Rock Of Pages

Rock journalists? Get thee behind me Satan. There are times like at any civilised dinner party, or passing through customs when you d be better off identifying yourself as a child molester or graverobber.

Like lawyering, the trade of scribbling about music has become a public joke over the last ten or 15 years. Indeed, one could take the recent sinking of the Melody Maker and its sister ship Select as the final bitter punchline.
These days, the best pop writers tend to compete in the book market, and the daily grind of producing copy falls to opportunistic young bucks who intend on moving onto the dailies or the weekend supplements. Hence, a serious falloff in the rate of fresh hacks that know the working end of a hatchet job from a hagiography.
You do get tarred slightly with the sense that if you re a pop person, you can never do anything real or serious, says Paul Morley, former NME journalist, New Pop theorist, co-founder of the ZTT label and The Art Of Noise and the man who helped design and hype Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Morley possibly one of the last great English rock journalists, even though he hasn t practised in 17 years crossed over into the serious market himself last year with the publication of his heavyweight memoir Nothing.
I think the danger at the centre of pop culture is that there s no real sense that pop and rock can be as serious in a wider context, he continues. For me, Neil Young and Dylan and Lou Reed and Beck, every album s like a great novel and it s got as much worth and as much intensity in it. But somehow, in the more established world, it s never really been allowed through. I feel myself sometimes being really patronised, along the lines of, My gosh, he s really intelligent . There s these weird little pats on the head that come from people who work in mainstream literature or the intellectual world.

For the sake of argument, let s say the whole shebang started with Paul Williams Crawdaddy in February 1966, the first publication to fancy itself as a highbrow organ rather than merely reproducing fluffy pop star profiles, a la Hit Parader, Beat and 16.
There were masterful music writers before that of course, primarily jazz or blues scribes such as Ralph J. Gleason, Robert Palmer or Leonard Feather, but also, distinguished men of letters were known to slum it: the poet Philip Larkin wielded a mean pen at the likes of Coletrane and Coleman, while WH Auden penned his treatise Notes On Music And Opera.
But the liggers-with-attitude we ve all come to know and love/loathe emerged in tandem with the rise of The Beatles and The Stones. Trailblazers like Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches and Nik Cohn set a standard which would be rarely surpassed over the next 30 years; the former three often rattling off sizzling drug-fuelled first takes in the pages of Creem and Rolling Stone, the latter raised in Derry but an English mod at heart.
At the age of 22, Cohn wrote perhaps the first rock book that mattered. Pop From The Beginning, or Wopbopaloobop Alopbamboom as it came to be known, was an acerbic critique of rock n roll from the crooners to Cream. Cohn was and is a shrewd bullshit detective, but the casual guy-standing-at-the-bar tone of his prose masks the fact that there s a hell of a lot of listening and learning behind the attitude. Cohn continued to distinguish himself over the next ten years, helping to inspire Pinball Wizard , writing Another Saturday Night , the magazine story which was filmed as Saturday Night Fever, proselytising about the notion of style many years before it was fashionable. It s been a while since Cohn was on the frontlines, but he still has plenty of sting in his tail, as is borne out by his 1999 travelogue and portrait of England s fringe culture Yes We Have No.
