Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994
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EPILOGUE
THE BUSINESS STILL needs stars. But many of today’s stars have been developed in the hatcheries of Disney or the stage schools that have sprung up all over the world to cater for the fact that entertainment is a business people will now pay to get into. Because there are fewer places to play and the audience now has too many options to be prepared to put up with an evening’s entertainment from somebody who is only just learning their trade, it’s harder now for people to establish the balance between entertainment and invention that we see in the stories of some of the people in the pages of this book. It’s never been easy to make it and it still isn’t. You no longer need a record company to make a record, but you might need their money to make you a star. It’s never been easier to play; it’s never been harder to win.
Then there is hip hop, which was just hitting its golden age in 1995. Just as children brought up in the decades after the Second World War, with unhindered access to toy guns and a steady diet of ‘take that, Fritz’ war movies on the TV, grew up to lace daisies into each other’s hair, so the generations raised in the eighties, who were deprived of war toys and encouraged to embrace their sensitive side, grew up not only to embrace music that was every bit as viscerally exciting as ‘Tutti Frutti’ had been half a century earlier, but also to express sentiments far more upsetting to conventional opinion. To ears raised on hip hop the sound of a rock band can seem as quaint as the sound of a Dixieland jazz band was to the Stones fans of the early sixties.
Concurrent with this has been the growth of social media, which has changed all our lives. It’s inconceivable that any young musician coming along today could keep his background in the shadows as young Bob Dylan managed to do. It’s unimaginable that a band of today would be able to behave as Led Zeppelin and David Bowie did during their early seventies tours. All their misbehaviour would be webcast live. They would be regularly required to do the one thing the stars of yesteryear never did – apologize. Rock fans like to feel that their heroes misbehave but wouldn’t really wish to see the evidence. As Walter Bagehot said of the monarchy, you should never let daylight in on magic. The stars of the sixties and seventies had a long run in the spotlight because in their early days access to them was strictly limited. It’s difficult to imagine the stars of today still being stars in twenty years’ time because we already know everything there is to know about them.
At the age of seventeen, in 1967, I was fortunate enough to see Louis Armstrong play. He was in his mid-sixties by then and not in the best of health. Nevertheless it was a privilege to see an artist who had been there when the tradition he represented was first established. In the same spirit, I’d encourage any young person to see Bruce Springsteen or the Rolling Stones or Paul McCartney in concert, even though they might be having to sing their songs in the only key they can still reach and their knees might not be quite as forgiving as they once were. I would encourage young people to see them because they are the last of a breed. Once they’ve gone, nobody will be doing what they do. When they go, the art will go with them. I don’t see any sign of the acts who came afterwards, who were born in the late eighties and nineties, accumulating successive generations of fans or acquiring the patina of legend in quite the same way. But that may just be the prejudice that comes from the perspective of my particular generation. It could be that Muse and Laura Marling will be headlining the main stage at Glastonbury in their seventies. All history is subjective. This book is no exception.
As I started out saying at the beginning, the age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has gone. We now have a new set of different stereotypes: the soul-baring diva, the minted mogul of hip hop, the stars of social media, diarizing themselves for our amusement, the mayfly stars of TV talent shows. Then there are the score of ghettoes stretching to the horizon in which dwell indie bands, heavy rockers, dance acts, the svengalis of robo-pop, new country stars and more singer-songwriters than even the most melancholy society could ever have need of.
The widespread sense of bereavement many felt when David Bowie died in 2016 was puzzling in the sense that many of the people who missed him so badly had been quite content to miss much of the music he had made for the last twenty years of his life. However, after his passing there was a final recognition that his death represented the vanishing of a breed: smart, independent, wilful, funny, self-invented, slightly vain and rarely dull. What made Bowie a rock star was the fact that, even at the furthest reaches of his journey from Brixton to Manhattan, from genteel poverty to great wealth, through the time of his immoderation to the age of his unsought respectability, from the odiferous dressing rooms of the Marquee to the marbled halls of the Victoria and Albert Museum, he seemed to remain one of us.
David Bowie was always an evangelist for new ways of doing things. But he made his name in the vanished world of records you could hold in your hand. He wasn’t available at all hours of the day and night except via a black vinyl disc, twelve inches in circumference, which we had secured by using all our available cash in one particular week – a record that would, for a while at least, be the most precious thing we owned.
