David Hepworth

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.

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.

According to Richard, who began burnishing his legend from an early age, he was born deformed. One eye was clearly bigger than the other. One leg was certainly shorter than the other. Hence Richard walked with short steps, which gave him a mincing gait. In the Pleasant Hill section of Macon, Georgia during the Second World War, at a time when sympathy for differences was in short supply, he came in for rough treatment. They called him faggot, sissy, punk and freak. And those were his friends.

Radio was the one medium that could afford to be colour blind. A year earlier, in the summer of 1954, the boy Elvis Presley had made his first broadcast appearance on the Memphis radio show of Dewey Phillips. Dewey made sure that the listeners knew he went to Humes High School. That way they would know that he was white. The colour blindness worked the other way as well. Up in the far north, in Hibbing, Minnesota, fourteen-year-old Bobby Zimmerman had taken advantage of the night-time ionosphere effect to tune in to Frank ‘Brother Gatemouth’ Page who was playing rhythm and blues records on a station out of Shreveport, Louisiana, fully a thousand miles away. Page talked the jive and played the blues but he was no blacker than his pale Jewish listener in the frozen north. On the air you could be whoever you wanted to be.

Its title, if it could be said to have one because nobody had ever considered it fit enough for publication, was ‘Tutti Frutti’. Its subject matter was, not to put too fine a point on it, anal sex. It began ‘Tutti Frutti, good booty’. It then added ‘if it’s tight, it’s all right’. It developed that idea further with ‘if it’s greasy, it makes it so easy’.

Richard called, and many answered. They answered from all over the world. ‘Tutti Frutti’ was covered by Elvis Presley in his first album the following year. It was in the vast white audience to which neither he nor Blackwell had ever given a moment’s thought when they made the record that his sound had its most profound effect. It was released in the UK in January 1957 on the B-side of ‘Long Tall Sally’. David Jones, a nine-year-old at Burnt Ash Junior School in Bromley, later recalled that his ‘heart burst with excitement’. Keith Richards, who was twelve and attending Dartford Technical High School for Boys, said ‘it was as if, in a single instant, the world changed from monochrome to Technicolor’. And Bobby Zimmerman, the boy who’d been tuning his radio to the sound of Shreveport from up there in the Iron Range of Minnesota, led a group called the Golden Chords who appeared in a school concert playing their own version of Little Richard’s song. It was an unimaginably hot, exotic sound to be attempted by anyone other than the people who made it that day in New Orleans, let alone a bunch of Jewish adolescents from the frozen north.

Recalling the events of 1 October, Jack Bruce said, ‘Eric was a guitar player. Jimi was a force of nature.’ Although it purports to be the music of universal brotherhood the world of popular music is anything but colour blind. In the fifty years after Elvis it found scores of different ways of mapping sub-divisions of the music, most of them with at least some racial implication to them. Black musicians are far more likely to be called ‘forces of nature’. This implies that they have arrived at what they do by a different route from their white counterparts. Much as it’s difficult to have a white singer you would describe as a soul singer, so it’s difficult to have a black star you would call a rock star. There are a handful of musicians who’ve walked this very fine line and they’ve been helped by the fact that they were directed from the beginning towards a white audience. Ultimately the thing that elevated Jimi Hendrix above Clapton, Beck, Green and all the other guitar players who came to pay tribute in October 1966 was as much stylistic as musical. It was in the three words that everybody, including Clapton, used to describe him. The real thing.

Before Janis Joplin there was nobody remotely like Janis Joplin. Jazz and blues had produced female singers who sang with similar directness about their thirst or their carnal appetites, but Janis was another thing altogether. She was a white rock star, which meant she was written about in newspapers and interviewed on television. Those things that were implicit in her performances became explicit when she talked about them. When asked how she came to be the singer in her band Big Brother and the Holding Company she said she had slept with the man who was sent to ask her. Furthermore she was so impressed with him she couldn’t say no. ‘I was fucked into it,’ she would cackle in interviews. Nobody had ever heard a woman talk like this. Certainly not for publication. Some of it was an act. Privately she confessed she had actually made up this story as a favour to the man. She seemed oblivious to what this might say about her. Because she was, in the argot of the day, a chick singer who behaved in a way no chick singer had behaved before, her personality was overshadowed by the way she played her gender and even that was overshadowed by the way she boasted about her sexuality.

There was no other way to keep themselves amused so Aycock invited various members of the touring party to come up with him for quick joy rides. On the last of these circuits his passengers were Randy Rhoads, the elfin twenty-five-year-old Californian guitar player who was the star of Ozzy’s new band, and Rachel Youngblood, the fifty-eight-year-old African-American woman who was subsequently described variously as make-up artist, hairdresser, wardrobe assistant and cook. She was the help, Sharon’s live-in maid from back in California. She had joined the tour to help Sharon be Sharon while she was making it possible for Ozzy to be Ozzy.

