BOOKS: Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of The Rock Stars by David Hepworth

It’s obvious from David Hepworth’s book that he is a big 70’s guy. His other recently published book, which i haven’t read, is about 1971.  He is definitely the kind of person (I can just picture it) who would say “music isn’t what it was.”  That’s effectively what this book is.

Therefore, this book on the rise and fall of Rock Gods is at its most enthusiastic in its first half.  Rock Gods of the 80s onwards are treated with less interest.  Kurt Cobain’s suicide is dealt with intelligently but briefly, almost dismissively compared with the longest chapter which is on the rise of Bob Dylan who Hepworth considers the ultimate Rock God.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with that although it gives more than a clue to what Hepworth considers the golden age of rock music.

Really, the nature of the book, although interesting, has less depth than the title promises.  The introduction starts promisingly but the book itself is really just a chronologically ordered list of potted biographies of famous musicians based on a year in their lives.  The book very quickly moves away from analysis of what a rock god is or was and becomes more concerned with anecdotes and trivia - interesting trivia, but still.  Example: the chapter about Jim Morrison focuses a lot on the year he got done for getting his cock out onstage but doesn’t really explain why I should care, or how it contributes to the rise or the fall of the Rock God. Likewise the fact that Little Richard's 'Tutti Frutti' was originally about anal sex is funny but essentially pub quiz level information.

The ‘event in the year in the life of’ approach rarely works for me.  Without context such a narrative relies either on the reader already knowing the context or not caring about it.  The death of John Lennon works better than most; but this could well be because The Beatles have several chapters devoted in this book.  Elvis gets two, everyone else just gets one year, usually the year they made it or the year they died.  

Likewise the list approach is always highly subjective.  My main query is the inclusion of Ian Dury, who was great but a relatively minor player looking back. Considering there’s no chapter on Sid Vicious from the same period seems an odd choice, Vicious being the ultimate anti-Rock God.  The conclusion I draw from this is that Hepworth isn’t interested in 70s punk and so chose someone he liked to write about.  Nothing necessarily wrong with that, it is his book after all - but this points once more to this being more like a list of favourite artists than historically influential ones.  Another quirk is the end of chapter lists of important singles and albums from the year in question, which sometimes omit songs from the artist you’ve just been reading about.

The overarching narrative is that the concept of the Rock God relied a lot on their mystique and ability to seem different to their audience in a special way.  According to Hepworth this went out the window with the arrival of us living, in his words, in a hip-hop world, which he seems to class as the opposite of rock somehow.  It’s true that In the 21st century, it’s not hard to find out what people in the charts have for breakfast or where they shop, which makes them less mysterious and more directly boastful. Instead of hiding away in a Gothic ruin pretending to be an occultist like Jimmy Page they will show off their bling on Instagram at will.  Considering there are chapters on Elvis and Michael Jackson, this doesn’t sit right with me.  They’d be straight on Instagram showing off their latest expensive diamond encrusted toilet roll holder or whatever.  The fall of the Rock God is more likely due to the fact that Rock Gods lost their novelty and that Rock as a genre ground to a natural halt.  

The mid-90s is a good place to stop - it was at this point that rock slowly became more derivative, with Oasis and Blur pinching bits of the 60s, Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party pinching bits of the Post-Punk era, and the original bands themselves reforming to do on the whole uninspiring Greatest Hits/grab the money and run nostalgia gigs.  The Rolling Stones are for instance are technically still going, but I’m sure people who see them now are either on a nostalgia trip or are curious to hear them play their old stuff live - and they give those people what they want.  Go on, name their last album without googling it - or in fact one of their albums from the last 20 years.

