Music

by

Under Their Thumb: How A Nice Boy From Brooklyn Got Mixed Up With The Rolling Stones (And Lived To Tell About It), by Bill German

This is certainly the most unusual book yet written about The Rolling Stones. Prior books had either been written by insiders (Up And Down With The Rolling Stones by Keith Richards’ drug supplier and aide-de-camp “Spanish” Tony Sanchez) or by professional writers/biographers (Old Gods Almost Dead by the ever-present Stephen Davis). What we have here in Under Their Thumb is a book written by a fan.

Bill German is not just any fan, though. As a teenager he started to self-publish the Rolling Stones fanzine Beggar’s Banquet. He toiled in obscurity for several years, building a network of fans and bootleggers who gave him tips about what (and who) the Stones were doing.

As fate would have it, German met the Rolling Stones and pressed a copy of his fanzine into the hands of Ron Wood, who looked it over and handed it to Keith Richards.

From this inauspicious beginning, Bill German somehow became a friend to the Rolling Stones. Not quite an insider, but far from being a mere fan, he managed to strike up friendships with both Ron Wood and Keith Richards. He went to their apartments, was invited to their parties, drank with them (but stayed away from drugs). He interviewed them, got insider information which was then published in Beggar’s Banquet with the approval of the Stones. Throughout he seems to have remained aware that he was possibly the luckiest Rolling Stones fan ever. Woody and Keith seemed to genuinely like the guy. Ron Wood asked him to help write his book of artwork, The Works. He got into press conferences, and backstage. Bill German was the proverbial fly on the wall.

His presence was disconcerting, if not downright alarming, to many of the business people that were tasked with taking care of the Stones. German would publish insider information straight from Ron Wood’s mouth, but then would get lectured by the managers and handlers who wanted all the information about the band to funnel from them. It seems apparent that, as the Stones went from their relatively care-free rock band days to becoming a business and marketing juggernaut, Mick Jagger began to become as much businessman as rocker, and as time went on he began to distance himself from German.

After first embracing German (Beggar’s Banquet became the official Stones newsletter around the time of the Undercover album), the suits behind the scenes began to fear him. Even though German usually sought approval before publishing anything, he still insisted that he was a “journalist.” Having a journalist deep in the heart of the Stones camp where outrageous drug use and serial infidelity were the norm was a worrisome prospect for those tasked with making sure the Stones got through customs at the airport and maintained good relationships with their wives.

The inevitable ending should surprise nobody except, apparently, the author. Bill German became frustrated and angry that the access he once enjoyed was now being denied. Once the Stones became the Machine starting with the 1989 Steel Wheels tour, even his friendship with Keith and Woody was not enough to get him where he felt he needed to be to continue putting out the fanzine.

He managed to hang in there until after the Voodoo Lounge tour but then closed the fanzine down and fell largely out of touch with his friends in the Stones camp.

German has a nice style, conversational, easy-to-read. He comes across as a likable and pretty level-headed guy and takes great pains to portray Ron Wood and Keith Richards as being wonderful human beings. Mick Jagger is, in Keith’s words, “a great bunch of guys.” Jagger is shown as coldly calculating, warm to those he likes and trusts, but he doesn’t like or trust too many people, including the author.

For me, the selling point of the book was that it was about the Rolling Stones well past their prime. Most Stones books concentrate on the Sixties and early Seventies, when they were challenging The Beatles for supremacy of the music world and The Who for the title of “Greatest Rock and Roll Band in The World.” Under Their Thumb is about the period of time that these earlier Stones biographies gloss over: the dreaded 80s and 90s when the Stones were releasing mediocre albums and tearing at each other’s throats. It’s a period that has an interesting story behind it. Here is where you’ll find the near break up of the band, Mick’s awful solo albums, Keith’s excellent solo albums, the Hail! Hail! Rock ‘N’ Roll Chuck Berry film that Keith organized, and the massive tours that brought the Stones back from the brink of death, but brought them back in a way that was largely unrecognizable from what they had been before. It is, somewhat surprisingly, a fascinating period in the history of the band, and Bill German was there for almost all of it.

by

John Lennon: The Life, by Philip Norman

For all of the millions of words that have been written about the Beatles as a band or as singular musicians, it’s somewhat surprising that the man who formed the group and who was one of the two pillars that supported it has never been the subject of a serious biography. Until now.