Richard Meltzer on the other hand, was far more wayward and wild, frequently inspiring, just as frequently unreadable, a scatologist and a motormouth pumped full of Nietzsche, the Dada-ists, The Dead and the Dictators. When Jimi Hendrix read Meltzer s review of Are You Experienced in 1967, he is reputed to have enquired, You were stoned when you wrote that, right?
Meltzer s best known work is probably still his first book The Aesthetics Of Rock, a rambling, shambling freeform rant which attempted to place rock n roll in the context of the rest of Western Civilisation. Meltzer got out of rock n roll writing a good many years ago (although he still fronts an Oregan band called Smegma), but his musical musings can be perused anew in the recent excellent anthology A Whore Just Like The Rest.
Which brings us to Lester Bangs, perhaps the best known and most remarkable of all the hack pack. A compulsive copy-vomiter, Lester went at his job with the zeal of a man raised by a Jehovah s witness (which he was). Apt to spiral upwards of 20,000 words in a single review Bangs was capable of the most scabrous rants ( James Taylor Marked For Death ), on-the-ball social commentary ( The White Noise Supremacists ), frontline reportage ( The Clash ) and breathtaking poetry ( Astral Weeks ). Uncle Lester never made the leap to so called serious writing in his short lifetime (he died at the age of 33 in New York, 1982, due to respiratory and pulmonary complications brought on by flu and ingestion of Darvon, as The Human League s Dare played on the turntable), but the posthumous collection Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung, edited by Greil Marcus, remains a holy text for any aspiring hack.
But of all the old-school sluggers, Nick Tosches is my favourite. The guy can write anything: first person memoir, biography, travel pieces, lewd satire, skits, screenplays, fiction (as opposed to thinly veiled autobiography), music reviews, interviews. Since the Creem days he has refined and developed his style, striking a deft balance between romance and cynicism. Indeed, Tosches is one of the few post-Bukowski writers who can make the beautiful loser shtick stick (for proof, consult A Slab Of Grease, A Bottle Of Carbona, And Thou from the amazing Nick Tosches Reader published just last year). His range is vast enough to range encompass mythic allusion, pop suss and the profane wit of the native New York Italian American, usually in one well-turned phrase.
No surprise then, that Tosches seemed to have no trouble in graduating from snotty rock brat into a fully fledged man of letters, writing distinguished biogs of Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, Sonny Liston and infamous Sicilian financier Michele Sindona, not to mention his celebrated Unsung Heroes Of Rock N Roll, as well as novels like Trinities and Cut Numbers. His all time greatest piece of journalism however, was Confessions Of An Opium Seeker , an epic account on his search for the last opium den on earth, which appeared in Vanity Fair last September.

