ENTWISTLE’S OX – Academy of Music, New York, March 8, 1975

John Entwistle became the first member of The Who to tour outside of the band when he took his own group, Ox, on the road in the UK towards the end of 1974 and in the US the following March. I saw shows on both tours, in Newcastle in the UK, and at the Academy of Music in New York, which was fifty years ago this month. After the Ox show in New York there was a reception where among the guests was Mick Jagger, so I sidled up to him to inquire who might be replacing Mick Taylor in the Stones but he told me to bugger off. I think he was drunk. 

Here’s my review of John’s band from Melody Maker dated March 22, 1975. I found the poster above on the internet.

It must have been galling for John Entwistle to look out and see the empty seats at the Academy of Music on Saturday evening and think back to just less than a year ago when The Who sold out the 20,000 seater Madison Square Garden for four nights in five days. 

        The audience gave him a hero’s welcome but reserved their biggest cheers for the songs he’s contributed to The Who’s catalogue over the years. Opening up with ‘My Wife’ and closing the show with ‘Heaven And Hell’ as an encore was a shrewd move. 

        The Ox have improved immeasurably since their first live gig in Newcastle last December. The band is tighter and better rehearsed, and mercifully the volume level has been drastically reduced though it’s still pretty loud. 

        Still, John remains the star. His unique bass playing stands head and shoulders above the musicianship of the other members of the band and the fast, rippling bass lines are the only feature that prevents The Ox from being just another competent group. Unfortunately, a bass player can’t carry a band, and no matter how stunning the bass lines become, the overall effect is disappointing. 

    Robert Johnson, on guitar, can’t match John; he often resorts to crashing chords during his solos in a vaguely Townshend fashion, which only reveals his apparent inability to match lick for lick with Entwistle. It also encourages unfair comparisons with The Who which I won’t go into.

        John, of course, is an old greaser at heart, and on the simple 12-bar based numbers The Ox are a fine rock’n’roll band, without frills but with plenty of sledgehammer drive. The drummer managed to hold his own against Entwistle’s bass but towards the end the horn player appeared to give up the ghost and use his instrument to demolish part of the drum kit, an odd but peculiarly Who-like ending. 

MAKING IT UP AS YOU GO ALONG: NOTES FROM A BASS IMPOSTER by Bill MacCormick

The Dulwich College Colts Rugby XV of 1967 included half of Quiet Sun, one member each of Roxy Music and Matching Mole, 40% of the group 801 and the older brother of Random Hold and Peter Gabriel guitarist Dave Rhodes. “I played centre, wing or fullback,” writes Bill MacCormick. “I got as far away from those nasty forward as possible.”

        Dulwich College is a public school, of which MacCormick disapproves strongly, but he can be seen in the back row of this musical XV in a photograph reproduced early on in Making It Up As You Go Along: Notes From A Bass Imposter. Through contacts made at the school, he became a contemporary and close friend of Soft Machine and others from what became known as the Canterbury scene, finding himself among a host of musicians whose work was unlikely to find commercial success; who preferred instead to perform experimental music loosely labelled as jazz rock, almost always improvisational with uncommon time-signatures, a bit cosmic and slightly weird, to my ears anyway. 

        MacCormick has written a chirpy, self-deprecating and remarkably candid memoir of his time as a musician in this strain of Britain’s underground, its close attention to dates, places and haphazard events, many of them trivial, suggesting he dutifully kept diaries retained for decades and/or has a remarkable memory. Stints in the avant-garde groups Quiet Sun and Matching Mole are followed by 801, alongside Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera and Brian Eno, and Random Hold who recorded for Polydor and were managed by Gail Colson, Peter Gabriel’s manager, which catapulted them briefly into the big time. When RH fired him he applied to Gail for moneys owed to him which emptied their bank account and effectively put an end to the group, and although this episode closes the book it contains references to the future throughout. 