There have been a couple of not-so-serious books written about Lennon. The most recent entry was Albert Goldman’s ridiculous and risible The Lives Of John Lennon, a book that was as mean-spirited in tone as it was unfair to subject and reader alike. The book grabbed a fair share of headlines back in the late 80s, and inspired U2 to write the song "God, Part II" (with the lyrics "I don’t believe in Goldman/His type like a curse/Instant Karma’s gonna get him/If I don’t get him first").

Now comes the first Lennon biography that is worthy of its subject, Philip Norman’s John Lennon: The Life. It is a massive book for a short life, but the life that was lived is endlessly fascinating. Of course, the lion’s share of the book is taken with the Beatle years, but a substantial amount is dedicated to the young Lennon, pre-Beatles and even pre-Quarrymen. Surprisingly, it is this account of the young man that is the most fascinating part of the book. The Beatle years have been written about endlessly. (Norman himself wrote one of the very first biographies of that band, the excellent Shout! The Beatles In Their Generation, way back in 1981 or so.) John Winston Lennon’s childhood and teenage years have only been glossed over.

The conventional narrative of John’s young life goes like this: Lennon was abandoned by his father, his mother was unable to care for him and gave John to her sister Mimi, Lennon managed to form a relationship with his mother shortly before she was killed by a drunk driver, Lennon channeled his anger and sadness into his new band.

The kernels of truth are all there, but the actual story is so much more complicated. Among other revelations, I had been unaware that John’s father had tried to take John away from his mother because his mother was not a particularly fit Mom, and that it was a very young John who made the choice to stay with his mother. His father abandoned John, but only after he was told that he wasn’t wanted (not an excuse, I know, but at least a wrinkle in the conventional narrative).

Julia Lennon was a very young woman who had almost no maternal instincts. She was at least as unwilling to care for John as she was unable. Again, it was news to me that John maintained a relationship with Julia the entire time he was living under the care of his Aunt Mimi. He would frequently stay at Julia’s home whenever he and Mimi had a row, and Julia went to see John play with the Quarrymen several times.

Far from the usual story (propagated by Lennon himself), John Lennon was not a poor kid from Liverpool. He was raised in what we would now call a middle class (or even upper middle class) home. Mimi adored him, despite their occasional fights. His mother also loved him, and so did the entire extended family. Far from being the alienated, disaffected youth he frequently portrayed himself as, John Lennon was a boy surrounded by love and concern. In retrospect, this is not surprising. Alienated, disaffected young men (think Kurt Cobain) do not write songs like "In My Life." John Lennon was no working class hero. He was a largely pampered, but deeply troubled, young boy.

There is also no question that a lot of Lennon’s angst was all too real. His young, attractive mother was more of a family friend than a mother, which led to some awfully conflicted feelings in John. Sigmund Freud may have been full of hot air about almost anything and everything, but John Lennon was a textbook case of the Oedipal Complex. He not only "loved" his mother, he lusted after her. As the boy started to become the teenager and started to become aware of his own sexuality, he found it directed towards his own mother…young, beautiful, free-spirited, independent Julia. Walking into her house one afternoon he found her with a lover in flagrante delicto, which further sent the signal to him that this woman was a highly sexual being. John would curl up behind his mother while she slept and wonder if he should touch her breasts. In John’s mind, Julia may have been willing. (The idea that she was willing is probably due to Julia’s cluelessness about her son’s feelings and her own lack of a maternal instinct…what mother lets her young teenage son cuddle with her on her bed?). It was a perfect storm of wrong signals that was set into concrete when Julia was killed. As you read Norman’s book, you can see John’s emotional and sexual needs coalescing around an ideal of the perfect woman: part nurturing Mother, part lover, free-spirited, independent, an outsider in her own society. Paging Yoko Ono, come in Yoko Ono.

