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Posts from the ‘Rock and roll’ Category

Apr 22

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Chan Romero 1941-2024

There was a time when Chan Romero’s “The Hippy Hippy Shake” was a song you had know. It was to the Beat Boom as “I Got My Mojo Workin'” was to the R&B scene. When Paul McCartney got hold of a copy and started singing it with his then-unknown group at the Star Club in Hamburg and the Cellar Club in Liverpool, it caught on fast. And when the Swinging Blue Jeans, another Liverpool group, recorded it in 1963, they took it to the top of the UK charts.

Like “I Got My Mojo Workin'”, it was basically a 12-bar blues — as was “Hound Dog”, the song that, when the 15-year-old Romero saw Elvis Presley singing it on the Ed Sullivan Show on his family’s black and white TV at home in Billings, Montana in 1956, introduced him to his destiny. “It just took me over,” he remembered. “I said, this is what I want to do.”

Romero, who has died aged 82, was born in Billings to a father of Spanish and Apache heritage and a mother of mixed Mexican, Cherokee and Irish descent. His mother sang and his brothers played guitars. He followed their example, and began writing songs. During his summer holiday from Billings Senior High School, he hitchhiked to East Los Angeles to stay with some relatives. A cousin drove him to Specialty Records in Hollywood, where the A&R man, Sonny Bono, liked his song “My Little Ruby” and told him to come back when he’d polished it up.

Back in Billings, Romero auditioned for a local DJ, Don “The Weird Beard” Redfield, who became his manager and sent a demo to Bob Keane at Del-Fi Records in Hollywood. Keane had recorded the Chicano singer Richie Valens, enjoying hits with “Donna” and “La Bamba”. It seemed a good match and Keane promptly signed Romero.

When Valens was killed at 19 years of age, along with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper, in the February 1959 air crash in Iowa, Romero must have seemed his logical heir. Indeed, Keane introduced him to Valens’s grieving parents, with whom he later often stayed at their home in Pacoima, East LA.

“The Hippy Hippy Shake” was his first release on Keane’s label. It didn’t make much impact in the US, but it went down well in Canada and Australia. In the UK it was released on EMI’s Columbia label. “My Little Ruby” was the B-side of the the follow-up, “I Don’t Care Now”, and that was pretty much that, although Romero toured with his backing band, the Bell Tones, and found himself turning away girls. “I haven’t got a girlfriend,” he told the Billings Gazette, “because I can’t tell if a girl likes me for myself or because I’m a singer.”

The original version of “The Hippy Hippy Shake” has everything you’d want from a rock and roll record in 1959: the urgent teenage voice, the twangy guitar, the rackety drums, all wrapped up inside a minute and 45 seconds. Thank you, Chan Romero, for your moment in history.

Jul 12

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Under the same sky

It’s 10 years since the veteran countercultural insurrectionist Mick Farren died. In 1976, in a celebrated polemic for the NME headlined “The Titanic sails at dawn”, he asked: “Has rock and roll become another mindless consumer product that plays footsie with jet set and royalty, while the kids who make up its roots and energy queue up in the rain to watch it from 200 yards away?” I thought of his words while watching — from a range of almost exactly 200 yards, as it happened, albeit on a warm, dry afternoon — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band giving the first of their two concerts in Hyde Park.

Farren wrote his piece only seven years after the Rolling Stones had played a free concert in Hyde Park to an audience of perhaps a quarter of a million (although I’ve always questioned that figure): a significant event in the history of both the band and the Sixties youth culture of which it was a part. All you had to do was turn up and find yourself a space on the grass. There were no merchandise stalls, because there was no merchandise. If you wanted anything to eat, drink or smoke, you had to bring it with you.

By contrast, Springsteen’s gigs (and others in the British Summer Time series) were sponsored by American Express. To secure a couple of tickets, even those very far away from the privileged enclosures housing the jet set (and perhaps even royalty), you needed to spend a few hundred quid. In the days leading up to the event, there were messages via a special app telling you what to expect and what you could and couldn’t do, with a map of the site, a list of prohibited items (including food and drink), and so on. And it all worked fine. Pleasant attendants, a variety of refreshment outlets and the provision of adequate toilet facilities made it a civilised experience. The weather was warm but not too hot, and the setting sun provided the golden light that enhances any performance.

