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.