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Posts from the ‘Rock music’ Category

Nov 28

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The return of Shakin’ Stevens

shakin-stevensThe first time I was impressed by Shakin’ Stevens was in 1970, while idly playing through his debut album with his group, the Sunsets, a bunch of rockabilly hounds from Cardiff, on the cheap sound system in the listening room at the Melody Maker‘s old Fleet Street office. Called A Legend, produced by Dave Edmunds and released on the Parlophone label, it contained one track that I found I needed to hear over and over again: a wild version of “The Train Kept A-Rollin'”, originally written and recorded by the bandleader Tiny Bradshaw in 1951, in the idiom of Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway, and given a definitive rockabilly restyling five years later by Johnny Burnette’s Rock and Roll Trio, with the great Paul Burlison on guitar. It might be a heretical view, but I found the lubricious pounding of Stevens’ version even more powerful than Burnette’s hallowed recording.

Seven years later, while casting his musical Elvis!, the great Jack Good — creator of Six-Five Special, Oh Boy! and Shindig! — selected Stevens to play one of the show’s three incarnations of Presley. Tim Whitnall played the boy Elvis, Stevens played the “perfect” Elvis of “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog”, and P. J. Proby played the late Elvis. Each of them fitted his role perfectly, and I’ll never forget the impact of the finale, when Whitnall and Stevens stood with heads bowed as Proby, in full Elvis-in-Vegas costume, sang “American Trilogy” from a pulpit against a backdrop of the film of the endless motorcade of white Cadillacs at Presley’s funeral.

At that time Stevens was still virtually unknown to the general public. But the show was a success, running for two years at the (now demolished) Astoria on Charing Cross Road, and soon afterwards he finally made his breakthrough as a solo artist, exploiting his voice and his looks — a cross between Ricky Nelson and Chris Isaak — with a string of pop hits including “This Ole House” and “Green Door”. Since then he’s been seen on reality shows, oldies packages and charity galas. In 2010 he was in hospital for several weeks after suffering a heart attack while gardening.

When I saw that he had a new album out last month, I was reminded of how much I liked that “Train Kept A-Rollin'” and his performance as Elvis. So I listened to it, and was pleasantly surprised. Echoes of Our Times is, at least in part, an attempt to write songs inspired by his family history, which he traces back to Cornish copper miners. That’s how the album begins, and other songs refer to the experience of family members — including his father — in the First World War, to a great-grandfather’s vocation as a Primitive Methodist minister in Wales, and to a grandmother’s work with the Salvation Army.

It’s as if, back at the very start of his career, he’d heard Music from Big Pink and decided to take that route. An excellent band features banjos and harmonicas and mandolins and a harmonium and a general feeling of handmade quality, occasionally broadening to include a small horn section and a cello. Shaky sings very well, with great conviction. Time has abraded his tone a little, which is no bad thing; curiously, on different songs he reminded of both Lennon (“To Spread the Word”) and McCartney (“The Fire in Her Blood”), but mostly he sounds like himself. Not all the material is great, but “Suffer Little Children” is a really fine southern-style blues-ballad, on which his voice has something of the strained urgency of Don Henley. “Train of Time”, all hurtling rockabilly twang and slap, is another great railroad song to put alongside the one I still cherish from his very first recording session.

So has Shakin’ Stevens, at the age of 68, transformed himself into the Welsh Robbie Robertson? That might be putting it a bit strongly. But Echoes of Our Times is thoughtful, enjoyable and substantial enough to make posterity significantly modify its judgement of the nature and scale of his talent.

* Photograph: HEC Records

Aug 24

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David Enthoven: the last goodbye

EG King's RoadOn my way to David Enthoven’s funeral this morning, I walked from Sloane Square down the King’s Road and paused at No 63A, where it all began. The weather was glorious: in the perfect sunshine, it was easy to drift back to the Chelsea of an imagined and sometimes real ’60s.

David died in London last week, aged 72, five days after being diagnosed with kidney cancer. Behind that door and up a flight of stairs, he and Johnny Gaydon, his schoolfriend and first business partner, set up EG Management in 1969, with King Crimson as their first clients. Marc Bolan, ELP and Roxy Music soon joined the roster. They were great days. (And here’s the obituary I wrote for the Guardian.)

