PATTI SMITH - 50 Years Ago This Week

Fifty years ago this week I met up with Patti Smith at a rehearsal studio on New York’s West Side to interview her for Melody Maker. We already knew one another. Patti was a fixture in the downtown clubs where musicians and their friends, and writers like me, liked to hang out until late, and her guitarist Lenny Kaye and I were introduced by mutual friends just after I arrived in New York in 1973. I'd also seen her on stage, at CBGBs and The Bottom Line, so I knew where she was coming from well before Horses, her debut LP, was released.

Because NME latched on to punk before Melody Maker, MM has been accused of being a bit stick-in-the-mud but I think this is unjust. ‘Punk’ seems to have become a catch-all phrase for young bands that emerged in the mid-seventies whose modus operandi was a bit DIY. They put anarchic emotion over technical skills, they disdained arena rockers like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, they wore their hair short and spiky and dressed in hand-me-downs. Over in New York I was writing about these bands as early as 1974, when I first met Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, and reviewed The Ramones and Television. It happened in New York well before London and I think this was well before NME cottoned on to it. 

Either way, I was quick to recognise Patti, who belonged to the same genre. Horses made a big splash in New York, just as it did earlier this year when it celebrated its fiftieth birthday. This called for an interview, and here it is, unedited, among the first interviews with Patti that appeared in the UK press. It was headlined Poetry In Motion and appeared in MM dated 29 November, 1975. 

Last month they caught Patti Hearst — and so ended the biggest man (or woman) hunt in the history of the US.

        All this is history now, of course, but it’ll probably be the subject of at least two best-selling novels in the near future, not to mention a major screen movie.

        But perhaps the first outside view of the Patti Hearst case was provided by New York’s sparrow-like poetess Patti Smith, then a struggling personality in the underground rock scene of the city. With considerable difficulty she raised one thousand dollars and headed for Electric Ladyland Studios in Greenwich Village and recorded a version of the traditional Hendrix classic, ‘Hey Joe’.

        The inspiration for this move was provided by the words of Randolph Hearst who, on seeing the picture of his daughter holding a rifle, exclaimed to the anxious ears of America: “What are you doing with that gun in your hand?”

        Patti Smith’s version of ‘Hey Joe’ was a bitch of a record. Opening with a poetic dialogue about the Hearst situation, it gradually flowed into the regular song. It was chock-full of atmosphere and, for topicality, it really couldn’t be beaten. Had it received more exposure, I’m sure that Patti Smith would have been an overnight sensation.

        It didn’t, though, and it never will. About 1,000 copies of Patti’s ‘Hey Joe’ were pressed and made available by mail order through her management company and selected record shops down in the Village. According to Patti’s manager, Jane Friedman, the project lost around 3,000 dollars, even though the singles were sold at $2.50, a mark-up of over 50 per cent on the regular singles’ price.

        Today it’s a collector’s item, and no more are available.

        Also today, Patti Smith stands on the brink of success after a long, hard struggle. This summer she signed with Arista Records, and her debut album is out in the states this month.

        Thanks to Clive Davis, the boss of Arista, she is only the second of many artists in this (New York) fringe rock fraternity to be recognised by a record company. The first, of course, was the New York Dolls, whose recording career slumped after two albums.

        But Ms. Smith cannot be placed in the same category as the Dolls, or any rock band, for that matter. Some may call her a singer, but she is really an improvising lyricist whose performances rush with crazy momentum as each song, or poem, unrolls. She recites with a musical backdrop, frequently breaking into song as the energy spirals, criss-crossing between the two and, more often than not, making up the words as she stumbles headlong forward.

        Her band has been increasing in size over the years. Four years back it was just Patti and her guitarist Lenny Kaye, an occasional rock journalist and walking encyclopaedia on the last two decades of pop in America. Kaye, who three years ago, incidentally, compiled the Nuggets album of relatively obscure US singles for the Elektra label, might be described as a free-form guitarist, as he plays random notes at will according to the prompting of Patti’s dialogue. They understand one another and, as such, it’s doubtful whether any orthodox guitar player would fit.

        Pianist Richard Sohl is a similar performer. Like Kaye, nothing he plays can be predicted beforehand.

        Recently two other musicians have been added: a second guitarist, Ivan Kral, who, like Patti, bears a striking resemblance to Keith Richard, and drummer Jay Dougherty. There is no bass player — Patti feels a drummer is ample rhythm.

        John Cale was brought in to produce her first Arista album, Horses, which is released this month. It was on this topic that we began what turned out to be a very lengthy conversation last week.

        “It’s a live album,” she announced, squatting on the floor. “There’s hardly any overdubbing at all. We just went in and did the songs straight away. In the studio we went through hell. I asked John to do it for me, I begged him to, and we had nothing but friction, but it was a love-hate relationship and it worked. At first I wanted an engineer producer, somebody like Tom Dowd, but Atlantic wouldn’t let him go, so I figured I’d get a top artist producer who would act as a mirror. The whole thing in the studio was us proving to John that we could do it the way we wanted, so we fought a lot but it was fighting on a very intimate level.”

        The result is an album that’s actually far more melodic than the half dozen or so occasions I’ve watched Patti perform in various clubs in New York. The inclusion of a drummer — Dougherty was brought in immediately before the sessions began — tightens up Patti’s style no end. Before, it was often shapeless and without discipline of any kind. Now you can even dance to Patti Smith, or at least some of the tracks.

        Even words were improvised in the studio, she says. “I’m not into writing songs. I find that real boring. All our things started out initially as improvisation, but doing them over and over again got them into a formula.

        “I can’t play anything at all, so Lenny and I work out tunes as they go along. I have words and know how I think they should go, so we just pull it out and pull it out further until we get somewhere.”

        She and Kaye first got together in 1971. This followed a period of Patti’s life when she lived at the Chelsea Hotel, writing poetry and spending time with rock musicians in what she describes as a “tequila split life.”

        Before that she was at art school, which followed work in a factory in New Jersey, where she was brought up. It was Dylan sidekick Bobby Neuwirth who introduced her to the changing musical inhabitants of the Chelsea Hotel. (Neuwirth is currently playing on Dylan’s tour of New England with Joan Baez).

        “Neuwirth recognised my poetry and immediately introduced me to everybody he knew in rock and roll and kept pumping me to work at it. I studied Rimbaud, too, but being surrounded by these rock and roll rhythms the two moved simultaneously.”

        It wasn’t until 1972 that Patti started making regular appearances in New York. In 1973 Lenny Kaye appeared following a reading Patti gave on the anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death, and from then on things accelerated. Pianist Richard Sohl joined the ranks and gigs followed at anywhere manager Jane Friedman could book them.

        Which just about brings us up to where we began: the ‘Hey Joe’ single recorded at Electric Ladyland. It was a deliberate choice of studio, for Patti strongly allies herself with Hendrix, another artist who took his art beyond contemporary strictures.

        “We had three hours of studio time, but I just did it like we were on stage. Eventually we had ten minutes left and no ‘B’ side, so I recited this poem and the musicians just joined in and we had it done.”

        According to Friedman, that ‘Hey Joe’ chapter lost about $3,000 as so many copies were given away to friends instead of being sold. Part of their deal with Arista was a clause that no more could be made, so it’ll remain a collector’s item for ever.

        Clive Davis’ interest in Patti stems from his days with Columbia, when Patti wrote the lyrics to two songs recorded by Blue Oyster Cult, a CBS act. The deal with Arista is for five albums over the next three years, and meanwhile she has branched out from New York, playing concerts in California for the first time. In the coming months she will embark on her first proper tour, mainly visiting colleges across the country.

        “We’re a group now,” she said. “We’re together and that’s it. I’m in rock and roll now and I’m proud to be in it.”

