MY STINT AS MELODY MAKER’S MAN IN AMERICA, PART 11 – New York, December 1973-October 1974

When I arrived in New York I checked into the Gorham Hotel – now renamed The Blakely – which was a dump. Tucked around the back of Carnegie Hall on West 55^th Street, it was the hotel from which The Who were evicted in April, 1968, after Keith Moon is alleged to have walked out on to a ledge several floors up and chucked cherry bombs down on police below. Like the Gramercy Park at the bottom end of Lexington Avenue, it was much used by English musicians unable to afford the more expensive Drake or Essex House, let alone the St Regis, Waldorf Astoria or Plaza.

I hated it and had to find somewhere else to live. A friend who worked for Columbia Records came to my rescue, finding me a one-bedroom apartment above a deli on Lexington Avenue between 55^th and 56^th Streets. It belonged to a friend of his, a girl who’d gone off to live with her boyfriend, quite hurriedly it seemed as she’d left all her possessions behind: books, records, furniture, kitchen stuff and a closet and drawers full of her clothes too. 

She didn’t have many records but among them was her copy of Revolver which I scrutinised closely. It seemed to be lacking three tracks, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing ’and ‘Doctor Robert’, and at first I couldn’t figure out why. This was the first indication I’d had that American Beatles albums were different from the UK ones, something I’d never realised until now.

         After three months I moved from Lexington Avenue into apartment 3D at 51 East 78^th Street, my home away from home for the next three years, of which more later.

In the meantime, life became even more hectic on the rock front in New York than it was in LA. My first assignment was a quick trip to Chicago where, with MM photographer Barrie Wentzell for company, I caught up with Emerson, Lake & Palmer, reviewing a show at the International Amphitheatre on December 3. I think Barrie had been asked by ELP’s management to take some live shots of them for promotional use and he’d checked into the Gorham on the same floor as me, which meant I had a drinking partner in New York, for a few days anyway. Roy Carr, the NME writer, had come over to do a story on ELP too.

         ELP were not really to my taste and I was a bit surprised that their brand of bombastic pseudo-classical rock found such an enthusiastic audience in a Chicago shed. Although they closed their shows with a vigorous stab at ‘Nut Rocker’, a much-loved variation on Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker’ first released in 1962 by a studio group called B. Bumble & The Stingers, ELP’s music was in sharp contrast to the perennially popular US-style non-stop boogie. They were big on special effects and showmanship, not least Keith Emerson abusing his Hammond organ with knives, and I figured this was what probably won over US audiences.

         After the show Barrie and I copped a ride back to the hotel in the same stretch limo as Keith. I’d known him since he was in The Nice, when he and his Danish wife Elinor used to drink in La Chasse, a private members club catering to the music biz on Soho’s Wardour Street. He was always a friendly, down-to-earth fellow, quietly spoken and quite different off stage to the knife-throwing extrovert his audiences thought they knew. We were chatting away about mutual friends in the back of the limo when the driver turned around and informed us we were being followed. Then he drove like a madman, skipping lights, making quick unsignalled turns and alternately slowing down and accelerating really fast. Keith, Barrie and I grabbed on to straps, hanging on for dear life. “We’ve lost him,” he announced after about ten minutes.

         This was the first of many visits I would make to Chicago and O’Hare Airport, the world’s busiest. Each and every time I passed through it I was accosted by ingratiatingly subservient young women in smock tops, ankle-length skirts and sandals with flowers in their long straight hair, promoting religious cults, all smiles and platitudes but chillingly persistent. “Thank you but I’m not interested,” I would say politely, mindful of what happened to Jeremy Spencer of Fleetwood Mac, and walk away. Then they’d follow me and try again. After a while I realised that the only way to get rid of them was to be filthy rude. “Fancy a fuck?” usually did the trick. Worked with Moonies too.

My next assignment from New York occurred just over a week later, on December 11 & 12, when I found myself witnessing Alice Cooper in action in Madison, Wisconsin, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, flying from La Guardia with his shrewdly clever manager Shep Gordon. There was snow everywhere and it was unbelievably cold. The exquisitely fragrant actress Cybill Shepherd was also accompanying Alice, covering the tour for some up-market woman’s magazine. We interviewed Alice together in his hotel suite, and for a moment I thought Cybill and Alice were an item but they weren’t. Of course, I found it difficult to purge the image of her stripping naked on the diving board in the famous swimming pool scene from The Last Picture Show. Most unsettling it was.

        At this time Alice Cooper was the name of the group, not just their lead singer who subsequently took the name for himself and replaced the band with hired hands. But the writing was on the wall as during the concerts there was a hidden guitarist called Mick Mashbir playing the tricky parts in the wings where the audience couldn’t see him. No-one tried to hide this from me. It was regarded as perfectly normal but I remember thinking how outrageous it would be if, say, The Who or Led Zeppelin had a guitarist in the wings covering for Townshend or Page – unheard of! And the Cooper band was aspiring to the same level.

        My connection with the Cooper crowd was eased by a solid friendship with Ashley Pandel, his publicist who worked for the Cooper set-up, Alive Enterprises, which was run by Shep. Ashley, whom I’d already met in London, would go on to form his own PR company in New York, the Image Group, with Alice as a star client, along with Lou Reed, The New York Dolls, Todd Rundgren and a few others. My ex-MM colleague Roy Hollingworth, now living in New York, went to work for him as a copywriter and on Friday nights a gang of us – Ashley and his girlfriend Nancy, Roy and his girlfriend Iris, Mandi Newall, who also worked for Ash – would head up First Avenue to an Australian bar called Waltzing Matildas and play darts. That December, when we were joined by Barrie, Roy Carr and music writer Lorraine Alterman, Mandi took a few pictures of us all in the bar, and I’ve attached them below. They’re only contact sheets so a bit small but every time I look at them I'm reminded of this period of my life, how nights like this, out with friends, made my first December away from home not so bad after all. 

At the top we find Barrie with Nancy, then Barrie with Iris, followed by Lorraine, Nancy and Iris; next row, Ashley, Barrie and Lorraine, then Ashley, Barrie, me and Lorraine; next row, Roy, then Roy Carr with Barrie; and we’re all somewhere or other in the big contact sheet.

