Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  What is actually happening21 is a fantastic, almost hysteric, acceleration in the mechanics of the star-making system. To meet the ever-growing speed-freak apocalyptic yearnings of the new rock audience for new heroes, new sensations by the hour, the industry’s back-room boys have had to get their media manipulations down to the finest of arts … talent has less and less to do with the matter.

  Andrew Weiner, Ink magazine, 1971

  As the Beatles had demonstrated in graphically lurid terms, the rock group of the 1960s was a collective ideal rendered unstable by the heavy-handed application of egos and cash. Like most of their contemporaries, they had evolved out of a series of random encounters between like-minded individuals, who came together in their mutual love for music. Under the intense pressures of fame – and its unequal distribution of financial rewards, songwriters substantially out-earning their colleagues – their union was subjected to a stress test. Few bands could survive untouched; most of them shed their weakest or most outspoken members, or simply disintegrated.

  Rock’s metamorphosis from an adolescent passion into a viable career encouraged all but the least ambitious members of leading groups to imagine that they were being held back – creatively or monetarily – by their bandmates. When Crosby, Stills & Nash formed in late 1968, all of them refugees from successful groups, they carefully chose a name that would emphasise their individual independence. From the outset, they imagined that (in the California spirit of the time) they would drift in and out of each other’s company, an arts collective rather than a prison gang. Several decades later, the trio was still regrouping annually, the hippie zeal of old replaced by the cruel logic of the bank balance. ‘I still ask myself why22 anybody would be in a band with [Stephen] Stills if they didn’t have to’, David Crosby noted with an absence of counter-culture harmony in 2006.

  The trio’s phenomenal success (with and without Neil Young) encouraged musicians and businessmen alike to believe that they had found a foolproof way of sparking creativity and making money. Rather than trusting to the traditional model of the rock band they would follow CSN(Y)’s example, and combine successful individuals from existing units. The most prominent of these so-called supergroups was ironically named Blind Faith – ironically, because only that quality could have persuaded the participants that this scheme would work. Instead, the collision of members of Cream, Traffic and Family survived for less than six months, torn apart by unrealistic audience expectations and personal differences. Not that this prevented the experiment from being repeated. For every Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Bad Company, whose union made a global impact, there were a dozen outfits such as the Souther Hillman Furay Band, KGB and Widowmaker, for whom the whole was less impressive than any of the individual parts.

  If the supergroup was an elusive and often illusory concept, so was its opposite: the solo career. While the individual Beatles were both popular and charismatic enough to sustain themselves outside of the gang, and CSN(Y) had built freedom into their formula from the start, the lure of seeing one’s own name in lights – or on an album cover – proved to be fatally enticing during the 1970s. At its most excessive, this tendency provoked all four members of the hard-rock band Kiss into issuing solo records on the same day. The entire quartet reached the US Top 50, testament to the power of their brand. Most such ventures were less rewarding, artistically and commercially.

  This mushrooming of commercial product was reminiscent of the jazz scene in the 1950s, when musicians (especially in California) would jam, and the results would be distributed across records issued under any of the participants’ names, apparently chosen at random. Like their jazz counterparts, many rock fans inspected the small print of their album covers with an antiquary’s zeal, as the once anonymous supporting cast was now annotated in exhaustive detail. So desperate was the search for saleable product in the booming market of the early 1970s that session musicians renowned for subtle and discreet touches on records by their more famous peers were plucked out of the darkness and encouraged to make their own music. The flamboyant success of Leon Russell, once an unknown piano player in Hollywood studios, inevitably prompted such natural sidemen as Nicky Hopkins and Jesse Ed Davis to be offered recording contracts. Meanwhile, other rock and R&B session men formed their own bands, such as the Section and LA Express, inevitably veering towards jazz when removed from their lucrative paymasters. This was the ultimate expression of the ‘me generation’, with everyone believing himself entitled to become a star. The disastrous sales of almost all these projects ensured that such excess would not be repeated in subsequent decades.

