THE YARDBIRDS: THE MOST BLUESWAILING FUTURISTIC WAY-OUT HEAVY BEAT SOUND by Peter Stanfield

Peter Stanfield wrote an unusual, rather scholarly, book about The Who that I reviewed on Just Backdated in 2021. Entitled A Band With Built-In Hate, it referenced the writings of critic Nik Cohn to position The Who as a Pete Townshend/Kit Lambert art project as much as a career rock band, a perception I found fascinating if a tad implausible in light of their longevity. No such slightly left-field insights find their way into Stanfield’s book on The Yardbirds, but it’s just as scholarly in a pointed, research-driven fashion. 

        Stanfield appreciated my review of his Who book and about 15 months ago the publishers of this book sent me an early draft with a request that I write an endorsement for its back cover. “Not so much a biography of The Yardbirds as an earnest plea for their importance in the story of UK rock to be fully recognised,” I wrote after reading it, “and a righteous endorsement of their significance, alongside a comprehensive history of the development of R&B in the UK during the early 1960s. The definitive Yardbirds book.”   

That quote appears on the cover but as it happens I wrote a bit more than that, adding: “As author Peter Stanfield points out, The Yardbirds went from R&B to psychedelia and acid rock and wound up as precursors to heavy metal via Led Zeppelin; and, in the course of this bumpy journey, became the training ground for Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, not a bad legacy by any means. Stanfield’s research has involved a comprehensive trawl through the cuttings files of every UK music magazine and elsewhere not only for mentions of The Yardbirds but of the growth of UK R&B in general.” 

        Clearly that was too much for a short paragraph on the back cover, but having now received a hard copy of the book, my reward for the endorsement, I stick by what I said, adding only that after about the first third of the book the story of UK R&B gives way to the somewhat chequered history of The Yardbirds themselves and how, with Beck on guitar, they expanded their repertoire into hi-tech music that was sonically way ahead of its time.  

        I never saw The Yardbirds on stage and by the time I reached Melody Maker in 1970 they’d sort of morphed into Led Zeppelin and/or Renaissance, two groups I wrote about, the former far more than the latter of course. But even up in North Yorkshire, where groups like The Yardbirds seldom visited, I was well aware of them, albeit not in their original incarnation as R&B raver-uppers but as a band that seemed to have taken their cue from chanting monks. The slightly haunting sound of their 1965 singles ‘For Your Love’ and, more especially, ‘Still I’m Sad’ reminded me of Joe Meek’s production of ‘Johnny Remember Me’ by John Leyton, a record I love, but the former prompted Clapton to quit the band on account of it being insufficiently purist for his tender blues sensibilities, or so we were told at the time. 

        Stanfield is having none of it. “Clapton’s departure from The Yardbirds was expertly stage-managed,” he writes, “an object lesson in how to deflect attention away from the real cause of his leaving – his personal behaviour and a falling out with management – and onto a story that lasted down the years.” We’re left to ponder on the specifics of Clapton’s “personal behaviour” but his leave-taking did The Yardbirds a favour in the long term as his replacement, the mercurial Beck, dragged them into the modern world where for two years they, alongside The Who, became innovative pioneers as pop morphed into rock. So fond was Beck of the song that opened the door to The Yardbirds for him that he gleefully played ‘For Your Love’ during his 50-year career celebration concert at the Hollywood Bowl in 2016, the film of which I can recommend for anyone seeking confirmation of Beck’s outstanding talent. 

        But I digress. The Yardbirds had “a sound unequalled by any other group”, wrote Richard Spaete in American Hit Parader magazine in 1966. Stanfield agrees. “The sonic adventurism of The Yardbirds (and The Who) kept them ahead of the pack of R&B-scene graduates,” he writes, noting also that The Small Faces and a few lesser known acts were in their slipstream too. No lesser critic than Lester Bangs also agreed: ”They came stampeding in and just blew everybody clean off the tracks,” Bangs is quoted in Stanfield’s introduction. “They were so fucking good, in fact, that people were imitating ’em as much as a decade later, and getting rich doing it.” No prizes for guessing who he’s referring to there. 

        This book about what Stanfield calls the “most blueswailing futuristic way-out heavy beat sound” is an ambitious as The Yardbirds were under Beck and his successor, Jimmy Page. Stanfield has trawled through the UK music press, mostly notably Melody Maker I’m pleased to note, for every mention of the group as it moved through its various incarnations, and he’s righteously distressed that for all their hard work and inventiveness they never quite made it in the manner he believes they deserved. It was a mixture of bad luck, faltering management and recurrent instability, with singer Keith Relf’s health a seemingly perpetual issue, while bassist/second guitarist Chris Dreja’s real ambition – in which he succeeded – was to become a professional photographer. Original bass player Paul Samwell-Smith became a successful record producer, drummer Jim McCarty kept the flag flying and we all know how the careers of Clapton, Beck and Page panned out. 

        Written sympathetically with an obvious enthusiasm for The Yardbirds and the music they created, Stanfield’s book has 428 pages, 40 of which are reference notes, as befitting an academic, an index and, throughout, a selection of black and white illustrations from the author’s own collection. 

ROCK & ROLL HAll Of FAME, 2025

Time was when the America’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame sent out cassettes containing one song by the nominees for that particular year. These were superseded by CDs which, in turn, were superseded by links to MP3s. I’ve kept most of the cassettes and CDs I received, the earliest cassette 1992 which suggests I’ve been a voter for 33 years, no doubt longer than most. They also sent out brochures and I seem to have hung on to most of these too but this year it’s gone all-digital and instead of writing down my nominees on a perforated card at the back of the brochure and mailing it to an address in New York I’ve been invited to use a link that, once my credentials have been verified, will enable me to vote with my mouse for the first time.

My R&R HoF cassettes and CDs. 