* * *

There is a rather sad postscript to my friendship with Patti. About a year later a New York underground newspaper called The Planet printed several topless photographs of her with cheesy captions written in the style of top-shelf magazines. Predictably, she was livid and the whole lurid business was the talk of the town in rock circles. As Melody Maker’s man in New York I felt duty bound to mention the vexed issue of Patti and the topless pictures in the news column I sent to London every week. Patti saw it and wasn’t amused. The next time we collided with one another she let me have it. In vain did I try to explain that I wasn’t endorsing the actions of The Planet but that it was my job to report everything, good and bad, that occurred in the NY music world. Patti wasn’t having it and she never spoke to me again.

YOU’VE GOT MICHAEL: Living Through HIStory – A Memoir By Dan Beck

Jackson, that is, and to have ‘got’ Michael was something of a poisoned chalice as Dan Beck, senior product manager at Epic Records in New York, would find out over the five years they worked together. What’s more, after reading his book, it somehow comes as no surprise that one of Jackson’s many managers played the role of gangster Tuddy Cicero in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. 

This is not to say that Jackson’s entourage and wider circle of business associates were all gangsters, just that the ruthless methods they and Epic employ, as portrayed by Beck, somehow reminds me of organized crime – or how food chains and clothing manufacturers market their product. 

Take how Walter Yetnikoff, boss of Columbia, Epic’s parent company, reacts when MTV decline to show Jackson’s video for ‘Billie Jean’: “Yetnikoff, who was livid, called a senior executive at MTV,” writes Beck. “‘Listen,’ he said, ‘You know those Journey and Bruce Springsteen and REO Speedwagon videos of mine that you guys like to play so much? Pack them all up. Put all the masters in a box and send them back to me. Because we are no longer in business together… unless you play [‘Billie Jean’].” We were thrilled to have the moral high ground! It was a place of integrity a major label rarely, if ever, enjoyed.”

Although Dan Beck’s book focuses on his role as Jackson’s go-to man at Epic and, primarily, his part in the marketing of HIStory, Jackson’s 1995 compilation-plus album, it’s really a memoir of his 20 years working for the company that exposes – if that’s the right word – the way in which major labels operated during a period when cash flowed into the record business like the Mississippi in flood. Beck’s in-tray features other artists besides Jackson but the revenues generated by Michael, most especially Thriller and albums either side of it, make the Jackson 5 star his number one priority. 

As might be expected, dealing with those who surround Jackson means Beck must walk on tiptoes. “Most superstars had a manager, an agent, an independent PR person and perhaps an influential road manager,” he writes. “It generally didn’t take long to engage that artist’s team and learn how to work with them. As product managers, we had to understand their strengths (and often their dysfunctions) to help them succeed with the giant multinational corporation to which they were signed. When it worked, the results could be nearly unimaginably great. When it didn’t, it could be a disastrous nightmare. Michael Jackson’s world was entirely different. By 1991, still only three albums deep into his solo career, his organizational structure was a sprawling maze of powerful experts, creative collaborators, well-meaning friends and a few questionable hangers-on.” 

In many respects the book is the inside story about the issues surrounding Jackson during a period when his career soared before hitting choppy waters brought about by what Beck judges to be naïveté. Thriller became – and remains – the undisputed best-selling album of all time yet at the same time its success posed an insurmountable dilemma in how to better it. Subsequent releases that sold less could, of course, be considered failures even if their sales figures exceeded 20 million, a figure 99% of acts would kill for. 

Beck wrestles with this and other problems over the five-year period in which he was product manager for the self-styled King of Pop, by then the world’s most famous entertainer. His biggest problem seems to have been a reluctance on the part of those surrounding Michael to be decisive. Better make no decision at all than to make the wrong one. 

        “As his own CEO, he had a disregard for costs that was legendary,” Beck writes. “The immediate need, as I perceived it, was to find the decision-makers and the people who could answer questions so that we could move swiftly and decisively on Michael’s behalf… We often had critical deadlines that would require his personal attention. Since we had to be able to get approvals and quick action, I was concerned that the fiefdoms in Michael’s orbit would be inclined to hold up decisions in fear of making the wrong ones.” 

Beck quit Epic in 1996, and thereafter watched sadly from the sidelines as Jackson’s career and public image plummeted. “I still couldn’t fully fathom the idea that he could commit the despicable crimes for which he was charged. I knew a Michael Jackson who was stubborn. I knew a Michael Jackson who could tell a fib if he felt it was necessary. But I also knew a Michael Jackson who had a certain core of honor. I had challenged and tested it, and he had never betrayed it. Had his naïveté led to his legal woes? Had the side of him that was socially awkward compromised him with the wrong people? Then again, how well did I know him? The magnitude of that trial emphasized just how minor my role and relationship were in his huge life… I was just a cog in the wheel for a brief time.

        “I liked Michael,” Beck concludes. “He was always polite. Almost always smiling. He was so often excited and enthusiastic… And while he understood every nuance of a dance move, he did not always grasp the subtleties of public opinion. In fact, there were times when he had difficulty seeing the obvious, such as ignoring our strong advice to curtail photo ops with children. He even seemed puzzled by it.”

        You’ve Got Michael is published by Trouser Press Books, has 290 pages, and is fully indexed. It includes an eight-page photo section featuring several shots of the author with Jackson and one with the manager who played that role in Goodfellas. He certainly looks the part. 

BARRIE WENTZELL: SHOULD’VE BEEN THERE… A Rock’n’Roll Retrospective 1965-1975

“The Kinks always hated photo shoots,” says Ray Davies. “When we first came into the music industry, photographers were strictly old school, with collars and ties and suits. It wasn’t until photographers like Barrie Wentzell sussed out that it was easier to dress like one of the band to find themselves included in the new era of rock’n’roll. He managed to be absorbed by the band. We talked about the music we wanted to make and he could reflect that in his shoots.” 

        Barrie wasn’t simply the first music photographer to look and dress like his subjects, he was the first dedicated, independent rock’n’roll photographer in the UK. Until his arrival, the photographers who took pictures of the acts in the charts also took pictures of politicians, film stars and sportsmen and women, anyone who was newsworthy. They worked for newspapers or agencies; John Lennon today, Harold Wilson tomorrow, or maybe an afternoon on the boundary at Lords snapping cricketers.

        Barrie, on the other hand, came from somewhere else entirely. His background was in design and he was interested in creative, artistic photography. He played the guitar well, dressed in faded jeans and wore his hair long. Somehow, one day in 1965, he was invited to a Diana Ross press reception at the BBC and he took his camera along. He photographed Ms Ross and took his pictures of her to Bob Houston, then assistant editor of Melody Maker, who used one on the following week’s front page. Barrie had found his vocation.

        The fruits of that vocation – ten years as MM’s staff photographer – are to be found in Should’ve Been There, a new book of Barrie’s remarkable work, 392 pages featuring everyone who was anyone in rock’n’roll during the decade spanning 1965-75. They’re all here: wonderful shots of Beatles, Stones, Zep, Who, Dylan, Bowie, Faces, Elton and many more. Most of these shots haven’t been seen for years because unlike most R&R photographers Barrie saw no reason to commercially exploit his work to any great extent in the decades that followed his retirement. Some might be familiar to older readers of MM – he and I logged a bit of time together, of course, and, indeed, I helped with the editing of this book – but what we have here is a treasure trove that in actual fact represents a tiny proportion of his work. 

        Barrie worked in an era before digital or mobile phones with built-in cameras, so Barrie took hundreds of pictures that weren’t used, all of which are on contact sheets. Below is a contact sheet of shots of Robert Plant in a limousine being interviewed in 1970 by Richard Williams, MM’s assistant editor. He has hundreds of similar contact sheets at his home in Toronto. 