By the early 1970s, Rolling Stone magazine had become the big boy on the rock block, providing a home for the balanced, well thought-out copy of Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau, as well as the furious prose of Hunter S. Thompson. Under the canny eye of Jann Wenner, RS soon lost some of its edge through forging political links with the music industry establishment, but as a result of this Faustian pact, became possibly the loudest voice of the counter culture, with the edgier Creem acting as a vicious little terrier snapping at its heels.
As the Seventies went on, the US Press corps became polarised into good and bad cops: the likes of Marcus and Cameron Crowe, often refraining from asking the hard questions out of a (natural enough) desire to be liked by the interviewee, and then Meltzer and Bangs, who d go toe to toe with the likes of Lou Reed, baiting the talent just for pig-iron.
Morley: If you take it from Meltzer and Bangs in the Sixties up to (Nick) Kent, I suppose after that, there was only versions of it in a way, only echoes. It s almost like the criticism ran faster than the music somehow, the style of it and the pace of it and the experimentation and its need to be a bit more serious than pop seemed to be able to stand at first. So for me over the last 20 years, there s just been a lot of repetition of it, or reminders of that kind of writing. Y know, maybe pop and rock just can t hold it.
In England in the early Seventies, the New Musical Express was rescued from its post-Sixties slump largely by the work of scribes such as Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent, who were as famous as the pop stars they covered.
The former was a North Londoner who began his career in 1970 as a contributor to the OZ schoolkids issue, joining NME two years later. After a stint as Associate Editor with that publication, he returned to freelancing, co-authoring with Roy Carr a book on David Bowie, publishing a best of collection Shots From The Hip, his mighty Jimi Hendrix tome Crosstown Traffic and more recently the John Lee Hooker biography Boogie Man. Like Cohn, or later on, Bill Graham in hotpress, Murray was always tough and rigorous but fair, striking a balance between social studies, street smarts and well-informed analysis of everything from country blues to Sixties pop to the art-school tradition.
Kent on the other hand, played Keef to Murray s Lou Reed, and like Lester Bangs (whom he sought out and studied under in the early Seventies) was completely enamoured of the romantic conceit of rock n roll dissipation.
Kent too began writing for the underground press at the age of 19 while studying English Literature at Bedford College, before being headhunted by the NME, and throughout the Seventies, was the most visible proponent of the method junkie lifestyle. More importantly though, he could spin a gripping yarn from his vantage point in the rock n roll foxholes, on tour with the likes of the Stones and Led Zeppelin. And when punk broke, he was a natural ally, working with The Sex Pistols, forming his own band The Subterraneans, and once earning the dubious distinction of getting chain whipped by Sid Vicious and cronies.
Kent spent much of the 1980s in heroin hell but rallied in the Nineties when he moved to France, working as a TV scriptwriter and director, finally publishing his selected writings The Dark Stuff in 1994.
Meanwhile, back in the USA, Greil Marcus published his first book Mystery Train in 1975, which proved that rock n roll writing could embrace the political and the mythological. Marcus s propensity for what Murray called vaulting intellectual ambition still earns him the derision of the fuck-art-let s-rock crowd, but what is often overlooked is his own capacity for righteous anger, evident in a seething Death Of Rock piece which appeared in Esquire in 1992, and recently resurfaced in his collection of Nineties writings Double Trouble Bill Clinton And Elvis Presley In A Land Of No Alternatives.
I wrote that Death Of Rock piece around February of 92, he remembers, when I had very little confidence that the Republican rule that had gone on for 12 years was going to end, that Bill Clinton or anybody else would be able to beat George Bush. When I wrote that Bill Clinton had not yet emerged really. And so it was a nihilistic, fuck-you, bitter piece in some ways, like say, Lipstick Traces (which) was born out of a revulsion with the country as it was symbolised by Ronald Reagan. It was not a country that I could bear to live in I mean, obviously I did live in it, I didn t go anywhere else but intellectually I did go somewhere else, I went to Europe, and I tried to understand a different culture in a way that was very difficult and foreign for me.
Lipstick Traces was essentially a trawl through a century of avant garde insurrection through the keyhole of the Sex Pistols Anarchy In The UK . Punk s iconoclasm not only was instrumental in dismantling gender barriers (Patti Smith had been a one-time Creem contributor, while Chrissie Hynde served time at the NME), it also gave the dinosaurs a much needed kick up the arse, opening the gates for vitriolicists like Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill.
Parsons got a job with the NME as a result of his first book The Kids, covering events like the Anarchy In The UK tour in 1976 and The Pistols Jubilee Day frolics a year later. This was at a time the paper was shifting 250,000 copies a week, and had the ear of every kid in the country (in fact, most of the staff were barely out of school themselves). After three years, Parsons left to carve out a successful career in fiction and mainstream journalism (his book Man And Boy was the eighth biggest British best seller of 2000), as well as guesting on BBC2 s Late Show, but not before he and his wife-to-be Burchill had authored the splenetic punk tract The Boy Looked At Johnny.
Burchill was a wicked-tongued 17-year-old harpy who all but tore the cock off cock rock and jammed it up its flatulent arse. Like her (by now) ex-husband, Burchill also managed the leap to the weekenders, by way of an unapologetically opinionated biog of Diana Spencer and an autobiography I Knew I Was Right, and she now files a regular column for The Guardian. Capable of irritating and antagonizing in equal measure, Burchill was a much-needed female voice in what remains the preserve of young males possibly a result of the Hi Fidelity trainspotting factor. Another major exception to the boy s club hegemony is US freelancer Gina Arnold, author of the outstanding Route 666 On The Road To Nirvana.

