Preview - "The Hit: Into the Rock'n'Roll Universe & Beyond", by Andrew Rawlinson by Andrew Rawlinson

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Eric Clapton sub-worlds, sub-plots derangement lightning at night THE ROCK’N’ROLL UNIVERSE (map) THE TEN PRINCIPLES OF ROCK’N’ROLL immediacy, directness, commitment, attack tangled glory Roy Orbison Johnny Green

derangement of the senses

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hall of mirrors short circuit magic trick the whole universe in miniature jungle and plain heat rolling wisdom they are not messing about arthur rimbaud love, suffering and madness quintessence of poison jerry lee lewis shaken nerves, rattled brains, broken will incandescent, hallucinatory, threatening a whiff of lycanthropy eating out of dustbins those real bastards, Belgian frontier officials Indonesia, Egypt, Scandinavia he just didn’t care cancer aggravated by syphilis encrapulement the hardened convict something akin to the key of love Inconsistent? Certainly. somebody done opened the door he just destroyed it – it was wonderful he killed them rock’n’roll went through a lot of pain, man a little extra info on Jerry Lee’s family using me as their pawn until kingdom come Marc Bolan a game of seduction Wendy O.Williams so she took a gun and shot herself ‘appetite for reality’ Jim Morrison testing the boundaries of reality shaman and scapegoat an exterminating angel beautiful man-child or cantankerous old boor?

it may also be the ultimate hit Patti Smith a Rimbaudette I was blushing jelly older than history itself “something so alive, it smells” right in front of you, around you, inside you Dionysus Liberator and Master of Illusions Brian Jones Bon Jeloud, Father of Fear Mick Jagger out there a sort of blessing simultaneously vulnerable and all-conquering we’re into another world women and men of danger groupies’ conquests as hits you melt and there’s a dark side “where can you get the most sensations?” God must be trembling Steve Miller

the hit and the rock’n’roll universe

THE PLASTERCASTERS

another kind of hit a world that can rise and fall THE GTO’S Keith Moon played a groupie nun Flying Burrito Brothers The BTO’s SUPER ROCK WIVES/GIRLFRIENDS makes us say ‘Yes’ is there anything else? flowing into the gaps reality as the ultimate show “we go beyond the physical level” Aleister Crowley it isn’t that far, actually a very strange medicine wits racing Jean Cocteau who can keep the pact? “sharpened by poison” many corpses “outside life” abnormality as reality William Blake a dust-up with a soldier better than any AC/DC title one of the great Minimal Print Runs thanks, Fred fiery serpent of the nether deep Oothoon ‘My Generation’ he died singing his own songs demonstrations by Roger Taylor and Lou Reed

and what are you testifyin’ to? a sense of rhythm is a sense of freedom open and closed dances Kama Sutra rather than the Ballroom Gazette obliterating levels plumage of the most extreme kind Iggy Pop a boxer, a matador, a gibbon and all of it is yours and mine two different kinds of freedom the land of a thousand dances and ‘serve up’ is right ‘Monster Mash’ the Bend, Bump, Bounce, Creep, Crawl, Jerk ‘animals’ (and I use the term loosely) a good example of surfeit ‘Rock Around the Clock’ as a Fox Trot the possibility of the unexpected Janis Joplin “an act of total extermination” Round Robin the copy being better than the original the locus of orgasmic revelation the first invisible music the real place you got hit was the body he who controls the beat controls the night carried off, apparently lifeless a classic death and resurrection scene it’s there and it’s breathing fire Don’t Knock the Twist you’re already gone naturally it has its shadow side over 100 people died on the dance floors like TV dinners are imitation food blasted with excess of light I’m ready for to fade “sure like to trash the fuck out of themselves” ever since we kicked off 3 million years ago sinking ships rather than diving dolphins Philoxenes terrifying Greek banquets a discipline of the soul light creates darkness You’ve been hit. And poisoned. unmatched form and figure of blown youth Björk riding a wave, being hit by a train and that’s just to begin with born of the first cry Lorca Led Zeppelin the whole thing just went, right there undeniably despotic “I felt the band was killing me” “Queen was a wonderful vehicle” “once you have lain in her arms” “I love it more than life itself!” the lightning strike of madness

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intimacy, power, transformation no happening whatever could be a hurt “they cried aloud for joy” “I turn, I twist, I twirl” “it swarmed, it climbed, it ran” I see the dancing maidens my whole body was becoming GOLD splendour and immensity “credulous of all marvels” Persian slippers, seven-league boots I saw the flash only that exists, without beginning or end behold, a pale horse ‘Raging Queen’ strong, beefy types, not overly bright disguised as a girl from exuberance into death because it’s everywhere, that’s why The Temptation of St.Anthony probably extreme deprivation people there do not wish you well pharmacon and I mean everyone “opium’s got nothing on this” handcuffed together ever since the criminal (that special kind of outsider) sex and drugs keep coming up together this is a messy business they are always peddled as beneficial The Great Health Robbery accountants and jockeys take drugs, too illegal drugs produce their own outlaws it’s a tradition that goes way, way back sends you back testifyin’ if you’ve got the beat, you’ve got the dance “a diseased transformation of the seed of rye” our friend Dionysus was there at the beginning when you’re high, you can take more the mouthpiece of the gods ‘slain’ for the Lord religious doo-wop, one could call it Sister Rosetta Tharpe D.T. Suzuki marked not by words but by sounds Rumi the middle of the turning world the last syllable of recorded time Shiva doesn’t ‘enter’; he’s already there lo and behold! you’re a different person the disease of being trapped la petite mort life is the ultimate incurable disease “turn giddy, rave and die” skeleton-clowns Mr.Dynamite himself there’s no escape

31 Antonin Artaud let’s start for once with the photos certain greater nastinesses invaded and looted it’s a sort of cannibalism afflicted at an early age the mind as a spur, the mind as guillotine he called his writings ‘spells’ tried to shag Anaïs Nin 32 conspiracies and consecrations peyote sessions masturbation among the Jesuit fathers he got into a fight on the boat a multiform and dazzling insinuation of animals but this drove him completely crazy like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth truth is a wild beast hunting you down realizing that I would not be able to slit his throat “an empty force, a field of death” The Sexual Awkwardness of God a pain in the arse you’ll see someone running 33 uproar is your only music this is the very ecstasy of love certainly not sweet nuthin’s a person such as Jagger should be locked up everybody falls off somewhere along the line Brian Wilson “it’s all scary” chaos of thought and passion, all confused Vince Taylor “subject to uncontrolled convulsions” “he didn’t seem to be pissing about” a diet of alcohol, acid, speed, eggs and visions a slow rock’n’roll suicide Kurt Cobain, Richey James, Graham Bond, Joe Meek, Peter Ham, Tom Evans “you’ll see daddy” it isn’t easy to know where anybody is anymore only the labels are different when it’s full-on, it doesn’t even notice you 34 that dark valley where all paths meet there’s only one thing you can say Death can come any way he chooses trembling, hoping, lingering, flying the outlandish, the freakish, the plain unlucky the voice is actually that of another mourner a penile implant Johnny Thunders “he didn’t give a fuck – and he looked great” 35 what a way to go Johnny Ace, Randy Rhoads, Jeff Buckley taking on the Mississippi – and losing Patsy Cline, Ricky Nelson, Cozy Powell uttered a cry of ‘Oh shit!’ and was gone Duane Allman, Berry Oakley, Nico she always was a bit of a loner electrocutions, drownings Steve Marriott, Vivian Stanshall, Steve Peregrine Took choked to death on a toothpick “just nature throwing her weight about”

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is this liberty or captivity? a happiness that often madness hits on he gets to the meat of things You’re out of your mind, Joker! hold back the lightnin’ with the palm of my hand you know my life is at stake Howlin’ Wolf reality itself is fucked up like lovers, like snakes, like gladiators hotel trashing as a religious experience “we’d killed a lot of fishermen and kids” Georges Bataille brutal enough to break everything that stifles bewildering objects we can only escape it by passing it on to others and they still made something out of it Plato prophecy, orgiastic rites, poetry, love you would set your life on any chance “if we moved in next door, your lawn would die” It is good to fall. It lightens up the darkness. Friedrich Nietzsche every really productive thing is offensive pungent declarations and bold leaps “a cadaverous perfume” diphtheria and dysentery let’s leave Barbara Cartland out of it heedless of health, life and honour be on guard against the good and the just a cure from the effects of culture you don’t have to be so quick on the draw he saw a horse being savagely whipped possibly syphilis truly poisoned, one might say “Summarily dead” “a wounded, noble animal” a philosophy of ‘More’ woke up this mornin’, couldn’t get out of my bed Dave Lee Roth contemplating a bit of master morality Vaslav Nijinsky “my hair is moving – I can feel it” theatres, opera houses, carnivals, circuses his grandmother starved herself to death heavy sexual traffic in ballet dancers charm, ruthlessness and vision half-cat, half-snake the perfect combination: effortless and daring I have no idea what fauns do after lunch a total success, then he fell ill ‘in sympathy’ after intervention by the Pope “Now I will dance you the war” shit, masturbation and eyes “You gu gu, I gu gu” it’s the provocation that stands out the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind

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THE HIT

& THE ROCK’N’ROLL UNIVERSE AND HOW YOU GET FROM ONE TO THE OTHER There is a universe – a reality – that has existed since the human race began (actually, since time began). It is vast and unpredictable. There aren’t many signposts and those that exist are often misleading or written in code. So it’s easy to get lost. But the possibilities are endless. There’s a lot of power available – too much, some say. Like a ten-foot wave, it can roll you over and bury you. It can’t be controlled. It’s slippery, fickle. Search through every other universe in existence and you’ll never find anything like it. Yet it’s round every corner, ticking over easily, ready to go.

Anyone who knows and loves rock’n’roll will recognize this world at once. Why? Because rock is a way into it. How? By means of the hit.

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I remember Eric Clapton talking about how, at the age of 15 or so, he was listening to Family Favourites on the radio. Suddenly – and it always happens suddenly – in the midst of the soft crooners and what used to be called ‘all-round entertainers’, came the first riffs of a Chuck Berry song. “It just did me in – pinned me against the wall.” This is the hot hit. It’s the starting point of rock’n’roll, its very centre, and the reason why it’s great. It’s the music that hits you, of course. But that’s not all. There’s something more. We are not talking here about something you’ve found but something that found you. Something that takes your breath away as soon as it hits you. This something is prowling the universe looking for places to strike. Actually, it doesn’t look – it just strikes. That is its nature. And it’ll take anything and anyone it can get. And once you’re hit, you stay hit. But that doesn’t mean that when you come out of it, you know the way back – or even the way in. This can get tricky. I’m interested in what’s in the rock’n’roll universe, its connections, how it works —

despite people’s love for it

not just the image

important as that is

not just a history

though I like history

not just the music

not just an account of the roots of rock or of particular forms of it – rockabilly, soul, psychedelic, doo-wop

though these are rich veins

not just a biography or even a set of biographies

though there are some good ’uns

not just the stories

though they often beat anything you’d read in a novel though they can make you think

not just the assessments and opinions

which can be extraordinary

not just the money and success not just the dreams and exaggerations

which can be fantastic

— but all of it. One universe (though with many sub-worlds), one myth (though with many sub-plots).

And finally, I’ve reunited everything under rock’n’roll as... Again, these pairs go together. Physical sensation cannot be cut off from abandon. As soon as you’ve got one, you’ve got everything.

Moving on right down the line, we come to rocker as..., which is just a way of putting a face on the different attributes. These pairs – rocker as lover and rocker as wild man; rocker as adventurer and rocker as showman, etc. – are also intertwined.

– each of which has strong overlapping orbits, and across all the dimensions. So all four (passion, sex, etc.) roll over into: excess, fantasy, disguise, glamour, lawlessness, revelation, fracture, and all their spin-offs (from addiction to calling down the gods), with no trouble at all. This is an entire universe, one that is lit up by the hit just as a landscape is lit up by lightning at night.

passion sex drugs bop until you drop

ecstasy has four spin-offs –

All of these intertwine. (See the photo of Roy Orbison on p.5.) So it’s not that excess is the flip-side of ecstasy (and certainly not the B-side). ecstasy and excess are aspects of the same thing. And ecstasy/excess is itself twisted round fantasy/disguise, glamour/lawlessness, revelation/fracture. Everything is so densely packed that you can go from any point in to any other in the time it takes to click your fingers.

derangement of the senses derangement of the personality derangement of society derangement of reality

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These sub-worlds and sub-plots are endless. But I’ve got a map (see below). It isn’t drawn using a compass, something that always points to the same place. Quite the contrary: it’s guiding force is derangement. Arthur Rimbaud (see p.8) speaks of ‘derangement of the senses’ – a phrase that’s extendable:

THE HIT & THE ROCK’N’ROLL UNIVERSE

addiction oblivion madness death

rocker as wild man

passion sex drugs bop until you drop

rocker as lover rocker as showman

pretence putting on the style performance illusion

disguise

civilization as a sham defiance taking risks exile

rocker as outsider

fame riches power make your own rules

rocker as superstar

rock’n’roll as enchantment & danger

lawlessness

glamour

of society

THE ROCK’N’ROLL UNIVERSE

rock’n’roll as image & spectacle

rocker as adventurer

loneliness insecurity restlessness search for identity

fantasy

of the personality

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rock’n’roll as physical sensation & abandon

excess

ecstasy

of the senses

DERANGEMENT

THE HIT

rocker as shaman

the journey nightmares the underworld calling down the gods

fracture

rock’n’roll as blessing & ordeal

rocker as hero

magic visions illumination redemption

revelation

of reality

THE HIT & THE ROCK’N’ROLL UNIVERSE

The rock’n’roll universe is quite as real as any other world and quite as spiritual, too. Wonderful transformations are possible there. And it has its own standards of excellence, of what counts.

THE TEN PRINCIPLES OF ROCK’N’ROLL Rock sees greatness in small things & magnificence in that which passes away

It accepts the weird and wonderful – even regards them as normal

Quips and cranks & wanton wiles – it can take them all (along with airs and graces) It doesn’t believe in people in uniforms and funny hats – but it likes uniforms and funny hats

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It can pick things up without getting nervous

It is direct and immediate, and carries no extra baggage

When you ask if you can come along, it says “Sure” – but you have to be able to keep up It is willing to take risks – but isn’t stupid

When the heat is turned up, it holds its line It doesn’t hide

These principles are part of the rock’n’roll universe. They’ll get you into it, keep you going and see you through.

Rock’n’roll can be:

black or white

fast or slow

male or female

loud or soft

solo or in a group

simple or complex

vocal or instrumental

pure or rough

traditional or innovative

passionate or cool

– it doesn’t matter. What counts is that it has the essential quality of the hit: immediacy, directness, commitment, attack. The musicians, having been hit themselves, transmit it to others. We enter the rock’n’roll universe in all its tangled glory – and the rock’n’roll universe enters us. That’s what I’m interested in: how we get hit and what happens to us when we are. This is the real rock’n’roll story, the only one that matters.

Bearing all this in mind, let’s get started.

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THE HIT & THE ROCK’N’ROLL UNIVERSE

Not only does Roy Orbison (seen here in 1964) have a great voice, a neat line in black and a delicate way of standing – he also has a natural affinity with the intertwined. (See the explanation on p.2 of the diagram on p.3). When I was talking over this idea with Johnny Green, I used the image of wound-round columns. Two days later, he phoned me. “Take a look at this month’s Mojo. There’s a terrific photo of Roy Orbison – and he’s standing next to a wound-round column.” “Right,” I said, “I’ll have that.”

