by Bob Stanley
2 This would be the fate of the pre-psychedelic beat groups. Places like Batley Variety Club, in a small Yorkshire town, became a home from home for the likes of the Searchers and the Hollies, and would provide them with a regular income until retirement age.
3 The original fifties definition of the word ‘hippie’ was someone who wants to be hipper than everyone else in the room. It’s unsurprising, then, that CSN fell out and tore each other apart so quickly. Adding Neil Young to the line-up in 1970 hardly helped. Among these elemental hippies, Nash turned out to be the lukewarm water.
4 MWF’s two albums contain some gorgeous Anglo–west coast harmonic pop; imagine CSN but with an extra ex-Hollie.
5 Stevie Nicks’s witchy personality was a construct that looked both back to glam and forward to new pop. She never wasted a word in her lyrics, was always ready to emphasise her lace-veil spookiness with ever-present scarves and Tarot cards, and it gave Mac a new dimension which nevertheless fitted the windswept, sea-salty atmosphere of previous incarnations; maybe Peter Green had foreseen the group’s future with ‘Black Magic Woman’ in 1968. Away from the group Nicks could lay this on too heavily (‘Leather and Lace’, a duet with Don Henley, US no. 6 ’81), but with Buckingham lurking over her shoulder she could still evoke frosted window panes and doomed Brontëan love – see ‘When I See You Again’ from 1987’s Tango in the Night.
6 Retrospectively, this sound has been termed ‘yacht rock’. This is partly because it suited the lifestyle of someone wealthy enough to enjoy smooth music while out for a sail; partly because sailing was a popular leisure activity among the wealthier California musicians; and partly because of a spoof TV series called Yacht Rock from 2005 which fictionalised the lives of late-seventies soft-rockers. Its anthem is the gorgeous ‘Sailing’ by Christopher Cross, an entirely aquatic single from 1980, just like a flotation tank (and a lot cheaper).
38
1975: STORM WARNING
There’s gonna be a rock star backlash … We’re moving into a grit cycle, a revulsion against excess.
Rock Follies, ITV 1976
The best-selling singles in Britain, 1975:
1 Bay City Rollers, ‘Bye Bye Baby’
2 Rod Stewart, ‘Sailing’
3 The Stylistics, ‘Can’t Give You Anything (But My Love)’
4 Windsor Davies and Don Estelle, ‘Whispering Grass’
5 Tammy Wynette, ‘Stand by Your Man’
6 Bay City Rollers, ‘Give a Little Love’
7 David Essex, ‘Hold Me Close’
8 Art Garfunkel, ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’
9 Roger Whittaker, ‘The Last Farewell’
10 10cc, ‘I’m Not in Love’
Beneath the pavement, the beach; beyond the city, the jetty. 1975 was a year of tame pop – the tamest ever – and myriad novelties. Glam dissolved fast as Slade tried to crack America and the Sweet began to write their own songs away from Chinn and Chapman’s keen guidance. Chinnichap’s big new stars were Smokie (‘If You Think You Know How to Love Me’, UK no. 3), who came from Bradford but sounded like an Eagles covers band playing on a sightseeing boat; they went on to have ten more sleepy Top 20 hits. Rod Stewart became a tax exile, scoring a number-one album (Atlantic Crossing) and single (‘Sailing’) that acted as a glossy goodbye to impoverished Britain. Everything sounded clean and empty. 1975 was typified by David Essex’s ‘Hold Me Close’, a dry, small sound, like music hall in a doll’s house. Cute, harmless, but impossible to dance to. The best-selling record of the year, a genuine phenomenon, was a re-recording of a Four Seasons flop from ten years earlier. Think what the Walker Brothers had done with Frankie Valli’s ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More’, then play it next to Rollermania’s defining 45. From ’66 peak to ’75 trough, pop had lost its way badly. Looking at Britain’s ten biggest-selling singles, Tammy Wynette’s reactionary rallying cry was a six-year-old recording; only the Stylistics could get you on your feet, and the year’s best major hit, ‘I’m Not in Love’, was sensuous as hell but narcotically numbed.
