RIP Gordon Spittle

I was sorry to see the name Gordon Spittle in today’s death notices.

Gordon was a sub-editor at The Dominion when I was there in the late 1980s. He also wrote Counting the Beat, published in 1997 – one of the best books about New Zealand pop music that I’ve read.

A comprehensive, authoritative and well-written history of Kiwi popular music from early folk songs through to Dave Dobbyn, Crowded House and the heyday of the Dunedin sound, it deserved far more recognition than it got. No New Zealand pop fan's book collection is complete without it.

Gordon died in Auckland on August 12, aged 72.

Wall of Sound, or Wall of Noise?

So Phil Spector has died. I was on holiday on a remote part of the coast with limited internet access at the time, so couldn’t have read the obituaries even if I’d wanted to. But let me guess that they almost unanimously hailed him as a flawed prodigy.

They would also, I imagine, have mentioned the so-called Wall of Sound – the recording technique Spector pioneered, in which masses of musicians were packed into the recording studio to create a dense, multi-layered aural barrage. I mean, why use only one drummer, one guitarist, one bassist and one keyboard player when you could have three or four playing each instrument in unison?

With Spector in the control room, the dial was permanently set at 11. That was supposedly his unique genius, and it led to preposterously hyperbolic comparisons with Wagner.

To be fair, lots of people admired him. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, for one, was in awe of Spector and yearned to emulate his sound, to the point that it became an obsession that almost literally drove Wilson mad. But if you ask me (and admittedly, no one has; the phone has inexplicably been silent), Spector didn’t produce a Wall of Sound so much as a Wall of Noise.

It was surely no coincidence that he was at his creative and commercial peak in the 1960s, an era when the American taste for bigness and excess was also evident in the grotesquely large, ostentatious cars rolling off Detroit assembly lines. Spector’s records were the aural equivalent of a 1960 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with its enormous bulk, acres of vulgar chrome and tailfins that were both outlandish and utterly pointless.  

It has always puzzled me that Brian Wilson measured himself against Spector and found himself wanting. Musically as well as physically, Wilson was a colossus compared with his pint-sized idol. I remain unconvinced that the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds is the perfect album everyone says it was (although it included God Only Knows, one of the most exquisite pop songs ever written); but though Pet Sounds was supposedly influenced by Spector, it had subtlety and nuance in abundance. These are not qualities associated with Spector, any more than they are associated with the Cadillac de Ville (or, for that matter, the Harley-Davidson Electra-Glide, which came from the same era).

And here’s another thing. At the same time as Spector was being lionised for making noisy, overblown, bombastic music in LA, British producers and musical arrangers whom virtually no one has heard of – people such as Johnny Franz and Ivor Raymonde – were creating records which, while just as imposing sonically, also showed finesse, restraint and an appreciation of light and shade. Just listen to any of the big hits by the Walker Brothers or Dusty Springfield –  songs such as Make It Easy On Yourself, The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, All I See Is You, I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten – and you might see what I mean. These are big, powerful songs, but they resonate emotionally in a way that Spector’s records never did.

By way of contrast, check out River Deep – Mountain High, by Ike and Tina Turner. Spector regarded this 1966 recording as his magnum opus, the ultimate expression of his talent, but to my ears it’s a frenetic, undisciplined din with little to commend it other than its furious pace, noise and energy. (The original video’s worth watching, mind you.)

Spector was bitterly disappointed when River Deep tanked, peaking at No. 88 on the Billboard chart. Perhaps public taste had moved on by then; the 1966 Cadillac Coupe de Ville was notably more restrained than its predecessors, and all the better for it.

So it's true then - pop music HAS become boring

(First published in the Nelson Mail, the Manawatu Standard and stuff.co.nz.)

I did something last week that I almost never do. I watched an item on Seven Sharp.

This particular item had been previewed during an ad break in the 6 o’clock news and it aroused my interest. It asked the provocative question, has pop music got boring?

So I watched the item, and the answer reporter Tim Wilson gave was: Yes, it has.

Ah, so it’s not just me then.

Here I was wondering whether I was alone in harrumphing over the monotony of 21^st century pop.

I had rebuked myself for doing what people have always done when they get to a certain age – namely, shake their heads at the incomprehensible tastes of the young. But here seemed to be at least partial confirmation of my view that pop music has become drearily predictable and insipid.

Wilson interviewed Auckland musician and arranger Godfrey de Grut, who lectures in popular music studies at the University of Auckland. De Grut comes with plenty of music industry cred, having worked with the likes of Che Fu, Brooke Fraser and Boh Runga.

Admittedly de Grut is no teenager, and neither is Wilson. But they’re a lot younger (and cooler) than I am, so I took heart from their assessment that mainstream pop music has become, in de Grut’s words, bland and homogeneous.

De Grut was able to explain in simple terms what it is about these songs that makes them l sound so similar. They use the same song structures and the same sterile technology. Often they’ve been crafted by the same songwriter. To me it all sounds pre-packaged and bloodless – the aural equivalent of junk food.

The Seven Sharp item seemed to confirm the impressions I’d formed on a recent car trip, when I couldn’t find any of the radio stations I usually favour and ended up listening to a pop station.

I started listening because there was nothing else available, but I stayed tuned out of curiosity and fascination at the sheer relentless sameness of the music.

Song after song followed the same pattern: simple, repetitive, almost childlike melodies – they reminded me of nursery rhymes – over an insistent, pulsing electronic beat.

It struck me as being fashionably gender-neutral. The voices were almost asexual, even androgynous, to the extent that it was sometimes hard to tell whether the singer was male or female.

I have no idea who the performers were, but I recognised the songs as being representative of a genre that’s heard everywhere in hotel lobbies, cafes and airport terminals. You can’t escape it, no matter how desperately you might want to.

It’s the same music that I’m forced to listen to when I’m put on hold while waiting to talk to my internet service provider/bank/insurance company/whatever. I assume it’s their way of persuading you to give up and leave them alone.

I even hear it if I wake early and tune into NewstalkZB’s Early Edition to get the first news of the day. For some reason there’s always a pop song playing behind the host when she comes back on air after the 5.30am bulletin.

Listening to this stuff, I find myself wondering whether pop music has exhausted itself and retreated to the same safe space it inhabited before rock and roll.

I’m just old enough to remember the dull, anodyne pop that emanated from radios before Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. It was the era of The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane by the Ames Brothers, Hot Diggity Dog Ziggity by Perry Como and How Much is that Doggie in the Window, by Patti Page. 

Rock and roll arrived in the nick of the time. If it wasn’t for Presley, Haley, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, we would have succumbed to the stupefying effects of an obesity-inducing musical diet that consisted wholly of white bread, doughnuts and marshmallow.

With the advent of rock and roll, popular music acquired not only a raw energy but an edgy, almost menacing quality. At the moment I’m reading an excellent book called 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, in which British writer Jon Savage analyses the culture and politics of that year through the prism of pop music.

By that time the epicentre of the pop world had shifted from America to London. It was the golden era of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Kinks – bands that produced their own distinctive sounds and could never have been mistaken for each other, unlike today’s sound-alikes.

Savage’s book is also a reminder that the sullen, pouty, rebellious stance of bands like the Stones and the Who was seen as a potent threat to the conservative establishment.

It occurs to me that no one could take offence at today’s mainstream pop, other than on aesthetic grounds. Perhaps that’s its problem.

Perhaps Jack London was right

(This is a slightly longer version of a column first published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, May 3.)