John’s enrollment in art school, his friendship with Stuart Sutcliffe (also doomed to die at a crucial time in John’s life), the formation of the Quarrymen and the Beatles are also handled in depth. The Beatle years do take up the majority of the book, but a large amount of attention is paid to the early years of the band when they were a proto-punk band storming the stage in Hamburg, Germany, gorging themselves on amphetamines to help them stay awake and strippers to help them calm down. It is in Hamburg where they met Klaus Voorman and Astrid Kirchherr, two extremely influential figures in Beatle-lore. Klaus would later design the famous Revolver cover and become a bass player for Manfred Mann and, later, John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. Astrid was the girl who stole Stuart Sutcliffe away from the Beatles and who provided the only early photographic record of what would soon be the most photographed band on the planet. But Klaus and Astrid also introduced the Beatles to the Exies, German and French Existentialists (the heavy duty artists crowd). Being introduced to these alternative types of art, literature, and music would later manifest itself when the Beatles broke out of the three-minute love song.

The fame years of the Beatles are handled perfectly for a Lennon biography. Paul McCartney remains a strong supporting role, but George Harrison and Ringo Starr are bit players. The focus, even during these years, is solidly on John. This book will never be confused with a general Beatles biography. John reconnects with his father (even has his father come live with him), becomes distant from his first wife Cynthia, loses his friend and manager Brian Epstein (another authority figure who dies too soon), and meets Yoko Ono. In the meantime there is an incredible amount of pot, LSD, cocaine, and heroin consumed and the most timeless music of the rock era written and recorded.

The Beatles were, in many ways, the first instance of the rock and roll band as a group. They were essentially a gang, and the public perception of them (written in stone by the movies A Hard Day’s Night and Help!) was of four close friends who lived together, wrote together, sang together, vacationed together. They were inseparable. Of course the reality was far different, but the shattering of that illusion by the sudden appearance of a certain diminutive Japanese "artist" caused bad feelings all around. To the average fan that grew up with this perception of the Beatles, the gnashing of teeth and public bickering during their breakup must have been difficult. It was "a golden age for lawyers" as stated in The Rutles.

Lennon’s post-Beatle life is similarly well chronicled in The Life. John’s solo career has achieved more legendary status than it deserves in the wake of his death. He released one stunningly brilliant album (John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band), one great album of pop classics (Imagine), one God-awful piece of unlistenable junk (Some Time In New York City), two mediocre albums of original songs (Mind Games, Walls And Bridges), and one mediocre collection of oldies (Rock ‘N’ Roll). He is nearly as well known for his year-long "Lost Weekend" of depraved debauchery as he is for most of his solo music. The Life recounts in great detail the Lost Weekend and also John’s descent into hard Left radical buffoonery and his subsequent "What, me a radical? I’m just a singer" fight against deportation.

The last stage of John’s life was his retirement and withdrawl into the Dakota. He stayed home and raised (with a lot of help) his new son Sean and made several half-hearted attempts to reconnect with his first son Julian. He learned to bake bread, and stayed away from music and musicians. Keith Moon tried to visit and Lennon refused to see him, even though Moon was more than happy to just sit and have a cup of tea. "I don’t want to have tea with Keith Moon," said John. "If I see him at all I want to get loaded and have a party." Even during his househusband years, there was a devil inside of John that he somehow kept on a short leash. More power to him.

Lennon famously emerged from isolation in late 1980 with the album Double Fantasy. One half of the album is a collection of pop gems, odes to hearth and home, beautifully written and sung by John. The other half isn’t. Within a few days of being told that Double Fantasy had gone gold, and that his record was a hit, Lennon was dead, murdered by a fan.

In the public eye, Lennon’s murder did three things:

  • John became a martyr, despite the fact that his murderer was not some right wing reactionary, but was one of the millions of people who followed and supported Lennon throughout his career.
  • Despite his vocal and financial support of various violent Leftist groups like the IRA or the Black Panthers, he became the "man of Peace" and not just a musician. His ineffectual, goofball attempts at "promoting peace" were now seen as being parallel to Gandhi, or even Jesus, and not as childish publicity stunts. The doggerel rhymes of "Give Peace A Chance" and the insufferable naiveté of "Imagine" came to symbolize the man and his beliefs to millions of people who didn’t listen closely to the "count me in" lyric of "Revolution" and who (wisely) skipped the entire Some Time In New York City album. This is the favored portrayal of Lennon from Yoko and her spokespeople, and even from McCartney and Ringo, who should know better. Let me just add that for all of its starry-eyed utopian blather and Communist Manifesto sympathies, "Imagine" remains an exquisitely beautiful piece of music.
  • Lennon’s reputation as a Beatle and solo artist was enhanced at Paul McCartney’s expense. Suddenly McCartney was the guy who wrote those slight, silly love songs with moon/June/croon/spoon lyrics. It’s a criticism that is deeply unfair to McCartney who, yes, did write those songs but who also was the truly avant-garde Beatle and the writer of at least as many classic songs as Lennon and possibly more.