When I got to St Luke’s, a large 19th century Anglican church just off the King’s Road, it was already close to packed with people wanting to say farewell to an extraordinary man. As they lingered in the sunlit churchyard after the ceremony, the event had something of the qualities of an English garden party, which was just as it should have been.

Tim Clark, his friend and partner in IE:Music, his second management company, gave an address which stressed the life-enhancing qualities that made David special to every single member of the congregation. Robbie Williams, whose life and career David and Tim had salvaged and remade, sang “Moon River” — a lovely choice — accompanied by the acoustic guitar of Guy Chambers. Lucy Pullin and a choir sang “Angels”, which Williams and Chambers wrote after David and Tim had brought them together. Lamar led the singing of “Jerusalem”.

The congregation included Robert Fripp, the founder of King Crimson, and all five surviving members of Roxy Music from the sessions for the band’s debut album in the summer of 1972: Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera and Paul Thompson, who came down for the funeral from Newcastle, where he now plays the drums with Lindisfarne.

One of the morning’s pleasures, over which the man in whose memory we were gathered would certainly have shared a chuckle, was the sight of Fripp, Eno and Ferry (so much history there, from Ferry’s failed audition for King Crimson to Fripp and Eno’s collaboration on No Pussyfooting and beyond) joining the singing of “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. You don’t get that every day.

Jul 17

3 Comments

Alan Vega 1938-2016

SuicideThe most interesting rock music is often made when people from different backgrounds or disciplines are thrown together, united in a desire to create something previously unheard. That was what made the Beatles, the Who, the Velvet Underground and Roxy Music so special, and it lay behind the brilliance of Suicide, too.

The singer Alan Vega, who died on Saturday at the age of 78, and the keyboardist Martin Rev formed their duo in New York in the mid-1970s: they were part of the downtown scene that revolved around the Mercer Arts Centre and CBGB. Suicide’s eponymous 1977 debut album, released on the Red Star label, belongs with the Ramones’ first album, Television’s Marquee Moon, Talking Heads’ 77 and — from outside the New York scene — Père Ubu’s The Modern Dance and Devo’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo.

Vega was a visual artist who listened to La Monte Young and the Stooges. Rev had studied with the pianist Lennie Tristano (a unique figure who had a whole school of jazz named after him in the late 1940s) and admired Cecil Taylor. If they had a jukebox, it was probably packed with ? and the Mysterians and obscure early rockabilly 45s. Together they made outsider art that, although too scary for most tastes, influenced a generation of adventurous young musicians.

In January 1977 I reviewed their debut album for the Melody Maker; it seems to have been the first piece written about them in the British press. I loved their stripped-down aesthetic and Rev’s camouflaged musicianship. Naturally I focused on “Frankie Teardrop”, the album’s longest (at 10 minutes) and most extreme track: the story of a 20-year-old factory worker who, in a state of existential despair, kills himself and his young family. Against Rev’s minimalist backing of industrial electronic noise and racing-heartbeat drum machine, Vega’s breathless recitative is punctuated by screams, howls and whimpers.

A few months later they supported the Clash on a UK tour. Shortly afterwards I saw them at the Marquee, where they added an entire dimension to their recorded work, largely thanks to Vega’s compelling presence. My friend Howard Thompson, who had alerted me to their existence, got the album released in the UK in his capacity as head of A&R at Bronze Records.

That first album was recorded at Brooks Arthur’s 914 Studios in Blauvelt, Rockland County, where Bruce Springsteen’s Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ had been created four years earlier. Its influence is all over Springsteen’s Nebraska, recorded in 1982, and in 2005 Bruce used Vega and Rev’s lovely “Dream Baby Dream” as a concert-closing anthem during his Devils & Dust tour. (In this interview with the Guardian‘s Martin Longley, Vega described Springsteen’s version as “America’s national anthem”.)