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CHAPTER ONE DERANGEMENT of the senses

excess

ecstasy

addiction oblivion madness death

rocker as lover

rocker as wild man

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passion sex drugs bop until you drop

rock’n’roll as physical sensation & abandon

All derangements are connected. And all sub-derangements, too. Like subatomic particles, they just keep reflecting each other (a hall of mirrors), jumping between each other (a constant short circuit) and turning into each other (a magic trick, where certainty and deception change places before your very eyes). This little lot are the ‘hard’ end of the spectrum, the most physical. For some people, that’s all there is. Actually, it’s just the beginning (even though it contains the whole universe in miniature – distilled miniature, if you like). There’s a lot here, even so. It’s a jungle – as soon as you find a path, you lose it – rather than a plain where you can see in all directions. There’s plenty of heat – and heat melts things (including us). It also creates mirages. So it requires a certain wisdom to find our way. Not the wisdom of the plains – still, solid – but a rolling kind (of course): what you get when you’re on the lam.

DERANGEMENT OF THE SENSES

passion/sex

RIMBAUD at the age of 18

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The poet makes himself a visionary by a long, gigantic and systematic derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences.

May I introduce you to two men who have a natural affinity with ecstasy and excess: Arthur Rimbaud and Jerry Lee Lewis. They are not messing about.

JERRY LEE LEWIS, aged 21 You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain, Too much love drives a man insane. You broke my will, But what a thrill. Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!

ecstasy & excess

drugs/bop until you drop

addiction /oblivion

rocker as lover and wildman

ARTHUR RIMBAUD (1854–1891)

His life was like his writing: he hurled himself into it, heedless of sense or consequence. At 16, he ran away from home and wandered through northern France and Belgium, penniless and hungry, in the wake of the invading German army. A year later, he wrote to the poet, Paul Verlaine, in Paris, and Verlaine, detecting what he called a “whiff of lycanthropy” in the letter, invited Rimbaud to come and stay with him. On arrival, Rimbaud antagonized everyone he met by his insolence, swearing and slovenliness. He disappeared once for a few days and was found living with tramps, covered in lice and eating out of dustbins. But Verlaine, recently married and with a young baby, was strongly attracted to the foultalking, foul-smelling teenager. They embarked on a life of alcohol, hashish and opium, as well as an affair that was marked by constant quarrels. It culminated in 1873 when Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist. Rimbaud had him arrested and he went to prison for two years. (They met up after his release, immediately started quarrelling and never saw each other again.) Rimbaud was writing throughout this turbulence: fierce and violent poems, most of them composed on the run and fuelled by a seething resentment against more or less everyone: God, Napoleon, his mother, librarians and those real bastards, Belgian frontier officials. In 1873, he had about a hundred copies of Une Saison en enfer/A Season in Hell printed, most of which he did not collect because he couldn’t pay for them. He distributed a few, was disappointed by the response and abandoned poetry for good – he never wrote another word. He was 19 years old.

Over the next 18 years, he traveled restlessly: Indonesia, Egypt, Scandinavia (where he worked in a German circus). In 1879, he went to Ethiopia – perhaps the first European ever to enter the Ogaden region – and spent the next few years gun-running. But he was cheated and made no money. Meanwhile, in France, Verlaine, in all other respects a disagreeable sod, was doing what he could for the man he loved: publishing Rimbaud’s work and even praising him in a book of his own, Les Poètes maudits/The Cursed Poets (1884). The title exactly describes Rimbaud’s case. But Rimbaud was in Ethiopia and we’re not sure that he knew about any of this. He did receive a letter from some French writers urging him to become the leader of a new literary movement, but he does not appear to have replied. He just didn’t care. In 1891, he returned home to France wracked with pain: he had cancer aggravated by syphilis. A tumour on his right knee was so bad that his leg had to be amputated. It didn’t save him. He died in Marseilles, aged 37. Rimbaud suffered illness and hardship throughout his life. But he willingly embraced them – more than that, he sought them out. “I am degrading myself as much as possible,” he said. (The French for ‘degradation’ is encrapulement. Brilliant!) Why? In order to “reach the unknown”. To do this, you have to take risks. Only then can you open up a crack that will let something else in. “The explosion that lights up my abyss,” in his words. In short, Rimbaud went looking for the hit. And it did him in.

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Poetry or life, it’s all extreme stuff: incandescent, hallucinatory, threatening.

and a few quotes from the boy wonder: Even as a small child, I used to admire the hardened convict who will always return to prison... he had more strength than the saint, more sense about him than any traveller – and he, he alone, knew why he did it and that it was glorious. I eventually came to see the disorder of my mind as sacred. I idled away my time, a prey to oppressive fever. I am an inventor with merits utterly different from all those who have preceded me; a musician, if you like, who has discovered something akin to the key of love.

madness/death

rock’n’roll as physical sensation & abandon

DERANGEMENT OF THE SENSES

passion/sex

JERRY LEE LEWIS (b.1935)

Here is a man driven by hits – of all kinds. I heard Elvis singing ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ and I said: “Wow, looka right here. I don’t know who this dude is, but somebody done opened the door.” This must have been in 1956. Two years later, he had cut his two masterpieces, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’ (at Sam Phillips’ Sun studios) and sold 31 million records. That’s one every two seconds, day and night, 365 days a year. In 1957, at the height of his success, he married his cousin, Myra. She was 13. When news got out, his career nose-dived. But he just kept on going, tearing himself to pieces in the process. Perhaps this is precisely why he could play rock’n’roll so well. Sam Phillips once said of him, I don’t care if he’s doin’ somethin’ so slow you can’t even walk to it. Jerry Lee’s still rockin’. And here’s Kris Kristofferson on Jerry Lee’s version of Kristofferson’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’: He just destroyed it. It was wonderful.

It’s obvious to me that a man has to know something about destruction before he can destroy wonderfully. Here are a few episodes from 1976: accidentally shot and wounded his bass player while drunk; arrested for shouting obscenities at his estranged wife’s (Jaren) neighbours; rolled over his Roller; arrested after appearing at Graceland, Elvis’s home, waving a pistol; went into hospital (ulcers, gall-bladder), wouldn’t pay his bill and got sued; cancelled a European tour. For Jerry Lee, destruction, chaos, hell and rock’n’roll are all of a piece. One critic said of him, He killed them with his music [and] his showmanship...He was never more in his glory. And having been killed, the audience are captured. Whether this state is blessed or cursed is something which Jerry Lee, bouncing back and forth between God and the Devil, is ambivalent about. He says he’s going to hell, dragging the audience with him but he keeps coming back, sustained by “almighty rock’n’roll” (his words). Rock’n’roll went through a lot of hell, man. People have put it through a lot of pain. But it’s carried its own load and it’s come through. You are not going to beat it. He should know. He’s lived it and played it and passed it on.

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Inconsistent? Certainly. Self-destructive? Undeniably. Indestructible? Looks like it so far.

ps. here’s a little extra info on jerry lee’s family

1951 1953 1957 1963 1971 1973 1982 1983

1984 1987

m. Dorothy Barton m. Jane Mitcham (though not yet divorced) m. Myra Brown (while still married to Jane) son, Stevie (b. 1959), drowns in a swimming pool divorces Myra; m. Jaren Pate son, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jnr. (b. 1954), dies in a car accident Jaren drowns in a swimming pool m. Shawn Stephens; she dies 2 months later from an overdose of pills; Rolling Stone implies he killed her but there’s no evidence m. Kerrie (his 6th wife) birth of Jerry Lee Lewis III

some words from the man himself See, it’s like, Satan, he’s got power next to God. He’s second in command seated right next to ‘im. Satan, he’s the Archangel, he’s like the Program Director or somethin’…Anyway, seems like the two o’ them are always playing some damn game against each other, using me as their pawn. That’s what it feels like anyways…It’s somethin’ I live with every damned minute of every damned day and night o’ my life!

ecstasy & excess

drugs/bop until you drop

addiction /oblivion

rocker as lover and wildman

Obviously, sex is a hit, a hot one. It’s part of rock’n’roll, and on two levels: as music and as performance. Marc Bolan: Of course, the whole thing is a game of seduction between me and the audience. My act is very sexual. I know it. I mean, when you’ve got this guitar between your knees, putting out a lot of energy, strong or soulful music, it’s going to be erotic whether you like it or not.

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Visions, too much loving, suffering, insanity, poison, broken will, quintessences, balls of fire – there’s quite enough here to keep us going until kingdom come.

Wendy O.Williams is a lot less coy: It’s more exciting than the time I was getting fucked while hanging over the edge of a 36-storey building. She was arrested more than once for nudity and lewd behaviour (masturbation) on stage. At the age of 48, she decided she was past her prime. So she took a gun and shot herself.

madness/death

rock’n’roll as physical sensation & abandon

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DERANGEMENT OF THE PERSONALITY

loneliness/insecurity

But to be driven by dreams tends to take it out of you. You never quite know where you are. Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep? Of course, the music is always there. But it may be stronger than you are. Whether it slips in easy or forces itself upon you, there’s not much you can do about it. Whatever comes from beyond ourselves is like that. Yeats records that unaccountable things happened in his childhood which left him with “an ungovernable craving”. When supernatural events begin, a man first doubts his own testimony, but when they repeat themselves again and again, he doubts all human testimony. Visions, dreams, fantasies, cravings, supernatural events, things that pull you in and turn you over – in a word, everything that can be conjured up: this is a big number. When your song is the voice of desire, it can take you anywhere. Heh, heh, heh! But (at the same time) beware! beware! One no longer dreams – one is dreamed.

You were born to rock, You’ll never be an opera star The classic symptoms of the deranged personality start young: the crazy mixed-up kid. Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy, as Shakespeare put it. But then again, maybe you prefer Bo Diddley: “I’m a mess” (followed by a lovely “Heh, heh, heh!”). For Bo Diddley, being a mess meant being a handful, a killer diller. How does someone get like that? By fighting, struggling, not taking other people’s answers. Or by staying away from other people, someone “who hasn’t been handled too many times by man, hasn’t had too many fingerprints across his brain.” A dreamer. But dreams are powerful things – whether you have them or whether you don’t. We dream most of the time, awake or asleep. Daydreams are just that – dreaming with eyes open. Dreams with me are no Shadows but the very Existences and foot-thick Calamities of my Life says Coleridge, who knew what he was talking about. This is dream not as fluff but as power and courage. Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. Put all these together and you get one of the ultimate contradictions. On the one hand, Real are the dreams of gods. That is, the world we live in, which seems so solid, is the dream we’ve had – but forgotten. On the other, when what you dream starts coming towards you – and you recognize it – this can be intoxicating or scary, depending on your constitution. What appears sublime and beauteous to one person is terrible and strange to another. So when Joseph, in his coat of many colours, dreamed a dream and told it to his brethren, they hated him yet the more...And they said to one another, Behold, this dreamer cometh. They were sneering – but they were frightened too. This man knew something they didn’t and he was strutting out ahead of them.

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Dreamers are rarely satisfied. Something is running through them – but at the same time they feel caught. Why? Because we’re imprisoned and need to be set free.

Bo Diddley in his coat of many colours

fantasy & disguise

restlessness/search for identity

pretence/putting on the style

rocker as adventurer & showman

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772–1834)

Coleridge was a lonely child, dreamy and precocious. When he went to Cambridge University at the age of 19, he was so much cleverer than his tutors that, out of sheer boredom, he fell into dissoluteness and debt. So he went to London and joined the 15th Light Dragoons (calling himself 'Silas Tomkyn Comberbache' – any performers out there prepared to take that on as a name?). He was eventually discharged 'insane'. In 1798, he and his friend and fellow poet, William Wordsworth, published Lyrical Ballads, a revolutionary work in every sense of the term. For one thing, it dealt with marginal figures and social outcasts such as the very young, the very old, the abandoned, the mad, the criminal. It also contained Coleridge's masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, told by the Mariner, old 'graybeard loon' himself, and detailing how, on a voyage to the South Seas, he shot an albatross "in contempt of the laws of hospitality" and subsequently under went "sundry Judgements". The poem begins with a citation in Latin: “I readily believe that there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe.” (And it has the word 'eftsoons' in verse 3 – another great name if you’re looking for one.) Then there’s Kubla Khan. (See central inset for its opening and closing lines.) According to Coleridge, it was written down straight after a dream. But he was interrupted by "a person on business from Porlock" and when he returned to his desk, the vision was gone and he had to leave the poem as it was, pristine and untouched. Well, he was lying. He did dream it and he was interrupted – but he worked on it like billy-o to get it right. Nice story, though. One of the reasons Coleridge had such vivid dreams was because he took opium (including a preparation called 'Kendal Black Drop' – no longer available, I assure you) for various physical ailments. He was known to have run naked round the house in a frenzy of pain and delirium; and Wordsworth records him throwing himself to the ground in agony and writhing "like a worm".

He also took bang or marijuana (supplied by his friend, Sir Joseph Banks, who later became President of the Royal Society – how's that for a supplier?), as well as hensbane, nepenthe and hyoscyamine pills. (Try laying those on your favourite rock star next time you're backstage.) All of them were 'medicinal' in a sense. But he was also interested in exploring the outer regions of the mind, the "diseased and fevered imagination", in his own phrase. Disease and fever: in other words, illness and fracture – even madness – as a form of insight. He once described his imagination as a "secret ministry" and his best works read like dispatches from another land. So this couplet from the Ancient Mariner (which he subsequently deleted) – Their stony eye-balls glittered on/In the red and smoky light – isn't just about delirium or inspiration (however induced), but what is revealed by it. The point is, though, that what you see in this state may be too much for you. Coleridge was fascinated by the supernatural. Once, in the wilds of Germany, he went looking for ghosts. He didn't find any but was "amply repayed by the sight of a Wild Boar with an immense Cluster of Glow-worms around his Tail and Rump." (Suggestions as to the rock'n'roller who best fits this description on a postcard, please.) His friend, Charles Lamb, referred to him as "an archangel slightly damaged". And he himself said of death that it "will be only a Voyage – a Voyage not from, but to our native country." He spent his last 30 years in London writing extremely arcane metaphysical works that justified the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. But this is metaphysics as the map of the supernatural: the country which, in various guises, he had inhabited all his life.

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In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. **** ...And all should cry, Beware! beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honeydew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

performance/illusion

rock’n’roll as image & spectacle

DERANGEMENT OF THE PERSONALITY

loneliness/insecurity

For Morrissey, isolation was a matter of survival. And that’s just the point: when you’re trapped, you run the risk of total loss. What I possess now vanishes before me, And what was lost alone has substance for me says Goethe’s Faust. There’s a German word, Sehnsucht, which is sometimes translated as ‘yearning’. But that’s too weak. It really means ‘yearning-addiction’, more a disease than a feeling. It has a world-emptying force. Step one pace back into the shadows and we’ve got that quintessentially modern archetype: the adolescent with no friends and a medically inexplicable skin condition. Utterly out of it and nowhere to go except deeper and bleaker. But then, Not fitting in is a gift. Only dumb people are happy. (Courtney Love; her and Wolfgang Goethe – what a pair!)

But what do you do when you feel that nobody is dreaming you, when nothing is coming towards you? I wanted to make songs about how we were living in the Midwest, says Iggy Pop. What was this life about? Basically, it was no fun and nothing to do. So I wrote about that. And Morrissey: Most of the teenagers that surrounded me, and the things that pleased them and interested them, well, they bored me stiff. Or to put it another way: How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world. Boredom, restlessness, a feeling of emptiness: these are birds that come and sit on your shoulder and you don’t know how the hell they got there. And I don’t mean sparrows, either. Not even parrots. These are vultures: big fuckers. Morrissey admits that he submitted himself to wilful isolation. Alright, in his case it was probably a matter of “alone and palely loitering” – isolation as style. But loneliness is something that tends to spread itself out. To be poor, reckless, rude, low-born, untaught, bewildered and alone – or even solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short – is not, as you might think, a description of Van Morrison before he reached the summit of his career; it is rather to be adrift in a land of sand and thorns, a banished man, afflicted with desolate passions and aching hours. Who, in their right mind, would seek out such a state? But rightness doesn’t come into it. In the midst of emptiness, the mind is the least of possessions.