        Interspersed among highly detailed accounts of the recording and stage careers of these bands are interesting diversions, the most unexpected MacCormick’s brief acquaintance with the actress Julie Christie, with whom he is besotted – naturally – the connection being the close friendship between her and Robert Wyatt’s girlfriend and subsequent wife Alfreda ‘Alfie’ Benge, and interviews he undertakes for Street Life, the alternative paper published between 1975-6, with Warren Beatty and US senator George McGovern among others. Furthermore, in between stints as a musician, MacCormick became a politician, campaigning on behalf of the Liberal Party and, later in life, becoming a councillor, all of which adds plenty of spice to this lively memoir. His indignation at the behaviour of the ruling classes is expressed most eloquently in the chapter that focuses on the lyrics to songs on Listen Now, 801’s only studio album.

        Throughout his musical career, MacCormick seems to have drifted through life with plenty of luck on his side, his boundless modesty conveying the idea that he wasn’t much of a musician – as indicated by the title – but was a good mixer, amiable, willing and not one to complain. Such diffidence is endearing and led him to decline an invitation to record with Richard Thompson. “Though flattered I politely declined,” he writes. “Thomson was Premier League. I was at best Conference League South. I knew my limitations.”

        MacCormick’s book is full of carefree banter like this, some of it rather over-egged, the literary equivalent of theatre’s fourth wall insofar as he takes the reader into his confidence in light-hearted asides, frequently veering off into arbitrary side-issues, many of them politically left of centre, and arcane observations about times and places, some of them no doubt gleaned from Wikipedia. There are frequent references to his older brother Ian who, as Ian MacDonald, was assistant editor at NME in the early 1970s and among the most eloquent and perceptive music writers of his generation. 

        Occupying over 100 pages at the end are 18 appendices, all of them press packs or features and reviews from the music press reproduced verbatim, many written by my old MM colleague Richard Williams, while the preceding two chapters are obituaries of musician friends (and Ian), and a “Where Are They Now” section of those still walking. With footnotes and endnotes galore, loads of black and white pictures throughout and an unreliable index, this makes for a long read, 470 pages in all, but if a fly-on-the-wall account of life as an avant-garde musician is your cup of tea it’s worth the effort. Unforgivably, however, MacCormick spells Townshend without the H. 

        Finally, a confession. It was June 1970, my first week as a staff writer on Melody Maker. Too embarrassed to admit that I was wholly unfamiliar with their music, I accepted assistant editor Williams’ summons to review Soft Machine’s Third LP, took it home and listened carefully to music which, having been raised on no-nonsense Elvis and The Beatles, was pretty much foreign to me.  

        Still, I did my best: “As the title suggests, this is Soft Machine’s third album,” I began, stating the obvious, “and their most ambitious yet” – an educated guess. “It is a double venture and features just four tracks – one per side.” So far so good but something more profound was clearly called for. “The first side, ‘Facelift’, was recorded live at the Fairfields Hall, Croydon, and starts with what could be mistaken for Mike Ratledge slowly pulling his organ to pieces key by key but soon the whole scene changes and becomes more interesting with solos from each of the group.” I went on to state that Robert Wyatt’s was “not the best voice on the British scene”, that side four was the best of the four with an “eerie space sounding organ reminiscent of 2001 Space Odyssey”, and that the whole band “blend individually as one machine. A good set for the Soft’s fans and jazz enthusiasts too,” I concluded, blandly. Richard Williams never again gave me a Soft Machine LP to review.

        This shameful episode came back to haunt me as I read MacCormick’s fascinating book, and reviewing it here offers me an opportunity to apologise deeply to Robert Wyatt, the only surviving member of the Soft Machine line-up that recorded Third. Sorry Robert. ‘Shipbuilding’ was great, by the way. 

DAVID JOHANSEN - The Last Doll To Fall Over

The New York Dolls in 1973, picture by Bob Gruen. David Jo is on the right.

The legend of The New York Dolls, erstwhile nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame yet shamefully never inducted, reached its finale last week with the announcement that David Johansen, their singer, had died aged 75, so it’s a pound to a penny it’ll never happen now. Or maybe it will. A dead Doll can’t disrupt proceedings after all. 

