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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'One of the best music books ever written, because Michael Odell knows music isn't about the musicians – it's about what it does to the listener, even if what it does ends up being wholly disastrous. It's sad, funny, fascinating and wise.' Michael Hann, former Guardian music editor 'Hilarious and disarmingly honest; a journey into the neurosis of rock fame, but through doors you don't expect.' Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry A tale of loving, living and surviving rock music Michael Odell is a rock music writer who takes his responsibility as cultural gatekeeper seriously; he asks rock stars the forbidden questions to discover whether they're worthy of readers' admiration. But after interviewing Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – two of the 'Big Six' icons – Michael is depressed. He has a public meltdown while chaperoning Oasis at an awards ceremony; he's lost joy in his bathroom full of rock'n'roll memorabilia; and his young son is in trouble at school for emulating rock star behaviour. Reluctantly Michael consults Mrs Henckel, a no-nonsense therapist with zero experience of pop culture. As Michael addresses his feelings about the past, in particular his failed teenage band, Mental Elf, he's forced to confront the question: is it finally time to grow up and forget rock'n'roll?
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Rock Bottom
A Music Writer’s Journey into Madness
Michael Odell
Contents
“What’s up with you, you c***?”
LIAM GALLAGHER
“How dare you!”
DAVID BOWIE
“Get out of my house!”
PETE DOHERTY
“Hey, those are my trousers!”
THE STROKES
“Very good, very good.”
NELSON MANDELA
“I’m glad no one checked my mental health when I was starting out – they wouldna f***** found any. Like your pal, rock ’n’ roll for me was do or die. My old man said if I didn’t make it, I’d end up in jail or dead. Of course we always hear about the winners. But in this game, when you lose, you lose big.”
OZZY OSBOURNE, 2017
AUTHOR’S NOTE
During a period that began in the summer of 2005, I was trying to solve some deep-seated personal issues related to an over-dependence on rock music, while maintaining a magazine job interviewing the world’s biggest rock stars. I have tried to tell the personal side of the story accurately and without upsetting too many people. This has meant telescoping some events and changing some names. The interviews with rock stars happened as reported.
1
I Had Too Much to Think Last Night
A bed. South London.
“Stop shouting! Stop shouting, you’ll wake Ronnie!”
“What? Wait! Where the hell is the band?”
“The band isn’t here. You are home. This is reality.”
Reality, I note with a sigh, is not as well-appointed as my dream-life. There is no fancy room service buffet or deluxe hotel chandelier above me but instead a modest Ikea lampshade and a large guitar-shaped damp patch on the ceiling. Before I left on my trip, the patch was about the size of a seven-inch single. Now it has swollen and grown two long tentacles. It’s about the size of the preposterous double-necked guitar Jimmy Page used while Led Zeppelin were in their 70s pomp.
The pretty, freckled face of my girlfriend Nicola peers down at me, a scientist examining a specimen. The fringe that makes her look like the dark-haired one from the Human League swishes into her eyes. She flicks it away to improve her view.
“Morning,” she says jauntily enough but her eyelids flicker, betraying a reading on the spectrum between curiosity and trepidation.
“Hello, you,” I say, blinking myself fully awake. “Sorry, I thought I was …”
“Michael, you were having a bad dream.”
“No, I was asleep,” I say.
“But you were shouting, ‘Pete! Pete!’”
“Who’s Peter?”
“How the hell should I know? It was your dream!”
Peter Townshend. Peter Doherty. Peter Hook. These are all Peter rock stars. I know this because I am a rock writer. I have been interviewing rock stars for twenty years. In fact, I have just returned from a testing international assignment. Thrombosed by the contortions of an Economy seat, blunted by in-flight refreshments, I climbed into bed next to Nicola late last night. I slept terribly and woke feeling vexed and haunted. I was dreaming about rock stars. I was on a tour bus with a band. There was music, beer and louche pterodactyl laughter, but the precise details evaporate upon probing. I certainly don’t recall any Peters.
“Get up. Have a bath. You’ll feel better,” Nicola advises.
“Yes, good idea,” I say catching the fug of my own long-haul traveller armpit.