        It’s important to realise, too that Barrie’s photographs gave Melody Maker a look that all the other music papers would have envied. Before he joined MM’s editorial team all the music papers, MM included, used either photographs supplied by agency photographers, record labels or PR companies, so the same shots appeared everywhere and were used over and over again. Barrie not only supplied MM with original shots but his personable nature and empathy with musicians enabled him to visit them off duty, often at their homes, and achieve results not seen elsewhere. 

        The photographs in the book are accompanied by Barrie’s story in his own words, his take on what it was like to do what he did, and captions in which he recalls his thoughts on the musicians he photographed. Some, Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend – “Fucking amazing work,” says Pete – amongst them, offer their thoughts on Barrie’s work too. 

CC with Barrie, Lincoln Festival, 1972. 

Photo by Jill Furmanovsky. 

        Barrie lost his appetite for taking rock shots after a Rolling Stones concert in 1973. “At this gig Mick announced that that photographers would only be able to shoot the first three numbers and then they’d be thrown out,” he writes. “The band had an official Rolling Stones photographer, so as to control their image. This practice seems to have become standard now with photographers being restricted to, in some cases, taking picture of only the first song or even less. Shame, as nowadays the audience has become the photographer: freely taking videos and pictures with their cell phones, while professional photographers are restricted. Thanks Mick! 

        “When I first started taking photos at live shows, I was sometimes the only photographer there. But by 1975, there were dozens of photographers vying with each other to get shots of the artists and bands… access was becoming more difficult, uncomfortable, and unpleasant.”

        Disenchanted with the profession that he can claim to have invented, Barrie moved to the Isle of Wight to run a greengrocers’ shop with his brother. 

        Should’ve Been There is published by Rufus Publications. Here is a link to a video all about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fNKoPslqxs

NORTHUMBRIAN BLUES: The Lost World of Big Pete Deuchar by Colin Harper, Volume 1: 1933-60.

No, I’d not heard of Big Pete either, not until Colin Harper sent me a copy of his book which, as labours of love go, might rank alongside Mughal emperor Shan Jahan building the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his dead wife, albeit not quite so time consuming as Shan needed almost 20 years to finish the job.

Colin’s skills as a tenacious researcher into the nooks and crannies of modern music first came to my attention in 1998 when I read his Mojo feature on Anne Briggs, the high priestess of British folk music. To come up with 6,000 words on a singer whose determination to leave society behind and take up residence on a remote Scottish island demonstrated extraordinary resolve, and the same can be said for this strangely moreish book about a little-known banjo player with broad shoulders, a moustache and goatee beard who died in 1988.

Colin came across six foot four inches tall Big Pete while researching Bathed In Lightning, his biography of guitar maestro John McLaughlin who, aged  17, long before fame and Mahavishnu beckoned, played New Orleans jazz alongside Big Pete in The Professors Of Ragtime up in the north east of England. This is little more than a footnote in McLaughlin’s career, of course, but Colin delved deeper and discovered the extraordinary life that Big Pete led in and out of the jazz music he loved, so much so that he couldn’t fit it all into one book. He’s working on Volume 2 as I write. 

Quite who’ll be inspired to buy this book is anyone’s guess, but it’s an astonishing tale, partly hinted at in the subtitle ‘Lost World’. It’s not so much pre-Beatles – though the Fabs will make a cameo appearance in Vol 2 when Pete encounters them in Hamburg – as pre-rock and roll, an era when even jazz, its precursor, was looked upon with deep suspicion by the authorities. Those who preferred this kind of music over the ‘light entertainment’ offered by the BBC, let alone performed it in public, were heading for a life of criminality, at least as far as right-thinking people were concerned. “There was still, two years into the 60s, a lingering frisson of seediness, doubt and debauchery about jazz and those who peddled it,” writes Colin his introduction.

This didn’t faze Big Pete. He was born into money, a Scottish dynasty of brewers and pub owners, but it was a dysfunctional family with upstairs cavorting with downstairs and the posh boarding schools to which he was sent didn’t suit his temperament. Indeed, Pete’s childhood reads like a gothic horror story from which he escaped with little more than a banjo and a bicycle, both of which he put to good use as he set about promoting jazz evenings on Tyneside and, in the fullness of time, pedalling across whole continents. 

        The band with which he was most associated, the Vieux Carré Jazzmen, was formed in 1954, lasted until 1976, was revived in 1991 and is still going strong. The venues at which they played were seedy and the rewards meagre but Pete swam against the tide, a bit of a hero who was both loved and loathed by most of those he encountered. Through scouring the local press, Colin has researched scores of gigs that in some way wouldn’t have happened had it not been for Pete’s energy, flair and, it has to be said, cussedness. Pete also had a fondness for the product on which his family’s fortune was secured which, coupled with a rather wanton disregard for authority, led him into trouble with the law. Amusingly, Colin is equally assiduous in detailing Pete’s many appearances in the dock at the local courtroom. 

        An outsize personality, Big Pete made enemies too, including a few ex-girlfriends and, as Colin traces his life up to 1960, he paints of picture of a resolute nonconformist in an era when it was deemed right and proper to stand in cinemas while the national anthem was played after a film’s closing credits. In 1957 he visited New Orleans where he encountered his idol, the clarinettist George Lewis, with whom he performed, on banjo, in the UK in 1959, recordings of which have been made available on the Danish Rarities label and 504 Records.

        As a convert to pure New Orleans jazz from the early part of the 20th Century, as espoused by the more celebrated and equally uncompromising Ken Colyer, it will come as no surprise that Big Pete was no fan of British trad, a vanilla variant performed by men in funny hats with striped waistcoats who, briefly and inexplicably, found themselves popular in the doldrums years leading up to the arrival of The Beatles. Nevertheless, he embraced trad somewhat reluctantly before turning his attention to R&B with His Country Blues band, but there we must take a break until the arrival of Vol 2 in which we will learn of the fate of Sally Stevens, Pete’s younger half-sister, a session singer who emigrated to California. Sally, a charismatic familial link to Big Pete, owned a copy of his ultra-rare self-published, largely autobiographical, 1981 novel Half A Chance. Regrettably, however, less than a year after Colin interviewed her, she died from bronchial pneumonia. 

        Northumberland Blues, published as a limited edition by Jazz In Britain Books, contains 24 pages of photographs, among them one of Sally with Jackson Browne, scores of foot- and endnotes and an unreliable index. It’s a fascinating read, a valuable history of the evolution of jazz in Britain outside of London. I’m filing it alongside Pete Frame’s Restless Generation. 

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, London Palladium, October 27, 2025.

‘Long Black Veil’ is an American folk ballad that dates from 1959, written by Marijohn Wilkin and Danny Dill, that tells the sad story of a man hung from the gallows for a murder he did not commit. He chose not to declare his alibi – he was “in the arms of my best friend’s wife” – in the courtroom so as not to betray his lover who “walks these hills in a long black veil”. It’s been covered by many – I heard it for the first time on The Band’s debut LP Music From Big Pink, sung plaintively by Rick Danko – and on Sunday night, at the London Palladium, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings chose to sing it for their sixth and final encore. 

But this was no ordinary encore, no ordinary climax to a wonderful concert, no ordinary way to close an evening that many will remember for a long time to come. Slightly overcome by the endless ovations, Welch and Rawlings stepped away from the microphones that amplified their voices and guitars, and walked towards the platform that covered the theatre’s orchestra pit. “This is something we’ve never done before,” said Welch. “We love this theatre. It’s like an old schoolhouse. You’ll have to keep very quiet now.”

You could hear a pin drop in the big old Palladium as the pair began, Welch strumming her Gibson, Rawlings picking out the odd note on that elderly Epiphone he so plainly adores. “Ten years ago, on a cold dark night…” And when they’d finished, after we’d strained but just about succeeded in hearing them perform acoustically in the strict sense of the word, the audience exploded, as they had time and time again during the previous three hours. 