        It was during my first year in New York that Alice’s tall blond drummer Neal Smith married another statuesque blonde, a model by the name of Babette, followed by a reception on board a boat that circled Manhattan, to which I was invited. Because police intervention could come only from another boat that would be seen approaching, parties held off shore like this offered opportunities for extreme debauchery, and this was no exception. Gallons of booze, shitloads of cocaine, fragrant cigarettes made from Old Nick’s navy cut, casino-style gambling and private cabins for intimate liaisons – you name it. It was well after dawn when the boat docked and its dishevelled, bleary-eyed passengers disembarked.

It being close to that time of the year, back in New York I wrote up my Alice Cooper story as a spoof whodunit in the style of a Sherlock Holmes Christmas story, in which I became the great detective on the hunt for Alice and his gang, solving the mystery of the distinction between the identities of Alice and Vince Furnier, his real name.

This was my first Christmas out of the UK, and – as I related at the conclusion of my last batch of memoirs – I invited Christine, my English ex-girlfriend from Los Angeles, to spend it with me, even offering to buy her flight ticket. To my surprise and delight she accepted and we agreed that from now on our relationship would be platonic. On Christmas morning I took her for a ride around Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage and later in the day had Christmas dinner with my friend Peter Rudge, his wife Frankie and their two kids. Pete had set up in business in New York to manage The Who’s American affairs and supervise the Rolling Stones’ touring worldwide. Knowing how much he loved sport I bought him a grid football outfit, complete with ball, helmet and the shoulder padding that US footballers use. I can still remember the look of delight on his face as he ran off to his bedroom to try it on. He returned to where we all were in the living room, looking something like this.

BEATLES SPLIT – SHOCK!

Here, there and everywhere this week I am reminded that it is the 50^th anniversary of The Beatles ceasing to be, at least if you observe the logic that their dissolution dates from April 10, 1970, the day Paul issued the notorious press release promoting his first solo LP. This document famously contained the first public statement that he no longer envisaged working with the other three again, or reactivating what was actually a long dormant writing partnership with John.

         Taking the form of a questionnaire between Paul and Apple executive Peter Brown, it was enclosed within advance promo copies of his album, thus guaranteeing its widespread distribution and readership, and, although Paul has subsequently revealed that it was not his intention to split The Beatles by this action, he must surely have foreseen its consequences. I’d have been amazed – maybe – if he hadn’t.

         This unhappy circumstance, which attracted headlines throughout the world, occurred precisely three weeks before I joined the staff of Melody Maker, so I narrowly missed out on being able to report the biggest pop music news story of the decade in the biggest weekly pop paper. At the time, of course, it came as a shock. In those days no one really knew what was going on behind the scenes in the world of The Beatles; that the break-up had been on the cards for a while and that Ringo, John and George – in that order – had all quit before Paul made his announcement but had been persuaded by the others to either change their minds or keep schtum, largely for business reasons. John, of course, was mightily miffed that Paul had let the cat out of the bag, not least because he had formed the group in the first place and believed quite strongly that this gave him, and only him, the exclusive right to terminate it.

         Nowadays we know – or think we know – so much about what was going on behind the scenes in the word of The Beatles that we don’t know who or what to believe any more. But not many serious books about The Beatles had been published by 1970 and even the best of them, Hunter Davies’ 1968 authorised biography, steered well clear of suggesting anything was ever amiss between the four individuals. Fifty years and hundreds of books – I own a modest 35 – later we are in a world of information overload but at the time it was greeted with disbelief and worldwide sorrow.

         But does it matter? Of course not. What matters is the ongoing love and respect for The Beatles and the music they made, and the enjoyment it continues to give to succeeding generations. I’ll never forget how my son, born in 1995, loved Yellow Submarine as a youngster, nor how seriously my daughter, born in 1992, coloured in a picture of George to leave among the tributes at Abbey Road when he left us in 2001.

         The mere fact that this 50^th anniversary is being celebrated – if that’s the right word – is surely as profound a symbol as any of the affection in which they are and always will be held. The Beatles remain the yardstick by which success in the music industry is measured, no matter that many of their accomplishments have been statistically surpassed simply because the business they did so much to create has grown so much bigger in their absence. Still, can you imagine the dissolution of any other music group ever being noted in the way this anniversary is? And still more, can you imagine the discovery of a hitherto unseen photograph of any other group besides John, Paul and George as teenagers, playing their guitars, making the news as the one below did last week?

         So here’s hoping that those worthy Scouse Knights of the Realm, Paul, now 77, and Ringo, 79, survive the hardships of 2020 and, along with Yoko, who’s all of 87 now, are still here, there and everywhere in 2021.

THE WHO – THE 1966 BUST UP IN NEWBURY

 Keith with Bruce Johnson and RSG’s Cathy McGowan on the night of the bust-up

Regular get-togethers with a group of my old Melody Maker colleagues enable me to catch up with former Who drummer Geoff Brown, who was the MM’s sub-editor for several years during my time on the paper and is now an Associate Editor at Mojo.

Former Who drummer Geoff Brown, you might ask. Never heard of him!

Well, while Keith Moon, Kenney Jones and, nowadays, Zak Starkey have all held down The Who’s drum stool on what at the time seemed like a permanent basis, there is a secondary group of drummers who for one reason or another have occasionally sat behind Pete, Roger (and John) and done their best to supply the beat. Detours drummer Doug Sandom springs to mind, of course, as does Simon Phillips who held down the drum spot alongside Jodie Linscott on extra percussion during the 1989-90 bells and whistles Tommy tour. A session drummer or two came between Doug and Keith and the past decade or two has seen drummers from other bands occasionally take over when Zak was elsewhere, not least playing for Oasis. And who can forget Scott Halpin who took over in San Francisco in November 1973 when Keith’s backstage tipple was spiked with animal tranquiliser? But where does Geoff Brown come in?

