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

by David Hepworth

  The bass player Flea was born in Australia. One emigration and a family breakdown later he too was in Hollywood with a stepfather who was a jazz musician nobody wished to employ. He fixed cars in the backyard, did drugs, and sometimes his frustrations with the hand he’d been dealt by fate boiled over into violent outbursts and the young boy would be afraid to go to sleep in the house. There were probably a lot of kids who had similar feelings at Fairfax High, where a huge proportion of the student body had parents who were either in show business or were hanging on by their fingernails to the pretence that they were.

  Unlike the rock stars of earlier decades these were kids who’d grown up on a very long leash. They were allowed to grow their hair at high school and do everything that went with it. John Frusciante, who had been born in 1970, was one of the foremost bedroom guitar players in southern California. The parents of kids like Frusciante didn’t mind if they were in their room smoking weed and painstakingly copying the licks of Steve Vai because at least they knew where they were. Essentially a very shy man who was younger and less gregarious than the rest of the band, he had developed his skills as a guitar player in seclusion. Hence he had woken up to find himself a professional musician and entertainer without being socialized into the smell, chaos and hurly-burly that are part of the life. When the band weren’t actually playing, Frusciante lived what he fancied was a Captain Beefheart kind of life: smoking weed, drinking wine, playing his guitar and filling in colouring books. It was a world far removed from the brutal imperatives of life on the road where the show must go on. Now that the band had a big hit album and a tour schedule to match, Frusciante started to feel anxious. The problem began when they were recording Blood Sugar Sex Magik. During the sessions for the album Frusciante started to hear voices in his head. They told him that if he went on tour with the band he wouldn’t see the experience through. He saw through the American and European legs in 1991 but by Japan it had all got too much.

  A band is such an unmanaged operation that it is perfectly possible for a problem like Frusciante’s to bubble up without anyone else either noticing it or talking about it. He’d joined the band when he was still young and impressionable enough to notice that Flea appeared to get deliberately stoned before going on stage, and to assume that this would be good behaviour to emulate. He had then started dabbling in heroin. After he left the band, he later said, ‘I decided to become a drug addict. I believe I made the right choice. It was what I needed then. I needed to completely isolate myself from the frenetic rhythm of the world.’ Later that year he turned up for an audition with the Meat Puppets in Arizona. He was barefoot and his guitar was not in its case. The band went through with the audition for the sake of form but it was clear to them that he was not of sound mind.

  In other areas of the arts, such as the theatre or classical music, it’s unusual for one of the performers suddenly to make themselves unavailable with such burdensome consequences for their colleagues. There is no understudy system in rock. There are no stunt men, no stand-ins. It is assumed that each player has a particular unique fingerprint which it would be quite impossible and very disrespectful to try to replicate. It’s also assumed that the players have to be thoroughly invested in the enterprise, and therefore if their heart is no longer in it to ask them to carry on even for a few nights would be cruel and unusual punishment.

  The Red Hot Chili Peppers tried first one replacement guitarist and then another. They resumed the tour in June. Luckily Frusciante’s abrupt departure happened before Rolling Stone had gone to press with the cover picture featuring all four members of the band. Thanks to the arrival of digital reproduction technology the art director was able to remove the guitarist’s naked picture from the line-up on the cover, and they were temporarily down to a three-piece. A naked three-piece. Frusciante was excised from the picture and from this particular bit of history. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were temporarily one member down. Given the nature of the photograph, that wasn’t the only member they were missing.

  1992 PLAYLIST

  Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes

  Spiritualized, Lazer Guided Melodies

  Take That, Take That & Party

  REM, Automatic For The People

  Leonard Cohen, The Future

  Manic Street Preachers, Generation Terrorists

  k.d. lang, Ingénue

  Pavement, Slanted And Enchanted

  The Lemonheads, It’s A Shame About Ray

  Eric Clapton, Unplugged

  7 JUNE 1993

  MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

  Career suicide

  PRINCE ROGERS NELSON turned thirty-five on 7 June 1993. The following day his publicist in Minneapolis announced that henceforth he wished to be referred to not by his name but by a symbol. This symbol, which resembled a cross between the symbols for male and female, had been introduced on the cover of his last album, which had come out late in 1992. The publicist couldn’t help MTV or anyone else with advice on how to articulate this new title. His record company Warner Brothers, with whom he had a contract said to be worth $100 million, said they had no more idea than anyone else. They had to issue all media outlets with a piece of type so that the symbol could appear in print. If the artist’s intention had been to confound the music business this latest move had succeeded. An English journalist called him the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, which was the nearest thing to a name that stuck.

