The previous weekend, 31 August - 1 September 1968, had seen the first Isle of Wight Festival, which the Doors didn’t play. I was there, of course, having left the Doors in LA to complete various TV, radio and supermarket opening commitments relating to the promotion of ‘Hello, I Love You’ before they hooked up with me for the double all-nighter Roundhouse rave presented by Middle Earth. The event was described as a ‘rave’ by newspapers at the time, even though raves as we came to know them, as events closely associated with repetitive beats, MDMA and overpriced water, didn’t yet exist.
Amazingly, MDMA didn’t hit the streets until the 1980s, even though it was invented way back in 1912. The sixties hippies had plenty of drugs to keep them high but they would have loved ecstasy, a drug that induces empathy alongside the desire to dance all-night waving glow sticks. Readers of Stoned magazine have consistently voted MDMA the best recreational drug ever, and I have to agree with them.
The first Isle of Wight Festival was a smallish affair with about 10,000 people getting down and dirty for a couple of days in the cow dung at Ford Farm near Godshill. Jefferson Airplane headlined, with other acts including Fairport Convention, the Move and Tyrannosaurus Rex playing landmark sets.
Very early roots and rumblings of 1970s pomp rock and glam rock where already there on the Isle of Wight that weekend with the core of the Move going on to form the Electric Light Orchestra, and Tyrannosaurus Rex going on to adopt one of the most successful abbreviations in the history of pop when Mark Bolan’s decision to rename his band T. Rex soon established him as a glam rock god.
Is that glam-rock god or glam rock-god? Whatever. Bolan had a string of huge hits, ending in 1977 with his biggest hit of all, ‘Tie a Yellow Mini Round the Ole Oak Tree’. Interestingly, Bolan died on 16 September 1977, exactly one month after Elvis supposedly popped his blue suede shoes on 16 August 1977, but that’s yet another story.
When you’re telling the story of rock there is always ten more stories connected to the story you are telling, endless spiders webs of connections, the old rock family tree thing, where you see who was in what band before they left to be part of a bigger or smaller band or go successfully or unsuccessfully solo. Who got lucky and who missed out, who now owns their own island and who scrapes a living playing Birmingham pubs, who dies daily on the has-been circuit and who immortalised themselves by bowing out in a car crash.
I guess I’m trying to give you an idea of the churn that was going on in music back then, that is always going on in music in fact. Even at the height of one era the young shoots of another era are already starting to emerge. Young shoots, upstarts, new kids on the block, trying out new things, trying to break the mould, looking for that winning formula, waiting for the time when they will grow up to be the biggest beanstalks in the bean patch and reduce the beanstalks they currently ‘support’ to has-beens.
In 1968 though, it was Jefferson Airplane, later Jefferson Starship, later Starship, that ruled the bean patch; Jefferson Airplane that was just about the biggest beanstalk dominating the worldwide plot. And if Airplane weren’t the biggest, because so called easy-listening music was what really dominated the pop charts in the sixties, they were certainly amongst the very coolest on the so called alternative scene. If you are talking impeccable hippie credentials then Airplane were to late sixties hippiedom what Henry VIII was to the Tudors.
True pioneers of psychedelic rock, Airplane actually came from the Bay Area of San Francisco – not just spent time there - and more than any other band defined the San Francisco sound with seminal tracks like ‘Somebody to Love’ and the Lewis Carroll and acid-trip inspired ‘White Rabbit’. There is nothing else to do but fall to your knees in band worship and bury your ears in a Surrealistic Pillow when you learn that apart from the first Isle of Wight Festival, Airplane played all four of the most mythical American festivals of the 1960s: Magic Mountain, Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont. Not even the Doors or Ravi Shankar can beat that.
God knows Morrison was good looking and charismatic, but no more good looking and charismatic than Grace Slick, the Chrome Nun, the dark haired, mystical, hippie uber-babe and it-girl lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, who at time of writing has a huge personal advantage over Morrison – though not a commercial advantage - by virtue of still being definitely alive.
We were all in love with Grace in the late sixties. So graceful, and so slick with a knife if you got on the wrong side of her. She was the first person ever to say ‘motherfucker’ on television while performing ‘We Can Be Together’. Grace and I were friends but never lovers. Although more in the employ of the Doors and Hendrix, as a general fixer to the stars I provided miscellaneous services to Airplane, mostly free of charge, just so I could be near Grace and hold her in awe as the true Queen of Hippiedom.