Nicola is very good about indulging the peculiarities of my job. You might say it comes naturally to her. She works in mental health, running a South London day centre where she helps a varied clientele adapt to a self-supporting life in the community. It’s not so far from living with a rock journalist: if I need rousing or cajoling, she has the skill set to do it.
“So, where did you stay?” she asks, drawing back the curtains.
“The Four Seasons,” I say, “Toronto.”
“And the weather?”
“Cold as a witch’s tit.”
“But they were nice?”
“Who?”
“Were the band nice?”
I wince at the question.
“Nice? Why are you asking me if they were nice?”
“You went all that way; I’m just asking if they were nice to you.”
“Come on,” I say, “you don’t really want people like that to be nice.”
Rock stars are combatants in important cultural wars. They are required to be many things but “nice” isn’t preeminent among them. However, Nicola is less bothered by the complex code of how rock stars should behave than I am. To her mind, they should assume the off-stage persona of cordial and respectful citizenry. Nicola is for common decency. She is for manners.
“What was Mick like?” she asks, with a cautious elevation of one eyebrow.
“A businessman. Emotionally disconnected from his product. Very much focussed on maximising profits,” I shrug.
“Oh,” she says with distaste.
I have been to Toronto to interview the Rolling Stones. In his dressing room, Sir Mick directed me to a seat ten feet distant from his. Across this chasm of empathy, he offered a wily, craggy defence of the Stones’ legacy. He’s been their frontman for over 40 years now. No wonder he feels more like a brand ambassador discussing augmentations to the product line than a rock star.
I went for broke. I lobbed in my hand grenade question: “Is it possible, as Keith and I discussed earlier, that the Stones’ sexual threat and perhaps even the entire permissive 60s may have originated with your cock?”
“Great quote. No comment.”
In most interviews the “grenade question”, something incendiary dropped onto the floor and left to roll around with the pin out, opens things up. But not this time. He was too good. Nevertheless, eyeballing the walnut-faced Jagger up close was a solemn and special occasion for me. Jagger and Keith Richards are members of the Big Six, the giants, the founders even, of modern rock whom every rock writer would like to interview. The others are Bowie, Townshend, Page and McCartney. They are getting old now and soon they will all be dead. It is my sworn aim to find the big beasts before they go extinct. And before I do too. In six months I will be 42.
“After the Stones, I expect you’re feeling tomorrow will be a bit of a come-down,” Nicola says.
“Tomorrow. What’s tomorrow?”
“The Q Awards.”
Oh yes, I remember now. Tomorrow Q magazine is holding its annual awards bash. Each journalist must chaperone one of the star guests up the red carpet, through a global media maelstrom and into a hotel ballroom where gongs will be handed out. I have been allotted Britpop titans Oasis. Oasis are not in the Big Six, but they are still a major force in rock. Just thinking about chaperoning them makes me feel anxious. I have spent quite a bit of time with the band in the past and, although they are funny and charismatic, they can be wildly unpredictable.
“I think you should get a new suit. And new shoes,” Nicola advises, after studying my outfit for the awards.
“Why? Those are fine.”
“Come off it,” she says. “The shoes are so 1980s, and the suit’s ridiculously small.”
“I don’t care. I am wearing them.”
Last year, as I chaperoned the exquisitely tailored Elton John up the red carpet, one of the magazine’s top brass hissed at me coldly. “Why aren’t you wearing a suit?” she said. “You look like his bloody roadie!”
It pisses me off that this year she has stipulated all writers should attend in formal wear. I will wear the ridiculous suit as a protest. A suit that brazenly refuses to do the conformist work of a suit. I do not believe rock writers should conform. Why should we, mavericks who articulate the voices of the counterculture, ape the dress code of The Man?
“For God’s sake, just go and buy one,” says Nicola, holding it up with clear distaste. “There’s nothing wrong with looking presentable.”
I sense we are about to argue, once again, about the place that conformity has in rock ’n’ roll culture. But we are interrupted by a noise outside the bedroom door. The tentative rat-a-tat of a small human knuckle.