  But this was an era in which even accepted stars could be disappointingly anonymous on stage, and audiences were beginning to demand something more from a rock concert than simply the opportunity to be in the same stadium as their idols. Two solutions to this conundrum arose simultaneously: the creation of more visual stars, and the transformation of rock into a form of theatre, in an effort to stoke excitement from the often mundane business of playing music in public.

  The very last thing23 Jagger says he wants to see is the Stones degenerating into nothing more significant than their own golden oldies revival show. Not for him the point of parody in which the band would go through the motions as an excuse to take the money and run.

  Roy Carr, NME, 1973

  Rock music has become24 the new vaudeville. Consequently the music is only a part of the overall package. Every bit as important is the visual impact.

  Music journalist Jim Smith, 1974

  No sooner had stereo sound ousted its monaural ancestor from the marketplace than the avaricious hi-fi and record industries plotted another coup. Marketing campaigns warned consumers that they would soon be the cause of derision amongst their friends if they didn’t replace their stereophonic equipment with its ultra-modern successor: quadrophonic. If stereo was sold as the logical format for listeners with two ears, quad sound employed another dimension, with four speakers set in the corners of a room. The listener would now be placed in the centre of the music, confronted by sensory impressions from all sides, just as in real life.

  The public proved resistant to jettisoning the expensive technology they’d recently purchased to play stereo records, while many artists were equally reluctant to change. They complained about the problems of mixing their recordings for quadrophonic release, with all the musicians and engineers squeezed into the exact centre of the playback studio, trying to judge whether the four sources of sound were perfectly balanced. As the subsequent success of surround-sound in the cinema and for home-entertainment systems proved, quad was simply too modern for its time. It reached an early apotheosis not on record, however, but in the concert hall, as Pink Floyd performed their 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon. A collection of songs exploring cultural stasis, collective betrayal and personal self-doubt was transformed by judicious use of sound effects – and, on stage, stunning use of lighting as a means of both bewitching and startling the audience – into the soundtrack for a generation. Its impact was more enduring than any of its contemporaries, as the album kept selling through the punk era and beyond, to become the second most popular LP of all time. It was a triumph of impersonality from a band few record-buyers would have recognised in the street, the album’s unforgettable visuals compensating for its creators’ lack of individual charisma. Dark Side carried listeners on a journey which left them mildly disturbed, gently comforted, and aurally stimulated. This was an album which exuded intelligence and significance: both serious, and dreamily intoxicating.

  With each subsequent album of the decade, Pink Floyd edged closer towards rock as audio-visual extravaganza, cloaking increasingly dark and cynical songwriting with innovative stagecraft. They were the least flamboyant musicians, and the most grandiose concept artists, in 1970s rock, reaching the inevitable climax of their passage as alienated megastars by constructing a wall between themselves and their audience – and then demolishing it in a gesture that signified not libe
ration, but a renewal of the cycle, which would lead inevitably to despair. As if to reinforce the surreal function of nihilistic rock as mass entertainment, The Wall proved to be an even more lucrative project than The Dark Side of the Moon.

  Other artists imagined equally lavish concepts, but chose to present them in more orthodox theatrical terms – Yes performing the gargantuan song suite Tales From Topographic Oceans on a stage designed to resemble an ocean floor; Genesis (in the person of lead singer Peter Gabriel) acting out their concept albums like an acid-fuelled mummer; Rick Wakeman concocting mock-classical suites around historical themes, and then performing them like grand opera, even staging one album inside the Empire Pool, Wembley, as an ice gala.

  Like the progressive-rock genre which gave these strange beasts their life, these stage shows (and their accompanying albums) were designed not just to entertain an audience, but to congratulate it on its intelligence. Short on visceral excitement, they targeted the cerebellum rather than the hips or the groin. NME reviewer Nick Kent was sceptical of Pink Floyd’s lack of spontaneity and dynamics: ‘one can easily envisage a Floyd25 concert in the future consisting of the band simply wandering on stage, setting all their tapes into action, putting their instruments on remote control and then walking off behind the amps in order to talk about football or play billiards’, he wrote. ‘I’d almost prefer to see them do that. At least it would be more honest.’

