BOOKS: AINT IT TIME WE SAID GOODBYE

Goodbye, Johnny B. Goode

The Stones say farewell to England in 1971

by Don Stradley

"At close range," Robert Greenfield writes of Mick Jagger, "his personality was just as addictive as any of the most powerful drugs known to man." This may be true, but there's little in Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye: The Rolling Stones on the Road to Exile that supports such a statement. The Jagger described by Greenfield is a moody 28-year-old who is moving  into the role of rock royalty as the band embarks on a farewell tour of the U.K.  Jagger is  like a kid from a wealthy family who knows he can get away with a lot and not have to pay the consequences. His hubris is surprising, for Greenfield's chronicle takes place in the blurry time after the Altamont Speedway disaster, when the Stones are being stomped in the charts by Chicago and Blood Sweat, and Tears, and Keith Richards is beginning his 1970s drug downfall. For those who think Richards is the heart and soul of the Stones, Jagger was ready to dump him for the versatile and ultra-funky session player, Jesse Ed Davis. I can't vouch for the addictive quality of Jagger's personality, but he was definitely a bandleader with whom you couldn't mess.

Early in Ain't It Time...we're given a description of England in 1971, which was apparently one miserable cold-water flat after another, where "most people feed sixpences into into a coin-operated electric heater mounted on a wall while wearing as many layers of clothing as possible." No wonder the Stones were looking to leave. Greenfield, at the time a new writer at Rolling Stone, talks his way into joining the tour, but he's no Hunter S. Thompson. His approach is wide-eyed neophyte, as he's constantly made to feel unworthy and out of place. Yet, as the band hits such destinations as Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, and Bristol, he rides the whirlwind. The venues, most of them decrepit music halls, all seem to be leaking; the Stones and crew travel by train and look on with suspicion at Jagger's new bride, Bianca, wondering if she's another Yoko Ono. Meanwhile, Greenfield hides in bathrooms, taking notes.

In many ways it's the typical rock band on tour diary, with Greenfield giving us details about the shows, and the mini-dramas that pop up, most having to do with Keith Richards' being late (or missing). Any amateur psychologist would say Keith was trying to sabotage his career. He was perhaps realizing how much control Jagger was asserting, and possibly feared he might end up booted from the group, ala Brian Jones. That Richards never missed a show is a testament to his love of the music, but that he constantly tested Jagger's patience suggests he may have secretly wanted out of the band. The crowds couldn't have been fun for him, either, even in his heroin stupor. Greenfied writes of one London gig that the "super hip and spaced out" audience members "dance only because they think this is what they are supposed to do."

This is Greenfield's third book about the Stones, and it's not entirely successful. The second half is mostly a less than fascinating account of his staying at Richards' mansion in the south of France, trying to get his host to sit still for an interview. This stuff might be good dinner talk, but it's not great reading. The book's first half, however, is near brilliant. It catches the group at the moment in time just before the likes of Truman Capote and Andy Warhol started turning up backstage. The band was still young enough that Charlie Watts' father saw him off at the train station at the tour's start, but jaded enough that Watts spent most of his time before gigs sitting in hotel lobbies, watching Doctor Who. Watts, not surprisingly, comes off as the Stone one might like to know personally, a gentle, smart chap with impeccable chops. Jagger, too, makes an impression. Less for being, as Greenfield felt, a sort of lascivious, champagne swigging, man of mystery who might smash a window when angry, but as a professional who still takes bad performances to heart, one who no longer listens to Chuck Berry but is still a rocker. Jagger was not merely the money grubber, as history wanted to call him, but was a true rock warrior, expending energies that would destroy most mortals, and still turning up on time the next night to do it all again.

BOOKS: David Bowie: A Life

There's a great story in David Bowie A Life, Dylan Jones' recent 500-plus page oral history, where Bowie is on a beach filming the video for "Ashes to Ashes." When a cranky old man  wandered into the shot, the producer of the video went raging after him. "Don't you know who that is?" he said, pointing to Bowie. The old man shrugged. "Some cunt in a clown suit." Bowie heard about this and loved it. "That's me," Bowie said. "A cunt in a clown suit." This, I think, would've been a great title for Jones' book. In the past year alone we've had Nixon: The Life, Sam Shepard, A Life, Muhammad Ali, A Life, Lou Reed, A Life, and I'm sure dozens of others with similar titles. Bowie: A Cunt in a Clown Suit would certainly stand out.