        The current brief tour of the UK by the King and Queen of Americana is long overdue. My wife and I saw them the last time they were here, in 2011, in Brighton, and the long wait to see them again has been frustrating. Their stage set was absurdly simple, a pair of matching rugs, four microphones on stands, a small table and one stool, no drums, no back line, no lighting rig aside from spots that shone down on where they stood and a wash of whirly circles that spread across the deck. At just after 8 o’clock a lone roadie brought a banjo on to the stage, leaving it on a stand next to the table. It raised a cheer which he failed to acknowledge. 

        Then they arrived, Welch in a long, patterned dress, flared below the waist, country style, her shoulders bare; Rawlings dressed as a cowboy, scruffy old jacket, faded blue jeans and matching shirt, on his head a big hat that hid most of his face, its brim turned up at the sides. Welch chose her words carefully between songs, and seemed visibly moved by the warmth with which they were received. Rawlings said next to nothing, leaving his extraordinary guitar skills to speak for him. “Don’t hold back Dave,” said Welch at one point, grinning. At another, after songs that required both harmonica and banjo, she said: “You’ve heard it all now. Banjo and harp, that’s all we’ve got.” She's very droll. 

        They sang 25 songs in all, divided into two sets with a brief interval. Though they began the concert with ‘I Wanna Sing That Rock And Roll’, from 2001’s The Revelator, a good few – I counted seven in all – were from their Woodland album, released earlier this year. They nowadays have a deep well of material from which to draw, and the subtle change in billing that seems to have taken place fairly recently – they’re officially a duo in name now as well as in reality – adds Rawlings’ own recordings to their repertoire which now tots up to ten albums’ worth of songs between them, plus a covers set, some live recordings and archive releases. Very few songs from Welch’s first five albums were performed. 

        But whatever they sang, from whatever stage of their career, didn’t really matter. Each and every song was delivered with tenderness and care, with perfect harmonies and subtle accompaniment that gathered momentum only when Rawlings took a mesmerising solo, frantically picking away at his instrument, fast, clear lines, arpeggios and ringing top notes that took him well past his 12th fret. He hugs that Epiphone like a newborn baby. Almost every solo he took inspired applause that somehow launched the pair into the next, often final, verse of whatever song they were singing and thus created a fabulous momentum to close it. On most songs Welch set the pace, crouching forward to establish a chorded rhythm that Rawlings picked up very quickly, inking in the details in his spindly, spider-web fashion. For many they were joined on double bass by Paul Kowert who either plucked or bowed his instrument, its deeper timbre balancing the sharp tone of Rawlings’ guitar and adding depth to the music’s overall tonality.

        Highlights? Too many to count really. Rawlings’ ‘Ruby’ and Welch’s ‘Red Clay Halo’ which closed the first set. More came in the second: Rawlings’ lovely ‘What We Had’ and ‘Hashtag’, both from Woodland; ‘Six White Horses’ from 2011’s The Harrow And The Harvest, with Welch hamboning and even stepping forward for a well-received twirl and two step; ‘Revelator’, with Rawlings’ sprawling, cresting solo; and all the encores, beginning with a delightful ‘Make Me Down A Pallet On Your Floor’, which, said Welch, they learned from Doc Watson himself, running through Neil Young’s ‘Cortez The Killer’, played furiously, a triumphant ‘I’ll Fly Away’, almost but not quite a singalong, Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’, another furious, incendiary cover and the icing on the cake, that pure rendition of ‘Long Black Veil’.

At the front of the stage – look, no mikes – for the final encore. 

        It takes a good deal to prise me from my nest in the country these days but it was more than worth it to spend three hours in the company of these ambassadors of a country that is no longer as great as it once was. Here’s hoping Gillian Welch and David Rawlings don’t leave it another 14 years before they visit our shores again. 

CAT ON THE ROAD TO FINDOUT by Yusuf/Cat Stevens – Part 2

The life of Cat Stevens was forever changed in the autumn of 1975 when, by his reckoning, he was saved from drowning by the Almighty. Swimming in the Pacific off the coast of Malibu, a powerful undercurrent pulled him away from the shore, his heart froze and his limbs felt too weak to get him back to land. “In a split second of the rapidly dwindling moments that remained of my life, I looked and prayed, ‘Oh God if you’ll save me, I’ll work for You.’” 

He was as good as his word and, though it didn’t happen overnight, Cat Stevens soon became Yusuf Islam and thereafter followed the Muslim faith, devoting himself largely to good works prescribed by a religion that, in his opinion, doesn’t get a fair crack of the whip in the Western world. 

        “Never was there a troubadour more handsome than Cat Stevens, nor a career so coloured with romantic stories and downright peculiarity,” I wrote in 1983 as the introduction to my book about Cat Stevens, and 42 years later – after reading his autobiography – I have come some way to understanding why he did what he did and, perhaps more importantly, what this likeable man had to endure when he swapped pop stardom for life as a Muslim. 

        It is a book of two halves, the first devoted to his life as Cat Stevens, initially as a rather dandyish and, we are told, reluctant pop star, then as the sensitive singer/songwriter who sold millions of records and became rich. The second half, roughly from 1977 onwards, is devoted his life as a Muslim, with plenty of emphasis on the difficulties he faced, some brought about by his earlier vocation, others by what he perceives as an antipathy towards Islam by an unsympathetic media that concentrates only on negativity. To this end he deals with issues like Salmon Rushdie, the Iranian Revolution and 9/11, invariably pointing out that – as in all religions – there are the good, the bad and the ugly. 

        This sets the book well apart from just about every other music biography I’ve ever read, as does Yusuf’s focus on his family, be it the mum and dad who raised him and his elder brother and sister in the Moulin Rouge restaurant near Cambridge Circus, or the family of four daughters and one son he raised after marriage to fellow Muslim Fawziah Ali in 1979. Yusuf writes about them all with affection and the frequency that other musicians devote to bass players, drummers and record producers. The on-off relationship with his brother and sometimes manager David is an ongoing sub-plot to the book.

        The slightly precocious, independent-minded child christened Steven Demetri Georgiou was fascinated by religious belief from an early age and, though the earthly temptations that came his way through exposure to the pop world were hard to resist, his eventual conversation seems somehow inevitable. Still, he road-tested other religions, among them Christianity, Buddhism and the I Ching, before settling on Islam to which he was drawn after David gifted him a copy of the Koran. 

        The clues were there in many of the songs he wrote between 1970 and 1975; expressing the thoughts of a seeker (‘On The Road To Find Out’ and ‘Miles From Nowhere’), climate-conscious environmentalist (‘Where Do The Children Play?’), disquiet at materialism (‘Hard Headed Woman’) and hope for mankind (‘Peace Train’ and ‘Sitting’). ‘Morning Has Broken’, of course, is an arrangement of a Christian hymn from 1931 while ‘How Can I Tell You’, to my mind his greatest love song, scores through the writer’s inadequacy to express himself. More than once in the book Yusuf recounts his dislike of being interviewed, and frustration at how the media misrepresented whatever opinions he was trying to express. 

        Yusuf has a friendly, unpretentious writing style and though some may be deterred by the detours into religious reasoning that occupy large chunks of the book’s latter stages, I shared his exasperation at incidents where he was shoddily treated by immigration officials in the US and Israel. Much of this he attributes to his high profile as a one-time celebrity, the quid pro quo being his ability to fund charities and Islamic education from the fortune he amassed as a million-selling artist. His gradual re-emergence as a musician, somewhat unexpected after selling his guitars and giving the proceeds to charity, is a welcome relief towards the end of the book. 

        It’s a long read – 554 pages – and, unusually, the 24-page b&w photo section is at the back. Inexplicably for a lengthy autobiography, there is no index. Finally, I need to mention that he’s in no doubt that Carly Simon wrote ‘You’re So Vain’ about him. “I never understood the endless hide-and-seek of finding out who [it] was about bro!” he writes. “Naturally, I knew it was me.” His song ‘Sweet Scarlett’ from his 1972 LP Catch Bull At Four was his response. 