On Friday May 20, 1966, at the Ricky Tick Club in the Corn Exchange, Newbury, The Who were supported by the Jimmie Brown Sound, for whom Geoff played drums. “Moon and Entwistle didn’t turn up,” Geoff once told me. “Well, they were very late. Daltrey and Townshend were furious, really angry. We were a soul band so they asked me and our bass player [Colin Standring] if we’d stand in for them. We did ‘Heatwave’ and then ‘Ooh Poo Pah Doo’, the Jessie Hill song. Then Moon and Entwistle showed up with Bruce Johnston of The Beach Boys, and they were pissed. Of course they took over but the atmosphere was really heated.”

         Tempers remained heated during the remainder of The Who’s set, however, and flared up at the end. “Moon kicked over his drums and a cymbal caught Townshend so he just threw his guitar at Moon,” remembers Geoff. “It caught him a really heavy glancing blow on the forehead and knocked him right back. Then there was a flare up in the dressing room and Moon and Entwistle left in their own car. It was obvious there’d been a real fight.”

         Keith received a black eye and badly bruised face and also required three stitches in his leg, and he and Entwistle announced their intention to leave the band. The next day Pete went to Keith’s house in Wembley to apologise but Keith refused to open the door. In the event it took a week before Keith decided to rejoin the fold, and in the meantime the other three used drummers from the support acts.

         After the incident Geoff continued drumming for another 18 months before turning to journalism in 1968. He still has his Rogers kit though.

READY STEADY GO! THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE. The Definitive Story Of The Show That Changed Pop TV – by Andy Neill

I can date with some certainty the occasion when I first discovered what The Who looked like when they were performing. It was July 2, 1965, a Friday, just after the pubs had shut, and they were appearing on Ready Steady Go!, on Granada TV, playing their new single ‘Anyway Anywhere Anyhow’, live too, and I’d never seen anything like it in my life before.

         The singer looked like he didn’t want to be there, as if the other three were people he wanted to avoid, and he didn’t so much sing as spit out the words to what sounded to me like a song of thuggish defiance; the bass player stood stock still and looked bored, plucking his strings with his fingers in an upward motion, not something I’d seen until now; the drummer was completely crazy, bouncing up and down on his stool and randomly hitting everything in sight, grinning into the camera like an idiot; and the guitarist, the most remarkable of them all, looked surly, ugly even, raising his arm above his head to slash down across the strings of his instrument, then using the volume control to create a stuttering effect, like Morse code, and deliberately inducing feedback from his amplifier, something I always thought guitarists tried hard to avoid at all costs. When the song reached its climax the camera zoomed in and out of the group as if the guy behind it was drunk or had fallen over, taking his camera with him. As the singer pointed out, they certainly didn’t follow the lines that had been laid before.

         I was reminded of this last week when my son and I watched two hour-long programmes devoted to RSG! on BBC4. The first was a ‘story of’ documentary, the second a ‘best of’, and both featured that performance by The Who as the climax to each. Were it not for CV-19 these shows would have coincided with the release of Andy Neill’s 272-page, large format book about RSG!, the text of which I read last year when Andy asked me give it an editorial once over. That slight conflict of interest aside, I can state, hand on heart, that it’s the best book about the best ever pop TV show you’re ever likely to read.

         It’s difficult to emphasise how influential RSG! was in terms of pop TV. Like pirate radio, mini-skirts and everything else that seemed to have been conjured up by The Beatles and Rolling Stones, the show epitomised the wholesale upheaval that turned our staid United Kingdom into a wonderful place to live during the first half of the sixties. “Ready, Steady, Go! was a pivotal part of the cultural development in the UK in the post-war years,” writes Pete Townshend in the book. “If that is rather a sociological beginning I should quickly add that it reflected the colour and vivacity of the times better than almost any other medium.”  

         The Who were clear favourites of RSG!’s production team and for a while ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’ was used as the show’s theme tune. “I tried to make the camera more of a participant, like another member of the band,” RSG! director Michael Lindsay-Hogg tells Andy of the appearance I watched. “When we did ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’, the bit where it takes off with feedback and things in the middle, the camera is shaking, and I didn’t care if it was out of focus or just coming into focus because in a funny way the music itself was so alive you wanted the camera to be alive, to be part of the music, you didn’t want it to be static.”

         While RSG! certainly offered the best possible showcase for The Who, just about every other act of note, British and international, was featured on a show that, at times, became magically chaotic as group, audience and technicians all mingled together on a dance floor at the studios in London’s Kingsway and, later, at Wembley. “Studio 9 at Kingsway was a marvellous place to do the show because it was like a rather sleazy nightclub in a basement studio,” says presenter Keith Fordyce. “It was very tight and cramped for the amount we got in there. The cameramen had a fairly difficult time because they were more or less busking it really. They’d line up what their shots might be but they couldn’t be quite sure they were going to get them, it was so cramped.”

         A list of those who appeared on the show, always within touching distance of the fans, is headed by The Beatles and Rolling Stones, and a regular was Dusty Springfield who briefly filled in the presenter’s role before mod heroine and fashion leader Cathy McGowan was hired. Dusty, along with her friend Vicki Wickham, the show’s then assistant editor, was instrumental in getting several black acts on the show, thus giving them their first TV exposure in the UK.

         All of this and more is detailed in Andy’s book which traces RSG!’s inception from its launch in August of 1963 to its final show almost three years later. Fully illustrated with special features on various performers, it includes contributions from Mick Jagger, Ray Davies, Chris Stamp, Eric Burdon and, naturally, Pete Townshend. Vicki Wickham and Michael Lindsay-Hogg have contributed forewords and are interviewed throughout.

         Adds Pete: “… Vicki, bounding from the control room to the studio, beaming, laughing and enthusiastic, tall and beautiful, but a little scruffy with it, like a highland pony, and Michael, who always seemed as though he was attached to an electric generator, his hair falling over his face, handsome, with the pout of a mischievous teenager but with a cigar clenched in his teeth – they both conveyed the sense that we were, all of us, breaking every rule of television. I felt they were breaking societal rules as well, and of course that is now a given.”

         The book is now likely to be published in the late summer.  