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There are two ways out. One is to go right to the middle of the thing and swallow it whole.

alienation as a sub-genre of rock’n’roll

Beware of thinking of life as commonplace...monotonous, simple, petty. Life is merely terrible. I feel it as few others do. Often – and in my inmost self perhaps all the time – I doubt whether I am a human being. Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld. The world is growing smaller every day. Everyday life is a total pain. It’s so boring, so degrading. How are we supposed to look up to that sort of thing?

First three quotes from Kafka; last one from Damon Albarn, singer with Blur. Whether you’re being hunted down, like Kafka, or fed up to the nines, like Albarn, the question is the same: wotcha gonna doooo about it?

fantasy & disguise

Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

restlessness/search for identity

pretence/putting on the style

rocker as adventurer & showman

During their first tour of the States in 1965, the Kinks had a gig at the delightful Illinois State Armory. Their promoter is a big, heavy guy called John Wayne Gacy and he invites them back to his house in Springfield. “We get there and the place has an awful, sickly smell about it.” He wants them to stay but they say ‘No’ and leave. Years later, Gacy is found to be one of the all-time American killers: the bodies of over 30 young men were found in his basement. But the point of the story isn’t that the group may have been intended for the chop. It’s that Gacy dressed as Pogo the Clown for charity in his home town. And when he was in prison, he did an album cover for a rock band: it was a picture of a clown. A picture of himself. Then there’s the story of when Davies decided, finally, once and for all, to pack it in. “I’m fucking sick of the whole thing,” he announced on stage – and said he was quitting the Kinks. He took some pills and some hours later staggered into the Emergency Ward of the local hospital with the words, “I’m Ray Davies and I’m dying.” They thought he was messing about and just laughed.

And by that sleight of hand that has made him what he is today, we arrive directly at Ray Davies. (Come to think of it, he’s like the two of them – Courtney and Wolfgang - combined.) Often cited as the clown prince of rock, a fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy (OK. I’m exaggerating but I wanted to get Yorick, the king’s jester, in here), this is a man who has been through it. By the age of 11, he was a seriously troubled loner: sleepwalking, playing truant, given to explosions of rage. He was seeing a psychiatrist and briefly went to a school for disturbed children. When he was 13, he was given a guitar – his first – by his sister, who was much older than him. He adored her. So there he is, with his guitar – dare we say, happy? – when the phone goes. His sister has died suddenly at work. It’s his birthday and he was happy and it’s all gone completely wrong and twisted and black. And there’s nothing he could do about it. A fool by heavenly compulsion. Jump a few years and he’s the driving force behind the Kinks. Starting off with piledriving singles like ‘You Really Got Me’ (1964, #1 in UK, #7 in US), he has gone on to wry social comment (‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ (1966)) and his Village Preservation Society project. And all the time that lopsided smile. Never at ease. The crazy mixed-up kid becomes a haunted man.

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Swallowing whole, excessive consumption – haven’t we come across this before? Try as we might, we can’t keep these people down. They keep appearing in our dreams: surfeit-swelled and profane.

John Wayne Gacy

as Pogo the Clown Ray Davies

as a Schoolboy in Disgrace...

performance/illusion

...and as Preservation’s Mr.Flash

rock’n’roll as image & spectacle

loneliness/insecurity

DERANGEMENT OF THE PERSONALITY

CLOWNS, FOOLS & JESTERS What links them all is what we’d least expect: these people are wise. How? Because pretended folly or madness allows us to get away with things. The court jester was renowned for his cutting remarks – cutting through pretence. And who better to do that than someone in disguise – someone who doesn’t mind making a fool of himself. So clowns will do and say things that others won’t. They enter the land of the forbidden and taboo. Nothing is as it appears anymore. Welcome to life – yours and mine. All of us, when we were born, entered upon this great stage of fools. We’ve forgotten it. They haven’t. And here’s another little somersault that changes everything: Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise. There’s that song by another Ray, Ray Charles’ ‘A Fool for You’: ‘You don’t want me around, but I’m not leaving. So I’ll never lose you.’ This is older than the world, too – and of course love and suffering, like helplessness and indestructibility, have always gone together. Those who know it are wounded. They’re seeking a cure. But they don’t know if there is one. Nobody does. Maybe the disease is itself the cure. This does things to you.

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Messing about is one of the things that fools and clowns do – those quintessential discomforters. I don’t mean the jester with his barbed wit and studied brilliance – that doesn’t really fit Davies’s case. No, it’s a far more disturbing ambivalence: the clown as both empty (so he can be anyone) and broken (so he can’t be himself). That’s why he dresses up: disguise is part of his identity. One day an Italian doctor was visited by a man who appeared to be overwhelmed by the suffering that is older than the world. “There’s nothing physically wrong with you,” said the good doctor. “What you need is a right proper laugh. And you’re in luck. The circus is in town and they’ve got the greatest clown I’ve ever seen. Go and see Grimaldi and you’ll be a changed man.” “I am Grimaldi,” came the reply. All fools, clowns and jesters are rock’n’rollers. Why? Because folly and disorder are linked to escape. The fool is a man of power in disguise – but the disguise is stronger than he is. That’s why it takes courage to put it on. There are four kinds of clown: Holy Fool

No-Man’s Land Clown Demon Clown Master Clown

suffering from a strange sickness – he doesn’t fit in betwixt and between; enjoys and suffers chaos associated with suffering and punishment knows the secret of transformation

some of rock’n’roll’s fools & jesters

Fools cross boundaries without even knowing it – like children, innocents and dreamers; jesters force issues and court catastrophe – like heroes, wildmen and delinquents. The dividing line between them isn’t easy to draw. It’s simultaneously fine, convoluted, moving, dissolving. On top of that, both fools and jesters are close cousins of fractured adventurers – the ones who wander off and never come back, or return, dirty and dishevelled, with something that nobody wants or understands. So when we go to the identification parade at the Weirdos’ Ball and see the usual suspects – Frank Zappa, Keith Moon, Syd Barrett, Julian Cope, Kate Bush, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Joe Meek – we’re going to find all sorts of tilters & lilters, bobbers & weavers, runners & hiders, pickers & pokers & waistcoat strokers. (Ray Davies in for his waistcoat stroking.) All of them are sporting the motley – the coat of many colours.

fantasy & disguise

So I leave you with this: My mother groaned, my father wept, Into the dangerous world I leapt; Helpless, naked, piping loud, Like a fiend hid in a cloud. William Blake, you are a nutter. But you knew about groaning, weeping, danger, leaping, helplessness, nakedness, piping, fiends, hiding and clouds. Not many do. But if you do, then something happens to you. You become a being darkly wise and rudely great: the glory, jest and riddle of the world. You may do everything upside down and back to front – but you’re out there tilting and lilting, bobbing and weaving, putting on the style.

restlessness/search for identity

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CHAPTER THREE DERANGEMENT of society

lawlessness

glamour

civilization as a sham defiance taking risks exile

rocker as superstar

rocker as outsider

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fame riches power make your own rules

rock’n’roll as enchantment & danger

I’ll start as I mean to go on – with showbiz and outsiders. What brings them together? The hit, which is both a grace and a disturbance. It sends us out and pulls us in at the same time. It’s all spin-offs and short circuits. What drives the mighty engine of showbiz? Our desires, our will. You can’t stop it. You can’t control it. Everything goes in and out of its maw. It fucks everyone. No wonder there’s such mounting in hot haste. And who is the outsider? Someone who is beyond us, who knows the shadow at the edge of the mind. Why did you leave your father’s house? To seek misfortune. When we’re driven by unruly wills and affections, it acquaints us with strange bedfellows. Their hair is fried and laid to the side. They start off stumbling on melons and end up amidst the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds, the mean and mighty rotting together. These great and foolish things, founded upon inconstancy, are tangled up in obsession and assault by demons. What do you expect but magic and conspiracy?

DERANGEMENT OF SOCIETY

fame/riches

But just a minute. Riding out into the unknown – isn’t that what human beings are supposed to do? I just torment a song, frighten it half to death, said Screaming Jay Hawkins. Welcome to imperfection. There are pure voices in rock’n’roll but the bleat, bark, bellow and roar outnumber them ten to one. Little Richard, seeming to have too much voice for his songs, made a feature of it. And that’s on top of his incomprehensible lyrics, his spirit women (Lucille, Miss Molly, Long Tall Sally – she’s built for speed), his mile-high hair and the impression he gave, while performing, of being no longer sane. Rock’n’roll has always welcomed the weird and wonderful. It doesn’t care where things come from. There’s room for aliens and angels, fallers and tumblers, money makers and window breakers, all of them caught up in sidesteps and fast shuffles. And what’s the response? Well, there are two: Hail! Hail! Rock’n’roll! and We gotta get outa this place. Magic and conspiracy. This is the freedom that exists between things, in the cracks. It isn’t solid, established, grand. It’s everywhere: in us – the gap between thoughts; in the world – standing on the brink, pondering our voyage; in the music – the space between the notes. You see, reality is itself cracked, porous. And guess what? It lets everything in: heat, darkness, drama. In the Decanting Room, the newly-unbottled babies utter their first yell of horror and amazement. Yes, we have been chosen in the furnace of affliction. We’re alive.

There’s nothing more unruly than free enterprise. Exploration and empire, it’s inventing and selling itself in the same breath – just like us. Tricks and secrets and immutable laws – aren’t we looking for them and being taken in by them? We send our barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world. Brimming, bright and large. Gaudy, babbling. But we keep flipping over into something else. We can’t help it. When we encounter something that’s alive, it gives us part of itself, its integrity, its authority even. And we do the same back. To be in this world is to be in the greatest entertainment there is. Everything is before us, everything is tried, everything gets in: the glorious and grotesque, the acute and vain, the muddy and thick. If everything gets in, the ways of escape are also without end. We’re knocking the hit back. We’re in the show. But there’s one thing we need to know: we’re being fashioned. And what is the greatest fashioner of forms? Love. It never lets you go. It warps the mind a little from the right. No wonder things tend to go out of shape even as we’re holding them. A conjuror puts a coin in his hand, closes his fingers over it, makes a pass with his other hand, opens his fingers again – and the coin’s disappeared. Then he pulls it out of your ear... This is legerdemain: ‘light of hand’, ‘light-handed’. Move but a step and we’ve got ‘light-fingered’, a term we use for thieves and pickpockets, who themselves rub shoulders with hoaxers and fraudsters – those who pull a fast one. This is a tricky business – and it’s called showbusiness. So keep your wits about you. You might find you’ve been taken for a ride.

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A headstrong, moody, murmuring race, always searching with a hungry heart. They made delicious moan upon the midnight hour and their love came tumblin’ down.

THIS STUFF IS LIMITLESS

–

SO WIDE, IT DOESN’T HAVE A DIRECTION

The Kingsmen’s version of ‘Louie Louie’ (#2 in the US, 1963) was made in a few hours at a cost of $36. Dave Marsh calls it the most profound and sublime expression of rock’n’roll’s ability to create something out of nothing. The lyrics, which some thought might contain a hidden message, were investigated by the FBI who pronounced them “unintelligible at any speed”. The group used to do Louie Louie marathons – the song went on for 45 minutes. In later years, radio stations held sessions that lasted for days: the only rule was that every version was played and no version was played twice. So people were fashioning the tune out of anything, including the tones of a touch phone. In the end, they had to stop it – otherwise it would have gone on for ever. In the late 80s, a Philadelphia DJ organized ‘Louie’ parades with proceeds going to victims of leukemia – the ‘Louie’ disease.

GLAMOUR & LAWLESSNESS

power/make your own rules

civilization as a sham/defiance

rocker as superstar & outsider

This is where the drama comes from: the crossed wires of glamour and lawlessness, intimacy and resistance. If something is real, it’s in, regardless of consequences, whether we like it or not. There is no truth without drama. And the play does not advance without troublemakers. Reckless and prompt in attack. Flippant and full of fancies. This isn’t a show that’s concerned with ‘self-expression’. It’s designed to carry something else. And what it can carry is absolutely anything at all.

Revolt begins in the cracks. And that’s where the hit is. It can’t be kept out. So there’s no protection, either. Freedom and subversion, eternally linked. Everything going into that show. Everything going out of shape. No established order can put up with much of this. It wants some things in and some things out. If everything gets in, then where the hell are we? Of course, freedom and power exist within established orders too – but you have to defend them. All you have to do with the hit is put yourself in its way. Not easy, because it’s not only soaring and flying but folded over on itself, subject to convulsions. But it’s looking for something to plug into. Anything you’ve got, it’s going to take away and it won’t be the same when you get it back – if we ever do. It may not be ours, even.

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When those who are hit are let loose, everything begins to creak and sway.

MAD WORLD, MAD KINGS, MAD COMPOSITION

Try Sly Stone, a prime example of the sacred hunger of ambitious minds. He grew up in the Church of God In Christ, recorded a gospel song with his brothers when he was four or five, became a teenage DJ, wrote and released a novelty record (‘The Rat’), and produced white R&B outfits (Mojo Men) and British Invasion soundalikes (Beau Brummels, #8 in 1965). Then he put together a super-hip band, was a huge hit at Woodstock and had three #1s between 1969 and 1971. He took two years to make ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’ (1971). Drug-fuelled sessions lasted days. Musicians (including Miles Davis, who is uncredited) came and went. It’s music that came out of the cracks, made by a man who didn’t get away, who found hell as advertized. He who gazes into the abyss will find the abyss looking back.

He started showing up late to concerts (“I make time”). Ghetto buddies – pimps and gangsters – were throwing their weight around: road crew beaten up, band members running for their lives. The Black Panthers were leaning on him. There were assassination threats (just after Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were killed). In 1974, he married Kathy Silva (they already had a son) during a show at Madison Square Gardens – they were divorced 5 months later. Over the next 20 years, he was arrested 16 times for drugs, guns and non-payment of child support. He went to jail. He lived in New Jersey under an assumed name. He turned up at the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in 1993 but didn’t talk to anyone. Not long afterwards, he was found living in sheltered housing. During the early 80s, he played with George Clinton for a while. And this is what George has to say about him: Yes, he had the fear...and his shit was so profound that you always thought he was talking about you. Or put it this way: I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.

taking risks/exile

rock’n’roll as enchantment & danger

DERANGEMENT OF SOCIETY

fame/riches

MAGIC & CONSPIRACY 1: THE BEATLES what they played

where you could see them

rock’n’roll pop psychedelia schmaltz avant-garde

cellar clubs stadiums TV film video

musical spin-offs

what they looked like

tributes & covers novelty records bootlegs parodies

hippies leathers showbiz boys fantasy figures

Their virtue and renown: intense, rich, ubiquitous. Drama and myth. Love and death.