CAT ON THE ROAD TO FINDOUT: THE OFFICIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Yusuf/Cat Stevens – Part 1

Just Backdated is off on his holidays, taking with him Cat/Yusuf’s autobiography which will be read by the pool alongside the house of friends who live in Valbonne, about 20 miles north east of Nice on the French Riviera. The book is of special significance to me because of my on-off relationship with the man I first knew as Steve in 1970 and – by way of a preface to my review of his book – here’s a bit of background.

The new-look Cat Stevens landed in the charts at number 21 with ‘Lady D’Arbanville’ in June of 1970 – the same month I joined Melody Maker. It was MM’s custom to publish stories on newcomers to the charts but Stevens, or Steve as he was known to his friends, was no newcomer. He might as well have been, however, since his new image was far removed from the foppish, velvet-suited Cat Stevens who’d graced the charts three years earlier with ‘I Love My Dog’ and ‘Matthew And Son’. 

        For this reason, instead of an interview he was invited to be the subject of MM’s Blind Date feature, during which musicians were played records ‘blind’ and invited to identify the artist and comment on their music. This was conducted by me in our offices and, meeting him for the first time, we got on pretty well. “He took a keen interest in the records played,” I reported, and among them were singles by Diana Ross & The Supremes (‘Love Child’ – “I don’t really like their sparkling dresses but they’re one of the greatest”) and The Moody Blues (‘Melancholy Man’ – “That’s a nice song. Their covers always look like cheap encyclopaedia covers”). 

        The following month I saw Steve performing for the first time at the NJF Festival at Plumpton Racecourse in East Sussex. Accompanied by his guitar playing sidekick Alun Davies, he “looked confident with a black pre-war Gibson that Sotheby’s might be interested in,” I wrote in the following week’s MM. “His quiet, pleasant and pretty songs drifted into the warm air with superb clarity, building up to ‘Lady D’Arbanville’, the song which, he said, had made him a pop star again.”

        In December that same year I interviewed Steve in the Red Lion pub behind MM’s office where he ordered a large vodka and told me he was concentrating on LPs now after recovering from the TB that took him out of the limelight for almost two years. “It seems as I am making a comeback but I have never been away,” he told me. Early the following year I was invited to watch Steve’s In Concert TV show being filmed at the BBC HQ in Shepherds Bush and I saw him again a year later at the Drury Lane Theatre in Covent Garden, a prestigious affair at which he was accompanied by a small choir, miniature string ensemble and, for the song ‘Rubylove’, a quartet of Greek musicians playing bouzoukis. My date was a huge fan, clearly besotted with him and rendered speechless when I introduced them at the post gig party. I sensed that women of all ages and backgrounds adored him. 

        Constantly surrounded by the rich and fashionable, Stevens mixed not with the rough and tumble of the rock’n’roll trade but with society friends, introduced to him by his manager Barry Krost, a flamboyantly gay man. He was courted by artists and models, actors and actresses, debutantes, dress designers and fashion photographers. 

        By now I had become a fan and his next two LPs, Tea For The Tillerman and Teaser And The Firecat – both multi-million sellers worldwide – were in constant rotation on my record player. He had become a leading light in the bed-sitter singer/songwriter genre and his name was coupled with a series of high-profile beauties, among them Linda Lewis and Carly Simon. 

        In June of 1973 I conducted a lengthy interview with Stevens at his well-appointed terraced house in Fulham. He was now a big star, of course, and this interview occupied a double-page spread in MM. I saw him only once during my period as MM’s editor in the US, in March of 1976 at Madison Square Garden, and attended a post-gig dinner for him afterwards. He was as friendly as ever and on his arm was another beautiful girl. 

        After I left MM in the spring of 1977 I lost touch with most of the rock stars I reviewed or interviewed, Steve among them, and when he converted to the Islamic faith and retired from music in 1978 I figured I would never see him again. However, in the autumn of 1982 I was approached by Proteus books to write a book about him. I told them I would do so only if Yusuf Islam – as he was then known – would co-operate in some way, and to this end set about finding him. 

        A helpful chap in a shalwar kameez at the London Central Mosque in Regents Park told me that Yusuf worked out of offices on Curzon Street in Mayfair, running an organisation called The Companions Of The Mosque and a children’s charity that was funded largely by the royalty stream from his back catalogue of music. He gave me the address, which I recognised as being the same as where his one-time manager Barry Krost once had offices. I wrote Yusuf a letter, enclosing my phone number, and hoped for the best.

        Sure enough, within a few days Yusuf called and invited me to meet him there. With his short hair and long beard he looked very different from the man I once knew but he recognised me from old and seemed interested when I told him about the book proposal. Our meeting was interrupted by prayers – he went off into another room to join colleagues while I listened to incantations and twiddled my thumbs – but he consented to help me, within limits, on condition that Proteus donated to the charity he headed. 

Yusuf explained to me that in the Muslim world there is a stipulation that no one must be seen to rise above anyone else lest this be interpreted as an attempt to challenge Allah, or God, and the publication of a biography might contravene this proviso. Nevertheless, although he declined to be interviewed, he agreed to read what I wrote, and correct any errors, and was as a good as his word, reading my manuscript and changing the text here and there. I knew he was something of a ladies’ man in the past but thought it best not to go into this, nor that he enjoyed a life of carefree indulgence in those days. I think he respected this discretion on my part. Our relations were friendly. 

        After a couple of these meetings I persuaded him to talk to me a bit about his life after he left music, his day-to-day routine as a Muslim, which he did, in part because he wanted to dismiss the popular notion that he was an eccentric recluse. He was also frustrated at having become a sort of unelected ‘spokesman’ for Muslims, this because whenever there was a news story about Muslims he was the one the media turned to for a comment, for no better reason than they knew of no one else to approach beside this ’former pop star’. 

        “There’s no equivalent of the Pope, Archbishop of Canterbury or Chief Rabbi in Islam,” he pointed out to me. “Everyone is equal.” Often, the stories were negative which meant he was forced to defend Islam, and he didn’t feel comfortable having to do this, time and time again. I sympathised with him.

        When it came out, the book, simply titled, Cat Stevens, was only about 26,000 words but for years afterwards was the only source of biographical information about him, and after its publishers went out of business it became rare and quite valuable. I once saw it advertised for over £1,000 on Amazon but it is no longer available, though last week one was on sale on eBay for £200. 

        By the mid-nineties the rights to books published by Proteus had been acquired by Music Sales, the sheet music publisher that also owned Omnibus Press, of which was now senior editor. Music Sales had acquired the rights to publish Cat Stevens’ songs as sheet music and when he turned up at our offices in Frith Street for a meeting about this he seemed delighted to see me again. I suggested we put my book back into print and when he asked if I had a copy to spare I gave him one of two that I owned which he never returned. Now I have only one. 

        After a bit of umming and erring, Yusuf decided he didn’t want it in print again, nor to take up my alternative suggestion to allow me to write a new book with his co-operation. Always gracious, he explained to me that he felt more comfortable out of the spotlight and iterated how unhappy he was at the way he’d been portrayed in the media over the years. The media continued to turn to him as a spokesman on Islamic matters, purely because he’d once been a pop star and was therefore the most prominent Muslim in the UK, at least to non-Muslims. It was not a role he wanted and one he wanted to shake off. A biography, he reasoned, would make this more difficult.

