Wrecking Bawl

The Lives of Brian: A Memoir, Brian Johnson (Michael Joseph 2022)

In one way I like the front cover of this book by the lead singer of AC/DC. In another I don’t. I like it because it’s well-designed and understated. Like AC/DC themselves, it’s not flashy or flamboyant. But part of the good design is the way the cover uses understated graphics – grey-tone photo and gold lettering – to contrast the overstatement of what Johnson is doing. He’s bawling into a microphone, mouth open and eyes closed under his man-of-the-people cloth cap. He looks both energetic and at his ease, doing what he was born to do: perform in one of the world’s greatest rock’n’roll bands.

And who can deny AC/DC’s greatness? Me, for one. I think they were a very good band up until 1980, combining both energy and intelligence, both heaviness and humor. After that, they turned into crude and witless heavy-metal. Because 1980 is when Brian Johnson joined the band, writing the lyrics, singing the songs, wearing the cloth cap. And that’s what I dislike about the cover: the fact that he’s on it. This book should have had a longer subtitle and that longer subtitle should have read: A Memoir of the Man Who Wrecked AC/DC.

Not that he talks much about his life in AC/DC here. The Lives of Brian is the first instalment of his autobiography, telling the story of his childhood, youth and apprenticeship in rock’n’roll. His childhood was out of the ordinary. His father Alan was English and his mother Esther was Italian. They met when Alan served with the British army in the Second World. It was “love at first sight”, says Brian, so they married and she came to live in England. Big mistake. That’s why the first chapter opens with this sting-in-the-tail: “The soundtrack of my early childhood was the clatter of my mother’s sewing machine, followed by the muffled sobs of her crying herself to sleep every night downstairs.”

It’s hardly surprising that his mother cried herself to sleep, because she had exchanged the sunshine and song of Italy for the darkness and damp of England. The dourness and defeat too. As Johnson says:

I can only imagine how much the poor lass’s heart sank when she first set eyes on Dunston, the part of Gateshead – just south of the river from Newcastle upon Tyne – where my dad was from. The factories and coal staithes. The back-to-back terraced houses on the steep slope of the Scotswood Road. The soot-faced men trudging home from work. Bombed houses everywhere. The constant wind and rain.

On top of that, of course, there was the rationing, which went on from another nine years after we “won” the war – the food made worse by the British custom of boiling it until every last atom disintegrated, turning every meal into a plate of grey sludge.

Like the opening line, that’s good writing and the good writing carries on in the rest of the book. That’s why I wonder if Johnson really wrote it. The front inside cover has reproductions of manuscript pages supposedly by him, written in different inks at apparently different times, but they could have been mocked-up. The prose is crisp, clean and professional, but writing books isn’t Johnson’s profession. And although the prose is crisp and clean, it’s also cold. It describes, but it doesn’t evoke, as though the writer is describing what happened to someone else. You get the who and where and why, but you don’t genuinely get the how-it-felt. That’s why I suspect Johnson had a ghost-writer. If he didn’t, I can only say that he writes autobiographies better than he writes lyrics.

He’s also a better person in his autobiography than he is in his lyrics. There’s no leering or lasciviousness here and there’s even subtlety rather than stridency. But there isn’t any self-pity. It was hard for his Italian mother in Dunston and it wasn’t easy for half-Italian Brian and his siblings. He met prejudice because of his background. And it wasn’t just that he was half-Italian: “My biggest problem growing up… was that I wasn’t growing up. I was a titch. A short-arse.” But he doesn’t make a song and dance about the xenonanophobia. Instead, he describes how he got into song. Unlike his father, who had a big voice but couldn’t carry a tune, he had a big voice and could carry a tune. And after he heard Little Richard singing “Tutti Frutti” – “I felt like someone had just plugged me into the mains” – he knew that he wanted to sing rock’n’roll.

That’s how he came to be the lead-singer of the band Geordie. They weren’t world-beaters, but they got known to the world and that’s how Johnson ended up in AC/DC. His recruitment was a very good choice by Angus and Malcolm in one sense, because AC/DC went to the top of rock’n’roll with Johnson on vocals. In another sense, it was a very bad choice. The worst possible, in fact, because Johnson proved to be a wrecking bawl, smashing the humor and fun out of the band and destroying what it had previously been. The late, great Bon Scott, AC/DC’s previous singer, wrote subtle and intelligent lyrics. He could be ribald, rib-tickling and rueful, convey both menace and melancholy. And he once rhymed “society” with “notoriety”. Johnson’s rhymes run like this:

Honey, what do you do for money?
Honey, what do you do for money?
Yeah, what do you do for money, honey?
How do you get your kicks?
What do you do for money, honey?
How you get your licks? (“What Do You Do for Money, Honey?”)

It wasn’t apparent at the time, but Back in Black (1980), AC/DC’s best-selling first album after Bon Scott’s death, was full of anthems for incels. That was Johnson’s doing and that’s why I think he was the man who wrecked AC/DC. I’ll read the next instalment of his autobiography in the same way as I’ve read this one, with interest and even enjoyment, but I’ll never stop regretting what he did to Australia’s greatest musical export. He met Scott, but he’s never matched him. He hasn’t even come close. The meeting came when Geordie and Fang (né Fraternity) both played at Torquay Town Hall in the 1970s. And that was it: their paths never crossed again.