Jones tackles the Bowie saga with gusto, interviewing hundreds of people, but there's a problem in the telling. First, Jones is clearly a doe-eyed Bowie fanatic, and second, it seems everybody is basically telling the same story over and over. Yes, I get it. Bowie borrowed or stole bits of this and that from others to create his own sound and image, he had a voracious, galloping intellect, and though he was a drugged out jerk in his younger days, he was a much nicer fellow when he got older. We read much from well-meaning idolaters who describe Bowie as a "tremendous cultural engine," and compare his death to "a hole in the sky." Unfortunately, the people who might have some insights worth hearing - Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Mick Ronson - have long since croaked.

Bowie came from a family of suicides and schizophrenics, wanted to be a rocker from the first time he heard Little Richard, and learned how to schmooze from his father, a public relations man with a prominent British firm. Bowie's mother was aloof, unpredictable; she'd later send letters to newspapers saying how disappointed she was in her son. When Bowie was born, the midwife who delivered him said, "This child has been on Earth before."
 
In the 1960s Bowie tried on various guises - the jazz guy, the blues geek, the mod, the hippie, the sax player, the mime, the folkie - and existed on the fringes of the London music scene. People suspected he was talented and charismatic, but it took him several years before he had a minor hit with "Space Oddity," and another few years again before the U.K. was swept up in Bowie mania. A 1972 appearance on Britain's Top of the Pops where Bowie sang "Starman"  was a galvanizing event for British teens, akin to when us yanks saw The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. By then, Bowie had morphed into his Ziggy Stardust persona, a gimmick that solidified him as one of the era's leading rock idols. 

He appeared in movies, changed his image with almost every album, snorted cocaine until there were holes in his brain, took part in drug-fueled orgies, dabbled in occultism, had some memorable radio hits, and maintained his reputation as an ever-evolving outre performance artist. He made headlines by saying he was bisexual, which no celebrities would cop to in the 1970s, but 20 years later settled down to a fairly normal family life with fashion model Iman. He lived anonymously in New York, and liked it that way. When health problems slowed him in the 2000s, he became a kind of gentleman recluse, spending more time in art galleries than on the rock 'n roll stage. He managed his affairs, accumulated a fortune even as his cachet waned, and endured a series of nasty biographies that depicted him as a cold-hearted, manipulative type trying to outrun a family history of madness. When he died of cancer in 2016, the reaction was astounding, with fans around the world using social media as a kind of wailing wall, giving the impression that a prize was waiting for the person who grieved the most. Perhaps it was guilt over having ignored him for so long.

Jones, an award-winning editor of British GQ magazine and an unabashed Bowie fan, gives us a lot to mull over. There was the time Bowie told Lou Reed to clean up his act, and Reed responded by beating Bowie senseless. There was Angie, Bowie's first wife, who is considered by some to be the villain of the piece, and there was Bowie's old manager, Tony Defries, who reluctantly participated in the book, and then sent Jones a bill for $360,000. There were the musicians Bowie screwed over,  and the ones who accepted his shortcomings and were simply glad to know him, put best by guitarist Earl Slick who told Jones, "He wasn't a saint, but I'll miss him a lot."

Then there was the monumental commercial triumph of Let's Dance in 1983,  an album Bowie manufactured specifically to be a hit, to get him on MTV, to make up for the money he'd missed out on in previous years. He welcomed the success, wore it rather well for a short time, but the phenomenon seemed to knock him off the rails. He was never the same.  Yet, Bowie maintained his status as an icon, as a kind of Internet prophet, and as a performer who inspired people to enjoy a more fluid sexuality, one who mingled rock music with literature, fashion, theater, and art. Martin Scorsese cast him as Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ; Nirvana covered "The Man Who Sold The World." There were projects that never came off, like the Ziggy Stardust musical, or an album of Elvis Presley tunes sung by Iggy Pop. There was even talk that Bowie might play the lead in a movie about Fred Astaire. (Fred liked the idea!)

Jones deserves credit for putting his love for Bowie on hold long enough to explore some of the nastier items on the ledger,  particularly Bowie's deflowering of a 14-year-old virgin - criminal behavior in the guise of rock debauchery - and Jones doesn't let Bowie slide. Journalist Paul Gorman lambasts those who put Bowie on a pedestal. "This absurd elevation (after his death) needs puncturing," Gorman tells Jones. "He wasn't my cup of tea," Elton John says, describing Bowie as "snooty." The darker aspects of Bowie 's life don't go on for more than a page or two, then it's back to how Bowie, you know, changed the universe by being a sharp dresser.

