RINGO – A Fab Life by Tom Doyle

Pity the poor drummers, left high and dry when the band no longer needs them, even one as famous as Ringo Starr. Singers and guitarists are shown the red carpet but drummers can’t figure out what to do with themselves. Charlie Watts sat in, but couldn’t drive, his high-priced cars while reading his ultra-rare first editions; Keith Moon drank himself to death; Ginger Baker squandered his riches on polo; Clem Burke played with a Blondie tribute band. Ringo tried pretty much anything and everything, and by 1979 was perpetually drunk. Diagnosed with a life-threatening intestinal blockage that year, a doctor told him that if he left the hospital without the recommended treatment he would die. To his great credit he sobered up, though it took a while, and is still with us, now Sir Ringo. In July he’ll be 86.

        There is no rational explanation why Ringo has, until now, been largely ignored by biographers but to the best of my knowledge A Fab Life – great title, by the way – is only the second [1] book to have been written on him while those about his band (and three bandmates) could fill a library. Perhaps the reason lies in this quote from Ringo’s close friend and fellow drummer Jim Keltner: “He seemed too overly humble… almost beyond humble… totally unaware that he’d done anything. That’s what I must have been like to be the drummer with The Beatles.”

Ringo’s diffidence is to blame, then, for the paucity of books about him but the truth of the matter is that his life is just as interesting, and indeed more comical, than John, Paul or George. Within a year of being drafted into The Beatles, just as they began their recording career, he found himself amongst the most famous men in the UK, and a year after that he was America’s favourite Beatle, and all the while he just kept grinning blithely and muttering plays on words, amusingly dry malapropisms that became known as Ringoisms, the best known of which was the title of The Beatles’ first film. 

This is a good-hearted book about a good-hearted man, and it covers all the important events in Ringo’s life, albeit not precisely in linear fashion. Wisely, Tom Doyle has opted to tell Ringo’s story through a series of snapshots, seventy in all, bite-sized chapters that are roughly chronological and in their often droll fashion somehow suit the character of the smallest, oldest and most lovable Beatle. There is a school of thought that Ringo, born Richard Starkey and known to his friends as Richy, is the luckiest man alive but he has lived up to his billing, even if his passage through life, as recorded here, occasionally reminded me of the character of Chance The Gardner from Being There, Peter Sellers’ last great movie role. 

If you’ve taken the trouble to keep tabs on Ringo’s extraordinary life during the past 50 years then you probably won’t find much that is new in this book. Nevertheless, Doyle has done his research admirably and listed among the many chapters every film in which Starr has appeared and every album that carried his name – and there’s lots of them, certainly more than I thought – and every one of them is critically analysed, their merits or otherwise noted in a detached manner.  One thing I didn’t know, and that Doyle makes clear, is that the well-known aphorism that Ringo wasn’t the best drummer in The Beatles, falsely attributed to John Lennon, was in reality a Jasper Carrott joke, uttered in 1987, that Carrott subsequently regretted. “I’ve never met Ringo,” says Carrott, “but if he was in the same room as me, I’d skirt around it very quickly.”

Of more import, perhaps, is the genuine love that Ringo inspires among his many friends. Aside from the period when he was so drunk that people avoided him, no one has a bad word to say about him, which reinforces the widespread view that he was the diplomat amongst the Beatles; bluff, warm and engaging, never one to raise his voice in anger or throw a tantrum, a born light entertainer who was probably more at home during The Beatles’ early years than those that followed. Indeed, Doyle’s portrait led me to feel a bit sorry for Ringo during those times in his life when he was drifting aimlessly, famous for having once been famous and, for a while in his middle age, little else. It comes as something of a relief when, sober, he rediscovers his love of drumming and goes back on the road with a series of bands under the Ringo’s All Starrs banner. 

Ringo: A Fab Life has 389 pages but, sadly, contains no photographs and isn’t indexed. This is poor, and can probably be blamed on excessive penny-pinching by Putnam, the publishers. What’s more, the Lennon quote on page 294 about the likelihood of The Beatles reforming isn’t credited to Melody Maker, let alone myself who conducted that particular interview in 1973. 

[1] The first was Ringo Starr: Straight Man Or Joker by Alan Clayson (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1991, subsequently republished by Sanctuary) which appears to be out of print though used copies can be found on the Internet. 

DAVID BOWIE – TEN YEARS GONE (Part 2)

The switch in record labels from RCA to EMI in 1982 saw David Bowie pocket a reputed $17 million advance and move back into the musical mainstream, this time on his own terms. With EMI’s promotional muscle behind it, Let’s Dance (1983), produced by Nile Rodgers, became his best-selling album ever, its funk-driven title track a big hit with an even bigger hook. He was looking different now too, more mature and smartly turned out in stylish pastel suits, business-like yet as attractive as ever, his neatly coiffured blonde hair and easy smile as appealing as the sheen of Let’s Dance tracks like ‘Modern Love’ and ‘China Girl’. The Serious Moonlight tour that followed saw Bowie ever more accomplished on stage, his gift for presentation now executed with effortless panache, a crowd-pleasing spectacle of light, sound, movement and mime, all to accompany a catalogue of wonderful songs played by top class musicians led by guitarist Carlos Alomar. It was this vision of Bowie that in 1985 seduced a worldwide audience of millions at Live Aid, his four-song set during Bob Geldof’s all-star charity extravaganza a highlight of the event and a triumph of mass communication.

        The momentum, however, was not to last. Tonight (1984) failed to match the sparkle of Let’s Dance, presaging an artistic decline that lasted for almost a decade, exacerbated by the disappointing Never Let Me Down (1987) which in the fullness of time Bowie himself would resoundingly disparage. The global success of the new ‘normal’ Bowie, and the less-than-radical soundtrack that accompanied this latest model, proved to be his undoing. In distancing himself from the cutting edge, he fell between two stools, alienating both the new and less critical post-Let’s Dance audience that recoiled at his theatricality while at the same time frustrating the more discerning long-term fans who’d been drawn to his visionary zeal. Matters weren't helped by contractual obligations to a hungry new record label.  

