Redheaded Reviews: Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Star by David Hepworth

If someone is going to write a book deciding who is a rock star or what a rock star moment is they should have the credentials to back it up. So I'm going to give you the writer's bona fides. Hepworth is a music journalist, writer, and publishing industry analyst who presented the definitive rock program Whistle Test and anchored the coverage of Live Aid in 1985. He has won numerous awards for writing and he is currently a radio columnist and a media correspondent for The Guardian. He believes that the age of the rock star is over. That it lasted from 1955-1994. In this book, he goes year by year and takes an event from that year, perhaps a personal event from a rock star's life or maybe an event in rock history that changed things. Here is a sampling of the years from the book.

September 14, 1955: Rampart Street, New Orleans, Louisiana. Little Richard was the first rock star. He was born a very unusual child with a deformed leg that he compensated for by taking small mincing steps that got him called a faggot, sissy, punk, and freak. He got his start touring with a snake oil salesman and then performed with a minstrel show who introduced him as Princess Lavonne and he played in a dress. He picked up the idea for his pompadour from a man named Esquerita and his makeup from Billy Wright though he would always say that people stole from him. When he got his record deal no one expected much. The song "Maybellene" by Chuck Berry's first song was playing on the jukeboxes. Producer Bumps Blackwell was up for doing something similar. They recorded "Kansas City" and "Directly From My Heart to You" but they just didn't seem to have it. They went to the local bar for a break and Little Richard sat down at the piano and began belting out the dirty song "Tutti Frutti". In the original version, it went "Tutti Frutti, good booty. If it's greasy, it makes it so easy." They brought the song back to the studio and Little Richard sang it to Dorothy LaBostrie with his back turned to her and she didn't want the job but Blackwell convinced her to do it for her children she was trying to support with the little money she was making waitressing. The song reached number two on the R&B charts and number 17 on the main pop charts which wasn't as high as the white Pat Boone version but it had reached around the world and set it on fire. He would go on and record further records with Blackwell such as "Lucille", "Long Tall Sally", "Keep a Knockin'", "Good Golly Miss Molly", and "The Girl Can't Help It''. The way he looked and the way he acted put him on another plane altogether and with his string of hits, it made him a bona fide star and the first rock star.

September 26, 1965: Aarhus, Denmark. The Who were in Aarhus on a Scandinavian tour. That night there had been crowd trouble and they had only been on stage for a few minutes when the crowd started throwing stuff at the stage and they had to head back to the dressing room and the hoses had to be turned on the crowd because they had gotten so out of control. Pissed off, they, as usual, turned on each other. The band had been formed by Roger Daltry with the mercurial Pete Townshend, the inscrutable, thick-skinned John Entwistle, and the indestructible Keith Moon. Townshend and Moon liked to provoke a reaction. Once Townshend shoved a five-pound note in front of a friend who was broke and when he didn't take it tore it up in pieces. Moon, who had mental health issues, beat up his mother who bought him a drum kit for him to take his aggressions out on. That night, though he didn't have his drums with him to bang away at and he and Daltry went at it when Daltry got pissed off at the band's use of speed and how it made the band act and flushed Moon's supply down the toilet. In retaliation Moon came at Daltry who punched him. Security had to pull them apart. After they played their second gig that night one thing was for certain: Daltry had to go. The manager of The Who for two weeks thought about how to reshuffle the band and fix it but could come up with no solution other than to let Daltry back in so he explained to the band that they had something together as a unit no matter how they felt about each other and Townshend and Moon couldn't stand each other and often came to blows. Daltry agreed to let the drug issue go and the band agreed to take him back. They realized that no matter how they felt about each other the band was more important. Later that year they would release their breakthrough album My Generation with the title song that would become their anthem. "My Generation" was inspired by when Townshend had a hearse outside his flat which offended the traditional residents of his neighborhood and was towed away by authorities. It was said that the Queen Mother didn't like seeing the hearse because it reminded her of the funeral of her late husband. He quickly wrote a song with its hostage-to-fortune line about hoping to die before getting old. This song would make them rock stars and put them in rock history books.