It is, however, premature to write off rock as a genre even if Rock Gods have in fact gone for good.  There’s always exciting indie stuff out there, as well as a lot of dreck admittedly - but that has always been the case, even in Hepworth’s day - for every Beatles there would have been a hundred Gerry and the Pacemakers.  Music is fashion, and fashion goes in cycles.  The 80s were on the whole a dry spell for guitar bands in the mainstream, but things turned around in the 90s through to the early 00s and then turned around again.  What Hepworth really means are that his Rock Gods are dead.  Music stardom still exists, and there’s nothing to say that guitar music won’t become culturally dominant again (although it’s true to say that there’s nothing to say it will either).

This is not a bad book, and is well written for what it is - if you enjoy music from the period covered (and I definitely do) you will find it very enjoyable.  But don’t expect more than some interesting facts from the past.  The future has no place in Hepworth’s obituary of the Rock God.

MUSIC: Pixies - Doolittle & Indie Cindy

There’s a new Pixies album, but first – the past…

 

It’s 25 years since the release of the Pixies’ Doolittle.  Doolittle is a slightly disputable masterpiece, but a masterpiece all the same – it’s the Pixies album which will always be on Classic Album lists, that’s for sure. 

I’ve always thought Surfer Rosa was their best album but maybe that’s because it’s how I got into the Pixies.  I’d tried listening to them before because of their indie reputation (massively influential on Nirvana and Radiohead and loads of other people I liked), but never really got them, apart from ‘Where Is My Mind?’ which I only really knew from Fight Club.  But once when I was ill and found a tape of Surfer Rosa in my sister’s cupboard I put it on on a whim.  The tape was on repeat and some time on the fourth go round it clicked and I understood it.  (Digression: I’ve noticed a lot of the music and books I cherish the most I hated at first.  Is this just me?  Is the lazy part of my brain attempting to stunt the culturally aware part or something?) 

Doolittle sounds less unique than Surfer Rosa to me, and therefore less of an achievement; but perhaps that’s because it was one of those albums that was so influential it became the indie norm.  It has a first half with skittish pop-rock songs with bizzaro lyrics and a darker, atmospheric second half bridged together by the a anthemic ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’.  Frank Black was obsessively listening to ‘The White Album’ during the making of Doolittle and in terms of making an album greater than the sum of its parts, it shows.  ‘Debaser’, ‘Monkey…’ and ‘Wave Of Mutilation’ don’t lose anything outside of the context of the album, but most of the other songs work better as slow-burning mood-builders, culminating in ‘Gouge Away’, possibly my favourite ending to an album (possibly not – it all depends on when you ask me, really).

Anyway, the big Pixies news this month is a new album, their first for 23 years.  After they split in the early 90s they started touring in the 00s, but these were purely ‘Greatest Hits’ shows – as a creative entity they seemed to have ended for good.  And then quite unannounced they started releasing new music last year.

The Pixies’ reunion has a lot in common with The Beatles’mid-90s reunion we mentioned a few weeks ago in two major ways.  One is that both bands had been dormant for so long and had an influential legacy that new material would always be compared unfavourably to.  The other similarity is that the reunion in both cases was missing a member.  The Beatles at least had two unheard John Lennon vocal tracks to base new songs around; the new Pixies songs have had no input from Kim Deal, their charismatic ex-bassist who quit two weeks before the new material started coming out. 

When ‘Bagboy’, the first new Pixies music in ages was surprise-released last year I was pleasantly surprised that it worked as well as it did.  Faint praise there, I know, but the song had and still has for me an aggressive strangeness and didn’t seem embarrassing.  It didn’t feel out of date, either – where it failed, it failed on its own terms and not for being a museum piece (like The Beatles’ ‘Free As A Bird’). 

And, in fact, a lot of the new material is just as good as some of the songs on Trompe le Monde and Bossanova.  The truth is that the memory cheats and the last two Pixies albums have songs as forgettable as some of the worst on Indie Cindy.  Indie Cindy has some great moments, just not as many as there would have been in their peak.  Playing it alongside Trompe le Monde I don’t see a massive gulf in quality – both albums have a similar killer/filler ratio (though Indie Cindy doesn’t have anything nearly as good as ‘Planet Of Sound’…)  It’s arguable that, for better or worse, Indie Cindy just picks up where Trompe le Monde left off.

