MELODY MAKER IN 1970

Aged 22, I joined the staff of Melody Maker on the first Monday in May, 1970, and during the course of the day spoke on the telephone to Ginger Baker, who told me about his new group Airforce. To have spoken to a man widely regarded as the most skilled drummer in rock on my first day there seemed like a good start.

The Melody Maker’s offices at that time were on the second floor of a large, institutional, six-storey building on the north side of Fleet Street whose doors, back and front, were manned by overweight security men in uniforms and peaked caps. Many other magazines published by IPC Business Press occupied the same premises, among them several football and farming magazines, as well as such fascinating titles as Laundry & Dry Cleaning News, Naval Architecture Monthly and Cage Birds Weekly, whose bow-tie wearing editor we affectionately referred to as ‘Joey’. Next to Melody Maker was Cycling Monthly* and two doors along was Disc & Music Echo.

Considering that Melody Maker was about to enter its golden age, when the circulation would rise to over 200,000 a week, the offices were decidedly underwhelming; dimly lit with a scuffed parquet floor, dented bottle-green filing cabinets, old wooden desks, rickety chairs and black manual typewriters of questionable vintage. The phones were also black and made from heavy bacolyte and the walls were covered in a random assortment of torn and faded posters. Richard Williams, the assistant editor, had written out some Dylan lyrics and stuck them to the walls. I sat opposite a sign that read: ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’ and to my right were the words ‘Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters’. Behind Richard’s chair were pictures of Italian footballers. 

I soon discovered that Richard had been hired by MM editor Ray Coleman the previous year in preference to myself as we were both among those who answered the same job advert in the classified ads at the back of the paper. When another opening arose about six months later Ray decided not to advertise again and had called me in March to see if I was still interested. I certainly was, and I still feel quite flattered that I was evidently only second on the shortlist behind Richard. 

The vacant desk that I assumed was next to that occupied by Chris Welch, a cheerful, curly-haired fellow whose Melody Maker features and singles reviews I had been reading for years. Next to him was the urbane, middle-aged Laurie Henshaw, the news editor and reputedly something of a ladies man, and in the corner opposite Laurie sat Max Jones, the much respected jazz critic who wore a dark blue skullcap and spent much of his day at El Vino’s, the Fleet Street wine bar opposite the building. Max was forever complaining about something or other, usually a problem with his expenses or the lack of parking facilities or how a ped (his word for pedestrian) had somehow inconvenienced him on his drive to work. Although jazz was his speciality he liked rock music too, at least some of it, and could discuss it intelligently. For this reason he was the first member of my parents’ generation that I met – and one of the very few from that generation that I would ever meet – that I could relate to as if he was a member of my own generation.

That first Monday at Melody Maker was very busy, it being news day – the day when the magazine’s news pages were filled. Under the supervision of Laurie Henshaw I was assigned to write various short news stories, some of them re-written from press hand-outs, others from information garnered on the telephone. Chris Welch was busy putting together the Raver column, MM’s gossip page, which often featured the adventures and opinions of Jiving K. Boots, a fictitious rock star from his home territory of Catford. 

At various times during the day I felt like pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Here I was, on the staff of Melody Maker, Britain’s most distinguished rock and pop paper, the magazine that I’d rushed out and bought every Wednesday for years. I’m not quite sure how I expected the offices of MM to be, but it certainly wasn’t like this. This was too ordinary, the offices too drab, the staff too matter-of-fact, the situation too mundane. At the end of the day I was wondering if I’d wake up the next morning and be back at Slough Magistrates Court, once again reporting on the justice meted out to those who drove carelessly on the M4. 

My first Tuesday at Melody Maker was equally eye-opening insofar as when I arrived at the offices at the appointed time of 10am no-one else was there, apart from the office boy and an elderly chap called Chris Hayes who wasn’t there the previous day and for whom the term lugubrious had probably been invented. Very tall and unusually slim with thinning black hair, dressed somberly in what looked like a demob suit, and with the demeanour of someone who has just attended the funeral of a dearly-loved relative, Chris Hayes had at one time been a full-time staff member but was now employed solely to produce the Any Questions column, to which readers would write to inquire about what equipment was favoured by the stars. He was on the phone and I sat and listened to his end of the conversation.

        “Tell me Eric old boy [Hayes always, but always, called everybody ‘old boy’], there’s a reader from Leicester here... writes in and wants to know what sort of guitar you use these days?” 

        I was not so much bemused by the fact that Chris Hayes was evidently talking to Eric Clapton (at 10.30 in the morning!), as much as the casual manner in which he addressed him.

        “Fender Stratocaster, old boy? How do you spell that? S... T... R... A ...T... O... C... A... S... T... E... R. Thanks. And what sort of amp do you use these days?”

“Marshall? Does that have two Ls?”

        Another call. “Pete, old boy, there’s a reader from Brighton wants to know what sort of wah-wah you use.” (This to Pete Townshend.)

“What, you don’t use a wah-wah?”

“But how do you spell wah-wah anyway? W… A… H W… A… H. Sounds bloody silly to me old boy. Best of luck with that Tommy business.”

And so it went on, with Chris Hayes talking on the phone to the great and not so great. He became quite exasperated when a PR person refused to immediately connect him with the rock star to whom he wished to speak – “Well, can’t you wake him up?” – though the depth of his telephone book largely precluded the need for PRs anyway. Occasionally his conversations would stray off the point and I came to realise that he was a chronic hypochondriac, and that an innocent ‘How are you?’ could bring forth from Chris a detailed account of all illnesses, aches and pains and minor accidents he’d suffered during the previous 12 months or, if you were really unlucky, a deeply pessimistic forecast of his health prospects for the foreseeable future. For me this was even more surreal than the previous day. For almost two hours the office was occupied solely by he and I, and me with absolutely nothing whatsoever to do but listen to him on the phone and read back issues of the paper. 

Eventually Max Jones rolled up. “Couldn’t park my bloody car anywhere,” he muttered. “What are you doing here?”

“I started work here yesterday.”

“Well, no-one comes in on Tuesdays.”

I soon learned that Tuesday was press day. Editor Ray Coleman, chief sub-editor Allan Lewis, his assistant and Laurie Henshaw all spent Tuesdays in Colchester where MM was printed. The rest of the staff stayed at home ‘doing research’, which meant listening to records or reviewing them, or simply catching up on sleep. The staff actually reconvened on Wednesdays at noon when we gathered for the weekly editorial conference, chaired by Ray. For an hour those present, which included the magazine’s chief photographer, the denim-clad, rake-thin and rather impish Barrie Wentzell, discussed what to include in the following week’s issue. Welch, as ever, was assigned the singles reviews, someone was delegated to do ‘Blind Date’ during which a musician was played singles ‘blind’ and had to guess who’d recorded it and comment, concert tickets were dispensed and potential interviews discussed. The meeting concluded, we dispersed to the nearest pub, the Red Lion in Red Lion Alley, which was run by a huge gay man called Wally who was always dressed in a black Russian tunic, and where lunches were long and liquid, unless they were taken upstairs in a small Chinese restaurant. My new acquaintance Barrie invariably ordered a ’glass of dry white wine and a small piece of cheese’.

When I arrived Melody Maker was in a state of flux. The previous editor, Jack Hutton, had left to launch Sounds, a rival rock weekly, and taken with him a good proportion of the old MM staff. Ray Coleman had arrived from editing Disc & Music Echo and was busy recruiting new staff with backgrounds similar to his own, young journalists from provincial newspapers like myself. In the coming weeks many other newcomers would arrive, among them Michael Watts, Roy Hollingworth and Mark Plummer, and in the meantime I kept my head down, still a little unsure about having pitched myself into the heart of the rock industry.

