David Hepworth writes in this 2017 book:
* Rolling Stone , once the organ of the alternative society, was about to move from San Francisco to New York in order to be nearer its real customers, the agencies that bought colour ads for cigarettes, drink and cars which were aimed at its free – spending thirty – something readership. The editorial had simultaneously smartened up to provide a more seductive environment. The photographers were more upmarket, which meant they brought with them their customary armies of stylists, make – up artists, hairdressers and miscellaneous ministers of the arts of vanity to make sure that their subjects looked reassuringly rich as well as edgily stylish. The look of 1976 was expensive and dissolute.
* THE GIRLS WHO shared Elvis Presley’s bed knew the drill. They had to listen for his breathing, which had on occasion seemed to stop in the night. If he got up to go to the bathroom they should knock on the door after a while and ask if he was all right. There were members of his personal entourage around the house at all times. Further staff, including a nurse who worked for his personal doctor George Nichopoulos, known to all as ‘Doctor Nick’, lived in trailers behind the house. Nonetheless the women he slept with were his last defence against the thing he feared most, loneliness.
Since he was a small child Elvis had hated to sleep alone. Once he was famous he no longer needed to. If he wasn’t with one of his longer – term girlfriends, willing women could be brought to him.* Among the diminishing number of people who actually cared about Elvis Presley there was a feeling he was running out of road.
* Like all superstars Elvis alternated between utter certainty and crippling doubt, spending very little time in the region between the two where normal human beings live out their lives.
* Even when he was dead, Time magazine didn’t put him on their cover. Nor did People . They didn’t think he was big enough, in the sense that they felt he no longer reached into people’s hearts. Elvis was just a rock star who wasn’t hot any more. Then, as the days turned into weeks and the news programmes continued to run footage of distraught middle – aged people talking about what Elvis had meant to them, the reality began to sink in. The late Elvis, as opposed to the living Elvis, was the one thing they could agree on.
* IN 1963 AMERICAN journalist Michael Braun went to Sunderland to write about a new group called the Beatles. As he observed how these four men interacted with the world he began to recognize that their appeal went beyond just music. ‘I began suspecting,’ he wrote later, ‘that I was in the presence of a new kind of person.’
Over the years pop music has unwittingly introduced many new kinds of people to a wider world. From Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis through Pete Townshend and Janis Joplin to Lou Reed and Bob Marley, pop has introduced young people to personalities they might never have encountered any other way.* [Robert] Plant was rebuilding his family life, which had been shattered not only by the loss of his child but also by an article his wife had read in an American music magazine which suggested that once on the road her husband was not faithful.
In those days before the death of distance it was possible for even world – famous musicians to be accompanied on tour by a species of ‘road wife’ without their actual wives getting to hear about it. The tabloids weren’t particularly interested in these people, the specialist press knew discretion was the price they paid for access, and the mobile phone and the internet were still the stuff of science fiction. Furthermore the dictionary of disapproval had not yet been developed. Drug users weren’t said to have substance issues. Heavy drinkers weren’t yet alcoholics. Rock stars who expected unfettered access to the bodies of any young women in their orbit weren’t yet deemed to have a problem with male entitlement.* Poses are vital in rock. They are not some optional extra. Poses are what send the pulses of young men racing. There was a splendour about Led Zeppelin’s swagger. It was the apogee of a certain sort of rock dream. None of the hundreds of bands that came after them and tried to adopt the same shape were anything like as convincing. However, like everything else in show business, it was a trick based on confidence. Once Plant no longer believed he could get away with it, once the essential absurdity of it began to dawn on him, once he started to believe the things all those punks were whispering in his ear via the letters pages of the music papers, once he was no longer cocksure, the magic inevitably ebbed away. After all, he was an old man. He was thirty – one.
* Although he played the wild man on stage, in the real world Ozzy was as helpless and needy as a small boy. Sharon found this side of him attractive. Without her he simply couldn’t function. Together they flourished.
* There is a disorientation in the atmosphere around a rock band on tour which brings about a certain detachment from the elementary laws of physics and chemistry governing normal life. Even if none of the protagonists are particularly unhinged or suffering from the need to test the limits of their own mortality there is a tendency to do the ill – advised which would only rarely arise in everyday life. This was particularly the case in 1982 when artists didn’t yet employ people whose primary job was to protect them from themselves. The world in which these people lived and moved was attuned to extremes. Nobody was yet suggesting that exercise and abstinence might be the secret to surviving life on the road. They were all prone to thinking themselves indestructible. The touring life was sustained by drugs and drink. Very few didn’t partake. All these people were moved to go beyond the red line, to hang themselves over the precipice, with predictable consequences.
* In June [1982], James Honeyman – Scott, the guitarist with the Pretenders, was found dead of heart failure in a girlfriend’s flat. ‘Cocaine intolerance’ was blamed. This was only days after he had agreed that bassist Pete Farndon should be fired from the same group because of his own addiction to heroin. Farndon would be found dead in his bath less than a year later.