Willie Nelson turned 84 a few days ago. Remarkably, he’s still performing.

That he’s even alive after an often turbulent and reckless life is an achievement in itself, and one that sets him apart in a business not commonly associated with feats of longevity.

Nelson is unusual in that he was something of a late starter. He initially won recognition as a songwriter and was well into his 40s before anyone took notice of him as a singer and guitar player.

Perhaps there’s something to be said for long incubation periods, because musicians tend to follow the reverse pattern.

Jimi Hendrix would be 74 if he were still alive today. Jim Morrison of the Doors would be 73, John Lennon would be 76 and Elvis Presley 82. But of course they all peaked early and died relatively young.

I sometimes wonder how they would have turned out had they lived longer.

I suspect they wouldn’t have aged well. In fact clear signs of decline had already appeared in the latter three, and even Hendrix seemed to have lost his way musically when he died at 27. His most creative years already seemed behind him.

Perhaps he would have become another Miles Davis, who revolutionised jazz trumpet in the same way that Hendrix did the electric guitar, and who went on exploring new musical paths for decades. We’ll never know.

Lennon never scaled the same heights as a solo artist that he had achieved with the Beatles, and Morrison – grossly overrated even in his prime, if you ask me – didn’t seem to have much gas left in his tank when he took himself off to Paris in 1971, where he died of a heroin overdose.

As for Presley … well, what can you say? He was still only 42 when he died, but he was bloated musically as well as physically and the hits had stopped coming.

If you wanted to be cynical, you’d say all four probably did their image a favour by dying young. Because the evidence suggests that most pop and rock stars enjoy a few glorious years of peak creativity – sometimes described as their “imperial phase” – after which they go into decline.

“Intensity and longevity are natural enemies,” the American novelist Jack London is supposed to have said, and there’s ample evidence that he was right, at least when his aphorism is applied to music.

Steve Winwood was hailed as a genius in his youth. He was barely 17 when he wrote and sang Gimme Some Lovin’ for the Spencer Davis Group, and even then he had enjoyed a string of earlier hits. But he hasn’t done anything notable for decades.

Jimmy Webb wrote some deservedly enduring and richly evocative songs (Up, Up and Away, By the Time I Get To Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, MacArthur Park – in the late 60s and early 70s, but who can name anything of significance that he’s done since?

Neil Diamond? Stevie Wonder? Elton John? My case rests. And of course we can only speculate on what Buddy Holly and Sam Cooke might have achieved had they not died young, but perhaps they too had already peaked. 

Neil Young confronted the transience of rock stardom in his 1979 song Hey Hey, My My, with its famous line: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”. At the time, Young wasn’t sure how much longer his career would last. The rise of punk threatened to displace ageing folk-rockers like him, and he was deeply affected by the death of Presley two years earlier. 

The irony was that Hey Hey, My My and the album it was taken from, Rust Never Sleeps, revitalised Young’s career. Today he’s one of the few survivors of 1960s rock who still commands respect for continuing to push himself in new directions.

A few others manage to keep the flame burning. Bruce Springsteen still seems to have genuine fire in his belly, more than 40 years after his first hit. David Bowie was exploring new territory up to the very end. Bob Dylan still seems to find fresh things to say, and fresh ways to say them (his latest album consisted of standards from the American Songbook). Even Brian Wilson, the unstable genius behind the Beach Boys, is enjoying a long Indian summer and still seems motivated to create.

On the other hand there are those who virtually become self-parodies. It may be heresy to say this, but Eric Clapton these days just seems to go through the motions.

He’s still idolised, but no one daubs “Clapton is God” on London walls anymore. The incandescent talent that he displayed with the Yardbirds and Cream in the late 1960s, when he seemed to discover guitar notes that no one had ever heard before, soon faded.

Then there are the Rolling Stones, similarly still trading on their past glory – which, to be fair, is all their fans want.

No one goes to a Stones concert expecting to hear interesting new material. The band haven’t had a major hit since the 1980s and on their most recent album, Blue and Lonesome, regressed to their early 1960s roots by recording songs by black bluesmen including Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf Burnett and Jimmy Reed.

The Beatles had a slightly longer imperial phase than most, starting in 1963 and peaking in 1967 with the Sgt Pepper album. Their musical evolution over those four years – with guidance from their inspirational producer, George Martin – was astonishing, but by the time of their double White Album in 1968 you could sense that their best was behind them.

They were sounding less like a cohesive unit than four individuals pursuing their own projects. Most notably, the extraordinary chemistry that had made Lennon and Paul McCartney the most successful songwriting team of the rock and roll era had evaporated.

When the band released their Abbey Road album in 1969, it didn’t consist of songs so much as fragments of songs, few of which sounded as if they had been fully developed. That’s probably because Lennon and McCartney depended on each other for ideas and inspiration, and would turn to each other when they got stuck. But by Abbey Road, the two were pulling in different directions (there’s a continuing debate as to whether Yoko Ono was to blame for this) and the magic had gone.

But back to those rock stars whose imperial phases ended abruptly in death. “Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse” was a famous line from the 1949 movie Knock on Any Door. The words are often wrongly attributed to James Dean, no doubt because they're strangely apt in his case.

Dean died in a high-speed car smash at the age of 24, after just three movies. A death wish? Who knows? He was, by all accounts, a troubled man. But certainly he got out at his peak, and in doing so ensured his memory would forever remain fabled.

Dean was eternally preserved as his fans wanted to remember him – a bit like Hendrix, Morrison and the rest.  But what a price to pay for immortality. 

The futile quest to identify pop music's greatest year

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, September 7.)

There seems to be some sort of contest underway to determine the most significant year in the history of pop music. Over the past year or so, several music writers have submitted their nominations.

For Andrew Grant Jackson, it was 1965. The American writer’s book 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music fastens onto the Beatles’ album Rubber Soul, the Rolling Stones’ hit (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and the Dylan album Highway 61 Revisited, on which His Royal Bobness, realising that pop stars had much more fun than earnest folkies, re-invented himself.  

British writer Jon Savage opts for the year that followed. In 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, he examines the significance of the milestone Beach Boys’ album Pet Sounds, the emergence of New York proto-punk band the Velvet Underground and the powerful influence of drugs, notably LSD, on pop music.

Now we jump to 1971. Another British writer, David Hepworth, suggests this was the year when the pop music era ended and the rock era began, although the distinction is entirely artificial.

 

In Never a Dull Moment: 1971 The Year that Rock Exploded (note the nod to Savage’s title) Hepworth bases his case, less than persuasively, on a series of unconnected developments: Don McLean’s American Pie, David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Rod Stewart’s Maggie May and Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. Good luck finding any commonality in that lot.

 

Now someone named James Woodall has got in on the act. In the British magazine The Spectator, Woodall makes a case for 1976, pronouncing that it “left a more multifarious pop and rock legacy than any year I can think of”.

 

Again, his reasoning his less than convincing. Certainly, 1976 was the year of the Sex Pistols, when the primitive thrashings of punk challenged the increasingly bombastic excesses of mainstream rock, but that’s about it.

 

Other than that, Woodall can justify his choice only on the basis that several singers – Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Dylan and Bowie – produced records in 1976 that became his personal favourites. That doesn't make it a watershed year for anyone other than him. 

 

What emerges from all this is that it’s possible to choose almost any year since the start of the rock and roll era (however that’s defined – I’ll come back to that later) and argue, on the basis of a few cherry-picked examples, that it was some sort of milestone.