Every track on Suicide had something interesting to offer, whether it was a hymn to a revolutionary icon (“Che”), a hymn to a girl (“Cheree”), or hymns to a lost future (“Rocket USA”) and a lost American innocence (“Ghost Rider”). What Kraftwerk were to Europe in the mid-’70s, Suicide were to the US: a snapshot of the Zeitgeist, an artful simplicity and some great grooves concealing profound and often troubling complexities.

* The photograph of Alan Vega (left) and Martin Rev is by Michael Robinson. It is taken from the back jacket of Suicide’s first album.

Jul 11

10 Comments

Radiohead’s ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’

Since its 11 songs include previously unreleased compositions whose origins date back to 1995, 2000 and 2008, I suppose it’s just a coincidence that Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool sounds like exactly the music the world needs at moment: reflective, sometimes sombre, but not ashamed to offer the consolation of beauty.

In my view, Radiohead keep getting better and better, and this is a work of great maturity. While, on the surface, regret and apprehension are the album’s dominant emotions, the music is subtly laced with a sense of hope that derives from the elegance of the songwriting and the inventiveness of the finely textured settings.

There isn’t a song and scarcely even a note here that I don’t love, but at this early stage (I waited until the CD release before buying it) I’m particularly taken with “Desert Island Disk” and “The Numbers”, both of which Thom Yorke sings against backings based on acoustic or near-acoustic guitar. The electronic washes on the former are typical of the care and imagination with which all the pieces have been assembled by the band and their producer, Nigel Godrich, while the latter introduces its bedrock minor-to-major strum via a brief visit to the land of Alice Coltrane.

If you haven’t already heard the lovely “Daydreaming”, click on it above to hear a good example of the ingredients coming together in a sonic collage which demonstrates that the work begun by the Beatles and George Martin is not yet exhausted. Throughout the album, Jonny Greenwood’s arrangements for string orchestra and female voices are like an additional limb of the band rather than a bolt-on extra.

A Moon Shaped Pool succeeds in one of the greatest tasks that art can attempt, which is to expand the personal into the universal. To the violence and bitterness and cynicism that surround us in this strange, misshapen and unfamiliar moment of history, it represents a quiet rebuke and — as much as art can be — an antidote.

Jun 6

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Bruce Springsteen at Wembley

Bruce River Wembley

Is it a fan’s wishful imagination, or does Bruce Springsteen reserve something special for the start of his London shows? I think back, in particular, to the spellbound harmonica and piano introduction to “Thunder Road” in a pin spot at Hammersmith Odeon in 1975 and the cathartic, eyes-closed rush through “Born to Run” at Wembley Arena six years later. Last night at Wembley Stadium it was a wholly unexpected solo-at-the-piano version of “Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street” from Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., slowed down, like he did with “For You” in ’75, but still a little trip back to the unshadowed wordspinning joy of youth: “Mary Lou, she found out how to cope / She rides to heaven on a gyroscope / The Daily News asks her for the dope / She says, ‘Man, the dope’s that there’s still hope.'”

If that was one for the fans, so was the next: “Seeds”, which I don’t believe he plays all that often. First the harsh voice against the stripped rockabilly guitar, and then an eruption of full-tilt rock and roll thunder — a thousand guitars, a hundred horns, the shout of a Hammond organ, the implacable backbeat, the measured walk of the bass, all churning on and on and on towards some invisible horizon — that reminds you of exactly what this music can do, in the right hands. And the realism of the lyrics: a man drags his family across the country, searching for work, seeing the homeless men by the railroad track, listening to the children’s “graveyard cough”. And watching the world of other men go by: “Big limousine, shiny and black / You don’t look forward, you don’t look back.”

“Sorry, son, it’s gone, gone, gone,” the job-seeker is told. What hasn’t gone is Springsteen’s magical ability to make an audience both dance and think, sometimes in the same song. Over the next three and a half hours of a wonderfully warm evening there were many more moments of contrast between exhilaration and reflection, from the dedication of “Tougher Than the Rest” (a gorgeous duet with Patti Scialfa) to Muhammad Ali to the fury of “Death to My Hometown”, from “Sherry Darling” to “Candy’s Room”, from “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)” to “American Skin (41 Shots)”. That last one resonates even more powerfully than it did when he wrote it in 1999, prompted by the shooting of the unarmed Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old street peddler from Guinea, by four plain-clothes officers of the New York Police Department who were later acquitted of second-degree murder. Last night he gave it full justice in a sombre, intense reading that was, for me, the centrepiece of the concert.

