If we start banning people of bad moral character, where do we stop?

CLARIFICATION: In the column published below, I said that Harvey Weinstein had been found guilty of sexual assault "by non-denial". In fact a spokesperson for Weinstein, quoted in the October 2017 New Yorker article that first revealed the accusations against him, said he "unequivocally denied" allegations of non-consensual sex. However it would be fair to say that subsequent statements on his behalf have been equivocal at best.  

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, the Nelson Mail and stuff.co.nz, May 16.)

I have never heard the American R&B singer R. Kelly – not consciously, anyway – so it’s unlikely that I’ll lose any sleep over the announcement that the digital music streaming service Spotify has taken his records off its playlist. Nonetheless, I’m intrigued.

Spotify removed Kelly from its playlist as part of a new “Hate Content and Hateful Conduct” policy. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that the implementation of this policy is probably related in some way to the uproar over Harvey Weinstein and the subsequent naming and shaming of countless alleged sexual predators in show business.

The virulent Me Too and Time’s Up movements, which have given a voice to women claiming to have been the victims of celebrity abusers, has achieved such power and momentum that companies in the entertainment business have been forced into damage control mode. There is a hint of panic in the way some of these corporations have hastened to protect their precious brands from stars whose sexual histories have become a liability.

The world has witnessed a veritable parade of the disgraced as previously respected entertainment names have been sacked or blacklisted, often on the basis of unproven allegations. 

Weinstein and Bill Cosby are the highest-profile casualties so far – found guilty by non-denial in Weinstein’s case and by a criminal trial in Cosby’s. But I didn’t realise how many more names had been implicated in this unedifying saga until I conducted a search on Google.

Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Dustin Hoffman, Ben Affleck, Steven Seagal, Garrison Keillor, the writer-director James Toback and the TV host Charlie Rose I knew about. But I was unaware of allegations against others including Richard Dreyfuss, celebrity chef Mario Batali, Larry King, Charlie Sheen, Oliver Stone, John Travolta and Sylvester Stallone, along with many more whose names were unfamiliar to me but are obviously prominent in the entertainment world.

In some of these cases, offending was acknowledged and apologised for; in others it was strenuously denied. Either way, reputations are tarnished, perhaps irreparably. The principle that people are innocent until proven guilty has been trampled underfoot in the media feeding frenzy.

But back to R. Kelly. Even cursory research into his background reveals allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse, some of it too unpleasant to detail here. He has never been convicted of an offence (he was acquitted on child pornography charges over a sex video involving an under-age girl and separately paid $250,000 to settle a claim that he had sex with a 15-year-old), but a social media campaign called #MuteRKelly has had him in its sights for some time.

Spotify insists it doesn’t censor content because of the behaviour of the performer, but its own statements suggest otherwise. Its head of content told Billboard magazine, in tortuous management-speak: “We look at issues around hateful conduct, where you have an artist or another creator who has done something off-platform that is so particularly out of line with our values, egregious, in a way that it becomes something that we don't want to associate ourselves with.”

This is where it gets intriguing, because if R. Kelly has been censored because of bad behaviour, as seems obvious, it could set a fascinating precedent.

Consider this. One of my all-time favourite movies is Chinatown, from 1974. It was directed by Roman Polanski, who fled America in 1977 after being charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. He remains a fugitive from the American courts today, although he lives as a free man in Europe.

Should I refuse to watch Chinatown because of the loathsome Polanski’s behaviour with young Samantha Gailey at Jack Nicholson’s place? There is a moral case for taking that stance, and Spotify’s action in respect of R. Kelly suggests that moral judgments can now be brought to bear in deciding what people should see and hear.

But this is tricky territory, because many of the artists, actors, musicians and writers we admire led less than exemplary lives.

Rock and roll pioneer Chuck Berry served a prison term for having sex with a minor. Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin. Hollywood idol Errol Flynn’s reputation was permanently damaged by allegations of sex with under-age girls.

Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old and Mick Jagger wrote a song about enticing a 15-year-old upstairs. Charlie Chaplin and Pablo Picasso had a penchant for girls young enough to be their granddaughters, and Picasso was sometimes abusive as well.

Woody Allen is seriously creepy, at the very least, and even Charles Dickens abandoned his wife and family for a teenager.

It’s a bit unrealistic to talk about boycotting these men’s artistic creations, no matter how much we might disapprove of their morals or behaviour. So as vile as R. Kelly might be, in the interests of consistency perhaps his work should be left alone too.