         I tended to agree with him, so no new biography appeared, though I had no doubt that the rather peculiar circumstances of his life and the many issues surrounding Muslims in the UK would make for a commercially successful book. Since his life outside music is largely an unknown quantity yet would need to be covered in some detail, no such book could be written without his co-operation. I never met with him again but by a strange coincidence I found myself often in the company of Alun Davies, his former accompanist, because Alun and his daughter Becky often performed – as Good Men In The Jungle – at The Compasses, the pub in my Surrey village. Alun, who was still in regular touch with Yusuf, kept me informed of what he was up to, and I asked him to put in a good word for me should Yusuf ever decide to write an autobiography and needed an editor. It never happened but Alun did mention to me that from time to time he continued to appear alongside Yusuf at isolated concert appearances. 

        In 2014 I was approached by Yusuf’s older brother David Gordon who planned to write a book about Yusuf. We met at our offices along with a woman who would ghost-write the book for him, and even went as far as to include David’s book on a schedule of forthcoming Omnibus books for 2016, the year I retired. David’s book never happened but along the way I told him that what I really wanted was for Yusuf to write his own book which Omnibus would gladly publish. This book didn’t happen either, well not for Omnibus. 

More recently, by which I mean during the past decade, Yusuf’s once strict devotion to Islam seems to have moderated. He’s released lots of new music, performed on stage with his guitar many times, including a Glastonbury appearance in 2023, and even accepted induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Many of his old LPs have been remastered and reissued, and I was even commissioned by Universal to write sleeve notes for the first two issued by Decca from Stevens’ early pop-star period. What I wrote can be fond elsewhere on Just Backdated. 

        Now along comes the autobiography – at last – all 550 pages of it, which is on the bulky side for a holiday read but, as you can imagine, I’m looking forward to reading Yusuf’s take on his extraordinary life. 

        I’ll review it next week. 

FLOPS ON 45: The Ones That Got Away 1965-1979 by Richard Lysons

This is the book that no established rock or pop star will want in their Christmas stocking. With very few exceptions, everyone who has enjoyed a hit record or two has also had a few flops, which they doubtless hope the world has forgotten. Now, along comes Richard Lysons to remind them of their flops, and while his motive is surely not to rub their faces in it, his diligence makes sure that none escape his merciless gaze. 

The truth is, of course that most acts, especially newcomers, record more flops than hits and the ratio of hits to misses across the board is anyone’s guess. Statistics aren’t available – doubtless because the record industry doesn’t want to talk about its failures – but I’m inclined to think that less than one in 30 actual releases became hits. Those that remain unsold might even have been melted down so the vinyl could be used again, a terrible fate. 

Flops On 45 is restricted to UK acts within the period denoted by its subtitle. By and large, it limits itself to acts who have, or had, enjoyed a measure of success along the way, which means that flops by hopefuls who never made the charts are ignored, otherwise the book would be about ten times its length. As it is, it’s 350 pages, including a substantial index and source notes, but no pictures, thus relieving its publishers, Empire Publications of Manchester, of substantial clearance fees. 

“Flops On 45 makes an important contribution to popular music history: it honours a forgotten workforce,” writes the eminent critic and sociologist Simon Frith in his introduction, referring to the detail – the chronicling by Lysons of all those involved, hundreds of names, in a record’s production – that is at the heart of his book. Indeed, I’m hard pressed to think of any pop book, not even those that record the hits, as opposed to the misses, with so much trivial information. As it happens, in 2005, to mark the 1000th UK Number One hit, I commissioned and edited 1000 UK Number One Hits for Omnibus Press, which in many ways is the antithesis of Flops On 45, and though authors Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh did a sterling job, they didn’t pack anywhere near as much information into the generous 600 pages of this large format, illustrated book as Lysons does into Flops On 45.

Faced with a proposal for a book on records that flopped, a commissioning editor such as myself might reasonably be excused for assuming that the book would flop too, for who would want to read about records few people bought? That’s not the point, of course. The point is to contrast the misses with the hits, and explain why an act with plenty of big hits somehow stumbles along the way. More specifically, and Lysons doesn’t hold back in this regard, he explains why he believes a record was a flop, usually because he thinks it’s pretty awful, but other factors such as taste, timing and promotion, or lack thereof, impact on a record's chances too. At the same time, though, he sheds a tear over those records that in his opinion deserved to be hits but weren’t.

Let’s take a random example. Only two acts – The Beatles and The Bee Gees – get a chapter to themselves. The Beatles didn’t have any flops collectively but the same cannot be said for the individuals after they’d split up. The Bees Gees, on the other hand, both top the charts and plumb the depths, and one of their biggest flops was ‘Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)’, to my mind the equal of ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ which reached number three, unlike ‘Fanny’ which didn’t chart at all in the UK. “Without doubt, one of the best R&B songs we ever wrote,” Lysons quotes Maurice Gib. “I love Arif Mardin’s production…” while Lysons adds, “It is one of the group’s finest songs and deserved to be a hit. Perhaps the title – inspired by the housekeeper at 461 Ocean Boulevard named Fanny Cummings – was the problem. As British-born, surely the writers knew the problems of using this word? But for me, ‘Fanny’ is in a class of its own.” I agree.

Flops On 45 is divided into 17 chapters, each of which deals with a particular strain of pop – Teen Angels, Underground, Ladies, London Boys, Glam, Punk etc etc – and is a trivia fans delight, well worth the £14.95 rrp. 

PINK FLOYD – SHINE ON: The Definitive Oral History by Mark Blake

“If you’re in a room, as I was at Live 8, with David, Nick, Rick and Roger Waters, nobody speaks,” says Polly Samson, wife of David Gilmour since 1994. “There is nothing but awkward silences. They have no small talk with each other. They have no big talk with each other. They just do not speak. And then they get on stage and suddenly they’re so eloquent, and the way they communicate is beautiful.”

Time was when the concept of an Oral History of Pink Floyd was about as likely as Van Morrison inviting journalists to spend an evening drinking with him while he regaled them with stories about his days in Them. Not only didn’t they speak to each other, they didn’t speak to the press much either. What’s more, pretty much everyone around them was tight-lipped too. They were an enigma, a “faceless obelisk” as more than one of their accomplices comment in Mark Blake’s second book about the group, following on from Pigs Might Fly, his definitive biography, now in its third edition. 

Now, of course, everything’s out in the open. Indeed, it took the squabbling between Roger Waters and David Gilmour, over the latter’s decision to reform the group to record and tour without Waters, that set off a time-bomb, opening the floodgates for all manner of grievances to be aired in public. The air of mystery was dispelled and, suddenly, Pink Floyd was an open book. 

        That element of mystery is most often explained by the strange story of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s founder, once its leading light, whose withdrawal from renown and eccentric behaviour was an ongoing source of invasive, sometimes salacious, speculation. But there was more to it than that, however; a detachment hinted at in the Dark Side song ‘Us And Them’: ”Who knows which is which and who is who?” 

        They didn’t like doing interviews, or having their photographs taken. On stage, they wore black and hid behind lights, screens and props. Their LP sleeves featured surreal, baffling imagery. It seemed as if they didn’t want their fans to know how they created their work, what they thought about it or even what they looked like. They were a conundrum, appealing to the curious, to problem-solvers, to those who believed – rightly or wrongly – that liking their music demonstrated a higher level of perception than, say, fans of Status Quo. 

Gradually, however, as the inner workings of Pink Floyd became exposed, what we saw wasn’t very nice. Beneath that aloof veneer, that inscrutable façade, lingered dysfunction and bitterness, rivalry and vanity, arrogance and greed – all of which Mark Blake reveals in spades this engrossing oral history.

Mark begins at the beginning, with Syd Barrett, or Roger as he was always known to his sister Rosemary, who speaks at length about the brother she tried hard to understand but never really did, and who cared for him later in life. We move on to how the group was assembled from among friends in Cambridge, with Syd as the central figure, soon to be joined in London by drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright. At this point Waters was the least musical, requiring Wright, the only trained musician, to tune his bass. For whatever reason, Waters looked down on Wright thereafter. 