Neither Rhoads nor Youngblood were keen fliers but somehow on that sunny morning they were persuaded into boarding the Bonanza, a later version of the aircraft in which Buddy Holly had perished twenty-three years earlier. In an attempt to either wake up Ozzy or tease his ex-wife, who was watching from below, Aycock repeatedly took the Beechcraft low enough to buzz the bus. On his third pass he miscalculated, clipped the bus with a wing, hit a tree and ploughed into a nearby mansion, where the plane immediately burst into flames. The initial impact with the bus woke Ozzy and Sharon who stumbled outside to be confronted by the sight of flaming wreckage. There were body parts strewn across the ground. All three who were on the plane died instantly. They had to be identified from their medical records.

After their deaths it was said that none of them had wanted to be on the tour in the first place, that what Randy had really wanted was to go to university and study classical composition, that Rachel had signed up for one last tour so that she could raise the money to buy an electric typewriter for her church, and that it was particularly surprising that they should perish together because she didn’t like Randy and in fact had called him a little white bastard. Clearly the accident was the bus driver’s fault but it seems the kind of grisly, pointless tragedy that could only have occurred in the course of a rock and roll tour. If the passengers had been members of a sporting team on their way to an away game or a touring theatre company en route to a festival it seems unlikely that reluctant fliers would have allowed themselves to be cajoled into getting into a small aircraft to go nowhere in particular with somebody they barely knew.

Meanwhile, far away from Hollywood, far away from this gilded high society, something stirred. The most significant musical moment of 1982 was the release of ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. This would prove to be as significant in its time as ‘Tutti Frutti’ was in 1955. Writing about it in Rolling Stone in September, Kurt Loder described it as ‘the most detailed and devastating report from underclass America since Bob Dylan decried the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll – or, perhaps more to the point, since Marvin Gaye took a long look around and wondered what was going on.’

31 SEPTEMBER 1983 THE CONTINENTAL HYATT HOUSE, HOLLYWOOD The absurdity of rock stars IN 1983 ROB Reiner, who had made his name as an actor on the TV comedy All In The Family, got together with comic actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, begged a small amount of money from a film fund headed up by Lew Grade and began shooting a modest film. The film they made was to do for the anonymous rock band trying to make a living what Dont Look Back did for Bob Dylan. It had no script; they made it on the fly and improvised the dialogue. The notional band played their own music. Their repertoire featured such self-composed tunes as ‘Big Bottom’ and ‘Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight’. Where possible they shot in real-world rock locations. They filmed at Elvis Presley’s graveside. The end-of-tour wrap party was shot around the pool on the roof of the Continental Hyatt House in Hollywood. This was the rock and roll boarding house that had been known in the days when Keith Moon stayed there as the Continental Riot House. The fictional subjects of the documentary This Is Spinal Tap were Spinal Tap, a band of prog rock plodders from the English provinces. In the film they were embarking on an American tour in support of their new album, Smell The Glove. The three members who mattered – a succession of drummers had all met with unfortunate ends – were David St Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls. All three looked like classically unmemorable members of rock’s army of anonymous foot soldiers. Their faces were slightly too old for their haircuts. These were men with nothing notably wild and untamed about them, men who for the most part lived standard lower-middle-class lives of blameless tedium, interrupted only by the occasional call to go out on the road and play the rock star for the benefit of the concertgoers of Moose Droppings, Ohio. Once there they would be temporarily decanted into a pair of spandex trousers in order to perform an overheated number in praise of their amatory member or their girlfriend’s bottom. Clearly, it was no job for a grown-up. Nonetheless it was the only job certain grown-ups could do.

Although the film makers stated that the misadventures of Spinal Tap were not based on any particular group, many real-life bands fell over themselves to claim that they inspired it. It was in 1983, when the film was being made, that Black Sabbath found that the Stonehenge set they had ordered was too big to fit on the stage. The British blues band Foghat were adamant that their management had once been taken over by a girlfriend of one of the members who insisted on planning their tour schedule according to numerology. They half-jokingly accused the film makers of having bugged their tour bus to get pointers. Every band wanted to own certain scenes. Everybody talked about the time they got lost going to the stage or when their amplifiers picked up the transmissions of a local car firm. Eddie Van Halen insisted on ordering an amp that went up to eleven. That was all part of their way of reassuring us that they were in on the joke. But the core joke of This Is Spinal Tap, that bands keep going long after they should stop because stopping is the very thing they don’t dare do, is too bitter a pill to swallow.