Scott was struggling then but went on to stardom. Johnson was struggling and thought he’d missed his chance of stardom. He was wrong and though I don’t want to say I wish he’d been right, I have to. I wish he had been right. I wish that Bon had gone on after 1980 and that this book had been his autobiography rather than Brian Johnson’s. As it is, I’ll just have to hope that there’s A Shot of Scott waiting for me in Bibliophiles’ Heaven.

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Front Row for the Axl Show

Nothin’ But a Good Time: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Glam Metal, Justin Quirk (Unbound 2020)

I like glam metal, hair metal, spandex metal, call it what you will. It’s raucous, it’s ridiculous, and it’s fun, even when the music is bad. And it isn’t always bad. There were sometimes talented musicians and skilful song-writers beneath the billowing barnets and caked-on cosmetics.

But who was ever going to take glam metal seriously enough to write a book about the whole phenomenon? No-one, I would have said if the question had ever occurred to me. That’s why I was pleased to come across this book. At last, I thought, I can learn more about Cinderella, Poison, Faster Pussycat and other ridiculous-looking musos who pouted, postured and partied so hard in the 1980s – and wrote some catchy tunes in-between.

But my anticipation of what this book was going to be like was way better than the reality. You’re right if you don’t judge this book by its cover, because although it claims to be about glam metal, Justin Quirk devotes most of his time to Def Leppard, who aren’t glam metal; Bon Jovi, who aren’t glam metal; Guns’n’Roses, who aren’t glam metal; and Skid Row, who aren’t glam metal. In fact, I don’t think GNR and Bon Jovi are metal at all. Unless it’s dreck metal. But the Bon Jovi section does contain these memorable words from Sebastian Bach, lead singer of Skid Row, as he describes his feud with Jon “Bon Blow Me”:

Look, I’m a twenty-two-year-old fucking Metallica freak on speed. I’m psychotic. I can drink four bottles of whiskey before I go on stage. Jon is a thirty-one-year-old Bruce Springsteen fan with a fax machine. He gets pissed on one drink. Who do you think is gonna win a fight? – ch. 7, pp. 215-6

That’s an entertaining quote, but it shouldn’t have been in this book. I think Skid Row wrote some good songs, but they aren’t glam metal. Okay, Quirk writes a fair bit about Mötley Crüe, who are archetypal glam metal, and about W.A.S.P., who are in the related genre of schlock metal. But who needs to read more about Mötley Crüe? Not me, even though I like them. They’re crude, they’re cartoonish and they’re fun. But they’ve received plenty of exposure both in print and on the net.

Cinderella show how it’s done

Cinderella haven’t. Nor have Faster Pussycoat. And those two bands wrote some good music and pouted, postured and partied with the best of them. To judge by his present raddled condition, Taime Downe, the lead singer of Faster Pussycat, must have good stories to tell. You can already tell from his name and from album titles like Front Row for the Donkey Show that he has a sense of humor. But he and his band are mentioned only in passing here. As for obscurer glam-metal bands – forget it. Quirk is too busy writing about bloody Guns’n’Roses, quite possibly the most over-hyped, over-exposed and over-rated band of all time. And not glam metal!

Britny Fox really show how it’s done

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So I’ll come off the fence: I was disappointed by Nothin’ But a Good Time. It promised much on the cover and delivered little inside. And it didn’t even offer the consolation of a photo section with lots of ridiculous costumes, poses, hair-dos and make-up. There are no photos and no index. If you want a good history, analysis and appreciation of glam metal, this isn’t it.

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Afterword: I didn’t notice that this book has two front-covers, one saying “The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Glam Metal”, the other saying “The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Hair Metal”. “Hair Metal” seems to be used much more in images of the cover, but “Glam Metal” always seems to be there in the listings of the title. Anyway, I shouldn’t have said that “glam metal” and “hair metal” are pretty much the same term. “Hair metal” is much vaguer, often used derisively or dismissively, and covers some bands that aren’t glam metal. Here’s the “Hair Metal” version of the cover:

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Bon and Off

Two Sides to Every Glory: AC/DC: The Complete Biography, Paul Stenning (Chrome Dreams 2005)

Like AC/DC’s music, this bigraphy is down-to-earth and easy to appreciate. Unlike AC/DC’s music, it doesn’t take a turn for the worse part-way through. That’s because the author stays the same. In AC/DC, one of the authors changed: the lead singer and lyricist Bon Scott died and Brian Johnson replaced him.

That’s when AC/DC took a turn for the worse. Much worse. In the past year, I began listening to AC/DC properly again – that is, listening to full albums. Indeed, full albums one-after-another. But only the ones with Bon on. He was the soul of AC/DC, mixing macho with melancholy. And if the macho was tongue-in-cheek, the melancholy was real. That’s why I no longer regret his early death: as I explained in a review of Highway to Hell: The Life and Times of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott (2006), I think he’d had enough and wanted to go.

AC/DC were on the verge of really big success when he died, but that was probably another reason for him to drink so recklessly. Two Sides to Every Glory devotes a full chapter to the night-and-aftermath of his passing, but doesn’t really deliver what the back cover promises: “revelations never previously published.” Yes, the full truth will probably never be known, but nothing sinister seems to have gone on and the main story won’t change. One night Bon Scott drank too much, pushed his body too far, and died in his sleep.