        The Dolls were the trashiest of the trash and for a year or two in the 1970s I was on first-name terms with David Jo, the last Doll standing. They were a band that never fitted in but never wanted to either. The field they ploughed alongside very few others, Iggy perhaps, maybe Lou at times, was at the extreme end of decadence, which was where they believed rock should squat. With the possible exception of Keith Moon, I cannot think of anyone who revelled in licentiousness as much as the five Dolls, David, Johnny Thunders, Arthur Kane, Sylvain Sylvain and Jerry Nolan (who replaced original drummer Billy Murcia who died in London in 1972). They made the Pistols look like choirboys. It made them enemies as well as friends, and I liked to think I was their friend, well for some of the time. 

        For a couple of years in New York, from 1974-76, when I was Melody Maker’s man in America, I saw David and his band regularly but they presented me with a dilemma. My predecessor in that role, Roy Hollingworth, adored them, declaring them the future of rock’n’roll, writing, somewhat loquaciously, in MM: “Here on this stage battles a baggage of balls and trousers and high-heeled shoes; and drunkenness and unwashed hair; and untuned guitars and songs that musicians would call a mess but a rock and roll child would say ‘God Bless You – You are so necessary!’ Rock and roll is sex. And the Dolls played on. And they played sex. Non-stop.”

        Such was Roy’s enthusiasm for the Dolls that it seemed churlish for those MM writers that followed him not to share it, to some extent anyway. There was much to admire about them, not least their enthusiastic embrace of an “us against the world” attitude, a stance much respected by those music writers who harboured a militant streak, but at the same time, as Roy noted, they could be very loose on stage, almost to the point of incompetence. Some of their songs, though, were absolute killers, especially ‘Personality Crisis’ and ‘Looking For A Kiss’, both of which were played endlessly on the juke box in Max’s Kansas City and, later, at Ashley’s Bar. 

        The first time I saw them, at the Whiskey in Los Angeles in 1973, I thought they were a hoot, and the second time, at the Academy of Music in New York a year later, I wrote about how much they’d improved but how they seemed intent on imitating the Stones. I would see them perhaps half a dozen more times over the next couple of years, a period that saw their fortunes slipping and sliding alas. At the Academy, however, they were still on a pedestal, their set preceded by a short film that had been made by their biggest fan, Bob Gruen, New York’s hippest rock photographer, then and now a good friend.

The Dolls were social animals, hanging out in New York bars like Max’s and Ashley’s where musicians gathered late into the night, and I got to know singer David Jo well, along with his girlfriend Cyrinda Foxe, a beautiful blonde who left him for Steve Tyler, the singer with Aerosmith. We also bumped into one another at parties and yesterday the US writer Jon Tiven posted this picture of me at the same table as David on my FB page. I think – but I’m not 100% sure – that the girl I’m with at the back is the model Lisa Stolley. 

        Later that same year I saw the Dolls at Club 82, the joint where I first encountered Debbie Harry with The Stilettos. “For the past two Mondays, the Dolls have appeared at the Club 82 in New York, an ideal place for premiering new ‘glittery’ talent in New York, but hardly the kind of venue for a band with two British tours and two albums under their belt,” I wrote in MM. “An obvious step down, in fact, and a sure pointer that all is not well in the Dolls’ camp. Some observers are going as far as saying the Dolls’ demise is a carbon copy of the Velvet Underground’s story in New York. Perhaps in five years’ time, their albums will be hailed as works of art and David Johansen, Johnny Thunders and Co will be resurrected in much the same way as Lou Reed has made his recent comeback.”

It wasn’t to be though Malcolm McLaren, a Dolls groupie, tried his best to resurrect their career by dressing them up in red uniforms and declaring them communists. “The Dolls had only just survived being labelled gay transvestites and had the bruises to prove it. If they were going to pursue the Communist trip under Malcolm's regime, Vivienne [Westwood] was going to have to run up matching bullet proof vests,” wrote Nina Antonia in Too Much Too Soon, her biography of the band, published by Omnibus in 1997 and eagerly commissioned by me. 

Nina's book - highly recommended. 