YOU’RE IN MY HEART – ROD STEWART with The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

On the opposite side of the road to where I get my hair cut in the Surrey village of East Horsley is a Woking Hospice charity shop where I used to take resilient clothes that no longer fitted our kids. I sometimes buy used CDs there for just £1 each and one day last week I came across this, still in its cellophane wrapping, ie brand new, which is most unusual and wouldn’t have pleased Rod had he been shopping there for cut-price CDs too.

         I used to love Rod Stewart’s music. Gasoline Alley was a fixture on my turntable around the time I joined Melody Maker in 1970, swiftly followed by Every Picture Tells A Story, the album that personifies Rod in his pomp. I tended to prefer his folksy songs over the rock’n’roll covers, songs like ‘Only A Hobo’, ‘Reason To Believe’ and, my all time Rod favourite, ‘Mandolin Wind’, but those first four solo albums were all gorgeous, simply devoid of duff tracks, and it seemed to me that his use of mandolins echoed the pastoral feel of The Band, rivalling even the exquisite ‘Rockin’ Chair’ from their second album. Rod wasn’t prolific but what he did write was thoughtful, homespun and, like the covers, always in the best possible taste.

         I just about wore out his first four solo albums and while the first three Faces albums could be a bit patchy the best tracks were as good as Rod’s. Things started to slip with Smiler (1974) where quality control was lacking somehow, and although the love songs he wrote on subsequent LPs found a ready audience with his female fans I lost interest as he morphed into a flashy rock’n’roll playboy, all loud clothes, yellow Lamborghinis and leggy blondes.

         I met him several times in the early seventies. He’d paid his dues the proper way, rising up from the clubs, but he was a bit of a cocky bugger, a sort of cross between a cockney Jack the Lad (which he wasn’t, of course) and a canny Scotsman (which he was, sort of) whose wallet remained firmly shut at all times. I’d been a big supporter of The Faces, writing glowing reviews of shows in both the UK and US, and he seemed well disposed towards us on Melody Maker, not least because he won the Top Male Singer award in, I think, 1972, and came to the presentation. He liked to be the centre of attention. He wallowed in applause. I suppose he had every right to be a cocky bugger. 

         He had a house at Windsor around that time and occasionally dropped into the Fox & Hounds, a pub in Englefield Green, near Egham, where I once lived and still had friends. I used to go back there from time to time to see them and one night I was there when Rod turned up. He wasn’t expecting to see me and looked at me warily, as if I was stalking him, which I wasn't of course. Unlike in rock environs, chance encounters between music writers and rock stars like this, in out of the way places, can be slightly awkward, as was this. I watched as people bought him drinks and he invariably asked for a large brandy, but he never bought one back which caused a bit of muttering amongst the locals. I suppose he was used to lackeys buying him drinks and had difficulty adjusting to a different environment. That night when he left the pub he found he’d left the lights of his Lamborghini on and the battery was flat, so he went back into the pub and asked for a push. No one volunteered and there were a few smirks but I felt a sort of filial duty to someone from what was now my world and went outside to take a look. Of course there was no way in hell that one person could push a Lamborghini, even a yellow one, so he had to get a cab back home and, presumably, return the following day with a mechanic, all of which would have cost him considerably more than a round of drinks. 

I think there was a touch of the emperor’s new clothes about the way in which his relationship with the press deteriorated. He didn’t like criticism. The last time I interviewed him was in a big hotel suite New York in 1974, when Smiler came out, and he was on the defensive, perhaps sensing that the tide was turning and the goodwill he’d enjoyed from the press was at an end. In the past he’d been chatty, friendly, but now he was behaving as if he expected the interview to turn into an argument. “Well, what do you want to know?” he asked when I switched on my tape recorder. He was unnecessarily abrupt, almost aggressive, and I’d been a supporter. He didn’t trust us writers any longer.

         The only Rod Stewart music I’ve listened to in the past 30 years has been the triple CD-set Reason To Believe which includes his first five solo LPs and a few bonus tracks. The acquisition of You’re In My Heart last week wasn’t an introduction to later songs, of course, because they’re everywhere and, truth to tell, the orchestration suits songs like ‘Tonight’s The Night’ and ‘You’re In My Heart’. ‘Maggie May’, which opens the set, is the only Rod standard with newly recorded vocals. It begins serenely, the first verse taken as a prelude, before settling into the familiar rhythm as the morning sun shows your age. Drums aside, the backing track from the song that topped the UK and US simultaneously is replaced by chunky strings and not until the slide guitar solo and a trace of mandolin during the false ending are we back in the summer of 1971. It is pleasing to note that Rod’s pipes are up to a more than passable reproduction of his vocal from that year.

         Rod duets with Robbie Williams on ‘It Takes Two’, turning it into a full tilt rock’n’roll song in which the strings are largely drowned out by electric guitars. At an overlong 4.27 it isn’t a patch on Marvin and Kim Weston – their classic version was only 2.56, incidentally – the Motown spring is missing, and couldn’t he have found a girl to sing with? Tina? Adele? The perfect fit would have been Amy Winehouse of course.

         Thereafter, until the final track, we are in familiar territory, Rod evidently having decided it was unnecessary to record new vocal tracks to ‘Sailing’ (cheesier than ever), ‘Reason To Believe’ (delightful), ‘Handbags And Gladrags’ (lovely), ‘Tonight’s The Night’ (ok, if you like that kind of thing), ‘I Don’t Want To Talk About It’ (ditto), ‘First Cut Is The Deepest’ (nice but no improvement on the [wonderful] original), ‘You’re In My Heart’ (see ‘Tonight’s…’), ‘I Was Only Joking’ (ok, but a bit long), ‘Young Turks’ (surprisingly rhythmic), ‘Forever Young’ (schmaltzy, with Rod’s amended Dylan lyrics still an irritation), ‘Rhythm Of My Heart’ (forgettable) and ‘Have I Told You Lately’ (lovely, though I prefer Van). The final track is a new song, ‘Stop Loving Her Today’, a tender weepie about blighted romance in the style of his arm-waving ballads.