Billed as a tour revisiting The River, it has become something much less specific and more inclusive, although half a dozen songs from that great 1980 double album studded the set (I was sorry he didn’t include “Wreck on the Highway”, but you can’t have everything). This being an arena, the sound was never going to be more than an approximation, albeit a powerful one, of how he and the E Street Band can sound. The salient bits — the lead vocals, Nils Lofgren’s howling guitar solo on “Because the Night”, Jake Clemons’ invocation of his late uncle on “Jungleland”, Charles Giordano’s keyboard salute to Danny Federici on “Hungry Heart” — were fully audible, of course, but you’d wish that everyone hearing them on this tour could also know their impact in halls of more modest size and human scale — like Hammersmith Odeon, to which he returned with the Seeger Sessions show a few years ago — where giant screens are not required and the musical nuances of which they’re capable might be fully explored.

Still, one thing a Springsteen show never lacks is a sense of intimacy. And as it had begun, so it ended: Bruce alone with the audience, strapping on an acoustic guitar to summon our collective history with “Thunder Road”, just as he did on his last visit three years ago but somehow different and still the perfect closure to yet another night invested with so much emotion that every song had the weight of an encore.

Apr 26

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Brian Eno: The Ship

Brian Eno The ShipSomewhere in West London, there is said to be a dealer in second-hand hi-fi equipment whose face lights up every time Brian Eno walks in. Eno’s interest in speakers of all types and sizes was on show this morning in his Notting Hill studio, where a small audience gathered to listen to a 15-channel 3D mix of his new album, The Ship. After the playback, I took the photograph above in order to give a partial sense of the configuration.

Originally commissioned by a gallery in Stockholm, The Ship has also been seen in Barcelona and Geneva in a larger audio-visual form which enables Eno to describe the installation as “songs you can walk around in”. When plans to install it at Somerset House fell apart, Eno decided to present this stripped-down version privately on his own premises, but there are still hopes of a full public treatment in London in the near future. I hope that happens, because to sit in the middle of it — with the sounds coming from all angles and heights, distributed by Eno and his collaborator, Peter Chilvers, according to the individual speakers’ inherent characteristics — was a very worthwhile experience.

This, Eno says, is his First World War album, treating the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 as a prelude to the slaughter that began on the Western Front two years later. To paraphrase him, its subjects are the relationship between hubris and paranoia, and the way the oceans and the land persist while “we pass in a cloud of chatter”. I had no idea of the theme before I sat down to listen, but I couldn’t miss the sense of a threnody running through the two pieces making up the album: “The Ship” itself, 21 minutes long, and a 26-minute suite in three parts called “Fickle Sun”, in which voices and lyrics are allowed to drift in a sea of sounds largely familiar from Eno’s adventures in ambient music.

At first, listening to the slow electronic washes and bleeps and the dislocated recitative of “The Ship”, and noting a tolling bell, I wondered if this was his elegant way of saying goodbye to his friend David Bowie. Wrong there, apparently. But a lovely piece nonetheless, its overlapping layers of synthetic sounds and occasional choirs of distant shadow-voices gradually building a mood of subdued disquiet.

“Fickle Sun” begins with tintinnabulation and flutter, soon thickened by a muffled bass-drum and a wandering rubberised bass line. Eno’s sombre, careful delivery of his stately melody reminds me of Nico singing “Frozen Warnings” or “The End” — at least until organ and staccato synth-brass chords intrude with a faint echo of Holst’s “Mars”, raising the tension before the textures thin out again to support a conversation between the double-tracked natural voice and its synthesised sibling. The short second movement features the actor Peter Serafinowicz reading Eno’s poem “The Hour is Thin” against simple acoustic piano figures: “The hour is thin / Trafalgar Square is calm / Birds and cold black dark / The final famine of a wicked sun…” The suite concludes with a gently paced cover of Lou Reed’s “I’m Set Free”, that famous declaration from the Velvets’ third album, with Eno’s lead vocal, sometimes double-tracked or harmonised, floating on the bell-like keyboards of Jon Hopkins, the guitar of Leo Abrahams and the violin and viola of Neil Catchpole.