 

In any case, I read somewhere recently – I think it may have been in Flying Nun Records founder Roger Shepherd’s entertaining book In Love with These Times – that everyone is convinced the music of their own youth is the greatest of all time, and I think that’s probably true.

 

The teenage years tend to be the time when music leaves its deepest imprint because emotions are intense at that stage of our lives and we’re at our most impressionable.

 

As it happens, I too would mount a vigorous case for 1965 or 1966 (my own teenage years) as the greatest years in pop music, although probably not for the same reasons as Jackson and Savage. It was a time when pop music was not only reaching new heights of sophistication, but branching off into multiple new directions. 

But even I can't be emphatic. Which was the greater Beatles album: Rubber Soul or Revolver, which came out the following year? My answer tends to depend on whichever one I'm listening to at the time. And anyway, what about Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was issued in 1967 and arguably represents the apotheosis of pop creativity? 

The truth is, no one can say with pontifical certainty that there was a single greatest year. 

I suspect an element of commercial opportunism behind the current spate of pop histories. Particularly among affluent baby boomers, there’s a hunger for nostalgia about pop culture and a desire to revisit their glory years.

 

It’s also apparent that there’s some convenient historical reinvention going on. Music writers are very good at retrospectively reading profound significance into historical events and making them fit whatever cultural narrative happens to be fashionable.

 

The emergence of the Velvet Underground, for instance, is reverentially treated as a development of almost biblical significance, although it went virtually unnoticed at the time other than by the arty New York elite. Even now the band remains essentially a cultish fascination, worshipped for reasons that have little to do with music.

 

Besides, all these books bypass what were arguably the most significant years of all: the years when rock and roll came into being. That’s probably because the precise origins of the genre are hard to pinpoint.

 

Conventional wisdom has it that it all began in 1955 with Rock Around the Clock, by Bill Haley and his Comets, but this is where it gets complicated.

 

Haley wasn’t really a true rock and roller; his background was in country music. His band was originally known as Bill Haley and the Saddlemen. 

Contrary to popular belief, Shake, Rattle and Roll (1954) was Haley's first rock and roll hit. Rock Around the Clock was first recorded in the same year and went to No 1 only after it featured on the soundtrack of the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle. 

Was it genuine rock and roll? Most musicologists accept that it was, but to my ears Haley’s hits owed more to the black jazz genre known as jump blues.

 

I would argue that it wasn’t until Elvis Presley stormed the charts in 1956 with Heartbreak Hotel that what we now recognise unmistakeably as rock and roll penetrated the commercial mainstream. But even then, Tutti Frutti by the wild black rocker Little Richard beat Presley to the punch by several months.

 

In any case, rock and roll wasn’t new. Black audiences had been listening to similar music for years. All Presley did was make it palatable to white ears.

 

For the true source of rock and roll, you have to go back at least as far as 1951 – to Rocket 88, by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (who were, in reality, Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm) – and even further. As I wrote in my recent book A Road Tour of American Song Titles, I defy anyone to listen to the young Fats Domino singing The Fat Man in 1949 and tell me it’s not rock and roll.

 

But no one, to my knowledge, has written a book devoted to 1951, and still less 1949, as the defining year of rock and roll. Could it be that we’re still perpetuating the cultural conceit that it was a white invention? 

'How Bizarre' turns out to have been aptly named after all

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, January 27).

I replayed the video of How Bizarre a few days ago, just to remind myself what all the fuss was about.

Remember the song? “Brother Pele’s in the back, sweet Sina’s in the front”.

Perhaps it would jog your memory if I mentioned the promotional video showing a red Chev Impala convertible with the singer Pauly Fuemana, wearing a tropical shirt, behind the wheel.

No one alive and sentient in New Zealand during the late 1990s could not have been aware of How Bizarre, both the song and its accompanying video (no one, that is, except the two otherwise knowledgeable gentlemen with whom I have lunch most Fridays, both of whom looked at me blankly a couple of weeks ago when I mentioned it).

How Bizarre was a phenomenon; there’s no other word for it. Recorded in Auckland in 1995 and attributed to OMC (for Otara Millionaires Club), it was arguably the most successful New Zealand pop record ever, topping charts in the United States, Australia and Canada and reaching the Top 10 in Britain, Germany and Sweden. The video was shown on US television an estimated 15,000 times.

The word “phenomenon” seems particularly apt because there was no obvious explanation for the song’s success.

It didn’t seem to matter that the lyrics didn’t make much sense. The history of pop music, after all, is littered with songs that became massive hits despite lyrics that were unintelligible. If you want verbal profundity, listen to Bob Dylan (although his lyrics don’t always make much sense either.)

How Bizarre chimed with record buyers and radio listeners for reasons that defy intellectual analysis. The most you can say is that the song was catchy, and that it seemed to capture the so-called zeitgeist – in other words, the spirit of its times.  

It had a sunny, laidback vibe that fused Pacifica-influenced South Auckland soul - Fuemana's vocal inflections were pure Otara - with South Central LA hip-hop. An incongruous dose of Mexican mariachi-style trumpet was thrown in for good measure. It’s fair to say no one had heard anything quite like it before.

At the time, credit for the song’s success was naturally given to Fuemana. To all intents and purposes, he was OMC. He was generally presented in the media as something of a backyard genius.

It took nearly 20 years for the real story to emerge. I read it over the holidays in an absorbing and well-written book by Simon Grigg, the owner of the Auckland record label that released Fuemana’s records.

Grigg’s book is called, naturally, How Bizarre, and those two words turn out to be far more apposite in the context of the book than they were in the song (which was about nothing bizarre at all; apparently Fuemana just liked the phrase).

The first thing that becomes evident in the book is that How Bizarre, the record, wouldn’t – couldn’t – have happened without Fuemana’s producer, Alan Jansson. A master of digital recording techniques, Jansson co-wrote the song (such as it is) and created the sound.

In fact it soon emerges that Fuemana had limited musical ability. According to Grigg, he had trouble even holding a tune. The reader gets the very clear impression that he wouldn’t have amounted to anything without Jansson’s inventiveness and technical wizardry.

In a sense, there’s nothing new here. Recording stars have always benefited from the ability of producers, engineers and musical arrangers to make them sound better than they really were. But recording technology is now so sophisticated, and so adept at embellishing and polishing sounds with digital massaging, that it almost doesn’t matter if the supposed “star” can’t hold a note.

The real stars are often the anonymous people manipulating the sound in the background. This seems to have been the case with Fuemana, whose contribution to the songs attributed to him often seems to have been minimal. He was a mere bit player in Land of Plenty, the follow-up hit to How Bizarre.

Grigg reveals this without malice. He was Fuemana’s friend, adviser and travelling companion throughout the roller-coaster How Bizarre years, but it was a friendship that was repeatedly tested to the limit.

Fuemana, who died in 2010, had charisma, charm and style, but he was also unstable, petulant, paranoid, naïve, feckless, egotistical and a fantasist. He often teetered on the edge of violence.

The reader is left wondering whether Grigg stuck with him because of his money-making potential or because he genuinely cared for him and wanted to protect him, often against himself. I decided it was probably the latter.

His book is an eye-opener. It’s no secret that the music business, internationally, is greedy, exploitative, manipulative, heartless and often extraordinarily stupid, being totally geared to the moving of “product”.

What was a revelation for me, reading How Bizarre, is that all the above is almost as true of the industry in New Zealand and Australia as it is in the US and Britain. A high proportion of the characters in the book come across as egotistical, nakedly ambitious, quick to take credit for other people's achievements and often just plain incompetent.