When Jefferson Airplane replaced jet engines with rocket engines in 1970 to become Jefferson Starship, Slick remained lead singer. Starship endured twice as long as Airplane but never achieved the same success and certainly not the same mythical status. Bigger hits came in the mid-eighties when Starship finally dropped Jefferson and topped charts all over the world with those archetypal 1980s anthems, ‘We Built This City’ and ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’.
‘We Built This City’ is the more interesting of the two, written by no less a figure than Bernie Taupin of Elton John fame, and a good track in the view of many, but that didn’t prevent it from being voted the worst song of the 1980s in a 2011 Rolling Stone poll. Really?! The worst?!
When you look up that Rolling Stone poll, it strikes you that the so called top ten worst songs of the 1980s, according to Rolling Stone readers, are all actually pretty good songs of their time or anytime. What is so wrong with ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ by Falco or ‘The Safety Dance’ by Men Without Hats? Skilful, catchy tunes. Ok, they’re ridiculous, but what pop song isn’t ridiculous? Ridiculous was never a bar to a pop song being great, from nonsensical ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ by rockabilly pioneer Gene Vincent, to revered, pretentious 80s synth-pop classic ‘Vienna’ by Ultravox. I mean, what the fuck is Vienna about? I’m not even sure it’s about Vienna.
May I offer you alternative worst songs of the 80s, ‘It’s a Mystery’ by plastic-post-punk, Toyah Willcox, or that grating, suicide inducing, wedding disco DJ staple, ‘The Birdie Song’ by The Tweets...
I feel that in this digression I’ve followed a white rabbit down a very deep and winding hole that has led me from the heights of Jefferson Airplane to the depths of ‘The Birdie Song’. If ‘history is just one damn thing after another,’ as Henry Ford once said, then the history of rock is just one damn multi-level maze that constantly zigzags back and forth between the sublime and the ridiculous.
A final word on amazing Grace Slick, if only to get us back to the late sixties, which is broadly where I think we broadly are. She retired from the music business following the Jefferson Airplane Reunion Tour of 1989. They weren’t that good on that tour apparently. True to her name, she decided to grow old gracefully, a decision I thoroughly respect. She has since said:
All rock-and-rollers over the age of 50 look stupid and should retire. . . . You can do jazz, classical, blues, opera, country until you're 150, but rap and rock and roll are really a way for young people to get that anger out. . . . It's silly to perform a song that has no relevance to the present or expresses feelings you no longer have.
At the centre of the spiders web of 1960s British rock bands and their myriad family connections was the Yardbirds. Super cool, monochrome, performing the eternally groundbreaking ‘For Your Love’ way back in 1965. A peerless stud farm of exceptional rock talent, the various lineups of The Yardbirds spawned no less than three all-time axe wielding gods of rock: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. I must stress that Clapton, Page and Beck were not in the Yardbirds at the same time. Such a concentration of guitar talent critical mass would have caused a nuclear explosion to rival Chernobyl of Fukushima Daiichi.
Follow the Clapton bloodline and we are soon creaming our denim jeans about how good Cream were. Follow the Beck bloodline and you have a man who didn’t join Pink Floyd because they were afraid to ask him. Follow the Page bloodline and you end up with a serious shortage of vinyl, vinyl demand far outstripping vinyl supply.
Actually, you end up with the New Yardbirds, followed by Lead Balloon, a band that lasted all of five seconds during a drunken conversation with Keith Moon, then Lead Zeppelin and finally Led Zeppelin. Page wisely dropped the ‘a’ from ‘lead’ so that nobody would think it was ‘lead’ as in ‘lead guitar’. Then again, why does nobody think of it as ‘led’, as in the past participle of ‘lead’, conjuring up images of a zeppelin that is led as opposed to one that finds its own way?
Anyway, it is yet another example of how the history of rock often hinges on a single letter, often but not always a T. The Beatles rather than The Beetles, Boney M., T. Rex, T-Pain, T-Bone (various), T’Pau, KT Tunstall, Clifford T. Ward, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, T. J. Hooker and so on.
