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? 

Graham Brazier: an alternative assessment

(First published in The Dominion Post and The Press, September 18.)

They farewelled Graham Brazier at St Matthew’s Church in Auckland last week.

Affectionate tributes were paid. Clearly, the former singer from the Auckland band Hello Sailor was loved and admired.

Karyn Hay of Radio with Pictures fame led the proceedings. Journalists noted the presence of Dave Dobbyn, Jordan Luck, Hammond Gamble, Susan Wood and former Auckland mayor Les Mills, who used to be Brazier’s father-in-law.

The full church was evidence that Brazier was important to a lot of people. Not all of us will be similarly honoured when we die.

But I do wonder about the media attention devoted to his death. 3 News devoted one and a half minutes to the funeral service, an honour not granted to many.

Effusive obituaries and newspaper columns were written. Some of those who paid tribute to Brazier seemed eager to show they had a personal connection with him, as if hoping that some of the glory attached to being an Auckland rock hero of the 1970s might rub off on them.

The fact that Brazier had convictions for assaulting two of his partners was barely mentioned. It was inconveniently at odds with the eulogies that described him as a gentle, polite and literate man.

This is not meant as an attack on Brazier, whom I never met. We are all imperfect human beings. Rather, I’m curious about who the media choose to honour, and why.

The established view among the New Zealand rock music priesthood is that Hello Sailor occupy a uniquely hallowed place in Kiwi pop culture. But do they?

They were world-famous in Auckland – or to be more specific, Ponsonby. They captured the spirit of a particular Auckland scene at a particular time.

I believe both their popularity and significance have been overstated. Gutter Black, their signature song, went no higher than 15 on the New Zealand pop chart – not bad, but it hardly qualifies for the anthem status bestowed on it. Blue Lady did only marginally better.

Admittedly, chart success isn’t the only determinant of a song’s greatness, but popular taste surely must count for something.

I suspect Hello Sailor were liked for a lot of reasons that didn’t necessarily have much to do with music. They personified a new urban cool that was fashionable in Auckland at the time. They had a raffish, subversive quality that made them attractive to a particular demographic.

They struck a pose that was particularly appealing because it was so markedly at variance with the politics of the conservative and autocratic Robert Muldoon, who was then at the height of his power.

But how good were they? They went to America and failed. I’ve heard it suggested that the reason they never cracked the LA scene was that they were too busy partying and doing drugs.

I don’t buy that. Plenty of rock bands have led notoriously debauched and drug-saturated lives while continuing to record hit songs. I think the truth is that Hello Sailor weren’t as good as their fans thought they were.

The members of another New Zealand band of that time, Dragon, led even wilder lives than Hello Sailor, but still managed to have a string of hits in Australia, including a No 1, and once cracked the Billboard Hot 100 in the US.

But Hello Sailor were lionised by writers, journalists, DJs and the culture commissars in a way that Dragon never were. It was a very cliquey Auckland phenomenon, and remains so.

One factor that enhanced the Hello Sailor legend was that drug use was big among New Zealand musicians at that time and the band was at the heart of that culture. Blue Lady was a drug song.

Some music journalists are strangely enthralled by dissolute rock singers and write about their flawed lives as if they are worthy of emulation. But what’s admirable about alcohol or drug addiction that wrecks people’s lives?

Only two weeks ago I saw a documentary about Amy Winehouse, in which a uniquely talented woman disintegrated in front of our eyes. Not an edifying spectacle.

Now Brazier is dead at 63. His close friend and bandmate Dave McArtney died two years ago at 62.

Both had been heroin users. In the eyes of some of their admirers, this enhanced their mystique. But you can’t help wondering whether both might still be alive if they hadn’t conformed to the archetype of the hard-living, junkie rock star that some journalists seem so keen to glamorise.

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.

More thoughts on Lou Reed

I recently wrote here about the death of Lou Reed – or more precisely, the media reaction to the death of Lou Reed. The response was interesting.

I’ve been writing opinion columns for nearly 45 years, in a variety of publications. It’s fair to say some of those columns pissed a few people off. But I don’t think I’ve ever provoked a more toxic response than I did with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground: an alternative view.

My blog is not something I devote a huge amount of time to, as anyone can see from the frequency of my posts. It’s purely a sideline. On an average day it attracts between 300 and 400 visitors, but occasionally my readership spikes to far higher levels – usually when a much more widely read blog, such as Whale Oil or Kiwiblog, links to something I’ve written. Otherwise this is one of the quieter backwaters of the blogosphere, attracting relatively little comment. When someone dissents, it’s usually in civilised tones.

Not so with the Lou Reed post. It went viral, as they say. For days, my readership went through the roof. Does this give me pleasure? Only in the way, say, that the proprietor of a good restaurant would be thrilled if his premises were suddenly overrun by drooling, incontinent Mongols with eyes in the middle of their foreheads.