         As a general rule overdubbed strings on existing vocal tracks seem to me like extreme repackaging. I heard – but didn’t buy – some of the Elvis tracks that were orchestrated a year or two ago, largely because it was mostly ballads and my Elvis is rock Elvis. Mostly out of curiosity and because I’m a big fan, I bought the Beach Boys with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra CD but, in truth, didn’t think the orchestra added much to Brian Wilson’s superb productions anyway. Rod’s excursion into this world, perhaps predictable after his Great American Songbook albums, is the best of the three and for £1 at a charity shop I’m not complaining. But where was ‘Mandolin Wind’?

SHE’S A RAINBOW: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF ANITA PALLENBERG by Simon Wells

The perception of The Rolling Stones in the Sixties was as much about attitude as it was about the music they created, and for this reason Anita Pallenberg was as much a member of the group as Mick, Keith and doomed Brian. She embodied all that was subversive about them – the feisty glamour, brash impertinence and haughty dismissal of conventional values, the kind of behaviour that grabbed headlines in the voyeuristic tabloid press, especially when something went wrong, like police intervention or death.

         “She, Mick, Keith and Brian were The Rolling Stones,” states Stones PA Jo Bergman, in She’s A Rainbow, Simon Wells’ new biography of Pallenberg, pragmatically acknowledging that Charlie and Bill were on a different wavelength. “Her influence has been profound. She keeps things crazy.”

         Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones’ manager concurred, as did Anita herself. “I feel as though I’m like the sixth Rolling Stone,” she said. “Mick and Keith and Brian need me to guide them, to criticise them and give them ideas.”

         Keith might, at a pinch, have conceded the point but I somehow doubt that Mick, who always seemed like the kind of man who preferred his women under his thumb, would agree. Nevertheless, the role of Anita in fashioning the image of The Rolling Stones between 1965, when she turned up on the arm of Brian Jones, and the mid-1970s, when her relationship with Keith Richards began to deteriorate, is the key point of interest in this book.

         Wells’ 2011 book Butterfly On The Wheel systematically and with great flair dissected the Great Redlands Bust, and he has chosen Anita as his next subject in an ongoing interest into rock and roll subplots that now include Charles Manson and The Who’s Quadrophenia. Pallenberg, born in 1942 of German-Italian ancestry, was a model, actress, muse and mysterious siren amidst the Stones’ harem of influential women; spectacularly beautiful in her prime and, quite appropriately in the light of this book’s title, something of a rainbow, strikingly colourful, hard to catch and likely to vanish into thin air in a jack flash.

         Published in hardback with a cover featuring Pallenberg dressed only a man’s shirt, her uncovered legs parted and a look of defiance in her eyes, She’s A Rainbow could be mistaken for a top shelf item but Wells makes it clear from the outset that Anita was no groupie or passive rock chick. He is especially good on her early life and on her films, which he writes about at length as befitting an expert on cult movies of the period. Much space is devoted to Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, Anita’s most celebrated role, which featured an on- – and perhaps off- – screen dalliance with Jagger, a cause célèbre that lingered within the Stones’ clique like a disagreeable fungal infection.

         As you would expect, the period when she was part of the Stones inner circle is covered in great detail, as it was at the time, particularly the 1967 holiday in Morocco where Pallenberg switched her affections from Jones to Richards, and the stay at Nellcôte, the mansion at Villefranche-sur-Mer near Nice where the group’s masterpiece, Exile On Main Street, was recorded. Charged with maintaining the domestic requirements for a household that sometimes numbered 20 or more, the multi-lingual Pallenberg displayed uncharacteristic catering skills that rivalled Mrs Bridges in Upstairs Downstairs.

         Moving to Westchester County in upstate New York by the late seventies, Anita and Keith grow apart. Keith blamed her for the Toronto heroin bust that almost saw him jailed and sees other women. She puts on weight, flirts with the New York City punk scene and when a teenager is found dead at her house in 1979, her world comes crashing down. Addicted to just everything possible, she roams New York and becomes an embarrassment before finally returning to London, cleaning herself up and taking a course in fashion and textile design at Central St Martin’s so as to become a costumier. Eventually her legendary status is acknowledged by the Britpop crowd, she gets pally with Kate Moss and is much applauded at an emotional re-appearance on the catwalk.

         Inevitably the book suffers from the ‘not much to say about the later years’ syndrome insofar as once Anita is back in London she spends the rest of her life not doing very much that attracts headlines, which translates as not doing very much that Wells can write about. Indeed, the final chapter opens on page 267, around 1980 when she’s 38, and she dies a mere 18 pages later, on page 295, aged 75. It’s kinda sweet that in her twilight years she became a keen gardener and tended an allotment at Chiswick.

         It was certainly an extraordinary life but Anita Pallenberg is a difficult prey to catch, as elusive as a butterfly, so for all his prodigious research and the wealth of information contained within his book, Wells hasn’t quite captured her spirit. Then again no one really could, though Keith Richards came closer than most.

THE INTERNETTES

Famous for having rudely dismissed Led Zeppelin’s first two LPs in Rolling Stone, John Mendelsson somehow avoided being hexed by their touchy guitarist but probably still watched his back when we last dined together, in 2004 in Holland Park, a stone’s throw from The Tower House. The occasion was to celebrate the publication of his Omnibus Press book Waiting For Kate Bush which opened with an unlikely story about a Bush fan threatening to throw himself from a tall building unless Kate herself appeared to talk him down. Eventually a policeman who was also a fan appeared on the scene and, after a conversation about the arcane tributaries of her career, he came down without the need for La Bush to rouse herself. The originality of this approach persuaded me to sign up the book.

         I first became aware of John through The Kink Kronikles, a 1972 double compilation LP which he compiled on behalf of the group and for which he wrote some of the best sleeve notes you’ll read anywhere. Deliberately eschewing their earliest singles, it remains the most thoughtful Kinks collection ever assembled. He was also partial to The Who, at least until they became a stadium band, and gave a helping hand to David Bowie before anyone else in America knew who he was.