At first I felt like a bit of a fraud at MM. After all, although my collection of about 50 albums was expanding rapidly by most standards – it would soon increase at a hitherto unimaginable rate as promo records rained down on me from every label under the sun, of course – my sum total of concert experiences wasn’t that great in my opinion, largely because until now I’d never lived in a big city where rock concerts took place regularly. It consisted of Cliff & The Shadows (Blackpool, 1959, as a 12-year-old!), The Beatles and various Merseyside groups who supported them on a package tour in 1963 (a life changing experience, that), a chance encounter with Rod Stewart in Steampacket at a pub in Ilkley, a few bands I’d seen at Bradford Tech and Leeds University (including Marmalade, The Move, Joe Cocker and The Hollies), various acts at last year’s Plumpton National Jazz & Blues Festival, and, of course, my favourites The Who on three occasions by now*; plus dozens of semi-pro bands, two of which included myself. But it didn’t seem to matter because the new intake of MM writers had similar backgrounds and experience to my own and before long we were all going along to rock shows together, learning from each other, simply revelling in the heaven-sent pleasure of it all.

The first concert I was sent to review for MM was an appearance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall by a somewhat mystical quartet called Third Ear Band, who were much respected in hippie circles for their uncompromising sound which was about as far removed from the rock music I liked as I now was from Slough Magistrates’ Court. With instrumentation comprising violin, cello, oboe and assorted hand-held percussion, they played hypnotic, mainly improvised music with a strong oriental flavour which to my ears sounded like an endless and somewhat tuneless drone, this largely because they seemed to have abandoned traditional western tunings. The effect might have been soothing were it not for the disturbing lack of pitch control – clearly an effect they sought and which impressed their many followers. Not wishing to appear naive, I gave them a positive appraisal on MM’s Caught In The Act page. But I never went to see them again.

The first album I was given to review was Soft Machine’s Third which presented similar problems as Soft Machine was an avant-garde ensemble of varying personnel whose free-form jazz improvisation and unusual song structures were so far removed from what constituted my record collection as to baffle me completely. I gave the album to a more enlightened friend who wrote his opinions down for me and which I subsequently reproduced virtually word for word in the following week’s Melody Maker. Richard Williams, in charge of doling out albums to review, never again gave me a Soft Machine album.

There can be no question that life on Melody Maker in the early Seventies was as good as it gets for a young journalist whose first love was rock music. The record industry was about to enter a boom period which was reflected in the largesse it doled out to us. There were endless supplies of free records and free concert tickets, access to the best nightclubs, the opportunity to forge friendships, or at last acquaintanceships, with the stars of the day (which offered ample opportunities for name-dropping), parties thrown by record companies with free booze by the bucketload, and plenty of beautiful, free-spirited girls who weren’t averse to stepping out on the arm of a Melody Maker writer even if they did see this as the next rung on the ladder to a night of passion with a rock god. It was a lifestyle far removed from the daily grind of everyday folk and in this respect it set the tone of my life for the next decade and some time beyond. The pay on MM wasn’t munificent but it would get better and the perks were endless and expenses not bad either. Soon I would travel abroad in pursuit of rock stars, eventually as far as California. Plane travel, posh hotel suites and backstage passes to concerts became commonplace. 

During the early months on Melody Maker everybody was finding their place and mine turned out to be News Editor. Ray Coleman evidently decided that of the new crop of MM writers he recruited in the summer of 1970, I was best suited to the more disciplined task of filling the first few pages with news stories than writing meandering features. This was probably a good call as I’d spent five years nosing out news stories in the real world, but I can still recall my delight when I was promoted after just three months, and for the next three years I held down the News Editor’s job. Thereafter I was destined to become MM’s longest serving American Editor, based first in Los Angeles and then, for almost four years, in New York, but that was way into an as yet unimagined future. 

This was an era in Melody Maker’s history when more emphasis was placed on news than at any other time. The reason for this was the intense competition between ourselves and New Musical Express and the newcomer Sounds, and the consequent need to attract readers with bold scoops. The front page of MM was always dominated by a brash, headline-grabbing news story, often relating to the demise of a group, hitherto unforeseen personnel changes or an impending tour by a big name act, either British or American.        
This was the immediate post-Beatles era, of course, and stories about the activities of the group, collectively or individually, always made front-page news. The most popular Beatles-related story was always a variation on the ‘Beatles To Reform?’ line, usually prompted by activity in a recording studio that involved a combination of two or more former Beatles working together, or a rash comment from one of them which hinted vaguely that a reunion could not entirely be ruled out. I was responsible for several ‘Beatles To Reform?’ stories, both before and after Paul McCartney wrote his famous letter to Mailbag, MM’s letters page, debunking the idea once and for all. 

I also prematurely split Led Zeppelin, ELP, Deep Purple and The Faces and implied that several big US stars, including Elvis, were on their way to Britain for shows that never happened. Indeed, barring ‘Beatles To Reform’, ‘Elvis To Visit Britain At Last?’ was the best of all news stories that never happened. In this regard, all a promoter needed to do was to tell us he’d sent off a telegram to Elvis’ manager Colonel Tom Parker offering him half a million quid for an Elvis tour and it was front-page news, regardless of the fact that Parker probably hadn’t even bothered to reply. Most of these speculative news stories resulted from intense pressure to come up with something dramatic when nothing dramatic was happening. Because of Melody Maker’s increasing status as the most widely read UK music magazine, those PRs who represented the top acts were anxious that their clients’ tours should be front-page news and would barter ‘exclusives’ with me. “If you can assure me of the front page, we won’t tell NME,” they would state. And of course I accepted the deal, even if sometimes their clients didn’t make the front page. 

Stories that generated ‘-mania’ were also popular with editor Ray Coleman. We’d watch the progress of singers and groups very carefully and if it seemed to us that a certain act was about to be promoted to Division One - the ‘toppermost of the poppermost’, as John Lennon famously described it – we’d splash them on the front page alongside a story that said very little other than that they were becoming very popular indeed. Thus did I invent ‘Freemania’ (when ‘All Right Now’ topped the charts) and ‘Purplemania’ (when a Glasgow concert by Deep Purple turned into a riot). My friend Michael Watts coined a neat variation in ‘T.Rextasy’. 

Another area made for headlines was the vexed question of bootlegging, then just coming into its own. By a curious coincidence it turned out that one of the biggest bootleg dealers in London ran a record shop in Chancery Lane, just around the corner from our offices. I became a regular customer and wrote about the availability of The Beatles Live At Shea Stadium, Got Live If You Want It by The Rolling Stones, Wooden Nickel, a live album by CSN&Y and H-Bomb, live Deep Purple. When I wrote a front page story about the imminent release of Live On Blueberry Hill, a Led Zeppelin live double recorded in California, the wrath of Zep’s brutal management descended on that little shop in Chancery Lane. Someone later told me an axe was involved. 

The biggest assignment I covered during my first summer on MM was the Bath Festival at Shepton Mallet over the weekend of June 27 & 28. Compared to the National Jazz & Blues Festival at Plumpton that I’d attended the previous year, this was just huge; perhaps as many as 150,000 people stretching away up a hill almost as far as the eye could see. The reason was that Led Zeppelin was appearing, taking pride of place on Sunday, the final day. I arrived on the Saturday afternoon, having driven down from London, typewriter in the boot of my car, all set to report this major event like the trusty reporter I’d trained to be. I parked my car backstage and wandered around, eight weeks into this job and feeling unusually privileged to be inside the inner sanctum at a major festival. The weather was fine, though it wouldn’t stay that way, and for longer than seemed necessary I was entertained by a chap with a guitar called Joe Jammer, evidently someone’s roadie, who was filling in while Frank Zappa readied himself to face the crowd. Frank came and went and was followed, curiously, by Maynard Ferguson, an ageing (by Bath standards) big band leader who’d taken a left turn into jazz rock to appeal to a younger audience. The highlight of the evening, though, was Pink Floyd, whom I was seeing for the first time, premiering their new work, Atom Heart Mother, the album with the cow on the front. I listened to them in wonderment and awe then retired for the night, driving to Bath and a nice warm bed in a B&B, unlike everyone else who slept beneath the stars.