* 1982 seemed short on new rock stars but it was long on people who wanted to act like them. Rolling Stone ’s cover stars for that year were mostly actors and TV people – David Letterman, Robin Williams, Mariel Hemingway, Matt Dillon, Timothy Hutton and Warren Beatty – all affecting the casual drag and ‘we mean it’ looks of rock stars. On 5 March the comedian and actor John Belushi was found dead in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, having ingested a speedball, a cocktail of heroin and cocaine. The woman who administered it to him, Cathy Smith, was a former associate of three members of the Band…
* On 30 April Lester Bangs, the rock critic whose words were as impressive in print as their author was unimpressive in person, whose reviews were a plea for acceptance from musicians and hipsters who wouldn’t spare him the time of day, who liked to say that rock and roll wasn’t so much a music as a way of living your life, finished the final draft of a new book he called Rock Gomorrah . His idea of celebrating completion was to take a number of Valium pills together with a strong cold remedy. He never woke up. He was thirty – three.
* Bands are like small political parties, presenting a united front to the outside world while a low – level internecine war is being perpetually waged within, a war in which nothing is forgiven or forgotten, nothing is openly discussed, and any person brave enough to propose a change of direction suffers the fate of being openly derided for doing what so clearly needs doing. This Is Spinal Tap captures the imperceptible heightening of tension and meaningful sidelong glances that greet any member apparently seeking the approval of anyone outside the group.
* rock industry: that it relies on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Once you’re no longer swept along by the power of its grand illusion, once you begin to question the conventions to which it clings, once the wires along which it dances are plainly visible, once you actually glimpse the desperation in the musicians’ eyes as they see some piece of on – stage business begin to unravel, once the amplification fails and you hear them barking at each other like any bunch of workmen in crisis, then you are seeing the world through the lens of Spinal Tap.
* 1985 was the year the scale of rock changed the nature of rock. The bigger the show is, the more it’s about ritual rather than content.
* THE ROCK INTERVIEW is an artificial interaction. It’s primarily a business transaction, entered into by both parties for their mutual commercial benefit. At the same time form dictates that it must masquerade as a friendly, almost flirtatious exchange of ideas. It often takes months of negotiation to set up but then takes place as if it’s a chance meeting. It demands a display of outward nonchalance from both interviewer and interviewee. The former is flushed and excited but pretends to be relaxed. The latter is suspicious and guarded but pretends to be relaxed.
* By the mid – eighties the family structures of rock superstars had come to resemble those of all – powerful sovereigns or landed aristocrats of years gone by. Their success meant that they, and they alone, sat at the top of a pyramid of wealth, status and power. As they looked down from the summit they could see the serried ranks of their heirs, their heirs’ tow – headed dependents, the long – established courtiers who transacted their business for them, the vassals and liegemen who handled the tasks beneath their dignity or competence, the new mistresses and the old ones who always knew far more than they let on, even the fools and soothsayers whose job it was to calm their troubled mind…
* The most impressionable group in society are teenage boys. They have a touching readiness to believe that somewhere nearby a bunch of young men only slightly older than they are and certainly no more exceptional are living a life larger, louder and more licentious than any in human history and are getting paid a fortune for doing so.
* The golden rule in music is that the more people protest that it’s all about the music, the more certain it is that it’s all about something else entirely. The thing that mattered most in hard rock was not the rock or the hardness thereof; it was looking the part. And Guns N’ Roses did. They combined glamour and danger in just the right proportions. This is the quality that was impossible to contrive.
* when fashion editors think of a rock star they think of Axl Rose in 1987. Nobody has ever looked more the part.
* The mother of the singer James Taylor, who had watched this process at close quarters, sagely observed that where musicians are concerned ‘The work is always the last thing that goes because it’s the thing that holds their life together.’
Their counsellors had to deal with the toxic combination of arrogance and self – abasement that is often the lot of the rock star. Performing provided its own high, both in terms of the sheer satisfaction it brought with it and also the transformational effect it had on their status. When not performing they were prone to feeling that others had detected their inner worthlessness.* As part of her treatment at the Betty Ford Center, where she was an in – patient with Tammy Wynette, [Stevie] Nicks had to write the words ‘I am not special: I am dying’ on a piece of paper. ‘That’s a serious thing to swallow,’ she reflected.
Ringo and Clapton were among the first wave of rock stars to change their ways with professional help. In time they would be joined by hundreds of others until it seemed that whenever you interviewed a musician over the age of forty they would volunteer their stories of how they’d stopped using drugs or alcohol. People who in the past were reluctant talkers would now hold forth at length with the practised ease of those accustomed to giving a detached account of their strengths and weaknesses. The confessional press interview became almost an extension of the process of therapy. Major retrospective features increasingly followed a standard arc: I flew high, I went too far, I crashed, I put myself back together with the help of a good woman/man/manager/therapist, and now what I want most of all from my public is forgiveness. Therapy saved the lives of a lot of rock stars, which is a blessing. It also diminished their mystique, which isn’t.* After Madonna, stars had no secrets. What’s more, the technology that would eventually enable us all to be the stars of our own lives was already on its way.
* Gay people in the world of rock, which likes to congratulate itself on being an outrider for new ways of living, were no quicker to announce their sexuality than their counterparts in Parliament, business, sport or the movies.
* People in rock bands can’t afford to allow themselves to glimpse the preposterousness of what they do.
* Prince could do anything. In terms of all – round ability he was probably the most accomplished rock star of them all. He could play most instruments, he had written huge hit songs like ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Little Red Corvette’, he could sing in a variety of styles…
* If in 1993 Michael Jackson had still been a member of the Jacksons rather than a solo performer, it’s possible that somebody in their circle would have told him that sharing his bed with thirteen – year – old Jordan Chandler was likely to be interpreted unsympathetically.