America had it even worse. At number one were the Doobie Brothers’ ‘Black Water’ (a Creedence-type tribute to the South, only sapped of all energy); John Denver’s ‘Thank God I’m a Country Boy’ (‘Got me a fiddle, eggs on the griddle’ – this was America sticking its fingers in its ears and closing its eyes, on the verge of surrender in Saigon, imagining itself inside a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon); Linda Ronstadt’s ‘You’re No Good’ (a retread of Betty Everett’s and the Swinging Blue Jeans’ smoking 1964 single, overcooked and turned to slurry). In any other year, these records would have struggled to make the Top 20 – none of them registered at all in the UK Top 50.
What had happened? Well, for starters, the industry should never have moved to California. The laissez-faire environment sent it to sleep; by 1975 rock was neutralised, and pop – whether bubblegum, glam, soft or teenybop – gave you little more to chew on. Linda Ronstadt’s gutless covers (she also cut the Everlys’ ‘When Will I Be Loved’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Back in the USA’ and Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Heatwave’) typified the lack of spirit. At least the UK had gone through glam and prog. America, from its new salad-crunching power base in Los Angeles, had spent all of the early seventies creating what became known as ‘classic rock’.1
Classic rock was more of a business model than a genre. The establishment of a canon (by industry and by critics) led to fifties and sixties recordings being repackaged with tags like ‘Rock Roots’, as if the Small Faces had been nothing more than baby steps for Humble Pie, and the Yardbirds a nursery for Led Zeppelin. By 1975 the huge sales of Humble Pie and Led Zeppelin led the industry to this conclusion (which proved to be lazy, and bad guesswork). There were refuseniks who, very soon, would seem like seers.
Radio also played its part in the emergence of classic rock. The turn-of-the-decade switch to stereo FM in the States – without the static of mono AM – had led to a new kind of radio programming, one which was still recognisably pop but wore a lightly furrowed brow – the music had to have its roots, however vague, in hippie. So the Moody Blues were in, but the Osmonds certainly weren’t. Classic rock was music that appealed to advertisers, drivers and young parents. It was written up in Rolling Stone, which managed to be both countercultural and crushingly conservative. It was also unforgiving, very male and very straight. Even now, magazines like Mojo and radio stations like Planet Rock will adhere to the mid-seventies classic-rock rules; they will deify Led Zeppelin’s hard-rock thunder but think Sweet are a bit silly.2 Decades later, this really shouldn’t matter. But it does – classic rock’s influence is deep, its hold is vice-like and, without a viable alternative to challenge it in the early seventies, its rules had been set in stone by 1975. For once, the American singles chart was not the place to find pop’s unlikely heroes. There was no Dion or Monkees or Creedence around to make school days go faster. There was disco, but we’ll deal with that later.
In the old American music centres, things decayed; the future was not so much cancelled as postponed while people struggled to cope with the present. Motown left Detroit as its population plummeted and its once grand city centre became a rusting hulk. Down in Memphis, Elvis stayed home, recording ever mushier ballads at Graceland, and barely saw the streets of his home town, where Stax Records, through heinous mishandling, went bust in 1975. New York City, meanwhile, had gone bankrupt and – with central government refusing to help – had been officially left to rot. Deep in the ruins things were stirring; out of desperation, or as a reaction to the sap that surrounded them, a few citizens of these great cities decided they wanted to hear something that sounded like whatever the opposite of the Eagles was. In Memphis, former singer with blue-eyed soul act the Box Tops (‘The Letter’, US no. 1, UK no. 4 ’67) Alex Chilton helped his band Big Star to invent the power-pop genre, using sharp Who edges and bright Beatles harmonies on 1974’s Radio City. Their sensibility, said Bud Scoppa in his Phonograph review, was ‘a tangle of hip affec
tations, mid-sixties mannerisms, teenage sagaciousness, jaded cynicism, and yearning romanticism’. Writers loved it, but Big Star were signed to Stax, which was already on the rocks, and Radio City sold a ridiculously small number of copies. By 1975 Chilton was taking Big Star into a smack- and depression-led place on ‘Holocaust’, ‘Nighttime’ and ‘Kanga Roo’, love songs that were cut with feedback and deliberately amateurish musicianship. Chilton was trying to create music that sounded like the exact moment before he expired. Rejected by every label in 1975, then bootlegged and known by only a small clique of believers, the album was eventually released as Big Star Third/Sister Lovers in 1978.