Beatle people themselves Stu Sutcliffe, Pete Best wives & girlfriends children associates fans

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culture swinging London hippiedom spirituality protest drugs university courses

representations of them

success

money

their vast sales Apple merchandizing collectibilia & memorabilia and not forgetting the money they didn’t make or lost

photos paintings/drawings/sculpture literature album covers comics/TV cartoon books/mags/fanzines rock criticism

Beatlemania their MBEs meeting Elvis exploitation rumours nostalgia

The Fab Four as depicted by Steve Gublis (see above, what they looked like)

GLAMOUR & LAWLESSNESS

power/make your own rules

civilization as a sham/defiance

rocker as superstar & outsider

There are several novelty records whose lyrics are made up entirely of the titles of Beatles songs. One of them is by Barclay James Harvest. I’d say ‘Work that one out’ except that I know you can’t. No one can when everything gets in. Over 60 versions of ‘She Loves You’, from Pinky & Perky to Tottenham Hotspur Football Team. (Mind you, it wouldn’t be easy to tell those two apart.) The Beagles: singing dogs in wigs. At the height of the merchandizing frenzy you could buy Beatles hair gel, a product that the Fabs themselves patently did not use, and magnetic iron filings that could be combed into a Beatle cut. (How? for crying out loud.) People would buy absolutely anything: canned Beatle breath, a Yellow Submarine Halloween outfit. Ah, how we are deceived by ornament. And yet, behold, the bright original appear. Apple: they had so much money they didn’t know what to do with it – and neither did anybody else. It was the first real business venture by rock’n’rollers. Shapeless, it was appropriated and distorted and lost and stolen. The only thing that lasted was Apple Records. The logo was based on a Magritte painting that Paul owned. That’s Paul the Painter, the Fireman, the one in bare feet on the cover of Abbey Road – and it’s Turn Me On Dead Man and the Volkswagen on the same cover auctioned by Sothebys in 1986 for £2300 and it just goes on forever. If you’d said to rock musicians in 1963 that rock’n’roll was an art form, they’d have laughed at you; if you’d said, in 1968, that it wasn’t, they’d have hit you. The Beatles were largely responsible for that. But Revolution in the Head goes hand in hand with an eight-page book that consists solely of the Fabs’ names (it cost five cents); ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)’; ‘All You Need Is Love’ and a plaque in Mathew Street, Liverpool that reads john LEnnon urinATEd hErE 27 TiMES. ThAnkS john ; Tommy Steele’s sculpture of Eleanor Rigby and an American TV cartoon series (67 episodes in 1965) which made no attempt to draw on their personalities or lives – even Penny Lane was set in London. But that’s the thing about myths: you can do anything to them and they still live, they’re still ours. Somebody else’s glory as your own personal possession. Sounds like stealing but actually it’s a form of tribute, the top of admiration, worth what’s dearest in the world. The Beatles are myths – but we create them all the time. We like the pure and untouched and we’re good at inventing it. But we can’t help mixing in a little of ourselves. Who does all this stuff belong to? Anyone who can get their hands on it. All worlds are like that: waiting to be claimed, waiting to pull us in. The magic and the conspiracy leak into each other, even make each other. That’s why showbiz, the purveyor of the unlimited, overlaps with art and crime, the joke and the hoax. Too good to stop now...

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Every single piece in this kaleidoscope is a way into a world. That’s what showbiz is: a transformer of experience and of worlds. That’s why there are no limits. And anything that partakes of the unlimited is mythic. A story may be interesting but it just passes the time. It takes a myth to give us a life of our own. Enter the Beatles. Chronologically, there is a story: from Hamburg and the Cavern to the rooftop performance in 1969 and Lennon’s smart-arse crack: ...and I hope we passed the audition. But myths, unlike stories, aren’t ordered. You can drop into them anywhere. You can reproduce a myth, interpret it, misinterpret it, worship it, lie about it, even claim that it’s yours – regardless of who you are (and that includes Paul McCartney). The group itself – all for one and one for all – was the first in which each one had an identity. (Has anyone done it since? I don’t think so.) Great adlibbers at press conferences: no one else comes close. Endless invention: the only act ever which, having become the biggest thing in the world, just got better. Then there’s their individual roles and qualities: the Cynic, the Charmer, the Thinker, the Comic. The Sod, the Git, the Drip, the Clot. A quick shimmy and we’ve got Stu Sutcliffe and Pete Best, both touted as Good-Looking Boys Who May Have Been Too Much Of A Threat To John Lennon. From Stu (who’s had a one-man play performed in his name) we go to Astrid Kirchherr – She Who Thought Up the Mean’n’Moody Look – and her photos. And my goodness, Beatles photos: the perfect showbiz item, infinitely varied and instantly recognizable. So we’ll put in Linda McCartney’s – and already the thing’s taking off. Wives and girlfriends: from Maureen Cox (novelty record: ‘Treat Him Tender Maureen’ by Angie & the Chicklettes, 1965, currently available on Flabby Road II) to Barbara Bach (appeared in Playboy in 1981); Cynthia Lennon’s paintings of the boys (there was a fanzine for her and one for Yoko – now there’s an outsider who jumped tracks); the Patti Boyd story (feed-in to Eric Clapton and ‘Layla’). And a bit of padding: Ringo’s Photo Album (1964). Associates: Brian Epstein and George Martin (that’s Sir George). Did they know what they were doing or were they lucky? And can anyone tell the difference? A great supporting cast: Mal Evans, Klaus Voorman, Magic Alex, Caleb (Tarot reader, I Ching thrower, no surname, worked at Apple, died in an asylum – or so the story goes). Fans: the Apple Scruffs. George Harrison wrote a song about them and by standing on a box outside Paul’s house, they could see him when he was having a shit. They told him, too. When he looked as if he didn’t believe them, they showed him how. Hangers on and raiders: Michael Jackson, who got the rights to their songs off them for $47m (and then licensed ‘Revolution’ to Nike so they could sell more shoes); Mark Chapman, who killed one of them just because he could; and the rest of us in between. They appeared everywhere, from high art to amateur scribbles; love letters alongside musicological analysis. There are pornographic fanzines on the Net; and their chauffeur writes his memoirs under the title of Baby You Can Drive My Car. (He even got his own obituary in the Times. But then so did Eric Griffiths, one of the original Quarrymen, who had a book written about them by Hunter Davies.)

taking risks/exile

rock’n’roll as enchantment & danger

DERANGEMENT OF SOCIETY

fame/riches

LETTING EVERYTHING IN 1 THE DISTURBERS

I challenge anyone to hold this lot in their mind all at once and remain easy. They just won’t fit. Why not? Because they’re prepared to go anywhere. Even the most ‘normal’ of them – Tolkien, say, or Hammond – are doing things that most of us don’t: inventing little grunty creatures that save the world; signing up once-in-a-lifetime performers. But of course no one is normal; we simply pass for normal. That’s the drama right there: a show with many exits and entrances. We’re being pulled in, being thrown out. And there shall be due execution upon us.

Aristotle Onassis

JFK

RFK

Princess Radziwill

John Bindon Antonin Artaud

Charles Williams Henry Miller Fellowship of the Rosy Cross

Dylan Gram Parsons Squeaky Frome

Truman Capote

A.E.Waite

Aleister Crowley

Graham Bond

Michael Jackson

L.Ron Hubbard

Lisa Marie Presley

Olivia Newton-John

Roman Polanski

Robert Thurman

Quentin Tarantino

Uma Thurman

Stephen Stills

Robert De Niro Monkees

Bee Gees

Easy Rider

Beatles

Terry Southern

John Lennon

Avant-Garde p.80

Martin Scorsese

Dennis Hopper

A.E.van Vogt Robert Heinlein Ray Bradbury

Frankie Valli

Woodstock

Jack Nicholson

Jack Parsons

John Travolta

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Sharon Tate

Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron

Jimmy Page

David Crosby

Neil Young

Bobby Beausoleil

ev ie

W.B.Yeats Robert Stigwood

Dennis Wilson

Kenneth Anger

Golden Dawn

Byrds

Phil Kaufman

Charles Manson

Mick Jagger Anita Pallenberg Donald Cammell

Anaïs Nin

John Hammond

Gerald Ford

Jackie O

J.R.R.Tolkien C.S.Lewis

Aretha Franklin

Martin Luther King

Maria Callas

Marilyn Monroe

‘Leader of the Pack’ p.82

Sgt.Pepper

Clash

Bernie Rhodes

Guy Debord

Malcolm McLaren

Sex Pistols

Situationist International

Vivienne Westwood

Fugs

Lettrist International

Jamie Reid

Allen Ginsberg

Alexander Trocchi

Peter Blake

Barbarella Grateful Dead Jefferson Airplane

Chogyam Trungpa

Lenny Bruce

William Burroughs

Hunter S. Thompson 1968 Democratic Convention

New York Dolls

Neem Karoli Baba

Jane Fonda

Students for Democratic Society

Tom Hayden

Jean Genet

Haight Ashbury

Yippies

Chicago 8

Richard Alpert/ Ram Dass

Timothy Leary

Weather Underground

Pigasus

Jean Cocteau George Jackson The Maids

Nation of Islam

Rocky Horror Show

Bobby Seale

The Blacks Black Panthers

Malcolm X

Muhammad Ali

Stokely Carmichael

Rennie Davis

Abbie Hoffman

Jimi Hendrix

Guru Maharaj Ji Biggie Smalls

Puff Daddy

Afeni Shakur

Miriam Makeba Tupac Shakur

GLAMOUR & LAWLESSNESS

Suge Knight

power/make your own rules

civilization as a sham/defiance

rocker as superstar & outsider

These links are pursued in Appendix 1, p.141 I leave it to you to fit the facts, lies and legends in amongst what follows

On your left: presidents and actresses, gangsters and sorcerers, populists and esotericists, mavericks and moralists. And what’s the link? Heat and darkness. They seep into every abundance: sex, death, invention, power. We can’t keep them in place. They just roll on, above all that we ask and think. So we won’t stay in place either. Everyone has a certain stinkiness. Disturbers certainly do. Theirs is a dirty job: take the illusion (even if it’s their own) and blow it up. There is no power without deviance. Crime and suspense, you could call it. These are the fractured adventurers, united by shared transgression. Light thickens and there in the shadows we see something that is part of us. It’s scintillating, full of tension – and promise.

The hit opens you up – but it offers you up, too. It’s a gift. So anything that is undeserved partakes of it. In fact, it has more in common with injustice than justice (which has to be set up and carried through to be successful). The hit is like a pardon.

Civilization as plastic surgery – but it’ll cost ya. And if you don’t volunteer, then the hidden persuaders – that cabal of big business, parapolitical operators, intelligence agencies and organized crime – are doing everything in their power to make sure it happens anyway. And we’re all outsiders to them. You don’t choose to resist this force – you find yourself doing it just so that you can breathe. Wrecking such a world feels like freedom. We are children born of sword and fire, red ruin and the breaking up of laws. This is the nightmare of every democrat and social psychologist: take away the nut cases and the anomalies, the contradictions and even the criminality, and nothing works anymore. A glittering madness is gone. True leadership and creativity involves that higher disturbance whose ‘products’ vary from spaceships to schoolyard shootings. The wild light passes along and everything goes out of shape. We’re searching for a wondrous doing and what do we see on the horizon? The dust of those who are riding towards us. And some gods will mount any horse. Thus saith the Lord: ‘I inform you that I overturn, overturn, overturn.’ The Lord is in this place; how dreadful is this place. Aye, divinity and slaughter sound very well together. They’re all around you – and they always were. Being in a world is like being taken hostage. How do we get out? By dropping all our baggage. Only those who have gone beyond the world can change it. Of course, it may require a deed of dreadful note. But as the sage says:

ev ie

A woman came to Napoleon to plead for her son, who was to be executed the next morning. ‘I ask for his life,’ she said. ‘Does he deserve it?’ Napoleon asked. ‘If he deserved it, I would not ask for it.’ ‘Then he shall have it.’

Napoleon isn’t on the map: the page isn’t big enough to accommodate his accomplishments and crimes. There are high and low crimes, insider and outsider crimes. Charles Manson – I don’t want him running around any more than you do. But then if I were young, black and striding out, I wouldn’t want to be picked up by the American cops, either. As some day it may happen that a victim must be found, I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list Of society offenders who might well be underground And who never will be missed, who never will be missed. So what to do? None of us see ourselves as collaborators. We’ll trip, trip, trip it up and down. We’ll roll and rumble, turn and tumble. We have a truant disposition and if we live, we live to tread on kings.

It doesn’t matter what a person’s rank is, whether he is noble or interesting: what matters is to hit him.

This is the quintessential revolutionary cry: attack those in power right now. The world is full of criminals of great wealth and we’re the ones paying for it. Ordinary life is the result of sado-masochistic economics, a kind of terrorism that consumes all forms and vestiges of tradition. Mind you, if you want a tradition, it’ll sell you one – including your own.

Once we’re in, mighty marvels are spread before us. And it’s here that civilization pulls a cunning stunt: it is only by its devices, it says, that wonders are manifest. Well, no. And what’s more, don’t look round the back – it’s not very pleasant. Civilization never is if you get in its way. It pushes us aside and casts us in its own image.

taking risks/exile

After the earthquake, a fire; and after the fire, a still small voice.

You can hear it if you’re prepared to go that far.

Reality is alive, unfinished. It’s always looking for more. So it’s holy and hot, which is to say, catastrophic – and if it has to be, tyrannous, monstrous. All that is required of us is that we enter it. You don’t need to know anything. The only thing you need is courage – courage to pass in and out of worlds. Incarnation and exile. That’s the greatest accomplishment of all – and it has its own lustre as well as its own danger, its own purity. We’ve got all of this – just like the disturbers: the gamblers and subversives, the trouble makers and glamour pusses, with their schemes, their shining troubles, their anguish of all sizes. They have for a certain term walked the night of tribulation. They’re inviting us to cross over, to try a little mutation. Marvels and disasters – both light us up. Why? Because they take us beyond. And beyond is where we want to be. We’re only truly human when we break out of bounds. To and fro goes the way. We’re all on it.

rock’n’roll as enchantment & danger

DERANGEMENT OF SOCIETY

fame/riches

LETTING EVERYTHING IN 2 THE AVANT-GARDE

They’re out there and unprotected: the outrageous and the experimenters, those on the fringes and the ones who just don’t care. It may look like a small band of obsessives, trying it on, trying it out. But these are people who can travel a long way. And what they bring back isn’t in the brochures. They revive the overlooked, discover the unheard. And out of that come unknown relationships. What a wonderful lotus it is that blooms at the heart of the spinning wheel of the universe. Music is all around it and all space is radiant with light.

Wild Man Fischer

Captain Beefheart

A.J.Ayer

GTO’s Alice Cooper

Zappa

John Coltrane

Sonic Youth

Alice Coltrane

Miles Davis Edgard Varèse

Bill Evans

Sun Ra

John McLaughlin

Erik Satie

Swami Satchidananda

Charlie Parker

Arnold Schönberg

Lord Buckley

Marcel Duchamp

Conrad Rooks

Chappaqua

Robert Rauschenberg

Ornette Coleman

John Cage

ev ie

Don Cherry Billy Higgins

Yoko Ono

John Lennon

La Monte Young

Fluxus

Pierre Schaeffer

Markus Stockhausen Holger Czukay

The Disturbers p.78

The Factory

Edie Sedgwick Holly Woodlawn Joe Dellesandro etc.

Billy Name Tony Conrad John Cale

Andy Warhol

Robert Mapplethorpe

Cornelius Cardew

Iggy Pop

Tom Verlaine

Velvet Underground

MC5

White Panthers

Television

Richard Hell

Steve Reich

Peter Greenaway

Michael Nyman

Fred Sonic Smith

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Terry Riley

Patti Smith

Nico

Eurhythmics

Can

Otis Ferry Prince William

Bryan Ferry

Julian Cope

Brian Eno

Cluster

Robert Wyatt Robert Fripp

Ivor Cutler

Keith Rowe

Syd Barrett

David Bowie

David Byrne ‘Leader of the Pack’ p.82

Angus MacLise

Lou Reed

Fred Smith

Marc Bell/ Marky Ramone

Blondie

Federico Fellini

O.K.MacLise

Laurie Anderson

Philip Glass

Ray Manzarek

Samuel Beckett Heartbreakers

16th Karmapa Kundun

Ravi Shankar

Debbie Harry

Ramones

Jim Morrison

Martin Scorsese

Johnny Thunders Ted Bundy

Robbie Robertson

New York Dolls

George Harrison

Rimbaud

Roy Orbison Dylan

GLAMOUR & LAWLESSNESS

power/make your own rules

civilization as a sham/defiance

rocker as superstar & outsider

these links are explored in Appendix 1, p.159

Where are we going to start? A good question because the avant-garde undercuts beginnings and endings, direction and order. It prefers the untried, the unsuspected. Everything is gathered in and given away.