AC/DC effectively died with him: with Bon, the light was on. Without him, it was off. Angus and Malcolm Young carried on writing catchy music, but Brian Johnson turned the band into what it had always claimed not to be: heavy metal. Crude and witless heavy metal. There’s no melancholy in songs like “Shake the Foundations” and “What Do You Do for Money, Honey?” There’s a lot of macho, though, and it isn’t tongue-in-cheek. I wondered whether I’d be able to carry on reading into the Brian-Johnson era. I was. The book was still easy and enjoyable to read, and it was still finding good quotes from Angus. Early on, he described AC/DC like this: “Five dwarves that make a big racket.” He also said: “Bon’s always been of no fixed abode and I’m in the flat above.”

That’s a clever line. So, in a different way, is this from well into the Brian-Johnson era: “I am sick to death of people saying that we’ve made 11 albums that sound exactly the same. In fact we’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.” Here’s another one: “I’m not going bald: my head’s just getting higher.” But, alas, none of that clever humor was being matched in AC/DC’s lyrics by then. Bon could both write and deliver subtle lyrics, creating complete stories in single songs. Johnson stamped out the subtlety and the stories. But if he wrecked AC/DC as a band, he didn’t stop their story being interesting, so I read on to the end. For one thing, the AC/DC story is also, in part, the story of popular music and their reaction to what is taking place around them. Or rather, their lack of reaction. This isn’t a clever or amusing quote from the band-breaker himself, but it does explain the appeal of AC/DC: “Our music doesn’t go out of fashion because it isn’t about fashion. I hear about all these different kinds of music: grunge, hardcore, death metal. And all it is is rock’n’roll.”

AC/DC have always captured the energy and excitement of rock’n’roll. Early on, with Bon, they combined those things with cleverness and charisma. Later, with Brian, they said balls to all that. And with Bon, energy, excitement and macho posturing weren’t the be-and-end-all of their music. “Ride On” isn’t a raucous rocker. It’s about a drifter who’s booked himself a permanent stay at the Heartbreak Hotel. Scott’s delivery is understated but evocative: he sings the drifter into life. By doing that, he foreshadowed his own death. And with it, the death of AC/DC. But they picked up most of their fans post mortem and most of this book is about the Brian-Johnson era.

How could it not be? They’ve been going for nearly fifty years and Scott was with them only for the first ten. This book was first published in 2005, but I won’t be hunting down any updated editions. This is all the detail I want. And some I didn’t want but found interesting anyway, like the detailed appendixes on everything from AC/DC promo material – “SPRAY CAN AND PLASTIC FLY … made to promote the Fly on the Wall album” – to “AC/DC songs recorded or performed by other artists,” from Metallica and Henry Rollins to Tiny Tim and Céline Dion by way of “obscure industrialists” Birmingham6. Plus, there’s an index and a comprehensive discography of both official albums and bootlegs. This is a good book about what was once a very good band.

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Shaman On U!

Copendium: An Expedition into the Rock’n’Roll Underworld, Julian Cope (Faber and Faber 2012)

A big book with big ideas about BIIIIIG sounds. As Cope himself might put it. I’d always been vaguely interested in him – what I chanced to hear of his music seemed intelligent, quirky and original – but never bothered to investigate further. But I knew that he liked Krautrock and stone circles, so it was a surprise to pick this book off the shelf and discover that he also liked Pentagram. And Blue Öyster Cult. And Grand Funk Railroad. And Van Halen.

Plus a bunch of obscure stuff. Very obscure. There’s a Danskrocksampler at the end of the book, including Steppeneuvlene’s “Itsi-Bitsi” from 1967. But whether it’s famous or obscure, Cope brings the same enthusiasm and open mind:

The problem with someone like Kim Fowley is that the intellectuals know that, on a long-term, sensible career level, he doesn’t mean any of what he says. So they dismiss him because they’ve fallen for the idea that you gotta mean what you say in the first place for it to have any value. Baloney! The innate truth of rock’n’roll shamanism is such that it can still ooze out and inform the world, even from the works of those who claim to be engaged in nothing more than some kind of parody. (Review of Kim Fowley’s Outrageous, 1967, pg. 32)

The writing is always fun, occasionally fiery, as he explores music from many decades and many genres: rock, heavy metal, doom, drone, glam, psychedelia, and more. There are also a lot of autobiography and digression in it, as he draws parallels between the music and his own life and interests, like landscapes and (pre)history. But I think he uses more words than he needs to. He isn’t writing Guardianese, but he gestures towards it at times. And I think his enthusiasm for weed and magic mushrooms must have led some of his fans into bad places:

Although the double-vinyl artwork is huge, gatefold and magnificent, the CD version of Dopesmoker is the best option overall, because you can get utterly narnered once you’ve put it on and not have to get up for an hour and ten minutes. (Review of Sleep’s Dopesmoker, 2003, pg. 367)

Cope doesn’t spend a lot of his time utterly narnered. Like Vox Day, he’s one of those people who get a lot done and make life more interesting for everyone. Copendium is a good example. Big book, big ideas, BIIIIIG sounds.

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Book in Black

Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe, Mick Wall (Orion Books 2013)

The big three of British hard rock are Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. The difference between the first two and the third is simple: Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple have influenced individual bands, whereas Black Sabbath have inspired entire genres. Rock history would probably look very different without them: various trends would have started later, slower or not at all. Or without three-quarters of Black Sabbath, anyway: in descending order of importance, the guitarist Tony Iommi, the bassist Geezer Butler and the drummer Bill Ward. The vocalist Ozzy Osbourne is more like a mascot, in my opinion. He isn’t a good singer and I’d like to re-run Black Sabbath’s early days with someone else from the Black Country on vox: Sean Harris of Diamond Head.