The book is full of interesting details but there are huge gaps in it, as if Jones ignored anything that wasn't mentioned by the subjects he interviewed. And despite Chris Stein, Courtney Love, and others gushing about how much they love Bowie's music, they don't offer much insight as to why Bowie was so great or ahead of his time.

Jones occasionally stops the narrative to chuck in tidbits about his own encounters with Bowie, which aren't especially revealing or entertaining. Jones gets some good mileage out of Bowie's friendship with John Lennon, but he spends too many pages on Bowie's art collection, his fashionista pals, and the massive Live Aid concert, where Bowie had the misfortune to follow Queen. In the end, David Bowie A Life is uneven, and overlong, but in a good way. 

It's interesting how everyone tiptoes around the subject of Bowie's anemic later albums. Jones rightly describes most of them as weak, but in reading this book I came up with my own theory as to why Bowie lost his touch. Pay attention: The first half of the book is filled with reminiscences by Bowie's old chums, musicians, ex-girlfriends, schoolmates, and mentors. It was from this grit that the pearl emerged. The second half of the book is all Kate Moss, Ricky Gervais, Bono, Baz Lurhmann, and museum curators, a decidedly un-gritty bunch who provided Bowie with a lot of celebrity arse-licking. You don't create something like Station to Station while hanging with Tommy Hilfiger.

In a way, I wish the book had been 500 pages of Bowie quotes. He's far more interesting than those whom Jones interviews, especially when knocking out bon mots like, "The rich know how much money they've got, and the wealthy don't."

One's interest in Bowie is usually in direct relation to how boring your life was when you first heard him. I recall vividly how Bowie's music practically lifted me out of my teen doldrums, where the only entertainment in my Massachusetts suburb was church league basketball and listening to my father complain about gas prices. Bowie made me feel smarter, and while Jones is wrong when he declares Bowie was as important as The Beatles - certainly not in my neighborhood - I could hear a bit of myself in some of the people he interviews, one after another saying Bowie had provided them with an escape route from their lives. Did Bowie mean any more to me than Lou Reed or Woody Allen or  Jack Nicholson? I'm not sure.

But I'll tell you what. Reading Dylan Jones' book, as bloated and unwieldy as it may be, made me think so.

An Ode To POPPY...Daughter of the Internet....

Poppy is like a long lost experiment by Andy Warhol. Speaking like an animatronic Edie Sedgwik, offering cryptic messages about infinity, fame, and how it feels to be human, all while ambient music drones behind her like she's the secret love child of Brian Eno, she conjures up memories of the very late '70s, when punk and new wave briefly gave way to synth pop, when Ultravox sang Warhol's old line about wanting to be a machine. 

What's Poppy all about? She's not a retro act, but rather, she's carrying on a tradition that goes back to the pop artists of the 1950s and '60s who used advertising and comic books, or whatever was handy, to create commentaries on America. Indeed, one of the videos on her YouTube channel consists of her asking the viewer, "Do you like Doritos? Do you like Monster Energy Drink? Do you like Taco Bell?" Not exactly Robert Rauschenberg blasting off with his images of John F. Kennedy and the space race, but miles above the drivel one usually sees on the Internet. What makes Poppy so  interesting is her absolute devotion to  her role. She walks a tremulous line: she's just young enough and cute enough to attract YouTube fans, and strange enough to keep them fascinated. "Do you love me?" she asks. "Will you do whatever I say?"

Less than a few years ago she was a generic YouTube singer - Moriah Pereira from Nashville - trying to get noticed. She has since rejected that old identity in favor of her bizarre Poppy personae. Now, in a voice that sounds somewhat like the recorded messages you hear when you dial the local movie theater schedule, she informs us that she loves her fans, loves computers, and loves being famous. After releasing a handful of routine teenybopper anthems, she traveled to Japan to record Poppy.Computer, an effort cited by Rolling Stone as one of the 20 best albums of 2017.

The trick, and it's a smart one, is that no one listening to Poppy is old enough to realize her style is not so new and innovative. Gary Numan was singing about his electric friends 30 years ago, and David Bowie was putting on an alien persona long before that. When Poppy chirps, "I want to be famous so people recognize me in supermarkets," she may as well be one of Warhol's glib transvestites. Of course, the kids in Poppy's audience couldn't care less about geezers from the past, and the podcast people interviewing Poppy aren't aware of anything prior to 2012. But each generation demands its own version of this peculiar, otherworldly character. It used to be Devo, or Klaus Nomi. It could be Nico, or Kraftwerk. It becomes passé rather quickly and vanishes, but always returns.