Once upon a time Springsteen made concert halls feel like clubs. Then he made stadiums feel like concert halls. At 73 he still performs for three hours with impressive vigour and generosity of spirit (he gives the band a mid-set break rather than taking one himself), but nowadays his big gigs feel like big gigs. That’s the price, I guess, of having such a massive following. But although I liked hearing “Darlington County” and “Mary’s Place” and “Badlands” and “Wrecking Ball”, and enjoyed his decent stab at the Commodores’ “Nightshift”, a lot of the set sounded coarsened, which was not how it used to be. Maybe the band is now so big — all those horns and voices — that the music has lost the agility which was such a vital part of its early charm.

And, of course, from 200 yards, each figure on stage was about a quarter the size of a matchstick. So you watched it all on the big screens. Which, inevitably, were not quite synched with sound travelling such a distance to where I was standing. That was about halfway back in a crowd of 62,000, some of whom said afterwards that it was the best Springsteen show they’d ever seen. In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland wrote an affecting piece about his reaction to the concert’s valedictory tone and its message for a generation now growing old.

I don’t begrudge anyone their enjoyment in Hyde Park. I’ve seen Springsteen at other times and in other places when the shows he delivered were as good as anything of their kind could possible be. But when I think about the corporate infrastructure of the Hyde Park concerts, and about the row over “dynamic pricing” in the US, and about the stories of what people are having to go through (and spend, of course) to see Taylor Swift on her forthcoming tour, I think Mick Farren’s point was so well made that its meaning has only grown louder over the years.

When he wrote that piece, punk rock was coming down the track. For a while that movement seemed to destabilise the commercial edifice built up around the music. Then the music industry found ways to reassert its authority, to globalise its product while building an impenetrable wall around it. Whatever the instincts and virtues of Springsteen, Swift and others, however immaculate and sincere, their gigantic tours are now an expression of that authority.

I’m probably sounding naive, because in a sense it’s nothing new. At the time of their free concert in Hyde Park, the Stones were managed by Allen Klein, the American hustler whose involvement was emphatically not motivated by countercultural concerns. Mick Farren also wrote books about Elvis Presley, and he knew perfectly well that Colonel Tom Parker didn’t care about Elvis’s audience or the culture they represented. He cared about making a buck.

Apr 21

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Listening to the music of time

By the time I started listening to Charlie Parker, he’d been dead for five or six years. I was in my early teens, too young to have heard “Parker’s Mood” and “Ko Ko” and the rest of his music as it emerged, first as 78s on the Savoy and Dial labels and then on Verve albums, interacting in real time with everything else around it. That didn’t stop me forming opinions and eventually writing about it. But it was a long time before I realised that older listeners might consider their opinions to be worth more than mine, simply by virtue of their perspective on the music’s initial impact.

I think the penny dropped in the 1970s during a bad-tempered exchange of letters with Derek Jewell, then the jazz and pop critic of the Sunday Times. Twenty years older than me, he tried put me in my place by telling me that he’d been listening to Parker’s records when they were new, while doing his national service in, if I remember correctly, the RAF. With the arrogance of youth, I answered back. But I did so with the uneasy recognition that, however much we both loved Parker’s music, his feelings about it might be intrinsically different from mine, his connection more intimate.

Now, half a century later, it’s my turn to have the sort of feelings that underpinned his words. Occasionally I find myself wondering how someone in their twenties or thirties today can possibly understand the music of Jimi Hendrix, or Martha and the Vandellas, or Albert Ayler, or Anne Briggs, or Curtis Mayfield, or Laura Nyro the way I think I do. I mean, you had to discover “Heat Wave”. “Quicksand”, “Live Wire”, In My Lonely Room”, “Dancing in the Street”, “Wild One” and “Nowhere to Run” in sequence, at the time, to make proper sense of them, didn’t you?

Soon nobody alive will know how it felt to experience that music as it came into the world, all brand new. But people will still want to have opinions about it. And there’s a possibility — heavens above! — that their opinions will be just as valid as mine, and possibly a lot more interesting.

This came home to me while watching Lisa Cortés’s new documentary about Little Richard in order to review it for Uncut magazine (seen above in a page from the June issue). I found it an extraordinary piece of work, on two levels. First, and most obvious, is the enduring charisma of Richard himself, who sets fire to the screen every time he’s shown either performing or giving an interview. The second and more unexpected level is the one on which it made me listen to the director’s choice of talking heads: young academics of colour, female and male, some gay, from American institutions, discussing Richard in terms of his self-presentation — derived from a sexually fluid segment of the black entertainment world — and its wider impact.

