Idle Worship (Text Only Edition)

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The solo stuff was different, much more tender, and certainly more wrought. The booze-and-football photos, it is clear now, were intended to compensate for the rampant sissiness of the recordings, the Bob Dylan covers (‘Mama You Been on My Mind’, ‘Girl from the North Country’), the McCartney ballads (‘Mine for Me’), and Stewart’s own sentimental cod-Celtic songs. This was the stuff I preferred; indeed, I would still rather listen to a ballad than anything else, and maybe this is Rod’s legacy to me.

They still sound surprisingly good, those three solo albums (Every Picture … , Never a Dull Moment and Smiler) that created the Hampden-and-bitter Stewart image. The cover versions are immaculate: so good, in fact, that when I sought out the originals (during that purist phase all Music Blokes go through, when we believe that originals must by definition be superior to the copies), I was disappointed by them. Sam Cooke’s ‘Bring It on Home to Me’ didn’t have that rollicking string arrangement; Dylan’s ‘Mama You Been on My Mind’ was pretty but plain, and anyway Dylan couldn’t sing.

And Stewart’s voice still sounds great. Why Caucasians used to believe that rock stars with croaky voices – Stewart, Janis Joplin, Frankie Miller, Joe Cocker, Paul Young – are white soul singers remains one of life’s impenetrable mysteries. (During the eighties, thankfully, with the advent of the more honey-toned George Michael and Boy George, this perplexing claim ceased to be made.) Only the overrated Otis Redding sounds as though he is gargling through porridge; neither Al Green nor Marvin Gaye nor Aretha Franklin seems as distressed, as pained, as the Croakies. Surely one of the points of soul singing is its effortlessness? But Stewart pinches other things from black music traditions: his vocal mannerisms, his laughs and spoken asides, and the way he rides the beat and slides under and over the melody line … these are the telltale signs of somebody with a good record collection and a sharp pair of ears, and they set him apart from the opposition. And anyway, Stewart had grown up with folk (hence the Dylan and the Tim Hardin covers) as well as the more ubiquitous R&B. He wasn’t a Jagger or an Elton John, but a straightforward, uncomplicated interpreter of popular songs: fifteen years earlier, he might have been our answer to Dean Martin; fifteen years later, he probably would have been a one-hit wonder for Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

Things went downhill fast after Smiler. There was one great last Faces single, ‘You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything’, which swung in a way that most English rock songs do not (mostly, I discovered years later, because Stewart and Wood had liberated a huge chunk of a Bobby Womack song for their fade-out), and then the band split up. Ronnie Wood joined the Rolling Stones, a move which, distressingly, made a lot of sense. And a year or so later Atlantic Crossing was released. There was no football pitch or pub photo on the sleeve of this one: just a monstrous cartoon drawing of Stewart, wearing an improbable silver jump-suit and, well, crossing the Atlantic.

I had left school by this time. And I had also turned my back on the other Rod fans I had knocked around with in the fourth and fifth forms: I was off to university and they weren’t, and I had started to hang around with people who made jokes about Existentialism (admittedly, the jokes consisted mainly of saying the word aloud, but they would not have amused the people with whom I had once shared an imaginary microphone). Had Rod met Britt by then? I don’t remember. And in any case, Britt was not to blame for the self-parody which sucked Rod down and out; if it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else – Farrah Fawcett, maybe, or some Seventies equivalent of that woman who knocks around with Michael Winner. Rod was hell-bent on making a berk of himself, and he didn’t need any help from Scandinavian bit-part actresses.

I bought Atlantic Crossing anyway, for its two aching ballads, ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’ and It’s Not the Spotlight’, but it was the weakest of his solo work – and therefore of the entire Stewart oeuvre – to date. And then I went to college, and listened to punk and blues and soul and reggae, and it should have stopped there, but it didn’t. My devotion intensified: I wore a Rod Stewart T-shirt that I’d bought for 50p, and I had a Rod Stewart poster on the wall of my college bedroom. It was, I guess, an ironic devotion – Rod had become a post-punk figure of fun by that time, and you would have to have been particularly imbecilic not to get the joke – but there was a glimmer of earnestness there, too: I was frightened by the Athena prints of Renoir and Matisse paintings that hung on my neighbours’ walls, and of the classical music that I occasionally heard coming from their stereos, and used Rod as a kind of talisman to protect me from these evil and alien forces. So I stuck with it for a while, until I felt more comfortable with University and with myself, and then I gave up. I preferred the Tom Waits version of ‘Downtown Train’ – he still listens, you have to give him credit for that – and I haven’t even bothered with the Unplugged album, which seemed aimed straight at me, and those like me.