The nitzschephone was a mythical instrument that appeared on early Stones albums – in fact, just a regular piano or organ miked differently. The idea was meant to be: ‘My God, they’ve had to invent new instruments to capture this new sound they hear in their brains!’ And they were inventing fresh sounds with old toys – therefore it deserved to be highlighted.

It’s not the world these people inhabit but the frontiers they’ve crossed – what they’ve got into, what they’ve left behind. We’ve all done that. So what does that make us? Well, impure and imperfect for a start. Crossing boundaries, transgressing – what’s the difference? Who decides? And then beyond those swirling sounds, beyond even that radiating immensity, is non-abiding. This is really the highest point of music for me: to become in a place where there is no desire, no craving, no wanting to do anything else. It is the best place you have ever been and yet there is nothing there. You see where this is going: out, out, out. Like the revelations of the telescope and the microscope, what we encounter was always there but we didn’t know it. The avant-garde puts us onto the same scale as the world. It is encompassing, it will not minister.

How about instruments: invented ones, ‘primitive’ ones (including holes in the grounds), things that aren’t instruments at all, not even vaguely – I mean any damn thing you can think of. Gamma rays picked up by scientific equipment, the high hiss of the nervous system, a quartet of space organ, wind, radio and landslide. Not sound in finite, controllable sequences, however fine (Bach) or ghastly (Phil Collins), but flooding everywhere like moonlight poured over fields. Masses of sound rotating, colliding, each at its own speed, on its own plane.

The senses are being extended – and the world, too. In fact, new worlds are all around us with their splendour and catastrophes. How do we stay on top of that? You don’t. Mastering the instrument isn’t the whole deal, says Billy Higgins. So what is? Being there – in the moonlight.

So it’s a risky business. Experiment and distortion, beauty and mutilation, truth and illusion – we’ve been there before. Everything gets in – but there are always gaps. The edges between what we do and what happens to us become blurred. Look around you, the world is moving on up. This is the lion’s roar and it began before you were born, before there was birth.

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Questions pile up like clouds before the thunder breaks. Where are these sounds coming from? Where do we put them? What are they for? We tend to feel uneasy when we don’t know the answers. John Cage once arranged a performance where there were microphones under all the seats so that every time someone moved, a sound was emitted from the stage. But the delays and distortions were such that the audience didn’t realize that it was they, waiting for the concert to begin, who were actually producing it.

New tonal scales, new sound-making machines – these change the way we listen. But then listening is itself a discovery, a kind of making: multiplying what is unified, unifying what is multiple. We do it all the time. (Now don’t get me started on time – its rubberiness, its transience, its allness.) And a little extra: if there’s anything lying around – a tape of granny laughing, a symphony, some TV dialogue – we can raid it. Plunderphonics (which has hybrided out to both megaplundermorphonemiclonics and bastard pop). Nothing is rejected. With the hit, everything’s a bonus; without it, everything’s a substitute. Where is all this happening? In a recording studio? Live somewhere, sometime? In your head? In the world? You tell me. ‘Think music’, some people call it. Which reminds me of the earliest jazz (in New Orleans around 1870, so no recordings). It wasn’t called ‘jazz’ then, but ‘ragtime’, ‘head music’, ‘faking’, ‘ratty’. No avant-gardist ever put it better. Yes, we need a new language for all this. Not just for soundscapes (colour and light and sonic weather), but for what contains them: silence, space – coagulating and crinkling, altering its density until sounds reach you in fractious fragments, forming unknown metallophonic alloys, texturhythmfields that are too fugitive for the ear to catch. This is alien music, indifferent to the human (a pointless and treacherous category). It’s mythillogical. We’ve left the well trodden paths and approved gestures. We’re making space for ourselves. We’ve got rhythms going so that no one can tell where the beat is.

taking risks/exile

Yet those who desire life can never be kept down. Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere, as the song has it. Avant-gardists are freewheeling, permissive, combative. They’re kinetic collaborators in the construction of reality. What they do exists on multiple levels – like us. And what do they aspire to? Freedom. Free music is humane, democratic; spontaneity as a form of truth. Cornelius Cardew even put forward the acceptance of death as one of the seven ethics of improvisation.

The performance of every vital action brings us closer to death; if it didn’t, it would lack vitality. Life is a force to be used and if necessary used up. So where does this leave us? Answer: somewhere we didn’t expect, a world of trans-sonic power and the primaudial human. Holger Czukay refers to the studio as a temple: “Ceremonies happened there rather than equipment being used.” Yet all of us are absolute beginners; we can all fail any time. We’re going out the chimney, into the fargonasphere, where there’s room for the provocateur and the saint, for magic and capturing spirits. Quarrel and purr. The condition of being here has changed.

rock’n’roll as enchantment & danger

DERANGEMENT OF SOCIETY

fame/riches

LETTING EVERYTHING IN 3 ‘LEADER OF THE PACK’

This is a show that likes to keep its simplicities intense, its threads wound round each other. It accepts passivity and bows down before fertility. Everything in the shop is for sale. The shelves overflow and the door is always open. When you go inside, what do you find? Fantasy and majesty pirouetting around each other. There’s a place for all of us. Supremes

Cindy Birdsong Blue Belles Herb Alpert Carpenters Shirelles Tammi Terrell Gene Pitney

Avant-Garde p.80

David Bowie

Marlene Dietrich

Patti Labelle

Burt Bacharach Dionne Warwick

Darius Milhaud Jean Genet

(1985)

producer: Shadow Morton

(book)

‘real’ rock’n’roll

ev ie

(1988)

Elvis

William Shatner

camp

Chipmunks /Chipettes

piano: Billy Joel

‘leader of the pack’

reissued as a single in UK, 1972, 1976; appears on 250 compilation albums

parody: ‘Leader of the Laundromat’ The Detergents

Jeff Barry Solo

(1964) (#19 US)

Pr Archies ‘Sugar Sugar’

Monkees

(1969, #1 US & UK)

James Taylor

Brill Building Carole King

writers: Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich

Ron Dante

Joey Levine

Carly Simon Lieber & Stoller

label: Red Bird

(1964) (#1 US)

singers: Shangri-Las Marge & Mary Ann Gasner (twins) Mary & Betty Weiss (sisters)

Coasters

‘Hound Dog’ Big Mama Thornton

British ‘imitation’: ‘Terry’ Twinkle (1964)

(1994)

both tribute and abuse

Whitney Houston

Leonard Nimoy

Dee Snider’s Teenage Survival Guide

(1975)

Joan Collins Fan Club

Drifters

divine take-off soft – real soft

Twisted Sister

Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid

Mott The Hoople

covers: Bette Midler (1972) Carpenters

Motown

‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ Crystals (1963) Shaun Cassidy (1977) ‘Be My Baby’ Ronettes (1963) ‘Chapel of Love’ Dixie Cups (1964) ‘Hanky Panky’ Tommy James (1966) ‘River Deep Mountain High’ Ike & Tina Turner (1966)

covers: Wilson Pickett

Goffin & King ‘The Loco-Motion’ Little Eva (1962) #1 US, #2 UK

Mann & Weil ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’ Righteous Brothers (1964) #1 US, #1 UK

Phil Spector

(1970)

soul sugar

Sakkarin / Jonathan King

Kasenetz /Katz

Ronettes

Don Kirshner

Cher

(1971)

Ohio Express 1910 Fruitgum Co.

parody slop

Tom Wolfe

Neil Bogart ? & The Mysterians

‘The Tycoon of Teen’

Joan Jett

article on Spector

Kiss

Marvel Comics

GLAMOUR & LAWLESSNESS

Donna Summer

Village People

The Disturbers p.78

Grateful Dead

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test book about

Ken Kesey & Neal Cassady Jack Kerouac On the Road

power/make your own rules

civilization as a sham/defiance

rocker as superstar & outsider

these links are explored in Appendix 1, p.167

Meanwhile, there’s every shape you can imagine, all jostling for attention and approval. Where do they come from, what are they doing? You’ll know the answers when you’ve had the dream – that is, been entangled, enraptured (and unenraptured). We’re in a world of tight avenues and dead-ends – and then suddenly it opens out and we’re flying again. When you’re seductive but you don’t know how you do it, when you’re striving for purity and you end up becoming a tyrant – that’s when distilled essences and blurred edges combine to create the drama. We pour ourselves into it at the same time as it pours into us. It can be spun out of nothing; it can be supported by all the pillars in the world and still fall sideways. However much we set it all up and lay it all out, the haphazard and anonymous still manifest themselves. Excitement and reassurance fumble each in the dark. It’s all embroidery and catastrophe. Actually, it doesn’t matter about the percentage-game boys, the pretensions and follies, the ones who can’t remember and those who remember too well. Money and intoxication spill out and sweep the landscape clean. The number who go under is high. But there’s always a little something left over – and it’s on the prowl. “Look out! Look out!” Too late, of course.

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‘Leader of the Pack’ is a gateway into showbiz in all its dimensions: faith and opportunism, passion and craft, foolishness and experience. Everything is tried because nobody really knows what will work and what won’t. In short, everything gets in – the old story. There are three ingredients in the song’s success: the group, the writers and the producer. It’s a bit like a meal: what you use to make it, how it’s prepared (combinations, proportions), and how it’s cooked. (That’s writers, producer, group in that order.) When they’re all first-rate, you get something that you remember for a long time. In the case of The Shangs, it’s a whole new sub-genre, a taste of its own. But this is showbiz we’re talking about, which means money, kudos and nostalgia. In short, ownership. This makes a confused tale worse confounded. ‘Leader of the Pack’ belongs to the time when rock’n’roll was young, even innocent. But there’s a funny thing about innocence: you can say that someone else has got it but not that you have. It’s a story we tell about ourselves afterwards, as if we were someone else. And stories, even though they’re made up, have one great advantage: they could be different. And so could we. There are conflicting stories here, as there always are when imagination and will are working hand in hand and everybody’s caught up. You know, love and transgression – going beyond. You see, we’re picked out. Maybe we went looking for the hit but even if we didn’t, it finds us anyway. Who we are, who we might be, is always tied up with trying to live up to our own stories, and we can get lost in that. Those who are beguiled are often deceived, and in order to stay enchanted we’ll deceive others. Distortion, selective memory, long tall tales – no one is safe from them. Why not? Because we’re in them. That’s our life. And showbiz is the industry that feeds it – and feeds off it. Seduction and ruin, desire and betrayal – that’s what happens when your heart is no longer your own. The Shangs’ best records are very distinctive: teen melodramas, mini-operas with a disturbing edge – running away from home, alienation, death. The entire sound is unusual: the basic girl group ooh-aah with Spectorian reverberations mixed in with dramatic speech, abrupt shifts from one section to another, and of course, those sound effects (thunder, bells, whistles, seagulls, motorbikes). Yes, they’re contrived and fatalistic – twominute OTT fantasies. They’ve been called corny, kitsch and camp. But they hold together and they sound like nothing else. You want to hear them again. The girls’ delivery has a lot to do with it. “They made my stories believeable,” says Shadow Morton. Mary Weiss’s voice is simultaneously innocent and committed – a combination that can make adolescents great. (They were all teenagers when they recorded ‘Leader of the Pack’, and Mary really cried on some of their records – if you believe that story, that is...)

KITSCH AND CAMP

These two styles-cum-attitudes are often lumped together but they exhibit quite different dynamics. Kundera defines kitsch as the absolute denial of shit – that is, no darkness, no disturbance, no disappointment, no discovery. Rather, it confirms us in what we already know, which is to say, what we’ve already decided we know. Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch what it is:

taking risks/exile

sentimental – easily digested like processed food, passing from junk to crap without an intermediary stage of nourishment; uncritical – and hence linked to authoritarianism of all stripes. Camp takes risks. It’s a form of display, the embodiment of life as theatre. Yes, it has a bitchy, small-minded side. But at its best it’s a mode of appreciation, not judgement. It relishes the awkward intensities of character, puts passion above mere accomplishment, and lauds attack over the fear of failure. It glories in subversion and is therefore a natural ally to irony, parody and conspiracy. Camp might be called ‘high heels cool’; kitsch is succulently prim. The Shangs wore boots.

rock’n’roll as enchantment & danger

ev i

DERANGEMENT of reality

the journey nightmares the underworld calling down the gods

ev ie

magic visions illumination redemption

fracture

revelation

rocker as shaman

rocker as hero

rock’n’roll as blessing & ordeal

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination – and it’s the hit that lets us in on the secret. Now, you may be thinking, ‘Hey! Reality is as it is whether the imagination is present or no.’ Not so. There is no reality without imagination just as there is no time without memory. But memory distorts time, we all know that. So what does imagination do to reality? It completes it. The world is a show. All worlds are. Everything goes into them – and we come out of them. And we can say this: reality is open it is constantly transforming itself it goes beyond itself it is where illusion begins. They hear it come out but they don’t know how it got there, said Ma Rainey, speaking about white folk and the blues. But how about this from Etta James, another great singer: It was like I was laying hold of some part of me that I didn’t even know was there until I let it out. Of course, they’re both telling the truth, the truth about what’s real and our encounter with it. How things get in and how they get out. How we get in, how we get out. Bringing these two together is holy work.

DERANGEMENT OF REALITY

magic/visions

The journey begins with the dream and the music. What is it to be in the world, any world? Where are the boundaries between inside and outside? They keep moving and so do the forms that we find there (wherever ‘there’ is). Try to realize that it’s all within yourself No one else can make you change And to see you’re only very small And life flows on, within you, without you. Of course, ‘within’ and ‘without’ are imprecise, too. As they change, so do we. Welcome to fracture and revelation, gods and demons. Embodiment and displacement – the departure from ourselves – are versions of each other. There are times when it’s fun and a pageant but there are times when it’s so oppressive that you feel like the least powerful person in the situation. This is Liz Phair talking about fame but it applies just as well to being alive, that wellknown sacrament and hallucination. We’re imperfect yet we always want to go further. It’s a folly but also a matter of honour. Where will we end up? We don’t know. But where were we before we started? We didn’t know that either. We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. And where’s that? The promised land.

‘Real’ and ‘unreal’ are imprecise terms. Wherever we look, wherever we go, there’s always more and yet something always gets away. At the moment when you are most in awe of all there is about life that you don’t understand, you are as close to understanding it as you’re ever going to get. We’re pulled up short and whenever that happens – whether we’re a physicist or a lover, a musician or a yogi – two things hit us: we hadn’t gone far enough; and who are we, who hadn’t gone that far? The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument, said Stan Getz about the tenor sax. But he could have been talking about the human instrument. You know, you and me. And there’s another way of looking at this instrument, when imperfection is shed and the light is seen to shine: Music doesn’t evoke the divine, it embodies it; it initiates spiritual enhancement. Reality makes us like itself. So what are we? The ones who carry the hit. The ones who know, however imperfectly, that we are part of the show. That’s the derangement right there. When a man looks in the mirror and ‘realizes’ that he is not who he thought he was, he can never go back. And he can never see the world as it was before, either. This takes us into the realm of those who have been hit and returned to transmit to us what they found there.

ev ie

Not only is the world stranger than you imagine – it’s stranger than you can imagine. And we are all collaborators in creation.