The next day I drove back to the site around midday and was astonished by the scenes in the village of Shepton Mallet. There was a phone box with a queue that stretched for over 100 yards. I calculated that if there were three people in the queue for each two yards, there were 150 people waiting, and that if each call lasted ten minutes, the last person in the line would wait for 25 hours before making their call. There were similar queues for toilets and food on the site; indeed, the contrast between the conditions endured by the fans and those enjoyed by the artists and their guests brought a sharp intake of breath. Backstage huge tepees had been erected to serve as private quarters for artists while a marquee served as a dining room in which waitresses dressed in traditional black dresses with white aprons served three course meals and a selection of fine wines. 

In the adjoining bar I met Led Zeppelin for the first time, introduced by my new colleague Chris Welch. Jimmy Page was dressed as a yokel in an old coat and scarecrow’s hat, and John Paul Jones had arrived by helicopter. Robert Plant, affable as ever, autographed a pink backstage pass for me*, and later in the day I passed this memento on to a girl I knew who was in the crowd and whom I had arranged to meet later that night. I actually got DJ John Peel to make an announcement from the stage: “Would Lorraine meet Chris by the backstage gate in 15 minutes.” 

        It was my introduction to Led Zeppelin. They played just as the sun was setting behind the stage, and mighty impressive they were too, even though my view was restricted by being too close to the high stage and having to crane my neck to see what was going on up there. But I could certainly hear them. Good grief! They opened their set with the hitherto unreleased ‘Immigrant Song’ which they attacked with all the ferocity of the marauding Vikings Robert was singing about. Drums and bass reverberated like cannon fire, and Page’s guitar cut through the twilight like a broadsword. Every other band on the bill sounded decidedly limp dick compared to this onslaught. The reception was phenomenal, and they returned to the stage for multiple encores. It was a coming of age for them, their first really huge British show, a triumph, and there I was lapping it all up. Serious competition for my beloved Who, I remember thinking. 

        Aside from the mighty Zeppelin, Sunday’s stars were Donovan, Santana, Flock, Hot Tuna, Country Joe, Jefferson Airplane* (whose set was aborted amid pouring rain due to fear of electrocution), The Byrds, who played a truly delightful all-acoustic set and, closing the show, Dr. John. Sunday’s music at Bath that year started at midday and finished at about 6am on Monday morning. I saw it all and in the misty dawn light drove immediately back to London, parked my car behind Fleet Street, rode the elevator to the MM office and wrote my story. 

It wouldn’t be the last night without sleep that I willingly endured in seven years service on Melody Maker.

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* The staff of Cycling Monthly once complained that we in the MM office made too much noise. Our Editor, Ray Coleman, informed them that we needed to listen to music for research, reviews and inspiration. He added: “We won’t complain if you lot cycle up and down the corridors testing new bikes!”

* I still think my fondness for The Who might have clinched my appointment to MM, as editor Coleman shared my high opinion of them which I expressed during my interview.

* I hadn’t been on MM long enough yet to realise it was dreadfully uncool for rock writers to ask for an autograph.  Now I wish I’d asked them all, all the hundreds I eventually met, for their autographs.

* I even interviewed Grace Slick, she of the Jefferson Airplane, when her group cut their set short and dashed from the stage in the pouring rain. I followed her into their tour bus and, much to her surprise, did a quick on-the-spot, off-the-cuff interview before the bus pulled away.

THE BETRAYALS by Fiona Neill

After 47 years in the game, it’s always entertaining to read a novel that features a fictitious character who’s a rock writer, especially when you weren’t expecting it and if the author appears to have no previous connection to our trade. What will they make of us, I wonder. Will it be realistic, OTT or dripping with clichés? And will the consequent references to the rock world and those who inhabit it ring true? 

This happened the week before last when at Gatwick Airport before an eight-hour flight I fancied a bit of light reading and picked up The Betrayals by Fiona Neill, a breezy novel about dysfunctional families in crisis. It’s weapons-grade chic-lit, piled high by the tills and ideal light entertainment for a long haul, though to my mind it owes a debt to Ian McEwan’s* masterpiece Atonement in that a key element of the plot hinges on a young girl’s mistaken perception that many years ago a couple she saw having it off alfresco was not the couple she imagined it to be. 

Barney the rock critic, the bleary-eyed cuckolded husband of an adulteress, doesn’t arrive in the story until page 134, but it’s a rock-style entrance all the same, driving a shabby car whose stereo is turned up to 11. “Mika!” he yells above the din. “He’s going to be big, big, big! Remember when you heard it first,” not a statement that puts Barney alongside Nostradamus in the Prophesy Hall of Fame in my view but we’ll let that pass. Having arrived late to a seaside gathering where friendships unravel he apologises by suggesting that, for his hosts, it… “Must have been like Geffen waiting for The Stone Roses’ second album,” a simile unlikely to be understood by the average chic-lit reader, though it certainly made me smile. 

Attuned by this to Barney’s interest in contemporary music but not yet enlightened as to his profession, I might have guessed when it becomes apparent that he’s a dipso, as all of us rock critics are or were of course. Soon we learn that Barney got tickets for the other couple’s daughter – the girl who saw the shag – to see Girls Aloud and an introduction to Cheryl Cole, and that because he was the first writer ever to review an album by Arctic Monkeys he got VIP tickets to see them at Glastonbury. It seems a bit far-fetched when it is revealed that Barney took his friend, the father of the Girls Aloud fan, on a press junket to Japan to see The Rolling Stones – as if – or that he snatched an exclusive interview with one of the Oasis Gallaghers after they bumped into one another on the street in Notting Hill. These are but a handful of the many references to his work in the tale, some more level-headed than others; rock acts and magazines or papers for whom Barney writes sprinkled here and there like designer clothes and lingerie in the ‘shopping and fucking’ genre that I’m told is so popular with a certain type of reader. 

Later on in the novel Barney retires to his bedroom, ostensibly to write a review of a Radiohead album for Q (I think it was), but in reality he just sits in front of his laptop and drinks red wine until he’s comatose. His decline into alcoholism is driven by the realisation that his profession has become redundant in the internet age, a position with which I can easily sympathise, but the reality is that his boozing has made him unemployable. Barney is not the main character in The Betrayals and his career as a rock critic is incidental to the main plot, but you’ll be delighted to learn that by the end of the tale he’s taken the cure, dried out and become a piano teacher. A light at the end of my tunnel indeed.

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*  At least two of McEwans books also feature rock references: in Saturday the son of the main character is a blues guitarist and in On Chesil Beach a rock-loving character opens an indie record shop in Camden Town. Both portrayals seemed a bit unrealistic to me.

KEITH MOON'S LIVING ARRANGEMENTS

The domestic arrangements of The Who were never a mystery to journalists. Alone among acts of their stature during the early 1970s they welcomed music writers into their homes for interviews, and it was no secret that Roger Daltrey owned a manor house in the village of Burwash on the Kent-Sussex border, that John Entwistle lived in a relatively modest semi-detached house in Ealing, and that after staying in a series of rented flats in central London Pete Townshend had moved his growing family into a large house next to the River Thames in Twickenham, a stone’s throw from Eel Pie Island where on October 30, 1968, The Who had performed in the dance hall of the island’s small hotel. 

As might be expected, Keith Moon was less settled than his three colleagues, moving from his birthplace in Wembley to a flat in St John’s Wood, then to the top half of a house in Maida Vale, then to a flat above a garage in Highgate and then to a substantial house in North London’s Winchmore Hill. Along the way he had married a model named Kim Kerrigan and become the father of a daughter but while at Winchmore Hill his marriage to Kim faltered and she went back to live with her parents in Bournemouth, taking daughter Mandy with her. Keith promptly abandoned the North London house for a bachelor flat in Chelsea, but when Kim decided to give him another chance they bought a property off St Ann’s Hill Road, on the outskirts of Chertsey in Surrey. I would visit Tara House, as it was called, many times, both before and after it became notorious as Moon’s ultra-modern pleasure-dome, a futuristic fantasy house consisting of five pyramids, four at each corner with a giant one in the middle. It was set in its own grounds but not too far away from a pub, The Golden Grove, conveniently located at the end of a 300-yard lane that led to chez Moon and, unhappily for its occupants, one other property.

