Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994
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About the Book
The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. But like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations.
What did we see in them? Swagger. Recklessness. Sexual charisma. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A certain way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes. Talent we wished we had.
What did we want of them? To be larger than life but also like us. To live out their songs. To stay young for ever. No wonder many didn’t stay the course.
In Uncommon People, David Hepworth zeroes in on defining moments and turning points in the lives of forty rock stars from 1955 to 1995, taking us on a journey to bust a hundred myths and create a hundred more.
As this tribe of uniquely motivated nobodies went about turning themselves into the ultimate somebodies, they also shaped us, our real lives and our fantasies. Uncommon People isn’t just their story. It’s ours as well.
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
14 September 1955: The first rock star
26 September 1956: The first rock idol
6 July 1957: The first rock fans start a group
22 May 1958: A bad boy flies in
3 February 1959: A good boy flies out
1 July 1960: Enter the guitar hero
25 September 1961: A boy invents himself
28 September 1962: The man who fit in
1 May 1963: The man who didn’t fit in
23 December 1964: The rock star as tragic genius
26 September 1965: The rock band as ongoing drama
1 October 1966: A new sheriff in town
18 June 1967: The first female rock star
15 May 1968: The view from Olympus
9 August 1969: The devil’s business
24 June 1970: Rock god embraces the occult
16 May 1971: The comeback
26 July 1972: Rock goes high society
3 July 1973: A ‘rock star’ retires
6 August 1974: Rock in a complicated world
18 July 1975: The best rock isn’t always rock
4 July 1976: The X factor
16 August 1977: Death is good for business
9 December 1978: A raspberry on top of the charts
8 August 1979: Twilight of the gods
8 December 1980: Death by fan
13 August 1981: Sex, violence and television
19 March 1982: Road fever
31 September 1983: The absurdity of rock stars
27 January 1984: A superstar on fire
13 July 1985: From dumper to sainthood
16 July 1986: Rock royalty up close
1 August 1987: Looking the part
9 September 1988: Clearing the closet
21 March 1989: Clean and sober
29 May 1990: Rock star as celeb
24 November 1991: The party’s over
7 May 1992: Man overboard
7 June 1993: Career suicide
5 April 1994: The last rock star
9 August 1995: Revenge of the nerds
Epilogue
Picture Section
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Picture Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
Also by David Hepworth
Copyright
UNCOMMON PEOPLE
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ROCK STARS
David Hepworth
For Clare, Henry and Imogen
FOREWORD
The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed.
The idea of the rock star, like the idea of the cowboy, lives on.
There are still people who dress like rock stars and do their best to act as they think rock stars would have acted in an earlier time, much as there are people who strap on replica holsters and re-enact the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It’s increasingly difficult to act like one or the other and keep a straight face.
The true rock stars rose and fell with the fortunes of the post-war record industry. They came along in the mid-fifties and they passed away in the last decade of the century just gone. We came to know them as rock stars but at first they had no generic name. In the early days, when Elvis Presley, Fats Domino and the like were coming out of nowhere, they might as easily have been called hillbilly cats, rhythm and blues shouters, specialists in western bop, plain pop singers or promoters of dance crazes.
The term ‘rock star’ really came into widespread use in the seventies and eighties when the music business was looking to sustain the careers of its biggest names. The business was no longer happy to hop from fad to fad. It was beginning to realize the value of brands. There was no better brand than a rock star. A rock star was supposed to be somebody you could rely on, somebody whose next record you had to have, often regardless of its merits. After that it was increasingly applied to everyone from Elvis Presley to David Bowie, from Morrissey to Madonna, from Ozzy Osbourne to Björk. By the twenty-first century, the term had been spread so thin as to be meaningless.
In the twenty-first century it seems rather inappropriate, to use a popular twenty-first-century term, to describe Kanye West, Adele or Justin Bieber as rock stars. These people are cut from a different cloth. The age of the rock star ended with the passing of physical product, the rise of automated percussion, the domination of the committee approach to hit-making, the widespread adoption of choreography and above all the advent of the mystique-destroying internet. The age of the rock star was coterminous with rock and roll, which in spite of all the promises made in some memorable songs proved to be as finite as the era of ragtime or big bands. The rock era is over. We now live in a hip hop world.
The game has changed. Rock stars were the product of an age when music was hard to access and was treasured accordingly. The stars of music no longer have a right to public attention simply by virtue of existing. Their products now compete on a level playing field with everything from virtual reality games to streaming movies. What was once hard to find is now impossible to escape. Music no longer belongs in a category of otherness. It’s just another branch of the distraction business, owned by the same multinational conglomerates as the theme parks and the multiplexes.