        Bowie’s solution to this dilemma was to form a group, Tin Machine, in which he would claim to be ‘just another member’, an optimistic prospect to say the least. If nothing else the two heavy-handed Tin Machine albums in 1989 and 1991 and subsequent live recording a year later moved Bowie away from the spotlight to lick his wounds. His commercial stock was now at its lowest point since before the Ziggy era but he surprised the world again, not with music but by marrying the Somalian model Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid [1]. Iman clearly inspired the romanticism of Black Tie White Noise (1993) and seemed to finally settle Bowie’s restless spirit and curb his occasional lapses into hedonism.

        Thereafter Bowie’s muse would fluctuate across a series of thoughtful, occasionally acclaimed albums that were never quite as illustrious as those that preceded them but at the same time restored his reputation and sustained it for two further decades. There were tours in which he was never less than immaculately turned out, with favourite songs from the past judiciously blended with newer material and, like many of his peers, he made announcements to the effect that he would no longer play old hits, only to renege on the pledge a year or two later. How could he not perform songs like ‘Starman’ and ‘Heroes’ that had become touchstones in so many lives? How could he top the bill at the Glastonbury festival, as he did in 2000, and not perform songs that the vast audience craved? Some of his later records, Earthling (1997) in particular, were on the experimental side while others, notably hours… (1999) and the enjoyable Heathen (2002), were designed for mass consumption, as was the less successful Reality (2003). 

        To promote Reality Bowie undertook a huge world tour that stretched from 2003 into 2004 but in June of ’04 was abruptly cancelled when he suffered heart problems at Scheeßel in Germany. It is understood that he underwent a heart bypass operation. After surgery, Bowie returned to New York, his home for the past decade, where he would continue to live in relative seclusion for the remainder of his life. 

        From that point on the public was told very little about what was happening in the world of David Bowie. He stopped giving interviews around 2006 and his official website remained silent for extended periods. It was reported that he had declined a knighthood and that he wandered around downtown New York’s galleries and bookshops unrecognised, his preferred disguise on public transport a hat worn low and the pretence of reading a Greek newspaper. Like John Lennon between 1975 and 1980, he lived privately, in an expansive, four-bedroom penthouse in SoHo [2], enjoying his marriage to Iman and raising their daughter, his finances secure thanks to judicious management of his copyrights and assets. Although he made occasional guest appearances, notably with the Canadian rock band Arcade Fire, the long period of inactivity and the knowledge that he’d been a heavy smoker for most of his life fuelled rumours about his failing health. In the words of the noted music critic Charles Shaar Murray, we no longer knew who David Bowie was any more, even if we ever did.

        Since presentation was so crucial to Bowie’s craft it is safe to assume that the reason the world henceforth saw so little of him was because he could no longer present himself on stage or elsewhere in the manner he would prefer. Bowie would no sooner appear as a shadow of his former self than reassume the character of Ziggy Stardust so, rather than appear as someone who no longer resembled the David Bowie that was universally adored, he chose not to appear at all. Age, it seemed, was the great leveller, even for David Bowie. Nevertheless, his absence created a vacuum in which his star continued to shine brightly: the exhibition of his stage outfits and other memorabilia at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013 attracted record crowds and would tour the world.

        That same year Bowie’s silence was broken dramatically with the unexpected release of The Next Day which took fans and everyone else completely by surprise. In what in hindsight can be seen as another superb piece of media manipulation, as impressive as any in his entire career, its unheralded arrival was a front-page news story in itself, Bowie deriving more publicity by doing absolutely nothing than other top-flight acts receive from the massive, not to mention expensive, advance promotion that is the norm in the 21st Century. A reflective, carefully crafted work, The Next Day won Bowie the Best British Male Solo Artist at the 2014 Brit Awards. The model Kate Moss, wearing one of Bowie’s original Ziggy costumes, picked up the award on his behalf while an enlarged 1973 photo of the real thing, in the identical costume, looked on from above, his arms outstretched and bare legs pinned together as if about to execute a dive into the audience. Best male? No competition, even at 67. 

        Two years later, on January 8, 2016, his 69th birthday, following another period of absolute silence, came the elegiac, brooding Blackstar, a recording which in hindsight seems to have been deliberately designed as a requiem. With lyrics that vaguely referenced his rapidly approaching demise, it will remain a moving, emotional epitaph, intentional in design, a unique and strangely appropriate climax to an extraordinary life.

        David Bowie passed away from cancer of the liver two days later. He’d evidently been diagnosed 18 months earlier and only a tight circle of family and friends knew the extent of his illness. Remarkably, it remained a close secret, so the announcement came as a profound shock to the world and inspired tributes from the high and mighty, fellow musicians and – most notably – multitudes of fans for whom David Bowie represented much more than simply a great rock star but an ideal, a way of life, an incentive to live as you choose and not be cowed by convention. Within hours of the news, these fans, many of them with blue thunderbolts painted on their faces, gathered in their thousands to sing his songs at locations associated with Bowie’s life and career where hastily erected shrines spoke far more about his impact on this world than any of the clichés uttered by the great and the good.

        I was at home in Surrey when I heard the news. The phone rang at 7.15am, unusually early. It was Paul, a local friend and writer of historical romances, telling me that BBC Radio Surrey had called him to ask if he knew how they could get in touch with me. “Why?” I asked. 

        “David Bowie is dead,” he replied.

         It took a moment to sink in and, truth be told, I thought he was saying something about his new record Blackstar, which I’d bought the previous day. 

         “I know,” I said. Then I checked myself. “Dead? That can’t be.”

         “It is, and they want you to call them.”

         “James Cannon?”

         “Yes.”

         I’d met James fairly recently. He and Suzanne Bamborough presented the 6am to 9am show on BBC Radio Surrey & Hampshire. I’d talked to him on air about John Lennon on the 35th anniversary of Lennon’s assassination a few weeks previously.