That 1992 cassette contains music by that year’s nominees, among them The Yardbirds, Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Sam & Dave, Johnny Cash, Buffalo Springfield, David Bowie and Booker T. & The MGs. I can’t remember who I voted for, probably Yardbirds, Velvets, Hendrix, Cash and Bowie, and maybe Booker T. because I’ve always admired Steve Cropper’s guitar playing and back in the day was in a band that played ‘Time Is Tight’, albeit not nearly as in time or as tightly as the MGs. 

I have long considered resigning as a voter. I believe there are too many inductees with the result that standards are slipping, a bit like the House of Lords. Certain acts that deserve to be inducted, among them Richard Thompson and Slade, have been ignored despite letters of protest I included in my mailed ballots, a form of dissent no longer available to me – see above. And I’m getting too old to care or even know all I ought to know about some of the inductees. I have never owned records, either vinyl or CDs, by seven of the 14 acts nominated this year, which is not to say I don't know what they sound like, just that they’re not to my taste.  

        But here we go again. For this year’s ballot I am invited to pick up to seven of the following: Bad Company, Black Crowes, Mariah Carey, Chubby Checker, Joe Cocker, Billy Idol, Joy Division/New Order, Cyndi Lauper, Maná, Oasis, Outkast, Phish, Soundgarden and White Stripes. 

        I think the words up to are pertinent here because seven is too many. I’ll vote for Bad Company, largely because I loved Free and the two surviving members of Free, singer Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke, deserve to in the HoF and are the only members of Bad Company who’ll show up anyway; sadly, guitarist Mick Ralphs is, I’m told, confined to a nursing home and bassist Boz Burrell died in 2006. 

        I’ll vote for Chubby Checker because his two great hits, ‘The Twist’ and ‘Let’s Twist Again’, were simply great records I’ve always loved, even if they were a tad gimmicky. 

        I’ll vote for Joe Cocker and not just because he’s a Yorkshireman, as am I, but because his sole number one UK hit was the best Beatles interpretation ever. 

        I’ll vote for Joy Division/New Order, for their music and to see whether or not Peter Hook will turn up and cause trouble. 

        I’ll vote for Oasis because they’re Brits and Slade fans, and also in the hope that they’ll disrupt proceedings too, but I guess that’s unlikely now that Noel and Liam have buried the hatchet in the interests of fiscal opportunity. 

        And I’ll vote for White Stripes because I like them. 

        That’s only six out of the seven. Unless any Just Backdated readers persuade me otherwise, those are all the names I’ll click with my mouse before April 21, the day voting ends. 

BECOMING LED ZEPPELIN

The promotional material for this film covering the first 14 months of Led Zeppelin’s stellar career suggests that their success was achieved “against all the odds” and that it is the “first officially sanctioned” film about the group. Neither statement is true. The second falsehood is easily rebutted by drawing attention to their 1976 movie The Song Remains The Same, their 2003 five-hour plus career retrospective 2-DVD package, and Celebration Day, the concert movie of their final appearance, when the reformed trio of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones performed with Jason Bonham, son of John, on drums, at London’s 02 in 2007. All three films were authorised by the group. The first falsehood is more nuanced but I would argue that the odds on achieving success were pretty short for a quartet that included two of the most experienced musicians on the 1960s London session circuit, one of whom had a keen eye for prevailing trends in rock music, and was managed by a Herculean, no-nonsense strongman who’d operated at the sharp end of the rock’n’roll trade for about seven years. 

        Quite why Page, Plant and Jones feel the need to tell these fibs is a bit of a mystery but mystery was always an essential commodity in Led Zeppelin’s bag of tricks. Let in too much light and you’re just another band, keep people guessing and you’re special, seems to have been mastermind Page’s mantra from day one; and, in his wisdom, which has never been in short supply, Page has prudently given the nod to a film that explains how they got where they did, but not what they did when they got there.  

        Becoming Led Zeppelin lets in a bit of that light in making clear that once the starting pistol sounded, Led Zeppelin set off at a furious pace, leaving little to chance. Realising at their first rehearsal in August 1968 that his group had something pretty special when they played together, and that this was their strongest card, Page established a rigorous work ethic from the outset and the others were happy to follow his lead. They made the road their home and recorded their first two LPs in the space of eight months, much of the second while on tour in America. Page and manager Peter Grant were quick to recognise that the kind of music they performed was more likely to find a receptive audience in America, which just happened to be where the biggest returns could be made, not that anyone mentions this.

        But before all this happens Becoming Led Zeppelin takes us back to the childhoods of the four boys. Baby boomers all, all bar Plant were raised in families that encouraged their musical ambitions and Jones’ family, the Baldwins, were professional musicians themselves. It was a black and white world but all the families were sufficiently affluent to own cameras and the kiddie pictures offer a sentimental touch not generally associated with Led Zeppelin; even the hardest of rockers were infants once. It would have been nice to include Grant, a virtual fifth member, in this anecdotal dip into the past but he’s ignored, as he is during almost all of what follows. 

        Next, we move on to influences, with each member allotted a few minutes to say how they were inspired by Lonnie Donegan (Page), Sonny Boy Williamson and Little Richard (Plant), bass players in general (Jones) and James Brown and Gene Krupa (Bonham). That old footage of 13-year-old Page skiffling away on a guitar twice his size on TV in 1957 is still presciently charming, and I enjoyed the footage of their heroes, so a nod here to whoever researched the old clips. 

        The preparatory years are also fun: Page and Jones as dapper young professionals on the studio circuit – they both played on Shirley Bassey’s 007 theme ‘Goldfinger’, arranged by Jones, amongst many other notable records – before the former is invited to join The Yardbirds and express himself at last; Plant in and out of various experimental outfits in the Midlands, one of which includes Bonham who is torn between drumming and the family building business. 