White rock critics of my generation, in other words the sort of people who generally get rolled out for such projects, are conspicuous by their absence from this project. But, as I say in the review, I listened to the views of Zandria Robinson, Fredara Hadley, Jason King and others, threaded throughout Little Richard: I Am Everything, with the feeling that I was hearing a new kind of voice discussing a familiar subject from a different and extremely valuable perspective. It gave me a jolt, but an inspiring one.

It’s possible that none of those young academics could list Richard’s first half-dozen Specialty singles in chronological order. Certainly none is anywhere near old enough to remember the precise cultural explosion each one caused on its release, just as I’ll never know how it felt to absorb Duke Ellington’s compositions as they emerged, one after another, on 78s in the 1920s and ’30s. But at this stage, perhaps there are more interesting things to know, and more important things to be said.

* Little Richard: I Am Everything is in selected UK cinemas on 28 April. The June issue of Uncut is out now.

Oct 12

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Art Laboe 1925-2022

I’m sure we all have a list of times and places to which we yearn to be transported in order to bear witness to particular musical events. My own would include the Miles Davis Nonet at the Royal Roost in 1948, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro and Bud Powell at Birdland in 1950, Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane at the Five Spot in 1957, James Brown at the Apollo in 1963 and Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable at the Dom in 1966. That’s a lot of time-machine trips to New York. But also very high on the list would have been one of the weekly dances hosted by the disc jockey Art Laboe at El Monte Legion Stadium, east of Los Angeles, where between 1955 and 1961 he presented star singers and vocal groups, mostly doo-wop and R&B, to a young and mixed audience of Hispanics, blacks and whites. Mr Laboe died in Palm Springs last Friday, aged 97, the day after taping his final radio show, and I’ve just finished writing his obituary for the Guardian. In 1963, two years after the last of the dances, Frank Zappa and Ray Collins wrote a song in tribute, which they recorded with Cleve Duncan of the Penguins. “Memories of El Monte” always makes me feel as though I know exactly how it must have felt to be there.

Dec 16

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Lenny the K strikes again

The last time Lenny Kaye put together a compilation album, it changed the world. Well, a significant part of it, anyway. The meticulously assembled double album released in 1972 under the title Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-68 became a touchstone for the generation that created the punk movement, first in the US and then in the UK. Listening to the Standells, the Seeds, Count Five and the 13th Floor Elevators, kids who’d been drowning in Tales from Topographic Oceans discovered that pop songs worked best when they were two minutes long and built on a minimum of chords, with lyrics that stuck to the teenage basics.

It’s funny to think that although it made its appearance only four years after the release of its most recent track, Nuggets was — intentionally or otherwise — a historical document. But it has never sounded dated, then or now.

Lightning Striking is something different. A two-CD set, it’s the support act to Lenny’s new book of the same name, subtitled Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll, in which he reminds us of the talent that was lost to music writing when he swapped his Remington for a Stratocaster and threw in his lot with a young poet named Patti Smith in 1971.

I met him the year before that, when he was working at Village Oldies on Bleecker Street — “ten dollars a shift and all the records I could filch,” he writes in the book — and contributing to publications including Rolling Stone and Cavalier, a Playboy rival. His album reviews for Jann Wenner’s rock-culture magazine were outstanding, written with an evident love for the music. We bonded over doo-wop and the Velvet Underground, and In New York in 1971 he showed me where the individual Velvets had taken their places on stage during their nine-week season the previous summer upstairs at Max’s Kansas City, where he’d been to see them many times.

Back in 2004 Lenny wrote a fine book titled You Call It Madness, on an unexpected subject: a study of the crooners of the 1930s, including Rudy Vallee, Russ Columbo and Bing Crosby. Now, a few weeks after his unforgettable appearance with Patti at the Albert Hall, comes his history of rock and roll in a series of very enjoyable vignettes, from Memphis in 1954 to Seattle in 1991 via New Orleans, Philadelphia, Liverpool, San Francisco, Detroit, New York City, London, and Los Angeles and Norway, who share the penultimate chapter (on Metal, of course).