         So I called James, and began to talk. I fact, I didn’t stop talking about David Bowie until 4 pm in the afternoon about eight hours later, aside from the time spent on the train to London when I tried to gather my thoughts, all the while listening to a hastily-compiled playlist of Bowie music on my iPod. By then my voice had been heard on BBC Breakfast TV over a series of still photographs. This was at 8.20 when I was still in a state of shock, trying hard to sound articulate and not clichéd. This came about simply because someone at Broadcasting House had heard me on Radio Surrey and must have thought I sounded reasonably coherent and knowledgeable. When I thought about it later I realised what a privilege it was to be asked to talk about David Bowie to a watching audience that was probably in the millions. There were lots of people far more qualified than me who could have been invited to talk over the still photographs but I just happened to be available and there was insufficient time to get hold of, say, a producer who'd worked with Bowie in the studio, or a musician from his many bands, or a Bowie biographer. This a link to it:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysudE9-MV2o

        Later, in London, I spoke to a score or more of BBC regional radio stations, firstly from my office and then from Broadcasting House. Much of what I said is part and parcel of what I have written in this blog post. 

         “He was the Hollywood rock star, as untouchable as the great movie stars of the thirties and forties, magnificent, superhuman,” I recall saying. “That is how he will be remembered.” It was a line I reiterated all day, over the phone to presenters up and down the country. After about five or six interviews it became strangely pat, like a mantra, and although I veered off line a bit with some personal reminiscences about meeting Bowie during my years on Melody Maker and working at RCA in the late seventies, it seemed to satisfy everyone.

         This hectic activity lasted from the moment I got up until 4 pm. I didn’t hesitate to consider whether talking about David Bowie was good thing to do or consider the integrity of what I was doing. I was a professional journalist, after all, and the media was my chosen path. It was my job, like it or not. No one offered to pay me for this and, of course, I didn't ask to be paid (though I do when I’m asked to appear in televised documentaries about rock acts). I didn’t have a chance to think really, to sit back and let the news soak in. David Bowie, alas, was dead.

        There was another, slightly surreal, element to all this. On the previous day I had bought Blackstar at Sainsbury’s, along with the week’s shopping. I played it in the car as I drove home, on the CD player in our living room as I read the paper and, having downloaded it on to my iPod, on a docking speaker as my wife and I ate our evening meal. We talked about it too, very atmospheric I thought, not particularly commercial, some lovely melodic moments, a bit jazzy if you consider a honking saxophone ‘jazz’, definitely the kind of album that will grow on me. It was my intention to listen to it more closely in the coming days, on earphones so I could hear the lyrics properly, and do a review on this blog in a day or two’s time. I did catch something in the title track about a single candle, a bit elegiac I thought, but I hadn’t heard enough of the lyrics, all of which I’ve now read more closely, to deduce that it was a farewell letter.

         After we’d listened to it a couple of time I decided to stick with Bowie for the time being and played his achingly lovely version of Paul Simon’s ‘America’ from the Concert For New York City in 2001. He followed this with a majestic, stirring ‘Heroes’ [3], of course, my favourite Bowie song, though ‘Starman’ runs it a close second. We listened to that too, enjoying it as ever. So it was that on January 10, 2016, the day David Bowie died, I had listened to his music all day without realising that he was dead.

        In the second decade of the 21st Century, when performers from rock and roll’s pioneering era seem to pass away with the inevitability of the changing seasons, the loss of David Bowie could be compared only to the deaths of Elvis Presley and John Lennon. “I am not a rock star,” he would repeatedly tell journalists. He was right. He was much more than that; untouchable, perhaps comparable to stars in the old Hollywood sense of the term, perhaps in his daring and ambition beyond compare, shining as brightly as any star on a cloudless night, truly one of the brightest we shall ever see. He’s up there now, looking down on us, and maybe, if you glance skywards and catch a comet flashing across the heavens, you might see David Bowie riding its fiery slipstream, laughing, singing and waving bye-bye, the prettiest pop star of them all. “If we sparkle he might land tonight…”

[1] Iman gave birth to their daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones, known as Lexi, on 15 August, 2000.

[2] After Bowie’s death in 2016, the penthouse sold for $16.8 million. 

[3] If after reading all this you feel the need for a quick injection of hi-octane Bowie or simply want to remind yourself what all the fuss was about, watch this on Youtube. Along with his Live Aid set, it's as good as it gets. 

DAVID BOWIE - TEN YEARS GONE (Part 1)

DAVID BOWIE

1947-2016

“I pour out what has already been fed in. 

I merely reflect what is going on around me.”

– David Bowie, July 1973.

David Bowie was the most charismatic and influential popular musician of his generation, a cultural polymath and stylistic trailblazer whose artistic breadth also took in theatre, film, video, fashion, mime, fine art and prose writing. Though hugely admired by vast numbers of fans throughout the world, he often seemed uncomfortable with mainstream recognition and throughout his long career made a habit of stepping back to experiment with genres of music and cultural expression unlikely to find commercial acceptance. By refusing to rest on his laurels and – apart from a misstep in the eighties when he courted the mass market to excess – recording a series of peerless albums at various times in his life, he maintained a consistent level of critical acclaim enjoyed by very few of his contemporaries.

        Born David Robert Jones in Brixton in 1947, Bowie paid his dues in a number of groups and guises until his breakthrough in 1969 with the hit single ‘Space Oddity’, perfectly timed to coincide with the American moon landing that same year. The song’s theme of alienation and impending doom would be a recurrent motif of Bowie’s work, alongside a sense of otherworldliness on the part of its creator, as if David Bowie really was from another planet, an alien being on a higher astral plane than mere mortals, someone who simply knew more than the rest of us.

        The new decade brought a change in his business affairs with Bowie, perhaps frustrated by his lack of progress after two early albums, abandoning his dependable but old school manager Kenneth Pitt in favour of the more flamboyant but slightly Machiavellian Tony De Fries. Together they founded a company called Mainman and staffed it with colourful, sexually ambivalent characters whose loyalty to David was never in doubt but whose profligacy would later come back to haunt him. De Fries encouraged his new client to behave like a superstar before he actually was one – “Never, ever, open a door yourself” – thus creating an illusion around Bowie that he was happy to go along with so long as it advanced his career. It turned out to be a Faustian pact but for the time being everyone involved was delighted with the new arrangement and, if nothing else, the Mainman crew certainly enlivened the London rock scene.