       When the four find one another they really were special. Much of the footage of early Led Zeppelin in the film has been seen before but there’s some new stuff and even familiar material has been enhanced. Here we have Page, his long black hair obscuring his features, conjuring up shards of jagged chords on the rather shabby looking, custom-painted Telecaster gifted to him by his pal Jeff Beck; a maestro on lightning fast solos, slides and the scraping of the violin. We see Jones running on the spot as he feverishly plucks the strings of the Fender Jazz Bass he used for years, its long neck swaying dangerously close to Plant on stages much smaller than those we grew accustomed to seeing Zep play on later in their career. The young Plant, at 20, is much thinner than he is today, a shaman in the making, trading vocal shrieks with Page’s bent notes, his curly hair bouncing, forever on the move. And at the back there’s Bonham, tumbling into his drums, grinning as he maintains a steady rhythm with Jones yet always looking to accentuate whatever Page is playing or Plant singing with a roll or a crash or an explosion everywhere. “I fell in love with his right foot,” says Jones at one point. 

        Led Zeppelin were truly fantastic, full of energy, in the early days but the suggestion that they toured America before the UK because they were ignored at home is open to question. The press in the UK didn’t ignore them – the earliest ever feature appeared in Melody Maker, written by Chris Welch after Page visited the office without prior warning, and I even wrote about them in the Bradford Telegraph & Argus before I joined MM. They chose to tour the US first simply because Page and Grant saw greater opportunities there and it was therefore advantageous to do so. Rolling Stone in the US may have been dismissive but that was really an exception. By and large, they were loved wherever they went, as the rapturous fans in their audiences – many of them female – seen in the film testify. 

        The present day interviews are candid and occasionally revealing with screen time shared impartially. His silver hair held back in a ponytail, Page looks dignified and, as ever, is the most enthused, contented and diplomatic, his pride in Led Zeppelin undimmed. Jones, traditionally the most reticent member of the group, looks the youngest, his hair trim, his features eager. He has plenty to say, which is refreshing, and he comes across as very likeable, modest too, almost as if 12 years in Led Zeppelin was just another session date in his work sheet. “Led Zeppelin? A silly name,” he says. “But we were stuck with it.” Plant, craggy, his golden hair turned to bronze and tumbling everywhere, is the most droll, the slight grin and twinkle in his eye suggesting there may have been times when he’s looked upon Led Zeppelin as a youthful folly. “My family wanted me to be a chartered accountant,” he says, tongue firmly in cheek. Of his first plane flight to the US he expresses astonishment at being served a meal on a plate with real cutlery that in different circumstances he might consider stealing. Bonham is represented by a hitherto unheard interview he did around 1970 that acts as a voice over, and he too seems to be in a state of perpetual wonder at all that happened to Led Zeppelin in such a short space of time. His wife Pat warned him on more than one occasion not to get mixed up with “that Planty”. 

        The emphasis, though, is on the music, and Becoming Led Zeppelin features heaps of terrific footage from America and the UK, some hitherto unseen, at last by me, though at just over two hours, it is pretty long and could have been trimmed, especially during the final half hour. If its intention is to find new fans in the 21st Century, it’ll probably succeed, especially as it stops long before Led Zeppelin reached their apogee two or three years later and dutifully ignores the stairway to indulgence and subsequent mischief that led indirectly to their demise. 

MARIANNE FAITHFULL (1946-2025)

The obituaries will have been written long ago and filed away with others for whom a long life seemed unlikely. Marianne herself probably didn’t expect to reach 78 either but there was a stubbornness to her character, a resilience that kept her going no matter the bullets that shot her down, even during that dark period in the early 1970s when she lived on Soho streets and begged for change to feed her heroin habit. At the time I was the News Editor of Melody Maker and not once in the three years I held that position was her name mentioned during the editorial meetings we held each Wednesday to decide on the contents of the following week’s paper. No one ever proposed an interview with her, even when Decca Records released a compilation LP called The World Of Marianne Faithfull that landed on my desk for review. Marianne Faithfull? Who wants yesterday’s girl? 

        I was in love with her in 1964, as was every teenage boy I knew and probably a few girls too. Our first sighting of her was on TV, in black and white, singing her two early hits ‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘Come And Stay With Me’. With her long blonde hair, perfectly sculpted nose and shy, angelic smile, she was the girlfriend we all of us wanted but couldn’t hope to have. Descended on her mother’s side from European nobility, she was virginal, prim, untouchable. We learned she was educated in a convent where nuns no doubt impressed upon her the merits of chastity, and she took these lessons to heart, modestly buttoning up her knee-length black dress to its lacy neck so there showed not a trace of cleavage. I would have gathered flowers for her, bought her trinkets and taken off my jacket to place on the ground so that her tiny feet might avoid a puddle beneath them and if, by chance, this gesture was insufficient to save them from the dirt I would willingly have knelt before her to wash those dainty feet and afterwards lovingly dried them with a soft towel. And were she to have rewarded me with a kiss on the back of my hand it would have remained unwashed to this day. Come and stay with me? Just say the word, my dearest. 

        Mick liked trophy girlfriends and when the sister of Britain’s top model proved unable to offer him the satisfaction he craved his eyes landed on Marianne who, by all accounts, had rejected him out of hand when they first met at a party hosted by Stones manager Andrew Oldham. She found him crude, unmannered, insolent, as did most of the UK population over 30. Marianne eventually surrendered and as a couple they became an enduring image of the Swinging Sixties, rivalling John and Yoko, and like Yoko she brought to her lover radical culture he couldn’t find elsewhere, alternative ideas, art, poetry, cinema and theatre, a different way of thinking. Determined to be more than the sparkling jewel on Mick’s arm, she became a promising actor on both stage and film. Blithely, Mick refused for years to give her the credit she deserved. Her life reached some kind of terrible apogee in 1967 when she was discovered wrapped only in a fur rug at Keith’s infamous house party at Redlands, raided by police tipped off by the News Of The World, the cruel injustice of the jail terms imposed on Mick and Keith matched only by the injustice suffered to Marianne’s reputation.