  But what were the alternatives? Those who were bewitched by the camp theatricality of David Bowie’s enactment of the glam-rock ethos watched with a certain befuddlement as he remade himself as a soul artist, touring America in front of a stage set inspired by pre-war German expressionist cinema. Few artists of the time employed such subtle gestures. Between 1969 and 1972, it had been enough for the Rolling Stones simply to appear in front of a crowd; their image as rock’s ultimate miscreants did the rest. By 1975, having already given the game away with a hit entitled ‘It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll’, they were reduced to depicting the increasingly jaded milieu of their songs with banal stage props, such as a giant inflatable penis – their mystique diminishing with every gimmick. Now in their early 30s, the Stones had lost their generational hold over the teenagers of the 1970s, who in America preferred the cartoon antics and comic-book make-up of Kiss, a melodic pop band masquerading as hard-rock daredevils. Lead singer Gene Simmons breathed fire on stage, and out in the bleachers, 12-year-old boys tried to set their seats ablaze, desperate to be part of this iconoclastic ritual.

  Rock now had its own language of symbols and clichés, which could be instantly understood by any audience. The simple phrase ‘rock ’n’ roll’, delivered from the stage (‘We’re gonna rock ’n’ roll all night!’) or bellowed from the stalls, was like a mating call between star and audience – American performances offering a variation in the cry of ‘Boogie!’ At their most basic, a band like Status Quo would resemble its audience from head to toe, their blue denims signifying that they might easily have traded places with anyone in the theatre. If the battle cry and dress code were in place, then the music almost didn’t matter: the mere promise of ‘rock ’n’ roll’ was enough. So hypnotic was the allure of rock stagecraft that a band like Queen could achieve man-of-the-people stature while delivering songs of almost operatic construction, recorded with more lavish care to production than any British band since the Beatles. Meanwhile, their overtly camp lead singer, Freddie Mercury, managed to obscure his homosexuality from his vast heterosexual audience for more than a decade, despite thrusting it at his fans with giddy delight.

  Queen’s 1975 hit ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was a four-minute collage of styles, new and old – from the Beach Boys to operetta, Paul McCartney to the Who. It completed a late flowering of the pop extravagance of 1967, with psychedelic whimsy giving way to a sense of joy that was entirely self-generated – music that was about nothing more weighty than the pleasure of its own existence. The cycle had arguably begun with Queen’s ‘Killer Queen’, and took in (depending on one’s taste) ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ (Elton John), ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’ (Captain & Tennille), ‘Listen to What the Man Said’ (Wings), ‘Miracles’ (Jefferson Starship) and two almost shockingly contemporary offerings from mid-1960s hitmakers the Four Seasons, ‘Who Loves You’ and ‘December ’63’. Here were all the once-essential ingredients of pop: melodies, counter-melodies, harmonies, and hooks, clutches of them in each song; uncomplicated aural delight rooted in a decade-old vision of pop innocence, and coated in a sheen that Paul Whiteman might have envied.

  The biggest-selling artists in the world over the next two years seemed to emerge organically from that same luxurious tapestry. Both Peter Frampton and Fleetwood Mac had launched their British careers in 1967, as a teen-pop star and a blues band respectively. Ten years later, they were partners in a stunning commercial coup, whereby unchallenging, effortlessly melodic pop music colonised the American rock market. Both artists had gimmicks, if you like: Frampton’s curls and ‘speaking guitar’ tube; Mac the media fixation with their disintegrating personal relationships. But the core of their success was the simplicity of their songs, and their emotional directness. They required no translation or indoctrination: they simply blasted out of the radio into people’s memories, the way that pop had always wanted to do. Their appeal was classless, all-age, region-free: just like the Beatles, for a world which the Beatles themselves had already transformed. Leading American critic Dave Marsh was baffled by Frampton’s popularity, which he said ‘frustrates analysis26’ because (Marsh claimed) the man was ‘neither an excellent melodist nor lyricist, his singing is hardly above average, his guitar work is competent and no more, his showmanship equally unexceptional’. Frampton delivered one guarantee, however: entertainment that would make a huge audience feel as one.