        Nevertheless, Bowie’s rise to stardom was not immediate. Though acclaimed by critics, his 1971 albums The Man The Who Sold The World, the cover of which saw him in a ‘man’s dress’, and Hunky Dory sold respectably if not spectacularly. The title song of the former was covered by artists as disparate as Lulu and Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana while the latter contained songs, among them ‘Changes’ and ‘Life On Mars?’, that would remain in his concert repertoire for decades. 

        Bowie’s singing voice was a rich baritone but he could extend his range upwards to tenor and even occasional falsetto. An instinctive rather than virtuoso musician, he played saxophone, guitar and keyboards but his greatest skill was as a songwriter and finding the right collaborators to help realise his compositions. During the making of The Man The Who Sold The World and Hunky Dory he recruited a key early ally in guitarist Mick Ronson who joined his stage group shortly before Bowie renamed them The Spiders From Mars, its leader now restyled as Ziggy Stardust, the ensemble designed to perform his 1972 album named after them. “The two records [the other was Roxy Music’s eponymous debut] torched flower-power for good,” wrote Bowie biographer and critic David Buckley, “replacing it with a confused agenda of post-modern irony and theatricality that became the roots of British art rock.”

The album saw lift-off with Bowie as Ziggy, presenting himself in concert as flamboyantly androgynous, his spiked hair carrot red, his clothes garish and colourful, outré and revealing, his whole demeanour screaming ‘star’ from the highest pinnacle. Crowds flocked to his concerts as he ushered in glam rock yet always maintained a rather aloof presence above the genre’s less cerebral acts like Slade, Sweet and his friend Marc Bolan’s T. Rex. Bowie’s elaborate costumes, many of them Japanese styled, were all part of the same package, in hindsight a work of art in itself. Consciously or not, everything he did from this point onwards became part of his art and his life as an artist. Amongst his greatest early achievements, therefore, was what he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror.

        Crucially, he represented the outsider, positioning himself on the side of those ill-suited for conventional society. His lyrics, often elliptical, spoke to misfits and loners, the timid and the disconnected, enabling them to cast off inhibitions while paving the way for a less macho style of rock performer and performance. A skilled interviewee, he was quick to realise that absolute truth was of less significance than the effect his words might carry. When he did speak to the press he often made headlines, not least in January 1972 when, during an interview with my Melody Maker colleague Michael Watts, he announced that he was gay or, at the very least, bisexual. No one at the time pointed out that he was married with a son [1] yet, in Watt’s opinion, this statement “changed the lifestyles of a generation and kick-started the LGBT movement. He was certainly aware of the impact it would make.” 

        Similarly, on a musical level he positioned himself outside the tried and tested blues rock formula typified by The Rolling Stones or more supercharged contemporaries like Led Zeppelin. While songs such as ‘The Jean Genie’, ‘Suffragette City’ and ‘Rebel Rebel’ – the latter the best Rolling Stones-style song they never recorded – were all full-tilt rockers, others reflected a more ethereal quality, the otherwordly ‘Starman’ borrowing Harold Arlen’s octave climb from ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ to startling effect. ‘Ziggy Stardust’ itself, of course, was assumed to be autobiographical.

        By the end of 1972 Bowie’s only rival as the UK’s biggest solo rock star was Elton John, and though America’s ingrained conservatism at first resisted Bowie’s theatrics, the US fell the following year. He even found time to revive the careers of Lou Reed, producing his Transformer LP containing ‘Walk On The Wild Side’, Reed’s only UK Top Ten hit, and Mott The Hoople, to whom he gifted ‘All The Young Dudes’, their biggest ever hit. Iggy Pop, too, benefited from Bowie’s patronage and became a close friend. 

        Bowie was at the peak of his early fame in 1973, the year his next LP, Aladdin Sane, attracted advance orders of 100,000 in the UK. In many ways it was Ziggy Part II, its striking cover of Bowie with a blue thunderbolt etched across his face solidifying his surreal image. Evidently distrustful of flying, he toured the world by land and sea with an extravagant entourage, crossing the Atlantic and Pacific by ocean liner and Russia, from Vladivostok to Moscow, by rail, but his biggest UK concert to date, which originated London’s Earls Court as a rock venue, was a disaster, the blame attached to his management for skimping on amplification, presentation and security. It was an omen of things to come. 

        In July 1973, just as it seemed as if Bowie would eclipse all before him, he abandoned the persona of Ziggy Stardust completely, memorably making the announcement from the stage at Hammersmith Odeon, shocking fans and, so word had it, even his own group, and returned to the drawing board. It would not be the only time that Bowie would abruptly spring an unexpected surprise, a career strategy he maintained until the very end.

        The patchy covers album Pin Ups (1973) was a holding manoeuvre but with Diamond Dogs (1974), and perhaps more importantly its concurrent stage show, Bowie invented rock theatre, a style of presentation that paid no lip service whatsoever to conventional rock concerts and instead relied purely on dramatic effect and elaborate stage props. “The one-and-a-half-hour, 20-song show is a completely rehearsed and choreographed routine where every step and nuance has been perfected down to the last detail,” I wrote in Melody Maker after seeing a concert in Toronto. “There isn’t one iota of spontaneity about the whole show. It is straight off a musical stage – a piece of theatre, complete with extravagant mechanical sets, dancers and a band that stands reservedly to stage right and never even receives so much as a cursory acknowledgement, like an orchestra in a theatre pit.” Kate Bush and Madonna took notes.

        The following year Bowie embraced blue-eyed soul with Young Americans, its funked-up US No. 1 hit single ‘Fame’ a collaboration with his new friend John Lennon that savaged his relationship with manager Tony De Fries. “By crossing over into disco/soul music he helped pave the way for the greater commercial success later in the decade of the Bee Gees,” wrote Buckley. “The Bowie model of white, blue-eyed soul would be hugely influential for the likes of ABC, Spandau Ballet and Simply Red as the eighties unwound, and British soul boys and girls everywhere have this pioneering album to thank.”

        He then stepped back from music to appear in Nicolas Roeg’s sci-fi film The Man Who Who Fell To Earth. It was astute casting, Bowie’s starring role as an extra-terrestrial sent to earth to save his own planet serving only to ramp up the impression of Bowie as a creature from beyond the stratosphere. As his career progressed he would accept roles in several more films, often as anomalous or quirky characters. 