By the end, I found myself wondering how many good songs must have sunk without trace because some vain, stupid record company boss or radio programmer decided they didn’t fit whatever rigid, narrow, unimaginative template was being enforced at the time.

Farewell to a lovely man and a born entertainer

Sad to hear today that the immensely likeable Alec Wishart, the co-founder of Hogsnort Rupert, has died.

Alec was the charismatic front man who uttered the famous line “Come on, my lover, give us a kiss” from the band’s nonsensical 1970 hit Pretty Girl, which spent three weeks at No 1 on the New Zealand pop chart.

He remained with the band through multiple incarnations and was reportedly looking forward to a gig later this year when he died yesterday, aged 76.

I first encountered Hogsnort Rupert, then known as Hogsnort Rupert’s Original Flagon Band, in 1968, when the band I was with played at a dance organised by the Wellington Diamond United Football Club.

Hogsnort Rupert, who hadn’t long been formed, played a guest spot that night. They were all working-class English lads, drawn together initially by a love of football.

Their skiffle-inspired music was rough and ready but infectiously energetic and exuberant, much like the guys themselves. Guitarist, singer and songwriter Dave Luther was the serious musician of the band, and its driving force, but it was Alec’s engaging personality that people noticed.

An appearance on TV’s Studio One talent quest led to them being signed by HMV Records. Knowing I was a fan, their producer, the late Peter Dawkins – later to become one of the most influential figures in the Australian music industry – got me to write the sleeve notes for their first album: All Our Own Work! (still available, I noticed recently, on Trade Me).

The original lineup didn’t last long. A couple of the members got religion, after which the band was rebranded as Hogsnort Rupert, with Alec and Dave still forming the core, as they would do for the next 40-plus years. (When I passed up an invitation to join them as bass player, my flatmate and journalism colleague John Newton dusted off his old Hofner bass and became a member of Hogsnort Rupert just in time to play on Pretty Girl, one of the biggest and most enduring New Zealand hits of the era.)

The Hogsnorts had two more Top 10 hits, Aubrey and Aunty Alice, before their recording career subsided. Being essentially a novelty band, their chart history was probably bound to be brief. But they remained popular as a live act, and few New Zealand bands have been regarded with more affection.

That was largely due to Alec, who was one of those performers whose personality took on an extra dimension when he was on stage. But he was an engaging man in private too – witty, amiable and ego-free. All those who knew him will be grieving.

Why glamorise chaotic lives?

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 31.)

In the early hours of New Year’s Day 1953, a powder-blue Cadillac pulled into an all-night gas station at Oak Hill, West Virginia.

The driver, a man named Charles Carr, turned to speak to the lone passenger in the back seat. When there was no reply, Carr touched the man’s hand. It was cold.

Hank Williams, one of the first superstars of country music and still one of its most influential figures, had quietly expired while en route to his next engagement in Canton, Ohio. He was just 29.

We tend to think of early deaths from drug abuse and general excess as a phenomenon of the rock era, but Williams was ahead of his time. He died of heart failure brought on by a lethal cocktail of alcohol and pills. His personal life had been an utter mess.

The brilliant black jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker was another early casualty of the destructive lifestyle often associated with the music business. Parker’s heroin addiction resulted in him being fired so many times that he was sometimes reduced to busking in the street.

When he died in 1955 at the age of 34, the coroner who performed the autopsy presumed him to be aged between 50 and 60.

The British rock singer Joe Cocker, who died of lung cancer last week, could probably count himself relatively lucky. Cocker developed a serious drug and alcohol habit after his career went off the boil in the early 1970s, but he cleaned himself up. He lived to be 70, but you have to wonder whether his life was foreshortened by substance abuse.

Cocker lived through an era when drug use was rampant among rock musicians. And the casualties didn’t always die young, as the sad story of Jim Gordon attests.

Gordon was one of three drummers who backed Cocker on his wild Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour of America in 1970. He was greatly sought after as a studio musician and played on countless Los Angeles recording sessions.

He was also a drug user whose abusive and erratic behaviour became increasingly problematical. Eventually Gordon murdered his mother, claiming her voice had tormented him for years. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and 30 years later remains in a California prison, having been ruled a continuing threat to society.

Was Gordon’s mental illness caused by his drug habit? I’m no psychiatrist, but it seems well established that mental illness can be greatly aggravated – if not triggered – by drug use.

Some of Gordon’s fellow musicians have testified that he never eased up on his drug and alcohol intake, even after he began having auditory hallucinations. As a consequence, he may spend the remainder of his life in jail.

The death toll among rock stars seemed to reach a peak in the late 1960s and early 70s. Some deaths were accidental (Mama Cass comes to mind), but drink and drugs were frequently implicated – most notably in the deaths of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin.

Even when death wasn’t the direct result of drugs or booze, there was often ample evidence of destructive lifestyles. Sam Cooke was shot dead by a motel owner; a deeply disturbed Marvin Gaye by his own father.

These deaths have been well documented, but it was only recently that a Sydney University psychologist took the trouble to undertake a study of the overall phenomenon. Professor Dianna Kenny examined the lives and deaths of 12,665 musicians and found that rock stars have a lifespan up to 25 years shorter than average, with high rates of death from accidents, suicide and homicide.

The unanswered question is whether some rock stars are predisposed to a high-risk lifestyle by their temperament (which is often fragile to start with), or whether we can blame the stress and pressure that often accompanies stardom. I suspect it’s often a combination of the two.

What can be said with certainty is that there’s nothing admirable or glamorous about an early death, which makes it all the more distasteful that many music writers insist on romanticising drugged-out, deeply flawed rock stars as if their lives are something to aspire to.

Musicians are frequently celebrated in the media not so much for the quality of their music as for the quantity of alcohol and drugs they have ingested or for the antisocial way they have behaved. Some journalists get a vicarious thrill from recounting the chaotic lives of the people they write about.

I recently read a book review in which reference was made to the Australian singer and songwriter Nick Cave, who has made no secret of his drug use, arriving on the London scene with his “glorious drug-addled rabble”. Sorry, but it’s hard to see any glory in heroin addiction.

A few months earlier I had read a fawning review of a book by the late Dave McArtney, of the Auckland band Hello Sailor. The reviewer wrote with almost breathless awe about the role drugs played in the band.

The irony is that McArtney’s fondness for the needle ultimately led to his sad death at 62 from liver cancer. I wonder whether, given his time again, McArtney might have chosen to exchange the drugs for a few precious extra years of life.

An era of glorious innocence

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, July 2.)

For people of a certain age, last week was a week of nostalgia.

June 21 marked 50 years since a Lockheed Electra carrying the Beatles touched down at Wellington Airport. It was a significant moment, and not just musically. Sociologically, it signalled the emergence of a youth culture that was determined to assert itself in the face of stodgy, adult-imposed conformity and conservatism.

Small wonder that ageing baby boomers spent last week wallowing in fond reminiscence as radio stations dusted off their Beatles records and newspapers reprinted photos of press conferences at which awestruck reporters asked banal questions of the famous visitors, such as whether they liked New Zealand mutton and butter – all of which were answered with patience and good humour.

To anyone who grew up post-1970, it must be hard to imagine the impact the group made here. New Zealand was naïve and insular. The rest of the world seemed impossibly distant and exotic. Jet travel hadn’t yet made it this far; Britain was still six weeks away by ship. The Beatles might have been visitors from another planet.