ZEUS’S THUNDERBOLT

I was 18, on the upper slopes of Mt.Olympus with a friend and a Greek soldier. It was midsummer but we ran into a storm (or it ran into us). Without warning, the lightning and thunder struck, a single explosion with no delay between light and sound. I’d always wondered why Zeus, king of the gods, had nothing more than the thunderbolt as his ‘attribute’. At that moment, I knew. All my senses were obliterated: I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I had no sensation of my body. I hadn’t been physically struck by lightning – but I’d definitely been hit. And in that split second, when, fully conscious, all contact with the world was swept away, I realized that I was without limitation. It changed me on the spot. The way I see it is this. Before any ‘thing’ exists, including ourselves, there is something else that exists for and by itself – so you can never encounter it in the company of others even when they are right next to you (like my friend and the soldier). You are always on your own. But that’s just the point: on your own is the only place to be. So the sole way to be true is to put ourselves in the way of the hit – and then go into the world that it opens up. Protection can’t work. We have to go on, not knowing where the path will lead. And there, in the midst of the greatest chaos, and against all computable odds, we find the simultaneous lightning and thunder that obliterates everything.

revelation & fracture

illumination/redemption

the journey/nightmares

rocker as hero & shaman

Rock’n’roll is both a search and an exultation. So maybe rock’n’rollers are more susceptible to religious/ spiritual aspirations than butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. But more to the point is this: does rock’n’roll bring reality any closer (assuming, of course, that it’s removed from us in the first place)? Answer: yes it does. This is why it can be called sacramental, which, I think, butchery, bakery and candlestick makery are not. And the difference is this: music is reality in another form. It’s but a few steps from this truth to another: every form is reality putting on a show. This is the link between Elvis belting out You ain’t nothing but a hound dog! and Lao Tzu and Ibn ’Arabi, two of the all-time great truthsayers. The musicians/singers don’t have to know this. They just have to make what they do real. They just have to pull us in. My eyes swept the dance floor anxiously, then I saw the lightning strike. The dancers seem electrified. Something within them came suddenly to life. An instinct that wanted so much to live, to fling its arms and to spread joy, took them by the heels. So said W.C.Handy in his account of the first time he played ‘St.Louis Blues’ in a club in 1914. He’s talking about the hit, sometimes called an epiphany (though not by people in black clubs in 1914). But let’s not be put off by hifalutin’ terms. ‘Epiphany’ comes from a Greek root meaning ‘to show’ and it means a manifestation of some divine or supernatural being. Epiphanies are the world putting on a special performance for us. They’re often tiny incidents, the briefest of moments, yet they imply great things. How come? Because of the qualities of reality that they bring forth: lightness and power, abundance and amazement.* The thing about rock’n’roll, good rock’n’roll – whatever ‘good’ means and all that shit – is that it’s real, and realism gets through despite yourself. You recognize something in it which is true, like all true art. (John Lennon) And here’s another great, Keith Richards (I leave you to imagine the drawl, the fag and the throwaway style): The beautiful thing about music is that there’s no defence against it. I mean, look at Joshua and fuckin’ Jericho – made mincemeat of that joint. A few trumpets, y’know.

There’s a fundamental principle behind these insights: the world is not made up of smaller and more basic elements; the world is the basic element and it brings with it all the characteristics of experience – space and time; discovery and loss; that which is hidden and that which is possible. In short, reality and illusion. These qualities are not constructed out of the thingsof-the-world. They are given to us with the world and things partake of them. Just as we do. This is what makes the hit real. It brings together distance and intimacy, vastness and delicacy – the ambivalence of existence. We can have it and lose it at any time and in any place. Crossing the boundary between these two is what makes us human. Everyone knows that rock’n’roll is about life full-on. But it doesn’t look away from adversity and pain, and for one reason: they’re part of what is true. When we ‘realize’ that, we see that it’s a blessing, one that arises out of the ordeal. It’s an initiation.

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And what is it to collaborate? To know that we are the mirror as well as the face in it, pain and what cures pain. This is the expanse of spirit: rich and dark.

* We’ve come across this before in another guise: flashers & dazzlers/whizzers & fizzers drifters & floaters/tilters & lilters striders/stalkers/tightrope walkers (see p.50)

the underworld/calling down the gods

100

rock’n’roll as blessing & ordeal

DERANGEMENT OF REALITY

magic/visions

ROCK’N’ROLL AND SHAMANISM these two pages are heavily reliant on Rogan Taylor’s Death and Resurrection Show little richard as shaman Born on Xmas Day 1935, one of 13 children, he sang in the local Baptist church in Macon, Georgia, and was likely to become ‘possessed of the spirit’ or spirit-slain. When he was 15 he joined a travelling medicine show and learned how to ‘call’ people. His rock’n’roll show was entirely shamanistic. He looked beautiful. He wore a baggy suit with elephant trousers, twenty-six inches at the bottoms, and he had his hair back-combed in a monstrous plume-like fountain. Then he had a little toothbrush moustache and a round, totally ecstatic face. He had a freak voice, tireless, hysterical, completely indestructible, and he never in his life sang at anything lower than an enraged bull-like roar. In 1957, he gave it all up and became a preacher for the Seventh Day Adventists; then returned to rock’n’roll – his comeback album was called Rock and Roll Resurrection – and blew everybody away. He did it on stage and off. He Got WHAt He WAnteD But He loSt WHAt He HAD! tHe Story of My lIfe. cAn you DIG It? tHAt’S My Boy lIttle rIcHArD, Sure IS. oo MAH Soul! (this on the Dick cavett Show.)

The archetypal shaman was a lazy boy, a dreamer, often precocious and always unhappy with the ordinary world. He couldn’t fit in and knew he never would. He was called to something different. Shamans were central to certain societies, all of them small – perhaps a few thousand – and most of them nomadic. A shaman was the connection to another world, the world of spirits. He – though there were some female shamans – became a shaman by taking a journey to the underworld. It was a tough trip and to complete it you needed one attribute above all others: you had to be fractured. That’s how the light gets in. That’s how you go beyond yourself. Contact with the supernatural is an ordeal. You get broken up, you get sick, you go crazy. But when you come back, you have something that others do not have. You can cure people – and whole societies – of their fundamental disease: being caught in a world of their own making, a world of false solidity and certainty. When these solid citizens come to you, flattened by their ‘concerns’, you can take them out of themselves and show them a bigger world – more dangerous but more exciting, ungraspable but freer. Shamans have signs of their powers. They can endure extremes of heat and cold: holding hot coals in their hands and thawing out frozen blankets by their body heat. They are capable of feats of strength, balance and athleticism. They can escape from more or less any constraints. They climb the highest trees and jump from one to another at dizzying heights. They have the gift of prophecy and can read thoughts. They make objects appear and disappear. They subject themselves to self-injury – and then cure themselves. This list is entirely magical, and is nicely balanced between the religious (prophecy, thought-reading – powers ascribed to saints and yogis) and the profane (the escape artist, the strong man, the conjuror, the juggler, the tightrope walker). And this is not an accident. Showbiz is disguised shamanism. It goes on. Shamans used hallucogenic plants and became possessed. They spoke in unknown tongues, could communicate with animals, danced in a frenzy and introduced novelty – all as a result of their journey, their communication with the other world. More than that, they embodied this world for the benefit of everybody else. This is one of the reasons that they were treated leniently, even indulgently, when they misbehaved, acting contrary to ‘normal’ restraints. By participating in the performer’s world, we become healed. Healed of what? Of being normal – which is to say, locked up. The shaman’s healing tools included song, dance and costume. He took on a new persona or mask, the better to pull us in, to make the performance real. This is the audience’s initiation and it comes about because the shaman has been through it all himself and is now revealing it to us. He goes before. He comes back. He opens the gate.

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Good hard rock; he murdered it and murdered us. When he was through, he smiled sweetly. ‘that little richard,’ he said, ‘such a nice boy.’

this is the angelic little richard. But wound round him, inside him even, is the one who sang ‘I Don’t Know What you Got But It’s Got Me’ (1965, #92, uS) – the quintessential shamanic cry.

revelation & fracture

101

...and he’s flying. I am the architect, the originator and the emancipator. Before me, it was cows and chickens and pigs. I’m the living flame. I’m burning.

illumination/redemption

the journey/nightmares

rocker as hero & shaman

SOME OTHER ROCK’N’ROLL CANDIDATES Taylor mentions 7 rock’n’roll shamans (Little Richard plus the following six). 1. jerry lee lewis

4. jimi hendrix

The Paganini of rock piano, torn between God and the Devil, and perpetrator of two masterpieces, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’ – both of them encompassing Heaven and Hell, much to Jerry Lee’s discomfort. (See also p.9)

The voodoo child, who paid the price. Underworld descent is very risky – such shamans often live only short lives. They die young, exhausted by the supreme effort that their performances demand. Sometimes they may not return to consciousness at the end of a seance. Their souls remain lost forever; their ecstasy a ritual death.

2. bob dylan

Bob looking uncomfortable

– receiving an honorary degree from somewhere or other

The two others are 5. david bowie (I’ve already quoted Taylor on Bowie as shaman on p.90) and 6. elvis, of course. (See p.119 for THE ELVIS RELIGION) michael jackson

So there you have it: the pantheon of shamanistic rock’n’rollers. It just so happens that I am writing this a few days after Jackson’s death. So it seems natural to look at him through shamanistic eyes. He had feet of gold and his shrill ooohs and visceral grunts came from the non-human register. Sound and image became reflections of each other and it was in that delicious union that he was really himself. Outside of that he appeared comprehensively lost. He created a world, Neverland, and part of what went on there was secret – but through shame, not because it was beyond the rest of us. He became more and more androgynous, changed colour, changed his face. True, he had a certain elfish charm, which, combined with his bejewelled shimmer, gave him an other-worldly allure. But it all went out of shape. He became the monsters he invoked and was subjected to two autopsies – dismemberment after death as well as before it. It is reputed that Freddie Mercury – another candidate for shamanhood – once said to him, “Rock’n’roll is man’s work, little brother.” If someone goes under when nobody could have survived, that’s heroism (or bad luck). But if you take on the poisons and don’t transmute them into medicine, then you become an outcast, the nemo – a term coined by John Fowles to denote the anti-ego, the psychological equivalent of anti-matter, the personification of man’s sense of futility, the emptiness he feels at his core. As Michael was consumed, he brought back less and less. He gave out pop that had no sex, no age, no race, no colour. He ended up with nothing and it took him away.

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Mr.Tambourine Man himself (who said, when he was still in high school, that he wanted to join Little Richard) and well acquainted with magical realms. “I see things that other people don’t see.” He has always written dream songs made up of startling visions and sudden poetic leaps. And as we all know, he was a charismatic Christian for a while. Those who are surprised at his choice of anchorage, or even his need for any ‘shelter from the storm’, are underestimating Christianity’s shamanistic potential, and the intensity of the religious crisis that goes along with being a rock’n’roll shaman. Or as Bob himself said, “I just have to hope that this music I’ve always played is a healing kind of music. We are all sick but we can be healed.” 3. john lennon

Michael hiding

“I was different from others. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things that other people didn’t see.” This seeing, he said, was hallucinatory, visionary. (Taylor points out that Dylan initiated Lennon in some way, enabling him to drop the moon/June lyrics and replace them with his own world: ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, ‘I Am the Walrus’.) The shaman returns from his journey with gifts of power. In Lennon’s case, they were so powerful that he virtually took a whole generation along as well. (Or as George Harrison put it, “The Beatles were just an excuse for the whole world to go mad.”) This power is soul-creating. It turned Lennon from an orphaned oddity into one who could say ‘Nothing is real’ (‘Strawberry Fields’) and ‘Limitless, undying love which shines around me like a million suns, it calls me on and on’ (‘Across the Universe’). But then, “the bigger we got, the more unreality we had to face” – and in the end, one part of that unreality killed him.

Michael exposed. This image is from the cover of Dab, a Plunderphonic album made in 1989 by John Oswald. It wasn’t for sale – he gave it away.

(see p.118 for him as the Archangel Michael)

the underworld/calling down the gods

102

rock’n’roll as blessing & ordeal

THE DISTURBERS: SECTION 1 There are very few on this section of the map who have escaped magic and conspiracy. They are the main players in a drama – one that’s under construction. It’s tricky: running like mercury, gathering in shining pools. We never get the whole plot – and what we do get is improbable, simultaneously kitsch and raw. To enter this drama is to be caught up in grace and favours, demands and sacrifice. These people have got it. They’ve been hit.

Marilyn Monroe

Maria Callas

Aristotle Onassis

JFK

Martin Luther King

Aretha Franklin

John Hammond Dylan

RFK

Truman Capote

John Bindon

Gram Parsons Squeaky Frome

Byrds

Phil Kaufman

Charles Manson

Mick Jagger Anita Pallenberg Donald Cammell

Bobby Beausoleil

Kenneth Anger

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Donald Cammell He shot himself in the top of the head and remained conscious (and euphoric) for a while. “Do you see Borges?” he asked his wife – a reference to the climax of Performance. Life copying art.

Gerald Ford

Princess Radziwill

Jackie O

Aleister Crowley

Princess Lee Radziwill The cover of her book about the Kennedy years. The cheekbones! The grooming! The self-delusion!

Phil Kaufman He hasn’t got anything particular to say. Good picture, though.

Aleister Crowley I am the Beast. I spend my soul in blazing torrents that roar into Night, streams that with molten tongues hiss as they lick.

Squeaky Fromme In a sense he came to me. This was in response to a spiritual calling which was beyond life and death. It was my intention to be a voice for the Earth.

Kenneth Anger Lucifer Rising is about demons – but love demons – so I have to work fairly fast because they tend to come and go.

Bobby Beausoleil Good and bad? It’s all good. If it happens, it’s got to be good. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be happening.

I’ve only given pix of those whom you might not know. I couldn’t find one of John Bindon, which is a pity. An interesting man: appeared in Quadrophrenia and Get Carter; worked for Led Zeppelin as ‘security’ and got John Bonham, Richard Cole and Peter Grant into a fight in Oakland in 1977 for which they all received suspended sentences; a ‘friend’ of Princess Margaret. Fierce, wretched, glorious: these are colours and perfumes that get everywhere.

141

The similarities between King’s and JFK’s assassinations are striking. There was a bushy area just across from the hotel veranda where King was shot, and witnesses say they saw someone hiding there and a puff of smoke – but these leads were never pursued. James Earl Ray, the supposed lone assassin, behaved very oddly for a man who wanted to avoid capture (including dumping the gun and a radio that could be traced to him in a doorway very close to the hotel). Conspiracy theorists see him as a fall guy, just like Lee Harvey Oswald; and King, like JFK, was killed because he was a threat to vested interests. Both of them were martyrs (a word which originally meant ‘witness’). Everyone in the drama can be sacrificed. King did as much as anyone for black freedom and I’d say that Franklin played her part too. It’s in her voice. It can go anywhere: taking off, hovering, plunging and soaring. And when we hear it, we too can do those things. It always has power – and so do we. And it isn’t just the music but something more, something we can find elsewhere, flowing in and out of us. Like heat and darkness. If you have your doubts, try the links that start with Sir Michael Philip Jagger. He and Pallenberg starred in Cammell’s Performance (1970) (which also featured Johnny Bindon, a ‘real’ London gangster-cum-wide boy, who has also appeared in other films – an instance of the crossover between crime and showbiz, and there’s a 400-page book right there). Jagger wrote the music for one of Anger’s films: Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969). It’s Moog noodling, and sounds as if he composed it – and maybe even played it – while he was having a crap. Lucifer Rising (1980) is dedicated to Pallenberg; the score is by Beausoleil (recorded in prison), and Cammell plays Isis. Pallenberg, a sort of super-groupie, is still going. Cammell committed suicide in 1996. Capote was invited to join the 1972 Stones tour of America as celebrity writer. He’d made his name with Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), a piece of doe-eyed fluff, and In Cold Blood (1965), a fastidious ‘faction’ about a family slaying, part mood journalism, part autopsy. A small man, much given to self-aggrandisement, he interviewed Beausoleil in prison. Radziwill came along on the Stones tour with Capote because she was looking for something to do. There’s a great vignette in Greenfield’s book of Keith Richards banging on her door, shouting, “Come on, you old tart!” It was all a bit beyond her, really. But she was Jackie O’s sister and we immediately crank up a gear into real money and power, real style. Jackie, JFK, Marilyn, Maria: all of them had the fierce wretchedness that glory brings. (The other two, RFK and Aristotle Onassis, were too straight to be really fierce, wretched or glorious.) Now you could say that Jackie was a housewife with a good eye and an unlimited wardrobe; that JFK was a hawk who was able to convince us that he was a dove; that Marilyn was a podgy and rather feeble blonde; that Maria had no more than an ‘interesting’ voice. But, boy, could they dazzle, could they turn you inside out. All of them took risks, tried it on, over-reached themselves. Did they get away with it? Well, they were all rolled over, that’s for sure. That’s part of their greatness – and why showbiz claimed them as its own. Not just because they’re in magazines and gossip columns but because theirs was a bold and hard adventure down there among the dragons and the deep, up there where the vultures fly.