Keith and Kim bought the house for £65,000 (approximately £925,000 in today’s money) and moved in during the early months of 1971. On two of its corners were bedrooms, each with en-suite bathrooms, another housed a ‘den’, its walls decorated with murals of superhero comic characters, and the fourth the kitchen which led to a guest bedroom and thence to the garage. The strange layout of Tara consisted of rooms within rooms, and the main bedroom housed a bathroom within it, ie you could walk all the way around it. The bed-head was up against the outer bathroom wall, facing a huge wall-sized window, and there was a spherical TV hanging from a chain fixed to the ceiling. The loo was within the bathroom, and John Lennon’s gold disc for ‘She Loves You’ was mounted on the wall next to a mirror above the basin. Keith told me he’d swopped it for his gold disc for ‘My Generation’.

In the centre of the huge main room was a sunken conversation pit with seating on three sides, a brass chimney pipe descending from the apex of the pyramid to an open fire next to a built-in TV. Around the pit was a spacious raised area on all four sides. Three sides of the building boasted glass walls to a height of about six feet, a decidedly rash choice since the master of the household had a habit of walking into them, sober or otherwise.

In the manner of the modern day trend of B-listers for welcoming photographers from celebrity magazines into their homes in exchange for a sum of money and a picture spread within, the Moons announced their acquisition to the world by opening up the grounds for a July housewarming party that doubled as a celebration for the release of Who’s Next. The press were bussed in from London, many other rock stars were in attendance – among them George Harrison and Ronnie Wood as I recall – and the evening concluded with a firework display that climaxed with the words ‘Long Live The Who’ illuminated in the sky. Predictably there were complaints from neighbours and the police were called, a taster of things to come. 

The likelihood that Keith Moon would settle into quiet domesticity in his new home was remote. The household consisted of Keith and Kim, their daughter Mandy, Kim’s mother Joan, who was separated from Kim’s father, and her son Dermot, and despite the presence of two young children the atmosphere at Tara was constantly chaotic. Keith was at all times performing, at least when I was there, though he did let his guard down late at night when no one else was around. He had a habit of playing Beach Boys’ music extremely loudly, often the same song – ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ – over and over again on his juke box in the den. Such was the regularity of police visits that he and they became affably acquainted, largely because Keith was invariably genial towards the long arm of the law. “Come in chaps,” he’d say. “Have a brandy. Let’s listen to some music while we discuss what seems to be troubling you. I’m sure we can work things out.” In the fullness of time a relationship developed between ma-in-law Joan and a member of the Chertsey Constabulary that further reinforced the unlikely but convivial rapport between the drummer of The Who, rock’s wildest extrovert, and the forces of law and order in this deeply conservative corner of rural Surrey.

I never kept a diary, so I can’t remember all my visits to Tara that well. On one occasion, though, I rashly drove Keith in his great big lilac Roll-Royce to the Fox & Hounds pub in nearby Englefield Green, where I once lived. It was hell to drive, like a big truck with very soft suspension, a mattress on wheels, and the bonnet with its Flying Lady mascot seemed to stretch out before you for ever, and each time you went around a corner you had to turn the wheel round and round and round again to make it. Keith sat in the back playing 8-track tapes at deafening volume. The drive back, in the dark after a few drinks, was even more nerve wracking. On this occasion I spent the night there, as I recall in Tony Fletcher’s definitive Moon biography Dear Boy. Keith gave me a sleeping pill that knocked me out until well into the following afternoon but before we hit the sack he had a disagreement with Kim, something about the soup she had made being insufficiently spicy, and he threw it at her. I thought she was an angel and I wanted to disappear.

On one of my last visits to Tara, in the spring of 1973, Keith was having a swimming pool built, complete with wave machine, and I remember riding around the grounds on tiny motor bikes he’d bought. During his occupation he acquired many expensive cars that were parked outside: two Rolls-Royces, one the lilac Silver Cloud III that I drove, the other a white two-door Corniche with an open roof; a white Mercedes coupé; a red Ferrari Dino 426 that bit the dust on a nearby double-carriageway; a silver AC Cobra that had once belonged to Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham; and his ‘fun’ vehicles, a milk-float, an old American ‘Al Capone’ style car with running boards at the sides, a hot rod and a hovercraft, not to mention the ‘ordinary’ cars for other members of the household. “Cars were simply toys for Keith,” says Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler, Moon’s long-suffering PA and chauffeur. “Most people see cars as transport, as a means of getting from A to B but for Keith they were things to play with, usually late at night when he was in the mood for a fast drive. He didn’t even have a driving licence.”

Keith’s bar bills from the Golden Grove were outrageous. He invariably bought several bottles on the slate to take home at closing time, usually vodka and Courvoisier, along with several of the customers. I had Keith’s phone number, which in itself was pretty remarkable as rock stars never gave out their phone numbers to anyone other than family, group associates and drug dealers, and after a while I thought nothing of calling up to ask what he was up to. If he was in he’d as likely as not say, “Come on over dear boy,” his typical greeting to all and sundry. 

I was by no means the only late evening visitors to Tara, and eventually Kim decided enough was enough. She left Keith for the second and final time in the autumn on 1973, subsequently moving in with Ian McLagan of The Faces whom she would eventually marry and settle down with in Austin, Texas. Keith remained at Tara for another year, hopelessly adrift in his ocean of disorder, and one night invited Jeff Beck, whom he had bumped into at the Speakeasy, back to his home, ostensibly to sell him the hot rod. “I realised that he was a bachelor in the true sense of the word although there was this girl lurking about [a girlfriend from Staines],” Beck told Tony Fletcher. “He showed me around the house and it was covered in dog shit. I’d never seen such a mess in my life. He hadn’t made the slightest attempt to clean it up. He was like, ’Mind the dog shit,’ like it had been there and it was going to be there. I mean, everyone has accidents, but this was in every room. [He hadn’t] any idea how to look after a dog. He opened up all the closets he had custom made, every single one was a disaster, stuff fell out on the floor and he didn’t put it back. It was as if a director had said, ‘Action!’ and coordinated the most incredible stunt of collapsing things… When we finally drank ourselves into oblivion, [the girl] tapped on the room where I was and said, ‘Do you mind if I come in?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and we wound up sleeping in the same bed even though she was purporting to be with Keith. She said, ‘I can’t take it any more, he’s driving me berserk.’”

Keith Moon sold Tara in 1975, the proceeds winding up in Kim’s bank account. It was bought by Kevin Godley of 10cc who in 1990 sold it to Vince Clarke of Erasure. Clarke demolished the house and built a new one on the same site, complete with a commercial recording studio called Ammonite. Moon found a second partner, Swedish model Annette Walter-Lax, and relocated to California where he lived in hotels and a series of rented homes until he settled down on Victoria Point Road in the Trancas area of exclusive Malibu. There, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, he built a split-level house from the ground up, no expense spared, and became the Beach Boy of his dreams. The actor Steve McQueen and his wife Ali McGraw were his next-door neighbours, but the relationship was not cordial. Keith would remain there until September 1977 when, tired of America and virtually penniless, he returned to the UK, eventually moving into Flat 12 at 9, Curzon Square in the Mayfair district of London. It was here, on September 7, 1978, that Annette found his lifeless body and the rock world mourned one of its best loved sons. 

DAVID BOWIE – A LIFE by Dylan Jones

The longer we mourn David Bowie the more his absence becomes apparent. Nevertheless, in many ways the death of a great rock star nowadays affects only those to whom they were personally close, and makes little difference to most of their fans. Thanks to the heritage industry they no longer fade away: we continue to buy and listen to their records, watch their concerts on screens and read about them as if they were still alive. True, we can’t see them in person any more but, because David Bowie absented himself from public life for over a decade before his death, his actual absence is illusive, like the extinction of an endangered species, regrettable but remote. The obituaries have been written but the books keep on coming. 

I thought about this a lot as I read Dylan Jones’ David Bowie: A Life, a book I welcome, albeit with some reservations. Though advertised as a biography, it is in reality an oral history, Jones having interviewed and/or solicited contributions from 182 individuals with connections to Bowie; some – like myself – quite tangential and others – like his garrulous first wife, collaborating musicians and long term associates – with much more to say. Bowie’s story is told through their words, linked by Jones’ lucid and informative passages that set the scene and hurry things along, and the result is both enlightening and far-reaching, the best text-led Bowie book I’ve read since David Buckley’s Strange Fascination. It’s surprisingly pacy too and, with so many opinions to decode, Bowie’s fluid, restless and magpie-like character is fully developed well before fame beckons. 