         When I left New York I thought I’d never see the Dolls again but I was wrong. On the evening of March 10, 2006, I watched what remained of the group – just David and Syl – at Selfridges on Oxford Street where they played in the basement, the Ultra Lounge as it was called in those days, and it was very dark and noisy and smoky, and throughout the evening beautiful models in off-the-shoulder short black dresses with long legs and six-inch heels plied me with champagne. Decadence still followed the Dolls everywhere, it seemed. The event was to mark the opening of a punk fashion week, though quite why the Dolls had been flown over at huge expense from New York for one free gig escaped me completely. For starters they weren’t really punks, more 60% glam, 35% Rolling Stones clones with the remaining 5% punk – but only in attitude, not musically.

         It would have been around midnight when the Dolls finally tottered on to the small stage in their high heels and finery but they played so excruciatingly loud that I was hard pressed to identify anything other than the opening number, ‘Personality Crisis’. Thereafter the Dolls turned up and up and, in a room with a relatively low ceiling that was never intended for live music anyway, the sound degenerated into a great wash of noise. I don’t think my ears have been assaulted in such a way since I stood on John’s side of the stage for Who shows back in the Seventies. As ever, David Jo pranced around like Mick Jagger, colliding into Syl and sharing his mike. Still, despite the volume the Dolls didn’t disappoint.

         My final Dolls show was on June 18, 2004, when the two Dolls who were at Selfridges, David and Syl, appeared with their original bassist Arthur Kane at the Royal Festival Hall as part of that year’s Meltdown Festival, curated by Morrissey, one of their biggest fans who once published a Dolls fanzine. At one point in the show, between numbers, David approached the microphone and thanked their English fans for their support. “And we got a lot of support from a writer on Melody Maker,” he said. “I can’t remember his name.” 

“It was Roy Hollingworth,” I yelled at the top of my voice from where I was sat, in a box at the side. 

David glanced up at the box but I doubt he recognised me from those days back in New York. “That’s right, Roy Hollingworth,” he mumbled into the mike. 

RIP David. 

JOHN LENNON V THE US GOVERNMENT

It was 50 years this week that I wrote my first big story for Melody Maker about John Lennon’s fight to remain the US. It was an ongoing story that I covered a lot when I lived in New York and as a result I made the acquaintance of John’s lawyer, Leon Wildes, seen above with John at one of the many hearings devoted to the case. Leon was a seeker of the truth, and in John’s case the truth of the matter – the real reason why the US Government wanted to expel him – was crucial in the successful outcome from Leon and John’s point of view.

It wasn’t often that my stories for Melody Maker read like formal law reports but this one does, a bit anyway. Here it is, as published in MM dated March 1, 1975. 

John Lennon’s protracted negotiations to stay in the United States will reach a climax within the next three months, according to his attorney, Leon Wildes, who this week explained to the Melody Maker exactly how John stood in relation to the Immigration Authorities.

        John entered the US on August 31, 1971, at St Thomas in the Virgin Islands, originally intending to stay for “about two months” and specifically to attend a court hearing concerning the custody of Kyoko, Yoko Ono’s daughter by her first marriage to film director Tony Cox.

        Leon Wildes was retained as Lennon’s attorney at the beginning of 1972 when it became necessary for him to apply for an extension to his visa to stay in the States.

        Since then there have been numerous attempts by the US government to have John deported, but constant appeals against Government action have enabled him to remain, if a little precariously, in the US. The situation, however, has meant that John is unable to leave the country for any reason. If he did, the chances are that he wouldn’t be able to get back in again, and this is a situation he dare not risk.*

        Lennon has travelled extensively within the US during his sojourn here. He has spent periods in Los Angeles, staying at a house belonging to record producer Lou Adler, whose name, incidentally, is currently coupled with actress Brit Ekland. He has also spent time in Florida with his son Julian**, but for the most part has lived in New York, mostly at an apartment in the Dakota building on New York’s West Side with Yoko. Recently they have separated and John is living with Yoko’s former assistant May Pang in a small apartment on the East Side.

        The Government case against Lennon is now before the US Second Court of Appeal in the Second (New York) Circuit. Lennon’s case has to be presented before the end of next week, and the Government’s likewise. The law will be argued in court and reaching the decision that follows will take between one and three months. 

