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

by David Hepworth

  As the enterprise gathered force, spawning a local version in the United States, performers, fans and media were suddenly energized by the tang of virtue in the air. Ordinary citizens doing their bit for charity equals ordinary compassion. Rock stars giving up their time to do the same somehow amounts to something heroic. As Band Aid turned into Live Aid in the spring of 1985 even the most mundane parts of the process were hailed as the workings of destiny. When Geldof attended the recording of ‘We Are The World’, the United States’ answer to ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, in Hollywood in January 1985 he found the organizers unable to believe that a star of Bruce Springsteen’s magnitude had actually driven himself to the session and was capable of getting from his car to the studio unaided.

  The shows, which took place on 13 July 1985 at Wembley Stadium in London and at the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, were carnivals of enlightened self-interest. All the musicians got the thing they wanted most, which was increased profile. The furious ones were those not invited. Geldof’s memoirs are a good account of how he always used the threat of being outshone by a peer when the appeal to save lives failed to move the dial. For every act that immediately agreed to do it there was another that would do it but wanted to be more equal than others. Billy Joel wouldn’t do it because his usual sax player was unavailable, the Stones wouldn’t do it ‘because Keith doesn’t give a fuck’ (although he scrambled on board as a member of Bob Dylan’s folk combo as soon as he found out Mick was going to do it with Tina Turner), George Harrison wouldn’t sing ‘Let It Be’ with Paul because ‘he didn’t ask me to sing on it ten years ago – why does he want me now?’ Stevie Wonder said yes and then had his manager say no. Geldof ran into the inevitable flak for mounting a concert in Philadelphia with so few black acts. He argued that none of those he had attempted to contact – Michael Jackson, Prince, Diana Ross and Lionel Richie – had called back.

  It was still a show in the most traditional sense. Everybody was determined to steal it. Older people probably thought it had been stolen by Queen, who unlike most of the veteran bands had gone to the trouble of putting together a tightly packed medley of their hits and had absorbed the key lesson of the open-air gig, which is to make the audience part of the show. Younger people decided it had been stolen by U2. They were on their third album and had a solid following but hadn’t yet entered the mass consciousness. Jack Nicholson introduced U2 that afternoon as ‘a band who have no trouble saying what they think’. It wasn’t always easy to decipher the exact meaning of U2’s statements but they certainly carried themselves like a group who had a lot to say. They did two songs that day. The first was ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. During the second one, ‘Bad’, their singer Bono descended two levels from Wembley’s high stage in order to draw girls out of the audience. Having extricated them he then enfolded them into a priestly embrace before returning them to the multitude. During this bizarre peregrination he was entirely invisible to the rest of the band. They had to keep churning away in the hope that their singer would eventually be returned in one piece. When he did so they left the stage, leaving one number undone, and departed the venue assuming it had been a career-ending disaster. But what Bono intuited was that at its heart Live Aid was a television show. ‘I was looking for a TV moment,’ he later confessed. He found one.

  It is an extraordinary moment. It is arguably the most high-wire entertainment moment to be enacted in front of a worldwide TV audience. Many millions are watching on TV, tens of thousands are in the venue; all Bono’s peers, all his elders and betters and all the people in the world who would most like to see him fail are watching closely; his fellow band members are playing with the singular fury of people who fear humiliation is at hand; and the only person who has got a ghost of a clue what he’s going to do next is this twenty-five-year-old man with his motorcycle messenger’s mullet, high-heeled boots, leather trousers and Principal Boy’s jacket, this man who has set out in the middle of a song in search of he knows not what. Judging by the reaction of the crowd his TV moment was achieved when the girl reached him to be comforted, thus resulting in a gesture that was as unreadable as most of U2’s songs but seemed at least to denote tenderness, a quality not to be found anywhere else that day. Live Aid made U2 stars.

  In 1985 rock was only just beginning its embrace of the outdoors. The artists at Wembley that day were performing on a stage left behind by Bruce Springsteen. Before playing Slane Castle in Ireland on 1 June that year Springsteen had never played, or indeed attended, a large-scale outdoor show. He was always foremost among those who thought that as soon as you took the roof off the experience of live rock and roll then it changed from a unique, at best transcendental experience to one that was effectively about maximizing revenues. At the interval in the Slane show he raged at his manager for having put him in the position of facing a crowd that seemed to be a disaster in the making. His manager told him that he had better get used to it. He had spent his life dreaming of being a genuine sensation and now that he was one he didn’t like it. Springsteen had successfully adjusted to the change in scale involved in moving from theatres to arenas – I stood at the side of the stage during one of those shows and watched how every detail of on-stage business was slowed down and slightly exaggerated to increase the chances of it communicating itself at the back of the venue – and now he had to do it again as he moved to the open air where you are inevitably competing for the audience’s attention with the sky and their own gathering fatigue.