Beatlemania, with its hordes of fans prepared to do almost anything to get close to their heroes, mystified and unsettled local authorities accustomed to young people behaving with compliant decorum. The official response to the phenomenon ranged from overkill – such as at the Wellington Town Hall, where the Beatles were unnerved by the sight of unsmiling police constables occupying the front rows at their concerts – to woeful ill-preparedness.

In Dunedin, only four policemen were on hand to ensure the Beatles got into their hotel safely through the hundreds of eager fans. When it was suggested that security was inadequate, the response was that the police had coped with a visit by Vera Lynn a few weeks earlier, so what could possibly go wrong?

Technologically too, New Zealand was found wanting. After the first of their Wellington concerts, John Lennon threatened not to go on again because the sound system was so hopeless. The sound technician was terrified the speakers would blow up.

It’s no exaggeration to say that in cultural as well as musical terms, the Beatles were a seismic event. Rock and roll wasn’t new, of course; in the previous decade we’d had Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson, Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis. But in those days New Zealand took its cultural cues from Britain rather than America.

The American-led rock and roll revolution of the 1950s, as significant as it was, was limited in its impact in New Zealand compared with the British beat boom led by the Beatles. I would argue that it was only post-Beatles that a true mass youth culture began to emerge in buttoned-down, monochrome New Zealand.

Though not a consciously subversive band, the Beatles unleashed a heady sense of liberation and a willingness to defy adult conventions. They did this through the sheer joy and exuberance of their music, which gave expression to youthful passions that had been previously been kept tightly controlled.

Musically speaking, they tilted the world’s axis.  The American music industry was completely blindsided by the so-called British invasion, of which the Beatles formed the advance guard.

By that time the first raw, exhilarating wave of American rock and roll – as embodied by Presley – had subsided, to be replaced by the sanitised pop of Bobby Vinton, Neil Sedaka and Bobby Vee, much of it emanating from New York City’s famous pop factory, the Brill Building. America was ready for something new and the Beatles provided it: in April 1964 they had 14 singles simultaneously in the Billboard Hot 100.

It took years for America to recover from the shock and reclaim its mantle as the wellhead of pop music. And of course the great irony is that the music that inspired the Beatles and the other British bands that followed in their wake – the Rolling Stones, the Animals, Manfred Mann, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, the Who – was all American. What the British bands did was repackage and re-energise American rock and roll and send it back to its home country, where it was in danger of being forgotten.

After the Beatles, nothing was the same again. At its heavier end, pop music soon morphed into something the pompous music critics called “rock”, which was supposedly to be taken more seriously. “Rock” music was freighted with sociological and political meaning.

The Stones, who deliberately cultivated a scowling, anti-establishment image, were a “rock” band, whereas the Beatles – despite their astonishing musicality – found themselves being dismissed as simply a very clever pop band.

Bob Dylan came along too – the first pop (sorry, rock) star whose records were bought for their lyrics rather than the tunes. Pop music split into ideological camps, and so it has remained ever since.

But all that was yet to happen when the Beatles touched down in Wellington in 1964. Looking back, what’s most striking about that era is its glorious innocence.

The brothers who inspired the Everlys

Following the death of Phil Everly, a lot of attention has been given to the various people influenced by the Everly Brothers – among them the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and the Hollies. But no one seems to have thought about who influenced the Everlys.

Though they were a pop act, their early influences were pure country. They were based in Nashville during the most successful part of their career and sprang from a country music tradition of brother duets that included the Blue Sky Boys, the Delmore Brothers and the Stanley Brothers.

The Everlys acknowledged a particular debt to the Louvin brothers, Charles and Ira, whose biggest country hits came out in the mid-1950s. The Encyclopaedia of Country Music says of the Louvins: “Their stratospheric vocal interplay made them probably the most influential harmony duet in country music history, touching everybody from Emmylou Harris to the cowpunk band Rank & File".

It’s long been recognised that sibling vocal groups have a special quality.  As the ECM puts it: “Similar vocal timbres, common word pronunciations, familiarity with each other’s singing style and shared cultural origins help to explain siblings’ ability to phrase and harmonise so well.” That’s never been more apparent than in the songs of the Louvins and the Everlys, but you can hear it in plenty of other family groups as well, from the Bee Gees to our own Topp Twins.

The Louvins, born Charles and Ira Loudermilk, came from a poverty-stricken farming family in Alabama and were first cousins of the prolific pop songwriter John D Loudermilk (they changed their name to make it easier to pronounce). The mandolin-playing Ira, a classic high, lonesome tenor in the bluegrass tradition, didn’t handle things well when their gospel-influenced style fell from favour in the early 1960s. The two acrimoniously broke up (as the Everlys were to do a decade later) and Ira’s life disintegrated in a classic Nashville story of self-destruction. He developed a serious drinking problem, was shot and seriously injured by his first wife, then died in a car crash with his second wife in 1965. Charles lived till 2011– long enough to enjoy the belated recognition that came his way when a new generation of country stars rediscovered the Louvin brothers’ music.  

For an example of the Louvins’ harmonies, try When I Stop Dreaming – a song they wrote themselves, and now a country standard. The similarity to Don and Phil Everly is striking. But that's from the commercial end of the Louvins' repertoire. Arguably more representative of their distinctive style is the traditional Appalachian murder ballad Knoxville Girl, a slice of gothic Americana whose grim theme is bizarrely offset by the Louvins' jaunty, offhand delivery. Classic.

 

And now for something utterly inconsequential

It’s a bleak, grey Saturday morning and I’m feeling picky. There are innumerable things I could feel picky about, but I’ve chosen something utterly inconsequential.

Today’s Your Weekend magazine, which comes with my Dominion Post, contains a review of Ray Columbus’ autobiography in which the claim is made that She’s A Mod, the 1964 hit by Columbus and his backing band the Invaders, was the first New Zealand record to reach the top 100 in the United States. It’s not clear whether this claim is made in the book or whether the reviewer got it somewhere else, but it didn’t ring true with me, so I checked.

Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles: 1955-2002 is the bible of the Billboard chart, listing every song that made the top 100 in the US during that period. It’s a treasure trove for tragic students of pop minutiae, among whom I count myself, and it makes no reference to Ray Columbus and the Invaders. In fact there are very few New Zealanders listed. Among those I’ve stumbled across in its 1000 pages are Auckland-born Gale Garnett, whose We’ll Sing in the Sunshine went to No 4 in 1964; John Rowles (Cheryl Moana Marie, No 64 in 1971); Split Enz (I Got You, No 53 in 1980); Dragon (Rain, No 88 in 1984); Crowded House (whose Don’t Dream It’s Over went all the way to No 2 in 1987, one of five Neil Finn songs that made the Billboard chart) and the late Pauly Fuemana’s OMC (How Bizarre, No 4 in 1997). Keith Urban has four entries too, but I’m not sure whether we can claim him. In fact I’m not even sure we can claim Crowded House, strictly speaking, but Whitburn generously describes them as a New Zealand band and that’s good enough for me.

Alas, however, no Ray Columbus and the Invaders. This is not to diminish that group’s considerable achievements: they went to No 1 in Australia and in so doing, cracked open the Australian market for countless other New Zealand outfits. But we must keep the record straight.

Great group, shame about the name - and vice-versa

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, March 30.)

People tend to forget it now, but one of the many odd things about the Beatles when they first crashed into the public consciousness in 1963 was their name.

Its weirdness seemed to match that of their clothing and hairstyles, which – like their music – resembled nothing that had gone before. I remember gazing at a picture of them as if they were aliens.