         John also belongs to that bold assemblage of music writers who juggle a musical career with occasional blasphemous ravings in print and lately he’s pressed me into service to draw attention to The Internettes, a duo that comprises himself and his partner, Dame Zelda Hyde, who sings while John does everything else, writing the songs and arranging them.

         Now in the normal scheme of things your man at Just Backdated is likely to ignore such requests but the truth is I was charmed by the songs and, if you’re prepared to overlook the rather amateurish backings tracks – probably sourced from one of those electronic keyboards that do everything if you press the right buttons – you might as well.

         Showing impeccable taste, Dame Zelda has a strangely deep, slightly melancholy voice and manages to sound like a cross between Debbie Harry, Frida from Abba, Dusty Springfield and Marlene Dietrich, all crossed with a hint of Phil Spector though it’s not so much a wall of sound, more a small barrier. If anything it's a homage to the pre-Beatles girl groups, just the sort of thing that drew John towards his vocation in life. There are hints of Stephen Foster (‘Irish Spring’), fifties musicals (‘Petticoat Lane’) and film noire (‘A Gangster’s Moll’) and, as you would expect from a subversive character like John, the lyrics on those songs that avoid matters of the heart deal with his pet peeves: organised religion (‘The Jesus Who Loves Me’ and ‘Aqmed’) and Trump/Fox News (‘When The Monsters Smothered In His Sleep’). Also, oddly, the cock crowing on ‘The Hired Hand’, a song about menial servitude, sounds like it was sampled from the beginning of The Beatles ‘Good Morning’ on Pepper.

         It’s all lots of fun, even if the backing tracks get a bit repetitive after a while. Still, that’s more than compensated for by the lingering taste of Dame Zelda’s haunting vocals. In a note to me last week John, delivered in his characteristic brand of sardonic tongue-in-cheekness, John suggested I use the phrase, ‘A work of life-transforming brilliance no home should be without’, which is going a bit far but I couldn’t help thinking how different his life would have been if only he’d said that about Led Zeppelin II.

A taste of The Internettes can be found here, along with a helpful pictorial guide to their influences:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YLXfAIP80s&fbclid=IwAR2GKs10s0ud2P7RkIJ4h7rG6XFM_uwEcjPgM7UbGCxGPIMpnteDkyBQhkU

THE OX: THE LAST OF THE GREAT ROCK STARS. THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN ENTWISTLE by Paul Rees

In 1990 John Entwistle spent two months in the region of Connemara on the west coast of Ireland where fierce winds coming off the Atlantic soon blew away any traces of last night’s old red wine. Here, in a stone house that was once the home of an archbishop, he began to write his life story, in longhand on A4 lined paper. He never finished the task and it remained unpublished during his lifetime but the tenor of what he wrote, in equal measure amusing, cynical and bitter, hangs over this biography like a dark thundercloud.

         For all his wealth, acclaim and success John Entwistle was not a contented man. His dissatisfaction stemmed from issues he never felt able to enunciate, and it saw him retreat into himself, chasing his demons in ways that did him no good at all: booze, drugs, women, bad diets, reckless shopping sprees and an obstinacy that translated into denial. Many interviewees for this book – and they include both his ex-wives and son, as well as many musician friends – all seemed incapable of confronting him about these matters simply because, in his dealings with and without The Who, his natural instinct was always to avoid confrontations.

         All of this contributes to a deep, persistent melancholia in the life of John Entwistle as conveyed by former Q editor Paul Rees. Less conspicuous than his colleagues in The Who but no less fascinating, Entwistle remained a distant, reserved figure to many, a character trait reinforced by the high profile antics of Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and Keith Moon. In this way, his story echoes what might be termed ‘The Bassists’ Curse’ – to be undervalued, unfulfilled and frustrated – and along with much else this led indirectly to his death at the relatively young age of 57.

         While the The Who itself and the other three members have inspired books aplenty, Entwistle has until now lagged behind. The dilemma facing biographers of individual group members is in separating their subject from the group, and, with Entwistle’s peculiar nature only aggravating the situation, it is no surprise that the book suggests there were two Johns – John of The Who, and John of The Home. The former is the well-known Ox with the spider emblem around his neck, dapper, on the left of the stage, motionless save for fingers a blur on the long necks of his various basses, a rock star who dives eagerly into all the temptations that his calling offers him. The latter, however, is seemingly hewn from the same oak as The Kinks’ ‘Well Respected Man’. Off stage John Entwistle invariably behaves like an old-fashioned gentleman, well turned out, well spoken, and well mannered, a well-to-do professional man who lives his life by routines and loves a plate of fish and chips. The rot sets in when the two Johns start to merge. 

         The 344-page book is divided into three parts, the first about John’s early years, the second about The Who and his role within it, and the third his sad, ultimately tragic decline as Townshend and/or Daltrey put The Who on hold, leaving their brilliant bass guitarist to drift aimlessly. It came about after Rees wrote a profile of Entwistle for Classic Rock magazine for which he interviewed Alison, John’s childhood sweetheart and first wife, and Christopher, their son. The acquaintance made, Alison and Christopher co-operated with Rees when he proposed a full scale biography, and it is clear from its pages that their testimony, along with that of Maxene Harlow, John’s American second wife, was crucial to his research. Alison and Christopher also handed over John’s own text, enabling him to quote from it at will, and this helps the book enormously.

         The result is very readable, leaning more towards the fate of the overindulged, hedonistic rock star and his troubled life than the music he created. Those looking for an insight into Entwistle’s extraordinary bass technique will be disappointed; although Rees heaps plenty of praise on John’s unique skills, he hasn’t spoken to other bass players about how John did what he did. A handful of musicians express their admiration for John’s work too, but there is no attempt to analyse it, Rees having evidently concluded that to do so would decelerate the book’s pace.

         John Entwistle’s early life was far from comfortable. An only child, he was 18 months old when his parents separated. He took an instant, everlasting dislike to his mother’s next partner and money was tight, which might explain why when he became rich he insisted on a preposterously high standard of living that would forever strain his finances. A naturally gifted musician, he inherited his talents from his parents and took lessons on the piano, then brass instruments and finally taught himself to play bass guitar because he liked the sound of Duane Eddy’s records. He took pleasure in making his first bass and thereafter immersed himself in the instrument, its makes, models and modes of amplification. His introduction to Townshend and, later, Daltrey, more or less tallies with all the other Who books I have, and The Who’s story is told – yet again (!) – in a breezy, competent fashion that differs from the rest only in that it benefits from John’s wry observations recorded in the text he wrote himself.