The murder of John Lennon is handled quickly in the book. John is killed in the last couple of pages. The Life is over and so is The Life. The spectacle of thousands of weeping, shell-shocked fans (I was one of them) is thankfully skipped. It is the common error of so many looks at Lennon’s life to include the post-murder tributes that have made a deeply flawed man who happened to be one of the greatest songwriters of the last 100 years into Blessed John, Martyred Patron Saint of Peace.

Several years ago, Barry Miles wrote a biography of Paul McCartney called Many Years From Now. It is one of the best of all rock biographies. Philip Norman’s John Lennon: The Life can now take a place proudly next to it on the bookshelf.

by

Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend, by Mark Ian Wilkerson

Mark Ian Wilkerson’s massive biography of Who guitarist/songwriter Pete Townshend is a long-overdue look at one of rock music’s greatest talents.

For all of their legendary status, The Who is a band whose career hasn’t seen all that many books. There was Dave Marsh’s excellent Before I Get Old, but that was back in 1983 or so, and there was Tony Fletcher’s masterful biography of the Who’s drummer, Moon (also titled Dear Boy in some editions).

But the main guiding force behind the band has received very little attention from biographers. Geoffrey Giuliano wrote a slim bio called Behind Blue Eyes a few years ago, but Giuliano is an atrocious writer whose main research tool is previously published interviews. So Who Are You: The Life Of Pete Townshend marks the first serious bio of one of rock music’s most towering figures.

It’s a qualified success. There is no question that the book is exhaustive. At more than 600 pages, it’s about twice as long as the average rock biography, and with good reasons. For starters, Pete Townshend is still alive and still making music more than 40 years after the Who first smashed their equipment. There’s a lot more to cover than there is in books about Hendrix, the Doors, Janis Joplin or any of the other dead-too-soon rock icons.

Another reason is that Pete Townshend agreed to be interviewed by the author, and God knows that once Pete starts talking he doesn’t shut up. Fortunately, he’s been the single best “rock interview” since about 1965, and age hasn’t mellowed him a bit. He’s still every bit as cantankerous and opinionated as the 19-year-old punk who wrote “My Generation.” So by all means, let the man talk. He’s almost invariably fascinating.

Where the book does not succeed is in giving much information about the man. Much of the first half of the book is virtually indistinguishable from a more general biography of the Who. Mentions of Townshend’s marriage, affairs, and other aspects of his off-stage life are skirted (the one exception being his devotion to the guru Meher Baba). Townshend’s childhood is covered briefly, but once the Who is formed the book becomes the story of that group, with a slight accent on the guitarist.

It is only around the time of the aborted Lifehouse project and the slightly later Quadrophenia that the author starts spending more effort on Pete’s life. This may be because these were quieter years for the Who. The albums were more spaced out, the tours not as endless. There was more time for Pete to be Pete. Whatever the reason, this is where Wilkerson’s book achieves lift off and becomes a truly world-class addition to the “rock bio” library.

Surprisingly the Who’s “Farewell Tour” (their first, that is, in 1982) happens at around the halfway mark. That leaves fully half the book to be about a small spattering of solo albums and some Who reunions. More surprisingly, this is the best part of the book. Seeing Townshend groping for meaning in his life and bouncing between solo artist, book editor, and writer…all while feeling the irresistable undertow pulling him back to the Who…makes for a fascinating story.

Townshend remains something of a mystery in the book. For someone as loquacious as Pete, the idea that there can be any mystery about him or his motivations may seem difficult to believe. But for all of his talk, Townshend has a tendency to stick to general philosophies: about the nature of art in rock music, about the meaning of life as expressed in lyrics, etc. He’s much less specific about his actual life. The closer one gets to Pete, the more closed he becomes. Dissing Roger Daltrey can be great fun, but he’s much more reticent to discuss his relationship with his wife.