But these are the records I own because of Rod: His California Album, by Bobby Bland, which is where Stewart first heard ‘It’s Not the Spotlight’ (and though Stewart’s version is flatter and less piquant than Bland’s, Rod wisely didn’t bother with Bland’s unattractive trademark phlegm-clearing whoops), and maybe even ‘If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don’t Want to Be Right)’; my entire Bobby Womack collection; my Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade; my Temptations’ Greatest Hits; and my Sam Cooke album. I was introduced to the Isley Brothers (‘This Old Heart of Mine’), Aretha Franklin (‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman/Man’), and Crazy Horse (‘I Don’t Want to Talk about It’). And once I had been introduced to Aretha Franklin and Bobby Bland and the Temptations and Chuck Berry, I got to know B.B. King and the Four Tops and Atlantic Records and Chess Records and … He gave me a good start in life, and as a young man, a pop innocent, one cannot ask for anything more than that. If I had been similarly smitten by Elton John or James Taylor or Jethro Tull or Mike Oldfield, all of whom were competing for attention at around the same time, it is possible that I would have junked my entire record collection a decade or so ago.

The people who stick with pop the longest, it seems to me now, are those who entrust themselves at a tender age to somebody like Stewart, somebody who loves and listens to pop music. Those who fell for the Stones got to hear, if they could be bothered, Arthur Alexander and Solomon Burke and Don Covay (and if they got to hear Don Covay they would find themselves wondering what, precisely, Jagger had brought to the Sixties party). Those who went for Led Zeppelin went on to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Genesis and Pink Floyd led you up a blind alley: there was nowhere to go, and so a good many people I knew stopped dead. Today’s youngsters, eh? Where are they heading for after they’ve chewed up the Sisters of Mercy or the Happy Mondays? (Suede and Teenage Fanclub, on the other hand …) Even after all these years, even after Britt and ‘D’Ya Think I’m Sexy’ and blah blah blah, I’d still like to buy Rod a drink; I’d like to sit him down and talk to him, not about Celtic or Jock Stein or Denis Law or ligaments or real ale, but about music. He knows much more than he’s ever let on.

Led Zeppelin and the Pixies (#ulink_aa84c097-2c2a-53e9-b515-fc92ba7e4970)

Martin Millar (#ulink_aa84c097-2c2a-53e9-b515-fc92ba7e4970)

IN 1972, WHEN I WAS A YOUNG TEENAGER living in Glasgow, I did not expect Led Zeppelin to come to town. I had been going to gigs since I was thirteen and as Glasgow was a popular venue for music I had already seen most of the biggest progressive rock bands of the day – Hawkwind, Black Sabbath, Captain Beefheart, Mott the Hoople, Alex Harvey, Deep Purple, The Who, and many more. (With great foolishness I declined to go and see T. Rex, deeming them to be too poppy. How silly can you get?) Nonetheless, I did not expect Led Zeppelin to come. They were too big, and too serious. I mean, they didn’t release singles or anything.

I had no clear idea of what the daily life of Led Zeppelin might be and assumed vaguely that they lived in some sort of Valhalla, sipping mead, talking to the muses and occasionally making records. Possibly they granted a few divine favours in between times. Whatever they did it would not include touring Scotland because, at least in my school, Led Zeppelin were a class apart, and we were not worthy.

People, including me, used to marvel that anything as good as them could possibly exist. We used to walk around the playground carrying their albums despite the fact that there was nowhere in school to play them. It was just good to have them around, and be seen with them. I spent a fair part of my early youth walking back and forth clutching Led Zeppelin Two, singing the riff to ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and conscientiously imitating all the guitar solos. (I bought this record before I had a record player. Really.)

This for me is the stuff of strong memories. For instance, when Led Zeppelin Four was released the first reports were confused. Two separate people who had skipped school for the day reported that they had seen it in shop windows but each of their descriptions of the album sleeve was radically different. This led us to wild and lengthy speculations in class ranging from the likelihood of two Led Zeppelin albums being simultaneously released to one of the sightseers being strongly affected by LSD, which was always a possibility in the early seventies, even among the very young.

Strangely enough, the solution turned out to be that one shop was displaying one side of the sleeve and the other shop was showing the other. It was of course a mighty and complex gatefold sleeve, .the like of which is no longer to be seen in these post-heroic days. Such was our immense Led Zeppelin interest that this sort of thing was fuel for hours and hours of fevered discussion which I still recall though I have no idea what I might have been supposed to be learning in the class at the time.

I think it was shortly after this that we heard that they were coming to play in Glasgow. Now for me, already hurt and disillusioned in life because other boys had girlfriends and I had no idea how to go about this, my main happiness and only spiritual elevation was obtained by lying around in incense-filled rooms, listening to Led Zeppelin. The prospect of seeing them live was therefore overwhelming.