It occurs to me that Lenny and I — born three months apart — belong to the last generation with first-hand engagement in the whole story, from hearing Bill Haley, Elvis Presley and Frankie Lymon before we were into double figures and the Beatles, the Stones and Motown when we were in our early teens. I’m not sure of the deeper significance of this, but in Lenny’s case it certainly informs his writing with a precious first-hand enthusiasm. And I’m glad he’s chosen to frame the story of the music through that lens.

In the chapter called “Liverpool 1962”, for instance, he illustrates the effect the Beatles had on him when the British Invasion was in full spate: “It made me want to find out, or at least feel what it felt like. In the summer of 1964, after patiently absorbing barre chords from a friend who could play some of the diminished progessions that Paul brought to ‘Till There Was You’, I bought a cherry red Gibson Les Paul Special and a Magnatone 280 amp (true vibrato, the same kind Buddy Holly played) from a kid down the street who had given up the calling. On November 7 the Vandals (Bringing Down the House With Your Kind of Music!) debuted at the Chi Psi fraternity on the Rutgers University campus.”

I love how he freewheels through the early history. “How to sing like a girl. In the voice of a girl. That is Philadelphia’s tradition.” That’s true from Frankie Avalon to the Stylistics. By 1966 he’s getting closer to the music. A lyricist uncle bankrolls and co-writes Lenny’s first recording, a 45 called “Crazy Like a Fox”, a folk-rock-protest disc released under the name Link Cromwell. A year later he’s speeding across America with his friend Larry in a ’56 Ford, heading for San Francisco and the Summer of Love, seeing Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Avalon and Quicksilver Messenger Service at the Fillmore. In a chapter called “Detroit 1969” he’s great on the story of the MC5, who foreshadowed so much, and the Stooges, with roles for the likes of John Sinclair, Danny Fields, Jac Holzman and Jon Landau.

Back in New York in 1971, he’s invited to accompany the unknown Patti Smith at St Mark’s Church on 10th Street. It was Sam Shepard’s idea. One rehearsal, in her apartment: “She chanted poems and I followed along, watching how she breathed. Simple chords, all I knew.” The story of how the Patti Smith Group emerged from the scuzzy Downtown scene of the early ’70s, intertwined with those of the New York Dolls, CBGBs, Television and the Ramones, is the centrepiece of the book and worth the price of admission alone. And it was Lenny who, before a show in Detroit in 1976, introduced Patti to the MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith, her forever soulmate.

Later on he takes us through Grunge and Death Metal, although the tracks representing those chapters on the album will probably be the least played in my house. But there are some gems: I didn’t know the hair-raisingly direct “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby” by the ’50s Chicago blues guitarist Pat Hare or “Marcella” by the Castelles, a gorgeous slice of Philly doo-wop. And there’s the trick that compilations sometimes pull off, of making you listen to something extremely familiar with fresh ears. In this case, for me, it’s Elvis’s “That’s All Right” and Cliff’s “Move It”, both of which suddenly sounded once again like messages from another planet.

If the album is fun, the book that inspired it is a wonderful extended blast of insider knowledge with outsider perspective, expressed in the language of rock and roll. Lenny’s mission with Nuggets almost 50 years ago was, he says, “to make sure my favourite records kept on living.” Apart from anything else, Lightning Striking shows how well he did his job.

* Lenny Kaye’s Lightning Striking is published in the US by Ecco and in the UK by White Rabbit. The album, compiled by Lenny Kaye and Alec Palao, is on Ace Records.

Nov 1

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Dylan 1980-85

While reading an interview with the filmmaker Jesse Dylan in the (London) Times last week, one quote caught my eye. The interviewer asked him about the continued productivity of his father, who is now in his ninth decade. Jesse replied that his dad wasn’t trying to outdo himself. “He’s just thinking, ‘Should I paint a picture today? Should I write a song?'”

It reminded me of of my own reaction to visiting the Musée Picasso in Paris a few years ago and realising how wonderful it must have been to be him, to get up in the morning and think, “Shall I paint a picture today? Shall I paint a few plates? Shall I make a bull’s head out of a pair of bicycle handlebars or a guitar out of a matchbox and some rubber bands?”