This is why Who Are You is an excellent title for an excellent book. You will close the book knowing much more than you ever knew about Pete Townshend. What you won’t know is who he really is.

by

Forever Changes, by Andrew Hultkrans

I’ve read several of the slim volumes about classic albums that Continuum publishes in the “33 1/3” series. Most of them have been very enjoyable. The books on Electric Ladyland, Highway 61 Revisited, and Exile On Main Street were particularly enjoyable, and I came away with a much deeper appreciation of those classic albums.

So I had very high hopes when I saw that someone had the exquisite good taste to write a book about Love’s 1967 masterpiece, Forever Changes. When I first heard the album, back in the early ’80s I fell in love with the sound. In a year that saw the release of many classic albums by legendary artists (Sgt. Pepper, The Doors and Strange Days, Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold As Love, Surrealistic Pillow…just to name a few), Forever Changes stands shoulder to shoulder with any of them. It has been in my “Top 20” albums of all time since 1981…one of the extremely few that has never fallen out of my favor.

Unfortunately, the book written about this classic album is one of the unfunniest jokes I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading. I have no idea who Andrew Hultkrans is, but I know his type. In grad school, he was one of the extremely earnest guys who sat in the front and uncritically swallowed whatever “lit-crit” the teacher of the moment was spewing. After class he went to the bar with everyone else, but he ordered a mixed-drink when beer was the order of the day, and when the subject turned to baseball he tried desperately to drag it back to Jacques Derrida’s or Stanley Fish’s latest assault on Western civilization. He was a drag, and a well-known drag.

I know this despite never meeting the man. I know it because I read his atrocious book about Love’s Forever Changes.  It reminded me of all those awful late 20th century “critics” I had to read in grad school…the ones who wrote about Shakespeare in prose so convoluted and so inarticulate that it made you hate the Bard of Avon…until you realized that your anger was misdirected and that it was the critic who was deserving of scorn and opprobrium.

Hultkrans mentions almost nothing…nothing!…about the gorgeous music on the album. The strings and horns that are perhaps the most perfect ever put onto a rock album, the sublime acoustic guitar that serves as the foundation for every tracks, the intricate drums…none of it worth even a brief mention.

Similarly the recording of the album: how Neil Young was the original producer, but left; how the band was so strung out on drugs that the famous Wrecking Crew of L.A. session musicians was brought in to play the album until the band managed to pull itself together; the push and pull of the band personalities, lorded over by the supreme egoist, genius and eccentric Arthur Lee…yeah, none of that gets mentioned either.

What does get mentioned? Page after page about Gnosticism, Marat/Sade, The Crying Of Lot 49, the Manson murders, and several other irrelevancies. The author’s contention here is that Arthur Lee was a prophet, perhaps a mad prophet, in the jeremiad tradition. Late in the year of the Summer Of Love, Forever Changes cast a darker, bleaker view of flower power and hippiedom, while still coming from that tradition. Lee saw a different vision of the hippies, one that directly anticipated the Manson murders. I wonder if Hultkrans ever heard the first two Doors albums, both of which preceded Forever Changes, and both of which were considerably darker in tone and sound.

But other albums that took a similarly dim view of what was happening culturally in California in 1967 don’t figure in. Prophets don’t come in droves after all, and if you make the case that Lee’s pessimism about Flower Power was shared by artists as diverse as the Doors and the Mothers of Invention, well, then Hultkrans doesn’t have much to write about.

Throughout the book, lyrics are twisted and bent out of shape to fit Hultkran’s thesis and to forge allusions with other more literary works and critical theories. It’s all a buncha crap, if you ask me. I’m not saying the songs don’t have meaning; I’m saying they do. By twisting the meaning to match his overblown theories and overheated rhetoric, it is Hultkrans who is saying the lyrics mean anything he wants them to mean. Makes my head hurt just to think about it.

Eventually Hultkrans resorts to the sort of hideous wordplay that the lit-crit types love so much because it makes them seem so much smarter and more sophisticated that the bourgeois proles who just want to read about an album full of great songs. Let me be the first to say that anyone who seriously uses the word “zeitgeisticide” in a sentence should never be allowed to write again. Not even a letter to a friend.

Back away from the pen, Andrew Hultkrans, before you attempt to ruin another album with your bloated eggheadery.