There he goes again

I know Philip Matthews of the Christchurch Press is a capable journalist because I’ve read some good stories by him. So why does he write silly, admiring pieces about rock musicians’ drug habits?

In his latest effort, about a documentary film on the New Zealand band Head Like A Hole, Matthews seems enthralled by the fact that two of the band members were heroin users.

It’s not the first time Matthews has displayed this vicarious fascination with drug use. He did it several years ago in a review of the book Gutter Black, in which he wrote with undisguised awe about the role drugs played in the Auckland band Hello Sailor.

We know drugs are part of rock culture. We also know about the huge damage they’ve done and the talented lives that have been prematurely curtailed or derailed by them. Matthews himself writes that drugs were a “soul destroying” factor in the breakup of Head Like A Hole and left casualties, as they invariably do. 

Acknowledging that drugs were part of the band's story is one thing. Being thrilled by the destructive junkie lifestyle, as Matthews seems to be, is quite another. Whether intentionally or not, it has the effect of romanticising and glamorising something that's neither romantic nor glamorous. Isn't it time he grew out of this adolescent phase?

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. 

A night of inspired weirdness at Ahiaruhe

Sometimes the most rewarding concerts are ones where you go along not quite knowing what to expect. I remember a fabulous night - I think it was at the James Cabaret in Wellington - when we were entertained by a slick Seattle-based, female-dominated alt-country outfit called Ranch Romance. I hadn’t heard of them before and I haven’t heard of them since, but what a performance.

It happened again with Lil’ Band of Gold, a bunch of mellow New Orleans music veterans who played the San Francisco Bath House several years ago. And possibly the greatest concert I ever had the good fortune to attend: Brian Wilson and a cast of thousands (or so it seemed) performing Smile in Wellington. I fretted beforehand that Wilson – my musical hero since 1964, but notoriously erratic – would let me down. I needn’t have worried. When I came out of the theatre I thought seriously about booking a flight to Christchurch to hear it all again the next night.

Conversely, the shows you attend with high expectations sometimes turn out to be a disappointment. Example: Steely Dan at Church Road a few years ago. Nothing will change my view that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are two of the cleverest musicians of the rock era, but live in concert? It was just like hearing their records, but with actual people on stage (and Walter Becker saying “fuck” a lot, which became tedious). Even more of a letdown was Emmylou Harris, who so lacked any stage presence when I saw her in Wellington that the audience hardly noticed when she came on. Mind you, she’s still up there in the galaxy of great country singers.

But I digress. At the latest house concert hosted by Simon Burt and Pip Steel at their rural Wairarapa home last night, the entertainment was provided by the Bend. Never heard of them? Neither had I. But you might recognise some of the individual names. Fane Flaws (guitar), Peter Dasent (keyboards) and Tony Backhouse (bass) have a remarkable collective pedigree that stretches back to Blerta, Spats and the Crocodiles. They’ve been playing together off and on for nearly four decades. On this occasion they were joined by a young (well, younger) drummer named Andrew Gladstone.

Why “the Bend”? Well for a start, it’s an ironic play on the name of a slightly more famous outfit from Canada. The Bend do irony very well. But as Flaws explained, the name was also inspired by a young lady who sidled up to Dasent years ago after a performance somewhere down south and inquired, in classically pinched, nasal Kiwi vowels, “Aren’t you with the bend?”.   

This little anecdote set the tone for a wonderfully entertaining night that was rich in sly, subversive humour but impossible to categorise musically. Think Talking Heads mashed up with Lou Reed and Frank Zappa (or so I was assured by someone more familiar with Zappa than I am) and an occasional hint of the Beatles, and you’re somewhere in the ballpark. At least that was my take on the Bend’s songs, but I admit to not being familiar with the musical territory these guys range over.

The first half of the night was – well, not exactly conventional (the Bend don’t do conventional), but at least there was something recognisable in the repertoire. It was energetic, raw, punkish (but always disciplined) rock and roll. After the interval, however, they spiralled into a different realm altogether – slightly deranged, with elements of cabaret (think 1930s Berlin, but with Fender guitars and a type of humour that you wouldn't encounter anywhere but New Zealand) and a madcap quality that had me thinking Spike Jones.