In terms of decline, the Detroit area had a head start on Memphis and New York. It had been in a state of upheaval since riots in 1967 – almost two hundred thousand whites left the city in the next two years, and economic desolation happened concurrently. The musical reaction came from the MC5 and the Stooges; both used dirty guitar sounds and ground out repetitive riffs like engines with faulty exhausts – you could choke on this sound, and it was way too greasy for radio. It was enough of a jolt to earn the MC5 a Rolling Stone cover in 1969, before their first album was even released. ‘Kick Out the Jams’, one of pop’s great titles, proved to be a noise in search of a tune. People wanted them to be great, but they spluttered and died. The Stooges were much better. They were led by the ferrety Iggy Pop, who was a circus freak of the old school. He spent much of his time on stage topless, contorting his body, flexing his muscles. Their titles alone – ‘Dirt’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, ‘No Fun’ – suggested the Stooges were the group least likely to kiss corporate ass. Elektra A&R man Danny Fields saw them at the University of Michigan student union in September ’68 and thought they were the sound he’d been waiting to hear all his life. Repetition, repetition, repetition: they were as automated and relentless as the Motown machine in its prime. Play ‘Going to a Go-Go’ after ‘Loose’ and you’ll see what I mean; both are one-chord wonders.
The Stooges sought power and release through sheer noise and endless, precision-made groove. This is what made the first two Stooges albums so refreshing and influential, first to David Bowie (‘Rebel Rebel’ is, essentially, a Stooges knock-off), then in punk (the Sex Pistols covered ‘No Fun’), and then to dozens of acolytes in the eighties. The very same qualities meant they were rejected out of hand in 1969.
The first album’s stand-out track was ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’, written over breakfast by guitarist Ron Asheton after Danny Fields told them they needed at least one actual tune. Elektra got John Cale in to produce it, he added an insistent one-note piano line and tambourine to give it zip, and they had the hardest, angriest record of 1969. ‘So messed up’ served as an opening line and a career manifesto. You imagined the Stooges were constantly grinding their teeth as they played. Their second album, 1970’s Fun House, had no tunes whatsoever, nothing but a groove, nothing but raw power; their third album, Raw Power, on the other hand, was all hooks and hits, but it came out in 1973. They had taken years off in between, been usurped by another Detroit act called Alice Cooper, become smackheads, become completely messed up. ‘I’m the world’s forgotten boy,’ shouted Iggy, now aged twenty-six. They split again.
Reviewing Raw Power for Let It Rock, Simon Frith thought it was the best album of ’73 (along with Tubular Bells) but concluded that Iggy Pop sounded ‘a little silly, and a little sad. However much Iggy may prance, he doesn’t really know what to do about America and he doesn’t really like to think about it.’ Iggy toyed with pop for decades after the Stooges split, living large on their legend, but he always seemed a bit panto without his band. He became Bowie’s drugs buddy, shouted at journalists who offered him coffee (he was clean of all drugs, he insisted), fornicated with a giant teddy bear on children’s TV and generally acted like a wally. Just when you were set to dismiss him, just when you thought that his doing a car-insurance advert was the final straw, he’d turn on the charm again, remind you of the basic, thrusting glory of ‘Search and Destroy’, and all was forgiven. In 2007 the Stooges got back together for a third and final time, recording an album called The Weirdness. ‘After forty years of making fucking records,’ Iggy wept to the press, ‘I really cared on this one.’ Enough already.