Despite the presence of such agitators though, at the end of the Seventies rock n roll meant megabucks. With major publications such as Time and People covering pop, the underground papers found themselves forced to compete, with the emphasis switching from criticism to celebrity gossip. Reviews and features got shorter and more uniformly positive, and with the advent of television as a medium, print journalism had to kowtow the line, or else.
Ask Paul Morley if the development of rock n roll as an industry meant the gagging of dissenting voices, and he has this to say:
Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, once upon a time you could get into a room with someone and hurl all sorts of abuse, both directly and indirectly, whether to their face or later, if you were a bit scared and did it behind their back. That was pretty soon battened down upon, which is a shame I think sometimes the artists themselves feel it s a shame. There was always a big furore about the thing I did with Jerry Garcia. I interviewed him wearing a Human League t-shirt and went on about the Fire Engines and things, and somehow it was considered to be a great lack of respect for the man.
But oddly enough, he actually really enjoyed the interview, and the whole thing was a lot of fun, whereas when you get someone coming in for 20 minutes asking really dull questions, I think they d rather have the sparring match. Within reason. I mean Meat Loaf tried to beat me up and Lou Reed just walked out after 30 minutes dead, I ll always remember that one. He said, Y know Paul, Delmore Schwartz was a journalist, you lot, you don t count! I kind of know what he means, y know? You make this great work and some guy comes along and asks the most banal questions.
Morley was foremost among the early Eighties New Pop theorists/terrorists. As punk and post-punk gave way to synthesizer pop, so did the critics change their spots. The old Keef clones were usurped by anti-rockist reactionaries concerned with a whole new aesthetic. Cut and paste was in, sweat and blood passi. Coke became the new heroin. Nick Logan left his editing post at NME to found style bible The Face.
And as the 1980s progressed (some might say regressed) pop critics needed to invent a new argot to accurately describe the incoming hip-hop and rave revolutions. In the US, the brightest star was probably Greg Tate, a brilliant rap/funk/jazz theorist who could pull theories on African Folk Art, Amiri Baraka and quantum physics into his writings on Public Enemy, Miles Davis and George Clinton. In Britain, Melody Maker s Simon Reynolds acted as chief interpreter of industrial and noise acts such as My Bloody Valentine, advocating a departure from the Eng-Lit tradition of critiquing music on its lyrical meaning rather than in pure sonic terms, before evolving into the poet laureate of rave. Reynolds compound-wordplay and avowedly cerebral approach weren t exactly fly on the wall accounts of Johnny Thunders turning blue, but his Energy Flash is an utterly indispensable exploration of dance music in the Nineties.
By millennium s end, with the splitting of the rock atom and its subsequent fragmentation into everything from nu-jazz to post-rock to illbient, the most interesting scribblings could be found in anorak mags like The Wire, a little esoteric for the casual punter perhaps, but pretty untouchable in terms of content and design.
The most intriguing of the boffin squad was probably Kodwo Eshun, an ex-Oxford egghead who literally transcribes the music into a syn-aesthetic sci-fi lingo which, like Burroughs, is inspiring for about three pages, excruciating for six (sample headings Transmaterializing The Breakbeat or Synthesizing The Omniverse ).
By now, many of the finer journalists such as Jon Savage and Simon Price had left the daily grind for the biography trail. Johnny Rogan, the method madman who disappears into his own beard for years at a time in order to pen doorstep-sized tomes on acts such as The Smiths, The Byrds and most recently Neil Young.
Then there s Victor Bockris, arch chronicler of the New York/Velvets/Burroughs underground, and a man whose work can swing from the good (Keith Richards, or What s Welsh For Zen with John Cale), the bad (a perfunctory Patti Smith job) and the ugly (an extremely slanted Lou Reed biog). Also noteworthy is workaholic Mojo contributor Barney Hoskyns, who seems to churn out books by the month on subjects such as glam rock, The Band, Prince, James Dean, Montgomery Clift and the mullet haircut, and whose epic history of the LA music scene Waiting For The Sun is but a hair short of definitive. Other masters of the form include Clinton Heylin (Bob Dylan), Stanley Booth (The Rolling Stones, Keith Richards) and Peter Guralnik (Robert Johnson, Elvis Presley).
Back in the newsagents though, the weeklies impact on pop lessened as the quality of writers deteriorated and the circulation of NME and Melody Maker began to go down the tubes. As former freelancers graduated to editor status, monthlies like Q, Mojo and Uncut became the dominant rock comics, peddling a more adult approach. Of these, Q can still be relied upon to pull the odd penetrating piece out of the hat (a recent up-close-and-personal Boyzone report being one example), but they do suffer from something of a VH1/MOR bias, and the chummy editorial tone can grate after a while. Uncut boasts impeccable choice of subject matter from Sixties iconography to Seventies/Eighties cult favourites and Nineties Americana, plus a handsome spread of film and book reviews but all too often, the critics resort to a mess of hyperbolic adjectives, or an artificially hard-boiled turn of phrase. Mojo have exactly the opposite problem incisisive writers, but an ultra-conservative choice of cover stars (Beatles, Beatles and more Beatles, with a side order of Oasis).
In any sphere, the lust for consensus eradicates all opposing voices. Nostalgia is fatal in rock n roll, but one can t help wonder about the days when gonzos like Bangs could argue Lou s Metal Machine Music as the best album ever made, or Meltzer could go off on one about The Trashmen.
My attitude is, There s 99 of that, why can t we have at least one of something else? argues Morley. Often you find if you take a byline off all of these people, you d never really be able to distinguish between them, it s the same voice almost. And they make the same discoveries in the same tepid way, so suddenly it s Nick Drake and then it s Tim Buckley and they might as well be writing about anything, you get no sense of the magic of the stuff.