May 16, 1971: New York City. On August 23, 1970, Lou Reed's parents drove into New York City to pick him up and take him home after he was kicked out of The Velvet Underground a band that was created by Andy Warhol. A band that he had written all the songs for but had taken none of the credit for. Underground was the operative word as they never broke out and had a hit. And Lou Reed desperately wanted to have a hit song. He had been writing songs for years trying to get a hit song with no success. And moving back home to his parents was a huge embarrassment and set back as in those days no one moved back in with their parents. He was twenty-nine and he still hadn't hit it big and was thinking he never would and had given up on the rock star dream. He took a job as a typist in his father's accounting office and wrote odd and badly in need of an editor poetry for publications. As a teen, his anger issues had surfaced and his parents had sent him to have electric shock treatment. This didn't work as his anger issues continued to hound him his whole life. David Bowie had come to New York City from England and while there had gone to see one of his favorite bands The Velvet Underground and enthused over Lou Reed to the lead singer Doug Yule who had to inform him that he wasn' t Lou Reed and that Reed wasn't in the band anymore. Reed recorded a little paired down song called "Walk on the Wild Side" about Warhol's Factory and on May 16, 1971, played it for Richard and Lisa Robinson. She was a journalist and friend of the stars and he was an A & R man for RCA records. This was a typical night when people in the music business would gather around and listen to Reed hold court and pontificate and play some of his songs. Robinson suggested that he give recording another go with this song at RCA where David Bowie had just signed a huge contract and was a big fan. He might even be able to get him artistic control and be able to record it in London where he wanted to record it. Over the summer Reed set out to claim credit for The Velvet Underground songs that he wrote. RCA threw a party for both Lou Reed and David Bowie and Bowie let Lou Reed take the limelight that night as he felt it his due. With "Walk on the Wild Side" Lou Reed would finally have the hit he so desired and put him in rock star history.

July 4, 1976: Tampa Florida. In 1970 Peter Green left Fleetwood Mac the band he helped found and went to become a gravedigger wanting nothing more to do with the band or any of the money from the band. This wasn't a problem for years because the band was in debt. Then when Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, and John McVie add Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks and put out their first album Fleetwood Mac it outsold any album from the Warner Brothers catalog and caused their back albums to sell meaning that Green got a check from the band. He took a shotgun and went to his accountant and threatened him. This earned him a ticket to the mental hospital. Mick, Christine, and John would form the rhythm section and they would put down the beat to a certain extent and then wait for the lyrics to come forth to finish it. The problem with this is that usually the lyrics were about the people in the room and no one wanted to share what they were writing. Stevie and Lindsey had made a deal to never date the lead singer of a band, but when they formed a duo they got involved. When they joined Fleetwood Mac too much time spent in the studio meant that they really didn't want to go home to each other at night and they ended up breaking up. Christine had married John to make her dying mother happy and broke up with him as soon as she could. She began dating the lighting man. John began dating Linda Ronstadt. Mick's marriage to George Harrison's sister-in-law was falling apart. They were doing a huge amount of coke and drinking during the creation of Rumours and it ended up costing them almost a year to get it done with all the retakes. Nicks would arrive every day in a fresh outfit as though she were going on stage in a theater and brought along her pet poodle. She wrote "Dreams" in fifteen minutes. In Fleetwood Mac "the talent was evenly distributed" but "the member who cast the greatest spell and catalyzed the other four was Stevie Nicks." She was always in danger of being overlooked because she didn't play an instrument. On stage, she "played" a tambourine that was taped up so as not to be heard, but it left her free to be the main attraction on the stage something she took seriously. "She had the Bambi eyes, Cupid's bow lips, Farrah Fawcett hair, and flawless skin of the girl you would never dare ask to the prom. At a distance, she was a blur of gauzy fabric." Young men couldn't resist her. On July 4, 1976, they took a break from recording to do a show in Florida with Dan Fogelberg, Loggins and Messina, and the Eagles. When Mick looked out over the crowd as he played he could see a wave of Stevie devotees dressed in her wispy, witchy, black dresses hoping to capture her magic for themselves and get the boy they wanted. Rumours would become one of the top-selling albums of all time for decades and Stevie Nicks would go on to have a successful solo career on top of her time spent with Fleetwood Mac. Stevie Nicks helped make Fleetwood Mac a success and with her stage presence, she was certainly a rock star.

The book ends in 1994 appropriately with the death of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Cobain was truly the last rock star. Other entries include multiple ones on the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Elvis, Bob Dylan and Michael Jackson as well as Duran Duran's making of the infamous "Girl's On Film" video and how that relates to the burgeoning MTV video world, Bonnie Raitt, Prince, Elton John, the death of Randy Rhodes, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, Freddie Mercury, Led Zeppelin, Hank Marvin, and Buddy Holly. This is a very well researched book that contains little gems of information that you might not have known. In my opinion, the entry of the date when he interviewed Bob Dylan shouldn't have been in there, but otherwise this a very interesting book and I highly recommend it.

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