Placed at the end of the album instead of being located in the middle of side two, as it was in its original incarnation on The Velvet Underground, this deceptively reassuring song seems even more unsettling. Which, at the end of a cycle of pieces dedicated to investigating the eternal interplay of hubris and paranoia, was presumably the intention.

* The Ship is released on April 29 on the Opal label in various CD and vinyl formats. The full audio-visual installation is travelling to Belgrade, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Mantua and Lodz.

Mar 14

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Keith Emerson 1944-2016

The NiceKeith Emerson died the other day, aged 71, apparently by his own hand. According to Mari Kawaguchi, his partner of more than 20 years, he had been thrown into a depression by the effect of nerve damage on his ability to play his keyboard instruments, with a series of concerts in prospect. Whatever one’s opinion of Emerson’s work, it is extraordinarily sad that his career should seemingly have ended in that particular form of defeat. Of one thing there was no doubt: his love of music.

I saw him first with the Nice at the Nottingham Boat Club in 1967, when they were a four-piece, with David O’List on guitar, Lee Jackson on bass and Brian Davison on drums. This was before they had made their first record. In a small room, in front of perhaps 100 people, they were exciting and stimulating; there was already a degree of showmanship emanating from Emerson, but not so much as to get in the way of the notes.

Two years later, in October 1969, I went on the road with them, on assignment for the Melody Maker: a three-day trip taking in Newcastle City Hall, the Essen Blues Festival in Germany and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. O’List had gone by then, and the remaining three were good company. In Newcastle, greeted by an ecstatic audience, they premiered sections of Emerson’s Five Bridges Suite, written in honour of Jackson’s home town. In Essen they followed Deep Purple and Amon Duul on stage, and were met by a muted reception. In Amsterdam’s beautiful 19th century concert hall the audience was respectfully enthusiastic; I recorded in my notebook that the applause for their version of Tim Hardin’s “Hang on to a Dream” seemed to go on for about five minutes.

This was a time when young British rock musicians, some of them with a grounding in classical music, were starting to stretch themselves in bands such as King Crimson, Soft Machine, Egg, Yes, Caravan and East of Eden. Emerson’s decision to leave the band and form a new trio with Greg Lake and Carl Palmer in 1970 represented a defining moment at which all that bright-eyed enthusiasm and musical adventurousness tipped over into excess. I saw ELP at close quarters during that year’s Isle of Wight Festival, their first large-scale gig, and I thought the whole experience was dreadful. Lake’s insistence on having a Persian rug to stand on while playing was just one of the factors that put them on their way to becoming a primary template for Spinal Tap.

But wind back a little, to a couple of months after I spent that long weekend in the company of the Nice. In December 1969 they played Fillmore West in San Francisco: here’s an audio recording of how they sounded back then. Surprisingly good, I think. When Emerson takes a long Hammond solo on “For Example”, they really hit a groove. The elements of the music are kept in reasonable proportions, with ambition and execution still in balance.

But you can sense where Emerson wanted his music to go, and why he felt he needed a different set of accomplices. To be brutal, Jackson and Davison weren’t cool enough. He needed a couple of guys who could play even faster and on whom long hair and twenty-guinea Anello & Davide stack-heeled snakeskin boots looked as natural as they did on him. For better or worse, he found them.

* The photograph of the Nice shows (clockwise from top): David O’List, Lee Jackson, Binky Davison, Keith Emerson.

Feb 4

4 Comments

John Cale in the round

John Cale RoundhouseThrough his contribution to the first two Velvet Underground albums, John Cale was one of the people who shifted the tectonic plates of popular music in the 20th century. Maybe it was unreasonable to expect more. But I always believed, based on his work with La Monte Young’s Dream Syndicate, the three albums of archive material from 1965-69 released by Table of the Elements a few years ago, his arrangements on Nico’s The Marble Index, his collaboration with Terry Riley on The Church of Anthrax, his instrumental music for the Warhol films Eat and Kiss, and various other pieces of evidence, that he had the potential to go a long way beyond the rock and roll template into which he settled with Vintage Violence, Paris 1919 and their various successors, whatever his occasional flirtations with punkish sedition (such as the line “We could all feel safe/Like Sharon Tate” which so upset the Island Records hierarchy in 1976).

