Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  Thus began the strange joint life of this unholy trinity, who would circle each other for the rest of their lives, using each other and in turn being used to their mutual benefit. There was a crackle about and around them. Lou could go off at a moment’s notice, Iggy was in the grip of heroin and gave the impression that he had already flamed out, David was shrewd and controlled but was inclined to turn up for interviews in a gown and claim, despite a paucity of evidence, that he was gay. Above all they were copy. They had no PRs telling them what to say. They thought like journalists. They were a three-headed attention-grabbing device. In the year that the Rolling Stones had gone into tax exile in France, George Harrison had achieved a form of rock sainthood by spearheading the Concert for Bangla Desh, the charts were dominated by singer-songwriters hymning the attractions of bucolic domesticity, and the rock establishment was still mourning the rock gods who had fallen by the wayside, this urban conspiracy of lairy transgressives, this same-sex marriage of convenience based on three chords and a shared mascara, this trio who had nothing to lose and everything to gain, were perfectly placed to wrench away the spotlight and fix it firmly on themselves.

  1971 PLAYLIST

  George Harrison, ‘My Sweet Lord’

  Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On

  Carole King, Tapestry

  The Who, Who’s Next

  Sly & the Family Stone, ‘Family Affair’

  Rod Stewart, ‘Maggie May’

  T. Rex, ‘Jeepster’

  Joni Mitchell, Blue

  Badfinger, ‘Baby Blue’

  David Bowie, Hunky Dory

  26 JULY 1972

  MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, NEW YORK CITY

  Rock goes high society

  THE ROLLING STONES’ American tour of 1972, which was on a grander scale than any of the tours that had come before it, was accomplished without computers, mobile phones or the internet. It was a low-tech world; in 1972 sixteen-year-old Bill Gates was still tinkering with the school computer to make sure he got to share his lessons with attractive girls. Before this tour very few rock and roll people had much call to rent a plane. Before this tour promoters didn’t try to get a country’s head of government on the phone to smooth out bureaucratic hold-ups. Before this tour the bands didn’t pretend that they were the only thing between the state and disorder on the streets. Before this tour bands hadn’t thought about actually rehearsing for their live shows, let alone hiring practice venues which were as big as the ones they intended to play. It was only at this point that people started comparing tours in terms of numbers: the number of people played for, the number of dollars grossed, the number of people begging to get on the guest list, the number of trucks it took to get the show from A to B. Everything about the Stones’ two-month American tour of 1972 was on an unprecedented scale. In fact it was the scale, which invoked regular comparisons with the military, that added to the self-importance of all those involved in the enterprise. This is where rock started to get an inflated sense of its own significance. It increased the lustre of the five men at its centre and particularly the two men at the centre of the five. It fixed an idea of how it is appropriate to conduct oneself at the pinnacle of rock and roll stardom that has resounded down the decades.

  The Rolling Stones knew they were setting new standards and therefore as the tour wound its way to New York City it was only meet and right that the birthday of the leading artiste should be marked by a gesture as unprecedented as the tour. The production manager’s plan was that this special birthday should be celebrated in front of a large crowd at Madison Square Garden and therefore it should be on an arena scale. To that end he had hired an elephant. This beast cost $700. His plan was that at the very pinnacle of the noise and chaos of a Rolling Stones tour reaching New York, immediately following ‘Street Fighting Man’, said pachyderm should take to the stage. In its trunk it would be carrying a single red rose. It would bow and present the flower to Mick. Everyone would sing ‘Happy Birthday’.

  Of course it didn’t quite happen that way. The elephant was vetoed by the management of the Garden, as were further plans to shower the audience with confetti and balloons. The production manager eventually moderated his demands and instead bought five hundred chickens, intending that they should be released during ‘Street Fighting Man’. The Garden also vetoed this. He then ordered over 150 cream pies, intending that the show should climax in a finale worthy of Mack Sennett. The Garden found out about this too and confiscated all the pies in sight.

  Inevitably they missed the pies the production manager had taken the precaution of hiding away. The big night came. As the Stones returned to the stage for an encore a cake was produced, and as Bianca Jagger was kissing her husband and presenting him with a large stuffed panda the first pie landed on the singer. Pies were then launched in every direction, at the other members of the band, at support act Stevie Wonder’s backing singers, and at key members of the Stones organization. Finally Ian Stewart stole up on the fastidious Charlie Watts, who had thus far managed to avoid the flying patisserie, and clamped one over each ear of his Buster Keaton head.

  Following the show there was a party in the roof garden of the St Regis Sheraton. Security was so tight that paying guests at the luxury hotel had to show their room keys in order to be allowed access to their beds – an indication of the demands big bands could suddenly make. The standard privileges that came with luxury accommodation were no longer sufficient for the Rolling Stones. The caution was based not only on the justifiable concern that fans might try to penetrate the private party but also the less grounded feeling that since more and more Americans were turning to guns to make their points it was clearly only a matter of time before somebody took a pop at Mick Jagger. It was a question Mick had been asked more than once during the tour. He said that if the recent death of King Curtis was anything to go by, you were in just as much danger of being eliminated by your neighbour as by a member of the crowd.