Pixies songs in the 21^st century seem to be longer than 3 minutes and veer disturbingly into an MOR vibe sometimes, but they are recognisably Pixies songs. Neither does Indie Cindy sound like the work of a band who’ve cynically slung any old rubbish together to exploit their influential reputation.  They do sound like they’re into what they’re doing whether I think it works or not and that’s the main thing.  ‘Bagboy’, ‘Magdalena 318’, ‘What Goes Boom’ and ‘Snakes’ are all songs where it gels together really well.  ‘Magdelena 318’ is especially weird and insidious, Frank Black’s subdued but still powerful vocals with a mournful surf guitar mixed with a more typical crunch.  On the negative side: ‘Blue Eyed Hexe’ is a fairly weak re-hash of ‘U-Mass’; ‘Another Toe In The Ocean’ and ‘Ring The Bell’ are bland and forgettable.  The title track has some appallingly bad lyrics (“I’m in love with your daughter… I’m the one who’s got some trotters/You’ve many mouths to feed”  Oh dear). 

There’s one thing that nags me.  Indie Cindy isn’t really an album so much as it is a compilation of all the new material that’s been filtering through since ‘Bagboy’ was released for download last year – there is nothing on this album that hasn’t been released already.  This is a major irritation, and undoes a lot of the general good feeling I have toward the band when listening to it.  There is a lot more of a sense of artistic viability in some of these tracks than there was in The Beatles reunion tracks, one-woman-down or no; but releasing an album out of 3 EPs (the last of which was only out a month ago) seems like a casually cynical piece of marketing, and makes it feel like the whole thing was done for the money after all.

Anyway, I’ve deliberately not read reviews of the new Pixies songs to try and make for a non-biased blog, so I’m going to go and read what savagings they’ve no doubt been getting in the press…

MUSIC: The Beatles' Early Albums

Although I on and off listen to The Beatles quite regularly (at leas a few times in a year), why hadn't I listened to any of their earlier music since being a teenager?  What could their pop from the early 60s have that their solid albums from the late 60s didn't?

In the mid-90s The Beatles ‘reformed’ without John Lennon, who was unavailable due to health problems.  Another influential band are about to complete the process of doing a very similar reformation at the end of this month, and we’ll get to them all in good time.  

Obviously The Beatles getting back together after so many years was news, and there was a great deal of hype, which hit home to the younger me how much The Beatles meant.  I mean obviously I liked them a lot and everything but there was something different going on there.  I mean, there wouldn’t have been the same amount of attention for Herman’s Hermits that’s for sure…  I think it was the first time I had ever got the sense of The Beatles being something different and meaning more to people than just another band from the 1960s.  It was first time I properly understood how much significance they actually had.

The Beatles were then and are still very, very popular but with a slightly peculiar reservation when it comes to credibility.  Most people who still listen to The Beatles don’t listen to about half of their albums, namely the first 5 (the Beatlemania ones, if you like).  Rubber Soul through to Let It Be are normally what the cool indie kids listen to, and with good reason – these are the albums that are more complex and interesting.  The period where they found Dylan, drugs, mysticism and legal disputes.  I still remember the first time I heard Revolver, with the garbled count-in of ‘Taxman’, and thinking the cassette was broken because it sounded so weird.  And then by the end of the album realising where The Chemical Brothers had got their career from on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.  ‘Love Me Do’ just wouldn’t have held the same sonic revelations.  I expect those amongst my generation who got into The Beatles started similarly – why would you listen to something so prosaic like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ when you could listen to all the weirdness of ‘I Am The Walrus’?  

This album, for Kurt Cobain, represented The Beatles at their peak

Kurt Cobain is probably the only artist (certainly the only icon) from the last 20 odd years to state a preference for the songs from the early 60s (‘About A Girl’ was famously written after an evening of listening to With The Beatles, and it definitely comes from exactly the same headspace as ‘Don’t Bother Me’).