The weird thing about Cale was that so much of his post-Velvets music sounded like the Velvets had never existed, which was why it was so pleasing to hear the way he treated “(I Keep a) Close Watch” at the Roundhouse last night, during his spot in a week-long series called In the Round which has also been featuring Marianne Faithfull, Edwyn Collins, Mulatu Astatke, Scritti Politti and others.

Even if, like many of his songs from the mid-’70s, it sounds as though he never quite got round to completing it, “Close Watch” remains Cale’s most poignantly affecting ballad. It’s perfectly fine when sung straight and solo, as he did with the version included in the excellent Fragments of a Rainy Season, recorded during a 1992 tour and released by Hannibal that same year. But last night he and his three-piece band subjected it to a complete overhaul, stretching its sturdy sinews and ligaments almost to snapping point with an arrangement based on waves and surges of growling, shrieking electronic sound. It was a mighty noise, and it gave the song a devastating impact.

Wearing a conductor’s black tail coat, black T-shirt and jeggings and brown lace-up ankle boots, with his hair dyed silvery blonde in a sort of Small-Faces-circa-Itchycoo Park style, Cale was in relatively genial mood, although he didn’t say much. There was a “Hello, London — good to see you” and an unsatisfactory introduction to his keyboards-player (doubling bass guitar), guitarist and drummer, both of whom doubled on electronic bits and pieces: “This is Nick, this is Dusty, and this is (indecipherable).” Given the attitude with which the three musicians approached arrangements that required not just precision but commitment, and in the absence of any other way for the audience to identify them, he might have done better.

The repertoire in his 100-minute set included “Coral Moon”, “Changes Made”, “Hemingway” and a densely propulsive final pass at Jonathan Richman’s “Pablo Picasso”, a reminder of what a creative rearranger of other people’s classics he can be. But, with the exception of “Close Watch”, it was still mostly generic rock and roll. At 73, and seemingly in good nick, there’s time for him to stretch his capacious intellect and wide range of technical skills in other directions once more. I do wish he would.

Jun 19

7 Comments

Lisa says

Lisa Robinson

Lisa Robinson’s There Goes Gravity — subtitled “A life in rock and roll” — contains photographs of the author with Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, John and Yoko, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Ahmet Ertegun, Iggy Pop, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Patti Smith, all of the Ramones, Johnny Rotten, David Johansen and Johnny Thunders, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, Bono, Eminem, Dr Dre, Jay Z, Smokey Robinson and Berry Gordy Jr, Kanye West, and Lady Gaga. Oh, and John McEnroe. What it doesn’t have is a photograph of Lisa with me. So I thought I’d fix that.

Here we are, caught by the flashbulb of her friend Leee Black Childers, who became the Weegee of the Max’s Kansas City/CBGB set. This picture was taken on July 6, 1972, according to the caption on the back, written in Lisa’s sloping hand. Apparently we’re at a restaurant in New York City called Butler’s, attending — and I can hardly believe I’m writing these words — a press reception for Black Sabbath.

We were, of course, on our way to somewhere else. I was in New York for the relocated Newport Jazz Festival, so we might have been bound for a concert by Ornette Coleman at Lincoln Centre’s Philharmonic Hall (where I think I embarrassed her by leaning over to invite Jerry Wexler and the New York Post writer Al Aronowitz to shut up) or Cecil Taylor at Carnegie Hall. Or we could have been heading off-piste to the St Regis Hotel to hear Mabel Mercer.

When she came to Europe in those days she stayed the Ritz in London and L’Hotel in Paris, and always insisted on changing her allotted room shortly after arrival, as a matter of principle. But New York was the capital of the world, and she was an excellent companion and sometimes guide. Mabel Mercer would have been her idea. Thanks to her, I saw the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Centre, Television (with Richard Hell) and Blondie, Talking Heads (then still a three-piece) and the Ramones, all before they had their first recording contracts — and it was she who pointed out Seymour and Linda Stein of Sire Records at a front table at Max’s, moving their lips with word-perfect accuracy to the songs of Talking Heads, whom they were extremely keen to sign.