        This need not necessarily be a final decision. Either party in the suit can make a further appeal to the Supreme Court which first of all decides whether or not to try the case or stand by the decision of the Appeal Court. If this court decides to hear a further appeal, then further delays will ensue.

        At the same time, Lennon’s attorney has filed two actions against the Government, which complicates matters further. The first and most important claims that the Immigration Department prejudged John’s case in the first place without giving him a fair opportunity to state his reasons for wishing to remain the US.

        This case was first brought in October, 1973, and the judge in question sustained Lennon’s claim. As a result John was given leave to examine the Government witnesses involved and already proceedings are in motion to question the man who was the District Director of the Immigration Office at the time of John’s original deportation order. This man, Sol Marks, who has since retired to Florida, held this position that charged him by law to decide whether proceedings should be taken against an illegal alien. Lennon, of course, is claiming that Marks should not have started these proceedings, that he prejudged the case. 

        Lennon’s second action is his “non priority” case which, like his first action, is being heard in the New York Federal District Court. This “non priority” list is a list of aliens within the US who are allowed to remain in the country for humanitarian reasons despite having convictions that would otherwise render them liable for expulsion. 

        Leon Wildes has secured copies of the “non priority” regulations, and a copy of other approved cases on the list. There are, he says, other persons on that list who have convictions for trafficking in drugs and he contends that Lennon ought to be on that list. Lennon, of course, has only one conviction for possession of marijuana, a considerably lesser offence than trafficking in illegal narcotics.

        Still another application was filed in 1972 contending that John and Yoko were outstanding artists and, as such, ought to be allowed to remain in the US because of their contribution towards the culture of the country.

Wildes claims he has information that shows that the Government deliberately hid this application, actually locking the relevant documents away in a safe, thus holding up or attempting to ignore the application. This, says, Wildes, was because of a memorandum which was circulated by an unknown Government agency to other Government agencies which stated that John and Yoko were to be kept under physical observance at all times because of possible political activities.

Wildes is currently attempting to find the source of this document. If he does, he says, it will break the case wide open and prove there has been a miscarriage of justice. “We have never deliberately asked for support from any important people or politicians, but several have come forward and indicated that they want to help,” Wildes told me. 

        “At this point I think we have got more law on our side than ever before. I think we have a better chance in view of the present political climate because attitudes towards John are changing all the time. Ultimately, of course, we hope that the law of drug convictions and entry into the US will be changed.”

        Finally, one other factor has arisen in John’s favour. England has just passed a law called the Uniform Rehabilitation Act which wipes out certain convictions from a person’s record after a certain number of years. This comes into effect on July 1 this year and will wipe out the original drug conviction against John’s name which was, of course, the US Government’s only concrete excuse for starting the proceedings against him on the first place.

        Meanwhile Lennon rocks on. This week sees the release of another solo album, a collection of oldies entitled Rock’n’Roll, the result of tapes made with Phil Spector in Loa Angeles last October.

        Yet another controversy surrounds the release of this set which was originally scheduled for April. An unauthorised bootleg album, titled Roots, and emanating from the same sessions has been advertised on TV as available by mail order only in the US. It contains much of the same material but in an uncompleted state. How these copies of the tapes disappeared from the studio and came into the hands of the “Adam VIII” label (the label mentioned in the TV ads) is a mystery but the situation resulted in Capitol’s decision to rush-release Lennon’s official album ahead of schedule.

____

* In a private conversation, John told me that every time he flew anywhere in the States he was terrified that for some reason, perhaps bad weather, the plane might be diverted out of the US and, on its return, he’d be barred from entering the US again.

** John also told me that it was when he was in Florida, staying with Julian at the Disney World resort near Orlando, that he signed the papers that finally dissolved the Beatles’ business partnership, the last Beatle to do so. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROCK & ROLL HAll Of FAME, 2025

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

My R&R HoF cassettes and CDs. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BECOMING LED ZEPPELIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARIANNE FAITHFULL (1946-2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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