But here’s the thing: it was astonishingly inventive and (like Spike Jones) musically literate. Dasent (who played on the recent Last Waltz 40^th Anniversary Tour, in which New Zealand performers paid tribute to the Band) looks too much like a librarian or mathematician to be in a rock band, but he’s a musician of enormous virtuosity. He’s quietly witty, too, subtly sneaking snatches from the theme tunes for Dr Finlay’s Casebook and The Avengers into a song about watching TV. (At least I think that’s what it was about.)

Backhouse, besides being an impeccably fluent bass player, has one of New Zealand rock music’s most distinctive voices. It has an almost operatic quality. And then there’s the charismatic Flaws, the band’s front man, who played and sang with manic energy. In fact you had to admire the whole band’s energy levels, considering this was their ninth gig in 10 days.

Behind it all, Gladstone, whom I’d guess is a generation behind the rest of the band, fitted seamlessly into all the inspired weirdness – a tragedy in one so young.

A terrific night all round, and a hard act for Simon and Pip to follow.

Correction: The original version of this post wrongly said I saw the Ranch Romance gig at Petone. 

Just shut up and sing, for God's sake

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

Back in the 1990s I attended a rock concert on the Wellington waterfront. The headline act was Carlos Santana, who had burst onto the scene in 1970 with a string of hits that included Evil Ways, Black Magic Woman and Oyo Como Va.

Those records still sound good today. Santana fused Latin and African rhythms with West Coast acid rock, a heady mix that made his early album Abraxas a best-seller. He was a guitar god too, producing arresting solos in a tone that was uniquely his.

Alas, Santana turned out to be a one-trick pony. His Wellington concert revealed a limited repertoire that ran the full gamut from A to B, to borrow a line from Dorothy Parker. The support act, George Thorogood and the Destroyers – exponents of honest, straight-ahead, no-nonsense boogie – were much more entertaining.

I could, at a stretch, have excused Santana for being predictable, but what was unforgiveable about that night’s performance was the frequent verbal interludes in which he insisted on sharing his philosophy, for want of a better word, with his audience. His droning, meandering homilies were even more monotonous than the music.

Santana gave the impression of suffering from some sort of Dalai Lama complex. Perhaps he thought we’d all paid good money to hear his half-baked, New Age theories on how to expand our cosmic consciousness.

Well I hadn’t, and I bet most of the other people there hadn’t either. But being polite New Zealanders, we suffered in silence.

Not for the first time, I wondered about the peculiar conceit that makes rock musicians – and some actors too – imagine that we look to them for inspiration on matters of politics, religion and philosophy.

They are probably encouraged in this delusion by adoring music critics who read profound meaning and insight into even the most banal song lyrics. Bob Dylan, who almost single-handedly intellectualised rock music, has a lot to answer for – although to give him his due, to my knowledge Dylan has generally avoided the trap of delivering sermons to his fans. On the one occasion that I saw him in concert he barely spoke at all.

Some other rock stars, regrettably, seem convinced that the world is vitally interested in their views on political issues; that we lack the gumption to think for ourselves and must wait for their guidance. Step right up, Bono – a man whose name has become synonymous with pompous sanctimony.

John Lennon was another who made the mistake of thinking that being a pop star conferred some sort of moral authority on him. Lennon became a bore from the moment he began using his music to deliver lectures about peace and love.

What made it worse was the sheer hypocrisy. Like many of his ilk, Lennon found it easier to sing about love – as in his puerile hit Imagine – than to demonstrate it in his personal life.

In her 2005 book John, Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia, portrayed the former Beatle as cruel and indifferent to her and their son Julian.   She recalled Julian saying: “Dad’s always telling people to love each other, but how come he doesn’t love me?”

The truth, of course, is that most rock and pop musicians are not moral exemplars. Neither do they have any more political or spiritual insight than you or I. But their celebrity status deludes them – and many of their gullible, star-struck fans – into thinking they’re oracles. The media are complicit in this, reporting celebrities’ political views as if they carry special weight.

Politicians have become adept at turning this to their advantage. Just look at the way Hillary Clinton co-opted Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Madonna and others in her unsuccessful bid for the White House.

These stars exploit their appeal as singers and musicians in an attempt to exercise influence in a totally unrelated field. This is a misuse of their power, and I lose respect both for the stars and the politicians who indulge in it.

The absurdity becomes evident when you imagine the roles being reversed. Would Springsteen invite Clinton to sing with him? I doubt it. To put it another way, Springsteen has about as much credibility as a political commentator as Clinton would have as a vocalist.