Like most musicians, she never went to bed before the small hours and got up when civilians were having lunch. She was out every night. She spent hours on the phone and could be a kindred spirit. She loved to gossip but know how to keep a secret, or at least how to share one with care. She was an early adopter and a good interviewer, adept at establishing a lasting rapport, which means the book contains unusually valuable stuff from many of the people with whom she was photographed. And she had a sharp New York wit, often employed to deflate pomposity (her best friend, and the book’s dedicatee, is the social satirist Fran Lebowitz). When the Stones hired her to be their press adviser on their 1975 US tour, she had no scruples about spending a little time on the dark side because she knew that — like her closeness to Page or Reed — it would give her marvellous material.

We lost touch some time before she became a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, where she has written about stars and edited the music issues for the last 15 years. Her very entertaining book came out last year and has just been published in paperback (by Riverhead). It’s good value if you enjoy stories about hanging out with Rick Rubin or Walter Yetnikoff, or anecdotes like the one about lending Jagger a pair of her lace knickers to wear on stage when his own underwear went missing. It’s a form of higher gossip but the less frivolous stuff is always worthwhile, too, because she engages with her subjects and approaches them from shrewdly chosen angles. She doesn’t write much about the music itself: she was an early friend of most of the great American rock critics, but she never wanted to be one. Good for her.

May 13

8 Comments

Taking on the British Invasion

Bobby Comstock

Fifty years ago this month, Bobby Comstock’s version of Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” was trying and failing to make it into the US and UK charts. It’s interesting to me not just as a favourite record from an almost freakishly fruitful year but as an example of one response to the British Invasion: an American artist copying a British approach to an American idiom.

Born in 1941 in Ithaca, New York, Bobby Comstock is a singer and guitarist who nibbled at the fringe of the Top 50 in 1958 with a lightly rocked-up treatment of “Tennessee Waltz”. It was released on the Triumph label, started by Herb Abramson after his departure from Atlantic Records, and since the 17-year-old Comstock’s early patrons also included Alan Freed and Dick Clark, it’s a little surprising that he didn’t do better. Five years later, having fallen in with the successful publisher Wes Farrell and the songwriting/production team of Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein and Richie Gottehrer, he released “Let’s Stomp” on the Lawn label. Despite climbing no higher than No 57, it became a party favourite and was widely covered over the years. Thanks to his association with Feldman, Goldstein and Gottehrer, he also played guitar on the Angels’ wonderful “My Boyfriend’s Back”, a girl-group classic.

“I’m a Man” is something very different and vastly superior: a raw blue-eyed R&B record with a crunching guitar/bass/drum riff, sinister organ, and lashings of echo on Comstock’s very impressive vocal. I don’t know who plays the eight bars of jagged guitar solo — probably Bobby himself — but it’s as impressive as anything Jimmy Page produced in his days as a teenaged session man over on the other side of the Atlantic.

Comstock grew up in the middle of the doo-wop era, and his earliest heroes included Chuck Berry, but I’d guess that “I’m a Man” sounds the way it does because in the summer of 1964 he and his band, the Counts, had supported the Rolling Stones on a handful of East Coast dates, finishing at Carnegie Hall. As he watched the chart-storming English longhairs delivering their interpretations of hard-core R&B songs to audiences in Pittsburgh, Pennsylania and Harrisburg, West Virginia as well as on Seventh Avenue in New York City, he must have felt he’d been given a licence to try it himself.

The single came out on Ascot Records in the US and United Artists in the UK; the copy I bought back then is pictured above. I had a Saturday job in a record shop at the time, and I guess that’s how I first heard it, while checking out the new releases. It certainly didn’t get much, if any, radio play.

Comstock had no more hits but made a good living for the rest of his career as a performer and backing musician — to artists including Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley — on the rock and roll revival shows promoted by Dick Clark and Richard Nader. He’s now living in retirement in Southern California, leaving the rest of us to carry on listening to “I’m a Man”, a highlight of his 24th year.

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