JOHNNY ROGAN has been described as pop s most eccentric biographer , and after spending an afternoon in his company it s not difficult to see why. Everything about him from his gigantic beard to his extraordinarily meticulous speaking manner to his cool rationalisation of his bizarre working methods (which once included writing for a whole year without speaking to another human being) radiates an off-kilter sensibility, albeit an extremely affable and friendly one.
Rogan is probably the most noted biographer in the music industry today, as well as being one of the most well-known rock writers around. Since 1979, his full-time vocation has been to sift through the minutiae of rock music. His CV includes critically-lauded biographies of Neil Young, Van Morrison, The Kinks, George Michael, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and Roxy Music.
But he is best known for his 1992 biog of The Smiths, Morrissey And Marr: The Severed Alliance. The book, which dealt with the break-up of the Manchester four-piece in great detail, provoked huge controversy in the music press upon its publication. In a statement which garnered massive publicity at the time, Morrissey himself was moved to comment: I hope Johnny Rogan ends his days in a pile-up on the M3.
Mercifully, however, Rogan has remained in one piece to this day. I interviewed him last week over pints in Dublin s Shelbourne Hotel, where he was stopping over to promote his latest book, Timeless Flight Revisited The Sequel.
It is an exhaustive trawl through the history of legendary American country-rockers The Byrds, whose line-up contained three greats of contemporary US music: David Crosby, Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn. The quintet recorded numerous seminal albums The Notorious Byrd Brothers, Fifth Dimension, Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, Younger Than Yesterday before disintegrating in a shambles of drug abuse, broken friendships, egomania, fistfights, incompetence and acrimony.
Rogan originally wrote a Byrds biog, Timeless Flight, in 1979, but the deaths of founder members Gene Clark (in 1991) and Michael Clarke (in 1993) acted as catalysts to make him return to the subject of this most quintessentially American of bands. The new book is an absolute must for anyone who s ever had even a passing interest in the group who gave us Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High .
JONATHAN O BRIEN: How does Timeless Flight Revisited differ from the first Byrds book you wrote in the 1970s?
JOHNNY ROGAN: It s about five times the length, for a start. I think it s unique in the sense that most people, when they go back to a book if indeed they ever do simply tag on a couple of extra chapters at the end. And that book (Timeless Flight) got very good reviews. So there wasn t any pressure to update it at all. But I really wasn t content to leave it. Ten or eleven years ago, I went out to America. I got a wealth of information and I just had so much that I realised it wasn t enough to update the book in a superficial sense; you really had to rewrite it.
Did it feel strange to revisit your own writing past?
I had this very weird feeling throughout re-doing it that I was using my younger self as a kind of unpaid researcher who d done quite a number of great interviews. I went back to the tapes and found stuff that I hadn t even incorporated in the original book. So I did a thorough excavation job on it. Then, finally, I started making a story out of it that wasn t there originally. This time I spent more time developing the personalities within the book, as well as specialising on the music.
Generally, when writing biographies, is it easy to get access to these people, or are they cagey about talking to writers such as yourself? Do they need much coaxing to talk?
Well, my advantage is that I do these things over an incredibly long period of time, so if somebody doesn t fancy it this year, it s not like I m on some deadline for the book to be finished. Y know, if I m not satisfied with it this year, I can always wait another five years. As for The Byrds themselves, they were incredibly frank and forthcoming any time I ever spoke to them. They never couched anything in euphemisms. It was extraordinary. The deaths of Gene Clark and Michael Clarke were catalysts in all this. It moved me quite a lot when they died. They were incredibly young guys, in their 40s, and they were two of the original Byrds it wasn t quite the same when Gram Parsons died. To me he was a marginal figure.
So I had this very macabre feeling when I was writing up the sections about them at the end of the book, whereby I thought that the only thing that ll drag me back to this book is when somebody dies. And I know it will, and I ll write another 100 pages and look at their solo careers, or their personal lives outside The Byrds, although I ve already done that to a large degree with David Crosby. But now it s like, Christ, which one of them is gonna go first? Or will it be me? (laughs). They ll go, or I ll go, and then the book will be ended for ever.
Writing both books, was it difficult going back so many years in time, what with people s memories lapsing, missing tapes, that kind of thing?
Not really. You d be surprised. Think of the amount of work that s been done on The Beatles, for example, and I m sure they don t remember half of it. You often find, with prompting, that the story builds from one person to the next. Some people have fantastic memories, and others are not so good. In the early 1970s it was still not that long ago for The Byrds, it was still their golden period, and they remembered it quite well.
Also, there was so much conflict within The Byrds, that these were quite emotive things for them. When I spoke to Crosby, he remembered quite vividly the actual day he was sacked from the band. The differing accounts all tally with each other the fight on the beach, that kind of thing. So you get all the main events. It s the minutiae that they wouldn t be so good on, but that s scholarship, you can find that out in contracts, or whatever. I got hold of a fair amount of documentation this time which I wasn t privy to the first time around. Like, I got all The Byrds contracts, and I saw the terms they were offered, what their recording commitments were, how many singles they had to record a year, and all that kind of paperwork.