Our favourite rock stars weren’t mere consumer preferences. They were markers of our identity, like football teams or political affiliations. We followed them through thick and thin. Once a pop star stops making good records, people stop buying them. Rock stars, on the other hand, can go on making weak records for years and we will still stick our hands in our pockets.
Now we live in a world of unlimited supply and exhausted demand. Music can be every bit as good now as it used to be, but it can never be as precious as it used to be. It doesn’t have our undivided attention any longer. We are no longer invested in it in quite the same way. Now that we have easy access to everything, the individual atoms that make up that ‘everything’ are less significant in themselves. The same applies to the people associated with those atoms. That’s why we don’t have rock stars any more. The business of entertainment has seen this kind of change before and will see it again.
In the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard, William Holden says to Gloria Swanson, the old star of the silents, ‘You used to be big.’
Her eyes widen. Her nostrils flare. ‘I am big,’ she assures him. ‘It’s the pictures that got small.’
With his breakthrough hit ‘Tutti Frutti’ in 1955, Little Richard introduced a new combination of musical mayhem and personal magnetism, unwittingly inventing the rock star.
When rock’s first idol Elvis Presley came home to headline Tupelo’s State Fair in September 1956, …
… it was a triumph for him and a vindication for parents Gladys and Vernon, whose first family photograph had been taken in the local jail.
John Lennon led the Quarrymen skiffle group at the Woolton village fete on 6 July 1957, the day he first met Paul McCartney. John was impressed by Paul’s musicianship; Paul was struck by John’s nerve.
Jerry Lee Lewis was warned not to take his thirteen-year-old bride Myra on his tour of the UK in 1958. When the British press discovered her age they whipped up the first full-scale moral panic around a rock star, causing the tour’s cancellation.
Buddy Holly only agreed to take part in 1959’s Winter Dance Party because he and his new wife Maria were in serious need of the money. …
… Young Robert Zimmerman of Minnesota saw him play a few days before his death in a plane crash, later recalling, ‘He seemed to have a halo around him.’
Adopting the cowboy name Hank Marvin, Buddy Holly-style glasses and the first Fender Stratocaster to be allowed into Europe, Brian Rankin (left) of the Shadows became the guitar hero who inspired the British guitar heroes with the 1960 hit ‘Apache’.
When Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village in the winter of 1961, almost everything he said about himself wasn’t true. …
… This entirely fictitious backstory somehow made him seem more authentic. Nobody, least of all the press, wanted to disbelieve it.
Ringo Starr didn’t
merely make the Beatles swing for the first time, he was also the person who rendered their image complete. Before he joined in 1962, John Lennon told him he would have to restyle his hair if he was going to fit in. He didn’t argue.
Pianist Ian Stewart (left) was a driving force behind the early Rolling Stones but once they signed a record deal in 1963 it was decided that he should be demoted to tour manager because his face literally didn’t fit.
Days before Christmas in 1964, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys broke down under the pressure of unrelenting road work, returning home to write his masterpieces and be with his teenage wife Wendy.
A backstage argument about drugs between Roger Daltrey and Keith Moon came to blows, almost breaking up the Who in 1965 before they had really got started. The simmering resentments within the group inspired their definitive recording.
Jimi Hendrix was introduced to the tastemakers of 1966 London through jam sessions at clubs like the Scotch of St James where musicians like Eric Clapton hung out and measured up the competition.
Between her first and second shows at the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967, Janis Joplin changed from hippie plain clothes to gold lamé pantsuit. The first show wasn’t filmed. The second was.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney appeared at a New York press conference on 16 May 1968 to announce that they had made quite enough money and now wished to distribute $2 million of it to artists via their Apple Corps.
On the eve of a dark new decade, the members of Birmingham band Earth changed their name to Black Sabbath, galvanizing a new audience for doomy hard rock.
Teen magazine editor Gloria Stavers took pictures of Jim Morrison in her bedroom, telling him to look at the camera as if he wanted to ravish it. In transforming this hipster into a love god in leather, Stavers invented rock-star style.