So, if rock journalism is increasingly little more than an annex to most labels publicity departments rather than a means of expression or a forum for debate, perhaps the future is on the Internet, where maverick contrarians can air their views free from any political agenda. After all, if you re not on the Warners/BMG/Sony/Universal mailing list in the first place, who gives a shit if you re blackballed? The web is jammed with DIY film critics who, sick of critical sycophancy, have taken to calling a Hollywood turd a turd perhaps that s where the next wave of pop prophets are to be found.
Paul Morley: Somehow the absurdist response seems to have gone missing. It s all so sober. I guess it s the white middle-aged middle-class guy in his 40s now who tends to be the predominant voice, so you get even new bands covered by guys who, in a sense, have no right to really write about these bands. Christgau in America still seems to have the attitude and can write about it in a way that isn t just pretending there s some kind of formal truth and formal history to this music. It s all about how you feel rather than pretending to put it in some kind of order.
Maybe old hacks never die, they just make money off reheating their glory days, whether it s Allan Jones in Uncut or Cameron Crowe s movie Almost Famous. Which is understandable when you consider how the game has changed. Back then, journalists would often go on the road with a band, reporting what they saw rather than what the musicians told them. Now, often as not, access is restricted to 30 minutes of pat quotes in a ghastly hotel room.
Charles Shaar Murray recalled the bad old days in a recent Guardian article, commissioned in advance of Crowe s forthcoming film.
Indicate that you might, under certain circumstances, be prepared to write a 400-word concert review of some dodgy combo and the next thing you knew another press officer would be flying you to Amsterdam, he recalled, buying you a stupefyingly expensive dinner, taking you on a tour of the red light district and uncomplainingly parting with a corporate wedge to buy you a wrap of over-priced cocaine. Then you d get home, slide behind the typewriter for 15 minutes and slag the band off. Oh how we laughed!

The Nick Tosches Reader and Richard Meltzer s A Whore Just Like The Rest are published by Da Capo Press. Almost Famous is released at the end of January.

POACHERS TURNED
GAMEKEEPERS
or All Musicians Are Just Failed Journalists

Richard Meltzer (Creem/Smegma, Blue Oyster Cult lyricist)
Chrissie Hynde (NME/The Pretenders)
Nick Kent (NME/The Sex Pistols, The Subterraneans)
Patti Smith (Creem/Patti Smith Group)
Bob Geldof (NME/Boomtown Rats)
Mike Scott (Jungleland Fanzine/The Waterboys
Neil Tennant (Smash Hits/Pet Shop Boys)
Paul Morley (NME/Art Of Noise)
Cliff Jones (Mojo/Gay Dad)
John Robb (Melody Maker/Gold Blade)
Jon Landau (Rolling Stone/manager Bruce Springsteen)
Fachtna O Kelly (Evening Press/manager Boomtown Rats and Siniad O Connor)
PJ Curtis (hotpress/producer Bothy Band, Sharon Shannon, etc.)