        Bowie was reaching another plateau and it was around this time that I made his acquaintance, socially at music industry events in New York, where I was stationed as Melody Maker’s US correspondent, and professionally during a lengthy interview in a hotel room in Detroit in 1976. “In his blue tracksuit he looks astonishingly healthy and although he could add a few pounds in weight his brain is as trim as his figure,” I wrote in MM. “His hair, blond at the front and red at the back, has been groomed by his personal hairdresser, and is swept up in a quiff. His classic, Aryan features alternate between expressions of genuine warmth and cold contempt whenever he senses troubled waters. His left eye is still strangely immobile, a legacy from the childhood injury he received, and it adds an incongruous touch to his rather aristocratic bearing. Even if David Bowie never opened his mouth, he would have found some niche in life purely on the strength of his looks.”

        It was during this interview that Bowie told me he was broke, clearly an exaggeration, and – as with the “I’m gay” admission in 1972 – designed to capture a headline. I didn’t mind. Obtaining good quotes was part and parcel of being a good reporter, though later in the same interview David denied ever being gay in the first place. “That was just a lie,” he said. “They gave me that image so I stuck to it pretty well for a few years. I never adopted that stance. It was given to me. I’ve never done a bisexual action in my life, onstage, record or anywhere else.”

        I suppose I was part of the conspiracy though anyone who had the good fortune to spend time with David Bowie will tell you that he could be the most gracious of men, well-mannered, well-spoken and utterly charming. Far and away the best-looking rock star in the world, women adored him. Most would have been willing to leap into bed with him at a moment’s notice, and Bowie wasn’t one to let such opportunities slip by. An avid book reader who took the acquisition of arcane knowledge very seriously, he could converse in an interesting way on all manner of subjects which probably explains why of all the rock stars I interviewed between 1970 and 1977 he was one of only two – the other was Pete Townshend – who asked me questions as the conversation proceeded. 

“Seen any good bands recently, Chris?” he might ask. “Read any good books? Seen any good movies? Visited a new gallery?” An unapologetic culture vulture, it was his way of absorbing information that might come in useful at a later date, regardless of the source. If he was obliged to submit to an interview, he figured he might as well derive more from it than a page or two in a magazine or newspaper, hopefully with his picture on the cover.

He probably learned how to grab headlines from John Lennon, who learned it the hard way when he implied The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. When I asked David if Lennon played a big role in the writing of ‘Fame’ he was dismissive. “No, not really,” he replied frankly. “I think he appreciates that. It was more the influence of having him in the studio that helped. There’s always a lot of adrenalin flowing when John is around, but his chief addition to it all was the high-pitched singing of ‘Fame’. The riff came from Carlos [Alomar], and the melody and most of the lyrics came from me, but it wouldn’t have happened if John hadn’t been there. He was the energy, and that’s why he’s got a credit for writing it; he was the inspiration.”

My interview with Bowie took place during the Station To Station tour, a series of concerts built around the album of the same name that merged black funk with the emerging European electronic school. I share the widely held view that it is his best ever. He appeared on stage as the title track’s Thin White Duke character, in black pants, black waistcoat and white shirt, with bright white strip lighting illuminating the stage. The only hint of colour was the blue packet of Gitanes in his vest pocket from which he plucked cigarettes to smoke between songs. Smoking was cool then. Amazingly, the show was preceded by a screening of the 1929 surrealist short film Un Chien Andalou by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, in which a woman’s eye is slashed by a razor blade; not really the sort of thing US fans would expect at a rock show. I read later that Madonna, aged 17, was at the concert I saw, her first ever rock show. 

        Station To Station is as timeless as it is flawless; yet the thrillingly successful world arena tour that followed would presage Bowie’s second retreat from the commercial sphere. Destabilised by the financially calamitous fall out with De Fries – following Lennon’s advice he would henceforth largely manage his own business affairs in tandem with lawyers and discrete, no-nonsense personal assistant Corinne ‘Coco’ Schwab – and an enervating cocaine habit, he wisely relocated to Berlin to work with producer/auteur Brian Eno on a trilogy of introverted experimental albums, thus maintaining his reputation as a genuine innovator and simultaneously avoiding the need to compete with punk rock. Although many tracks on these now highly acclaimed records were doom-laden instrumentals and perversely uncommercial, the Berlin period produced the stirring majesty of ‘Heroes’, a meditation on the futility of the Berlin Wall that is arguably the finest song he ever wrote and certainly the most popular.

        After emerging from his German retreat for another arena tour, Scary Monsters And Super Creeps (1980) saw Bowie move to more conventional ground, its most affecting track ‘Ashes To Ashes’ a revision of the Major Tom saga from ‘Space Oddity’. By this time videos – short films to promote singles – had arrived and few benefited more from this development than Bowie whose acting experience gave him the jump on less imaginative fellow travellers. The video for ‘Ashes To Ashes’, with Bowie in Pierrot costume, not only lit the touch paper beneath the New Romantic movement but ushered in an era when he consistently led the field in this new art form. As if to prove the point, his next move, again unexpected, was to appear on stage – bravely and with distinction – in Chicago and on Broadway in New York as the severely deformed John Merrick in The Elephant Man, a role that required him to contort his frame throughout the play’s duration.

        By this time, I had left Melody Maker and was working in the press office at RCA Records in London, a job that required me to represent Bowie to the media, hardly onerous as by now he was living permanently in New York. I took a couple of journalists to Chicago to watch The Elephant Man, one of whom, Angus McKinnon from New Musical Express, defied the instructions of Bowie’s “people” and succeeded in interviewing him for considerably longer than the allotted hour, much to their annoyance. He also took along his own photographer, the soon-to-be-celebrated Anton Corbijn. The following week – the week that Scary Monsters was released – NME had a Corbijn picture of Bowie on the cover and five pages of McKinnon’s interview inside. Unlike his advisors, Bowie was already familiar with Corbijn’s work and, as I suspected, knew far better than them how to achieve maximum coverage.

