I started writing 1n 1971. My first book was a strange sixties conglomeration of narrative, philosophy, poetry, spirituality, photography and cartoons. I thought it was brilliant. Unfortunately nobody else did. That’s probably because it was unreadable. I still feel a nostalgic love of it though.
I then set about writing Sci-fi. I wrote four or five novels without a glimmer of success.
In 1980 I had a re-evaluation. I went and talked to my friend Roy Harper about producing a biography. He was keen. It morphed into a book based around his lyrics. I spent 20 years on that project. It was in 4 parts but never saw the light of day.
In the meantime I was still writing Sci-fi and delivering a course on The History Of Rock Music. So I made that into a 4-part book. A publisher was interested but wanted it cut down from 1200 pages to 200. I wrote him a different book. It was pulled on the day of publication.
Undaunted I continued writing.
I had a job as a teacher and four kids. Every night, after they were in bed I’d write. Whatever took my fancy – Sci-fi novels, weird underground novels, antinovels, environment, antireligion, travel, education, art, poetry and rock music.
Then I discovered self-publishing.
Then sonicbond publishers contracted me for eight books on my rock heroes.
The Beatles White Album and controversial Revolution No. 9
There is huge controversy over this album among Beatle fans. The sprawling double album with its range of styles, solo efforts, experimental tracks and spontaneous jams, divides opinion, Some rave about it and enjoy the rawness, versatility and daring. For them the variety piques the attention. Others see it as being full of fillers and unhoned numbers and would have preferred a single album of more carefully crafted songs. I’m firmly with the former. For me the album shines precisely because of its range and rawness.
The most controversial number of all was Lennon’s Revolution No.9. Many people wrote this off as a Lennon indulgence, a meaningless pile of junk – and I must admit that I used to feel the same. It was one of a few tracks that I used to skip.
Not anymore. When I came to write the book I had to study each track in detail. Here’s an extract from the book that might help explain:
Revolution 9 (Lennon McCartney)
There is no doubt that Yoko really turned John on. He’d become lost, searching and feeling desperate, as we heard in ‘Yer Blues’. Yoko, with her uncommercial avant garde approach, quirky humour and zany perspective provided a stimulating life-line. It awakened aspects of John that had lain dormant. Suddenly he had a desire to be authentic, say what he thought, and do what he wanted, regardless of the consequences. She’d unshackled him. It was no longer about image and creating commercially successful songs. He wasn’t just a Beatle; he was John.
The other Beatles, press and public, found this new Lennon hard to understand. He wasn’t following the rules. Yoko unleashed a new burst of creativity and it did not always head off in the direction people wanted. Being accessible and commercial were no longer considerations. Being artistically authentic was all that mattered. Nowhere was this more obvious than on this Beatles track and the three experimental albums he released with Yoko in 1968/69 – Unfinished Music No.1 – Two Virgins, Unfinished Music No.2 – Life With The Lyons and Wedding Album.
‘Revolution 9’ and these three albums largely used the same techniques – cut-up, backwards sections, tape loops and spoken word. The two of them were having fun producing soundscapes – painting abstract aural compositions with noise. It might leave the other Beatles, critics and the public bemused but they were enjoying themselves.
Saxonmotherson summed up the situation perfectly: ‘Sigh…where were YOU in 1968? I was 17. MLK & RFK were assassinated, there were race riots, cities burned, Anti-Vietnam demonstrations, all over Europe, there were student demonstrations. When MLK was killed, there were army tanks (ARMY TANKS!) in the field behind our house. There was a police riot in Chicago. First time I heard R #9, it made perfect sense to me. In retrospect, it still does. It is 1968. It is the aural version of Guernica by Picasso.’- comment on Beatles Bible.
At the time, 1968, with the French fighting in the streets, and black riots in a number of US cities, there was much talk of revolution. Violent revolution really seemed a possibility. Speaking to Jan Wenner in his 1971 Rolling Stone interview John articulated his thoughts on violent revolution: ‘At 17 I used to wish a fuckin’ earthquake or revolution would happen so that I could go out and steal and do what the blacks are doing now. If I was black, I’d be all for it; if I were 17 I’d be all for it, too. What have you got to lose? Now I’ve got something to lose. I don’t want to die.’ ‘Revolution’ was a really important song for him. He was breaking out of the straitjacket and saying something from the heart. The Vietnam War and Civil Rights issues were exploding and he was determined to have a voice in it. He had been dismayed by the overcautious reaction of the rest of the band and their rejection of it as a single.