         It is no secret that they didn’t get on personally, and Rees spares no blushes in detailing the various fall outs. Daltrey doesn’t come out of it well, a bit of a grumpy old bugger; Townshend is usually in a world of his own, a surprisingly absent presence in the book; and Moon is as mad as a box of frogs, though it is the drummer with whom Entwistle bonds most easily, the pair sharing a love of practical jokes and disorderly behaviour. The impression is given that Entwistle often provoked Moon in this and that he felt it was his duty to protect him, as if Keith was the little brother John never had. Moon’s death clearly affected Entwistle more than he let on. “I saw vulnerability in John when Keith died,” says manager Bill Curbishley. “There was something taken away from him that couldn’t ever be put back.”

         A recurring theme up to this point is The Who’s precarious finances which didn’t stabilise until Tommy was a success. When real money arrived at last, all bar Daltrey were reckless spenders and Entwistle maintained his profligate ways until the very end, stockpiling possessions galore that filled his houses to the brim, even Quarwood, near Stow On The Wold in Gloucestershire, the gigantic pile he bought in 1976 and owned until his death. Rees contends that John’s collection of bass guitars was the biggest in the world.

         The crux for Entwistle came when Townshend brought the curtain down on The Who for the first time at the end of 1982. ‘To Entwistle, Townshend’s decision was a personal affront,’ writes Rees. ‘Initially, he was despairing, but soon enough this turned to a seething, burning resentment.’ “He would have toured and toured,” adds Curbishley. “That was his life.”

         Already dark, Entwistle’s life from this point onwards becomes a calamity of almost epic proportions. Outwardly buoyant but inwardly furious, he increases his consumption of all the poisons, chief among them brandy and cocaine, he’d happily ingested in The Who, confident that his physical strength can withstand it all. For a long time, far longer than Moon, this was the case but as we move from the eighties into the nineties it becomes clear that the only difference between Entwistle and Moon was that it took him an extra 24 years to kill himself.

            Serially promiscuous, John divorces Alison – who is heartbroken – and takes up with Maxene, a nice LA girl who before long realises that keeping up with John will kill her and joins AA, only for this to put a wedge between them. She is followed by Lisa, a bad LA girl, who matches John glass for glass and toke for toke and who is ultimately blamed, at least by Christopher, for killing his father. “It was Lisa that truly fucked him up,” he says. “And I hate her for what she did to him.”

         John’s tours with his own bands are covered extensively – as, throughout, are his solo recordings – but there is a nagging sense that he’s flogging a dead horse. The only respite from this descent into hell – as the red tops would have it – are those occasions when Townshend and Daltrey elect to reform The Who for various reasons, not least among them to shore up their finances. But no sooner is Entwistle back in the black than he’s on the phone to Harrods, his preferred retailer.

         Entwistle played his last show with The Who at London’s Royal Albert Hall on February 8, 2002, but it was comforting to be reminded that the last show he played with them in America – a country he loved – was in October 2001 at Madison Square Garden, the Concert For New York to recognise the firemen who died in 9/11, and that it was a triumph, one of the group’s best ever in the post-Moon era.

         As is well known, John Entwistle died on June 27, 2002, in Las Vegas from a heart attack induced not by the previous night’s consumption but by a lifetime of indulgence. There was a bit of unpleasantness in the aftermath, much of it caused by Lisa, but in a poignant Epilogue we join Alison and Christopher at a garden party in 2018, the pair of them sharing memories with old Who retainers of the man they remember as husband and father. “He was a very silly boy, but I loved him for years and years, and I didn’t stop loving him,” says the girl who knew him long before he was John of The Who. She preferred John of The Home and was, after all, just 13 when that 14-year-old boy began courting her.  

         Finally, the book is well indexed, lacks a discography and I’m not too keen on the cover which looks a bit washed out to me. The cover of the US edition, below, is far better.

        

JETHRO SPLIT… OR NOT. A NEW DAY YESTERDAY by Mike Barnes, book extract.

In this extract from Mike Barnes’ new book A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & The 1970s, Mike reveals how the manager of Jethro Tull and editor of Melody Maker concocted a fake news story long before present day politicians.

         The 600-page book, published last week by Omnibus Press and edited by yours truly, examines the myths and misconceptions surrounding prog rock. Mike paints a vivid and at times amusing picture of the Seventies and the milieu which enabled prog to thrive and, in some cases, throw up groups like Pink Floyd and Genesis who went on to long-lasting international and commercial success.

         It is 1972 and Jethro Tull are smarting from criticism aimed at their album Thick As A Brick. However, whatever barbs caused the group to chafe over these reviews was nothing compared to what would happen when their next LP landed on reviewers’ desks.

The press were now primed for Jethro Tull’s increasing ambitions, and the overall critical view of the equally ambitious A Passion Play would be almost universally negative. And with hindsight this is much easier to understand.

         A Passion Play is basically a concept album about a recently deceased person (Ronnie Pilgrim) and his journey through the afterlife. This has come to light more recently, but at the time it came across like an ill thought out mystery film, where the audience is fed cryptic clues as if when they all fit together, but at the completion of the puzzle some pieces don’t quite fit and others seem to have become lost, leaving everyone scratching their heads.

         And, indeed, the album was intended to be made into a film, but that venture fell through, although video footage was shown during the group’s live shows. The album has its many champions and was again number one in the US and number 13 in the UK. It was also critically savaged.

         Lyrically, Thick As A Brick was at least partially comprehensible and poetically quite attractive. A Passion Play has some interesting imagery, but is less comprehensible. But all that could be forgiven if the music had been of better quality. There were times on Thick As A Brick when its complexity seemed a tad gratuitous. But that was nothing compared to its successor, where everything feels over ornamented in a way that both fails to serve the song-sections and produces a huge accretion of detail that quickly becomes wearisome. Some parts are impressive – the ‘Overseer Overture’ in particular – but if ever a Seventies progressive rock album warranted a panning for being over-wrought, this is the one.