With Led Zeppelin though, do we ever think of a zeppelin made of lead, as in the heavy metal plumbum (Pb)? I simply think of that band, Zeppelin. Jimmy Page with his ostentatious double neck Gibson and the Hindenburg zeppelin dirigible on fire, as featured on the cover of their monumental first album, Led Zeppelin, often called 1 or One.
One is another example of how in the rock industry, if you’ve got the music right, a failure of imagination regarding the album title does not necessarily have a detrimental effect on record sales. To date Led Zeppelin One has sold 8 million copies in the USA alone. Then again, it does have a great cover, unlike the Beatles’ White Album, which has neither a great title or a great cover but has done pretty well too.
It is worth considering that the opposite can also be true. A decent title and an imaginative cover does not necessarily mean commercial or critical success. Take Back to the Egg, the seventh and final studio album by British-American supergroup Wings. A memorable title and a clever sort of cover, with the band looking down on the Earth from a spaceship and all that jazz, didn’t stop the album from being a huge flop by Wings’ standards.
The disappointing sales of Back to the Egg were probably not helped by Rolling Stone magazine describing it as ‘the sorriest grab bag of dreck in recent history.’ Quite a comedown for a man who brought us ‘Mull of Kintyre’, as well as playing a significant hand in Sgt Pepper and a few other good albums. Still, McCartney soon came back at us and answered his critics with the ‘Frog Chorus’ and ‘Ebony and Ivory’, a duet with Stevie Wonder about black and white people making love together on pianos.
Led Zeppelin One was released on 12 January 1969. Page, Plant, Bonham and the other one, the bass player, had wisely decided to eschew the jingly jangly, Eastern influenced, acid-inspired sonic explorations of hippie-dippydom in favour of hard-hitting, no frills blues-rock fusion, all played with incredible ability and precision from four of the finest, hairiest and most authentic rock musicians ever to breathe the fetid air of a recording studio.
The hippie-dippy thing still had some way to run, Woodstock hadn’t even happened yet, but heavy rock was here to stay, and along with the tragic fiasco of Altamont and the timely appearance of hard hitting Brummie Satanists Black Sabbath and Ken Dodd’s extremely loud Deep Purple, it would burn the hippie dream down.
That isn’t the Hindenburg burning on the cover of Zep One, it is the late sixties. It is the peace and love bullcrap of that idealistic era going up in smoke to the jagged, rolling, no-nonsense rhythms of ‘Good Times Bad Times’. It is the wrank smell of rotted flowers, body odour and dry shit, being burnt away by a cleansing wildfire of exploding hydrogen. As so often happens in the history of rock, Zeppelin were taking rock forward by taking it backwards, only with better recording facilities. Robert Plant was the new Little Richard, screaming along to a simple, driving, irresistible, primordial rhythm.
Strange then that Zeppelin were soon to go on to record ‘Stairway to Heaven’, a powerfully pretentious pocket-symphony, a peerless paragon of prog rock pomposity, an awesome epic of mesmerising mythology, an uber-track as musically mind-bending as it is ultimately meaningless and absurd, perfectly at home in the collection of any spaced-out, space-wrecked flower child. As, indeed, is the entire 1971 album on which ‘Stairway’ is to be found, Four or Four Symbols, with its enigmatic drug, Tolkien and landscape gardening inspired themes.
May queens calling you to spring clean their bush, laughing trees, pipers fresh from the gates of dawn blowing smoke rings up your ass as you look to the west, your spirit crying for leaving, and it all seems to make sense precisely because your head is humming and it won’t go, in case you don’t know.
Zeppelin burnt hippiedom down only to reabsorb and reinvigorate its ashes, only to have us all waiting for the angels of Avalon at the battle of Evermore once we had finished waiting for the fifteen minute guitar solo to finally end.
Zep Four even dares to take us back to California to relive the idyllic dream one more time, to have one more desperately hopeful look for that ultimate, suntanned, pneumatic, au naturel, hippie it-girl chick with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair. You know the one. The drop dead gorgeous sorority uber-babe, slim and petite enough for some schmuck hoping to get laid after the gig to lift onto his shoulders so she can see the stage. She, of course, was long gone, having become a frigid, bitchy feminist no longer willing to put-out, or a cleaned-up, respectable, suburban trophy wife with two kids, interested only in squeezing the lemon of her estate agent husband.