We sometimes see the same thing happening here, albeit on a much more modest scale. The actor Sam Neill and the musicians Don McGlashan and Chris Knox have all thrown their weight behind the Labour Party in past election campaigns.

Usually it’s the left of the political spectrum that benefits (if that’s the right word) from such celebrity endorsements, but there are exceptions. The psychologically unstable rapper Kanye West recently announced during a concert that he would have voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election, had he bothered to vote at all.

For this he was booed, as he deserved to be – not because he supported Trump, but because he assumed his fans were interested in his politics.

In hindsight, we should have booed the tedious Carlos Santana too.

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? 

Is the latest Jagger child a vanity baby?

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, July 22.)

Mick Jagger is becoming a father again, and the first question has to be: Why?

He’ll be 73 when the baby is born. By the time the child gets to the age when he or she might appreciate having an active Dad around, Jagger’s likely to be getting pretty decrepit. He almost certainly won’t have the energy that a child demands and deserves.

If it’s a boy, Jagger will be pushing 80 about the time his son will start wanting to kick a football around or go for bike rides. If it’s a girl, Dad may be too old and infirm to take her to her first school disco (assuming, that is, that she would risk the embarrassment of being seen with a geriatric father).

He’s unlikely to be much help when the poor little rich kid enters the turbulent teenage years. And as a British female academic wrote this week about her own experience of having children with a much older man, there are other risks – such as the ageing father having little patience with a demanding, noisy kid, and of tension over generational differences in attitudes toward child-rearing.

So whose purpose is served by this late-life fatherhood? Not the child’s, I fear.

I’ve heard it said that Jagger’s wife, American ballerina Melanie Hamrick, shouldn’t be denied a child just because she happens to be 43 years younger than her husband.

Perhaps that’s a valid argument. Yet I can’t help wondering whether for Jagger, this will be a vanity baby – a child conceived so that he can enhance his reputation for virility and perpetuate his image as a rocker who defies old age.

He may be afflicted with the same peculiar form of male vanity that led Hugh Hefner, at 82, to marry a woman 60 years his junior. According to one report, Hefner is past the point where he can perform sexually, but appearances must be maintained.

Jagger is a complex personality who inspires mixed emotions among those who know him, but one constant seems to be that Mick comes first.

I recently heard Kim Hill interview American journalist Rich Cohen, who has written what sounds like an interesting and insightful book about the Rolling Stones called The Sun and the Moon and the Rolling Stones.

Cohen said he liked and admired Jagger, but his comments reinforced the impression that the pouting rock god is ruthlessly ambitious and single-minded.

Jagger and his bandmate Keith Richards elbowed the original Stone, guitarist Brian Jones, out of the way when he was seen as an impediment to the band’s success – although to be fair, Jones had become increasingly difficult as he lost control of the group.

Jagger didn’t even attend his old friend’s funeral, claiming contractual commitments forced him to fly to Australia to play Ned Kelly in a woefully misconceived film. But his behaviour was consistent with the Mick-first rule.

Cohen noted that Jagger and Richards were equally hard-nosed in the way they treated their loyal keyboard player Ian Stewart, “the forgotten Rolling Stone”.

They allowed him to be sacked because he didn’t fit the band’s image – and although Stewart continued to play on Stones records, including some of their biggest hits, he was never acknowledged as a member.

With Jagger as CEO of the multi-million dollar business that was the Rolling Stones Incorporated, business trumped loyalty.  

Then there was his 60s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull. In her autobiography she wrote that Jagger didn’t want her acting career to distract people from him. There it is again: Mick first.

The other interesting thing about Jagger is that his entire public life has been a pose. In fact you could say he’s perpetrated the most audacious fraud in the history of pop music.

A white boy from a comfortable middle-class home in the outer suburbs of London, he’s spent his adult life singing in the accent of a black man from the mean streets of America’s urban ghettos.

He’s Dartford, not Detroit. His music career has been one long act of mimicry. But the fans are happy to go along with the illusion.

And here’s another thing. For more than 50 years, the Stones have successfully passed themselves off as working-class rebels and heroes of the 1960s counter-culture when in fact they’re hard-core capitalists, as committed to making money as any multinational corporation.

The cynic in me says good luck to them. But I can’t help feeling sorry for the baby who will be born to a man old enough to be her great-grandfather. Kids deserve better. 

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.