Nicola winks at me as a cue to prepare myself. “Heeeeereee’s Ronnie!” she cries, like an MC introducing an act on an old-time TV rock show, and our nine-year-old son Ronnie shoulders through the door. He is wearing his Who pyjama set with a toy plastic guitar slung round his neck. Nicola gently guides his back as he hops onto the bed, as if onto a low stage. Then, with apple-cheeked intensity, he begins mimicking the riff to “My Generation”. Instead of electricity and amplification, he deploys growls and phlegm for effect. When he gets to the line “Hope I die before I get old”, Nicola arches a quizzical eyebrow. When he has finished, he waves to the imaginary crowd, takes off the guitar and assumes his ordinary persona.
“Hello, Daddy. Did you have a fun time in Canada?”
“Yes, I did, thank you.”
“Did you meet the real me?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Was he nice?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Are they paying him more pocket money?”
“Yes. He’s getting the same pocket money as everyone else.”
Our son is called Tom, but he takes his middle name from the Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood and likes to use that instead. He is heavily invested in the welfare of his namesake. I have told him that when Wood was drafted into the Stones in 1975, instead of making him a full member of the band, Jagger kept him on a wage for the following nineteen years. Our Ronnie has been indignantly curious about Wood’s financial package ever since.
“Did you bring me a souvenir?” he asks.
“I did. We’ll hang it in the bathroom together later, shall we?”
Whenever I return from an assignment, Ronnie and I enjoy curating any new rock memorabilia I have acquired. Our bathroom is a rock ’n’ roll shrine, and the placing of new artefacts is a tradition, a harmless bit of father–son bonding. At least I think it is.
“What did you bring him this time?” Nicola whispers to me. “Please, God, I hope it’s appropriate.”
I can understand Nicola’s concern. On a recent trip, I made a mistake. I was on tour with New Order on the west coast of America, and on the final night in California there were a few drinks. Late in the evening, I lurched about the dressing room looking for a souvenir and slipped what I thought was the duster used for wiping down Peter Hook’s bass strings into my bag. Peter Hook’s bass playing, especially on Joy Division records, is some of the most legendary in rock. I wanted a connection with it, even if it was just a rag. But when I got home and unpacked my trophy, I discovered it was a pair of underpants.
Owning a pair of Peter Hook’s underpants would still give me a solid connection with legendary New Order and Joy Division bass lines. But Ronnie didn’t agree. “Why have you brought home someone else’s pants?” he asked me. We didn’t hang them up in the bathroom. I threw them away.
Ronnie is growing up fast. He is taking rock ’n’ roll increasingly seriously, so we have to monitor his exposure to it carefully. Rock is not like other art forms, like, say, pottery or theatre or ballet. Its core values – seditious hedonism, emotional extremity and nihilistic torpor – need to be managed carefully in the domestic sphere.
And so, I am not sure about my Ronnie Wood souvenir. I know this new artefact is a borderline case.
“A cigarette butt,” I say finally.
“Jesus, Michael,” Nicola says under her breath, “why on earth have you brought your son a cigarette butt?”
“It’s Ron Wood’s. That means it’s been held in the very same fingers that played guitar on the Stones’ ‘Miss You’ and ‘Start Me Up’, not to mention Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’,” I explain.
Nicola’s shoulders drop as though she has been the recipient of bad news. “You are insane,” she says quietly to herself.
I do not agree. For me, a fag butt with a direct physical connection to such music puts the owner in touch with immortality.
“Daddy, why were you shouting in your sleep?” Ronnie asks suddenly.
I look at Nicola. She shrugs. “It was quite loud,” she confides to me gently.
“Daddy’s not shouting now. He wants to get up,” I say.
“Pete! Pete!” my little boy shrieks, giggling. Then draping himself around me he adds: “Come back!”
“Come back?” I ask. “Did I actually say ‘Come back’?”
Nicola nods. “’Fraid so, you weirdo.”
“Yes, you sounded scared, Daddy!” says Ronnie.
“Alright, alright,” I say, unpicking his sausage fingers from around my neck. “Daddy was just having a bad dream.”