The Beatles themselves, certainly Lennon and Harrison, didn’t seem particularly sentimental about this era.  Lennon speaking at the end of the 60s said he felt it had gone against his nature to dress in a suit, selling out to make money, although Lennon was a constant revisionist who often told a version of history that most suited his current audience.  But for all of them things from the start of their career were going to make them less proud than things from later on, because they had progressed as artists.  They weren’t going to make great claims for things they felt they had long surpassed, which is why they seemed less enthusiastic when talking about those songs.

However, it remains a fact that all that screaming and hysteria that followed The Beatles like a curse wasn’t for songs from Sergeant Pepper but for the early stuff.  They became “bigger than Jesus” (in Lennon’s hubristic but accurate words) with songs like ‘She Loves You’.  Bob Dylan sat up and took notice of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ when he was the most influential singer songwriter in the world, which seems laughable now – as if Dizzy Gillespie had been inspired by George Formby.  It’s a question of relativism and historical bias.  Because The Beatles outstripped their earlier work in no time at all, it’s easy to overlook that earlier work, and to forget that they hadn’t mapped out their career in advance.

Having recently acquired copies of all the remastered albums I spent a week giving all the early Beatles albums – the unfashionable Beatles albums – a good old airing.  I enjoyed most of it, but it made very clear that at that point they were primarily a singles and live shows band.  Albums were just where singles could be resold with some filler to, well, fill up the running time (although in honesty all of The Beatles’ albums have a fair amount of filler – look at Let It Be).  Even the best songs from this era are difficult to listen to if you’re searching for anything meaningful from the lyrics (which are generally a combination of the words ‘love’, ‘her’, ‘you’, ‘him’, ‘me’ ‘man’, ‘woman’ and occasionally ‘diamond ring’).  But that’s a wrongheaded way of listening to these songs because they weren’t trying to express anything complicated (or anything specific at all).  They were trying to be exciting in a short amount of time, and transfer that excitement to other people.  Anthony Burgess said that “they perform a simple job, adequately”, but he was wrong – they performed a simple job extraordinarily well.  If the lyrics are worthlessly repetitive then the music is versatile and unexpected.  

The albums are shamelessly fun, catchy and deceptive – and punchy enough that when quite unlovable songs like ‘Mr Moonlight’ come on, they go away quickly.  Also, there are more songs you move your hips to.  Perhaps that’s why Help! is viewed as the transitional album, because it’s the last time they even tried to make songs people could dance to.  Rubber Soul is excellent, but from that point on it’s music for the head, not for the hips.

Beatles For Sale is the only Beatlemania album I found it hard to warm
to - it's full of insipid covers and limp originals, and its title suggests
 it was intended as no more than a cash in

Playing ‘Love Me Do’ next to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and trying to comprehend  that there’s only 3 years between them is mindboggling.  They don’t only sound decades apart but worlds apart.  I’ll never love With The Beatles, but I’ve realised that I like it a lot (Lennon’s snide, sarcastic voice was made for such cynicism as ‘Money’).  These albums do have a sense of urgency in a way that the later albums (made by the slightly older and much richer men) don’t. In terms of artistic ambition the later albums win hands down, but listening to the earlier albums gets past The Beatles as mythic cultural legends and reminds you of what made them famous in the first place.  

The fact that everyone was vaguely disappointed by that 90s reunion was that it forcibly reminded people that The Beatles were musicians before they got to become legends.  The public were expecting something legendary from legends, and they got ‘Free As A Bird’ instead.  It was by no means terrible, and arguably more worthwhile than banging out the oldies for money like The Rolling Stones. However, you got the feeling that by reforming they had traded in a bit of their reputation as well.  This is something we will discuss again in a few weeks time in relation to the Pixies…