        When the affair with Mick was over there was a miscarriage, followed by a suicide attempt and years of drug dependency. She hurtled downwards. She was now a harlot and it would take the best part of a woeful decade for her to redeem herself. It came with the extraordinary 1979 album Broken English, a record bursting with obscenities. “Why’d you let her suck your cock?” she sang on ‘Why D’Ya Do It’, the song that followed ‘Working Class Hero’, John’s own two-fingered, expletive-littered rebuke. If that’s what you want from me, here it is, in spades, she seemed to be saying. I would still have washed her feet. 

        Thereafter Marianne became a sort of grand dame of British pop. She released many albums and became a cult figure. Her experiences placed her above the rank and file, dignified, cool and rather aloof. She was defiant. You wouldn’t want to tangle with her. Other musicians sought her out for advice and to kneel at those feet. Punks liked her and she chose her collaborators carefully from among her peers: Nick Cave, Damon Albarn, Metallica. Her appearance alongside Johnny Marr singing ‘As Tears Go By’ at the Linda McCartney Memorial Concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1999 is wonderful. I’d loved to have heard her sing with Dylan or Lou Reed or Tom Waits or anyone else whose voice prized character over mellifluence. Ill health dogged her but she’d done it all, seen it all and survived. 

        In the 1980s, when I became the editor at Omnibus Press, one of the projects I inherited was a biography of Marianne that had been commissioned by my predecessor but remained undelivered by a negligent author. It never was delivered but a year or two later I commissioned another author to write a book about her and when it was published Marianne, who had somehow become aware of its long gestation period, evidently read it and told an interviewer the publishers had been waiting for her to die before publishing it. “But I haven’t died so they published it anyway,” she cackled. I thought it was a hilarious reaction. I’ll laugh and cry and laugh about it all again. So long Marianne. 

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Who is Bob Dylan? Having spent a lifetime dodging the question, he’s apparently given the nod to this terrific early-years biopic which might be expected to answer it, but of course it doesn’t, nor would we want it to. The spell remains. 

        Dylan’s elusive nature is the predominant theme of A Complete Unknown, in which Timothée Chalamet offers up a striking, believable and thoughtful depiction of the young Dylan; visiting Woody Guthrie at his hospital bedside, rising up from the clubs of Greenwich Village and somehow juggling two girlfriends, Joan Baez and Sylvie Russo, the latter a fictional character clearly based on Suze Rotolo, with whom the real Dylan was photographed on the sleeve of his 1963 Freewheelin’ LP. Quite why the producers felt it necessary not to give Rotolo her real name – unlike every other real life character in the film – is a mystery*, but then again much of Bob Dylan’s appeal is his mysterious, impulsive nature, and in this respect A Complete Unknown delivers in spades. 

I wasn’t quite prepared for how well Chalamet would handle the music, to somehow replicate the sneering, nasal delivery that elevated Bob Dylan into a class of his own but it was the musical moments, the songs, hit after hit, and very loud too, that kept me gripped to my seat yesterday afternoon at the Guildford Odeon. It didn’t matter where it happened: in the Village clubs before sparse audiences, in concert halls of ever increasing size, in the Columbia Records recording studio or in his apartment as he worked on his songs and their lyrics. For me, the most moving sequence in the entire movie was when he was figuring out ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ while Baez was making coffee in their tiny kitchen. Having got the chords right, he begins to play and sing, hesitant at first, then with confidence. Beaz hears him, recognises that something of great cultural value is being created right before her eyes and joins him on the bed, leaning over his shoulder to read the words from his notebook. My heart pounded as she began to harmonise on the song that first made its writer’s name. 

If Dylan’s wary, intangible nature is the film’s overriding motif, then other themes intermingle over two hours and 20 minutes that seemed to flash by. Fame is a burden he’s unwilling to shoulder, taking him by surprise, unsettling him. He hides behind his shades and the scene in which fans mob him as he’s driven away in a limousine reminded me of the painting of Dylan wrapped in fur and cradling a cat in the back of a car in Guy Peellaert’s wonderful Rock Dreams book. “Messianic, he need only point his finger and the temples trembled before him,” was Nik Cohn’s caption.

And then there is identity. Dylan and Sylvie/Suze watch Now Voyager, the 1942 movie in which Bette Davis assumes a new self to escape the clutches of her domineering mother. “She just made herself into something different,” says Dylan, pondering on the possibility of doing precisely the same thing himself. Much later Baez challenges his story that he “worked on carnivals”. He just smiles: never apologise, never explain. 

        Similarly, Dylan refuses to be categorised. He moves at speed, often on a motor cycle. This leads to the film’s stirring climax, the now legendary appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he defies the organisers, among them father figure Pete Seeger, and performs with an electric band on the closing night. While traditionalists backstage recoil in horror, the crowd jeer as he storms into ‘Maggie’s Farm’, but after a verse or two the music overwhelms them and they begin to cheer, just as in an earlier sequence, at the 1964 Newport, when he performs ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ and they join in spontaneously on a chorus they’re hearing for the first time, recognising its significance as a harbinger for a decade unfolding at pace. 