As the present editor of GQ magazine, former editor of a few more and the author of 20 other books, Jones has been awarded the OBE for services to publishing, and his work ethic is clearly Herculean. This book is 556 pages long yet contains no images whatsoever, which is probably a first in the Bowie book industry, and pretty audacious since he remains far and away the most photogenic rock star the UK has ever produced. The format of the book precludes Jones from having to take a view on matters that some fans might find distasteful, thus enabling him to craft a ‘warts and all’ book that manages to avoid the rather prurient sensationalism of several other Bowie biographies I’ve read, yet include the debauchery anyway*. At the same time Bowie’s work is venerated through the opinions of experts: fellow musicians, record producers and prominent persons in the worlds of art and fashion. Some might consider this approach dispassionate but any such charges are mitigated by the scale of the undertaking, not to mention the wealth of information, much of it fresh, that can be gleaned from its pages. 

“The lack of subjectivity… should enable the truth to shine through,” Jones asserts in his acknowledgements, which is a nice way of saying that many of his interviewees speak their mind without concern for the feelings of others. There was always an element of bitchiness amongst those who surrounded Bowie, at least in the Mainman era and immediately afterwards, and the book certainly benefits from their candour and, probably, creative imagination. In this regard I would question the reliability of certain interviewees, not least a journalist who states that Bowie visited early manager Kenneth Pitt ‘just before Ken died’. I happen to know that Pitt is alive and well, now 95 and well cared for. This is but one dubious statement I found, not many but enough to create concern, leading me to discern a tendency in Jones to value the impact of a juicy quote over its truthfulness, with the old Fleet Street maxim of ‘don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story’ never far away. Bowie himself, of course, was no stranger to this tactic. 

Just about everyone is in awe of Bowie, and many of the anecdotes confirm the widely-held view that he could switch on the charm at a moment’s notice, disarm new acquaintances with his knowledge of just about everything under the sun and simultaneously take on the air of a pubbable bloke with whom you’d enjoy exchanging corny jokes over a couple of pints in your local. Most of the women interviewed, and some of the men, seem to have been willing to leap into bed with him in an instant, and Bowie wasn’t one to let such opportunities slip by. No one was immune to his allure, and even those who were cast aside ultimately forgive him and appear delighted if communication is restored. It is clear from the book that he had a profound effect on almost everyone with whom he came into contact and that he was adept at putting people at ease who might otherwise be intimidated simply by his proximity. One of the few dissenting voices was an old man walking his dog who in 1980 interrupted the filming of the ‘Ashes To Ashes’ video on Southend beach. ‘Do you know who this is?’ asked film director David Mallett. ‘Of course I do,’ he replied. ‘It’s some cunt in a clown suit.’ “Sometime later,” Jones writes, “Bowie remembered, ‘That was a huge moment for me. It put me back in my place and made me realise, ‘Yes, I’m just some cunt in a clown suit.’”

Touches like this, and what I believe is a scoop about him singing backup on a Frank Sinatra recording during the Station To Station sessions, animate Jones’ book. Nevertheless, there are some important absentees, the missing voices: Iman Abdulmajid, Bowie’s second wife, granted only a few second-hand quotes; Corinne ‘Coco’ Schwab, his über-efficient personal assistant for upwards of 40 years, always a model of discretion, unafraid to offend A-list celebs who request an audience at the wrong moment; and Tony Defries, Bowie’s artful manager during the Ziggy period who, perhaps characteristically, tried to muscle in on the project and, when that failed, invoiced Jones (more out of hope that expectation) for $360,000 ‘for his contribution’. What was that about a leopard and its spots?

‘Never open a door yourself,’ was Defries’ sly advice to the client he signed in 1971, a bright, personable young man terrified he might become a one-hit wonder after his 1969 single ‘Space Oddity’, just about all he had to show for seven years as a professional musician, peaked at number five. Those seven years and the period before, Bowie’s schooldays, are covered well with family, childhood and teenage friends and early band mates, most of them the usual suspects, chipping in. Troubled stepbrother Terry looms large, clearly a big influence, and a contrast is drawn between supportive father Heyward ‘John’ Jones and his mother Peggy who seems like a very cold fish indeed.  

On the outside Bowie is the model of cool but inside a bundle of neuroses and it was probably desperation that led him to throw in his lot with Defries, a wonderful move in the short-term but disastrous a few years down the line. The colourful Mainman staffers have had their say in other books but it’s good to get them all together again to more or less confirm what we all suspected – fabulous presentation but absolute chaos behind the scenes – and many of their stories still raise a smile, especially as I was on nodding terms with most of them. Photographer Brian Duffy (who died in 2010) hits the nail on the head when he says that Defries ‘realised that in order to get the record company really going, you had to get them up to their neck in debt, which was… a masterstroke.’ It was a bit like a pyramid scheme which imploded leaving many investors skint, and that includes just about everyone apart from Defries and, to a lesser extent, Bowie from whose earnings the profligacy was debited. 

In the eye of the hurricane, Bowie realised he had to kill Ziggy and in the aftermath his life becomes disordered, as does the book. I was confused by the chronology in the period between the recording of Pin Ups and Station To Station; as if the disarray of Bowie’s daily life between 1974 and ’76, exacerbated by his copious cocaine consumption and the financial fallout of leaving Defries, was reflected in these pages. It’s not as if matters aren’t covered – Diamond Dogs, the ‘theatre tour’, Young Americans, ‘Fame’, the friendship with John Lennon (excellent quotes there), The Man Who Fell To Earth, the ‘Isolar’ tour – just that the sequencing is askew, and not until we reach the recording of Low and subsequent sojourn in Berlin is order restored, just as it was in Bowie's life. 

The Berlin period is fascinating, allowing Bowie to reconnect with reality after the horrors of Los Angeles, though I was surprised that more attention was paid to the cover of Lodger than the music it contained and that, ‘Ashes To Ashes’ aside, Scary Monsters was glossed over compared to the dire Just A Gigolo movie and Bowie’s heroic stage performance in The Elephant Man. ‘Heroes’, the song, gets the full treatment but not much else is said about the experimental music he made with Brian Eno. I don’t believe Jones is being deliberately selective here, just that revelations in the book are contingent on who’s willing to be interviewed, with the result that where witnesses are available whatever they witness gets fulsome coverage, and vice-versa when they aren’t accessible. 

Thanks mainly to Nile Rodgers no such problems occur with Let’s Dance, Bowie’s best-selling album ever, which for better or worse took him into the mainstream, and plenty of Bowie watchers line up to stick the knife into Tonight, which followed, and also Never Let Me Down. Plenty of associates talk about Absolute Beginners, the movie and the song, which like Jones I love, and he is especially good on Live Aid, which isn’t surprising as his 2014 book The Eighties: One Day, One Decade, focused on just that. Geldof’s charity bash, Bowie’s role in it and its repercussions get an enlightening chapter all to themselves. 

‘My biggest mistake during the 80s was to try and anticipate what the audience wanted,’ states Bowie as we move into the doldrums years, followed by the later years when David lived ‘like royalty in exile’, as Jones puts it. Though the 90s were not as interesting as the two previous decades, plenty of people come forward to talk about the less well known music that Bowie recorded in this more settled period of his life, his ongoing need to check out new trends and canny ability to avoid being recognised when he sought anonymity (often by wearing a hat and pretending to read a Greek newspaper), while a few testify to his tetchiness when things did not go precisely according to plan. A surprisingly large number of people met up with Bowie in the period after he abandoned live performance in 2004 to live privately, enjoy his marriage to Iman and raise their daughter, and we learn of projects that were mooted yet not acted upon and how remarkable it was that such secrecy was maintained before the release of The Next Day in 2013. Many interviewees confirm that the rumours concerning Bowie’s poor state of health were ill-founded, at least until the very end, and that he found peace in downtown New York where he could stroll unrecognised into book stores and coffee shops. Almost everyone assumes that his heavy smoking was fatal. 