Plenty of people talk about this era, when Pink Floyd was a pop group pure and simple, in frilly shirts, loon pants and kicking their legs in the air for photographers. The inscrutability came later, after Syd was abandoned to whatever was going on inside his head, which no one could understand, and with Gilmour as his replacement an element of professionalism is introduced, along with the walls erected to keep outsiders at bay.

Nevertheless, Mark Blake has unearthed plenty of bystanders to take us through the story, among them a surprising number of former girlfriends – they got married and divorced a lot, leaving a pool of embittered ex-wives who, no doubt, hoovered up a decent chunk of their earnings – road crew, some of whom were retained even when their services were no longer required, record producers and studio hands, management staff, flatmates, collaborators, photographers, journalists and, most especially, Aubrey “Po” Powell who, with the late Storm Thorgerson, made up the design team Hipgnosis, creators of Floydian artwork. Some 92 voices are credited in the acknowledgements, the interviews conducted between 1992 and 2025, which speaks for itself as far as Blake’s diligence is concerned.

The quotes are linked with Mark’s text to explain the background, much of it setting the scene for when and where he interviewed the members of the group and, in his own idiosyncratic way, comments on how they behave. We hear how Waters’ domination of the group tore it apart, how he bullied Wright and alienated Gilmour. For years Mason acted as a go-between but in the end opted for the Gilmour faction, a wise move. Waters’ incomprehension at how Pink Floyd could exist without him is at the heart of the tale. 

“You are antisemitic to your rotten core,” wrote Samson, never one to mince words, to Waters in 2023, “… a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.”

“Imagine waking up to [her] every morning,” responded Waters.

And if the band you’re in starts playing a different tune… 

THE COLONEL AND THE KING by Peter Guralnick

Every great story needs a great villain, and in The Elvis Presley Story the villain has always been Colonel Tom Parker, his manager. Just look at the evidence: he conned poor old Elvis out of 50% of his earnings, maybe more; he was a bully, unsophisticated and uncultured, steering Elvis away from his R&B roots towards MOR and innumerable schlock films, neutering his sexuality in the process; he bartered Elvis’ health-sapping Las Vegas appearances to pay off his gambling debts; and, finally, to hammer the nail into the coffin, he wasn’t even who he said he was, concealing his real identity as – wait for it – an illegal immigrant.   

That, at least, is the commonly held narrative, and also the theme of the “authorised” 1922 biopic Elvis The Movie, with Tom Hanks as, to quote my own review, the “scheming, Machiavellian Parker, thoroughly dislikable, overweight, lumbering, ugly and speaking with a nasty quasi-Boer accent born of his Dutch ancestry, of which Elvis was forever ignorant.”

        Peter Guranlick, Elvis’ premier biographer, however, believes otherwise. The only minor criticism of his magnificent, definitive two-volume Presley biography, Last Train To Memphis (1994) and Carless Love (1999), was that he was too easy on Parker. In this third book – a coda if you like – Guralnick goes out of his way to fully redeem Parker’s reputation, painting a portrait that is the complete opposite of his (un)popular image, an avuncular, wise and witty man who was kind to animals, stood by his friends, always kept his word and was scrupulously honest. Indeed, so robust is the author’s defence of Parker, so persuasive his tone, that I’m inclined to believe him. 

        The story is told in two parts. The first, subtitled How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free? – the proposed title for a book Parker intended to write but never did – is a 300+ page biography that avoids focusing on Presley and instead offers fascinating details on aspects of Parker’s life hitherto unexplored, many of them heart-warming. The second, occupying the final 250 pages, tells his story through a selection from the “tens of thousands” of letters he wrote (and a handful he received); to Elvis and his family, business associates, friends and foes, the earliest eulogising Elvis before he managed him, the majority pushing his point of view with regard to Elvis’ career, many of them illustrating Parker’s quirky sense of the absurd. Some of these letters are alluded to in the biographical section of the book. 

Parker’s upbringing in his native Breda in Holland had been explored before but never in such detail, and the same goes for his early life in the US as a “carney”, a general labourer on travelling fairgrounds and circuses where he was always willing to turn his hand to any task, no matter how unpleasant, and learnt show business from the ground up. He was particularly adept at working as an “advance man”, arriving a week or two in a town before the carnival, setting up deals with local businesses and making absolutely sure its entire population was aware of the coming attraction, thus maximising profits, a skill he maintained with Elvis. I found these pre-Elvis chapters absorbing – there was a likeable streak of eccentricity in Parker’s character, a restlessness, a need to make up his own rules as he went along and not to accept the status quo. Above all, he got things done.

Introduced to the music world through a fairly brief relationship with crooner Gene Austin, he quickly became known as a mover and shaker, moving on to manage Eddy Arnold and, later, Hank Snow. Elvis – a “promising new singer” – was drawn to his attention early in 1955 and after watching him on the Louisiana Hayride Colonel booked him onto a Snow tour that opened in Roswell, New Mexico, on February 14. He stole the show, just as he did on two tours of Florida that followed. The reaction from teenage girls was explosive, and when Mae Boren Axton, a former school teacher (and co-author of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’) who was working for Parker, spotted a former student in the audience, she inquired what was it about Elvis that she liked so much. “Awww Miz Axton,” she replied, “he’s just one great big beautiful hunk of forbidden fruit.” 

Parker moved swiftly. By the end of the year, flying by the seat of his pants, he had edged out Presley’s manager, won over Elvis’ sceptical parents, negotiated a release from Sun Records and transfer to RCA, overseen more chaotic concerts, arranged more TV appearances and set the wheels in motion for Elvis’ first movie which turned out to be Love Me Tender. He worked 16 hours a day, every day, and Elvis sure appreciated it: “You are the best and most wonderful person I could ever hope to work with,” wrote Elvis in a letter addressed to Parker on November 21, 1956. “I will stick with you thru thick and thin… I love you like a father.”

Which pretty much sums up the relationship from then on, though Guralnick is at pains to point out that, creatively, Elvis was in charge, while when it came to business Parker ruled the roost. In amongst what follows are details of complex royalty and advance deals with RCA and various film companies in which Parker, forever astute, invariably comes out on top. He never forces Elvis into doing anything he doesn’t want to do – thus contradicting the widely held belief that Parker stifled Elvis’ artistic ambitions, and reveals how the spendthrift in Elvis was most often to blame for placing earnings before art. 

        Furthermore, according to Guralnick, Parker did not interfere with the production of Elvis’s Comeback Special in 1968 (though he hated the word ‘comeback’, insisting Elvis never went away), the reason why Elvis never toured outside of the US was not Parker’s lack of a US passport but the customs risk to whoever was assigned to carry his drugs, and the impetus behind the notorious sell-out of his back catalogue to RCA in 1973 came from Elvis and his father, not Parker. And the 50/50 income split applied only to joint ventures agreed upon late in Elvis’ career. 

The story gets darker towards the end as Elvis’ weight and health problems interfere with Parker’s innate sense of responsibility towards the paying public. The hopelessness of the situation, the breakdown of the marriage if you like, may have led Parker to become addicted to gambling, squandering his fortune on Vegas roulette wheels, an inexplicable reversal of type for a serial winner. He’s stoic when Elvis dies and bitter when the Estate seeks to free itself from his clutches. Towards the end he’s on speaking terms with its CEO and in the end even Priscilla comes around to appreciating all that he did for her late husband. By this time, too, he and Guralnick have become friends, insofar as Parker could ever befriend a journalist. 

It’s not easy to come to terms with the idea that Colonel Tom Parker was a saint but Elvis And The Colonel succeeds. The book is illustrated throughout with photos, many I’d not seen before, and beautifully written, as you would expect from Peter Guralnick. 