The time is right for Poppy. With Lady Gaga beginning to look like a Staten Island mob wife,  kids looking for an authentically outre character could do a lot worse than Poppy. With her glazed eyes and outlandish wardrobe, she makes most other YouTubers look like unkempt subway buskers playing for dimes. To her small but loyal audience, she's  an entirely lovable, adorable, daughter of the Internet come to life. And while Gaga is too ready to weep about the pressures of her career, Poppy treats fame like an ice cream cone. 

 Sometimes she looks like Alice in Wonderland, if Alice were fascinated by smart phones and Instagram. Instead of the Cheshire Cat and Mad Hatter, she has a talking skeleton and a potted plant for company. Poppy has nightmares, though, which suggests all is not perfect in Poppy's world. She is sometimes menaced by a manikin named Charlotte (a stand-in, no doubt, for the plastic, hostile types in the media), and she refers to a mysterious "they," as if she's under the control of some cult. Her videos occasionally reference the devil; now and then she unexpectedly bleeds from the nose or mouth. Then, as cheerily as a kiddie show host, she'll announce, "I am validated by having your attention," or "I am empowered by creating quality content for the Internet."

Some search for secret messages in her videos, and others want to discover more about Poppy's past, as if they're eager to prove she's not a robot. These intrepid investigators are wasting time, for they should be enjoying her work for what is.  Just the way she plays with words in her videos is intriguing; she makes it sound as if she's testing them out for the first time, deciding how to arrange them. ("Do you like this hat I'm wearing? Do you like it? Do you like this hat?") She is as gentle as a haiku, capable of an almost eerie stillness; when she does move, it's the way a girl from space might if she'd studied our habits by watching Japanese music videos. She might dress as a bunny or a vampire, dance with a giant muppet, or spend six minutes lacing her always exotic shoes. She also does a robotic "Mary Had A Little Lamb." Why not?

Today, Poppy is in that precarious position where she'll either have an explosive radio hit, or will stay where she is, floating though the YouTube universe until her act wears thin. There's something wonderful about her, though. Video director and musician Titanic Sinclair may be the architect behind Poppy, but if he is her Pygmalian, he couldn't have asked for a better Galatea. Sinclair had previously tried a similar angle with a YouTube singer named Mars Argo - he also released his own Weezer sounding grunge-pop EP called I Have Teeth - but in Poppy, who is purportedly 23 but looks 14, he's found the perfect cyberspace Barbie princess. Sinclair shoots her in loving style, with lots of pastel blues and beige. She's usually alone, talking directly to the camera in a voice that may or may not be modulated through auto-tune. Sometimes it appears Poppy's words aren't perfectly in sync with her lips, which adds to her ethereal presence.

Like most alien visitors and pop stars, Poppy is a bit of a holy fool. She's so innocent in appearance, yet so uncannily weird, that interviewers tiptoe around her, not wanting to inadvertently upset her. When a recent podcast host asked her dumb questions about sex, she smartly deflected them with childlike answers. It was quite a performance. I almost wish she could've met Johnny Carson. Yet, I can't predict how long she'll last. Bowie dumped the spaceman gimmick after a couple years, and Numan, though still active, had a short shelf life in America. Is Poppy crafty enough to reinvent herself when her current persona is played out? Will her fans grow with her? Is there more to her than weirdness? A previous Poppy project, 3:36, is ambient music designed to help people sleep, which suggests she has more on her mind than, say, the typical American Idol winner.

As for Poppy.Computer, it's a highly listenable hybrid of 1980s MTV era dance music (Think "Walk Like an Egyptian, and "Our Lips Are Sealed") and modern Japanese pop, presented by a young female who claims to have been "created," not born. "Poppy is an object," she sings in "My Style." "Poppy is your best friend." But if she's an object, she's not unfamiliar with romance. In "Computer Boy," which features the album's tastiest hook, she sounds joyous when she sings, "I fell in love with the man of the future/I have a thing for my laptop computer/the only one that brings me joy/is my computer boy."