Yes, by 1971 it had all long gone, the events of 1969 saw to that. By June 1969 even the Rolling Stones could no longer tolerate Brian Jones substance abuse and increasingly erratic behaviour and he was eased out of the band with Mick Taylor taking his place. Jones cited musical difference but in truth he was so fucked-up that he couldn’t squeeze ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ out of a penny whistle and when he tried to play the harmonica his mouth bled.
The Stones, of course, surfed the wave of turmoil that always surrounded them, straight out of the sixties and on into the multi-zillionaire super-groupdom that characterised them for the rest of the millennium and well into the next. Jones’ destiny was not so glamorous.
A midnight swim that went wrong, a fatal fall, suicide, murdered by his builder following a row about what type of slabs to use for the new patio. Who knows? Whatever the truth, he was found motionless at the bottom of his swimming pool at Winnie-the-Pooh’s old mansion in East Sussex. His Swedish girlfriend Anna Wohlin maintains that he still had a pulse when they pulled him out, but when the medics arrived they pronounced him dead. A verdict of death by misadventure was recorded, the coroner noting that his heart and liver were so considerably enlarged by long term drug and alcohol abuse it was a wonder they fitted into his torso.
Jones was one of the first victims of rock excess. Before then the most common method of rock ‘n’ roll bucket kicking had been transport accident, which nonetheless remained quite popular. It is often said Jones was the first victim of rock excess, but it should not be forgotten that 25-year-old Frankie Lymon, less his Teenagers, perished from a heroin overdose the previous year on the floor of his granny’s bathroom. Although not a juvenile delinquent, Frankie was no goody goody despite his boyish looks.
Still, Jones’s demise is remembered as the first of a string of tragedies that within a few years had claimed the life of some of the biggest names in sixties pop. Two short years saw Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison (allegedly) join Jones at that great gig in the sky. To be precise, it was a few hours over 2 years, Jones being pronounced dead in the early hours of 3 July 1969 and Morrison being pronounced dead later in the day on 3 July 1971.
I flew over to the UK to attend the long planned free concert in Hyde park on the 5 July which the Stones dedicated to Jones. Easy to be nice to him now he was dead and unlikely to sue for control of the name of the band he had founded. Jagger waxed lyrical reading extracts from Shelly’s Adonais and hundreds of white butterflies were released in tribute to the dead star. The Hyde Park area cabbage crop was devastated that summer but what did the Stones care about such prosaic concerns.
Jones’ body was buried in Cheltenham, three miles deep in a locked, air tight, gold, silver and bronze coffin paid for by Bob Dylan. This was partly to deter trophy hunters from robbing Jones’ grave but mainly to prevent him rising from the dead and reaching for his lawyers. Watts and Wyman were the only Rolling Stones to attend the funeral.
Jagger and Richards were notable by their absence. As ever, Richards was busy in the studio, busy too entertaining his close relatives, sister morphine and cousin cocaine. Jagger fucked off to Australia with Marianne Faithfull to make the B-movie Ned Kelly claiming his filming contract allowed no delay.
Perhaps Jagger was grieving deep inside and unable to concentrate because Ned Kelly is an awful film and the critics duly shredded it. Jagger disowned it and didn’t even bother to turn up for the world premiere. The Guardian has since described the film as ‘slow, uneven and dull as ditchwater’ and Jagger’s performance as ‘bizarrely tension-free’. One critical slipwit quipped that in the film Jagger ‘looks more Amish than Irish-Australian’.
Were Jagger and Richards a selfish, arrogant pair of cunts who wouldn’t give Jones his due and continue to deny him to this day, or were they sick of holding together what had become their band by dint of hard work and creative contribution while Jones became an increasingly useless, pretentious and unstable prick? The answer to this central question of Stonesology is yes and yes.
Whatever, the Stones now had that mythical early figure that all of the greatest bands must have, that ever youthful lost genius and totem who either went mad or died or went mad then died. Brian Jones, Syd Barrett, Peter Green, John ‘Stumpy’ Pepys, Bon Scott. I can’t really include Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Bonham and Karen Carpenter in that list because their deaths spelt the end of the acts they were so synonymous with.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience would obviously have been totally screwed after Jimi Hendrix choked to death on his own vomit in September 1970, except that the official Jimi Hendrix Experience, which included Mitch Mitchell and Noel Reading, ceased to be active after June 1969. In the short time Hendrix had left to live, other band formations with him at the centre were often referred to informally as ‘the Jimi Hendrix Experience’ but they weren’t.