The few pop groups we were familiar with then had names like the Shadows, the Ventures, the Platters and the Pirates. What could have inspired a misspelled name suggestive of insects?

As it happened, the Beatles were admirers of Buddy Holly and the Crickets, who had chosen their name because they wanted something different from the bird-themed band names popular when rock and roll started to blossom in the late 1950s. So the four Liverpudlians opted to call themselves the Beetles as a tribute to their American heroes, but then – with the inventiveness that became their trademark – turned it into a word-play by inserting “a” in place of an “e”.

Not that any of this matters, since no one these days gives a thought to what an odd name the Beatles was. They so quickly took the world by storm that it ceased to matter.

The same applies to the Rolling Stones. They took their name not directly from the famous proverb (“A rolling stone gathers no moss”) but from a Muddy Waters blues song called Rollin’ Stone. It’s probably not the name a 21st century marketing consultant would choose for an up-and-coming rock band, but it doesn’t appear to have held them back.

What caused me to ruminate on this was a quirky reference book called The A to Z Of Almost Everything, in which I came across a section devoted to the derivation of pop group names. As it happened, it didn’t include the Beatles. But as someone with a penchant for trivia, I started jotting down other group names I could think of that either particularly appealed to me or had intriguing back-stories.

I included in my list several groups from New Zealand, starting with the Windy City Strugglers – a name perfectly chosen to reflect not only their geographical roots but also their music. The Strugglers (who have been going since 1968) are a gritty blues/folk/country band who draw their inspiration from the traditional songs of the American South – songs that are often concerned with the pain and despair experienced by poor rural folk in just trying to get by from day to day.

But the name also pays homage to their home town of Wellington, the world’s windiest capital. On top of that it conjures up an image of a group of battlers, heroically persevering in the face of the weather, prevailing musical fashions and the challenges of making a buck in a notoriously capricious business. So “Strugglers” couldn’t be more apt.

I remember also being impressed by the name of the 1980s Dunedin student band Netherworld Dancing Toys, which was pinched from a line in a song by Roxy Music. Don’t ask me why, but it had an evocative ring. Unfortunately it was a case of great name, shame about the band. I couldn’t stand their clunker of a song For Today, which was inexplicably a hit.

Another striking name is Fly My Pretties, which isn’t so much a band as a loose-knit bunch of very accomplished New Zealand musicians who occasionally collaborate. Founder Barnaby Weir, who chose the name, was apparently inspired by the scene in The Wizard Of Oz where the wicked witch sends her winged monkeys off to find Dorothy and Toto (though apparently she doesn’t utter those precise words).

Looking beyond New Zealand, a band name that always appealed to me was Dexy’s Midnight Runners. It alludes to the drug Dexedrine, which was popular among club goers in the English Midlands, where the band originated. “Midnight runner” referred to the fact that the drug gave users the energy to keep going all night.

Those who recall the video of their hit Come On Eileen will recall Dexy’s Midnight Runners as looking like a bunch of raffish, street-wise and slightly menacing urchins. It was a case of the name and the band being a perfect fit.

Creedence Clearwater Revival was an inspired name too, though cobbled together in haphazard circumstances. It worked because it seemed right for their music, which sounded like something out of the bayou swamps. (I was captivated when I first heard Proud Mary, a song about a Mississippi paddle steamer, and remember feeling a vague sense of betrayal when I learned the band came from California rather than the Deep South.)

Inevitably, sex was the inspiration behind many band names. That of British art-rock band 10cc referred to the volume of semen ejaculated in a male orgasm. American pop band the Lovin’ Spoonful took their name from a phrase in a blues song by Mississippi John Hurt which probably meant much the same thing. And of the several different explanations I’ve heard for the meaning of Pearl Jam, the most convincing is that it’s a slang term for semen.

The name of Steely Dan, one of my favourite bands, had sexual connotations too. The original Steely Dan was a steam-powered dildo in William Burroughs’ novel The Naked Lunch. That band founders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker chose the name says something about both their subversive sense of humour and their esoteric intellectual leanings.

Blind Faith, the first so-called supergroup, and Dire Straits had names that told a story about the bands’ origins. Blind Faith was a sardonic (and prophetic) comment on the prospects of the four musicians getting along together, while Dire Straits expressed the desperate state of the band’s finances.

It can be seen from this that band names are created from all manner of things. ABBA was taken from the initials of the members’ Christian names, while the Bay City Rollers chose theirs by sticking a pin in a map of America and hitting an obscure port city in Michigan. The Doobie Brothers were named after a slang term for a marijuana joint, while Bob Dylan’s backing group was simply known as “the band” and retained that name (albeit with a capital T and B) when they became an act in their own right.

What’s also clear is that a dumb name like the Beatles is no obstacle to success if the band has talent. Conversely, pop history is littered with the corpses of groups that had brilliant names but no talent to back them.

Crispian St Peters has been on my mind

If I had a flag, it would be flying at half-mast today. I just learned that Crispian St Peters died on June 8, aged 71.

Crispian who? You might well ask. But if I mentioned his 1966 hit song The Pied Piper, still a staple of classic hits radio formats, the name might mean something.

St Peters (real name Robin Peter Smith) is almost as well remembered for the speed with which he faded from the pop scene as he is for his few hit songs. Rarely has a star shot into the firmament so spectacularly and then so quickly sputtered and died – a fate often attributed to his inflated self-regard, which attracted the derision of the British music press. (Well, when you start comparing yourself with Elvis and the Beatles after only two hit singles, you’re asking for trouble.)

But no one can take away from St Peters those few terrific songs, which stand as vivid reminders of the classy pop music emanating from British recording studios in the mid-60s.

He first came to attention with You Were On My Mind, a cover version of a song that had been a hit in 1965 for the preppy American pop-folk group We Five. St Peters gave the song a darker, more brooding quality. The song opens with his rich, supple baritone over a spare, chunky bass-and-drum backing and gradually builds into a pounding crescendo featuring a punchy sax and a Hammond organ. It made the Top 10 in Britain but as I recall, didn’t replicate the success of the breezier American version here.

The Pied Piper came next, and again it opened with a distinctive, chunky bass motif (faint echoes here of Chas Chandler in the Animals’ We Gotta Get Out Of This Place) – but this time it introduced a jaunty element in the form of a piccolo dancing behind St Peters’ vocal in the chorus. It proved an irresistible hook (I remember even my mother liking it) and The Pied Piper became his biggest hit, rising to No 4 in the US, No 5 in the UK and Australia, and No 2 in New Zealand.

And that was just about it, at least in Britain and the US. But I reckon St Peters’ best song was the third in his trilogy of 1966 singles – and other New Zealanders liked it enough to push it to No 9 on the charts here. The song was Changes, a haunting, elegiac song written by the American folk singer Phil Ochs but given an up-tempo treatment by St Peters’ arranger. St Peters sang his own harmonies on his two earlier hits but here he demonstrated his vocal range by singing alternate verses an octave apart, then both parts simultaneously. (Sounds gimmicky, but it worked. Just listen - you can find it on You Tube.)

Once again, the musicianship on this great record – notably Jimmy Page’s mournful guitar and a crisp, military-style drum tattoo that adds an ominous, almost funereal tone – is exemplary, reminding us how good those largely unknown 1960s British session musicians were. (Studio veteran Vic Flick and the youthful Page, in his pre-Yardbirds/Led Zeppelin days, played guitar on St Peters’ hits. Harry Stoneham played the organ, Rex Bennett was the drummer and Ronnie Seabrook contributed that distinctive bass – household names all.)