The best of Poppy, though, may be found in those 40-second videos on her YouTube channel, particularly one called "I Love You So Much," where she lovingly caresses an old television set (or is it a vintage computer?). Squatting next to the monitor in a long dress and what appear to be heavily lacquered red platform shoes that might've been worn by an extra in Cleopatra Jones, her tenderness recalls a prediction by Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, that we would all one day worship machinery. It's not especially groundbreaking, this image of the girl and her beloved TV set, and you'd be right if you said the whole idea is rather heavy-handed and obvious, but Sinclair has such a clear-eyed approach that we forgive his sophomoric ideas. Frame it nicely, use pretty colors, don't take up too much of our time, and you can effectively recycle just about anything. At such moments you realize that, whatever is being rehashed here, Poppy and Sinclair are up to something worthwhile - and no other recording artist has put social media to better use as a whistlestop campaign.

JANIS: LITTLE GIRL BLUE...

If a fist could sing it would sound something like Janis Joplin. In fact, while watching Janis: Little Girl Blue, Amy Berg's 2015 documentary now on Netflix, it was fascinating to see how Joplin often sang with her fists clenched. Most female singers keep their hands open. For Joplin, music was associated with power and aggression. Listen to her best stuff, those bluesy epics that left most people with their mouths open in disbelief; she sounded like she was in a long fight and was trying to wear down a much bigger opponent, simply with her voice. And as they say about a lot of fighters who come away from hard battles, she won her share but there was a price to pay. True, Patti Smith or Madonna may have made a fist now and then, and some of the heavy metal women might punch the air, as did Sporty Spice, but Janis Joplin was working on a different plane than those women. As someone says late in the movie after Joplin has  overdosed on heroin, the poor woman not only felt her own emotions deeply, but she felt those of everyone else, too. It couldn't have been easy to be such a conduit in the turbulent 1960s.   

Janis: Little Girl Blue follows the usual pattern of the Joplin tale: the misfit girl from Port Arthur, Texas suffers the cruelty and small mindedness of the locals. Then she finds out she could sing. "It turned out I had this loud voice," she said. "It was quite a surprise." From there came a stint as a folk singer, long before the Beatles had landed, long before Dylan was on the air. She eventually joined Big Brother and the Holding Company, a twangy blues band that could barely keep up with her, or so the story goes. They don't sound bad in the documentary, and history has given them a bum rap, but they were definitely dumb guys. When it was time to be filmed at the Monterey Pop Festival, the boys  wouldn't sign release forms. Janis' moment to shine was nearly kaboshed by some stupid rivalry between San Francisco and LA. She got her way, though. She was like an alley cat that wandered in through the back door and took over the entire house.

It would be hard to make a bad documentary about Janis Joplin. The story is sad, and there's plenty of amazing footage out there. In this one, we hear snippets from her diary and letters home to her family (read by singer Cat Powers, who sounds a bit like Janis). There was a profound loneliness in her that wasn't fixed by fame or drugs, though she found some temporary comfort while performing. When she tries to explain the joy of being on stage, she usually dissolves into embarrassed giggles. Squares like Dick Cavett didn't get her, anymore than the jerks in Port Arthur had, the cruel types who'd voted her "Ugliest Man" as a sick  fraternity prank. When she returns for her high school class' 10th year reunion, she's not a conquering hero, but a bitter misfit. "I wasn't asked to the prom," she tells a local reporter, "and it pains me to this day." The irony is that Janis Joplin wasn't ugly at all. Seeing her in this movie, there's a kind of untamed sweetness to her, like a wacky lioness. 

The Joplin story has been told countless times in books and documentaries. There was even a successful stage production of her life story a few years ago. Janis: Little Girl Blue won't be the last time we hear this tragic saga. Berg does a fair job. We come away thinking Joplin never stood a chance, not with a coterie of junkies around her. Watch the footage of Joplin in Monterey, compared to her performance at Woodstock. Within two years, she'd gone from being a fiery blues goddess to a dazed parody. We meet some of her old friends, and they cry over her memory, but they weren't much help to her. She had relationships with both men and women, but it would be flippant to call her a lesbian or a bisexual. She was simply lonely, trying anything  to numb the pain. John Lennon is shown reacting to the news of her death. Ever thoughtful, and a junkie himself, Lennon suggests there's something wrong with our society, and wonders why so many people have to find ways to protect themselves from the harshness out there. One surprise was a bit from Country Joe McDonald, who dispels the the long held notion that he Janis were linked. "We weren't in love," he says. "There was no sizzle." From this side of the desk, if you couldn't sizzle with Janis, you couldn't sizzle with anybody, bub.