When juvenile hero worship turns downright bizarre

I accept that some grown men (and, much more rarely, women) indulge in a form of hero worship. The object of their adoration may be a sports star, a musician, an actor or even a politician. This mystifies me, because I would have thought that hero worship is something you grow out of as you mature; but I accept that it exists, and that it’s essentially harmless.

What I struggle to accept is fawning admiration of flawed people, as if self-inflicted flaws are worthy of our approval. This is a particularly common phenomenon in writing about rock music, where musicians are frequently revered not so much for the quality of their music as for the quantity of alcohol and drugs they have ingested or for their dysfunctional personalities. Lou Reed, who was virtually deified by the rock press when he died last year, was a case in point.

There is another example in yesterday’s edition of Fairfax Media’s Your Weekend section, in which Philip Matthews reviews the book Gutter Black, by the late Dave McArtney, of the 1970s Auckland rock band Hello Sailor.

Matthews is clearly enthralled by McArtney’s drug habit. He devotes a big chunk of his review to it, writing with awe about the role drugs played in the band. The title of Hello Sailor’s song Blue Lady, Matthews tells us, was a coded junkie tribute to a favourite syringe. The band lived in a house they called Mandrax Mansion, after a sedative that was fashionable at the time.

When they went to Los Angeles hoping to crack the American market (a fanciful hope, I would have thought – the band was world-famous in Ponsonby but was hardly noticed outside New Zealand), McArtney survived an overdose. His bandmate Graham Brazier (who was convicted last year on charges of assault against his former and current partners, though we hear very little about that) took heroin at Disneyland. The band spent much of its time in LA partying at their rented house in the Hollywood Hills, which may help explain why their mission was a failure (although, on the other hand, the reason may simply have been that they weren’t as good as they thought they were).

Matthews excitedly relates all this in the apparent belief that readers will be as impressed as he was by the band’s dissolute lifestyle. The great irony is that he reports McArtney’s fondness for the needle ultimately led to his death at 62 from liver cancer. You almost get the impression this is something Matthews thinks we should all aspire to.  

Of course the fact that McArtney died as a result of his drug habit only serves to enhance his mystique in the eyes of people like Matthews. The prospect of canonisation into the sainthood of rock music is enormously enhanced by premature death.

This blog post will almost certainly result in me being accused of making a callous attack on a dead man. It is nothing of the sort. McArtney was a stalwart of the Auckland music scene and was obviously much loved. I was saddened to read of his death. But the fact that his illness was attributed to his past drug use makes it all the more bizarre that Matthews should romanticise his lifestyle. He should grow up.

 

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.

 

Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground: an alternative view

Lou Reed has died, and for the next few days the media will be awash with dribbling, fawning tributes. Most of them will probably be written by people who are tone-deaf.

No band in the history of rock music was more over-rated than the Velvet Underground, the "avant-garde" group Reed formed in New York in the 1960s ("avant-garde" being a term that should come with a flashing red warning light attached). Typical of the tributes we can expect is one I heard on Radio New Zealand this morning, in which it was said that everyone who heard the Velvet Underground was inspired to go out and start their own band. The explanation for that is simple: anyone hearing the Velvet Underground quickly realised you didn't need to be able to sing or play to form a group and be lionised by the left-wing, university-educated cognoscenti (who even then were trying to claim rock music as some sort of socio-political statement).

In that respect Reed's band foreshadowed punk by 10 years. Punk and the Velvets were both essentially anti-music in the sense that they made records for people who didn't like, or at least weren't interested in, music. The difference was that whereas punk at least had a redeeming working-class energy, everything the Velvet Underground did was an artful pose. They were rapidly adopted as the house band of the artsy-fartsy liberal intellectual elite, a status they have never entirely relinquished.

Fans of the Velvet Underground, who mostly exist in universities and the media, have assiduously promoted the myth that they were hugely influential. They were nothing of the sort, other than in the minds of their small coterie of admirers.

They are invariably referred to as a "cult" band, which is a snob code word meaning their appeal was too cerebral for ordinary joes to understand. The fact that the Velvets never cracked the Billboard Top 100 only confirms their credibility in the eyes of their fawning fans, to whom commercial success was the kiss of death and a sure sign of ideological error. But it's probably an accurate measure of the band's real worth.

The problem with the Stones is that they're just greedy

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, May 22.)