You write in the foreword that David Crosby gave you the best interview of your life . He must have been one hell of a character.
He was! We talked first in 1980, when he was freebasing cocaine. I didn t reckon he had much longer to live, and I don t think he did either. It was three or four years before his series of imprisonments, culminating in his incarceration in a Texan jail cell.
Under what circumstances did you meet him?
It was an extraordinary thing. It was in my home town, down the road from my school (laughs). I wanted to take him down the local pub but he wasn t having it. He was doing 24-hour freebasing at the time, so it was pretty difficult. Incredibly lucid, though. It didn t affect him at all. It seemed to make him sharper, if anything. There weren t any lapses. It was the early stages of his freebasing, relative to what he did later on.
But he was severely addicted. I got there at 1pm and he was obviously just getting up. You could hear him in the kitchen, hammering away. He probably had a rock in there or something. He was setting up the freebasing equipment and his pipe was on throughout the entire interview. He was concerned about drugs, even at that stage. I think he felt that people were getting to him. And he was about to get dropped by Capitol Records as well.
Finding him was easy. I just approached the record company who were promoting him over here. He wasn t doing any interviews, but when he heard that I was doing a book on The Byrds, he decided, If this is the guy who s doing it then I ll talk to him, I wanna tell the truth. Maybe they told him I d spoken to McGuinn and Clark and all the others.
What was your assessment of Crosby as a human being?
There was a lot of hubris in the stuff he was saying. He was incredibly humble at times, astonishingly arrogant other times. He s very emotive, but also a very pleasant guy, and very persuasive. We argued long and hard for many hours about the circumstances of The Byrds, and the dynamics within the group, which is a fascinating thing in itself.
It was all about very disparate personalities you have the ice-cold McGuinn, who s like this 18th-century rationalist, and you ve got Crosby, a bundle of conflicting emotions, liable to fly off the handle at any given time. And McGuinn kinda wins the war by virtue of this attritional coolness he has (laughs).
What insights did you gain into the various personalities of The Byrds?
They all went through their strange odysseys of drugs and abuse, and humility as well. I think they all come across as very flawed people. There s a lot of pathos in Michael Clarke s story, for instance. It s almost Shakespearean, they ve all got their fatal flaws. One thing I came out of the book thinking was that nobody comes out of it badly, or at least no worse than anybody. Their greatness, I hope, shines through. You have to remember what a strange time they were experiencing, and also how young they were, only 18-20. That s the thing I now realise.
So many of your books have been about US 60s rock acts Neil Young, The Byrds, Crosby Stills & Nash. You re obviously obsessed with that strain of American classic rock.
I guess I am. It s a long strain, y know? That s why I made the connection between The Smiths and The Byrds when I heard This Charming Man , I thought, there s a link there. I remember talking to Nick Kent about it once and he felt the same. He said there was a sense of . . . he used the word valour with regard to their music. Heroic.
Would you ever do a book about a more modern band?
Well, new acts get documented very quickly. That wasn t always the case when I did the Kinks book in 1984 it was the first book ever written about them, and they were 20 years into their career. That couldn t happen today. As soon as a group has a number one single there s a book on the shelves about em, be they The Prodigy, All Saints or whoever. When Eamon Dunphy did his book on U2, twelve more like it soon followed.
Dunphy s still trying to live that book down, incidentally.
Well, we won t talk about his reference to that famous Dublin group the Buzzcocks (laughs).
Of all the books you ve done, which have been the most rewarding to write?
That s a difficult one to answer . . . the book I found most enjoyable to do was that Crosby Stills Nash & Young one. It wasn t a strain to do it. I liked writing it. It was just very pleasant, a bit of nostalgia. No hassle connected to it at all.
The worst was Starmakers And Svengalis. That was the toughest. I mean, it drained me a lot. It took years to do, and there was no commission, and I was living hard. It was a hard book to do, without going on the dole and having to live in Ireland for a while as well. I wrote it in longhand, and it was originally 300,000 words, and then it had to be cut to 150,000 . . . it was just endless.
But Morrissey And Marr: The Severed Alliance was the most successful book. It was the shortest time period of all of them to write, and I was bringing a lot of my own history to it. And it was a real challenge. It was almost like a secret society, one that had never been broached. Nobody had ever gotten to The Smiths. To get into that was quite an achievement.
For better or worse, it s going to be the one you re remembered for, isn t it?
Yeah, if only for the reaction it generated. That s down to Morrissey as much as the sales of the book. I met him last year, again, at the High Court case (where a judge ordered #1m to be paid to ex-Smiths Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke in lieu of unpaid royalties, and described Morrissey as truculent and devious JO B). We talked then. He was pretty pleasant, really. Morrissey s got a mask of almost cold indifference about him at times, so he s not going to come up to you and give you a warm handshake. He s always gonna be somewhat aloof and . . . Wildean, if that s not too obvious an adjective.