  1985 was the year the scale of rock changed the nature of rock. The bigger the show is, the more it’s about ritual rather than content. By the end of 1985 Springsteen had played forty-six shows in the open air in front of crowds of sixty thousand and more. Nobody would try harder than he did to bridge the gap between artist and crowd. He proved it was possible but it was still a stretch. People tend to enjoy their initial experiences of big stadium shows. After a while they begin to notice that their enjoyment is entirely conditional on the vantage point they’ve managed to get, their age and the degree of difficulty involved in getting home. This is even more pointed at festivals, which are tests of endurance where the performing musicians share none of the privations the crowd must put up with.

  In 1985 it was all still fresh. The people who tuned in to Live Aid that day saw a rock spectacular taking place against a clear blue sky, a show that for the most part featured your favourite hits, a show that took place in the presence of royalty and the great and the good, a show from which you came away with the warm glow of self-congratulation that comes from having been part of something virtuous. If you attended, everyone else envied you. The crowd, as Dylan Jones pointed out in his book about Live Aid, seemed more like your neighbours than the drug-and-drink-inflamed super-fans who ruled the roost at most rock shows. The atmosphere in Wembley Stadium that day, where rock’s gentry mingled with the MTV generation in front of the heir to the throne and his glamorous wife, was like a superior kind of village fete.

  Live Aid mobilized a lot of money. It made a superstar and eventually a knight of the realm out of Bob Geldof. It set Elton John, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger on the road to acceptance by the Establishment that would eventually result in their knighthoods. It made rock stars look like warriors who would take up noble causes on our behalf. In the public mind, large-scale rock and roll shows and displays of public virtue seemed to coalesce. Everybody at home looked at those sun-dappled arms being raised above suburban heads in rhythmic clapping along to Queen’s ‘Radio Ga Ga’ and suddenly decided this live rock and roll might be for them after all.

  The front page of the following day’s Mail on Sunday called it ‘Rock’s Finest Hour’. The New York Times led with a picture of Geldof being hauled on to the shoulders of Pete Townshend and Paul McCartney. The Daily Mirror had a picture of Mick Jagger with Tina Turner above the headline ‘Rocked With Love’. On the Monday The Times said there was an international campaign to award Geldof, formerly the mayor of the dumper, the Nobel Peace Pr
ize. No rock star ever enjoyed more prestige than he did at that moment.

  1985 PLAYLIST

  Band Aid, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’

  USA for Africa, ‘We Are The World’

  Madonna, ‘Material Girl’

  The Smiths, Meat Is Murder

  Tears for Fears, Songs From The Big Chair

  Kate Bush, Hounds Of Love

  Tom Waits, Rain Dogs

  Fine Young Cannibals, Fine Young Cannibals

  Run-DMC, King Of Rock

  REM, Fables Of The Reconstruction

  16 JULY 1986

  MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, NEW YORK CITY

  Rock royalty up close

  THE ROCK INTERVIEW is an artificial interaction. It’s primarily a business transaction, entered into by both parties for their mutual commercial benefit. At the same time form dictates that it must masquerade as a friendly, almost flirtatious exchange of ideas. It often takes months of negotiation to set up but then takes place as if it’s a chance meeting. It demands a display of outward nonchalance from both interviewer and interviewee. The former is flushed and excited but pretends to be relaxed. The latter is suspicious and guarded but pretends to be relaxed.

  When the interviewee is a superstar who is as familiar to you as Bob Dylan is, and has been familiar to you since you were a kid, the correct form is not to betray even a tenth of how excited you are. Therefore there’s a marked contrast between your outer being, which has to compose itself into a pose indicative of faux relaxation, and your inner being, where a little demon is bouncing up and down, pointing and shouting, ‘Look! Bob Dylan! Right next to me!’ The rational part of you tilts your head to suggest rapt attention. All the while your animal senses are working overtime to absorb and retain as much information as possible about the clothes, hair, smell, smoking habits and body language of the person you’re sitting alone with. This is made more intense by the fact that for my generation no star of films or literature or sport or politics could possibly outshine a star of rock. And no star of rock has more mystique and magnetism than Bob Dylan. He is the Everest of rock interviews.

  We were in a dressing room at Madison Square Garden during a three-night stand in the summer of 1986. The interview was to go in the first issue of a new music magazine in the UK. He had been persuaded to do it by the woman who was in charge of international media relations at his record company, CBS. I was conducted into a dressing room and there he was. He didn’t get up. At close quarters he looked reassuringly like Bob Dylan, almost spookily so. It was as if he was an actor emerging from wardrobe immediately prior to playing Bob Dylan. His penumbra of curls was at a position of maximum elevation. The bulk of what he was wearing seemed to be made of black leather. Black leather motorcycle boots, black leather waistcoat, black leather fingerless gloves. Like many over-photographed people he seemed to have a large head atop a slight frame (this is probably merely a reflection of the fact that we have spent hours searching their faces but have never met the original). He narrowed his eyes like cowboys do when a stranger presents himself in town. He offered a hand. His features were wreathed in the smoke from the Kool he had in his other hand. He was clearly thinking what artists are always thinking before an interview: let’s get this over with. A large dog sat at his feet. What’s the dog called? ‘He has no name,’ Dylan said, then, realizing he’d missed the opportunity for a witticism, added, ‘No. He’s called late for dinner.’