That’s not the only point of comparison between the two, for sure. But Dylan transforms farm implements into sculpture and photographs into paintings with the same unstoppable desire to make stuff. He’s not expecting everything he creates to be the equal of “Desolation Row”, just as Picasso didn’t think a painted soup dish needed to be a rival to the Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Jesse Dylan’s remark might have helped me to make a different kind of sense of the latest volume of the Bootleg Series, titled Springtime in New York and assembled from recordings made in the first half of the 1980s. This was a period that included Shot of Love, Infidels and Empire Burlesque, and most of the tracks on the deluxe five-CD version of the new release are outtakes from those sessions, in Los Angeles as well as New York, plus material from various tour rehearsals and a couple of live tracks (“Enough Is Enough” from Slane Castle in 1984 and “License to Kill” from the same year’s David Letterman show).

There are works of genius here, the two takes of “Too Late” and its eventual metamorphosis into “Foot of Pride” being the prime exhibit, showing Dylan functioning in 1983 at the peak of his powers, creating something that only his imagination could have produced, working away at its shape and structure and detail and angle of attack (and then still not being satisfied enough to put it on the relevant album). “New Danville Girl” has long been loved by bootleggers as a prototype of what would become, 18 months later, the epic “Brownsville Girl”, featuring a friendlier arrangement and more modest production but lacking some of the final version’s finer points. “Let’s Keep It Between Us” is a Dylan song recorded by Bonnie Raitt in 1982 and here performed two years earlier as a confiding southern soul ballad, with wonderful B3 interjections from Willie Smith.

By and large, however, this is an assembly of lesser material. Unlike The Cutting Edge or More Blood, More Tracks, it’s not the sort of compilation that enables the dedicated student to make a close scrutiny of Dylan’s working method over a tightly defined period of time. It’s a whole lot looser than that, and variable in quality. You don’t necessarily need Dylan’s versions of “Fever”, “I Wish It Would Rain”, “Green, Green Grass of Home”, “Abraham, Martin and John” or “Sweet Caroline” — or Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me To Do”, which isn’t noticeably better than those performed by a hundred young British R&B bands in the mid-’60s (including my own). You might, of course, need his gorgeous version of Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”. But what all of them do is remind us of what Dylan’s backing musicians often say, that he knows a very large number of songs — and if you’re in his band, you have to be ready to play them, at least in rehearsals.

Taken together with the outtakes of songs like “Blind Willie McTell”, “Jokerman”, “I and I”, “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight”, “Sweetheart Like You”, “Tight Connection to My Heart”, “Seeing the Real You at Last” and “Dark Eyes”, some of them pleasingly devoid of the production touches added to the versions released on the original albums, they made me think of what it might be like if Bob Dylan turned up in your village with his band, rented the parish hall and spent an evening entertaining the locals. It wouldn’t be a show. It wouldn’t be for posterity. Nobody would be taking notes or keeping score. There might be false starts and missteps and re-runs. There would certainly be some things that didn’t work quite as well as others. Playing these five discs end to end, flattening out the artistic highs and lows, allowing the kaleidoscope of Dylan’s approach to American music to form and disperse and reform, you get a sense of how much fun that would be.

* Bob Dylan’s Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series 1980-85 is out now in various formats and configurations on the Columbia Legacy label. The photograph of Dylan in New York is from one of the booklets that come with the deluxe version and was taken by Lynn Goldsmith.

Sep 30

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Bob Moore 1932-2021

The bassist Bob Moore, a member of Nashville’s legendary A-team of studio musicians, has died at the age of 88. He played on some of my favourite pop records of the 1960s, but to be honest I’m not sure that I ever noticed the bass on any of them. That’s how good he was.

As a boy he had a shoeshine stand on a street corner close to the rear entrance of the Ryman Suditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry, and he got his start after putting a regular five-cent polish on the cowboy boots of Ernest Tubb’s bassist, Jack Drake, who gave him informal lessons. His break came in his early teens when the great pianist and producer Owen Bradley called him in for his first session.

He wasn’t a James Jamerson or a Bootsy Collins, in the sense that he became famous for changing the role of the bass in popular music. But here are some of the hits on which he played: Patsy Cline’s “Crazy”, “Walkin’ After Midnight” and “I Fall to Pieces”. Elvis Presley’s “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame”, “All Shook Up” and “Return to Sender”. Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely”, “Running Scared” and “Dream Baby”. Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man”. Don Gibson’s “Sea of Heartbreak”. Jim Reeves’ “He’ll Have to Go”. Leroy Van Dyke’s “Walk On By”. Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin On”. Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia”. Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date”. Marty Robbins’s “El Paso”. Conway Twitty’s “It’s Only Make Believe”. Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothings”. Claude King’s “Wolverton Mountain”. George Jones’s “She Still Thinks I Care” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today”. Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA”.