But Harris was too young for that: all four original members of Black Sabbath were born in 1948 and seemed destined for the same circumscribed lives as their parents and grandparents. Then rock’n’roll came along and gave them a chance to escape boring factory jobs or careers as petty criminals in Birmingham. But with money and fame came drugs, alcohol and the chance to misbehave in much more spectacular ways. Not that they made as much money as they should: they were promoted on their first American tour as “Louder Than Led Zeppelin” (ch. 3, “Bringers of War”, pg. 72), but they definitely weren’t as well-managed. Or as well-received: despite creating much more interesting and innovative music, Black Sabbath didn’t receive the respect or critical attention they deserved until long after Led Zeppelin.

Mick Wall was one of those who gave Led Zeppelin that attention, in When Giants Walked the Earth (2009). He’s also written biographies of Metallica, AC/DC, Guns’n’Roses and Iron Maiden, so he’s well able to give Sabbath the credit (or blame) for their central role in heavy metal. Unfortunately, he’s also fond of rock journalese, hyperbole and mixed metaphors. This book has a nice cover, so it’s a shame about some of the prose:

Twenty years later groups like Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden and, in particular, Nirvana, would excavate the same heaving-lung sound to delineate their own scorched-earth policy to a music scene even more elaborately formulaic than the heavy rock scene of the early Seventies – and be rewarded with critical garlands, heralding a new genre they called ‘grunge’. In 1971, however, Sabbath and their new, planet-heavy sound were simply dismissed as dimwitted, offensive and beyond redemption. (ch. 4, “Pope on a Rope”, pg. 81)

But that second sentence is okay and a good summary of how Black Sabbath were treated by the rock press. They were a bad joke for decades. Not that they helped themselves, at times: Ozzy says that he didn’t find Spinal Tap funny because it was too close to the real thing. And it was partly inspired by Black Sabbath, who also went on the road with a Stonehenge stage-set. A very big one, with a performing midget. However, Wall doesn’t manage to mine much of the comedy in the Sabbath story. There’s a lot there, both intentional and unintentional, but Tony Iommi’s ghosted autobiography Iron Man (2011) is both funnier and better-written than this book. Iron Man isn’t as detailed or as objective, though: Wall knows how important Black Sabbath are, but he praises them only when they deserve it. They’ve recorded some bad albums too and Wall describes in detail how and why they went astray in the 1980s.

Re-uniting to play Live Aid in 1985 was a one mistake, for example, but I like the commemoratory photo, which is included in the last of the three photo-sections here. It’s one of their unintentionally humorous moments: Ozzy is harking back to his “Homo in a Kimono” get-up on the cover of Sabotage; Geezer is wearing red trousers and pointy red shoes; Tony is in shades and black-leather-with-dangly-bits; and Bill is looking like a rock-goblin, complete with beer belly, bandana and dirty red baseball boots.

I like that in a rock star, but I wouldn’t like to have been anywhere near him on one of his drinking-bouts: I’d prefer not to have read the story of a plumber turning up to Bill’s Parisian hotel-suite in 1980 to clear drains “clogged with his vomit” (ch. 7, “Neon Nights”, pg. 165). And I wouldn’t want to be near Ozzy whether he’s drunk or sober, stoned or straight. He’s entertaining and endearing, but I assume that he’s best appreciated at a distance. He departs Black Sabbath part-way through the book, but Wall stays with him and tells the story of his solo career, including the tragic death of his guitarist Randy Rhoades in a plane-crash. Wall also describes the success of Ozzy’s reality TV show, The Osbournes, and his various returns to the Black Sabbath fold, in between Ronnie Dio, Ian Gillan and the other vocalists whom Tony has recruited down the decades.

They have their stories told too, as do the Sabbath manager Don Arden and his daughter Sharon. Black Sabbath have had a long history, have crossed paths with a lot of other musicians and have influenced even more, from Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, as Wall notes, to the Melvins and Sunn O))), as Wall doesn’t note. The respect they now enjoy is a fitting tribute to their talent and their originality. This book could have been much funnier and easier-to-read, but it’s a detailed guide to an important band by a journalist who has known them – and even worked for them – since the 1980s. And it’s got an index, which is good. But a discography would have been good too.

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Go with the Quo

Status Quo: Still Doin’ It – The Official Updated Edition, compiled by Bob Young, edited by Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt (Omnibus Press 2013)

Status Quo have been responsible for some good music and some bad album-covers. I can’t decide which is the worst of the covers. I don’t need to explain the appeal of the music, because Brian May does it for me, joining John Peel, Hank Marvin and H.R.H. The Prince of Wales among the big names who pay tribute to a rock institution. Queen were touring Europe at the same time as Quo and May attended one of Quo’s gigs, probably in Germany:

I manoeuvred myself behind the back line, and found myself with my ears midway between the back of Francis’s amp and the back of Rick’s. So, crouching like a true addict, I got a perfect stereo image, and at entirely suitable volume! As they launched into “Down, Down” I could hear the twin clangs of their superb rhythm guitars interacting in perfect rapport, and I thought …this is a perfect moment. A moment of sheer privilege. There is NOTHING in rock quite like these two giants at full throttle … Nothing! (pg. 57)

“Rhythm” is a key word. So is “volume”. Status Quo are very loud. And yes, despite the good songs, they can be very naff too. If they weren’t one of the inspirations for Spinal Tap, they should have been. But I think they were. Maybe even the chief inspiration. The names of both are amphimacers (dum-di-dum), both come from London and both started playing hippyish flower-power music in the 1960s before finding their true path. In early photos of Quo you can see frilly shirts, page-boy haircuts and even jumpers, cardigans and blazers. Then they put on their denim, grew their hair down and started their Piledriver. The Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, whose first “front-row” show was Status Quo in Copenhagen when he was eleven, calls the cover of that album the “first real head-banging visual unleashed to the masses”.