        The final chapter is devoted largely to tributes, many of them heartfelt, and the conclusion I reached at the end was that it’s one hell of a shame that a man of Bowie’s talent, wisdom, influence and allure didn’t live to be 100. The comment that struck me most forcibly, however, came earlier in the book, from film-maker Julien Temple: “There have been many people who have liberated us politically, but David liberated us emotionally, sexually,” he says. “Ultimately he wanted to set people free.”

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* The claim on page 155 by Lori Mattix that Bowie took her virginity when she was 14, sensationalised earlier this month in The Daily Mail as if it was a scoop, is from such an old interview that I honestly can’t remember where I first read it. It has been available to read on the internet for ages.

DAVID BOWIE: I WAS THERE by Neil Cossar

In June I reviewed on Just Backdated a book called The Who: I Was There, suggesting that it was a tribute to the group that their fans would contribute to a book of this kind and that only The Who inspired such affection from their followers. I was wrong, of course; so did David Bowie as this enjoyable book in the same series by a different author shows. (I contribute the introduction to this book, a slightly amended version of the text I wrote for a songbook that was published by Music Sales shortly after Bowie’s death in 2016, and which you can find elsewhere on this blog.)

This book follows the same format: a chronology of selected concert dates that were attended by fans and, in some cases, associates of Bowie, who offer their reminiscences of the shows, plus additional sightings of Bowie that merit attention. After a few recollections from teenage friends, among them David’s girlfriend Dana Gillespie (who at 14 looks more voluptuous than many women twice her age), we begin with The Konrads in June 1963 and work our way through to May 2006 when David appeared as a guest vocalist at a David Gilmour concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall. As with the book on The Who, it is the stories from the devoted fans that animate its pages, all of them detailed and affectionate, and in many cases simply offering grateful thanks towards a performer whose brilliance on stage is remembered decades after the event. Some even stray into how seeing and hearing the music of David Bowie had a profound effect on their personal relationships. 

Between August 1972 and March 1976 I saw Bowie on six occasions – twice in the UK, thrice in the US and once in Canada – and four of these shows are in the book. Among them is the celebrated July 3, 1973, concert at Hammersmith Odeon when David announced the cessation of The Spiders in terms that could be misinterpreted as if this was his last concert ever and not the last concert by the Mick Ronson-led band that backed him throughout the Ziggy era. An element of mystery has attached itself to this episode ever since, specifically with reference to who knew and who did not know what Bowie was planning. Soundman Robin Mayhew, interviewed for this book, has the last word: “Mick Ronson and [crew member] Peter Hunsley were the only ones who knew it was going to happen. Peter told me that David was going to ‘break up the band’ over the intercom just before the last show began.” Just like the lyric then, except that manager Tony Defries was probably in on it too. 

It is surprising that Neil Cossar couldn’t find a witness to the show at the O’Keefe Centre, Toronto, on June 16, 1974, the third concert in that year’s bold, theatrical and hugely influential Diamond Dogs tour. I was among a party of music writers flown from New York to Canada to report on this and I can still recall my amazement at witnessing a show that paid no lip service whatsoever to traditional rock concert presentation. (I can also remember booking a 4 am wake-up call in my hotel room so as to dictate my quite lengthy report on the show down the phone line to the editor’s secretary at Melody Maker, it being a Monday – press day – and Toronto being six hours behind London.) Still, there is a report on a similar concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden on July 19, which I also attended, but the futuristic staging and props were best seen in a smallish theatre and didn’t really work in a 20,000-seat arena. Not long after this they were abandoned, largely due to the expense of carting them around, and the tour metamorphosed into what came to be known as Bowie’s ‘soul tour’.

Another show missing from the book is the one I saw on March 1, 1976, at the Cobo Hall in Detroit, now immortalised as the first ever rock concert that Madonna, then aged 17, attended. “It was a major event in my life,” she said later. “I was wearing my highest platform shoes and a long black silk cape… I don’t think I breathed for two hours. I came away a changed woman.” Regrettably, a similar quote from Madonna is attributed to a concert at the same venue in April 1978, the only mistake I spotted in an otherwise error-free book (unless, of course, Madonna attended both shows, which is unlikely since she moved to New York in 1977). 

That show was on the Isolar tour, with its dramatic black and white lighting and a besuited Bowie coolly puffing on Gitanes throughout. The ice-blue of the cigarette packet in the pocket of his black waistcoat was the only colour on stage. Though not as visually memorable as the Diamond Dogs show I saw in 1974, from a musical standpoint it was the most enjoyable Bowie concert I ever saw, the Station To Station material translating wonderfully to the stage, along with the same show on March 26 at Madison Square Garden, which is covered in the book.

From then on David Bowie just got bigger and bigger, and all the subsequent tours are covered religiously: Serious Moonlight, Glass Spider, Tin Machine, Sound + Vision, Outside, Hours, Heathen and Reality, which takes me up to the last time I saw Bowie, again at Hammersmith (now the Apollo) in October 2002. Bowie certainly worked hard, as this book testifies, and due attention is also paid to one-off events such as his four-song set at 1985’s Live Aid – still Bowie’s greatest ever big show concert appearance for my money – the Freddie Mercury Memorial Concert in 1992, and his Sunday night headlining appearance at Glastonbury in 2000. Missing, however, is the Concert For New York City at Madison Square Garden in 2001 when Bowie opened the show by sitting cross-legged and singing Paul Simon’s ‘America’, minimally accompanying himself on an Omnichord, a tiny portable keyboard. This prefaced a reading of ‘Heroes’ that, because he was singing for the firemen of 9/11, just about matched the emotional punch of Live Aid. Either way, Bowie – a consummate professional as well as pioneering visionary – always rose to the occasion when part of a multi-artist bill at era-defining events. 

The final Bowie concert covered in the book, as opposed to the David Gilmour show mentioned above, is at Prague on June 23, 2004, from which David Mackuu reports, sadly, that after 15 minutes he left the stage. “Shortly afterwards David came back on and tried to sing ‘Life On Mars’, but then suddenly apologised for being in pain and that was the end of everything.”

It wasn’t quite the end of everything. After a concert at Scheeßel in Germany the following day (not covered here) he was taken to hospital for emergency treatment. He would live on for 11-and-a-half more years and make a handful of guest appearances but his career as a live performer was effectively over from that night. From that point on David Bowie went into virtual hiding, so the book closes with a few random sightings and, appropriately, a series of heartfelt tributes from fellow performers and musical associates.

CAUGHT IN A TRAP: The Kidnapping of ELVIS – Extract 3

This is the third and final extract from my novel CAUGHT IN A TRAP: The Kidnapping Of ELVIS, which is published tomorrow, August 16, the 40th anniversary of Elvis' death.

The Stockholm Syndrome has set in. Elvis Presley has bonded with his kidnappers. A ransom note has been delivered to Graceland. At the cabin in the Kentucky Hills where he is held captive, Elvis and his three captors – Delmore Pandel, his wife Sandra and their friend Roy Kruger – have time to kill. It is time for an experiment.

Before they slept they checked on Elvis in the locked bedroom. He was sleeping soundly. The following day, after breakfast, all four of them, Elvis, Del, Sandra and Roy, squeezed into the truck and drove into the Daniel Boone National Park, stopping at a gas station on the outskirts of Montecello to buy food for a picnic lunch. Elvis was in a buoyant mood and had to be persuaded to stay in the truck with Roy while Del and Sandra went inside to pick up the provisions, and when they returned he pleaded with them to be able to step outside.

        “I just want to be able to be normal in the midst of ordinary people,” he said. “That’s something I never had, not since I was famous anyway. Let me use the bathroom. I won’t try anything.”

        Del and Roy looked at one another. “Should we let him?” asked Del.

        “Yes,” said Sandra. “I trust him.”

        “OK, but you gotta wear this hat,” said Roy, handing Elvis a floppy hat in green camouflage material that he wore while out shooting. Elvis reluctantly placed it on his head. 