In 1979 I was on a teaching exchange to the USA. I wonderfully ended up in Los Angeles for the year. My family swapped jobs and houses with an American family. Teaching in Los Angeles was a challenge at first but I soon was in the swing of it and the students were wonderful.
By 1979 I had been writing Sci-fi for a while and had a few novels to my name.
The family we exchanged with had an older daughter and she noticed that not only did I have hundreds of Sci-fi books on the shelves but one complete row was Philip K Dick, one of my favourite authors.
So it was that in October I received a phone call from the daughter. She told me that she’d seen the Philip K Dick books and that Phil, as she called him, was a personal friend, would I like to go and meet him?
Would I?? Would I indeed?? YES I WOULD!
She explained that she would be returning to Los Angeles in November and she would sort something out.
I was ecstatic. I had the chance to actually meet one of my heroes. What could be better. I only hoped that she would be able to arrange it and that ‘Phil’ would be happy to meet me.
My mind was racing. There were so many questions I could ask, advice I could glean, but above all – just the chance to meet the famous Sci-fi writer.
It all worked. Cheryl came round and collected me and a highly nervous young writer (myself) found himself in a car heading for Philip K Dick’s apartment.
It was, I’m afraid, all a bit of a blur. We sat in his living room. I perched on the sofa and ‘Phil’ talked and tried, unsuccessfully to put me at ease. I did manage to ask some stilted questions and received warm replies.
He told me that he’d just been on the film set for an adaptation of one of his novels that was tentatively going to be called ‘The Claw’. He showed me a poster for it with this huge metal claw reaching for a planet. He had been at a screening of the early rushes and explained to me that it was like looking into his own head.
I have subsequently looked for that film but never found it. Perhaps they renamed it? Perhaps it was never completed or released.
I asked ‘Phil’ what he considered to be his best piece of writing. He told me that he was very proud of a scene he had imagined; a duel between a gunslinger and a teleporter. The gunslinger had drawn his pistol to find that he was holding his own pancreas. Philip considered that the best piece of imagination he had ever come up with.
By the end of the evening I had been totally mesmerised and completely failed at asking any advice. He probably would have told me not to bother and I would have ignored him.
I left full of a warm glow, afloat on the honour of meeting the great man but annoyed that I had been so overcome with nerves that I hadn’t managed to relax. I hadn’t even taken a book for him to sign. I cursed myself!
‘Circle’ is the first of Roy’s epic songs and certainly not one that Shel could turn into a commercial success. It lasts over ten minutes and has five sections to it, including a spoken part – absolutely unique for its time. The song is the central point of the whole album.
Each of the sections involves different tempos and instrumentation.
The piece starts with Roy strumming on acoustic guitar to a subdued drumbeat. Then follows a spoken word section of a strained conversation between Roy and his dad over the sound of traffic. This leads to a faster sequence featuring drums and bass, and then subsides into a slower but more intense part augmented by strings with drums in the background. The mood builds in intensity with fast plucking of guitar, drums and strings coming in strongly, followed by a return to a softer section in which Roy’s voice rises at the end of each line to a falsetto. The strings appear again as the finale is reached.
A very ambitious and exacting piece of work that must have tested both Shel and Roy in the creating of the final successful recording, I can only imagine the conversations.
The lyrics deal with the constant pressure in Roy’s childhood to succeed, and success being measured in wealth. Roy’s father is addressing Roy about his accomplishments and Roy is responding. The topics move through Roy’s rejection of religion to his adolescent striving for importance and acceptance towards his realisation that the only thing he can be is himself. The song covers betrayal of relationships along with the inability to find answers. Roy’s final assertion is that all we can do is to live our lives.
The last spoken word is his Dad’s, who ironically, not understanding a word of the long introspection, says ‘Aye Lad – but I always knew you had it in you.’
We have to go back a little further to see what else induced this full-throttle burst into rock, back to where The Beatles burst onto the scene, revitalising rock, reawakening it and bringing it back from the dead.
