Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  If the Carpenters were ultimately enacting a tragedy, then the James Last Orchestra, which reached its commercial peak during this decade, offered a similar audience a foolproof guarantee of pleasure and security. Last (nicknamed ‘Hansi’ by his fans) was a German jazz bassist who had hit upon the concept of ‘Non-Stop Dancing’ as a means of applying the ethos of the pre-rock dance bands to the modern era. ‘All the bands were just playing7 music from the 30s and 40s’, he explained. ‘So we started with songs from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.’ Only the tunes survived, as all the symbols of rock ’n’ roll were tossed aside in favour of rich orchestrations and jaunty dance beats, accompanied by wordless chorales in which even the most tuneless aficionados could participate. So uniform yet flexible was his approach that it could encompass almost every form of music, from Jimi Hendrix to Bing Crosby – all fodder for Last’s non-stop party, which would force everyone from small kids to great-grandparents on to the dance floor. Arguably the world’s most popular and least celebrated artist, Last could fill enormous halls around the world for decades to come, provoking the most conservative audiences into emotional frenzies that they could not achieve elsewhere in their lives.

  The 1970s were full of such ambiguous artists, pitched somewhere between the extremes of easy listening (‘You could say I’m the Ray Conniff8 of the pop world’, said Elton John) and hard rock. Neil Diamond carried the trappings of the rock star and the sensitive troubadour, but oversold every line as if he was desperate to reach the back row of a Broadway theatre, which was his natural milieu. In an earlier age, the musical stage might also have represented the ultimate horizon for Billy Joel, who was torn between his classical training, his passion for the immediacy of rock ’n’ roll, and his unashamedly sentimental storytelling – a combination more enriching than the ingredients that made up Bruce Springsteen, but lacking in the latter’s innate command of rock mythology. Elton John was the most mysterious of them all, equally at home and unsettled as a pub pianist or the focus of a stadium audience. He’d debuted as a confessional singer of someone else’s words; adopted a broad Southern twang to hide his roots in the London suburbs; then abandoned reticence to become the most flamboyant pop artist of the decade, indulging himself in brilliant pastiches of so many styles that there was no longer one he could call his own. ‘I’d like to have nine pianos9 on stage, a cascade of pianos, and make my entrance like that’, he revealed in 1973 as if he was Liberace. Seven consecutive No. 1 US albums illustrated his power as an entertainer, until his revelation in 1976 that he was ‘bisexual’ (and the break-up of his writing partnership with Bernie Taupin) sabotaged his career at its peak. A fan from Utah greeted his honesty with a profound sense of betrayal: ‘I regret facing the fact10 that he is a gross perverter of the sacred … I pity him for his sexual illusions and perversions.’

  If Elton John was ultimately too unpredictable to command an all-ages audience, the likes of Andy Williams were too safe. Despite growing his hair a daring inch or two over his collar in the early 1970s, working with rock producers, and tackling material by Paul McCartney and George Harrison, Williams would have to wait another two decades or more before being adopted as an icon of kitsch easy listening by many who had despised him in his commercial prime. (Meanwhile, Linda Ronstadt occupied the role that Andy Williams had once played in musical culture, treating familiar pop hits to makeovers which sapped their original spontaneity.) Abba would experience an even more extreme reversal of critical fortune. The Swedish band’s victory in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest marked the first occasion on which a remotely modern record had triumphed in that dumbed-down arena. But it damned them by association amongst those who would relish, for example, Wings, ELO or Blondie – Abba being too slick, too commercial, too Swedish (and therefore, it followed, emotionally empty in their English-language songwriting). Redemption had to wait until their original teenage audience inherited control of the entertainment media, at which point Abba were rehabilitated – like a Stalinist purge in reverse – into an imaginary version of 1970s culture, in which froth and frivolity replaced the shadows of terrorism and economic decline remembered by veterans of the decade.

  Those who had experienced adolescence during the 1960s were now reluctantly facing maturity: too old to be convinced by Grand Funk or Bolan, too young to settle for Andy Williams or Johnny Mathis. To satisfy their needs, and exploit their increased spending power, rock developed its own form of what radio had once called ‘good music’. The names might have changed – no Sinatra or Tony Bennett – but the principle was the same: extract-flush-lefting the ethos of a musical revolution (once it was swing, now the counter-culture) and offering it with a finesse that would once have seemed outrageously un-hip.