        Elvis Presley’s public appearances were almost always pre-planned, tightly choreographed and reported in the press, no matter how brief. On such occasions Elvis made sure he looked the part, dressing up in his capes, buckles and belts, the way he and his fans thought he ought to look. He usually wore outsize sunglasses. Elvis would no sooner slip out of the house in everyday clothes to pick up a quart of milk than the Queen of England would be seen in her nightdress.

During pre-production meetings in Los Angeles for the Singer special in May of 1968 its producer Steve Binder had suggested he and Elvis step out of his office on Sunset Boulevard and mingle with passers-by. Elvis was appalled by the suggestion, fearing that he would be mobbed on the street and some sort of disturbance ensue. He was therefore deeply humbled when no one recognised him. “We were just four guys standing in front of this building,” said Bones Howe, Binder’s audio engineer said afterwards.

It was quite another thing, however, for Elvis to use the bathroom in a roadside gas station without a security detail checking out the building first, making sure no one else was inside and waiting outside while he relieved himself. However, Elvis had been a captive now for five nights and, although he’d been given a change of clothing – the overalls and t-shirt he loathed so much – he hadn’t had a shave in all that time, nor been able to wash properly and re-dye his hair as was his custom. As a result Elvis’ natural brown colour was just starting to show at the roots and, as each day passed, his stubble had continued to grow but it wasn’t black like the dyed hair on his head, more salt and peppery. The camouflage hat only added to the obvious reality that he no longer resembled anything like the Elvis Presley that the world would recognise.

“OK,” said Roy. “But I’m coming with you.”

Elvis stepped down from the truck and walked across the forecourt to the bathroom. The only other customer, a young man dressed in a check shirt and similar overalls to those Elvis wore, was filling up a station wagon, and as they approached the bathroom a middle-aged woman pulled up in a sedan, got out and walked towards the shop. Neither gave Elvis and Roy a second glance. 

Inside the bathroom was another man, splashing water on his face at the basin. He turned and stepped aside as Elvis passed close by him, glancing at Elvis but showing no signs of recognition. When they had finished Elvis and Roy walked back to the truck, passing close to the woman from the sedan who was lingering by a newspaper stand close to the entrance to the shop. She ignored them.

Back in the truck Elvis appeared overjoyed. “You have no idea what that felt like for me,” he said. “That’s the first time in 20 years I’ve been able to walk around outside in public and not be recognised. Now I know what it’s like not to be Elvis Presley.”

Emboldened by the success of their experiment at the gas station, the quartet drove on into the National Park, eventually stopping at a picnic area and eating lunch. Although the area was far from crowded, a handful of other groups of picnickers settled nearby, among them a family of four: father, mother and two boys below the age of 10. After their meal the boys began to throw a football to one another and when one boy failed to catch the ball it rolled to where the group was sat. Elvis glanced at the others. Roy nodded. Elvis picked up the ball, stood up and threw it back to the boy. 

“Thanks mister,” he shouted from about 10 yards away. The father of the boys waved in acknowledgement and Elvis waved back. He smiled and sat down. The King of Rock’n’Roll was beginning to enjoy normality.

In the afternoon the four of them continued their drive through the National Park, stopping now and then and getting out of the truck to admire the scenery. At one particular spot they mingled with a coach party. Elvis again went unrecognised. Driving back to the cabin in the early evening they passed a roadside diner and Elvis suggested they stop to eat. “I can’t remember what it was like to go into a restaurant and be served, just like a normal person, no one making a fuss,” he said. 

There were only three other vehicles parked outside, and it was safe to assume one of them belonged to the staff. Roy parked the truck and sent Sandra inside to check on how crowded it was.

“There’s only two tables occupied,” she reported back. “A young couple on one and an old guy on the other.”

“OK,” said Del. “I’m sick of eating in the cabin anyway.”

“Me, too,” said Elvis. “But that’s not to say I don’t like your cooking Miss Sandra,” he added hurriedly.

Sandra smiled at Elvis, and Elvis grinned back. It seemed like any natural exchange between old friends. 

“You sit facing the wall Elvis,” said Roy. “If anything happens we’re out of here quick.”

The four of them ate burgers and fries washed down with coke. No one paid them the slightest notice. Elvis said little throughout the meal, relishing his anonymity. It never even occurred to him to go up to the counter and identify himself, not that the waitress would have recognised him anyway. As they walked back to the truck he asked, “Do y’all trust me now?”

“I guess so,” said Roy. “But I still had this with me, just in case.” He opened his jacket to reveal the .38 stuffed into his belt. 

Elvis winced. “You didn’t need that,” he said. “I gave you my word.” 

Sandra thought she detected a touch of hurt in his voice. “I believe you,” she said.  

Back at the cabin Elvis joined Roy, Del and Sandra on the porch before they turned in for the night. Roy and Del were drinking beer, Elvis and Sandra coke. “Did you guys serve in the army?” Elvis asked them.

Roy and Del nodded.

“Vietnam?”

“Yea,” said Roy. “But we don’t talk about it.”

“They don’t like to,” said Sandra. “Even I can’t get them to tell me anything about what they did there.”

“Why not?” asked Elvis.

“The way the Americans treated the Vietcong,” said Del. “It wasn’t good.”

They lapsed into silence. Then Roy spoke. “I’ll tell y’all one story. We took a prisoner once, me and Del. A stray Vietcong man we found in the jungle. We ought to have killed him but we didn’t. We couldn’t. Not in cold blood. He wasn’t a soldier, just a simple man, a farmer maybe. So we tied him up and took him with us, back to where we thought our camp was located. But we got lost in the jungle, didn’t know where we were, lost our sense of direction. It was night, there were no lights, nothing, just a torch that I had.”

Elvis nodded. “So what happened?”

“The Vietcong guy sensed that we were lost and he showed us the way,” said Del, picking up the story. “He couldn’t speak no English and we couldn’t understand him but he led us out of the jungle even though he was our prisoner. And when we got near the camp he pleaded with us to let him go because he knew that if we took him into the camp he’d be shot.”

“Did you let him go?” asked Elvis.

“Yea,” said Del. “He’d saved us. We thought maybe he had a wife and kids. He could have led us back to where his people were, and we’d have been captured or killed.”

“He ran off back into the jungle as fast his legs could carry him,” said Roy. “The thing is… we trusted him and he trusted us. We repaid his trust.”

“Just like today,” said Elvis. “You trusted me, and I repaid it. I can’t lead a normal life, and never will, even after you let me go. But you showed me what it was like. Millions of men dream of being Elvis Presley, and I dream sometimes of being one of those millions. Today a little piece of that dream came true for me. Because of the same trust you shared with that Vietcong guy in the jungle.”

BYRDS: Requiem For The Timeless, Volume 2 by Johnny Rogan

Until Mark Lewisohn began his detailed investigations into The Beatles, no music writer had devoted more time, words or commitment to chronicling the history of a group than Johnny Rogan with the Byrds. For Johnny, like Mark, it is an ongoing life work, not a project that is over once the book is published but, instead, a kind of mission – I hesitate to call it an obsession – to set down all the facts in all their wondrous detail as they continue to evolve. No surprise then that Johnny has followed up 2011’s Requiem… Vol 1 (1,200 pages), which concentrated on the group, with Vol 2 (1,248 pages), which tells the individual stories of the six Byrds who have left us: original members Gene Clark and Michael Clarke, together with Kevin Kelley, Gram Parsons, Clarence White and Skip Battin. Rogan has written individual chapters, two of them book-length, about all six that could be construed as separate biographies in themselves, yet has chosen to publish them all within the same volume.