This kind of change has happened before – when talkies replaced silents, and then when TV stole the thunder of the movies. When record shops were replaced by online streams, twelve-inch records were exchanged for a ribbon of noughts and ones, and your favourite stars took to publishing pictures of their diurnal round on social media, everything changed. You simply can’t live the life of a rock star any longer. The mobile phone alone saw to that. The rock star’s mystique is at an end.
I may be wrong. I am of a certain age. I have prejudices, as do we all. It could be that the chart botherers of today, the people picking up their awards at the end of the year and headlining at the burgeoning number of rock festivals, the people getting those slightly trying-too-hard reviews in the posh papers – well, it could be that they will still be around in forty or fifty years’ time, the same way that Keith Richards and Bruce Springsteen have been; it could be that with time they will prove every bit as mythic as their predecessors of the sixties and seventies. If they are I won’t be around to tell you how surprised I am.
What interests me is this. If we no longer have a breed that qualifies for the description ‘rock star’, how can it be that the idea of the rock star as a social type remains so strong? This didn’t happen yesterday. Back in 19
73, just two years after the death of Jim Morrison, just as a new generation was beginning to warm to David Bowie’s tongue-in-cheek rock-star figure Ziggy Stardust – a rock star in inverted commas for people who were beginning to find the unvarnished article just too corny – a magazine called Texas Monthly published what was the first recorded example of the term ‘rock star’ being applied to describe somebody who wasn’t a rock star. In that case they were actually writing about a ballet in which one character was much adored by the others. ‘He’s a Christ, a Buddha,’ they said, and then, stretching for a parallel a young readership might relate to, ‘a rock star’. In the years since 1973 we have grown increasingly used to ‘rock star’ being employed as a descriptor. Bill Clinton was supposed to be the first rock-star President. Russell Brand is a rock-star comedian. Marco Pierre White is a rock-star chef, Andre Agassi a rock-star tennis player. These days you can even be a rock-star fund manager.
In characterizing people as rock stars we are superimposing on them qualities we associated with actual rock stars in the past. It’s only when we describe people who aren’t rock stars as being like rock stars that we get an inkling of the qualities we came to associate with rock stars as a tribe.
What kind of qualities? Swagger. Impudence. Sexual charisma. Utter self-reliance. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A tendency to act on instinct. A particular way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes.
Similarly there are qualities rock-star types do not have. A rock-star chef will not refer too closely to the recipe. A rock-star politician will not be overly in thrall to the focus group. A rock-star athlete will not go to bed at the time specified by the coach. A rock-star fund manager will make a huge call based on a gut feeling rather than indulge in a prolonged period of desk research and make a sober examination of the evidence.
Recklessness, thy name is rock. In fact a deficiency in reck is the defining characteristic we ascribe to rock stars as a social group. We believe in this recklessness so strongly we even ignore any evidence to the contrary, of which there is plenty. Keith Moon never did run a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool, the Beatles never did smoke grass at Buckingham Palace, the police never did drop in to find guests at Keith Richards’ home munching a Mars bar between Marianne Faithfull’s legs; but such is our need to believe that generations of followers of rock myths and legends have laid their heads on their pillows and screwed their eyes tight shut, hoping against hope they might wake to find out such things had been the case.
Rock stars didn’t just live their own lives. They also lived a life on our behalf. They lived in our heads. If you were born in one of the decades immediately following the 1950s, a pantheon of rock stars provided you with a cast of fantasy friends who lived out their lives in a parallel universe of which you could only dream. They did things you wouldn’t dare do with people you would never meet in places you could never afford to go to. Yet you felt, because you had in a sense both started at the same point – them as musician, you as fan – that you shared a certain kinship for ever. You checked in with them when the time came for them to release their latest album or visit your town on tour, tried to detect what might be going on in their personal lives from the remarks they made in interviews, looked at the state of their hairline or waistline and silently measured your vital signs against theirs. Sometimes in the middle of dull days you even found yourself wondering what they might be doing at that precise moment. That’s one definition of a rock star.
The worship of rock heroes has some of the characteristics of religion. We believe rock stars know something we don’t. Grown men who have long ago ceased believing in comic-book heroes have no trouble convincing themselves that the people who are their heroes because they once played a memorable tune on the electric guitar can offer them wise counsel in middle age. In the 2000 movie High Fidelity, Bruce Springsteen appeared to the hero to advise him on his unsuccessful love life. This is interesting because the one thing we know about Springsteen is that for much of his young adult life his love life was a disaster area, albeit one palliated by the ready availability of sex with beautiful women. The principal reason why his love life was so unsatisfactory was connected with the fact that he had, by dint of talent and superhuman dedication, turned himself into the rock star he had always wanted to be. In fact he was so busy becoming that rock star that he had no time for the things that being that rock star was supposed to give him mastery of.