  This was rock for adults, or those preparing to reach that status: often idealistic in its social concerns (saving the whale and the planet, now, rather than overthrowing the capitalist order), and aware that the simplistic desires of youth, for sexual fulfilment or personal power, carried burdens which might remove more freedom than they granted. Its musical surface was slick, produced with consummate technical skill by the likes of Richard Perry, Lenny Waronker or Gary Katz; or, indeed, by the artists themselves, when they had the ears of a Stevie Wonder or Joni Mitchell. Jazz, the music of informed adulthood since the birth of the cool at the end of the 1940s, was rarely far from the heart of these records; likewise a set of mannerisms borrowed from soul and the blues. Because many of these urban sophisticates had flourished in the 1960s, they knew how to construct a hit single, with the result that records with such adult themes as Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ and Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ found their way on to Top 40 radio. The doyens of this approach – not a style, as it was too multifaceted, or a movement, as each act had its own rationale – were Stevie Wonder, already a slightly jaded veteran in his early 20s (albeit one who had mastered every instrument he could reach, and could ease himself effortlessly from sentimental balladry to politically charged funk); and Steely Dan. Their cynicism and perfectionism grew as they quit the road and devoted months of sessions to driving the most agile musical talents of their generation through countless retakes, until they had achieved the ultimate expression of their sourpuss, icy beauty.

  What divided these musicians from those who were unknowingly pioneering the way for the radio format known as Adult Contemporary – the Carpenters, Barbra Streisand, Captain & Tennille, to name but three – was that they carried with them the dead weight of the counter-culture. Either, like David Crosby and Graham Nash, they continued to fight the same battles as they had a decade before, loyal to their tarnished flags; or, like Mitchell and both Carly and Paul Simon, they wrote about the death of that idealism, and its insidious effect on their personal lives. Their focus was intense, but usually aimed inward: each child of the ‘we’ generation struggled to come to terms with the consequences of being ‘me’. While his occasional musical partner Neil Young surveyed the inevitability with which (in his phrase) time fades away, Stephen Stills notoriously dedicated an entire series of 1970s compositions to the study of his ‘changes’, that most ‘me generation’ of concepts. But at least they acknowledged the inevitability of change. Others preferred to sustain the past endlessly, avoiding adulthood in favour of sustaining a golden (or imaginary) past.

  I realise the Beatles did fill11 a space in the 60s, and all the people who the Beatles meant something to have grown up. It’s like with anything. You grow up with it and you get attached to it. That’s one of the problems in our lives, becoming too attached to things.

  George Harrison, 1974

  I don’t like oldies12 or nostalgia. I don’t like rock ’n’ roll anyway – original rock ’n’ roll. I can’t stand it. I never listen to Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis or Carl Perkins. I can’t bear all those people. I heard them fifteen years ago, thank you very much, and I don’t want to hear them now.

  Mick Jagger, 1974

  So large had the Beatles loomed over the 1
960s that their existence – even as a shadow – was an embarrassment to the culture of the early 1970s. There was no kudos to be gained from displaying an overt influence to their music: the likes of Badfinger and the Electric Light Orchestra were mistrusted for their undue affection for the recent past. (Other influences from the 1960s, such as the Velvet Underground and the MC5, were considered more acceptable by critics.) Ex-members of the Beatles were lampooned for caring too much about politics (Lennon), religion (Harrison) or family life (McCartney); or, like Ringo Starr, for over-reliance on more talented friends (especially the other Beatles).

  The shadow was inescapable, however, and assumed strange shades. In 1973, and again in 1976, entrepreneurs tried to launch young bands called the New Beatles; the first of them even released a single, ‘Push Button Rock’. ‘Legally speaking13, we have registered the name,’ said their manager, ‘and I assume that was permitted because the Beatles have officially disbanded.’ Not that this diminished the commercial value of the original group’s catalogue, which was milked by two retrospective double albums in 1973, and then the simultaneous reissue of all their original singles in 1976 – with the result that they filled twenty places in the novelty-starved British chart. Beatlefest conventions offered a distant glimpse of Beatlemania for those too young to have experienced it in person; likewise several theatrical shows based around their songs, culminating in a disastrous movie adaptation of Sgt. Pepper, starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees. There was even a pornographic novel, published in Copenhagen, entitled Insex Mania, which climaxed (literally) with the Beatles indulging in a rampant orgy on the stage of the Roundhouse theatre in London.