Some people, Moore once said, can play a hundred notes a second without making a contribution. Another person can play the one note that makes a better record. It’s not hard to guess in which category he belonged.

Aug 22

9 Comments

RIP Don Everly

After a decade of estrangement, the Everly Brothers chose the Royal Albert Hall in London as the venue for their historic reunion concert on September 22, 1983. It was an unforgettable evening, all tensions seemingly resolved as the harmonies soared once again on all those great hits of the ’50s and ’60s. Phil died in 2014, aged 74. Now Don has gone, too, at 84. Here’s how I reported the reunion concert in The Times, with a wonderful photograph by Nobby Clark.

Oct 9

33 Comments

John Lennon, b. 9 Oct 1940

John Lennon was born 80 years ago today. I interviewed him a few times for the Melody Maker at the Apple HQ in Savile Row, on the first occasion in the autumn of 1969. As many others did, I found him a thoroughly engaged and engaging interviewee — and, by the standards of the time, remarkably open.

One afternoon, when we’d been talking for a couple of hours, he took me with him in his car to the Thames TV studios on Euston Road, where he was being interviewed for the early-evening news show, so that we could carry on our conversation. These were the days when the names of John and Yoko regularly featured on evening-paper billboards. You knew they were around. At Thames that day he was due to talk about his decision to return his MBE in protest — as he had announced in a press release — “against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.”

During that journey to the studios, I remember him expressing his enthusiasm for a recent Lee Dorsey 45, “Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky (From Now On)” — he liked songs with brackets in the titles — and telling me a story about the early days.

“In the beginning,” he said, “it was a constant fight between Brian (Epstein) and Paul on one side, and me and George on the other. Brian put us in neat suits and shirts, and Paul was right behind him. I used to try and get George to rebel with me. I’d say to him: ‘Look, we don’t need these suits. Let’s chuck them out of the window.’ My little rebellion was to have my tie loose, with the top button of my shirt undone, but Paul’d always come up to me and put it straight.

“I saw a film the other night, the first television film we ever did. The Granada people came down to film us, and there we were in suits and everything – it just wasn’t us, and watching that film I knew that that was where we started to sell out. We had to do a lot of selling out then. Taking the MBE was a sell-out for me.

“You know, before you get an MBE the Palace writes to you to ask if you’re going to accept it, because you’re not supposed to reject it publicly and they sound you out first. I chucked the letter in with all the fan-mail, until Brian asked me if I had it. He and a few other people persuaded me that it was in our interests to take it, and it was hypocritical of me to accept it. But I’m glad, really, that I did accept it – because it meant that four years later I could use it to make a gesture.”

When he moved to New York in 1971, he liked to keep in touch with the UK, often through the music papers. The postcard above is typical of those he’d send from time to time. In October of that year, when I sent him a note to ask for an interview for a book I was writing a book about Phil Spector, he replied immediately. He could do better than that, he said. He was about to go into the studio with Spector. Within a day or two he’d arranged a return air ticket and a room at the St Regis Hotel, where he and Yoko were living. So I spent three days with them, watching John sort through Elvis 45s for his jukebox, attending the sessions for “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” — those brackets — at the Record Plant, and going with them to look at a town house on Bank Street in the West Village, which they ended up renting from Joe Butler, the drummer with the Lovin’ Spoonful.

Lennon had a way of including people in whatever was going on, which is how come Spector’s chauffeur and I ended up in the group photo on the picture bag of “Happy Xmas”. When I read a piece in The Times this week blaming him — and particularly the song “Imagine” — for all the ills of the 21st century, I thought back to the man I knew briefly, to his warmth and enthusiasm and courageous refusal to be confined by the entertainer’s role. We know now, of course, that he was complicated and difficult and sometimes cruel, and there are aspects of his life that will always be difficult to explain and excuse. That’s true of most of us. In his case, I can only speak as I found — while wishing, of course, that he could have been here to celebrate his 80th, and to give us his thoughts on the state of things.