THE WHO: Live At The Oval

September 18, 1971, a Saturday, was a lovely autumn day, perfect in every way. At lunchtime in Kennington, just south of the River Thames, the sun shone down on a vast horde of rock fans streaming from Oval Underground Station and making their way along Harleyford Street to the cricket ground that since 1845 has been the home of Surrey CCC. Some were running, hurrying along to secure a spot near the front; for that evening, as dusk fell, the greatest live rock group in the world would perform on a rickety stand long since demolished. Like the game of cricket itself, with its many formats and multi-coloured strips, the Oval is much redeveloped since that night but it remains the traditional venue for the final, often deciding, Test Match in five-game series involving England and one of the cricket-playing nations that take turns to visit our shores each summer. For this reason, it is often the scene of noisy celebrations. 

The group who played at the Oval that night certainly provoked a noisy celebration and, it could be said, is much redeveloped too, this imposed upon them by the passing of two members. Furthermore, the music they play, both at the Oval and currently on what is likely to be their final American tour, is somehow traditional too. Their best-known songs have joined the body of work that is the cornerstone of rock music, just as the sonatas and symphonies by the great composers are the cornerstone of its classical equivalent. Nine songs performed that night at the Oval were performed last week when the two surviving members of the group, along with six others, opened their ‘Song Is Over’ tour in Florida. 

It was and is, of course, The Who: Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle and Keith Moon, Londoners all, and in 1971 they were at the peak of their powers. The previous month had seen the release of Who’s Next, regarded by many as their finest achievement, and it’s likely that the 40,000 who turned out that autumn day remains the largest crowd ever seen at the Oval, for sponsorship reasons now known as the Kia Oval. It’s official capacity, even today, is only 27,500. At the time it was the biggest crowd ever assembled to watch The Who in their home town. 

I was among them, covering the event for Melody Maker. In the 16 months since I’d joined the paper I’d done my best to ingratiate myself with The Who and their support team for the simple reason that I thought they were the best band in the world, and by the time of this concert I was sufficiently friendly with their acting manager Peter Rudge that he’d given me an on-stage pass so I could stand alongside the band, on John’s side, with my plus one which happened that day to be my sister. I watched and reviewed the show from this privileged position but, being so close, the music didn’t sound as clear as it would have done from out front. It never does. Still, it sounded a lot better than The Faces who preceded The Who on stage, this because The Who used a brand-new and very expensive PA system that wasn’t made available to the other acts on the bill. On hearing how The Who sounded, Rod Stewart left early, muttering indignantly to himself. 

My 'priority' pass for The Who's Oval show. 

 

I was aware that the concert was being recorded. The Pye mobile studio truck was parked at the rear of the stand where the temporary stage had been built, cables were everywhere and recording engineers were scurrying about, but I was told later – much later, in fact, not until I was involved in selecting tracks for the 4-CD Who box set 30 Years Of Maximum R&B in 1993 – that the tapes were unusable, evidently something to do with the positioning of microphones. Modern technology is a wonderful thing, however, and the tapes have been resurrected, so, for the past 48 hours I’ve been listening to The Who at the Oval as if I’d been one of those scurrying from the tube station to get close to the band. And it’s a damn near flawless performance, a perfect snapshot of The Who in their prime, spurred on by that reckless spirit of adventure that characterised them in this, their imperial phase. 

The Who had spent most of the previous month touring America, playing mostly arenas, so they were at Olympic fitness. Still, they rehearsed with their new PA and lighting rig at the Granada Cinema in Wandsworth during early September, concentrating on the newer songs from Who’s Next, and the set they played at the Oval was almost identical to those performed on the US tour, a judicious mix of old and new, the kind of set they would perform until the new became the old much later in their career. 

Because of the need to switch sound systems there was a long delay before The Who arrived on stage, and when they did they opened up with a spontaneous jam, probably to test the PA, its assumed title ‘So Glad To See Ya’, taken from Roger’s improvised lyric. Satisfied with the sound, they launched into ‘Summertime Blues’, a safe starter, to get themselves in the mood, John and Roger already displaying top form, Keith warming up and Pete a bit reckless, as he was wont to be. John’s song ‘My Wife’ followed, a steamroller, chockfull of power chords, Keith steady, John in good voice, Pete more disciplined, switching from block chords to lead runs as the song cruised towards its end; Roger, underused, hanging grimly on, keepin’ on movin’ as he sings when John steps back. “The Ox,” he announces at the close.

The tempo yielded for the more melodic ‘Love Ain’t For Keepin’’, another new song, shorter than most, with unforeseen harmonies in mid song, before a couple of trusted favourites ‘I Can’t Explain’ and ‘Substitute’, the former’s quick solo a blistering assault, the latter a tight, brief showcase for The Who’s harmonic flair. Roger introduced ‘Bargain’, a relatively complex song performed with ease, before the more melodious ‘Behind Blue Eyes’, equally assured, arpeggios cleanly picked. 

‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, the fifth Who’s Next song of the night, followed, a lengthy, tight reading that was edited for their recent single, accompanied by the pre-recorded synthesiser track that reins the group in to a certain extent and heralds its dramatic climax. The semi-public Young Vic rehearsals aside, this would have been the first occasion on which fans could hear this latest, up-to-the-minute addition to The Who’s instrumental arsenal. The other, equally famous, synthesiser-based Who’s Next song, ‘Baba O’Riley’, would not be introduced into The Who’s set until later in the year.  

‘Baby Don’t You Do It’, a power-driven take on a Marvin Gaye Motown song, allows John and Keith to display their chops, punctuated by Pete’s improvised guitar licks. It was no secret that at this time of their evolution their guitarist smoothed his passage with gulps from a brandy bottle – as John would do later from ‘water’ bottles attached to his microphone stand – and it’s my contention that this enabled both to ride roughshod at times, freeing themselves to play as flexibly as they chose, to leap into the unknown, on numbers like ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’ and, later in this show, ‘Naked Eye’ and ‘Magic Bus’. Because today’s audiences invariably demand to hear only what they recognise, such spontaneity is rarely heard now. This indulgence might also explain Pete’s rather undisciplined comments during the show, with references to silly mid-on, his smart new white outfit and how he’d give his guitar away at the close, sounding a bit like intemperate rants.

Two selections from Tommy, ‘Pinball Wizard’ and ‘See Me Feel Me’/’Listening To You’, followed, both crowd pleasers, the latter especially electric as the Tommy hymn doubles back on itself, gaining momentum as it charges forward. At this point in the show the huge Klieg spotlights behind the back line were switched on, their beams illuminating the scene – and what a glorious sight it was from the stage: 40,000 delirious Who fans waving ecstatically as Roger sang about how listening to them inspires the music they hear. 

Seconds after it ended Pete yelled ‘My Generation’, and they launched into a brisk take on their rabble-rousing statement of independence, a brutal riposte to Tommy’s fanciful optimism. This segues into ‘Naked Eye’, heard no doubt for the first time by many present, a long, undulating, dramatic piece of highs and lows, and finally ‘Magic Bus’, another lengthy, bouncy crowd-pleaser, the group’s take on Bo Diddley, that ends with a traditional Who smash up. “Inevitably Townshend’s guitar – a brand new Gibson bought for the day – was sacrificed to the crowd,” I wrote in the following week’s Melody Maker. “He hammered it to pieces with the mic stand and took a flying leap into his stack. The wreckage was thrown to the crowd as Moon stood up and literally walked through his drum kit.”

The Melody Maker headline on my show review. 

It was a fitting climax to one of The Who’s greatest ever shows, now available for all to hear; shame movie cameras weren’t covering it too. 

Unusually, The Who Live At The Oval is released by Universal Music, The Who’s US label, and for this reason is a tad more expensive than their releases on Polydor. The package contains a 20-page booklet with top notch sleeve notes by Andy Neill, lots of pictures taken on the day and an explanation of how and why the recording was finally upgraded for public consumption.