New York was where the biggest and best nihilists were. Like the Stooges, the Velvet Underground were similarly intrigued by pure noise and didn’t feel much kinship with the Great American Songbook. They were formed by two mean-faced contrarians. Charismatic Welshman John Cale, who could have been the new Richard Burton in a parallel world, went to New York to do a postgrad course in modern composition on a Leonard Bernstein scholarship. Entirely uninterested in pop, he had joined La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music. Among other new methods of creating music, Cale and the Theatre once sustained a single note for days; another time they screamed at a plant until it died. Lou Reed had fought his way out of a troubled Jewish upbringing that included ECT with a radio show called Excursions on a Wobbly Rail. He also played guitar and got himself a publishing deal in 1964 with budget label Pickwick, on which he released an unhinged dance-craze single under the fake band name of the Primitives. ‘The Ostrich’ didn’t catch on like ‘The Twist’, but it did well enough to earn Reed an appearance on TV; Cale was invited to back him in the fictitious Primitives. Reed revealed to Cale that ‘The Ostrich’ had been written by tuning all six guitar strings to one note. The Welshman was impressed, and soon the Velvet Underground were recording avant-pop like ‘Heroin’ (‘it’s my life, it’s my wife’ – they made it sound great) and ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’. There is a point on the latter, immediately after Reed sings ‘and then my mind split open’, where you can actually hear a tear in the space–time continuum. This was 1967, but it was also 1977. And 1987. Reed and Cale had somehow created a noise so brand new that it tore a hole in pop’s natural state of progression, so sharp and freakish and heart-piercing that it makes me burst out laughing every time I hear it. It sounded like the future, and nobody (bar the young David Bowie, at home in Beckenham) was listening. ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’ was violently and gleefully against what the west coast of 1967 – that is, the whole pop world in 1967 – stood for. No peace, no easy options. And yet it was a song of unrequited love with sweet, ghostly harmonies backing Reed as he sings, deluding himself, ‘I know she cares about me, I heard her call my name.’ This was pop, but not as anyone – Warhol and Bowie aside – would have recognised it in the year Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ and the Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’ were all over the radio.3
In 1975, with the Velvet Underground long dissolved, Reed made an album called Metal Machine Music. It was four sides of feedback, that was it. That was all. In 1975 it was succinct. It was an end – the ‘ultimate conclusion of heavy metal’, according to Reed’s notes. Most importantly (because you’d never want to actually listen to it, trust me), Metal Machine Music was a statement. Lester Bangs, writing in Creem, was the only journalist to understand this at the time. ‘Any idiot with the equipment could have made this album, including me, you or Lou. That’s one of the main reasons I like it so much.’ He also called Reed ‘an emblem of absolute negativism’.
A magazine called Punk was launched in 1975. The first issue included a large piece on Metal Machine Music. It existed to celebrate a new scene being played out in clubs like CBGB, Zeppz and Max’s Kansas City, by bands like the Ramones, Blondie, the Marbles and the Patti Smith Group. Unquestionably, they were the children of the Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed – surely with no small sense of pride – was usually in the crowd. Intriguingly, none of these bands sounded anything like each other. The Marbles, now all but forgotten, were Beatles nuts playing power pop, while the Ramones aimed to condense Beach Boys, Phil Spector and Shangri-Las hits into recidivist ninety-second bursts with antagonistic titles like ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’. On paper they may have seemed as backward-glancing as the Marbles. They had the ferocity of the early Kinks, the
pace of the early Who, named themselves after the young McCartney’s stage name – Paul Ramon – and played as fast and loud as possible, no gaps between the songs. Leather jackets, T-shirts and jeans; they felt like the entire history of music (blues and folk aside) pummelled, broken down into pieces and recast in bubblegum. It didn’t feel like it was looking backwards at all; it felt more like an art project on how to distil modern pop’s essence.
The Ramones’ debut album in early ’76 was incredibly primitive, the most unprofessional-sounding major-label record the seventies had seen. It had no solos; it was a simple, straight line of energy, and it became the single biggest influence on UK punk – a teenager in Deptford called Mark Perry was so moved by its excitement he started the Sniffin’ Glue fanzine.
In short order the Ramones made three rama-lama albums (Ramones, Leave Home, Rocket to Russia), and scored a few minor UK Top 40 hits (‘Sheena Is a Punk Rocker’, ‘Swallow My Pride’, ‘Don’t Come Close’) which the radio wouldn’t touch; in the States ‘Rockaway Beach’ (no. 66 ’78) was their only sniff of a hit. In interviews (‘What does brevity mean?’) they came across as sweet and extraordinarily naive: ‘We’re playing pure rock ’n’ roll with no blues or folk or any of that stuff in it,’ explained Johnny Ramone. But then drummer Tommy Ramone left in ’79 and it turned out that it had been high concept after all, with Tommy as the secret mastermind: ‘My function with the Ramones was as a producer and an organiser,’ he told Timothy White in 1978. ‘There was never anything like the Ramones before. We used block chording as a melodic device, and the harmonies resulting from the distortion of the amplifiers created countermelodies. The hypnotic effect of strict repetition, driving the music like a sonic machine … it’s very sensual. It was a new way of looking at music.’ After Tommy left, the Ramones’ sonic machine continued on cabaret autopilot for twenty years until Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee had all died.