We didn’t see it that way. We thought of rock stars as living a life far removed from our daily cares. In doing that we saddled them with the often impossible requirements of our fantasies about what that larger life was. We liked to think of rock stars as being as rich as Croesus while not giving a fig for material possessions. We liked to think they had struggled to the very peak of one of the most competitive professions on earth without exhibiting any unseemly glimmer of ambition. We wanted them to become ever more famous and successful but reserved the right to complain if the popularity that we wished on them made it harder or more expensive for us to see them. Furthermore it was a condition of rock stardom that our favourites were either underrated or rated for the wrong things. We liked to think we could discriminate between the common herd and ‘the real fans’. We liked to feel that these rock stars were broadcasting on a particular wavelength which could only be picked up by true initiates like us – or, to be more precise, me. And most tragically and inevitably of all, we demanded that they remain unchanged, forever young on our behalf.
There was a greater premium on these rock stars remaining young as we got older; the need for them to embody what we saw as rock and roll values became more intense as our lives changed. The more the majority of the people who had grown up with rock and roll spent their days tethered to a work cubicle, earning their livings tapping at a computer keyboard, the company’s badge on a lanyard round their necks, their every move tracked by an all-seeing corporation, and the more they found that in public life they were compelled to curb their tongues and bite back on whatever they were just about to say, the more they looked to rock stars to be the people they were no longer permitted to be.
We wanted rock stars to be glamorous but also authentic. We needed to feel that they were forced to beat off willing sexual partners with a stick while also living a fulfilled family life. We saw them as staying up too late, sleeping through the morning, never quite giving any one thing their full attention and yet still, by dint of some special rock-star magic, operating to their full potential.
If they were still performing in their fifties and sixties, that wasn’t simply because they wanted to. It’s because we demanded it. Being a rock star, as Bruce Springsteen said to me thirty years ago, retards adulthood and prolongs adolescence. This is precisely what we found so attractive about it. We imagined these rock stars, as somebody once said about Keith Richards, not so much burning the candle at both ends as applying a blowtorch to the middle. That’s a rock star.
Ultimately, as another rock star observed, all things must pass. Now, like the cowboy, the cavalier, the wandering minstrel, the chorus girl, the burglar in the striped sweater, the top-hatted banker, the painter with his beret and the writer in his smoking jacket, the rock star must finally be consigned to the wardrobe of anachronistic stereotypes. In real life he has been overshadowed by hip hop stars who are brazen enough to make the most shameless rock star blush, and overtaken by talent-school munchkins who are far more manipulative than he would have dared be. His power base has been destroyed by the disappearance of the record industry, his magic fleeing in the twenty-four-hour daylight of social media.
Whether you think this is the end of that particular road or just a pause for breath, now is as good a time as any for an account of the rise and fall of this tribe of rock stars, who came to the fore in the years following the Second World War, waxed in the seventies, and waned with the twentieth century. They were a product of the rise of post-war prosperity and the end of an age of actual warriors, of a time when a new ge
neration looked around for a new race of people to idolize, this time for different reasons. They rose on the back of the record business, which fancied it was going to be around for ever but lasted not much longer than the people who made ‘What the Butler Saw’ machines. Along with that business they have now departed the stage.
While they were on the stage they captured our imagination and our trust in a way no movie star or sports star or writer managed. They changed the way we looked, the way we talked, the way we walked, and what we considered an acceptable way to behave. We considered them more worthy of our trust than politicians, spiritual leaders or captains of industry. This is particularly amazing since, as most of the people who have been responsible for managing rock stars will tell you, many of them had difficulty finding their way from their hotel room to reception in time for the bus, let alone organizing a workable energy policy.
This is of course a cliché. But then it’s a cliché that has been built up over fifty years. It’s an interesting cliché because we’ve all had a hand in developing it. If being a rock star has been the ruination of some people then we should all accept part of the blame, because in a sense we helped do that to them. This book is about the people the rock stars were before being hit in the small of the back by rock fame, it’s about the fantasy figures that rock fame transformed them into, and it’s about the personal price they paid for playing a starring role in our dreams. It’s about the people who found themselves becoming rock stars, about their abrupt social elevation, the changes that affected them and the people around them, and the consequences for their nearest and dearest.
There was never such a thing as an original pure rock-star archetype. Our mental picture of what a rock star is supposed to amount to has been imperceptibly built up over half a century as each successive tide of music has come in and gone out and left its mark on the shore. If there is a rock-star stereotype it has to encompass Little Richard and also Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney as well as Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen alongside Sid Vicious, The Edge with Bob Marley and both Kurt Cobain and Keith Moon, and on into infinity. The idea of a rock star contains, if not exactly multitudes, then certainly a number of facets all of which speak to our depths.