Aug 4

42 Comments

Rhythm and booze

MP_Lon11

A funny old movement, pub rock. If, that is, it was a movement at all, which you would have some trouble deducing from the 71 tracks making up a diligently compiled three-CD anthology titled Surrender to the Rhythm. It’s a stylistic odyssey travelling all the way from the Darts’ ’50s rock and roll medley of “Daddy Cool” and “The Girl Can’t Help It” to the pop-funk of Supercharge’s “You Gotta Get Up and Dance” via most of the stops in between.

The subtitle is “The London pub rock scene of the Seventies”, and it certainly was a London phenomenon. The pubs I remember best in this connection are the Red Cow in Hammersmith, the Hope & Anchor in Islington and the Greyhound in the Fulham Palace Road. And, of course, the one in the picture, the Kensington in Russell Gardens, W14, just north of Olympia, which was where — at the prompting of my friend Charlie Gillett — I turned up one night in early 1973 to see a band called Bees Make Honey, whose repertoire veered from Louis Jordan to Chuck Berry.

Charlie’s Sunday-lunchtime Radio London show, Honky Tonk, was the parish magazine of pub rock. Before the Bees, he’d been listening to Eggs Over Easy, a mostly American band who proposed the shocking notion that there could be alternatives to progressive rock and the college/concert circuit: a relaxed, easy-going kind of music played in a relaxed, easy-going environment. The pubs fitted the music of people who still had Music from Big Pink in their ears and had more recently been listening to J. J. Cale, but also owned a copy of Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation.

As a transitional movement, there was no real consensus — least of all on trousers, that infallible barometer, which went from drainpipes to flares and back again — except a unanimity of belief in the necessity of sweeping away the dominance of an old guard attacked in Mick Farren’s famous 1977 NME essay. “The Titanic Sails at Dawn”. The bands coalescing around this scene in its early days included Roogalator, Brinsley Schwarz, Ducks DeLuxe, the Kursaal Flyers, Ace, Kokomo and Kilburn & the High Roads. As a back-to-basics movement, it set the scene for punk, with a crossover point defined by Dr Feelgood and Eddie & the Hot Rods.

There are some obvious choices here — the Brinsleys track that gives the collection its title, the Feelgoods’ “She Does It Right”, the Kilburns’ “Billy Bentley”, the 101ers’ “Keys to Your Heart”, Elvis Costello’s “Radio Sweetheart”, the Hot Rods’ “Writing on the Wall” — and others that I wouldn’t have associated with this idiom at all, such as Chris Rea’s “Fool”, the Jess Roden Band’s “You Can Keep Your Hat On” and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s “Sergeant Fury”. Occasionally there’s something that’s a delight to hear again: Sniff ‘n’ the Tears’s irresistible “Driver’s Seat”, Chris Spedding’s charming “Bedsit Girl”, Starry Eyed & Laughing’s jingle-jangle “Money Is No Friend of Mine” and Roogalator’s “Ride with the Roogalator”, featuring the roadhouse guitar of Danny Adler. Obvious omissions are anything by Kokomo or Dire Straits, or Ace’s “How Long”, surely pub rock’s finest three minutes (instead we get their “Rock and Roll Runaway”).

The biggest surprise to me was Cado Belle’s “Stone’s Throw from Nowhere”, which I’d never heard before: a coolly soulful recording with an elegant lead vocal by Maggie Reilly, in the idiom of Minnie Riperton or Randy Crawford, and the sort of guitar-playing, by Alan Darby, that you might have found on a Norman Whitfield production. Also on the soul side is Moon’s chunky “Don’t Wear It”, a reminder of the excellence of Noel McCalla, their lead singer. They were one of the bands who landed a major-label deal without finding commercial success.

For A&R people — and I was one at the time — the early pub rock bands were a bit of a conundrum. Their modesty of scale put them at odds with the prevailing ambition, which was to search for the next really big act. I was always uneasy about the lack of any sense of genuine innovation. I was being guided by a belief in linear evolution, and I was probably wrong. Andrew Lauder at United Artists was right to sign the Feelgoods, and Dave Robinson was right to use the scene as a platform for his Stiff Records artists. Sometimes it’s necessary to step back in order to prepare for the next leap forward, and that’s what pub rock was about.

* Surrender to the Rhythm is released on Grapefruit Records.

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