The Beatles had taken the UK by storm in 1963. ‘Love Me Do’ was released on 5 October 1962 and reached a modest number 17. However, ‘Please Please Me’, released on 11 January 1963, then ‘From Me To You’, followed by ‘She Loves You’, all raced to the top of the charts. A sold-out tour sent the young girls screaming hysterically, and by October 1963, Beatlemania had been born in the UK, a phenomenon that was unlike anything witnessed before.
  Then, the dry tinder caught. The vacuum in rock music created by the payola scandal of the late fifties, with its subsequent clampdown on rock ‘n’ roll, had left an empty gap. Rock had become soft. It was all soft rock and pop with clean-cut pop idols. It had lost its rebellious edge. With the release of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ on 26December 1963, The Beatles shot to number one and that gap was filled. Their subsequent tour started on 7February 1964. It featured an incendiary slot on the highly influential Ed Sullivan Show, which helped to shoot them to the very top. All across the country, families tuned in to see what the fuss was all about. The kids were instantly smitten. Beatlemania took off in the States with a vengeance, with radio stations playing non-stop Beatles tracks and The Beatles dominating the American charts. The British invasion had begun.
Bob wasn’t new to rock music. In High School, performing as Robert Zimmerman, his bands were rock bands. Robert Zimmerman was a rocker. He idolised Little Richard. As a teenager, he even appeared in Bobby Vee’s backing group playing piano. One of his earliest songs was an ode to Little Richard. It was only when he left home and moved to Minnesota that he traded his electric guitar in to purchase an acoustic model and came under the thrall of folk music in order to busk in the local clubs. Back in those days, his early muses were Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson and Hank Williams. He absorbed their influences, both musical and lyrical, to create the incarnation that, when he moved to Greenwich Village, became Bob Dylan.
By the time he arrived in New York as a 19-year-old in the freezing winter of January 1961, he was already performing a range of folk and blues and had begun songwriting. But the love of rock music hadn’t died. His first single, ‘Mixed Up Confusion’, recorded on 14 November 1962, featured a full electric band.
He wasn’t going to have another shot at rock music until December 1964, when, together with his adventurous record producer Tom Wilson, they had a first attempt at a folk rock fusion. They conspired to overdub a Fats Domino-style piano rock sound onto Bob’s earlier acoustic recording of the traditional folk song ‘House Of The Rising Sun’. Bob wasn’t happy about the result and the track did not see the light of day until much later (finally making an appearance on an interactive CD-ROM in 1995 – Highway 61 Interactive).
Tom Wilson was enamoured enough with this dubbing experiment to apply it to Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound Of Silence’, which sparked their career into the stratosphere. Bob, meanwhile, had turned his attention to the sound created by fellow folkie John P. Hammond (son of the great blues folklorist John H. Hammond). John had created an electric blues album featuring three members of Ronnie Hawkin’s backing band – The Hawks. The music was raw, blues-based rock with a folk base. That was the sound that Bob favoured.
Excerpt – 1967 had been the year of great change. Psychedelia had swept through with the Pink Floyd’s piper, Hendrix’s experience, Traffic’s fantasy and Cream’s gears. Acid rock had stormed in from the West Coast. Bringing the strange days of the Doors, Captain Beefheart dropping out, Zappa freaking out, the Byrds being notorious, Love forever changing, Country Joe and the Fish applying electric music for the mind, and Jefferson Airplane taking off.
The music had evolved. In the 1950s, rock ‘n’ roll had been viscerally subversive; in the 1960s that had taken on a more sophisticated cerebral direction. Whereas rock ‘n’ roll had been music to madly jive to, psychedelia was music to get stoned with, to lose yourself in its intensity and nuance, to dance expressively, listen intently with friends or sit with headphones on and absorb the sounds and words. An album had to be pawed over, concentrated on and sucked dry of all that it contained. The cover and liner notes were studied and analysed, the lyric sheet searched for meaning and the music internalised through repeated listening. Albums were sacred.
But by 1968 the rot had started. The tendrils of exploitation were creeping in. Revolution was big business. Money bred excess. The values were already being undermined and trust tested. The casualties were beginning to surface. Reality hit home. In San Francisco in October 1967, they held a march for ‘The Death of Hippie’ in protest at how the values had become commercialised. The ‘Summer of Love’ was officially dead. The sharing culture, love and peace, equality and freedom, was tainted.