        I watched Bowie on stage in The Elephant Man for three straight nights as he contorted his body for the role and spoke with a strange, high-pitched accent in imitation of the real John Merrick. I came away hugely impressed, as did all the theatre critics who reviewed the play when it transferred to New York for a further three months. 

        This experience confirmed in my mind that David Bowie was a true polymath and I am thankful for the slight relationship I had with him at this time. Unfortunately, I had no further dealings with him as he left RCA for EMI soon afterwards. 

[Part Two Tomorrow] 

[1] In March 1970 Bowie married Angela Barnett, a Cypriot American model and fashion designer, who in May of 1971 gave birth to a son they named Zowie. In the fullness of time he would alter his name to Duncan Jones. Angie and Bowie separated in the mid-seventies and were divorced in 1980.

The framed photograph at the top of this post was taken in 1973 by my friend Barrie Wentzell, Melody Maker’s staff photographer from 1965 until 1975. It hangs on the wall at the base of the stairs that lead up to my office in our home.   

1975 In New York Rock - A Summary

Fifty years ago, at the end of 1975, I was called upon by Melody Maker’s editor to summarise the year in rock in New York, where I had lived for almost the whole year. Here’s what I wrote:

As New York slows down for the Christmas Holidays and shoppers gather in Rockefeller Centre to gaze up at the enormous illuminated tree, it seems an appropriate moment to glance back at the year here.

We read that New York is heavily in debt, that Mayor Beame can’t afford to pay his workers and that President Ford has vetoed any government assistance, but the skyscrapers are still standing and Madison Square Garden is still boasting sell-out shows. Traditionally, the entertainment business holds its own in times of stress – there’s nothing like a good depression to sell records and concert tickets.

New York is no exception. It’s more newsworthy when an established act’s record doesn’t go gold here, or when their concert doesn’t sell out. Music of all kinds thrives in New York and 1975 has been no different.

The most important event of the year has been the re-emergence of Bob Dylan, not only as a New Yorker but also as a Village Person. Quite what motivated Dylan to tread the downtown streets once again no one knows but our lives have certainly been richer for it. The luxury of Malibu and the pleasures of living upstate in the country have lost their attraction: Bob’s back where he started and don’t we know it.

The year began with Blood On The Tracks, a spectacular return to form, and ended with Desire. In between were The Basement Tapes and numerous unscheduled appearances in the city that culminated in the most extraordinary tour of his career, the Rolling Thunder Revue, which climaxed, somewhat limply, with a benefit for Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter at the Garden two weeks ago.

Bob’s in New York right now, seeing to the release of the new album. Last night, my spies tell me, many of the Rolling Thunder crew stopped off at The Other End to catch John Prine, a slight indication that the excitement is not yet over. There’s talk that the Revue will play concerts in California early next year, and a chance they’ll travel to the UK. 

During the year the Beacon Theatre has risen to prominence as a rock venue, taking over the role previously played by Howard Stein’s Academy of Music on 14th Street, which has all but closed down as far as live music is concerned. Aesthetically, the Beacon is a vast improvement, though its situation, at 74th and Broadway up on the Westside, is not as convenient as the old Academy.

Despite its impersonal, cavernous nature, the Garden still thrives as a rock venue. The Rolling Stones broke all attendance records this year when they played for six consecutive nights and grossed well over a million dollars, easily eclipsing both Elvis Presley and The Who, who have both sold out four-day runs.

But outbreaks of violence at the Garden have left an ugly scar, though these have occurred only at concerts by black artists. New York still rings with tales of thieves who went about their business with alarming efficiency at a recent concert at the Felt Forum, the Garden’s smaller annexe, stealing purses and jewellery while the security guards were powerless to help. A step-up in security is bound to be enforced next year.

If the second half of the year has belonged to Dylan, and the summer to the Stones, then the first part of 1975 belonged to Led Zeppelin whose earnings from the US during February, March and April must have been astronomical. Not only did they tour the entire country – including three shows in New York – but their Physical Graffiti album topped the Billboard charts and sparked off remarkable sales for their entire catalogue. At one time there were five Zep albums in the Top 100.

Elton John, another of Britain’s big dollar earners, chose to ignore New York this year, although he did play the Garden last November, bringing John Lennon on stage for a memorable guest appearance. Elton’s Rock Of The Westies tour was restricted to the Western States.

The Who, too, have been absent, probably because they played the city in 1974 when Pete Townshend was unhappy with the shows. It seems likely they’ll include New York on their schedule early next year when they return for the second half of their US tour. Who manager Pete Rudge, though, was still undecided at the time of writing. 

On a lesser scale, the clubs here continue to thrive. Queues line up outside the Bottom Line nightly, and the re-opening of the Other End – formerly the Bitter End – has provided some competition, attracting Dylan to its stage in the process.

The so-called underground in the city has thrown up another potential star in Patti Smith, easily the most prominent artist to have emerged regularly at CBGBs, a Bowery bar catering for unsigned local bands. The first band to emerge from this strata, the New York Dolls, split this year but re-formed later with a change in personnel though they don’t have a record contract and are currently dormant. Television, the underground’s other big hope, remain unsigned despite critical recognition and earlier this month they released a privately distributed single. Patti Smith did the same thing before Arista signed her earlier this year.

Only two major outdoor events occurred in Central Park, both, coincidentally, within 24 hours. The first was a mammoth gathering to celebrate the end of the Vietnam War, organised by Phil Ochs. Paul Simon made an unscheduled but welcome appearance, alongside Ochs, Joan Baez, Peter Yarrow and Richie Havens. The following day Jefferson Starship, certain winners of the comeback-of-the-year award, played their annual free concert attended by over 100,000 fans.

Paul Simon AND Art Garfunkel remain firm New Yorkers, and Simon’s season at the Avery Fisher Hall last month was among the year’s musical highlights. Garfunkel showed up at his midnight Saturday concert and joined his former partner for two songs.

The disco boom has continued with scores of private clubs opening in downtown Manhattan to cater for dancers who keep going until the following day. The trend continues to break records each month. ‘Fly Robin Fly’ by Silver Convention was number one last week and ‘That’s The Way (I Like It)’ by KC & The Sunshine Band is number one this week. Both are perfect examples of the disco trend.