        Other characters in the movie are present, well portrayed and correctly identified: scheming manager Albert Grossman, drunken Johnny Cash, aide-de-camp and sounding-board Bob Neuwirth, long suffering Seeger who, incidentally, pitches in to help tidy away chairs after Newport – a nice touch, infirm Woody Guthrie, unable to speak as Huntington’s disease devours him, ace picker Mike Bloomfield on a Telecaster and even Al Kooper adding his wild mercury Hammond lines to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as Columbia A&R chief John Hammond watches on from the studio control room. The street scenes evoke early Sixties Greenwich Village perfectly, the right cars, the right shop fronts, the right clubs, the right buskers. Who knew that Dylan bought the whistle he blows at the start of ‘Highway 61’ from a street vendor on his way to the session? 

        Who is Bob Dylan? We still don’t know. We never will. Even when Sylvie/Suze leaves the apartment she shares with him for a temporary stay in Europe she tells him she doesn’t know who he is. This film is great but as its title implies, the question remains. 

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*The mystery has been cleared up for me since I wrote that. Evidently Dylan read the script and felt that Suze Rotolo's privacy ought to be protected, so he requested her name be changed. Nevertheless, anyone who knows anything about Dylan will be able to identify her as the 'Sylvie' character. 

SMiLE: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Brian Wilson by David Leaf

David Leaf has risen to a Beach Boys’ role similar to that of Mark Lewisohn with The Beatles and the late Johnny Rogan with The Byrds. He is now the group’s foremost archivist and biographer, though in Leaf’s case his focus is primarily on Brian Wilson, their dominant figure, with whom he has worked in various capacities over the past four decades. This is his third book about the group, though his first, The Beach Boys & The California Myth, originally published in 1978, has been republished, retitled and updated many times, just like Rogan’s Byrds books and, to a lesser extent, Lewisohn’s Beatles books.  

        Leaf’s latest book is an oral history of the making, aborting and re-making of SMiLE, Wilson’s follow-up to Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys’ 1966 album widely acknowledged as his masterpiece, and consists of hundreds of old and new quotes from everyone involved, punctuated by the author’s informed explanations and commentary on a legendary album that never was, not until 2004 anyway, though in the meantime tracks recorded for it had appeared on other Beach Boys LPs and their exemplary 1993 5-CD box set Good Vibrations: 30 Years of The Beach Boys. 

        The book is, in every conceivable way, the last word on a subject as complex as it is fascinating. As the follow-up to Pet Sounds, expectations for SMiLE were off the scale but it was not to be. “Determining how, when and why SMiLE began to fall apart is much more difficult,” writes Leaf after mention of non-musical issues impacting on The Beach Boys in 1966, among them Carl Wilson’s draft notice and an impending lawsuit with Capitol Records. “Actually, it’s impossible.” 

        Nevertheless, Leaf and several others, among them Wilson himself, do their best to explain why SMiLE never happened, drawing attention at some length to the lack of enthusiasm for Brian’s SMiLE songs from other members of the group, most notably Mike Love, who felt he was ‘fucking with the formula’, which sapped Brian’s confidence. “He hated it,” says Brian at one point. “I didn’t know how to deal with it.” Their record company, eager for more big hits in the style of ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ and ‘I Get Around’, wasn’t too keen on it either. 

        Another factor was what seems today, as I write this, a disturbing omen for Los Angeles. During the recording of a track provisionally titled ‘Fire’, part of an ‘Elements’ suite that would eventually emerge as the freeform, slightly disturbing ‘Mrs O’Leary’s Cow’, a building close to Gold Star Studios, where the album was being recorded, burned to the ground. This spooked Wilson who retreated into his shell, a situation exacerbated by his increasing dependence on mind-altering drugs. Furthermore, Brian felt strong competition from The Beatles and it didn’t help when Paul McCartney arrived in Los Angeles and played him the tender ballad ‘She’s Leaving Home’ from their upcoming Sgt Pepper album. 

        All of these matters take up roughly the first half of the book, with the remainder devoted firstly to Brian’s re-emergence after being sent off the rails by the SMiLE debacle, with the final third detailing how the album was finally re-recorded, and performed live, by Brian with a bunch of newly appointed, highly skilled musicians, all of whom worshipped at his feet. Such flattery is justly warranted, of course, though it does get a bit wearying as the book progresses. We all know that Brian Wilson was great at what he did, probably among the best young composers in the world during his heyday, but the number of times such acclaim is repeatedly expressed by one and all during Leaf’s book is its only flaw.

        SMiLE: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Brian Wilson is published by Omnibus Press on 13 March, RRP £25 (£23 on Amazon) and contains 321 pages with an eight-page colour photo section and, in a concluding chapter, contributions from 14 other music writers in thrall to SMiLE and Wilson’s talents. The book lacks an index. 

CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP: A History of The Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang

Clever chap that he is, Santa Claus identified an area of ignorance in my music knowledge and delivered this book to me on Christmas Day. I’ve never been particularly fond of rap music – to my mind it lacks melody and most of the time I can’t decipher the words – but I’m always up for investigating the roots of music, be it pop, rock, blues, R&B, jazz or even rap, for that matter, and thanks to Santa and Jeff Chang I now know all about where it came from and how it originated.

        I wasn’t to know it at the time, and even those involved hadn’t a clue how what they were doing would end up, but rap in its original incarnation of hip-hop was being invented a few miles from where I lived in New York in the mid-seventies, up in the Bronx, an area I only ever drove through, a few miles north of Manhattan’s tony East Side where my apartment doubled as Melody Maker’s US office. 

        The sole manifestation I saw of the culture that would produce this multi-million dollar musical phenomenon was graffiti on the exteriors of subway trains. It was a weird and wonderful form of artistic expression enacted mostly by black teenagers with spray cans who daubed the carriages in translucent colours; strangely plump, circular lettering of distinctive design that spelt out their nomes-de-can, or tags as these balloon-like expressions of individuality became known, arrogantly displaying not just the artistic skills of the individual graffiti artist but also their audacity in gaining access to the surfaces on which their work appeared. I loved it and was wryly amused by the city’s largely vain attempts to erase their work, the carriages on which washed out graffiti still poked through. 