I queued up overnight for my ticket. The police patrolling this queue were particularly and needlessly unpleasant but I will not dwell on this as I do not wish to spoil the memory. The venue was Green’s Playhouse, later to become the Apollo. This had several features which would annoy me now, namely it did not sell alcohol and it was seated but I don’t recall being troubled by this at the time. Everyone generally stood on the seats or rushed to the front when the band played. As to alcohol, this was more of a problem, particularly as we were all too young to buy it legally elsewhere. Much creative thinking was done to obtain a few cans of McEwans and it was necessary to drink them quickly and surreptitiously in the street before the gig. Many junior rock fans, forced to bolt down their beer in the short distance between the bus stop and the venue, paid a heavy price later in terms of illness, disorientation and utterly irate parents.

I have probably never been as excited as when waiting for Led Zeppelin to come onstage. In the weeks since buying the tickets I had talked of little else. Well, probably nothing else. Although everybody had their different preferred bands we were entirely united in regarding Led Zeppelin as by far the best, apart from the out and out pop music fans, of whom I seem to remember there were relatively few, and possibly one or two hard-core West Coast devotees. To this day I completely fail to understand what they saw in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I mean, put ‘Our House’ next to ‘Black Dog’ and what have you got? Precious little if you ask me.

It was not unknown for bands to cancel their trips to Glasgow and this had been a source of great dread. Grimly pessimistic even at an early age, I was more or less convinced that they would not appear. Right up till the moment that Robert Plant, my complete, total and absolute adolescent hero, stepped onstage, I did not actually believe that they would play.

Now the Glasgow audience, while appreciative, usually took some time to warm up. Generally they would spend some suspicious moments sizing up the band before completely accepting them. Even then any heavy rock outfit indulging in too much balladeering and not enough power chords could be given a fairly hard time. On this night this was not the case. As Led Zeppelin appeared onstage like Mighty Heroes From Another Realm the place exploded. Everyone was up over the seats and piling down the front before Jimmy Page had completed his first riff. The bouncers, hardened Glasgow thugs normally hostile to this sort of behaviour, retreated in confusion.

Led Zeppelin played with no support act and, unlike many of the other bands in the fab early seventies, had no stage set and no fancy clothes. They wore plain T-shirts and jeans and their onstage equipment looked fairly modest although Robert Plant did have a sort of metal stick which made funny noises when he put his hands near it, very important for the psychedelic middle section of ‘Whole Lotta Love’.

They started off with ‘Black Dog’, a song with a dazzlingly good riff, and from then on it just got better. Thundering versions of crunching tunes like ‘The Immigrant Song’, ‘Communication Breakdown’ and ‘Rock and Roll’ flowed into the powerful electric blues of ‘Killing Floor’ and ‘I Can’t Quit You Babe’. (I suppose I would now have to grudgingly admit that it was a bad thing for Led Zeppelin not to have immediately acknowledged the original versions of some of these blues. At the time I would not have cared. I mean the original artists played them quietly, with acoustic guitars. Not the same thing at all.)

There were the screaming vocals of Robert Plant and the wailing and fantastical guitar playing of Jimmy Page. Behind them, as we young rock completists were well aware after dutifully sending in our poll forms for ‘Musician of the Year’ in each category to the music papers, were the excellent John Bonham on drums and the equally excellent John Paul Jones playing bass and keyboards. In between the huge chunks of noise were outbreaks of calm as they played a few acoustic numbers and some gentle songs of Misty Mountains and Elvish Warriors, all this being well suited to alleviating the tedium and frustration of my youthful existence. Aware of the status of the band, the audience listened to these in quiet rapture and did not speak, cough or fidget.

I loved every second of it. I was enormously appreciative of John Bonham’s drum solo. When Jimmy Page played his guitar with a violin bow I quite possibly wept for joy. I think it is an accurate recollection, rather than wishful thinking, that Led Zeppelin did do extremely good live versions of their material. As ‘Whole Lotta Love’ climaxed I had reached the sort of state you see in films of early Beatles concerts, that is, more or less hysterical. Seeing Led Zeppelin was probably a more satisfying fulfilment of a dream than any that was to follow.

They ended with ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Wow. What experience could have been better for me and my schoolfriends? None. Nothing would have come close. It was the best song in the world played by the best band in the world and here they were doing it right in front of us. The Archangel Gabriel coming onstage and blowing his trumpet would have had less effect. The concert ended. I was awestruck.