  A BBC radio series detailing the history of the Beatles in 1972 was followed by a thirteen-part extravaganza devoted to Bing Crosby, and another to the entire history of popular music. By that Christmas, the rock ’n’ roll-free compilation 20 All-Time Greats of the 50s was the best-selling LP in Britain, appealing to the ‘neglected market14’ of buyers aged 25 to 35. Similar collections of rock ’n’ roll hits followed, and sold equally well. Meanwhile, the UK singles chart in December 1972 was filled with reissues by Carole King, the Animals, the Drifters, the Shangri-La’s, Little Eva and various Motown acts – a clear sign that the incipient glam-rock movement was only reaching a minority of potential purchasers.

  The desire to return to the simpler pleasures of the 1950s kept the era’s surviving rockers in work. Elvis Presley was in Las Vegas, tackling his early hits at almost double their original tempo, in a desperate attempt to recreate the savage excitement they’d once aroused. Jerry Lee Lewis deliberately aggravated his Teddy-boy following by playing country standards instead of ‘Breathless’ and ‘Lewis Boogie’. Chuck Berry was rewarded with the biggest sales of his career for the puerile novelty record, ‘My Ding-a-Ling’. (Professional moralist Mary Whitehouse alleged that the song would encourage small boys to unzip their shorts and play with their penises in public.) Fellow veteran Rick Nelson returned with ‘Garden Party’, a lament for his inability to escape his past. In October 1972, those two records were in the US Top 10, alongside one of Elvis Presley’s last convincing rockers, ‘Burning Love’. Within months, poor physical and psychological health had so drained Presley that he began to approach his songs with the manoeuvrability of a giant oil tanker. Berry, meanwhile, had exhausted his creativity as a composer and was becoming an increasingly cynical performer, while their old partner in rebel-rousing, Little Richard, was reduced to stripping on stage to salvage even the faintest echo of his 1950s outrageousness.

  Yet the nostalgia could not be stemmed. The promoter Richard Nader assembled an array of 1950s doo-wop groups and discovered a formula that could fill New York’s Madison Square Garden’s 20,000 seats. The BBC inaugurated several weekly shows devoted to ‘revived 45s’, and American stations, with more air to fill, invented the all-oldie radio format. Record labels established divisions to repackage the recent past, RCA taking the laurels for excess with two four-LP box sets by Elvis, the second of which – running to a limited edition of 15,000 copies – was accompanied by a piece of cloth supposedly sliced from one of Presley’s stage suits. And rock ’n’ roll was lending its nostalgic sheen to film soundtracks. Martin Scorsese’s 1967 debut feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, had been filled with frat-rock and doo-wop classics, a technique now perfected by the same director’s Mean Streets. The latter emerged in 1973 alongside American Graffiti, a pitch-perfect recreation of late 1950s teenage life; like its British equivalent, That’ll Be the Day, it mapped out its characters’ lives in two-minute slices of rock ’n’ roll – once ephemeral, now classic.

  Packs of ageing Teddy boys still walked the streets of British cities, arousing not fear but bewildered amusement. Their London contingent flocked to Let It Rock, a King’s Road boutique owned by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, which was devoted to original and reproduction Ted fashions. ‘Very heavy, it was15’, said McLaren proudly of the shop’s ambience. ‘No one’d dare come in the place unless they were Teds. Mick Jagger stood outside the shop for half an hour once and never came in. Ringo Starr was the only one who dared to actually come in on a Saturday.’ When Let It Rock was rebranded, finding fulfilment as Sex, the Teds went elsewhere, maintaining an underground revival which by 1976 had spawned a gig circuit and such new/old bands as Shakin’ Stevens & the Sunsets, Crazy Cavan and Matchbox. Original Teds derided the adolescent Plastic Teds who were trying to ape them, although every generation joined forces for a march upon the BBC demanding airtime for their music.