Is the Rolling Stones juggernaut finally running out of steam? That’s the question people are asking overseas as fans baulk at the preposterous prices the British rock veterans are charging on their latest American tour.

According to reports from the United States, the band’s management has had to slash ticket prices because of poor sales. The alternative was to play to half-empty venues – not a good look for an act that has long claimed to be “the greatest rock and roll band in the world”.

Prices for the tour were originally set at $US170 in the cheap section, $635 for a premium seat and $2000 for a VIP package. A music blogger wrote that the cost was prohibitive for anyone not working in investment banking.

Compare that with the price of tickets to see Paul McCartney later this year: $50 in Seattle, $39.50 in Milwaukee. Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty are reportedly charging modest prices too, and selling well. So it’s not as if fans are no longer interested in seeing old stagers recapturing their glory days.

Part of the problem may be that the Stones are running on empty. Their last No 1 hit in the US (Miss You) was in 1978 – 35 years ago. They haven’t made the Billboard Hot 100 chart since 1998, when Saint of Me rose to the dizzy height of No 94.

Their last album, A Bigger Bang, was in 2005. How long can they expect fans to keep paying for variations of the same old routine?

But familiarity – dare I even suggest boredom? – is only one part of the explanation for resistance to the Stones’ ticket prices. I suspect the band is paying the price for good old-fashioned greed.

The Stones have never come cheap, and as their recorded output has dwindled they have had to rely more heavily on tours to maintain them in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. Their Bigger Bang tour of 2005-6 was declared the highest-grossing tour of all time, earning $437 million. But they may have pushed their luck too far.

Certainly, some of their fans seem to be seeing them in a more critical light. “I have to give them respect for what they have done, but now they seem like an embarrassment,” Cameron Bowman told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Seriously, how much more money do they need? I feel like they are in Donald Trump or Gordon Gekko territory – just money for money's sake.”

Here we’re getting to the nub of the issue. For more than 50 years the Stones have been remarkably successful in passing themselves off as working-class rebels and heroes of 1960s counterculture, thumbing their noses at the capitalist establishment. The gullible fans bought it unquestioningly.

Perhaps they are now finally waking up to the reality that the band members are capitalists to the core, as fervently committed to making money as any giant multinational corporation. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the band moved en masse to the south of France in the 1970s to escape paying British taxes.

Let’s look at Sir Michael Philip Jagger, in particular. Jagger’s entire career has been built on fakery.

Some of the other original Stones – notably Bill Wyman and Keith Richards – had a legitimate claim to the working-class pose the band assumed in its early years, but Jagger came from an impeccably bourgeois background. His father was a schoolteacher and his mother was an active member of the Conservative Party. Jagger attended the relatively select Dartford Grammar School.

Given this background, it astounds me that for decades Jagger has managed to make a fabulously lucrative career pretending to sound like a black man from the mean streets of urban America. The jive talk, the bluesy inflections – it’s an astonishingly cheeky pastiche, but he’s carried it off.

As for that anti-establishment persona, which persists to this day (and which Jagger still promotes), it’s hard to reconcile with his immense fortune, which is estimated at nearly $US300 million. I don’t see how you can claim to be part of the revolution while living in the palace.

He’s reputed to be tight-fisted too. Jagger is a rarity among wealthy showbiz figures, and rarer still among knights of the realm, for having no known record of charitable work or public service.

This is no great surprise. Some of the meanest, most grasping individuals I’ve known were people who assiduously cultivated their anti-capitalist credentials.

You may deduce from all this that I dislike Jagger, but that’s true only up to a point. I think he’s a phony, but good luck to him if he can get away with it. My irritation is with all those dopey fans who still worship him as a totem of the protest generation.

Like most of my generation I’ve enjoyed the music of the Stones, though I wouldn’t call myself a hard-core fan. They made some great records, albeit a long time ago, and on the one occasion I saw them in concert (again, decades ago) I thought they probably merited the label of greatest rock and roll band in the world.

I have a grudging admiration for the wizened old reprobate Keith Richards, who strikes me as a much more genuine and likeable individual than Jagger, and more seriously committed to music for its own sake. 

But the band is stretching credulity – in fact defying gravity – by continuing to masquerade as down-and-dirty rock and roll rebels after more than 50 years.  No one can pretend that their appeal rests on anything other than nostalgic yearning for the heady days of Honky Tonk Women and Gimme Shelter, when we were all young, idealistic and beautiful (well, young and idealistic, at least).