Outside I was completely deafened but still awestruck. That night the deafness gave way to a hideous ringing in my ears and I was still awestruck. Next day at school everyone was awestruck.

‘We are awestruck,’ we said, walking around the playground carrying our Led Zeppelin albums. ‘Completely awestruck.’

And it was true.

Time moves on. A few years later I was no longer awestruck by Led Zeppelin. They released another good album, Physical Graffiti, but were overtaken by time and the Sex Pistols. I went to many punk concerts, and it was still enjoyable but as the eighties crept on I started to lose the habit.

I was, I suppose, a little bored with the whole thing. Music did not seem a great deal of fun. I was aware however that this was a problem with me rather than the music. It is odd how people can dismiss whatever is popular at the time as ‘not as good as it was in my day’ and actually make themselves believe it. There is always something good around, it’s just that you get past the stage of appreciating it properly. Personally I was a little distressed no longer to appreciate it properly. Having passed thirty it always seemed like too much effort to actually go and see a band anywhere, what with London being so difficult to travel around in late at night. It was also too much effort to enter enthusiastically the fantasy land of any group of people whose sole talent was knocking together a reasonable tune and posing onstage. I had probably not been really excited by a live band since The Jesus and Mary Chain some years previously and by 1989 I had ceased going to gigs entirely.

By 1989 of course music listening had entirely changed. Whereas at my school Led Zeppelin were common currency, by now no such common currency existed. In any school there would be devotees of Heavy Metal, Rap, Reggae, Trance, Techno, Thrash, Hardcore, Indie Rock and no doubt various others. Dance music, utterly without credibility in the early seventies, was now popular with all sorts of people. However as this is a piece about two gigs rather than a history of music I shall pass over this, merely pointing out that from my point of view, proper music absolutely requires that there should be someone onstage hitting a loud guitar and the guitar has to be plugged into a fuzzbox. Anything else just won’t do.

So, where was I? Living in London and gone completely off gigs, it would seem. And I must admit that this was somewhat of a disappointment, and made me feel old.

When someone provided me with a spare ticket for the Pixies in 1989 I accepted it fairly doubtfully. I really only agreed to go at all because my pleasant new girlfriend wanted to. Personally I would just as soon have stayed home watching TV, especially as Britain’s late-night viewing had radically improved in recent years and I could now watch all night ‘American Gladiators’ and ‘Video Fashion’.

I had no great expectations of the music. For one thing, I had never heard the Pixies. They were American and had been in Britain before but this was their first time as stars. Their first full album, Surfer Rosa, was a big hit and they were receiving a lot of attention. So although I was ignorant of them, among others there was an air of expectation about the gig generated by those hip enough to have bought their first release, Come On Pilgrim, a mini LP, and those still avidly tuning in to John Peel on the radio.

Life for me now was different of course. I had to work for a living, which was bad. On the other hand, I no longer had to make up stories and bribe older people to buy me alcohol, which was good. I was fully entitled to march into any bar in London and demand a pint, and a whisky to follow if I deemed it necessary. I had my own home to go to and would not be censored by anyone even if I crawled through the door and made a mess on the carpet.

Different as well was my attitude to the upcoming event. I did not hang around in my bedroom listening obsessively to Pixies records, as I did in those weeks preceding Led Zeppelin’s show. Nor did I talk about the gig continually, or feverishly worry that it might be cancelled. I probably would not have minded had it been cancelled. This would have saved me the trouble of going out and left me free to watch ‘American Gladiators’ and ‘Video Fashion’. How perilous it can be to reach thirty!

The concert was at the Town and Country Club – a very strange name for a music venue I always thought. Unable to come up with any last-minute excuse for staying in, I reluctantly got myself ready and found myself packed in with what seemed like hundreds of people in a Transit van, driving slowly from Brixton to Kentish Town.

As I crawled out of the van, and rubbed the circulation back into my limbs, I saw that there were people everywhere. Hordes of fans were struggling out of the Bull and Gate, pint glasses still in hand, and queueing up for the Town and Country. The pavements were full of couples holding hands, groups of young boys and girls edging their way closer to the doors, serious looking souls selling fanzines, gloomy-faced policemen, hopeful ticket touts, and various smug-looking people slipping in through the door marked Guest Passes. All in all a good atmosphere, and I was already thinking that possibly this was not such a bad thing to be doing.

The Town and Country was a good venue, much better than Green’s Playhouse, with bars in easy access, a huge open space to hang around in and a balcony with seats if you needed a rest. As we arrived the support act was playing. I have never had any interest at all in support acts, regarding them mainly as things that get in the way of the real gig, but tonight it was My Bloody Valentine and they were very fine. Already a fair proportion of the crowd was dancing to their dense sound.