Changes remains one of my favourite songs, but it got only as far as No 57 on the American Billboard chart. After that it was pretty much over for St Peters. Dubbed the Cassius Clay of pop by the musical press because of his apparently incorrigible hubris (he reckoned he was a better songwriter than Lennon and McCartney and a more exciting performer than Tom Jones – a laughable claim when you see him lifelessly miming The Pied Piper on You Tube), he slipped into obscurity and ended up playing working men’s clubs. The irony was that the boasting was his manager’s idea; St Peters went along with it, believing the mantra that any publicity had to be good.

His later songs, including several he wrote himself, leaned toward the country idiom – an appropriate genre, given that St Peters seemed determined to emulate the self-destructive, Crazy Heart career path blazed by countless faded Nashville stars. His marriage failed, he suffered several breakdowns and in 1995 he had a stroke. He finally gave up performing in 2001.

He deserves to be better remembered than he is. His best songs are shining classics of British 1960s pop.

Okay, so it took more than 20 years - but it was worth the wait

Sometimes I wonder if I’m one of those tragic individuals who’s fated always to be the last cab off the rank. I had one of those occasions last week when I bought a DVD called Black&White Night – a recording of a 1987 concert by Roy Orbison and a select group of friends.

I learned of this film only recently from hearing Kim Hill interview Stephanie Bennett, the Englishwoman who produced Black&White Night and now lives on Waiheke Island. But when I started mentioning the DVD to friends, it seemed I was the only person still alive who hadn’t already enjoyed it.

No matter. I decided to write this anyway, in the unlikely event there are other benighted individuals out there like me.

Black&White Night was originally made as a TV special. It was filmed at the Ambassador Hotel’s Coconut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles and features a stellar lineup of backing musicians and singers: guitarist James Burton, Bruce Springsteen, T-Bone Burnett, Jackson Browne, J D Souther, Tom Waits, k d lang, Bonnie Raitt and Jennifer Warnes. The bass player is Jerry Scheff and the drummer is Ronnie Tutt – both, like James Burton, former members of Elvis Presley’s TCB band and veteran LA session musicians. (A slight annoyance, for me, was the presence of the ubiquitous Elvis Costello, who since the early 1980s seems to have made a career out of hanging around in the shadow of much greater performers and not bringing anything to the table. But that’s a personal thing.)

There are several factors that make Black&White Night (and yes, it’s entirely shot in monochrome) a fantastic concert. The first is Orbison himself, who at 51 was still in exceptionally good voice and still hitting the high notes as if the previous 25 years hadn’t happened. The second, of course, is the songs – and they’re all here: Running Scared, Only the Lonely, Crying, Oh, Pretty Woman, Blue Bayou (perhaps my favourite), In Dreams and It’s Over, among others. Orbison himself was so charisma-free that he became, paradoxically, almost charismatic. The impassive way he sings these songs – songs of great emotional intensity and almost operatic scale – is part of his appeal. His expressionless delivery also means the songs have to stand on their own, unembellished by any histrionics. Which, of course, they are well able to do.

But what gives this performance a special magic is the guest stars – not because they take over the show, but for quite the reverse reason. At no point does anyone look remotely interested in trying to upstage Orbison. It’s his night, and they’re there strictly in a supporting role. Their great respect for him, and their pleasure at helping him present his songs, is obvious in every frame. Raitt, Warnes and Lang sing like angels and there are moments when they look positively rapturous. Even Springsteen is caught several times looking at Orbison with unabashed admiration.

It’s quite moving, and all the more so when you consider Orbison’s history. He was a giant in the early to mid-sixties (I recall Crying, a Christmas present from my brother, as the first LP I ever owned), but from the late 60s onwards he vanished from the radar, displaced by the pop revolution that followed the so-called British invasion led by the Beatles. There seemed no place for Orbison in the musical tumult that followed, and his career went into a long decline. He suffered terrible personal tragedies too: first the death of his wife Claudette in a motorcycle accident in 1966, followed two years later by a house fire that killed his two sons.

The hits stopped coming after 1967; it was to be another 13 years before he had another song in the Billboard Top 100 (1980’s That Lovin’ You Feelin’ Again, a duet with Emmylou Harris). For much of that period Orbison was reduced to playing second-rate venues on the has-been circuit. His career must have been close to its nadir when I interviewed him for an Australian Sunday paper in 1974: he had just performed for the inmates of Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison. But in one of the great redemption stories of pop music, he began to emerge into the light again when other stars – among them Harris, Springsteen, Lang and Don McLean (who had a big hit with Crying in 1980) – rediscovered his songs. The formation of the Travelling Wilburys with George Harrison, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne in 1987 marked the completion of Orbison’s journey back from obscurity.

You need to know this story to fully appreciate Black&White Night. On one level it’s simply a great concert; on another it’s a poignant tribute to a man who went from hero to zero and back again. And it seems somehow consistent with the rest of Orbison’s life story that within months of making this film, he was dead from a heart attack, aged only 52. His last top 10 hit – You’ve Got It, with the Travelling Wilburys – was issued posthumously.

The Beatles, a punk band? I don't think so

Radio New Zealand on Saturday replayed a programme in which Kim Hill interviewed New Zealand singer and songwriter Chris Knox for her Playing Favourites segment, in which guests talk about their lives and the music that has influenced them. I’m not sure when it was recorded, but obviously it was before Knox had his stroke last year, from which he is still recovering.

Knox, who is considered a founding father of the punk movement in New Zealand, chose as his first song the Beatles’ Baby You’re A Rich Man, and made the comment that the Beatles were a punk band themselves in their Hamburg days.

With all due respect to Knox, this sort of revisionist bullshit can’t be allowed to go unchallenged. Attempts to confer musical legitimacy on punk by claiming that the greatest pop band in history were precursors of punk won’t wash.

Punks raged against the status quo, but there was nothing in the music of the Beatles to suggest they were remotely interested in bringing down the “system”. The most they did was mock it in a good-natured manner, as when John Lennon famously told the audience at a Royal Variety performance in 1963: “Those of you in the cheap seats, clap your hands. The rest of you, just rattle your jewellery”.

Punk “music” – and I use the word loosely in this context – was all about rage, anger and alienation, whereas the music of the Beatles was essentially joyous. They may have looked wild and subversive by the standards of the time, but there was nothing nihilistic about them. Once people had got over their strange clothes and long hair, the Beatles became the darlings of the conservative British media – which is more than can be said for Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten and the other rebarbative pioneers of punk.

The Beatles didn’t confine themselves to rebellious rock and roll but fed omnivorously on a multitude of musical influences that included black r ’n’ r shouters such as Little Richard, soul groups (Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Isley Brothers), mainstream, white-bread pop (Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Burt Bacharach) and even music from the stage. A Taste of Honey, from their first album – a song played in decidedly un-cool waltz time – was originally written as the theme for a Broadway production of the same name; Till There Was You, which was part of the Beatles’ repertoire at the Star Club in Hamburg, came from the Broadway musical The Music Man. Later they wrote sentimental ballads such as If I Fell (sometimes self-mockingly rendered in concert as If I Fell Over).

Punk? I don’t think so. The diversity of their repertoire confirms that the Beatles were interested in music for its own sake, not just as a means of making a statement – which was what punk was all about.

Most crucially, however, what irrevocably set the Beatles apart from the punk bands of the 1970s was that even in their early days they were accomplished musicians. They could sing and they could play – especially McCartney, whose creativity as a bass player has never been given due recognition. In contrast, one of the defining elements of punk was that punk bands couldn’t play. This was a point of which they were defiantly and perversely proud.