  The charts of the 1970s were full of songs which used ‘rock ’n’ roll’ as a shorthand expression for lost youthfulness (‘Rock ’n’ Roll, I Gave You the Best Years of My Life’, for example). There was also a spate of rock stars celebrating their roots by revisiting the songs that had fuelled their own adolescence. The Band (Moondog Matinee) and John Lennon (Rock ’n’ Roll) leaned on the 1950s; the slightly younger David Bowie revived the mid-1960s London R&B scene (Pin Ups). Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, a band with roots deep in the world of fine art, ranged back to the 1930s, via Bob Dylan (These Foolish Things and Another Time, Another Place). Other veterans of the British beat boom were enticed to relive their glory days by joining a 1960s revival tour across America, which Peter Noone insisted ‘isn’t a nostalgic get-together16’. Merseybeat veterans the Searchers defiantly devoted much of their set to a lengthy rendition of Neil Young’s ‘Southern Man’, but soon discovered that nobody wanted to see them grow. All their audience desired was the opportunity to close their eyes slightly and imagine that it was 1964 again.

  A similar effect was achieved by the so-called power-pop movement, a scattering of American bands who all preferred to believe that they could erase rock’s diversions into pretentiousness and politics by pretending that it was – not 1964, perhaps, but certainly no later than 1967. The paragons of this vogue were Raspberries, who concocted brilliant pastiches of the Beach Boys, the Who and the Beatles, before cramming all their fervent passion for the past (and the pinnacle of mid-1970s studio technology) into one glorious expression of pop consciousness: ‘Overnight Sensation’. Todd Rundgren began the decade as a one-man compression of 1960s melodicism, before deciding that writing perfect pop songs was too easy to be interesting. As an initial farewell to the art, he devoted half of his 1976 LP Faithful to exact replicas of classic hits from 1966 – an exercise that was at once stunningly impressive and utterly pointless. Yet the past wasn’t that easy to shake off: in the early 1980s, Rundgren masterminded an entire album of Beatles pastiches, Deface the Music, and many years later found himself touring in Ringo Starr’s band. His imitation Fab Four paled alongside the consciously satirical version created by Eric Idle (script) and Neil Innes (songs) in The Rutles: a mock-documentary film in which George Harrison conspired in the demolition of his own history. Inevitably, Innes would be dragged back to the Rutles in middle age by the public’s endless need for nostalgia, his lampooning of the past inspiring the sam
e revivalism as the Beatles themselves.

  As the 1970s progressed, the past reappeared in increasingly surreal ways. There was a brief craze in British discos for the hits of the swing era: enough to carry Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’ and ‘Moonlight Serenade’ into the Top 20, in any case. A flurry of young bands masqueraded as doo-woppers or vintage rockers, while delivering the palest pastiches of the ferocious original article: notably Mud (soon ensconced in seaside variety, mixing rock medleys with comedy routines), the Rubettes (‘Letters have poured in17 saying how refreshing it was to see such a bunch of smart lads on the telly’) and Showaddywaddy (‘We’re trying to create a 197418 rock and roll image … it isn’t as raw as 50s rock’). Young girls who’d missed out on Michael Jackson, Donny Osmond and David Cassidy focused their puppy love on British groups who dressed as if they were teenage bowling teams from Philadelphia, c.1961: the Bay City Rollers, Kenny and Slik amongst them.

  The critics preferred their nostalgia delivered with conviction: hence the enthusiasm for the pub-rock scene which emerged from early 1970s London, and provided an apprenticeship for many of the future pioneers of punk. The most feted were undoubtedly Dr Feelgood, an Essex R&B band who were greeted with ecstatic relief (as here, by the NME’s Tony Tyler): ‘They have no record contract19. They are virtually unknown outside London. They do their own roadie-ing. They mix their own sound. They are so bloody fantastic to watch and hear that I – and many others – would sooner spend ten minutes in the company of their bone-crunching traditional rock ’n’ roll than squirm restlessly through yet another electronic prima donna tarted up with dry ice and sequins.’ As guitarist Wilko Johnson explained, in the studio ‘we do our music live20 – we set the gear up, stick microphones in front and DO it!’ But what they did was quite deliberately retrospective: almost a pop-art performance, in fact, fetishising the past to emphasise the distance between then and now.