  The party seemed an appropriate culmination for a tour that had been in many senses a move upmarket. The Stones’ press people targeted Time, Newsweek and Esquire rather than the magazines and papers read by their fans. There was clearly a need to prove this was a grown-up business run by grown-up people. Rolling Stone magazine played along by commissioning Truman Capote to be their correspondent on the road with the band. Capote took his New York socialite pals Peter Beard and Jackie Kennedy’s sister Princess Lee Radziwill with him. This didn’t go down well. In the end Capote couldn’t bring himself to write about the Stones. He said they didn’t interest him as a subject. They should have interested him because this was the tour when they emerged as a new branch of high society, which was Truman’s specialist subject. He might have been miffed that he had been blindsided by this sudden rise of the rock-star class. When he had thrown his famous Black and White Ball in New York in 1966, around the same time that Jimi Hendrix arrived in London, the five hundred names on the guest list were supposed to be a faithful representation of all the movers and shakers in everything from politics to the arts. The musicians included Frank Sinatra, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein. There wasn’t a single rock star. By 1972 this had all changed. This time the Stones’ progress around the country was much like that of the Elizabethan court, trailing courtiers and mountebanks, rousing, exciting and provoking the countryside as it went on its way; taking advantage of whichever local nobs felt they might benefit from putting them up for a night, and leaving in their wake unsettled debts, ravished daughters and furniture in the moat.

  The Rolling Stones tour of 1972 has a special place in the folk memory of rock because it was so closely documented. All the major organs of the media were given their little sliver of access and went away moist with excitement. With one eye on their own place in history, the band hired film maker Robert Frank to document the debauchery. When he complained after a while that he hadn’t managed to get any orgy footage they staged one for him on an aeroplane between shows. They dutifully threw a television
set out of a hotel-room window for the cameras, a process which, as the film showed, was a good deal more tiring than it ought to be. The Stones felt they had to act up to what the straight world was coming to expect of rock princes. (When Capote was with the tour he was roused from his hotel room in the middle of the night by Keith Richards, who said he wanted to show him what a rock and roll band was all about. Truman explained through the door that he was quite content he already knew what a rock and roll band was all about.) The finished film was only given the most limited release – the traditional fate of all the behind-the-scenes peeks the Rolling Stones insist on having total control over.

  In a conversation with Andy Warhol which was published in Rolling Stone the following year, Truman Capote spoke about how he had noticed that all the people in the Stones’ orbit seemed to draw sustenance from their proximity to the spotlight in which the Stones operated. You could see this in the pictures. The Rolling Stones were starting to have a disturbing effect on the men who flocked around them. At their most serious this meant they tried to keep pace with Keith Richards. In its mildest form this was just people who looked roughly like the Rolling Stones but weren’t the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger already had that peculiar quality of being able to change any room he entered purely by virtue of entering it. Keith Richards was the bad boy that all the good boys seek approval from – approval which will always be withheld. Such is the nature of the Mick and Keith act, and the reason why they call themselves the Glimmer Twins. All they owe to other people is the merest glimmer. Much of the coverage in the press was bathed in a glow of admiration, however, verging on the homoerotic. Interviewing Mick Jagger backstage, the New York Times noted that his pants were tailored of ‘a silk-like material that clings so tightly that his genitalia are pushed up and out – a sexual display as aggressively protuberant as a fifties teenager in a push-up bra’.

  The guest list for the party had been put together by Ahmet Ertegun and his wife Mica. Ahmet believed in parties because they got written about in the newspapers. He also liked going to them. The Erteguns were New York royalty and this list reflected that. Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gianni Bulgari and Oscar de la Renta rubbed shoulders with Woody Allen, Carly Simon, Andy Warhol and Tennessee Williams. Entertainment was provided by Muddy Waters and his band, Count Basie and his big band, and some hoofers from a Broadway show. The Stones were somewhat sheepish about the fact that such veterans were apparently at the beck and call of a bunch of musicians who were by comparison mere children. The inevitable cake was produced, the inevitable live nude girl emerged from it, and she performed the inevitable bump and grind in the direction of the birthday boy. The New York Times thought that it was evident a new era of rock chic had begun. Their reporter asked guest Bob Dylan what he made of the party and he replied, ‘It’s encompassing … it’s the beginning of cosmic consciousness.’ Keith Richards was less impressed. He surveyed the bacchanal and, reflecting on the inevitable consequences of rock having suddenly become such a big grown-up business, said, ‘Right now is when you realize you’re just a product.’

  1972 PLAYLIST

  Neil Young, Harvest

  Paul Simon, Paul Simon

  Todd Rundgren, Something/Anything?

  Rolling Stones, Exile On Main St

  Randy Newman, Sail Away

  David Bowie, The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars

  Jimmy Cliff, The Harder They Come

  Yes, Close To The Edge

  Stevie Wonder, Talking Book

  Steely Dan, Can’t Buy A Thrill

  3 JULY 1973

  HAMMERSMITH ODEON, LONDON

  A ‘rock star’ retires

  THE ERSTWHILE DAVID Jones, twenty-six-year-old son of a charity worker from Brixton, south London, had devoted ten years to getting the kind of recognition that had finally come his way after he appeared on Top of the Pops playing his hit single ‘Starman’ just twelve months earlier. This song came from his then new album The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. This depicted the career of a fictional rock star. This division between actor and role was anything but neat. The same month his management company MainMan had produced a PR dossier clearly announcing their client as ‘Rock star David Bowie’.