The comments posted here were some of the mildest. The really rank, pustulous ones appeared elsewhere, such as on Dominion Post rock critic Simon Sweetman’s Blog on the Tracks – both the Facebook version and the one on the Stuff website. I didn’t bother to read many, still less respond; what’s the point? I just skimmed enough to get the general tone. Here’s one of the more thoughtful ones:

“Oh fer fuckssakes. Du Fresne is such a colossal flaming twatcock. So much so he has ‘Curmudgeon’ on his newspaper byline [actually, no longer true]. He can fuck off.”

Well, that certainly put me in my place. Here’s another:

“Fuck you, your constipated definition of music, and your artsy-fartsy name.”

You get the general drift. Note the way they carefully craft their arguments. Marvel at their command of language and calm, systematic rebuttal of my points. Above all, admire their cool restraint. 

The first of the above was signed by someone calling himself István Ping Clover. Something makes me suspect it’s not his real name. That’s one of the problems with the blogosphere: it provides cover for slime-secreting invertebrates who hide behind supposedly enigmatic pseudonyms.

Anyway, suffice it to say that most of the furious rejoinders to my blog post (and they came from all over the world) confirmed my longstanding belief that there are essentially two types of music fan, and that one type, paradoxically, isn’t very interested in music. Citing Lou Reed’s influence on primitives like the New York Dolls and the Stooges – or the tedious and bombastic U2, for that matter – is never going to convince me of his compelling artistic legacy.

The thing that Reed devotees have in common (and this includes most people who write about rock music) is an admiration, above all, for nihilism and dysfunction. Drug addiction and/or alcoholism, a chaotic private life (which often involves treating people around you like shit), brushes with the law, spells in treatment clinics, failing to show for concerts, lashing out at journalists and showing contempt for fans – these are what establish artistic credibility. A bit of simplistic, sanctimonious political posturing helps too. Who cares if you sing flat and can barely tune a guitar?

Commercial success, almost by definition, nullifies artistic and cultural cred. The self-ordained high priests of rock journalism, the illuminati who dictate what’s uncool and uncool, are contemptuous of popular taste. What would the proles know?

And of course the ultimate seal of authenticity is to burn out spectacularly and die, a la Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin – neither of whom remotely deserved the iconic status they ensured for themselves by the simple expedient of dying pathetically at 27. (I wonder, has rock music ever produced a more comically bad song than Morrison’s The End?)

Having said all that, my original post was not so much an attack on Lou Reed (heck, I can even see why people might like Walk on the Wild Side and Perfect Day) as on the absurd exaggeration of his influence. That Rolling Stone should name The Velvet Underground and Nico the 13^th greatest album of all time is simply laughable – but entirely predictable, given that magazine’s fondness for posers. This is the same publication, after all, that declared Dylan’s dreary, plodding, interminable Like a Rolling Stone the greatest song of all time, and ranked John Lennon’s Imagine – a song for hippy thumb-suckers – as No 3.

Incidentally, here’s what Rolling Stone said about the Velvet Underground album: “Much of what we take for granted in rock would not exist without this New York band or its seminal debut: the androgynous sexuality of glitter; punk’s raw noir; the blackened-riff howl of grunge and noise rock; goth’s imperious gloom.”

Hmmm. Not much there about music. If the Velvet Underground can take credit for anything, it’s for being the first rock band to adopt the pretentious habit of wearing dark glasses even at night. As I said in my original blog, everything they did was an artful pose.

But let’s come back to the reaction to my post. What intrigued me most was the sheer intensity of it. People used to kill each other in religious disputes, but we’re no longer a religious society and I wonder whether we’ve had to find other things to form fanatical loyalties to.

As with religion, rock music has its own heresies and schisms. In the 1960s, music fans roughly split into two camps: those who liked the Beatles and those who liked the Stones. In hindsight, it was like Sunni Muslims versus Shi’ites. But the ideological lines have hardened immeasurably, to the point where you take issue with the established consensus at your own risk. The people who attacked me in the blogosphere probably think of themselves as free, anarchic spirits, but in fact they display a strong authoritarian streak and a savage intolerance of dissent. They are the Brown Shirts and Red Guards of our time.

Some of the enforcers of rock orthodoxy resorted to crude caricature. They said I’m old and pathetic; that I’m Catholic (now there’s an odd accusation, as inaccurate as it is bizarre); that I know nothing about music (not quite true); that I haven’t caught up with anything that’s happened since 1965; and the ultimate putdown, that I’m probably a Beatles fan (as it happens, I am).  

Is musical taste ultimately subjective anyway? That’s what one of my nieces suggested in a post that explained my behaviour by saying that I’m a curmudgeon and a reactionary and I like stirring people up, all of which is partly true.

I think she’s correct up to a point, but not entirely. Taste is largely subjective, but not when it comes to judging whether an instrument is out of tune, the drummer can’t keep time and it’s purely a matter of luck whether the singer hits the right note. Using any of these objective yardsticks, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground would probably never have survived past their first audition.

 

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.