        Other manifestations were less obvious, to me anyway. If Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is to be believed, and I have no reason to think otherwise, it all began with an urban renewal plan in the South Bronx that prioritised roads over housing. The resulting displacement created territorial divisions controlled by rival gangs, some of whom looted turntables from hi-fi shops during the electricity blackout that hit New York City during the night of July 13-14, 1977, an event I remember well. Close to where I lived restaurants were giving away food that would otherwise decay through lack of refrigeration, the streets were crowded with revellers and the beer was warm for once. 

        On their looted turntables DJs began to scratch, to make new sounds from old records, at parties held originally in their apartments before they broke out into the streets and, eventually, clubs. DJ Cool Herc (Clive Campbell) noticed that dancers “got wild” during instrumental breaks, and began playing songs with them. Then, in a technique he called “the Merry-Go-Round, he began to work two copies of the same record,” writes Chang, “back-cuing a record to the beginning of the break as the other reached the end, extending a five-second breakdown into a five minutes loop of fury, a makeshift version excursion. Before long he had tossed most of the songs, focusing on the breaks alone.”

        Thus was born a crucial element of rap, alongside the graffiti, DJ-ing and break-dancing – as first seen and heard in the UK via hip-hop pioneer Malcolm McLaren’s 'Buffalo Gals'. Before long DJs were opting to play dub versions of Jamaican reggae singles or only instrumental breaks in songs, and whipping up excitement by talking over them.

        The three pioneers of the genre were Herc, Afrika Bambaataa (Lance Taylor) and Grandmaster Flash (Joseph Sadler) whose backgrounds are covered extensively; their families, how they arrived on the hip-hop scene, their entrepreneurial schemes and their prescience in driving forward new ideas. The former contributes a foreword to this book, Bambaataa was a bringer of peace to warring neighbourhoods and Flash more or less invented scratching by shifting the needle as he spun records on twin turntables. 

        None of this would have happened, however, without the sense of injustice felt amongst the black communities in both the Bronx and Jamaica, from where immigrants to New York brought the influence of reggae. Hip-hop arose from the need of these deprived communities to stamp a culture of their own on society, and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop describes how they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

        This is not a new book – it was first published in 2005 – nor, at 560 pages, is it short. I haven’t even finished it yet but I figured what I’d learned so far was worth a post on Just Backdated. In the fullness of time I doubtless will, though other, shorter books waiting for me might grab my attention in the meantime. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is less about the stars and more about the background, politics and unsung heroes. It’s well indexed, has a useful discography and bibliography and the list of names among author Jeff Chang’s acknowledgements alone reflects the depth of his research.  

JUST BACKDATED – The Top Thirty

The first week of the year seems like a good time to review the performance of my Just Backdated blog, and bring the Posts Chart up to date. In doing so yesterday I discovered that the number of hits in the Top 20 listed in statistics automatically conveyed to me by my Blogspot host differs considerably from the number of hits recorded when I look at each of the 1,041 posts individually, specifically that there are far more hits registered in the individual listings. Computer science baffles me and this discovery of mine surely indicates that it isn’t an exact discipline even though those behind it would like to think it is. Accordingly, I have revised the chart considerably and opted to list the Top 30 this time around, with the result that although posts about The Who still dominate, there are many newcomers. 

        Nevertheless, aside from one remarkable instance, there isn’t that much in the way of changes from the top 10 I wrote about in March 2022, when I last did a survey like this, this one to commemorate notching up 1,250,000 hits. That figure has now risen to 1,810,987, so the two million mark looms, perhaps later this year or early next. Either way, the number of hits Just Backdated gets every month is increasing all the time, probably the result of more readers becoming aware of it. 

        The big surprise is that my synopsis for the abandoned book with Mandy de Wolf, Keith Moon’s daughter, has now clocked up 45,100 hits, still in second place but closing in rapidly on the number one post, my review of The Who’s Live at Fillmore East 1968 CD which has remained pretty much static all year. In 2022, The Fillmore CD had 47.7k hits, with Mandy on 20.3k, so its acceleration is quite remarkable. Barely a week goes by when it doesn’t get between 2-300 hits, and I keep wondering where they all come from. These two posts are streets ahead of all the rest. 

        Many of the 25 comments on the post about this proposed book – which I provisionally titled Moon Girl: My Life in the Shadow of Rock’s Wildest Star – suggest it should be published but for personal reasons Mandy has told me she’s no longer interested in writing the book, with me or anyone else as a ghost writer. Naturally I respect her wishes. 

        As before the chart contains far more Who posts, with 14 of the top 30 all related to the group or its individual members. Posts about Keith and John seem to win out over posts about Pete or Roger, though the last post I wrote – about those dodgy Daltrey books – has racked up over 800 hits in a few days, which is not bad going. Led Zep come second with five. Slade have just one post in the top 30 – my obituary of their much-loved tour manager Graham ‘Swin’ Swinnerton – but lots of posts about the group have clocked up between 1,500 and 2,00 hits. One day, if I could be bothered, I might tot up the number of hits each act has received across all my posts about them, and I’m pretty sure Slade would be third. 

        Non-Who post that have somewhat expectedly racked up well over 2,000 hits include my review of Look Away, the Sky documentary about the exploitation of girls/women in the music industry, my review of the Melody Maker movie largely devoted to our ace photographer Barrie Wentzell, my obituary of Pete Overend Watts of Mott The Hoople, a post about my friend Adrian Boot’s punk photo exhibition review, an obituary of Robert Stigwood, my Steely Dan interview, two close encounters with the odious Jimmy Savile, seeing CSN&Y in Denver in 1974, and my adventures with Lynyrd Skynyrd. 