  Prince could do anything. In terms of all-round ability he was probably the most accomplished rock star of them all. He could play most instruments, he had written huge hit songs like ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Little Red Corvette’, he could sing in a variety of styles, he produced himself, he had his own studio base up in Minneapolis far away from the power centres of the music business, and he had teams of backing musicians he could call on. He could even dance, which was not a talent to be overlooked.

  In an area of operation where it’s perfectly possible to reach a position of eminence with a narrow range of abilities providing you use those abilities wisely, as Bono has done, Prince had an embarrassment of talent. Unlike so many musicians, he didn’t have a problem making up his mind. If anything he was over-productive. Once he had written a song and recorded it, he wanted it out. Like so many musicians, he had never got over the thrill of hearing his new tune on the radio for the first time. He just wanted to have that thrill more often. Oddly enough, the people standing in his way were the people at his record company, Warner Brothers.

  The functions of a traditional record company like Warner Brothers were threefold. They would provide finance to the artist in exchange for an agreed number of records over an agreed period of time. They had the factories and specialist skills that meant they knew how to manufacture those records. And they had the distribution network, the trucks and the salesmen and the clerks, that meant they could get them to the public; they also had the relationships within radio that enabled them to get the records aired. Neither they nor the radio particularly wanted the new record from Prince quite as often as he did. It lessened the novelty. Over time it was bound to reduce the value of the name they had helped Prince build up.

  Prince’s argument was cute. He claimed that since Warner Brothers had their contract with the guy called Prince they had no choice but to release the material the guy called Prince had done. The symbol, meanwhile, was free to start again somewhere else. This was the contractual equivalent of faking his own disappearance. Warners, who had him under exclusive contract as a recording artist, were naturally reluctant to let him start again somewhere else. In return, he said they were treating him like a slave. He took to appearing in public, mainly to pick up awards, with the word ‘slave’ written on his cheek.

  Prince had no problem with self-belief and here he was at the high point of the period where he thought he could do anything. The work didn’t have to come out under his famous name because it would be popular on the basis of its obvious quality. This theory was tested. He tried working remotely throu
gh his hired hands. He put his protégée Carmen Electra in a multi-media reworking of Homer’s Odyssey called Glam Slam Ulysses. The LA Times said the musical production was ‘simply silly’. It closed in no time. He gave moviemaker James Brooks four songs for his new film. This tested so badly that all the songs were removed from the soundtrack. Very few of the acts he had signed to his Paisley Park label fulfilled their promise and Warner Brothers wondered why they were having to pay for it all. Meanwhile they were doing quite well out of selling copies of a compilation of his hits and B-sides, which they had priced at an unprecedented $49.99.

  At the same time as Prince was getting involved in this game of bluff and counter-bluff with Warner Brothers in the United States the singer George Michael began an action against his record company, Sony, in the High Court in London. He was arguing that his contract with them was unfair and that they had not properly promoted his most recent album because they didn’t agree with the artistic direction he had chosen to take. In starting this sort of action George Michael certainly didn’t lack courage. There must have been times during the seventeen days he spent in court listening to the technical arguments of lawyers for both sides when he feared that no good could come of it. During the three days he spent giving evidence he must have suspected that nobody was less likely to qualify for the sympathy of the general public than a pop star who hadn’t been able to bring himself to say in open court how much money he was worth. Instead he’d handed the judge a piece of paper on which was written the figure: £100 million.

  The nub of the case was that while George Michael’s first solo album after leaving the pop duo Wham! had sold twenty-five million copies worldwide, the follow-up had managed a mere eight million. George’s argument was that this disparity was down to Sony’s failure to promote it properly. It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a record does well the artist deserves all the praise and when a record does poorly the record company deserves all the blame. At the same time, only in the record business, which at least makes a show of following the artist’s wishes, would someone be permitted to follow up a record as light and ingratiating as George Michael’s first one with one as dark and introspective as his second. Only in the music business would the artist be given complete unfettered control of the packaging of these records. Only in the record business would he be allowed to follow a package with a colour picture of the artist on the cover with another one where the cover was taken up by a vintage black-and-white picture of the crowd at Coney Island in 1940.

  Only in the music business would a person be allowed to call this record Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1. George Michael was so desperate to shake off what he thought of as the frivolous image of the party songs that had made his name that he gave his album what would go down as the neediest title in history. Both Prince and George Michael thought that if people could listen to their records without knowing who had made them they would be even more favourably inclined towards them. In fact, as the people at the record company knew, the very opposite was the case. Indeed prejudice was the attitude upon which the music business operated, the muscle upon which the whole rock-star system turned. Prejudice is just as likely to be favourable as negative: thanks to prejudice fans are likely to interpret the actions of their favourites in a good light. It’s prejudice that makes those same fans go out and buy records they already have for just one extra track. It’s prejudice that makes them spend money they do not have to come to see an artist in concert, from ever greater distances. Fans are prejudiced. That’s what makes them fans. The people most likely to buy your new record are the people who bought the last one. Prejudice in the form of name recognition and brand loyalty was the basis upon which record companies handed out million-pound advances. Until you were known, the record companies needed to hear your songs. Once you had a name they were buying that name because they knew lots of people were prejudiced in favour of it. The last thing they wanted was people listening without prejudice. Without prejudice they might not get round to listening to your record for years. They might go and listen to something else.