Led Zeppelin respectfully disbanded after Bonham choked to death on his own vomit in Hendrixesque and Scottesque style in 1980. Zeppelin were wise enough to know they were never going to find another drummer that could carry the Zeppelin sound. Although, to be fair, a combination of Phil Collins and Tony Thompson made four reasonable fists of drumming for Led Zeppelin when Page, Plant and the bass player reunited for five minutes in 1985 to play Live Aid. That’s how good a drummer Bonham was, as good as Phil Collins plus one of America’s greatest session drummers, an original member of Chic and so on.
As to the Carpenters, they were a duo, so it was impossible to remain the Carpenters in the plural when Karen Carpenter died of anorexia-related heart failure on 4 February 1983.
The Doors tried to carry on for a while after Jim went in 1971 but it wasn’t really happening. The guys may have supplied most of the musical talent but Jim had supplied all of the personality.
I wasn’t with Jim when all that shit went down in Paris. Although I loved the guy - as Richards always says of everyone he’s worked with before he disses the shit out of them - by 1971 I’d grown tired of Jim’s moody, alcoholic ways and sorting out his many paternity suits and I had no desire to travel with him to the French capital. There was no real music scene in Paris, just a bunch of washed out English and American rock junkies getting smacked-up to the tune of an accordion.
When they weren’t quelling student riots the Paris police were lazy, corrupt bastards and could always be relied upon to turn a blind eye for a few franks. That’s why it’s hard to know what happened. I have to confess that even I don’t know exactly what happened.
The official story is that Jim was found dead in his bathtub by girlfriend Pamela Courson - it’s always the girlfriends that find the bodies - the official cause of death being heart failure, although how people know that for sure is beyond me because no autopsy was performed. Who but the French...? That every death involves heart failure doesn’t mean every death is caused by heart failure. He was only 27 for fuck sake. Why did his heart fail? They might as well have written ‘lack of breath’ on the death certificate, or should I say, ‘manque de souffle’.
One story that might have some truth in it is that Jim died of a snorted heroin overdose in the toilet of the Rock and Roll Circus Club on Paris’ Left Bank - for all his drug taking prowess Jim hated needles. His body was then carried back to his apartment by his dealer, the aim being to avoid a scandal that even the French police would have felt obliged to investigate. Marianne Faithfull, allegedly in the club at the time - she certainly got about did Marianne - is said by some to allegedly know more than she has ever let on, allegedly.
The problem with this particular conspiracy theory is that Jim had put on a lot of weight by 1971 and would not have been an easy carry for some skinny, escargot sucking, Parisian drug dealer. Then again, I’m only assuming he was skinny because he was a heroin dealer and therefore probably a user, and anyway, perhaps he had help.
Did Morrison actually meet his end on 3 July 1971? Legends abound that he is still alive somewhere, but if he is I’ve not seen him. I’ve never looked into his eyes again, except in my dreams. Still, that doesn’t mean he isn’t alive. Jim was a clever bastard, at his best one of the great philosophical minds, and certainly adept at disappearing when it suited him. He may still be alive, living with some indigenous Amazonian tribe deep in what’s left of the Brazilian jungle, practising as a witch doctor and imbibing the holy moksha medicine on a daily basis.
I’d like to think Jim is still on this side of the great divide, but he sure seemed to me to be a terminal wreck by 1971. Fucked up by alcohol, heroin and poetry, he was the barely alive essence of hippie excess, the walking embodiment of the late sixties turned sour. He was surely heading for the rock star knacker’s yard, where they’ll dispose of a rock wreck’s raddled, useless body as an impediment to the advancement of his or her illustrious career. So, if Jim met his end in a Paris apartment bathtub or in a Paris club toilet, if hard drugs were closely connected with his demise, then I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
What matters is that if Jim did die back then, and not in a Florida OAP home aged 76, he lived fast and died young. What matter is that, just as he promised, he got his kicks before the whole shit house went up in flames, although, of course, he was the main lamebrain being careless with the matches. Jim gave death a lot of thought, so was more aware than most that nobody gets out of here alive. Jim, my beautiful friend, I salute you, wherever you are or are not, you crazy sonofabitch.