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his map began with Crowley because I could get from him to Anger and Jagger and Beausoleil, who was a member of the Manson Family and is presently serving a life sentence for the murder of Gary Hinman in 1969. Heat and darkness, invisible yet palpable, seeping their way into magic and music, glamour and sex and death. Crowley (1875–1947) upset more or less everyone. He’d fuck anything – men, women, animals – but he had a ready explanation: this was sex magick, conjuring up and releasing the forces that rule the world. Drugs and initiation (he joined the Golden Dawn in 1898) help too. THE WICKEDEST MAN IN THE WORLD shrieked John Bull, a Middle England rag in 1923; A MAN WE’D LIKE TO HANG. Of course, Middle England is easily provoked. But what are we to make of Ian Fleming (the 007 man but then someone quite high up in Naval Intelligence) considering using Crowley to lure Rudolf Hess to Britain in 1941 by magickal means? Actually, such an alliance is not so peculiar as it appears. Crowley defined magick as “the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will.” That is, you create a ‘form’ by means of the imagination, invest it with ‘will power’ – and it becomes real. I can see certain wings of the military quite prepared to give that a whirl. Another of Crowley’s sayings was DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW. This doesn’t mean ‘Do whatever you feel like’ but ‘Do what you have willed – don’t just imagine it.’ And in magickal terms, the reason is obvious: don’t simply watch the drama, be part of it. Embody something. Be somebody. This is true liberty. And according to Crowley, it is the defining ‘note’ of a new age, one that he was himself ushering in. Whether you believe this or not is up to you. But many have (including some who were out of their depth). Crowley would have understood that: I have my moments of imbecile impulse. Who hasn’t? Anger (now in his 70s) is a follower of Crowley and regards his films as magickal artefacts, capable of changing the world. He’s a gay visionary who likes gods, demons and bikers. “The purpose of Lucifer Rising is to make Lucifer rise.” The Lost God will find himself again. And of course the labyrinth goes on and on. Ford wouldn’t have got in if Squeaky hadn’t tried to kill him. Nor would Kaufman if he hadn’t produced Manson’s album, Lie (1970), and, five years later, hijacked Parsons’ body and cremated it (actually, he doused it in gasoline and made a bit of a mess of it) in the Joshua Tree desert. But he did. There’s a musical line we can follow here. Parsons, bit of a loser, joined the Byrds, who had electrified everyone with their version of Dylan’s ‘Mr.Tambourine Man’ (#1, 1965) – before Parsons joined them. Dylan was ‘discovered’ by Hammond, who’d already found Billie Holiday and would go on to sign Aretha Franklin. And she’d known King all her life because he and her father were both renowned preachers. King was investigated by the FBI. “No holds barred,” said William Sullivan, the head of COINTELPRO (which investigated American subversives). “We used the same techniques as we did against Soviet agents.”

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THE AVANT-GARDE: SECTION 1 These people undercut more or less everything they came across. You often can’t tell when they’ve started or finished, or what they’ve done (or even if they’ve done anything at all). It’ll be an uncertain ride. Pocket volcanoes and dissolving molecules are entirely possible. But stay at home and all we’ll get is more cheese sauce.

Wild Man Fischer

Capt. Beefheart

GTO’s Zappa

Alice Cooper

Edgard Varèse Edgard Varèse

Arnold Schönberg

Erik Satie

Robert Rauschenberg

The Disturbers p.78

Fluxus

La Monte Young

Erik Satie

as a young weirdo. I am not a musician. I am a phonometrographer. Phonology is superior to music. There’s more variety in it...The first time I used a phonoscope, I examined a B flat of medium size. I have never seen anything so revolting.

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Yoko Ono

John Lennon

John Cage

Marcel Duchamp

as an old weirdo. I refuse to submit to sounds that have already been heard.

Arnold Schönberg

There is still a lot of good music waiting to be written in C major.

Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage thinking, “Why don’t we blow everything up?”...

La Monte Young the artist as gunslinger

Marcel Duchamp I am an artist, a chess player, a cheese dealer, a breather, a fenêtrier. The usual Duchampesque mix of truth and lies. (No one knows what a fenêtrier is – there’s no such word.)

the same ...having done it

159

Cage was also influenced by Satie (1866–1925). In 1963, he arranged for a full performance of Satie’s Vexations: 180 notes repeated 840 times. It took ten pianists, working in relays, 18 hours to perform. (One of them was John Cale.) Satie was a wry and whimsical minimalist. He often appended instructions-cumcomments to his works: ‘Open your head’, ‘With astonishment’. His advice for anyone playing Vexations was to “prepare oneself by serious immobilities”. He was also at the heart of the French avant-garde after WW1. Apollinaire’s programme notes for Parade – a 1917 ballet with music by Satie (score for typewriters, sirens, airplane propellers and two pianos), scenario by Cocteau, decor by Picasso – contains the first ever use of the word ‘surréalisme’. Satie knew Varèse (1883–1965), a fellow Frenchman who moved to the US in 1915 and was one of the first to conceive of music for electronic instruments. “I long for instruments obedient to my thought and whim...a whole new world of unsuspected sounds” (1917). Varèse tried sirens, sleigh bells, an anvil, but the technology wasn’t equal to his imagination and he sank into depression. He was looking for new sounds – and they were proving elusive. “I need an entirely new medium of expression: a sound-producing machine (not a sound-reproducing one).” Eventually, such a machine came his way. It was the result of military technologies developed during WW2. Zappa himself tells the story of how he found one of Varèse’s albums in a store in San Diego when he was 13, and was knocked out. No wonder he went on to promote sonic dissidents himself: the GTO’s (see ch1, p.14), Wild Man Fischer (see ch.3, p.70), Capt.Beefheart (briefly mentioned, ch.2, p.60) and Alice Cooper. (Yes, I know he’s an all-American rebel – #1 records, multi-millionaire and the like – but he gets in anyway. This is a generous avant-garde, the best kind. It’s got lots of room.)

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e left THE DISTURBERS with John Lennon (p.157), so we’ll start with him. All his avant-garde works were done when he was with Yoko Ono. I’m thinking of the films (Smile, Rape, Erection) and the performances (Bed-In For Peace and various instances of Bagism: John and Yoko wrapped in bags) - all of these between 1968 and 1971. Yoko herself was part of the Fluxus group: based in New York and given to such performances as ‘Washroom’: LOCAL NATIONAL ANTHEM OR OTHER APPROPRIATE TUNE, SUPERVISED BY UNIFORMED ATTENDANT, IS SUNG OR PLAYED IN WASHROOM. Another member was La Monte Young, who tried all sorts of music, including a piece that consisted of the single instruction: RELEASE A LIVE BUTTERFLY INTO THE AUDITORIUM. Young was a pupil of John Cage at the time. Good old John: a dedicated experimenter, wandering through a vast sonic universe asking, ‘Where is everybody?’ Well, he can count me in. One night, I was listening to Indeterminacy, which consists of him talking about this or that, surrounded by a typical Cagean mix of sounds, made and found. At one point, he gives his philosophy of music: whereas in ‘normal’ music, you have to ignore all the extraneous sounds (people coughing, police sirens, etc.), he wanted to produce something that couldn’t be interrupted. As he was saying this, various sounds were emerging from the mix accompanying his voice. It was 2am and I was in an apartment on a London street. All of a sudden, I heard a sound – and I didn’t know whether it was part of the mix or out in the street. Bingo! I got it. Uncertainty makes the world bigger; certainty closes it down. The Cage connections are A1. He was taught by Schoenberg (the original 12-tone man, whose avowed aim was the emancipation of dissonance). He was mates with Rauschenberg (the most experimental of the Pop Artists) and Duchamp (the original enfant terrible). Duchamp took the piss out of everything. In 1917, he did a very avant-garde thing: he took an ordinary urinal or pissoir, signed it ‘R.Mutt’ and exhibited it as a sculpture. People got upset – but who cares about that? Decades later, it was discovered that the original had been lost. So someone commissioned an exact copy. And here’s a picture of it.

Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955)

a real bed, real paint When I first saw it, aged 18 or so, the universe suddenly got bigger.

one of Cage’s scores for Variations I (1958) Baffled? Play it anyway.

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‘LEADER OF THE PACK’: SECTION 1 We love the play-place of our early days (as Ellie Greenwich might have said). True, we have our fair share of fiddlers and clowns here as well as inventors of harmonies – but that’s as it should be in the beginning when we’re quick and full of fresh variety. Alright, creation may expire before tea-time and it may all turn into ambition, distraction, uglification and derision. Is that a shame? I don’t think so. Why not look at it as the birth of that which is counter and strange, adazzle and dim. They’ve got a life of their own too.

Avant-Garde p.80

David Bowie Mott The Hoople

covers:

Bette Midler (1972) soft – real soft

Twisted Sister (1985) ‘real’ rock’n’roll

Dee Snider’s Teenage Survival Guide (book)

Joan Collins Fan Club (1988) both tribute and abuse

Shadow Morton Ellie Greenwich

looking mysterious

looking gorgeous

camp

Chipmunks/Chipettes (1994)

producer:

Shadow Morton

divine take-off

Carpenters (1975)

British ‘imitation’: ‘Terry’ Twinkle (1964)

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piano:

Billy Joel

reissued as a single in UK, 1972, 1976; appears on 250 compilation albums

‘Leader of the Pack’ (1964) (#1 US)

label:

Red Bird

writers:

singers: Shangri-Las Marge & Mary Ann Gasner (twins) Mary & Betty Weiss (sisters)

Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich

Bette Midler

parody:

looking divine

‘Leader of the Laundromat’ The Detergents (1964) (#19 US)

Mr.Dee Snider

Carpenters

looking ‘really’ hideous

looking soft

All four Shangri-Las: Mary Ann, Betty, Marge, Mary Some photos show a trio rather than a quartet – Betty and Mary Ann dropped out at various times – and I’m told that that there are others which include girls who are none of the original four (though I’ve never seen one) as well as a group of four false Shangri-Las (though I’ve never seen a photo of them either). As for their look, it’s true that their posed shots are of a piece with other girl groups of the time. But they were good live performers and it was easy to believe that they were tough, wise kids who wound up pregnant in eleventh grade, then found out that their boyfriends had been drafted and ended up waitressing at the Big Boy while Mom sat home with the brat, cursing the day she’d gotten knocked up. (This is Dave Marsh at his finest – but you’ve been taken for a ride, mate. They were embarrassed by their greaser image, loved Herman’s Hermits and wanted to record Rodgers and Hart.)

Mary Ann died in 1970, aged 24. She’d started having seizures and one of them killed her. (Some accounts say it was a drug overdose but there’s no evidence to support that.) Marge died in 1996 of breast cancer. It just keeps getting away from us.

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Alvin Chipmunk looking tributive and abusive

Julian Clary (half of the Joan

Collins Fan Club) looking camp

Not so Twinkle, who wrote ‘Terry’, her own motorbike boyfriend crash song, at the age of 16. It got to #4 in the UK in 1964. ‘Terry’ isn’t a copy of ‘Leader’ – just on the same shelf, a British rival with a smaller engine. Three months later she disappeared from the charts. She made some recordings in the 70s with her father (leader of the Conservative party on the Greater London Council) under the name of ‘Bill & Coo’. (His name was ‘Sidney’.) They weren’t hits. Finally, the parody: ‘Leader of the Laundromat’, which takes the ridiculous side of ‘Leader of the Pack’ – ignoring the provocative and the serious – and waves it at us so that we can giggle and snigger. The Detergents were a one-off group, put together just for this song. They really didn’t go anywhere – and never expected to. Various showbiz dimensions overlap in these stories: pretence and bravado, innocence and exploitation, commitment and nostalgia; and of course the ones that include the most: success and failure, and money, money, money. Everybody’s pitching in. Some take the knocks and go under; others find the gold and the glory and are taken over. The light and shadow flicker to and fro. If there were dreams to sell, what would you buy?

he ‘Leader of the Pack’ story is a tangled one and Shadow Morton doesn’t make it easier to unravel. An enigmatic and elusive man (hence his nickname), he is given to inventive flourishes and fanciful tales. When he met Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry at Red Bird Records in 1964, he pretended that he wrote songs, and having said he’d deliver one, he booked the Shangri-Las into a recording studio, and on the way there pulled over in his car and wrote ‘Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand)’ in 20 minutes. (He says.) It went to #5. As for ‘Leader of the Pack’, Morton has claimed at least once that he was wholly responsible for it. “I don’t think Ellie heard the song until it was on the radio.” It simply isn’t true. OK, Shadow was a hustler – but a hustler who loved the music and had the originality to strike gold. He says he didn’t even know what a producer did when he recorded ‘Remember’. Does this matter? Of course not. If anything, it’s a bonus: the producer as rock’n’roller. He later did some production (‘Midnight Lady’ on Rock & Roll Queen, 1972) for Mott The Hoople, who, under Bowie’s influence, indulged in a little glamouflage: before you could say “image makeover”, they were camping it up, teetering around on stage in make-up and cartoonish platform shoes. Bowie (our link with the AVANT-GARDE) inhabits his own universe, we all know that. I am become a name, for always roaming with a hungry heart, much have I seen and known...How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! But does that mean he knew what he was doing? I think he was so innovative because he was a bit mad. He created Ziggy Stardust and then started believing he was this character that was a god. Back to ‘Leader of the Pack’. In fact, Morton, Greenwich and Barry had all wanted to be singers when they were teenagers. They weren’t that different from the Shangs. Ellie is sweet and straightforward. It’s a frightening time...We need to grab that anchor of stability but we can’t find it...until we hear a familiar tune on the radio...fun, happy, safe, simple and comfortable. Who’s she talking about here? Crazy mixed-up kids? No – herself in her fifties. Barry is a laconic man, entirely at home with da doo ron ron and shaddy daddy dip dip. “I couldn’t play other people’s songs – only knew two chords,” so he started to write his own. He began as a novelty-cum-parody singer (‘Dickie Went and Did It’, ‘Can You Waddle?’) but graduated to doing demos for recording companies. His first hit as a writer was ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ (#7 for Ray Petersen in 1960). He bet on death from the beginning, you could say. Red Bird Records was founded by Lieber and Stoller in 1964 specifically for girl groups. Its very first single, the Dixie Cups’ ‘Chapel of Love’ (written by Barry and Greenwich) went to #1. Twenty percent of its first 50 issues were hits – a phenomenal success rate. But it didn’t last. The label folded after two years and everything was sold for peanuts. Many tapes were just thrown away. Strong resonances attract strange bedfellows – some of them famous, others barely known. It’s not certain that Joel – a nobody at the time – played on ‘Leader of the Pack’ (Morton says it was ‘Remember (Walkin’ in the Rain)’ but who believes him?) but he was around somewhere and is happy to have that on his CV despite his huge sales since. He ended up bigtime.

