a bunch of stuff. Rock stars are their own certificate of provenance. The artefacts of Andy Warhol and Liberace had been sold off recently by smart auction houses but both men had had to die to qualify for the accolade. Elton wasn’t going to wait. He followed the four days of the sale closely from Miami, where he was on tour. He used his new toy, a mobile phone costing around £2,000, to keep in touch with Sotheby’s chairman Lord Gowrie. Gowrie was the aristocrat who had resigned from the Cabinet claiming it was impossible to live in London on a minister’s salary.

  Future sales of Elton John’s possessions would be to benefit his AIDS charity. This one was meant not just to shake off the accumulated baggage of the past and prepare himself for a new streamlined future. Elton was also the beneficiary. Reviewing the collection, the Daily Telegraph made the observation that Elton’s taste in jewellery ‘oddly mixes the tastes of a conservative duchess and a mid-Thirties flapper’. Nonetheless, the New York Times reported that the sale realized over $8 million. This was three million more than they had been expecting. One Magritte painting went for over $100,000.

  There is a time to build up and a time to break down. For Elton this had been a year of breaking things down. He had relinquished some of the responsibilities he had recklessly built up in the first flush of his success, including the chairmanship of Watford Football Club and the artist roster at his label, Rocket Records. There was one more thing to let go. Two months later, on 18 November, a statement from John Reid’s office announced that Elton and Renate were going to divorce. There was something about mutual respect; nobody was at fault; their schedules simply didn’t allow them to spend enough time together. It was the familiar litany of excuses the special ones use to explain that their lives are not like ours.

  Then he went back to work. Since turning pro as a member of Bluesology in 1965 Elton has been on some kind of road, first as an anonymous sideman, then as a modest emergent singer-songwriter, crowningly as a pop sensation and finally as a national and international treasure. That same combination of status anxiety, need for the approval of a crowd and showman’s addiction to a steady income stream that put him on the road in the United States in the late sixties keeps him on a far more de luxe road today. It appears to be the only thing that inoculates him against his greatest fear, which is inactivity.

  He also resumed his shopping habit. He spent lavishly on a new set of treasures to replace the ones he had sold. But the form of shopping that meant most to him, the one through which he satisfied the small boy inside, was the one that took place regularly at music megastores all over the world. Elton John would turn up in shops like Tower or Virgin, depending on where he was in the world, holding a long list of new releases and chart entries. He would be accompanied by a chauffeur whose job it was to carry away his acquisitions. He would comb the
racks and then buy multiple copies of everything, one for each of his houses. These shopping trips were a record fan’s dream come true. Elton was the only rock star who cared enough about records to behave this way. To be like that you have to be still in touch with your inner child. Sir Elton John’s undiminished passion for the love that got him started may be the thing we like most about him.

  1988 PLAYLIST

  Elton John, Reg Strikes Back

  The Pogues, If I Should Fall From Grace With God

  Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man

  Morrissey, Viva Hate

  NWA, Straight Outta Compton

  U2, Rattle And Hum

  REM, Green

  Pet Shop Boys, ‘Always On My Mind’

  Metallica, … And Justice For All

  Pat Benatar, Wide Awake In Dreamland

  21 MARCH 1989

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Clean and sober

  ROCK WAS FEELING its age. The stars who had been born during the Second World War were now in their forties. The men were learning they were no more immortal than the hair that had been the crowning glory of flaming youth. The vestigial pony tail, that puny sprig of often greying hair widely sported by the formerly hirsute in 1989, was suddenly the harbinger of rock’s looming mid-life crisis. At the time Elton John had one, as did Pete Townshend and Ringo Starr.

  Since the Beatles finished in the late sixties Ringo had compensated for his periods of enforced inactivity by filling his days with drink. Drinking was his primary occupation. He even turned down invitations that might involve a forty-minute drive because that was forty minutes when he couldn’t drink brandy. His wife Barbara Bach was no more in demand as a former Bond girl than he was as a former Beatle, so there was a lot of idleness to contend with. The drinking came to a head in late 1988. Following a drunken brawl with his wife in a Jamaican hotel, an incident that found its way into the British papers, the two of them checked into the Sierra Tucson Center in Arizona to dry out.

  They weren’t the only entertainers seeking medical help for a condition that had traditionally been put down to character flaws. It had gone past the point of being acceptable to laugh alcoholism off, as Townshend had done in 1980 when he publicly thanked Rémy Martin for ‘saving my life by making the stuff so expensive’. In 1987 Eric Clapton had once again checked himself into the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota to deal with his problem. At the time he was continuing to function in his normal way. A two-hour show in the evening fits quite neatly into the drinker’s day. None of his admirers would have known anything was wrong. The playing didn’t really suffer. The mother of the singer James Taylor, who had watched this process at close quarters, sagely observed that where musicians are concerned ‘The work is always the last thing that goes because it’s the thing that holds their life together.’

  Their counsellors had to deal with the toxic combination of arrogance and self-abasement that is often the lot of the rock star. Performing provided its own high, both in terms of the sheer satisfaction it brought with it and also the transformational effect it had on their status. When not performing they were prone to feeling that others had detected their inner worthlessness. All entertainers think they’re getting away with something they shouldn’t be getting away with and fear that at any moment their bluff will be called. Drinking is one way to blot out that feeling. It helped that drinking was also socially acceptable. It could begin in polite society. It might finish in sordid seclusion. People like Clapton and Ringo had more than a need to soften the edges of the day. They had to drink until they passed out.