  Neither Prince nor George Michael would have got involved in confrontations with their record companies if they had been in groups. Groups generally have one member who fears the consequences of doing anything that doesn’t have to be done and therefore they tend to be less reckless. If in 1993 Michael Jackson had still been a member of the Jacksons rather than a solo performer, it’s possible that somebody in their circle would have told him that sharing his bed with thirteen-year-old Jordan Chandler was likely to be interpreted unsympathetically. But there was a booming entertainment business, then there was Michael Jackson, who seemed like another business altogether. Jackson had more power and money than any one individual in the history of the game. People in that position don’t get much advice. If they do, they don’t listen.

  On 21 August 1993 the police obtained a search warrant to gain access to 5225 Figueroa Mountain Road, Los Olivos, Santa Barbara. This was the address of the Neverland Ranch. In the two thousand acres surrounding Jackson’s twenty-five-room mansion was an amusement park as lavish as anything open to the public elsewhere in southern California. There were creatures like lions and elephants selected for their capacity to inspire awe as well as miniature creatures such as might appeal to children. Disney music played from a hundred speakers disguised as rocks throughout the grounds. There was a Ferris wheel, a steam train and thirty full-time gardeners. The running costs of Neverland were over a million dollars a month. When the police arrived at the ranch, and at other Jackson properties, to gather evidence as part of an investigation begun by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Sexually Exploited Child Unit, it was as though they had breached the diplomatic immunity of the sovereign state of stardom.

  Jackson cancelled the rest of his Dangerous tour and fled with Elizabeth Taylor by private jet to London where he sought help from the fashionable therapist of the time, Beechy Colclough. He was taking the painkillers Percodan and Demerol – a legacy of the treatment he’d been prescribed after the 1984 fire. One of the people who persuaded him that he should seek help was Lisa Marie Presley, who had become his new phone girlfriend. She also counselled paying off his accusers just to make the charges go away. The authorities let it be known that Jordan had described Michael’s penis, and when he returned they would need to photograph it. The humiliation was made worse by the fact that the media of 1993 didn’t shrink from describing any detail. There had been scandals before. This was going to be something different. This was heading for shame on a massive scale.

  It was the year that Bill Clinton was invested as the 42nd President of the United States. It was the year that Janet Jackson appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone with somebody else’s hands cupping her naked breasts. It was the year the thirteen-year-old Ryan Gosling was relocated from Canada to Florida to become a member of the cast of The All-New Mickey Mouse Club alongside the equally unknown Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.

  The biggest album of 1993 was the soundtrack to The Bodyguard. This starred Whitney Houston as a diva with a dark secret. The extent of Houston’s real-life dark secret would not emerge until after her death, but her marriage to Bobby Brown was already the stuff of supermarket magazines and twenty-four-hour rolling news. The ups and downs of the private lives of the people who made records were now in the public domain in a way they had never previously been. It was good for business. The soundtrack of The Bodyguard was the first and last album to sell a million copies in just one week.

  George Michael didn’t win his case. Prince moved away from Warner Brothers, releasing his music on a variety of labels. Stung by a Warner Brothers executive who’d allegedly said he’d ‘lost it’, he sat down and wrote a song called ‘The Most Beautiful Girl In The World’. It took him just a day. The song was a huge hit all over the world in 1994. It was the last time he had the whole world’s attention.

  1993 PLAYLIST

  Radiohead, Pablo
Honey

  Suede, Suede

  David Bowie, Black Tie White Noise

  P. J. Harvey, Rid Of Me

  The Roots, Organix

  Liz Phair, Exile In Guyville

  The Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream

  Kate Bush, The Red Shoes

  Wu-Tang Clan, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

  Bob Dylan, World Gone Wrong

  5 APRIL 1994

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  The last rock star

  IT WASN’T UNTIL Friday, 8 April, when an electrician working on Kurt Cobain’s house looked through the window of one of the outbuildings and saw a man’s body with a shotgun and a pool of blood beside it, that anyone knew he was dead. The leader of Nirvana had been lying there for three days. Although Cobain had clearly been under great stress, having recently checked himself out of an upmarket rehab facility in Los Angeles and broken off relations with his wife Courtney Love, who was making her own attempt to quit heroin, the process was deliberate. He had taken his own life after writing a series of notes and smoking a number of cigarettes. He’d also thoughtfully provided a towel for whoever might have to swab up the blood.