  As rock graduated from halls to arenas, arenas to stadia, each of the multiple relationships between artists, audiences, music and the wider culture was changing. Larger spaces required more grandiose gestures to fill them; more volume; more spectacle. The sense of communion and communication across the gap between stage and seating was sacrificed: subtlety and ambiguity would be lost on the wind before they reached the front row. With the rare exception of a band such as the Grateful Dead, who managed to sustain both their community and their free-form musical structures throughout their thirty-year trip, rock artists had to choose between two career models: intimacy, spontaneity and low financial rewards; or excess, predictability and riches unimagined by their predecessors. As record companies merged to form corporations, and the illusion of rock as a tool of a counter-culture vanished, rock was reinvented as the most potent entertainment phenomenon of the age – with the music to match.

  Groups have tried that laid-back27 experimental trip too long. We’re not going to use any audience to get heavy; our music is going to get simpler. We want to be seen as a dancing band whose records get taken to parties.

  Paul Stanley, Kiss, 1975

  Two hundred million Americans28 out there don’t appreciate subtleties. They want to be sledge-hammered over the head with clear issues … Remember, it was mass-culture that created rock ’n’ roll … I think Shakespeare is shit! Absolute shit! ‘Thee’ and ‘thou’: the guy sounds like a faggot.

  Gene Simmons, Kiss, 1977

  In 1970, single-minded obsessiveness and multi-instrumental prowess combined with technological innovation to create a new formula: the one-man rock group. Emblematically, Paul McCartney, with his debut solo LP, was one of the first to experiment with playing and singing an entire album by himself (albeit with moral support and occasional vocals by his wife). Emitt Rhodes reproduced the vintage sound of the Beatles in his garage; Todd Rundgren ranged from McCartney melodicism to Zappa eccentricity on his early self-made ventures, mushrooming into the synthesiser-drenched madness of A Wizard A True Star; while Stevie Wonder declared effective independence from Motown’s hit factory by immersing himself in a recording studio to concoct ever more dazzling confections of fu
nk, soul and pop.

  While those artists won kudos for their ambition (alongside criticism that no man alone could reproduce the collective spontaneity of a band), an equally driven musician was following the same course in Boston. Tom Scholz was a mechanical-engineering graduate from MIT whose day job involved designing products for Polaroid. At night, he would retreat to his self-constructed home studio, where he devoted years to recording and re-recording the same batch of songs – layering guitar and keyboard parts like samples in a carpet warehouse, endlessly finessing the tone of each instrument, and inventing sonic gadgets to approximate the sound he heard in his head. It was, noted critic Lester Bangs, ‘a parody of the mad doctor29 walled off in his lab’. But from Scholz’s almost compulsive labours came Boston – both a band (because even Scholz couldn’t command enough machines to deliver his sound alone on stage) and a self-named record which eventually sold more than 17 million copies.

  Led by the anthem-like single ‘More Than a Feeling’, Boston sounded like a triumph of market research. It was as if a computer had been fed a generation of successful rock songs, and then programmed to combine the quintessential elements into coherent packages. Scholz had achieved the same effect by accident and intuition, adding the visceral thrust of heavy guitar riffs to irresistible choruses and song structures that sounded both ‘classic’ and entirely fresh. This was hard rock and power pop, prog and metal, every American formula of the 1970s streamlined into one seamless package. Only those who were determined to ignore the mainstream could resist.