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the covers What a collection – all of them having a shot at teenage angst. Why? Out of homage, irony or desperation to fill up some time and space – who knows? And that’s why the song works: it creates its own dimension which others move into. Of course, the death of Karen Carpenter (who looked like she wanted to be a nun) has no direct link with the fatal crash at the end of ‘Leader of the Pack’. But who could fail to make the connection – like a flame reaching out for more fuel. Midler’s natural raunch (though she did have Barry Manilow as her accompanist in the early days when she was performing in New York’s gay bath houses) is independent of the Shangs’ constructed greaser image – but the echo is there. Snider (We’re not ‘Glam’, we’re ‘Hid’ – because we’re hideous), born in 1955 and front man for Twisted Sister, is a professional teenager who combines the ridiculous (Arockalypse (2006), including ‘Chainsaw Buffet’), the provocative (his 1998 film, Strangeland, features Captain Howdy, “a sinister pervert in clown make-up”) and the serious (Dee Snider’s Teenage Survival Guide gives sound advice on school, dating, suicide and masturbation, amongst other topics). Ridiculous, provocative, serious: the Shangs to a T. Clary has a degree in Drama and English, and makes his living from innuendo (that’s in-your-end-o). But there are other levels he can go to. Love: The meaning of life. Blissful when mutual, painful when unrequited, only true when unconditional. To live in this heightened state is the spiritual ambition of us all. It’s why we’re here. True, it’s been said before – but it is well said. As for his PVC and rubber outfits: “It’s my fantasy, my way of being honest.” All fantasies flirt with the outlandish and the absurd but they become honest when we put ourselves into them – like ‘Leader of the Pack’. That’s why we’re pulled in. As for the Chipmunks, I’ve already mentioned them (ch.2, p.61) – and frankly, there isn’t a huge amount to say. Actually, it’s unclear who sings their version of ‘Leader’: the Chipmunks (Here’s Looking at Me, 1994) or the Chipettes (The Chipmunks’ 35th Birthday, 1993). And of course, it makes no difference. A squeaky-voice version of a carefully crafted teenage doom song by creatures who don’t exist – this is extremely unlikely. How to explain it? A prodigality of aspiration.

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ROCK’N’ROLL & FILM/THEATRE and the like

ROCK’N’ROLL AND THE OTHER PERFORMANCE ARTS honorary rock’n’roll movies it’s the attitude that counts

ROCK’N’ROLL FILM Rock’n’roll and film are very close, not to say incestuous. Let’s start with the ads, promos, features and warm-ups.

The Wild One (1953): that great opening shot; and Brando’s mumbling slouch. Rebel Without a Cause (1955): the quintessence of teenage angst (which is quite as important as teenage fun – to teenagers, that is). And all summed up in James Dean’s body language. Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984): Kitty’s mother: “I’m trying to be both a mother and father to you!” Kitty: “Well, go fuck yourself, then!”

some oddities where would rock’n’roll be without them? All Beach Party movies (most of them with Frankie Avalon). In Catalina Caper (1967), ‘Scuba Party’ is sung by Little Richard, surely one person who has no need of SelfContained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.

We have the name of a group taken from a movie: Duran Duran (a baddie in Barbarella (1968)). The name of a movie taken from a song: That’ll Be the Day (1973), a film about rock’n’roll, starring rock’n’rollers (including Keith Moon and Ringo) – title from Buddy Holly’s #1 hit (1957); Pretty Woman (1990), terrible film, great song (#1 for Roy Orbison in 1964). Hits from movies too numerous to mention. Well, I will mention Madonna because she’s had four #1 hits taken from films: ‘Crazy for You’ from Vision Quest (1984), ‘Live to Tell’ from At Close Range (1986), ‘Who’s That Girl’ from Who’s That Girl (1987), and ‘Vogue’ from Dick Tracy (1990). But I won’t mention Elvis because he’s a law unto himself (see pp.119–135). Rock’n’roll soundtracks – and I mean the specially composed ones: Simon & Garfunkel, The Graduate (which gets in because everyone remembers it); Pink Floyd, More (1968) and Zabriskie Point (1970, directed by Antonioni) – the first two scores they did, the beginning of their ‘high’ instrumental art; Isaac Hayes, Shaft – exactly the right man for the job for on-the-street soul; Alan Price, O Lucky Man – complements Lindsay Anderson’s social commentary; Bee Gees, Saturday Night Fever (1978) – at their peculiar, inventive best in the highest-grossing film ever until ET overtook it; Mark Knopfler, Last Exit to Brooklyn – American realism. Festivals and concerts by the score: Monterey (1969), Woodstock and Altamont (both 1970); Scorsese’s The Last Waltz – with Dylan, the Band, Muddy Waters, Clapton, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell; Prince’s Sign o’ the Times; Concert for Bangladesh (1972) – the first ‘rock for charity’ concert, with Harrison, Dylan, Clapton, Ringo; Sing Sing Thanksgiving – B.B.King and others at the California prison; Heartland Reggae – a Rasta celebration of Haile Selassie’s visit to Jamaica in 1978, with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Rockumentaries, often by serious directors: (Godard on the Stones, Pennebaker on Dylan).

But what we’re really interested in, of course, is the rock’n’roll movie proper.

Rockula (1990): a comedy rock version of Dracula with Bo Diddley. Yes!

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The first rock’n’roll films were simply showcases for the performers (Rock Around the Clock, The Girl Can’t Help It) (both 1956). Sometimes there was acting as well (Elvis, Beatles, Saturday Night Fever). Little by little, we got satire (This is Spinal Tap), coolness (Blues Brothers) and conscious trash (Rock’n’Roll High School). Biopics (Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Doors, Sid & Nancy) spliced music and drama together.

Superstar (1987): the life of Karen Carpenter depicted with Barbie dolls. The director was sued by Richard Carpenter and Mattel.

Film has its own glamour, and needless to say rock’n’rollers wanted to get in on the action. Magical Mystery Tour (1967) led the way: the first film made by performers from beginning to end. It was panned when it came out but is viewed more indulgently now. Not far behind we have:

Townshend’s Tommy, starring Daltrey with help from other rockers – Tina Turner, Elton John – and straight actors (Jack Nicholson) and Quadrophenia (with Sting acting); Pink Floyd’s/Roger Waters’ The Wall, starring Bob Geldof;

Zappa’s 200 Motels: will-o’-the-wisp, free form, with Keith Moon as the Hot Nun and Ringo as Larry the Dwarf;

McCartney, Give My Regards to Broad Street: he wrote it, composed the songs and acts himself (Ringo acts a character called ‘Ringo’); “few films in rock history can boast such a litany of grotesquely embarrassing scenes”; Carny, written and produced by Robbie Robertson, who also acts in it;

the Sheb Wooley story

Sheb had a novelty hit with ‘Purple People Eater’ (#1 in 1958). He’d already appeared in two iconic films: High Noon (1952) and Giant (1956). He later acted in Rawhide (the TV series) with Clint Eastwood, whose sole foray into singing (Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites, 1963) could fairly be called a novelty, and who was mayor of Carmel, California for a while in the 80s. A film called Purple People Eater came out in 1988. Clint isn’t in it but Sheb is a trapeze instructor and Little Richard plays the mayor. How about that for an acting/singing/ political/rock’n’roll/novelty crossover?

Ray Davies’ Return to Waterloo, which he wrote and directed.

All of these had music from their principal turns (apart from Carny). But of course some rock’n’rollers want to just act – no relying on their music. Bowie is one. Cher is another – the only rocker to have a #1 and win an Oscar (unless you count Barbra Streisand, which I don’t). Jagger’s done straight acting (Performance, Ned Kelly), and so have Daltrey (Litzomania, McVicar) and Dylan (Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid). Dylan has directed a straight film, too: Renaldo & Clara. And for reasons of my own, I’d like to mention Sheb Wooley. There are many books that deal exclusively with rock and film. I’m doing something different: laying out the contours of the landscape, the world. In 2006, The Killing of John Lennon came out; in 2007, Alvin and the Chipmunks (in which a bad-guy manager drools over the merchandizing rights – and hey! the film’s tied in with a whole range of merchandizing aimed at the under-tens); in 2008, Madonna directed her first film, Filth and Wisdom. Meanwhile, Snoop Dogg continues to crank out his porn videos (and uses some of them to sell his records). What’s going on here? I’m going to kick the ‘cultural studies’ approach into touch and come straight out with it: the gods have taken abode in us. Some of them are imps, some of them are sleazeballs and some of them are posturing ninnies. But there are those who stride out. I, for one, will take the lot and we’ll see what we can work out as we march on.

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actors with bands Russell Crowe (who’s acted in the stage versions of Grease and The Rocky Horror Picture Show) and 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. Johnny Depp and P. Keanu Reeves, two bands: Dogstar and Becky.

ROCK’N’ROLL & FILM/THEATRE and the like

straight opera and ballet

ROCK’N’ROLL THEATRE Theatre and film are different beasts. Theatre is live, for one thing. We have adaptations: Oliver! (1964) from Dickens, which starred a 13-year-old Phil Collins as the Artful Dodger; and Jerry Lee Lewis as Iago in Catch My Soul (a rock Othello). And we have ‘original’ rock musicals: Hair (1967) was the first, and both Grease and The Rocky Horror Picture Show were shows before they became films. Of course, live rock’n’roll is itself a theatrical conceit. We’re just looking at the forms it takes. (Lester Bangs once described Alice Cooper as far closer to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty than anything an avant-garde theatre troupe could come up with.)

Roger Waters, Ça Ira: an opera that dramatizes the French Revolution. Entirely classical, with a full-scale orchestra and choir. The outdoor version I saw in Poland had a white horse, acrobats and a crane. Carly Simon, Romulus Hunt: an operetta, designed to appeal to ‘younger people’. It’s about divorce and includes Jamaican magic. Damon Albarn, Monkey – Journey to the West: an operatic adaptation of Chinese myth to the circus. Mark E.Smith, I Am Curious, Orange: music for a ballet by the Michael Clark Company. The Fall played on stage. The album was called I Am Kurious, Oranj.

Rock operas, like Tommy, The Wall and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (by Genesis), began as concept albums and were then put on as theatrical shows. We’re gradually getting away from rock’n’roll and into musical drama. Townshend’s The Iron Man (adapted from a Ted Hughes novel with John Lee Hooker in the title role) is an example, along with Randy Newman’s Faust, and two works by Tom Waits: The Black Rider (with a contribution from William Burroughs) and Alice, both of which were staged by Robert Wilson (who directed Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach). Another Waits and Wilson project was a musical version of Woyzeck (a 19th-century play by Georg Büchner), which has also been adapted by Nick Cave (with Warren Ellis) – for an Icelandic theatre company. And Wilson and Waits have done a score for Kafka’s Metamorphosis. This is crossover as exotica: one ‘art form’ evolving into another. It’s but a step from these works to opera. And we might as well do ballet.

Elvis Costello, Il Sogno: an operatic version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with touches of Ellington, Gershwin and Stravinsky. “It can stand with the works of Britten and Glass,” said one fan.

All that’s left is straight theatre. Bowie’s done it (see p.90) and so has Sean Combs (see p.94). Debbie Harry starred as a wrestler in Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap in New York in 1983, apparently. It closed after one performance.

David Byrne, The Catherine Wheel: music for a ballet choreographed by Twyla Tharp.

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baroque and roll: the rock/classical crossover

We’re miles away here from rock film and theatre. But that’s what happens to crossovers: they get transformed out of all recognition. Let’s run the gamut and see where it takes us.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer liked the classics. An album of a live ‘adaptation’ of Mussorsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition was a big hit in 1971. They even threw in a cover of B.Bumble and the Stingers’ ‘Nutrocker’ (see right). Works 1 (1977) included tracks entitled ‘Piano Concerto No.1’ alongside ‘Lend Me Your Love Tonight’ and a version of Aaron Copland’s ‘Fanfare For the Common Man’, which reached #2 in the UK singles charts. Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio (1991) – a particularly ungenerous story has it that he hummed it to Carl Davis, who wrote it down. John Cale, The Academy in Peril (1972) – but he was a classically-trained avant-gardist (and not all the tracks are ‘pure’ classical). Joe Jackson included ‘Symphony in One Movement’ on Will Power (1987), played by an orchestra, and then wrote Symphony No.1 in 1999, this time played by a ten-piece ensemble plus rock guitarist, Steve Vai, the whole thing resting on a bed of electronic keyboards. Billy Joel’s Fantasies and Delusions (2001) was a collection of solo piano compositions (played by someone else). Sting has recorded an album of songs by John Dowland (accompanied by lute). And way back in 1969, Deep Purple came up with Concerto for Group and Orchestra and the Gemini Suite (1970) – both composed by Jon Lord. In the same vein, Metallica have played with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra; and Jon Roth has played the violin part of ‘Summer’ (from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons) on the electric guitar. Yngwie Malmsteen wrote Concerto Suite for Electric Guitar and Orchestra in 1998. He says that it isn’t rock guitar plus orchestra but an orchestral work in which the solo instrument happens to be the electric guitar.

Of course, there’s a fair amount of Let’s-see-if-we-can-do-this here. A bit like Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe’s ‘Barcelona’, which got to #2 in the UK when it was re-released in 1992, the year of the Barcelona Olympics; and the best-known of all classical crossovers, Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ (“inspired” by Bach’s ‘Sleepers Awake’ and ‘Air on a G String’ but not actually a direct pinch from either. It is the most-played record in Britain since WW2, and there are over 800 cover versions.) But we’re already knocking on the door of something far brasher: Let’stake-an-old-sacred-cow-and-kick-it-in-the-balls. Nero and the Gladiators’ ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ (1961, #48 in the UK for one week), based on Grieg, with its laconic introduction – Ah, say there, Brutus, like, where is this king’s pad? – is a teenager farting in church. And ‘Nutrocker’ by B.Bumble and the Stingers (1962) is a story that only showbiz could invent. I’ve already told some of it on p.59 and here’s the rest. The original pianist for the group was a sessions man called Ernie Freeman, who played on an earlier hit, ‘Bumble Boogie’. A teen band, who had no connection with the record at all, was hired to tour and promote it, one of whom, R.C.Gamble, was called ‘Billy Bumble’ – but he was a guitarist. Freeman didn’t show up for the recording of ‘Nutrocker’ so another sessions man, Al Hazan, was drafted in. He did one take, thinking it was a practice, and the producer said, “That’ll do!” – and released it. The record went to #1 in the UK and a touring group was put together. It included Hazan and Gamble. But which one was B.Bumble?, I hear you cry. No idea. Gamble quit the music business three years later and went on to become a professor of economics in Kansas.

Now, you may be thinking, ‘Dickens, Shakespeare, Burroughs. The French Revolution and Chinese myth. Oratorios and symphonies. Farting teenagers and economics in Kansas. What is all this?’ But we’ve been this way before. The high and precious crosses over into the improvised and the unconsidered (and vice versa.) Performance, with its endless variants on ‘live’ and ‘fabricated’, intertwining with form and image, colour and sound, and wrapped up in scam and promotion, is all around us. It’s the major part of our identity, of our embodiment or form. We’re all doing it. There is no limit to the links between imagination and reality – you know, the hit and the world it reveals. That’s the high and precious way of putting it. Or if you prefer: We should expect the best and worst from mankind, as from the weather.

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