  While booze had a dated image, cocaine was chic. It was still expensive enough to seem enviably upmarket and its association with the world of deadlines, workload and pressure made many musicians perceive it as a servant rather than a master. Linda Ronstadt was one of the first to give it up when a doctor pointed out how cocaine can cause the hair cells in the ear canal to lie down. This may explain why so many of the solo albums made in the eighties sounded brilliant to the people who made them but unlovely to the listeners. Nevertheless cocaine still seemed an attractive part of the crackle around rock stardom. Stevie Nicks initially resisted going into rehab in 1987 even after her friends and family intervened because she felt sure that it would be bad for her image if it got out that she was trying to quit coke. She also knew that submitting to the doctors would mean she couldn’t play the star card, which was the way she dealt with everything else in her life. As part of her treatment at the Betty Ford Center, where she was an in-patient with Tammy Wynette, Nicks had to write the words ‘I am not special: I am dying’ on a piece of paper. ‘That’s a serious thing to swallow,’ she reflected.

  Ringo and Clapton were among the first wave of rock stars to change their ways with professional help. In time they would be joined by hundreds of others until it seemed that whenever you interviewed a musician over the age of forty they would volunteer their stories of how they’d stopped using drugs or alcohol. People who in the past were reluctant talkers would now hold forth at length with the practised ease of those accustomed to giving a detached account of their strengths and weaknesses. The confessional press interview became almost an extension of the process of therapy. Major retrospective features increasingly followed a standard arc: I flew high, I went too far, I crashed, I put myself back together with the help of a good woman/man/manager/therapist, and now what I want most of all from my public is forgiveness. Therapy saved the lives of a lot of rock stars, which is a blessing. It also diminished their mystique, which isn’t.

  On 21 March 1989 Bonnie Raitt released her tenth album. This was a watershed for the thirty-nine-year-old singer/guitarist because after her ninth album her record company Warner Brothers had decided to let her go. They’d sent her a letter explaining that they wouldn’t be renewing. At that stage Raitt was an admired artist who had yet to break through. The admired recording artist, like the admired novelist, feels that all those good notices should entitle them to some form of tenure. The people at the label, on the other hand, think they can take the money it would cost to roll the dice on them one more time and spend it on somebody new. This is not unreasonable in itself but is an unpopular move within the music business, which can be surprisingly sentimental. When this happened to her, Raitt was looking at the prospect of turning forty with no label. She had also recently broken up with the man in her life.

  The daughter of a successful singer in film and stage musicals, Raitt had rejected all family advice in her teens and gone to live with an older man. Dick Waterman handled the careers of bluesmen who had been rediscovered in the great folk sweep of the sixties. Young Bonnie, who admired their craft and identified as much as she was able with the terrible disadvantages they had had to contend with throughout their lives, watched and learned. The learning wasn’t just in the technique of the slide guitar or the right way to sell a barrelhouse blues. She was also, like many of the wide-eyed white kids who got into folk music in the sixties, tempted to believe that these people were great artists because of the lives they had led, and that if she could bring herself to suffer similarly she might be almost as good. She carried the booze for these intimidating men, many of whom were alcoholics who played for drink rather than anything else. She got to know how it worked. She knew that Son House, who taught Robert Johnson how to play, was allowed a bottle of vodka an hour before he went on. Any more than that he would forget the words. Any less than that he would forget the words. Like thousands of other touring musicians she accepted without question that you needed a few drinks to reach the appropriate level of looseness to be able to entertain an audience. She had also come to know that at the very time that audience is taking its clothes off and climbing into its bed the musician is still fizzing with the undischarged electricity that is the residue of every live performance. That raging storm is traditionally quelled in the bar. Furthermore she found that cocaine made her more capable of staying up in the bar with the boys from her band, drinking for longer.


  There was another factor, one never far from anyone’s thoughts in a business where what you look like is profoundly important. At around the time Raitt was being dropped by her record company she was playing a show in Louisiana. Somebody in the audience, motivated by the combination of concern and rank effrontery which is the mark of the true fan, passed up a note. It asked how come she had got so fat. It suggested she should maybe think about working out. Then somebody else asked her when the baby was due. The final straw was the call from Prince suggesting that the two of them might like to work together. ‘It’s one thing to go on stage if you’re a little chunky – it’s another to make a video with a guy who’s known for looking foxy,’ says Raitt. The record with Prince never happened – she had no more wish to be manipulated by a maverick genius than by a standard corporation – but the prospect of shooting a video with him drove her to her first AA meeting. She knew there were two sorts of musician who become addicts. There are the unsuccessful ones who drink and drug to deal with their feelings of rejection and, like her contemporaries Paul Butterfield and Richard Manuel, end up dead. Then there are the successful ones who drink and drug to deal with their fear of no longer being successful and who can generally afford to get help in expensive clinics. Bonnie Raitt simply bought a bike and planned her next record.

  She had no thoughts of great commercial success when she started making that record with producer Don Was. She had a new deal with Capitol and her only ambition was to sell enough to be allowed to make another one after that. She didn’t realize how different the album would be until she’d finished it. The engineer Ed Cherney remembers, ‘We were coming out of an era of big hair and big noises on records. When we were listening to the playback on the first song Don said, “Why don’t you take some of that echo off the snare drum?”’ Cherney took the advice, which made for a drier, more modest-sounding record, something more suited to the living room than the rock concert hall. They thought it was going quite well but they had no particular commercial expectations of it until the A&R man visited the sessions and, before he left, said, ‘You’d better get a tuxedo because you’re going to the Grammys.’