Here’s the Top 30, with the number of hits and the 2022 placing in brackets

1) The Who Live at Fillmore East CD,  50.7k hits (1)

2) Moon Girl, 45.6k (2)

3) Jimmy Page – Boleskine House, Tower House & More, 18.9k (3)

4) John, Paul & Keith, Santa Monica, 1974, 16.6k (4)

5) Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight, 12.41k (newcomer to chart)

6) Jimmy Page – The Day Jimmy Met Robert, 9.1k (5)

7) Keith Moon’s Living Arrangements, 8.6k (13)

8) Palazzo Dario – The Palace that Tommy Bought, 7.68k (6)

9) Deep Purple – Trouble in Jakarta, 6.99k (11)

10) The North of England Beer Drinking Championship, 6.4k (15)

11) Marianne Faithfull, 1980, Book Extract 6.2k (new)

12) Keith Moon & The Pythons, 6.13k (8)

13) Pete Rudge, Who/Stones tour manager, Interview from MM 1973, 5.3k (new)

14) The Who UK tour 2014 announcement, 5.1k (7)

15) The Who in Hyde Park, London, June 26, 2015, 4.78k (12)

16) Dennis Wilson MM interview, 4.45k, (new)

17) Abba Live At Wembley Arena CD review, 4.4k (new)

18) The Who Live in Ottawa review, 4.4k (new)

19) The Who – My Hidden Gems album, 4.28k (10)

20) Led Zeppelin in Chicago, 1975, 4.21 (new)

21) Launching Dear Boy, 4.15k (9)

22) Eric Clapton On The Road 1974, 4.03 (new) 

23) Jimmy Page Biography review, 4.02 (new)

24) Johnny Ramone’s Mosrite, book extract, 4.0k, (new) 

25) My 70th Birthday Playlist 3.9k, (new)

26) Graham Swinnerton, Slade tour manager obituary, 3.8 (new)

27) My Introduction to Debbie Harry, 3.5k (new)

28) John Entwistle (1944-2002), obituary, 3.4k (14)

29) The Who in Birmingham, December 2014, 3.3k (new)

30) David Cassidy obituary, 3.1 k (new)

An honorary listing ought perhaps to go to my reports of The Who at New Bingley Hall, Staff, 1975, which was in three parts whose combined hits total is 6997. 

Finally, my thanks to all who visit Just Backdated. The number of hits I get makes it all worthwhile and encourages me to keep going.

ROGER DALTREY – FOUR PHANTOM BIOGRAPHIES

Midway through December I came across a “biography” of Roger Daltrey by “James Patterson” on Amazon. What struck me was that the photograph on the cover was not Roger, albeit of a young man with blond curly hair leaning towards a microphone on a stand, and it occurred to me that the image might have been created by AI. Sample text, too, looked suspicious to me, largely because it was insufferably bland and unctuously sycophantic. 

        I drew attention to this book to three friends of mine, all dedicated and knowledgeable Who fans, all of whom agreed with my conclusions. One of them was Ed Hanel whose home on the Hawaiian island Kailua accommodates what might just be the biggest collection of Who records, books and miscellanea anywhere in the world. It is Ed’s custom to obtain absolutely anything and everything Who related – regardless of quality – to add to his collection but it came as a bit of a surprise to me that in buying a copy of this book, he came across no fewer than three further “biographies” of Roger, each of which seemed to him – and me – to be of dubious origin. So, as a service to Who fans everywhere I am posting Ed’s comments here on Just Backdated.

        Over to you Ed. 

 

FOUR ROGER DALTREY BOOKS RELEASED 23 December, 2024.

EACH MERITS ONE STAR

Roger Daltrey Biography: Discovering the Legend of Rock Stage by “Adam Young” 

No publisher, sold on Amazon. Last page Bar Code: 14795988R00085. Amazon indicates that the book was originally published 24 November, 2023.

        Largely direct quotes, sometimes with minor changes, from Roger Daltrey’s autobiography, Thanks A Lot Mr Kibblewhite. For example: Roger’s “Chapter One: The Flannel Shirt” opens with, “On a muggy Florida night in March 2007, Pete and I walked out onto the stage at the Ford Amphitheatre in Tampa.” This becomes “Chapter One: The Flannel Shirt”, opening with “Pete and I walked out onto the stage at the Ford Amphitheatre in Tampa on a hot Florida night in March 2007.”  The text doesn’t get any better or any more original.

        The book’s text ends with excerpts from Chapter 16 of Roger’s book. In effect, the book ends in the mid-1980’s, referencing Live Aid 1985 and noting, incorrectly just as Roger did, “That was the last of The Who for nearly a decade.” Accordingly, the book completely ignores the last 40 years of Roger’s life.

The Legend Of Roger Daltreys (sic): Great Vocals And The Struggle For Self-Expression by “Betty Jo LeClair”

No publisher, sold on Amazon. Last page Bar Code: 14795989R00085.  Amazon indicates the book was originally published on 17 June, 2023.

        Largely direct quotes from Thanks A Lot Mr Kibblewhite, sometimes with minor changes. For example, Roger’s book ends with an acknowledgement, thanking Mr Kibblewhite, “And I really mean that.” This book inexplicably changes Roger’s words to, “Mr. Kibblewhite, I am quite grateful to you.” In Chapter 19 “Brothers”, the text begins by skipping several pages of Roger’s text, then quotes Roger for several pages only to stop mid-page. At the top of the next page, the text repeats several pages (Pp. 128/9). 

The Voice That Changed Music: The Story of Roger Daltrey and His Rock Revolution, by “James Patterson” 

According to Amazon, Mr. Patterson is a published writer. No publisher, sold on Amazon. Last Page Bar Code: 1479203R00049. Amazon indicates the book was originally published on 3 November, 2024.