That’s in the foreword, where Ulrich goes on to describe the effects of the show and the album: “Quo were, to this snot-nosed Danish kid in the mid-1970s, KING SHIT”. But his praise may be misleading. One crucial difference between Status Quo and Spinal Tap, or Status Quo and Metallica, is that Status Quo aren’t heavy metal. They don’t write about Satan, violence or sex and they don’t use stage-props. No Stonehenge or dry ice for Quo: just massed amps and loud riffs. “Our gimmick is that we don’t have a gimmick”, as they say on page 86. So the heavy-metal side of Spinal Tap came from bands like Black Sabbath and Uriah Heep. Spinal Tap play more complex music than Quo too, but Quo don’t mind. They have their simple formula and they’re sticking to it. When they went In Search of the Fourth Chord in 2007, they were joking.

Some bad album-covers (click for larger versions)

That’s another way they aren’t heavy metal: no pretension or pomposity. No great technical skill or musical innovation either. Very few fans of Eric Clapton think “That could have been me.” Clapton plays too well and has been too influential for fans to easily picture themselves in his shoes. But lots of Status Quo fans must think that. Quo have rocked the world, not re-written rock. This book covers six decades of two blokes in a band: Francis Rossi and Rick Parfitt have always been there, drummers and bassists have come and gone. It would have been better with an index and a discography, but it’s mostly pictures anyway. Like Quo’s songs, some pictures are good, some are bad. After all, only the mediocre are always at their best. Quo haven’t been at their best very often, but I’m glad that they’re still doing it and still enjoying it.

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Elsewhere other-posted:

• More Musings on Music

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Bleeding Black

Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns n’ Roses, Stephen Davis (Michael Joseph 2008)

The back cover calls the book “AN EPIC TALE OF EXCESS, DEBAUCHERY, ADDICTION, PARANOIA, MANIA AND GREAT F**KING MUSIC”. It gets five out of six right. Stephen Davis is also the author of the Led-Zeppography Hammer of the Gods, first published in 1985. Since then, his writing has got better and his subjects have got worse. I don’t like Led Zeppelin much and I don’t think Robert Plant is a very good singer. But Led Zep sound good set beside Guns n’ Roses. They sound subtle too. A few of GNR’s songs start well. I forget what happens to them after that. As for “November Rain”… Sheesh. It’s so wrong on so few levels that it’s probably prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Yes, you understand American foreign policy better after hearing – and watching – what GNR do to rock music:

Niven cautions that Guns didn’t think Spinal Tap was funny. (ch. 6, “The Big Guns n’ Roses Adventure”, pg. 159)

But the main explanation for what’s wrong with GNR isn’t that they found success while based in Los Angeles. That isn’t fatal for a band. Mötley Crüe did too, but they are entertainingly cartoonish. GNR are obnoxiously cartoonish. No, the main explanation for what’s wrong with GNR is simple: W. Axl Rose. Davis holds his nose – hard – and takes the lid off the kid from Lafayette, Indiana. Racism, sexism, homophobia, killing small dogs – it’s all here in unflinching detail. But Axl has a bad side too. And the cycling shorts are by no means the worst of it. There’s also the plagiarism:

Then something crucial happened. Photographer Robert John took Axl to see a group he was shooting: Shark Island, the house band at Gazzari’s on the Strip. Shark Island was supposed to be a great metal band, but they were too fond of melodies, plus their hair was all wrong, and so they would never break out of the L.A. metal circuit. But Richard Black, Shark Island’s lead singer, was a charismatic front man with killer stage moves, the kind of small-venue choreography that could make a packed club break out in a communal, drenching sweat and get the joint rocking on its foundations. Axl watched Richard Black with total fascination and then proceeded to appropriate his act. …

According to Robert John, “In Hollywood Rose and L.A. Guns, Axl jumped straight up and down, holding onto the mike stand for balance. Axl later admitted he’d got the whole snake move, that S-curve, from Richard. He once told me that he even wanted Richard to somehow get credit for this. Most of Axl’s moves” – the headlong run across the stage, the furious stomp, holding the mike stand straight out with both hands, the blatantly sexual snake dance – “that’s all Richard Black.” (ch. 4, “The Treacherous Journey”, pp. 60-1)

In a better world, Shark Island might have had the big success and GNR the bit-part in their four-hundred-page biography. But success would probably have corrupted Shark Island too and swollen Richard Black’s head. Still, it’s impossible to believe that they would ever have become as bloated and excessive as GNR or that Black could ever have out-assholed Axl. GNR are one of the Big Three among the bands that I hate. The other two are The Clash and Oasis. But GNR are odious in a more entertaining way than those two. I can’t imagine even picking up a biography of The Clash. And if I ever try a biography of Oasis, it will be strictly out of primatological interest. This, on the other hand, is a readable book about risible people. I couldn’t read all of it, but it’s hard to believe Stephen Davis doesn’t sometimes feel the same about the people:

One time, after [Bret] Michael [of Poison] had slagged Guns, Axl confronted Poison backstage and told them, to their face, that they sucked. Bobby Dall, whose band already had a record deal, replied: “Maybe fucking so – but you gotta suck, sometimes, to make it in this business – and you guys will never make it at all.”