I recently heard Jim DeRogatis, rock critic (a job description that generally doubles these days as a synonym for wanker) for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of a new book about the self-consciously arty 1960s New York band the Velvet Underground, define the punk aesthetic thus: “You don’t have to learn how to play an instrument or be a virtuoso to make great rock and roll”.

Well, fancy that. If only Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly had realised that, they wouldn’t have had to waste all that time learning to play.

Anyone could do it, DeRogatis said; all you needed was a vision and a burning desire to say something. There it is in nutshell: music for people who don’t like music. Two chords were enough for most punk bands.

(Interestingly enough, the Velvet Underground, who are often cited as a key influence on punk, were Chris Knox’s second choice on Playing Favourites. Characteristically, they were playing out of tune – not that anyone would have noticed, or cared.)

Punk legitimised the mad flailings of the talentless. It created a sorry legacy that is still immediately apparent to anyone tuning in to Music 101 on Radio New Zealand, in which some terrifically talented young New Zealand musicians are subjected to the undeserved indignity of being sandwiched between acts that are no more capable of making music than I am of swimming Cook Strait.

The problem with punk was that it placed attitude above musicality and talent. Whether you could play or sing didn’t matter, so long as you adopted the right ideological posture.

Punk represented the politics of envy transferred to rock music. The punk rebellion was given a figleaf of artistic credibility on the basis that it marked the return of rock music to its working-class roots; a rejection of the bloated, over-produced corporate rock exemplified by bands like the Eagles, who would spend months in the recording studios polishing each track to almost sterile perfection. But in essence punk was political: a spiteful bid by the angry, the frustrated, the inarticulate and the untalented to wrest control of rock music from those who infuriated them by being able to play and sing.

Naturally it was embraced with enthusiasm by the rock journalism priesthood, whose only interest in music was as a vehicle for a message. The rock critics generally welcomed punk as some sort of metaphor for the class struggle against fat, corrupt capitalism – which of course it was. But no one should make the mistake of thinking it had anything to do with music, and neither should anyone – not even the sainted Chris Knox – debase the Beatles by smearing them with punk’s noisome ordure.

Footnote: The Velvet Underground song chosen by Knox on Playing Favourites was a typically pretentious piece of gothic nonsense called Venus in Furs, which includes the phrase “love not given lightly”. Interestingly, this is the key line – and title – of Knox’s own signature song. I wonder how many people realise the line was not originally his.

If it's popular it must be bad

I have just read Grant Smithies’ cover piece in Your Weekend about Pip Brown, the former Masterton girl (note that: Masterton girl) who is conquering the pop world under the name Ladyhawke.

Smithies is a clever and knowledgeable writer about pop and rock music (and so he should be, considering that he’s chosen it as his professional niche), but he shares the besetting fault of many others ploughing the same field. He’s a bit of a snob.

He refers to the fact that Ladyhawke draws her inspiration from the mainstream pop of the 70s and 80s: Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, the Electric Light Orchestra, Pat Benatar and so on.

Smithies manages to restrain himself from commenting on her musical tastes until it comes to Phil Collins, whom he labels “the insomniac-friendly King of Bland”. Ladyhawke recalls her dad playing Phil Collins on the car stereo all the way to Auckland and says, rather defensively: “Hey, some Phil Collins songs are really good. You can’t help but rock out to Easy Lover.”

Actually you can, Smithies interjects disdainfully, after wondering why the young Pip Brown didn’t call CYFS from a petrol station along the way.

Okay, it’s clever, and harmless enough. And to be fair, Smithies balances the ledger towards the end of his piece, where he declares that Ladyhawke’s brand of pop is as catchy as the clap (nice line). But the gratuitous sideswipe at her fondness for Phil Collins is telling.

Smithies springs from a long tradition, dating from the late 1960s, of “rock” critics (they prefer the term “rock” to “pop” because of the latter word’s supposedly trivial connotations) for whom just about anything that’s commercially successful is fatally contaminated.

It’s only a year since Smithies got into an amusing stoush resulting from an article he wrote about Billy Joel. Smithies appears to have sucked up to the former chart-topper during a phone interview, pretending to be a fan so that Joel would play ball. Then he wrote a disparaging piece in which he condemned Joel’s music as “sentimental rubbish”, never imagining that the singer-songwriter would read it. But Joel did, and wrote Smithies an indignant letter asking why he hadn’t been more honest when they spoke.

That episode may have discouraged Smithies from insincerely ingratiating himself with pop stars, but it doesn’t seem to have changed his view of popular music.

I’m no fan of Phil Collins myself, but after several decades it becomes tiresome reading rock journalists sneering at pop stars for committing the cardinal sin of being popular.

It’s as if any music that’s commercially successful must, by definition, be bad. Even the Beatles – to my mind, the most creative pop band in history – went through a long period of being treated by most highbrow rock critics, especially those from America, as unworthy of serious critical attention. More recently, Abba suffered the same fate before attaining a sort of retro-chic status. But it would be hard to find a more perfect example of pure, sophisticated pop than Abba’s.

Generally speaking, the critics prefer their rock heroes to be obscure and esoteric. They love nothing more than to write rhapsodic pieces about performers few people have heard of. It adds lustre to their critical image – or so they seem to think – if they can claim knowledge of something or someone that is too abstruse or inaccessible to have penetrated the public consciousness.

They revel in the exclusivity of the priesthood – the status supposedly conferred by inside knowledge denied to the ignorant masses.

Amusingly, the critics often use the overworked term “legend” to describe these obscure heroes. In the jargon of rock criticism, it is almost axiomatic that a “legend” is someone that only an enlightened handful – the cognoscenti – know about.

It also helps ensure critical approval if a rock star or band strikes a fashionable political pose. Better still if they’re drug-addled and dysfunctional as well. And of course no one appeals to the critics more than someone who is tormented by demons. Death by suicide or drug overdose almost always ensures canonisation. Phil Collins would undoubtedly have got a much better press if he hadn’t been so damned normal.

Ladyhawke herself appears to have suffered as a result of this syndrome. She says success in her home country was far more important to her than anything that happened overseas. Yet even when she was playing huge venues overseas, she told Smithies, she sensed a lot of negativity and cynicism whenever she came back to New Zealand. Perhaps we prefer our pop stars to be dark, gloomy and introverted – rather like our movies, as explored in Sam Neill’s documentary Cinema of Unease. But that’s a subject for another day.

In a recent blog I referred in passing to the American music journalist Tom Moon, author of 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die.

Moon occasionally lapses into the irritating gibberish that is Rolling Stone magazine’s house style, but his great redeeming grace as a critic is that he’s open to all manner of musical influences. Not only does his book span almost every genre imaginable, but Moon has no qualms about celebrating pure, commercial pop (Abba is there, along with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass) alongside the arcane and the highbrow. Moon’s slogan is “The more you love music, the more music you love”.

Significantly, Moon has worked as a professional musician (a saxophonist) himself. He understands that music is a complex interplay of melody, harmony, rhythm and sometimes words. This sets him apart from many of his peers, who seem primarily interested in lyrics (the more enigmatic the better, because we all know that if a song’s hard to understand it must be profound) and the ideological posturing of the performer.

I don’t know about Grant Smithies, but I suspect that many rock critics, unlike Moon, can’t sing or play a note and possibly aren’t really interested in music for its own sake. The result is that they write about it much as a blind person might review a movie.