        The cover picture is not Roger. Additional pictures in the book are dubious at best. The text reads like notes collected for a book project at the initial research stage. For example, “After this, Daltrey’s solo career underwent a major turning point with Rough Mix ( 1977) (sic), a joint project with Pete Townshend.” A little later on, we read, “This release [Under A Raging Moon] contained the smash track ‘Parting Should Be Painless’ and had a more polished rock feel” (Pp. 38/39). Basic editing should have caught both mistakes. Roger had no role on Rough Mix and ‘Parting Should Be Painless’ is found instead on the album of the same name. Because the text is confused about Rough Mix in several references, it may be useful to clarify that Pete’s partner on this project was Ronnie Lane.

        There is a segment that addresses Paul McCartney’s releases, with no relation or connection to Roger (Pp.48-50).

Roger Daltrey Biography For Curious Kids by “Leo Whittaker”

Published by Little Big Giant, sold on Amazon. Last page Bar Code: 14796674R00066. Amazon indicates that the book was originally published 5 August, 2024.

        The cover is an animated figure that looks like a Halloween Mask, with no relationship to Roger’s appearance. Written as a children’s book. Chapters end with a “Key Takeway” such as: “Teamwork can help you achieve success” or, “Don’t be afraid to explore and find new things you love.”

        Unfortunately, there are glaring mistakes. For example, we are told that the first public performance of Tommy took place at a “massive venue” (P. 55). The first public performance is generally considered as occurring at the Institute of Technology, Bolton, UK, on 22 April, 1969. The first widely reported performance took place on 1 May at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, on Frith Street in London’s Soho. Neither venue could be remotely considered as massive. 

  Furthermore (P. 75), we read, “In Tommy [the movie], Roger played the role of the ‘Hawker’, a character who sold everything from toys to dreams.” It would be hard to cram more misinformation into one sentence. The only role for Roger in any version of Tommy is, of course, the lead character, Tommy Walker. The hawker is a pimp who offers up a woman as a cure for Tommy’s woes, perhaps not an appropriate aspect to include in a children’s book, albeit rather amusing when reflecting on the chapter’s Key Takeway: “Trying new things can lead to exciting adventures” (P. 79). 

SUMMARY

The plagiarism in two of the books and the lack of proper fact checking or editing in all four are disappointing at best. None should be considered as appropriate reviews of Roger’s career.

        The versions of these four books appear to be run off at the same time, with the same date (“23 December 2024”) and the same last page format. For reference, I received my copies here in Hawaii on 24 December, 2024, after ordering them several weeks earlier.  

JUST BACKDATED ROCK BOOK OF THE YEAR

Since Just Backdated has become a repository for music book reviews I have decided to nominate a Rock Music Book of The Year and the first winner of this prestigious award is WHEN WE WAS FAB – Inside The Beatles Australasian Tour, 1964, by Andy Neill & Greg Armstrong, which I reviewed in July. 

        Regrettably, I was obliged to review the book from a pdf sent to me by Andy, whom I have known for years, and it wasn’t until November that I acquired an actual copy of the book, which was published by Woodslane Press, an Australian company, but is available through Amazon (at £28.95), though you may have to wait until stocks are replenished. As of today, Abe Books are offering it at £38.84, and although it was being sold by Waterstones at £39.99, it now appears to be out of stock there. 

        It’s worth every penny and the difficulty in obtaining it is a crying shame, for When We Was Fab has romped home an easy winner in my book of the year survey. It’s 306 large-format (30cm x 30cm) pages are packed with superbly researched text and hundreds of photographs, many in colour and previously unseen, alongside documents, press clippings and vintage memorabilia. A few can be seen below. 

            In their 20-year investigation to uncover anything relevant, Andy and Greg interviewed scores of people, from the tour’s promoters to many of the fans who saw the shows and waited expectantly on crowded pavements to watch John, Paul, George and Ringo (or stand-in drummer Jimmie Nicol) drive by. Insofar as it covers virtually every hour of The Beatles’ lives from 11 June, 1964, when they landed at Sydney, to 1 July, when they left Brisbane for London, the book ranks alongside Mark Lewisohn’s Beatle books for accurate, comprehensive reportage of what nowadays is regarded as the most intense explosion of Beatlemania anywhere in the world. 

        As I wrote in my review of the book in July, until now the only available reportage of this extraordinary tour has been Beatles Down Under by Glenn A. Baker, Australia’s foremost writer on pop music, a book I’ve owned for years and which is now quite collectable. Baker’s book was very much a fly-on-the-wall account and was fairly eye-opening insofar as when it was published in 1982 it offered hitherto unreported details of JPG&R’s off-stage activities that can best be described as less than saintly. Much of this is downplayed in When We Was Fab, not least because its authors believe those interviewed by Baker were exaggerating the Beatles’ sybaritic urges for effect. The truth is less scandalous but no less sensational, not least how the tour came about in the first place and was almost scuppered through a bureaucratic impasse, and the extent to which the four Beatles coped with the madness that surrounded them, mayhem that continued virtually uninterrupted for the duration of the visit. When The Beatles arrived in Adelaide, a staggering 300,000 fans and curious Australian adults lined the route from the airport to the centre of town to catch a glimpse of the world’s greatest ever pop group, the largest-ever crowd they attracted anywhere in the world. 

It’s all here in When We Was Fab, the chaos, the concerts, the airport scenes, the hotel receptions, the press conferences, the pope-like balcony appearances, the cast and crew, the experience of Jimmie Nicol, drafted in to replace bedridden Ringo at the start, the girls who managed to evade security, the whimsical response to all this madness from the Beatles themselves and even the few who threw eggs at them. In the words of Derek Taylor, their in-house PR who found himself in the midst of it all, “It was the longest-running story since World War II with the advantage that no one died.”