  The humour of this only occurred to me afterwards. At the time I was too flustered by the need to survive each moment. When you meet a Bob Dylan, a Paul McCartney, a Mick Jagger or a Bruce Springsteen, the scales are so loaded in their favour that all the pressure is on the person who’s supposed to be asking the questions. The more accommodating of these personalities see it as part of their job to make you feel at home. Bob Dylan is not one of that sort. One of his great strengths is that he gives the impression of genuinely not caring what you or anybody else thinks of him. This must be a natural reaction to having spent most of your life surrounded by people who are desperate to please you.

  Our conversation, such as it was, took place over two meetings at Madison Square Garden. After the first one the woman from the record company asked him how it was going. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘He keeps asking me questions.’ Friends have laughed at this. What did he expect? Of course I was asking questions. It was an interview. There was a time I might have laughed too, but now I can entirely sympathize with him. The truth is I didn’t really have any questions for Dylan. He’s not a politician. He didn’t solicit my vote and doesn’t owe me an explanation for anything. When you interview somebody like Bob Dylan all you’re really hoping for is that they will find it within themselves to just talk to you, to open up, to say what’s on their mind, what they thought about the last show or even what they watched on TV last night. Sometimes they do. Sometimes even Bob Dylan gets loquacious. This was not one of those times.

  I tried to get him to talk about Blind Willie McTell. He’d recorded a song named after him. It was the best thing he’d done in years, but in a characteristic act of cussedness he had refused to put it out. I tried and tried again but he clearly wasn’t going to be led in the direction of that subject. Then he cut across me to ask, ‘You heard the McPeake Family?’ No, I said, I hadn’t. I looked them up afterwards and found they were traditional musicians from Northern Ireland. Was he just trying to change the subject to something he did want to talk about or was he saying, you Brits come over here asking about long-dead blues singers while you have no knowledge of your own culture? That’s the way I took it.

  At the time of this interview Bob Dylan was forty-five, which in 1986 was Methuselah in rock music terms. His tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which was being hailed in some quarters as the return of the Blonde On Blonde sound which he had shrewdly described as ‘that thin wild mercury sound’, was in reality a marriage cooked up by his management, who also handled Petty, to justify them being able to play large arenas. Dylan was still the older brother that everyone in rock wanted to impress and critics were always apt to claim every new record as some sort of ‘return to form’, even though it manifestly wasn’t. Dylan with the Heartbreakers was one of those match-ups that did neither of them any favours, partly because Dylan was up to his usual tricks – refusing to play the songs the band wanted to play, changing keys without warning, seeming to wish to wrongfoot everyone who was sharing the stage with him.

  The new album, Knocked Out Loaded, was clearly exactly that. It was thrashed out in two weeks of sessions immediately prior to rehearsals beginning for the American leg of his tour, and it sounded like it. Dylan had got to the point where he realized his records all sold round about the same number of copies and figured that it didn’t matter much what those records were like. Therefore the best thing to do was just get on with recording one and putting it out. When I gave him a copy of the album to sign backstage at Madison Square Garden it was the first time he’d seen a finished copy. He wasn’t madly interested in the record but he took a felt-tip, gripped it in his left hand (he’s right-handed) and signed it for my friend.

  He signed it on the inner bag where the names of the musicians were listed on a halftone picture of a woman. What nobody knew at the time was that this woman was Carolyn Dennis and Dylan had secretly married her just a few weeks before. In the same year that Madonna, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen seemed to be buckling under the weight of scrutiny from a media establishment that grew more hydra-headed every day, Bob Dylan seemed to have found a way to hide in plain sight. Dennis had given birth to their child in January and he had set the two of them up in a house. His new daughter’s name was listed among the people thanked on the cover of the album. She was his fifth child. And Dennis wasn’t the only woman in Dylan’s life at the time. He also maintained Carole Childs in another home. Whether or not they knew each other’s precise status, they behaved as though they didn’t. ‘I could just disappear into a crowd,’ he said t
o me. It’s not impossible he was being mischievous.

  By the mid-eighties the family structures of rock superstars had come to resemble those of all-powerful sovereigns or landed aristocrats of years gone by. Their success meant that they, and they alone, sat at the top of a pyramid of wealth, status and power. As they looked down from the summit they could see the serried ranks of their heirs, their heirs’ tow-headed dependents, the long-established courtiers who transacted their business for them, the vassals and liegemen who handled the tasks beneath their dignity or competence, the new mistresses and the old ones who always knew far more than they let on, even the fools and soothsayers whose job it was to calm their troubled mind, and all these people were thinking the same thought. What must I do to remain in the sunshine of the favour of my lord? For his part, my lord is thinking: if I don’t work all these people don’t eat.