         It includes a faux children’s tale, ‘The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles’. This was meant to serve as light relief – and its chamber ensemble backing is quite sweet – but the recitation, with its groan-inducing punch line “The hare had a spare pair” delivered by Jeffrey Hammond in a toe-curling, exaggerated comedy Northern accent, makes one so glad that it’s over that for a minute or two, it’s actually a relief to be plunged back into more of the brain-curdling bombast.

         But why was it all so indigestibly over-egged? Ian Anderson offers these views: “It’s a pain in the arse,” he admits. “There is just too much going on, but it was done with a cheerful innocence. Not only I, but members of the band, would come up with ideas of layering things and complex rhythms that were demanding on the ear. We all got carried away and as a record producer, I should have had more discipline and taken a bunch of stuff out of the arrangements.

         “But it was difficult to tell enthusiastic musicians in a band, to ‘just play 4/4 drums through this [section]’. You feel like you are hampering somebody and taking something away from them, because they want to be creative and do something interesting.

         “But I would be the first person to say – and I knew this pretty soon on as when we started playing it live on stage – there is too much stuff happening; it’s too incessant. There are sections where the music opens right out, and there are quiet and rather stark passages that are slower and more open but when the band come crashing in it does tend to get a bit daunting.” He also picks out his “bloody saxophones” as something the album could have done without.

         Anderson’s relationship with the music press always seemed uneasy, especially around this time, but now seems to have become rather ameliorated through the passing of time.

         “It wasn’t uneasy on my part,” he asserts. “It was just that people understandably couldn’t be supportive if they didn’t’ like something that you did or they felt that your time had come and gone, and they shouldn’t be in hock to your record company or you just because you were pals.

         “So for example Chris Welch of Melody Maker decided that he’d be supportive of us, but had to be seen to be an independent mind, dish out some bad reviews and not be tarnished with the idea that you were somehow a tame journalist.”

         Steven Rosen of American magazine Circus spoke to Anderson in 1975, by which time Jethro Tull had been generally accepted back into the critical fold. But it exemplifies the power of music journalists who could dish it out and then retreat back to their bunkers. Readers who sent letters into the Gasbag page in New Musical Express would almost inevitably end up slightly humiliated as the more articulate, older journalist editing the column would always have the last word. Anderson clearly found all this frustrating. One needs to recall that he was, at this time, only a young man thrust into the spotlight and trying to make sense of the dichotomy between huge sales and critical opprobrium.

         “If somebody says, ‘I think your music is shitty’, that’s like saying, ‘I think your wife’s a whore’,”, he told Rosen. “And I get very angry when people say that behind my back or via the unassailable media of the press. Because I’m not in a position to defend it and I won’t be brought out or taunted by public criticism into answering it back in the same medium. Because I can never win, I’m not a journalist, and I’m not in a position to see that my words remain undistorted or in the true context when they finally appear in print… I have a fairly low opinion of the press because I think it plays way below the average level of intelligence of the audience who reads it.”

         Record companies spent a considerable amount of money taking journalists on a press junkets in the hope of good reviews. Chris Welch recalls being flown to Tokyo in 1972 by Island Records to see Emerson, Lake & Palmer, where he saw the rivalry between Progressive rock’s rising stars at first hand:

         “We arrived at the Hilton Hotel in Tokyo and just as we walked in – Keith [Emerson], Carl [Palmer] and myself, and a photographer – through the other glass doors came Ian Anderson and Jethro Tull. They were playing a concert in Tokyo that night, and because we were at the Hilton, Ian Anderson took one look at them, said, ‘I’m not saying at the Hilton with ELP’, turned around and stormed out. They walked out and booked themselves into another hotel. It was exactly like Spinal Tap.”

         Welch’s album review of A Passion Play and assessment of Jethro Tull’s live show live show were both critical, but seem fair and considered. Speaking to the journalist now there is no sense that he suddenly felt obliged to mete out a panning. Fellow Melody Maker writer Chris Charlesworth offers a second opinion: “I sat next to Chris Welch during A Passion Play at the Empire Pool. We were both bored stiff. The audience was bored too, and were making paper darts out of the programme and flying them around.”  

         What happened next was the single most bizarre outcome of a clash between the music press and a group. Jethro Tull announced their retirement.

         Jethro Tull’s manager Terry Ellis told Rob Partridge, news editor at of Melody Maker, that his charges were retiring due to the “abuse” that they had received from critics

         “I say abuse and I mean abuse – it certainly wasn’t fair criticism. In a lot of cases critics have been taking advantage of their unassailable position to be abusive,” he told MM.

         “Ian Anderson is extremely brought down by it all. When he reads in the music papers ‘Passion Play is bad’ he feels terrible, his life is music. The abuse is psychologically wearing him down and he feels it’s not fair to perform under this pressure.”

         In their statement last week the band announced their retirement would be for an indefinite period. But how long is “indefinite?”

         “If I could say one month or even 10 years, it would be a definite period.”

         At the time fans didn’t know what to make of it. This hugely popular band suddenly seemed revealed as a bunch of cry-babies because some people had the temerity to point out to them that A Passion Play was such a towering folly.

         “This gave the impression that the band had broken up and I was somehow responsible,” Welch explains. “The MM ran a ‘shock’ front page news story about the decision. It wasn’t until some years later I learned that the story had been the result of deal between MM editor Ray Coleman and Tull manager Terry Ellis, without reference to me. As it turned out JT came back with a new album War Child a year later in 1974 and announced a long world tour to promote it. My feelings about it all? Well, I was surprised the editor felt greater loyalty to the music biz than to his staff but at least I hadn’t upset Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin and caused them to ’break up.’ That could have been rather more awkward.”

         Anderson had been cited as being part of the perpetrators of this story, but he puts the blame squarely on Ellis and Coleman and opines now that the whole scam was “ridiculous”.