This stuck in Axl’s craw. Sucking was against everything W. Axl Rose believed in. (ch. 3, “The Treacherous Journey”, pp. 74-5)

That’s funny and I hope that Davis meant it to be. But the joke wears thin well before the end of this book. Okay, three of the band – Axl, Slash and Duff McKagan – looked good for a bit, early on, but the best thing GNR ever did was inspire this article in The Guardian:

Minute five: Is mainly taken up with Slash being a rock god. For those readers who are unfamiliar with this song – which is possibly a criminal act, may I add – you know when Regina Spektor sings “The solo’s real long, but it’s a pretty song” in “On the Radio”? This is the solo she means.

A helicopter flies around Slash, giving us rockgodness from all angles, although possibly putting his cigarette out in the process, which is not a bad thing, as it will kill you.

Smoking, I mean, not guitar solos. Although if any guitar solo could kill, it would be this one. You can tell Slash is a rock god because his stance is so wide he is almost doing the splits. (Read on: Guns N’ Roses – November Rain)

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Halfway to Paralysed

Halfway to Paradise: The Birth of British Rock, Alwyn W. Turner (V&A Publishing, 2008)

This is a big book about big names. But not always respected names: Cliff Richard is a by-word for “bland” and Tommy Steele was much more music-hall than mean, moody and magnificent. And some of the names were big back then, half-forgotten now, like the charismatic but unlucky Billy Fury from Liverpool. He was born Ronnie Wycherley, which explains his change of name. Vince Eager, Georgie Fame, Johnny Gentle, Dickie Pride and Marty Wilde weren’t born under those names either. Re-invention is an important part of rock: musos are made to sound and look meaner. Or milder. The Beatles, who appear in the final chapter, were taken out of their black leather. Which is ironic, because it was inspired by Gene Vincent, who was put into his:

Vincent had been brought over to Britain by Jack Good, primarily to appear as the star of the television show Boy Meets Girls. Anticipating danger, Good had been horrified to meet off the plane a polite Southern gentleman. “I thought he was going to be a dagger boy, the rock and roll screaming end,” he remembered, before adding with some relish, “I had to fix him.” He readjusted Vincent’s look so that, by the time the star reached the television screen, he was dressed in black leather and ostentatiously dragged his damaged leg behind him. When asked later about this new image, Good cited Shakespeare’s Richard III as a model, with the moodiness of Hamlet thrown in, and admitted that the set was constructed to make it more difficult for his star: “I arranged for some steps so that he could hobble nicely on TV, but he negotiated them very well and hardly looked as if he was hobbling at all. I had to yell out, ‘Limp, you bugger, limp!’ He didn’t mind. He limped.” (ch. 3, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, pg. 94)

Vincent was an idol of the Shadows, Cliff Richard’s backing group, and the bassist Jet Harris is quoted as saying: “That’s what we called real rock and roll.” But the Shadows appeared in suits, not black leather, and so did all the other British acts discussed and pictured here. They might have admired Gene Vincent, but they dressed like Buddy Holly. And played like him too: British rockers didn’t have the primal power, the jungle rumble, of Americans like Gene Vincent, Duane Eddy and Eddie Cochran. Unlike Elvis, that trio all performed in Britain, but doing so killed Eddie Cochran: he died in a car-crash near Bristol in 1960 at only the age of 21. He was the greatest of the early rockers, I think, or at least the greatest might-have-been. If you’ve never heard “Somethin’ Else”, “C’mon Everybody” or “Summertime Blues”, you haven’t heard the roots of rock. If Cochran did all that having barely left his teens, what might he have done later?

He reminds me of Évariste Galois, the French mathematician who died at twenty but whose work is still honoured in his field. I don’t think Cochran was a genius like Galois, but he had great talent and he stands out in his photos, on-stage in 1960, like a peacock among crows. His backing players, presumably British, wear suits and ties. Cochran wears black-leather trousers and a metallic waistcoast over a plaid shirt. He dominates the stage as he might have dominated the ’60s, but he never reached 1961. His posthumous single, “Three Steps to Heaven”, topped the charts in Britain but “didn’t even make the top 100 in the United States”. It wasn’t a very good single, after all, but Britain was grateful for his tour and he has always remained popular here. It would be some time before Brits were brewing rock’n’roll as potent as that of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent at their best. Vincent was hampered by a bad leg. Perhaps Brits were hampered by good taste.

You can see them beginning to shake it off here, but the most memorable photo remains that of Eddie Cochran in 1960, king of the stage and ready to reign in the decade ahead. He’d never get a chance to and the book says he foresaw this. After Buddy Holly died in a plane-crash, Cochran had premonitions of his own death in an accident. He wanted to stop touring and concentrate on studio work. But the need for money brought him across the Atlantic and sent him back dead. It’s a memorable story, which is why I mistrust it. The re-inventions of rock don’t stop after death and Cochran pioneered more than music for Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. They too would die young and attract memorable stories, but there’s little hint of their drugs and decadence here. Cochran was about songs, not sybaritism, and didn’t celebrate self-indulgence.