He came up to me, I didn t approach him. Frankly, I think he was looking for sympathy or something although you shouldn t read into things Morrissey does, because you re always liable to get it wrong. His opening line was, So, this is where it all ends. Melodramatic or what? He was going on about his negative feelings about the case I feel like I ve been through the mangler and so on and it was only later on that I thought, That s ironic, Morrissey expecting me to be sympathetic towards him. (laughs) It s a sign of his own self-confidence, or perhaps how the rest of the world tends to deal with him. I think most people do deal with Morrissey sycophantically, because they re all fairly precious about him, and understandably so, to a degree.
When he came out with that good-natured quip ( I hope Johnny Rogan ends his days in an M3 pile-up ), do you think he was just trying to come up with a good soundbite, in his usual manner?
Well, it wasn t a spontaneous comment. It was written down and faxed to the NME. It wasn t like it just slipped out of his mouth he thought about it carefully enough to write it down. And he wasn t asked to do that; he sent it to them of his own volition. They didn t phone him up and say, What do you think about this book? He sent that down to them unsolicited. So what his motives were I don t know.
Did it perturb you?
It didn t bother me at all. I just thought it was a very odd thing to do, when he hadn t read the book. He should ve waited a week later until he d seen it. But to denounce something when you haven t read it doesn t put you in a strong position and weakens your entire case. The book wasn t that critical of him anyway, or vituperative. It wasn t exactly Albert Goldman stuff (laughs). Morrissey s comments implied that there was something dreadfully salacious about the book, but I always felt it was a celebration of The Smiths. It s not hagiographical in any way: he merely comes out of it as an unusual character. The judge in the High Court case was far more caustic about Morrissey than I was! (laughs)
What do you think his problem with The Severed Alliance was?
I m not sure there s an answer to that. As I said, he hadn t read the book. In fact, I phoned Morrissey six months before the book came out, four months before he made that statement, and he certainly didn t say anything bad to me. I asked him would he come up and talk to me, and he said, No, I d prefer to be in a wardrobe at the foot of the stairs, or something like that. A humorous comment. It certainly wasn t anything like, I really don t want you to write this book. Then he said, You must go on, and I must go on. All fairly theatrical stuff (laughs), but nothing negative, as is his wont.
So what was Johnny Marr s reaction to the book?
Quite hostile, after the event. Most surprising.
Was he taking his cue from Morrissey, do you think?
I ve no idea. I just thought Johnny Marr was very sensitive. But I can only surmise. I can only think they were bothered about the implications of the financial arrangements that were discussed which is all now a matter of public record, thanks to the court case.
I can only think that that s what bothered Marr. The stuff I wrote about his artistic contribution to The Smiths could hardly be more flattering. He s probably one of the best guitarists and arrangers of his generation. I love everything he did up until The Smiths ended.
Is it true that you once wrote for a year without speaking to another human being?
Yep. That was for Starmakers And Svengalis, about 1984. I didn t do it as some emotional reaction to a relationship or anything (laughs). It was to do with making time and putting myself in a frame of mind where I was just totally focussed I hate that word on doing the book and nothing else. I didn t want TVs and radios and newspapers around. People were a drain on my time. It s difficult to explain, but when you re set upon completing something and the budget is that tight, you ve gotta find somewhere to live that is either free or very cheap. You can t go out for a drink and you don t wanna be around people who remind you of that life outside. It s almost a monastic thing. It was necessary to get the job done. And it wasn t any great sacrifice.
Do you think your self-imposed solitary confinement did things to your personality?
Nah, because I ve always been a bit of a loner. When I was at university I used to work really hard, till 9pm every night in the library. I was always ambitious in that sense. I was used to a fairly solitary lifestyle . . . God, I sound like Morrissey! No, I ve been like that from a relatively early age. There ve always been periods where I ve retreated to do the kind of work I do. I m not one of those full-time authors who have very stable lives and get up at 7am and go running and get the kids up for breakfast . . . (laughs) you read these wonderful profiles in the Sunday Times magazine. I couldn t do that sort of stuff. Fair play to them, though! But I ve always found that I have to get into it. There s an element of method acting there too. It still goes on to this day in different manifestations I still work through the night and go to bed at 9 in the morning.
Do you employ people to do research for you?
No, never. I do everything. I wouldn t wanna give up the means of control. Getting the interview is always the most difficult thing, for me. There s that terrible moment when you ve tracked somebody down and they re a phone call away. And you pick up that phone, and you know that in the next two minutes, you re either gonna hit the air in triumph, or it ll be a big chunk of that book you have not got. Also, I d never send anybody out to do an interview on my behalf. Who knows what they d come back with? You could write down your questions, but beyond that, you never know what s going to evolve, and sometimes you have to take up the gauntlet and run with it. That s the thing about being a biographer you always have to live on your wits. n
Timeless Flight Revisited The Sequel is out now.