Predictions for next year: Aerosmith, who blatantly model themselves on The Rolling Stones, will become a major band in the US; Patti Smith will have difficulty broadening her cult following into mass appeal; Paul Simon will score a Broadway show; Bob Dylan will remain active: and John Lennon, whose immigration problems seem to be almost over, will visit the UK at last.

MY GIBSON LG1

I will have owned my Gibson LG1 acoustic guitar for 50 years today. I bought it in New York, from a shop called We Buy Guitars on West 58th Street, on Boxing Day 1975 when I was Melody Maker’s US editor based in the Big Apple, the best job I ever had. I’d spent Christmas Day on my own, hung over after a party the night before, and since no one had bought me any presents I figured I’d buy something for myself. 

I’d always wanted to own a Gibson. The first one I ever played was a 335 at Gargrave Village Hall in, I think, 1966. It belonged to the guitarist in a group from Barrow-in-Furness who came on after my group, The Pandas, opened the dancing on a Saturday night. I can’t remember the name of the group that came on after us but they were far more accomplished than we were. Their lead guitarist used a Fender Strat, their rhythm man the Gibson and the bass player a Fender Jazz. After they’d played our bassist John Holmfield and I chatted with them and, a bit gingerly, asked if we could have a go on their guitars. The rhythm man handed me his 335 and for five minutes I was in heaven. I owned a Futurama III, a cheap Strat knock-off with a dodgy action, and until that moment didn’t know what it was like to play a top quality guitar with a low action, with strings that were millimetres away from the frets so you didn’t have to press hard to make the note ring. I wanted a guitar like that and although I bought and sold a few others in the meantime, it would take me another nine years to get one.

It was crisp and chilly on Boxing Day 1975. I woke up bright and early and decided to walk from my apartment on E78th Street, down through Central Park and over to West 58th. I tried Manny’s – New York’s most famous guitar shop – first but all they had in the Gibson acoustic line, mostly J45s and J200s, were a bit too pricey for me. We Buy Guitars was more down market and inside I found the LG1, which was just what I was looking for. It cost me $165, plus $13 tax. On the back of the headstock is number 126577 which means it was made at Gibson’s Kalamazoo Plant in Michigan in 1963, according to the website that dates guitars from serial numbers. I still have the receipt, below. 

It has lived with me ever since, my most loyal friend. I brought it back from America, via Amsterdam to Leeds-Bradford Airport, in 1978, and down to London the following year. Foolishly, I lent it to a minor-league rock musician (who shall remain nameless) in the mid-1980s and when he returned it there were loads of scratches around the bridge and sound hole. Two other (bigger) stars, Elvis Costello and Alan Hull, have also played it and both offered to buy it but I turned them down. It now lives with me at our home in Surrey, propped up against the wall in the room that used to be our daughter's bedroom, which I now use as my office. 

A few years ago, I noticed a crack in the back and, having seen him on the TV show Repair Shop, I took it to David Kennett at Flame Guitars in Sutton. For £200 he repaired the crack, fitted a new bridge and generally spruced it up a bit but he wasn’t able to eliminate all the scratches. No matter, it still plays beautifully. Last week, as a 50th birthday present for my faithful old guitar, I restrung it with expensive D’Addario (custom light, 11-52) and it sounds as good as new.

         My son Sam, who will one day inherit it, started learning to play on this guitar about 15 years ago and is now streets ahead of me. Although I love guitars and the sound they make, I was never much good as a guitarist but I wish I’d had a Gibson to learn on when I was his age. 

        You are never alone with a guitar. I’ve played my old Gibson when I’ve been drunk and when I’ve been sober, when I’ve been stoned and when I’ve been straight. I’ve played it when I’ve been happy and when I’m sad. Indeed, when my sister rang to tell me that our dad had died – not unexpectedly – in 1997, the first thing I did was take the guitar of out its case and strum a few bluesy chords; I did the same thing at the end of a love affair in 1987 and when an old and dear friend died in 2020. Eighteen months later, when my great pal Johnny Rogan died, I played 'Mr Tambourine Man' Byrds-style on it is his honour. I have never played it in public but if I was called upon to do so I would probably play the riff from 'Substitute' or maybe 'Waterloo Sunset', two of the handful of songs I’ve perfected over the years. 

    

        My faithful old guitar is sitting here in the room where I’m typing this. If it could smile at me I think it would, and if it could hear me I’d tell it that it was far and away the best thing I’ve ever bought for myself in my entire life – fifty years ago today. 

SURF’S UP: BRIAN WILSON & THE BEACH BOYS by Peter Doggett

Behind a cover that shamelessly mimics the typography and colour scheme of Pet Sounds lies the best book on The Beach Boys I have read since Timothy White’s The Nearest Faraway Place in 1994. This is not to disparage the work of David Leaf, whose closeness to the group, and Brian Wilson in particular, gives him an insider’s edge, or Steven Gaines, whose flair for drama made his 1986 biography Heroes & Villains a page-turner, just that Peter Doggett mixes precise literacy and in-depth research with an impartial critical assurance that previous books have lacked. Moreover, it’s my guess that he has spent much of his adult life considering what he wants to say about a group whose music he clearly adores, before finally settling down to write the book that might well be the last word on the subject.  

First, an acknowledgement. I have known Peter Doggett since the 1980s when, as editor at Omnibus Press, I commissioned him on a fairly regular basis to produce discographies for inclusion in the music books we published. At the time Peter was the editor of Record Collector magazine whose discographies, I had noted, were the most comprehensive and accurate to be found anywhere. I wanted the best and found it, and as we got to know one another I commissioned him to write several books for Omnibus, some of them published under the pseudonym John Robertson, taken from the Byrds song, because the powers-that-be at Record Collector took a dim view of their staff moonlighting elsewhere. 

But I digress. Although Surf’s Up begins more or less at the beginning (after Peter’s coverage of an astonishing, unexpected appearance by Brian Wilson at a London fan club event in 1988) and ends with Brian’s passing, this is not a linear biography that follows the career of The Beach Boys year by year, song by song or trauma by trauma. Instead it jumps around, artfully leaping from key issues into subsidiary areas, the sum of which leads to a greater understanding of the progressive forces and, perhaps more importantly, malign undercurrents that shaped the group’s career. Among them are razor-sharp profiles of the widely contrasting personalities involved, the power struggles between them, anecdotes galore, many of them unflattering, and, of course, plenty about the mental health of Brian Wilson, their in-house maestro who wrote and arranged all their best songs. 