It’s pathetic, really. Perhaps the Stones would be doing themselves and everyone else a favour by pricing themselves out of the market. Then they could quietly retire and take up indoor bowls, or some such activity as befits their age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bitten on the bum by MMP

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, January 3.)

HOLD everything!

Dismiss the government. Call another election.

The John Key-led coalition government has no legitimacy and no mandate to do anything. This is the logical conclusion to be drawn from the non-stop wailing emanating from those still smarting over the election result.

Labour and the Greens insist the government has no mandate for the partial sale of state assets. As Labour stalwart and marijuana law reform activist Phil Saxby explained it in a letter to this paper, parties supporting partial asset sales won only 48.98 percent of the vote. Because parties opposed to asset sales won an infinitesimally greater share (50.29 percent), he seems to suggest, the government is morally obliged to abandon its plan.

But if that’s the case, the Left can surely argue that none of National’s policies were endorsed by a majority of voters. It follows that the party must abandon everything in its manifesto.

There would therefore be two choices: hold another election (and just see how the voters like that), or go into a state of suspended animation for three years during which nothing would happen.

But let’s back up for a moment. In the general election of 2005, Labour and Jim Anderton’s Progressive Party formed a centre-Left coalition with a combined share of only 42.26 percent of the vote. Funny, but I don’t recall the democratic purists of the Left protesting then that the Clark government had no mandate.

The truth is, of course, that it’s mightily difficult for any party to secure an absolute majority under the MMP system. If National can’t even do it with 59 seats to the combined 48 seats won by the two main centre-Left parties, chances are that no party will ever pull it off.

This is the very reason so many anti-MMP campaigners complain that the system can lead to political paralysis.

Of course it suits the Left to argue, now that we have a centre-Right government, that it has no mandate. It must be a bitter disappointment that MMP, which the Left saw as a way of weakening the National Party’s traditional dominance in New Zealand politics, has let them down.

The exquisite irony is that Mr Saxby was one of the original promoters of MMP, but cries “unfair!” when the system delivers a centre-Right coalition. Well, he asked for it.

* * *

ARE GREYING rock fans being played for a bunch of suckers?

In recent years a steady procession of reformed 1960s and 70s bands has passed through New Zealand on the concert circuit, hoping to capitalise on nostalgia for the glory days of rock.

Some are still capable of “doing the business”, as they say. But with others, you get the impression that things are a bit – well, desperate.

Ads for the forthcoming “Creedence Clearwater Revisited” tour trumpeted the fact that the band includes original Creedence Clearwater Revival members Stu Cook and Doug “Cosmo” Clifford. But anyone familiar with CCR knows that the heart, soul and creative brain of the band was John Fogerty, who wrote and sang the band’s songs as well playing lead guitar.

Promoting the tour on the basis that it features Cook and Clifford (the original CCR bass player and drummer) is like announcing a reunion of the Beach Boys featuring David Marks and Ricky Fataar, or the Bee Gees starring Colin Petersen and Vince Melouney.

Of course you’ve never heard of these individuals. They once played in those groups, but no one remembers them.

That the faded remnants of CCR continue to tour, even after Fogerty tried to prevent them from using the name Creedence Clearwater Revisited (which cleverly retains the initials of the original band), is testament to the public’s enduring fascination with the music of rock’s golden era. But a decent pub covers band could probably replicate the CCR sound just as well.

* * *

ALL MY LIFE, the word “fatality” has been pronounced with the stress on the second syllable: fa-TAL-ity. But in some radio news reports on the holiday road toll, the emphasis has mysteriously shifted to the first syllable, so that it comes out as “FAY-tality”.

A similar fate has befallen the word “flotilla”. Traditionally it has been pronounced as flo-TILL-a. But when Israeli commandos boarded a fleet of Turkish relief ships approaching Gaza in 2010, television and radio newsreaders decided this was all wrong. Suddenly it became FLOW-tilla.

Similarly, broadcast reports on the Foreshore and Seabed Act often referred to the public DO-main, rather than do-MAIN. This quaint pronunciation is reminiscent of parts of the American South, where people call the POL-lice when someone’s causing trouble.

Why these peculiar inflexions? It can only be ignorance. A new generation of journalists and newsreaders appears not to have encountered these words before, so makes up whatever pronunciation feels right. Then it starts to spread virally.

Sadly, resistance is probably futile. This is a language in flux – a process as unstoppable as the phases of the moon.