A bit of history: Johnny Rogan and I first became acquainted in 1982 as a result our association with a publisher called Proteus Books, and neither of us today looks back fondly on this alliance. Johnny had written a book for them on Neil Young and I had written one on Pete Townshend. Both of us were invited to their Christmas party which was held that year in a function room on Sale Place in Bayswater, and we somehow ended up talking to one another while drinking as much free booze as we were able to stomach. Both of us had come to the unspoken conclusion that Proteus was not a company whose ethics were whiter than white, and that taking as much advantage of their hospitality as humanly possible was a prudent course of action. When the party concluded we retired to a nearby pub. Not long afterwards we sat next to one another at a bankruptcy hearing for Proteus Books held in the ballroom of a hotel on The Aldwych at which the Irish rock photographer Finn Costello raised a huge cheer when he reproached the company’s MD in spectacularly colourful language. Johnny and I were amongst those who cheered the loudest and we’ve been friends ever since.

But back to the Byrds. The first edition of Johnny’s Byrds saga, then titled Timeless Flight, was published in 1981 by Scorpion/Dark Star and the second, which I still have, in 1990 by Square One Books. Johnny inscribed this one to me: “No 3 in the charts this week. Beaten out by Omnibus. Fix!” which sounds a bit like a Donald Trump tweet. Neither of these editions boasted the heft of the third edition, Timeless Flight Revisited: The Sequel, which came out in 1997 and, at 720 pages, drew a line in the sand as far as extent was concerned in terms of rock biography. Requiem… Vols 1 and 2 together, of course, make even that look like a mere pamphlet.

In the first volume of Requiem Johnny explained his incentive by recalling how he first heard The Byrds’ ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ in June, 1965: “McGuinn’s strange vocal inflexions, that distinctive Rickenbacker and the sumptuous harmonies all contributed to a record that sounded unlike anything I had ever heard before… Several radio plays later I was completely entranced.” Johnny longed to get his hands on a Byrds album but family finances were tight in those far off days and to avoid parental ire at squandering hard-earned pocket money on something as superfluous to their daily existence as an LP, he bought record tokens which he mailed to himself with a faked note congratulating him on winning a competition sponsored by Radio Luxenbourg. “That’s how I came to purchase the first albums I ever owned,” he writes. “[The Byrds’] Mr Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn!”

And now here we are 52 years and five books later, and that’s just on the Byrds. Rogan, of course, has also written 19 other books, eight of which I published while running the editorial department at Omnibus Press. One of them was Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance, the first significant book on The Smiths which, by rock book standards, became an international best seller. Morrissey disapproved of course, though its title – which implied that the Smiths’ singer and guitarist were the key members of the group – was cited as evidence on Morrissey's behalf in the court case brought by drummer Mike Joyce over what he claimed was an unjust distribution of royalties. 

But back to the Byrds. Because of the way it is structured, there’s no need to begin Requiem… Vol 2 at the beginning, so I didn’t, skipping around at my leisure and relishing Rogan’s absurd attention to detail. In all six cases Rogan has unearthed hitherto unreported facts and stories, most notably on Kevin Kelley, about whom nothing has been published prior to now, and also on the better known Gram Parsons and Clarence White. Nevertheless, whichever way you turn, it’s a rather bleak read, quite the opposite of a fairy tale. Four of the six – Clark, Clarke, Kelley and Parsons – pretty much drank and/or drugged themselves to death, the upshot of the rock’n’roll lifestyle (though in Parsons’ case it ran in the family), while White was tragically killed in a road accident and Battin was a victim of Alzheimer’s. Then there’s the temptations of the flesh that occur around all successful rock bands, and Rogan is especially good at tracing, and telling the stories of the women involved, thus adding a tasty spoonful of human interest that is all too often lacking in rock biographies. Naturally, such overindulgence in just about everything available to them had an injurious effect on their relationships with one another and on those close to the first four, especially their wives, girlfriends and offspring, with the result that recriminations and bitterness persisted for years, legacies were fought over and absolutely no one felt a whole lot better when they were gone. 

At almost 400 pages*, Gene Clark gets far and away the weightiest treatment, and rightly so in view of the fact that he was the first to leave the mothership; the great underachiever whose wonderful album No Other remains a cult favourite for connoisseurs everywhere and to whom an air of otherworldly remoteness clings to this day. No one better deserves the honorary tribute ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Clark’s tale is perhaps the saddest of the lot, though it’s run a close second by his almost namesake Michael Clarke (135 pages) whose post-Byrds career never really amounted to much and who, like some of the others, later became involved in bogus editions of the group that angered his former colleagues. 

Second in order of coverage, perhaps inevitably, comes Gram Parsons (208 pages) whose riches-to-rags, well not quite, life story has already inspired two substantial biographies and whose adventures with The Flying Burrito Brothers, not to mention The Rolling Stones and Emmylou Harris, make him the ex-Byrd with the highest profile. Born into a fortune founded on orange juice, Parsons was a precociously talented songwriter as well as a gilded prince, arguably the originator of Americana, yet somehow doomed as the Byrd who flew too close to the sun, though if you believe Chris Hillman Parsons was never a Byrd at all. I’m inclined to think that this is sour grapes from the only other Byrd with a rightful claim to being a pioneer of country rock, and who still rankles at the posthumous acclaim that clings to Parsons. Either way, after several pages devoted to legal wrangling over Parsons’ song copyrights, Rogan concludes the chapter by rightly asserting that, “Only David Crosby and Gram Parsons have arguably transcended the group legacy by daring to create, or having thrust upon them, an equally enduring myth based on their own image.”

White (122 pages), Battin (96) and Kelley (82) are less well known but still interesting case studies, and like the first three covered in the kind of detail you would expect from Rogan. It is instructive to be reminded that White appeared on eight Byrds albums and was a full time member of the group for longer than all the originals barring McGuinn. Without doubt the finest instrumentalist to have flown as a Byrd – in the same class as James Burton and our own Albert Lee in my opinion – he was modest, unassuming and, by Byrds standards, relatively abstemious. One night at the Whisky in Los Angeles a flamboyantly dressed well-wisher told him: “I just want to tell you how much I love your guitar playing.” As Rogan relates, “White accepted the praise with characteristic good grace and later enquired of his fellow Byrds, ‘Hey, who was that guy who came in to talk to me?’ ‘That was Jimi Hendrix,’ they told him.”

Bass player Skip Battin, the oldest Byrd by some distance, is a relatively minor figure, another who became involved in later, ersatz, editions of several bands with whom he was associated, including the Byrds. Kevin Kelley, a cousin of Chris Hillman, was enlisted as drummer in 1967, lasted less than a year and worked as a session player between failed attempts to launch an independent career. Rather like the surviving John York, Kelley is a forgotten Byrd who, for much of his post-Byrd life, delivered flowers for a living. 

Left to right: Gene Clark, Michael Clarke, Kevin Kelley,

Gram Parsons, Clarence White and Skip Battin

In the chapter devoted to Kelley, Rogan writes despairingly: “The Eighties was a decade of reckoning for every one of the surviving Byrds. All were forced to readjust their lives and find meaning in a world that no longer considered them gods or even fallen princes. Some sought salvation in the Lord, others in the bottle or the free-base pipe. Few seemed destined ever to record for a major label again. It was a time when the phrase ‘the good old days’ was no mere cliché but a brutal reality.”

The reality of a post-fame life for those who fell from grace, those who once sat alongside The Beatles in the pop charts, who were once screamed at on stages from London to Los Angeles, and who might once have appeared on the front pages of the music press, is an overriding theme of Johnny Rogan’s biographies of the Byrds, and no more so than in this latest book. Only a relatively small number of the great rock performers from the past find themselves living in the lap of luxury several decades on from their glory years; the remainder, the vast majority, scratch a living from a past that is recycled like the endless sub-par sequels to hit movies. Johnny Rogan’s telling of the Byrds’ story is therefore a salutary lesson that the joys of being ‘toppermost of the poppermost’ are more often than not short-lived. Nevertheless, the surviving Byrds and those who left us are fortunate to have attracted such a conscientious biographer, and those of us who love reading about the world of rock in all its ungainly, bloody and often mind-blowing detail are fortunate to have him too. For those who relish such authenticity, Rogan’s the man

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* This includes copious credits, references and notes, over 60 pages following the Gene Clark chapter alone, and there are similar notes, relative in length to the chapters themselves, after the rest. The discography (of solo recordings by all the members of the Byrds, not just the six covered in this book) occupies a further 171 pages at the end of the book.