To this end, Surf’s Up is a jigsaw with 59 pieces, each one a shortish, unnumbered chapter, or essay, on some aspect of The Beach Boys. In a book of 382 pages (discounting end matter), that works out at about six a half pages per bite-sized chapter, which makes it more of a compendium than a biography; an easy read then, and, for that matter, one you can dip into here and there without losing the plot, complex as it is. This structure might not suit newcomers to the saga of The Beach Boys’ but, by now, it’s unlikely that those interested in the group, this book’s core market, will be unfamiliar with the lurid details of what went on behind the scenes. Nevertheless, at the start Peter helpfully proffers potted biographies of the dramatis personae, all 41 of whom in some way or other play a role in the story, from Brian and his brothers right down to management, auxiliary musicians and even a few in-laws. 

Let’s pick a random essay. “Why do people hate Mike Love?” begins one. “Let me count the ways.” Plenty of them follow, though Peter does recognise that, obnoxious as he can be, without Love’s energy the group might never have got off the ground in the first place. The relatively long chapter on Pet Sounds emphasises how so many of its songs laid bare Brian’s insecurities yet doesn’t quite nail what everyone thought about the LP at the time, not Peter’s fault of course, just that mixed messaging over the years and, quite possibly, fake news reportage, has blurred reality. Keith Moon, however, hated it, probably for the same reasons that Mike Love may or may not have hated it too. Among the many others, therapist Dr Eugene Landy’s influence on Brian gets two chapters, and there’s plenty about deaths in the family, relatives galore, surfing as a sport, the joys of California, dietary and spiritual matters, Dennis’ indiscretions with Charles Manson (and 17 naked girls), Mike Love’s money-making schemes and whatever rivalry existed between The Beach Boys and The Beatles. 

What else have I learned? Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean sang uncredited lead on ‘Barbara Ann’; Al Jardine is a bit dull; ‘Good Vibrations’ lost out to ‘Winchester Cathedral’ by The New Vaudeville Band for Best Contemporary Song at the Grammys in 1966 (what were they thinking?); ‘Heroes And Villains’ was re-written after Brain’s Rolls Royce was nicked from a cinema car park; supplementary Beach Boy Bruce Johnson, born Benjamin Baldwin as the son of a single mother from Illinois, had the enormous good fortune to be adopted by an uber-wealthy LA family. No wonder he always looked so laid-back. 

There’s almost 30 pages of reference notes at the end, a reflection of the author’s dedicated research, a three-page bibliography but no index which would have appalled at least one mutual friend of ours. Neither are there any pictures, no doubt because no new ones could be found and, in any case, everyone knows what The Beach Boys look like. It’s what they sound like that really matters, and Peter Doggett’s deft musical analysis sent me back to the music, specifically my Good Vibrations box set and a CD of remasters called Summer Love Songs, time and again over the past week, the only trusted and true factor in judging the merits of a music book. 

        “The music survives best in the hearts and souls of everyone who has been touched by it, enriched by it, opened themselves to all its emotional ambiguities and riches,” writes Peter at the close of his book. “Nobody else made music like Brian Wilson; nobody ever could.” 

        I couldn’t agree more. 

CHRIS REA (1951-1925)

It’s a bit of a cliché to call a rock star down to earth, implying that he or she is unchanged by fame but there is no more apt description of Chris Rea whose death, aged 74, was announced yesterday. With his creased, careworn face, stocky shoulders and tough, no-nonsense attitude, he looked like a builder’s labourer, seeming to me to have arrived at the restaurant straight from the stage set of Auf Wiedersehen Pet and, of course, he had the accent to match, gruff Geordie, just like Dennis, Neville and Oz. 

It was 2012. We had not met before and the lunch had been arranged by someone in his employ to talk about a book he might write, an autobiography possibly published by Omnibus Press, of which I was editor, responsible for acquiring books. I chose a nearby restaurant and it wasn’t expensive, of which I was glad because as soon as he began to talk I sensed a man unimpressed by wealth and fame, of which he had both, who would have been just as happy if I’d taken him to a greasy spoon, not that there are many of those in the West End of London.

I like to think we got on well. We were both from the north. I told him that I loved his song ‘Driving Home For Christmas’ because it resonated with me insofar as every Christmas Eve for years and years I used to drive up the M1 from London to Skipton to spend a few days with my dad when was alive. He was pleased but shrugged. It wasn’t his greatest moment, he said, and he talked about how the blues was his real love, and soul music too, and if all I had of his in my record collection was a greatest hits set – which was true – then he’d put me straight. A week after the lunch he sent me a copy of Chris Rea (Blue Guitars), an 11-CD (and 1 DVD) collection of his blues recordings, 127 songs in total. Beautifully packaged in a large format, the accompanying booklet was illustrated by his own paintings – he was a dab hand with a brush and palette – and photographs of the 25 instruments he played, and when I played the discs I realised there was so much more to Chris Rea than the handful of hits with which he is associated.

Over lunch he talked about his love of Little Feat, and when I told him I’d interviewed Lowell George a couple of times back in my days on Melody Maker, he was impressed and wanted to know everything, all I could remember, about the encounters. He also told me how much he loved Motown music but he wasn’t much impressed when I told him I’d met Michael Jackson. 

Chris had arrived for the lunch in a taxi which had brought him all the way from where he lived in Cookham, near Maidenhead, and he told the driver to wait, probably for two hours. He explained that he was unable to drive for some health reason, which must have galled him because we also talked about cars and his love of motor sport. It seemed slightly ironic to me that this pragmatic, humble rock star owned a Ferrari that he couldn’t drive. 

I think we parted as friends and I’d like to have met him again but it was not to be. For reasons unexplained, the book never happened. A shame. I’m playing Album Eight (Gospel Soul Blues & Motown) from his Blue Guitars collection as I write. Sounds great. RIP Chris.

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.