In 1971 Lou Reed came out of self-imposed retirement on Long Island, setting out to exploit his own legacy via some new songs and the support of British fan David Bowie.
When the Rolling Stones climaxed their American tour at Madison Square Garden on the occasion of Mick Jagger’s birthday in July 1972, a giant cake was wheeled on to the stage. The original plan had called for an elephant.
Mick Jagger’s marriage to scene-maker Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias in 1971 had translated him from rock star to international personality, suddenly as notable for his fashion choices as his songwriting.
David Bowie emerges from his limousine at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, on 3 July 1973. Schoolboy Malcolm Green can be seen between Bowie and the policeman, behind the car, wearing a dark jacket borrowed from his mother.
Bruce Springsteen laboured long and hard to write and record his anthem ‘Born To Run’ in 1974 and then, with E Street Band member Clarence Clemons, to develop the stage act that could live up to its promise.
Reggae star turned rock star Bob Marley electrified London’s Lyceum on 18 July 1975 with a show that would go down in history and put him in the charts.
It was the songs of Fleetwood Mac that made them popular. It was the charisma of Stevie Nicks, pictured here in 1976, that made them fascinating.
When Elvis Presley died at Graceland in 1977, he was a has-been. …
… The unexpected public outpouring of grief gave him a new dignity in death and turned him into a bigger star than ever.
Punk rock introduced a rich new cast of characters to music. Ian Dury is pictured here in 1978, when his ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ made him for a while the UK’s most popular, and most unlikely, rock star.
Robert Plant and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin consult their manager Peter Grant backstage at Knebworth House on 8 August 1979. The singer, who was turning thirty-one, was starting to feel his age.
The murder of John Lennon in December 1980 transformed his public image from sardonic rocker to martyred artist. The Rolling Stone cover picture, taken earlier on the day he died, featured Yoko Ono at his insistence.
Duran Duran were unaware there was such a thing as MTV when they made their video for ‘Girls On Film’ in 1981. Getting the clip banned was far better for business than getting it shown.
The elfin guitar hero Randy Rhoads was a key part of the act in Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard Of Ozz. At the time of his death in an avoidable air crash in 1982, he was said to be planning to quit to study classical music.
Actor Harry Shearer in 1983, playing Derek Smalls during the shooting of This Is Spinal Tap, the film that taught the world to see rock stars as essentially middle-aged men in preposterous trousers.
After suffering third-degree burns to his scalp during the shooting of a Pepsi commercial in 1984 Michael Jackson, the self-christened King of Pop, began taking the painkillers that would eventually contribute to his death.
13 July 1985. Rock and royalty bask in a new level of acclaim at the Live Aid concert in Wembley Stadium, the show that won Bob Geldof a knighthood and launched the live-rock boom.
Bob Dylan with Tom Petty at Madison Square Garden in 1986. Earlier that year Dylan had secretly married and was having such trouble writing new songs that he was seriously considering retirement.
The members of Guns N’ Roses surrounding Tom Zutaut and Teresa Ensenat, who signed them to Geffen Records because they looked like MTV’s idea of what rock stars should look like.
Elton John poses in the midst of just a fraction of the luxurious impedimenta he sold through the auction house Sotheby’s in September 1988 as part of his short-lived back-to-basics campaign.
Bonnie Raitt decided to get sober when a fan asked about her weight. The resulting album Nick Of Time, one of a number of records reflecting middle-aged preoccupations, was a huge hit in 1989.
During her Blond Ambition tour of 1990, Madonna’s writhing with her dancers was designed to generate the publicity that was her artistic currency.
The walls of Freddie Mercury’s Kensington home were turned into an improvised shrine following the Queen singer’s death from an AIDS-related illness in November 1991.
Guitarist John Frusciante was unsentimentally cropped out of the Red Hot Chili Peppers line-up on the cover of Rolling Stone after he had a breakdown and left the group in the middle of a 1992 Japanese tour.
In the midst of a dispute in 1993 Prince thought he could escape his own identity by disavowing his contracts, swapping his name for a glyph and, in some extreme cases, appearing in concert behind a mask.
Worried he couldn’t properly live up to what he expected a rock star to be, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana killed himself in 1994.
The band may be no more; the brand lives on.
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