He’d be in his seventies now, like the Rolling Stones, who don’t quite make this book. That’s appropriate, because I think he’d have given more to music if he’d survived.

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Def and the Maiden

Rock Chronicles: A Visual History of the World’s Greatest 250 Rock Acts, general editor David Roberts, foreword by Alice Cooper (2012)

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Rock stars used to die of drink and drugs. Now it’s decrepitude too. Alice Cooper, who writes the foreword to this slab-like selection of sonic samurai, is in his sixties. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are about to enter their seventies. Chuck Berry is in his eighties. They haven’t died before they got old and their tunes-for-teens are now a soundtrack to senility. Rock itself will last till the arrival of the Deus ex Machina (or DeM), I reckon, which means it probably won’t see out its century. But some of the bands in this book may already have written music for that apotheosis of the anthropic: I was both surprised and pleased to find that the big names of kraut-rock are all covered, from Kraftwerk to Can by way of Einstürzende Neubaten and Popul Vuh. Also covered are those odd and eerie avant-acousticians Magma, so you can indulge your Vander-lust and see some unusual umlauts by reading about Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandoh and other monuments of Zeuhl. But I wonder whether the DeM – the electronically enhanced superhuman who will overthrow such concepts as individuality and personality – will find less unconventional bands more interesting. There might be more intellectual meat in Carcass than in Can, as it were. Or music might not interest him/Him at all.

Not that the Liverpudlian gore-metal pioneers Carcass find their way into this book, though they’re probably much better-known in the English-speaking world than some of the bands that do, like the Brazilians Legião Urbana, the Argentinians Soda Stereo, the Spaniards Héroes del Silencio, and the Russians B-2 (Би-2). I suspect that progressive, diversity-desirous worthiness was at work in some of the choices, but it’s good to have some unknowns in among the obvious and nowadays it’s easy to sample the music of a new band that sounds interesting. But the unknowns conform to the rules of rock: this music is overwhelmingly created by white males and white males have been its most successful and famous performers. Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix are big exceptions, but neither is of pure black ancestry and I don’t think blacks on their own could ever have created rock’s sonic sine qua non: the electric guitar. Or electric amplification, at least. I’m not sure the Chinese or Japanese could have either. They have the intelligence, but not necessarily the innovatory impulse. Either way, they’ve certainly taken it up enthusiastically and some Eastern bands here even play tribute to it in their names: Japan’s Loudness and Guitar Wolf, for example.

Dionysos

Loudness is one of the things that interest me about rock, though I prefer not to experience it for real. Electric amplification allowed man to bellow back at Mother Nature for the first time. In a controlled and sustained way, at least. We’ve been able to bang back with explosions for centuries, but the electric guitar was strum-for-thunder and put extreme volume under the control of single individuals. Camille Paglia compares rock-musicians to Dionysos Bromios, Dionysus the Thunderer, and it’s interesting to wonder whether other Dionysiac attributes, like androgyny, are reflected in the long hair traditionally associated with the loudest forms of rock. Or was it simple psychology? Loud music attracts attention and so does long hair, after all. But heavy metal is interesting, or attention-grabbing, not just for its volume: it’s one of the clearest examples of the way rock has evolved. As the book notes, the “earthy riffing” of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” spawned the genre in the early ’sixties. It’s gone on to mutate and morbidify in all manner of ways down the decades, but none of the metal bands here are particularly extreme, unless you want to give that label to the pretentious, po-faced, and faux-dangerous Slipknot. I don’t: I think Black Sabbath were much more interesting and original in their early days. The Sabs are one of the big names who get two pages of text and two pages of photos, which incorporate a side-column of classic album covers. The images for Paranoid (1970) and Sabotage (1975) are too small to come across as they should – which is ridiculously – but the photos of the Sabs have the c-factor in two ways: the band either look cool or make you cringe.

Click for larger images

So do other big names, though some photo-sections are all cool (The Jam) or all cringe (The Scorpions). And some will make you chuckle, like Angus Young clowning in his schoolboy uniform in the entry for AC/DC. But Angus can look cool too: it’s interesting how some people photograph well and some don’t. The Californian punk-band Green Day supply one of each: the singer and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong has camera-charisma and the bassist Mike Dirnt doesn’t. Green Day, a three-piece, raise another interesting question: why have bands usually had four members? My theory is that the instruments and personalities in a four-piece band best match the four standard forms of human personality, which were classified in the classical world as sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholy. The labels are based on a pseudo-medical system of humours, or body fluids, but also correspond, in modern psychology, to the personality dimensions neuroticism and introversion-extraversion: sanguine people are low on neuroticism and high on extraversion; choleric are high on both; melancholic are low on extraversion and high on neuroticism; and phlegmatic are low on both. Like Green Day, Guns’n’Roses are an exception to the four-piece rule and don’t fit neatly into a tetradic personality classification. Teratic might be closer the mark for at least one Gunner. Precisely how one would classify Axl Rose’s personality remains a challenge for morbid psychiatry, but he did look good in the early days of the band, I have to admit.

Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe, who are also given two pages of text and two pages of photos, has managed to look good much longer, despite the heroin addiction and the near-death experiences. But da Crüe have another c-factor: they’re often more cartoonish than cool. Their priapic predecessors Led Zeppelin were coolest at their capillariest: when their locks were longest in their middle years. As the ’eighties began their hair shortened and their clothes became workaday, not flamboyant. Then Bonzo died before he got old, which I’ve always felt was a shame from a scientific point of view. Def Leppard pay obvious onomastic hommage to Zep and coagulate cool and cringe in their photos, though tending more to the latter. One of their photos puts the “cock” into rock and the “flourish” into phallic with no fewer than four guitars jutting skyward from the crotch. Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac finds another way to put the cock into rock, suggestively clutching at and positioning a jutting microphone in 1979. Suggestively to the phallocentric photographer and viewer, that is: Nicks didn’t deliberately perform in that kind of way, but she is one of the rare attractive women in this book. Perhaps the most attractive is the blonde guitarist Orianthi, now performing with Alice Cooper but young enough to be his grand-daughter.

Cooper supplies another c-factor: the creepy one. I’ve never liked the look of him or felt comfortable about enjoying his music. Phil Collins has always made my flesh crawl too and Elton John is so revolting that I can’t even bring myself to look at his photos or read his biography, though I assume that, beside the creepiness, he supplies a fifth c-factor: the camp one, as evident in the photo-sections for Queen and Prince. Then there’s the cack-factor, as evident in the Scorpions, the Clash, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, and the über-egregious Iron Maiden, whose cover-art has always been more interesting than their music, though not much less adolescent. Finally, there’s the Cro-Magnon-factor: shumble forward moronic muso-Mancas Oasis. They have stiff competition from Guns’n’Roses, the Clash, and Springsteen, but I think they’re the band I hate most in this book: Liam Gallagher is Axl Rose minus the stage-presence and beauty (and Axl was beautiful, almost ethereally so, in his youth). But one photo of the Gallaghers unconsciously chimping it up for the camera does raise the question of rock genetics. What are the genetic patterns in this book? The Beatles and the Smiths look very Irish too, though in a much more positive way, and their music was obviously much more intelligent and attractive. But are Celtic genes over-represented there and elsewhere? I’d suggest they are, but how much do they contribute to musicianship and how much to the desire to perform? After all, Oasis definitely have the latter, but don’t appear to have much of the former.

The Cro-Magnon Factor: Noel and Liam Gallagher

I’ve also read that, beside the Cro-Magnon looks, cloddish music, and cretinous behaviour, Oasis are responsible for the curse of compression: the recording technique that reduces the difference between loud and soft sounds to give music more punch in noisy settings. If so, it would be entirely fitting: compression reduces the light and shade in music and makes it less subtle. Musically speaking, you’re painting in broader strokes with a brighter, less varied palette, as though Leonardo had created the Mona Lisa with a roller-brush and house-paint. Nice one, Cro-Mancs! Their rivals Blur, who get two pages of text but no photo-section, used to insult them with epithets like Oasis Quo and Status Quoasis, but I think that insults Status Quo rather than Oasis. I’d much rather listen to Status Quo than Oasis or Blur, but I wouldn’t like to attend one of their gigs. They don’t get a photo-section, but like Kiss, who do, I know that they like massed rows of amps and play it very loud. I prefer imagining high volume to experiencing it, because I value my hearing and don’t like insulting any of my senses with artificial stimulants. Rock-in-the-raw counts as one of those and has sometimes bellowed back too loudly and too long at Mother Nature, becoming part of modernity’s tendency to tyrannize the world with technology. Just as street-lighting drowns the stars and modern agriculture destroys subtle flavours, amplified music often drowns beautiful natural sounds or its own subtleties. Most of the bands here don’t sink to the level of dance music or rap, which has a silent-c-factor, but they haven’t always added to the beauty of the world rather than its brutality.

Or its boorishness. But those who inflict loud music on others sometimes pay the price for it. Human beings aren’t adapted to very high volume and a lot of the pale males in this book must suffer from tinnitus. Which is another interesting phenomenon: rock can be music that goes on giving, even when the recipient doesn’t want it to. Attend a Motörhead gig and your ears may remember it, or regret it, for the rest of your life. Motörhead get two pages of text but no photos and, although it’s not mentioned here, have used one of the most interesting titles I’ve ever come across: “Everything Louder than Everything Else”. It’s actually a line from Deep Purple’s Jon Lord and is a reminder than language is more interesting than music, though perhaps not more fundamental to human nature. The two may have a common origin, though music obviously evolves more easily: you can also find it, in one form or another, among birds, fish and insects. But those groups don’t have the symbolic powers of human beings: this book is all about sounds and their creators, but you can experience it in complete silence. In short, it evokes musical memories through words and pictures, all the way from AC/DC and Aerosmith to Frank Zappa and Z.Z. Top, a three-piece who are famous for their beards, of course. Except for Frank Beard, the drummer, who is clean-shaven. And when Gilette offered Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill “a million dollars each to shave their beards for a commercial”, they turned the offer down. “We’re too ugly,” Gibbons said. The humour in this book doesn’t just come from the photos, but there are too many bands and some of them have existed too long for the text to provide detailed history or analysis. But if you like rock and want to see lots of cool, clownish, cringe-worthy, camp, crap, Cro-Magnon and creepy rock’n’rollers, it’s worth a long look. Or even two or three. But looking and listening aren’t all rock invites us to do. I wish some of the information here was easier to extract: I’d like to have a database of names, ages, and origins for some statistical analysis. There are patterns to be found in rock before the DeM drops in and humanity drops out.

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