  A year earlier this would have seemed presumptuous certainly, possibly even funny. In the twelve months since Top of the Pops it appeared that this perennial trier, this strolling player, this dilettante who seemed fated to be forever just ahead of or behind the beat, had snapped into sync with the times. He was thus able to bank an entire lifetime of acceptance. And this currency could be exchanged everywhere. It was artistic success, as measured in the uniformly favourable reviews for his record. It was fashionable acceptance, as could be seen in the notables who suddenly expected to get into his shows without paying. It was teen enthusiasm, as he could detect in the keening sound rising from the auditorium floor at his shows. This last was particularly calculated to warm the heart of an old pop picker who’d been burning to be famous since he was sixteen years old.

  But in the beginning David wasn’t meant to be Ziggy Stardust. Somebody else was going to take on that role. The first person he’d lined up was Freddi Burretti, originally plain Fred Burrett, a miniature gay guy he’d happened upon during one of his R&D trips to gay hang-out El Sombrero. He’d cooked up the Ziggy idea in the course of the life-changing trip to the USA in early 1971. Over the months many things had fed into it: the wasp-in-a-bottle sound of the Stooges (from whose singer he also lifted the name); the legend of Vince Taylor, the British rock and roller whose self-destructive streak prevented him from making it; the limping figure of Gene Vincent, whom he’d encountered trying to make a comeback while on his first trip to Hollywood; the bright orange tonsure which he’d spotted on a model on the cover of UK women’s magazine Honey; the uniform of Malcolm McDowell and his ‘droogs’ in Stanley Kubrick’s version of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, released in the US at the end of 1971. It was all coming together like an art project played out in the real world.

  Multi-sourced though it was, Ziggy Stardust was also the perfect invention for its moment. It was a moment when the heads of both the new generation of seventies kids and the old sixties kids felt tugged back to a pre-Woodstock world of cheap formica glamour and nasty hair products, a world which the hippies had draped over with their cheesecloth and suede and obsession with authenticity, a world which seemed to pulse through the lurid dreamscapes of Guy Peellaert, the books of Nik Cohn and the clothes of Mr Freedom.

  In the decade just passed, it had seemed reasonable to assume the personalities projected by rock stars were either true to their real ones or had grown from them naturally. Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust was a product of a new age, when the figures on stage seemed just as likely to be characters in a musical play. On Bowie’s first post-Ziggy tour he was supported by the new band Roxy Music, whose singer Bryan Ferry carried himself like Jack Buchanan (a popular British musical comedy artist of the inter-war years); in 1972 they vied for radio play with Alice Cooper, as portrayed by Vincent Furnier, a preacher’s son from Michigan, who climaxed an evening’s entertainment by having himself hanged.

  Nobody seemed content any longer with being who they were. Nobody was singing their heart’s desire. Nobody was writing personal-pronoun pop. This was a new era of gleeful self-consciousness, of stratagems and ruses you were invited to see coming from miles away. The edges of the picture were different, the trousers tighter, the speech newly guarded and self-consciously hard-bitten, the hair colour anything but the natural shade. It was like so many moments in rock a revenge on the recent past.

  Bowie’s manners may have been different but the music beneath them was reassuringly square. ‘The Jean Genie’, the big hit single Bowie had used to bridge the gap between Ziggy Stardust and the follow-up album, started out as a vamp on the Yardbirds’ ‘I’m A Man’, a riff so bred in the bone of every rock soldier on the M1 that Mick Ronson feared it was beyond redemption. T
he public didn’t care about that. On the scale of catchiness, it sat comfortably between Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and Sweet’s ‘Ballroom Blitz’. Bowie already liked to tart up his work with noteworthy accents, such as Mike Garson’s avant-garde piano interjections. The basic menu might be meat-and-potatoes hard rock, which was a standard part of the British diet, but he was always sure to spice it with a soupçon of strange.

  It doesn’t matter how long has been spent on the planning, the scheming and dreaming: fame inevitably arrives with violent suddenness and catches its victims unprepared. When it begins to break out, as it did for David Bowie in June 1972, the only thing to do is hang on for dear life. The music business has two forms of demand: non-existent and impossible to satisfy. Either nobody wants you at all or everybody needs you yesterday. For the six months after the ‘Starman’ breakout Bowie played anywhere his management could book him. Some of the choices were poor. He did a show at the cavernous Earls Court arena for which he was woefully ill-equipped. MainMan believed that if you wished to be big you had to behave big. Some suspected the artist’s well-publicized fear of flying was just one of his Hollywood affectations. They indulged him nonetheless. After touring the UK in 1972 he sailed to the United States, touring there by bus and train, through whose windows his jaded gaze was confronted and songwriter’s ears pricked by the licentious passing show from which he would fashion his next record ‘Aladdin Sane’.