I’m not (even for a moment) suggesting that there’s anything in my experience that’s startlingly different to what happened when thousands of other people started listening to what we now know as rock music in the sixties.
Where I'm Coming From
It’s reasonably inevitable that people of my generation will have a particular perspective on what’s gone down over the past forty years, and it’s going to be a perspective that differs substantially from that of a person born, say, ten years earlier or ten years later.
If we were born ten years earlier we might have caught the first wave of rock’n’roll but would probably have settled into the same path of careers, kids and conventionality that our parents fell into once they’d met their life partner by the time the sixties rolled around. In that scenario the events that shaped Hughesy’s attitude to music would have been irrelevant, incomprehensible or insignificant.
If I’d been born ten years later, I’d probably have been caught up in the punk/new wave thing and have a different perspective on the way things stacked up on the path to generational revolt against the dead hand of the ageing rock’n’roll dinosaurs.
So everything that follows in these pages is the opinion and experience of someone who came to an interest in music at a particular time (the mid-sixties) and in a particular place (Townsville in northern Queensland, Australia).
What I’m writing is an attempt to sort out those experiences in my own mind and reflect on what’s gone down since 1966. While it may seem at times like I’m heading towards some sort of Grand Unified Theory Of The Place Of Rock In The Pantheon Of Pop, if I am that’s just, to quote the Temptations, my imagination running away with me.
I’m definitely not trying to rewrite history to exclude everything that I’d consider to be unworthy of a place in my own personal musical pantheon.
If I don’t like it, I’ll ignore it, but I won’t try to pretend it didn’t happen. While I could put forward the proposition that Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols, the Eagles, and, say Fleetwood Mac are all irrelevant because they don’t occupy spaces in the hallowed ground of my personal taste I’ll prefer to view them as part of a separate musical universe.
I know it exists. I just don’t want to go there.
There’s a lot of music out there, and there aren’t too many people who have the time or the inclination to make an effort to listen to all of it, even if completing such a Herculean task was a remote possibility.
We all employ some sort of editing or weeding out process.
Personally, from the first time I heard Led Zeppelin I I was inclined to write them off based on the fact that much of what I heard on the album seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to things I knew and loved from the first Jeff Beck album.
That was well before allegations about things that were appropriated from various American blues men.
So I never bothered. My loss? Could well be.
Am I worried about it? Not in the slightest.
The reader may well feel the same way towards artists I hold in high esteem. That’s cool. It’s a free country.
In much the same way, from the first time I started reading about the Sex Pistols there was something there that triggered the Hype alarm bells in my brain. Must have had something to do with the presence and poses of Malcolm McLaren. I’ll have my teenage rebellion with a touch less svengali, thank you very much, and if that means you’re going to label me a fuddy duddy and sweep my opinions to one side, that’s fine with me.
The Eagles, after a couple of interesting albums seemed to turn themselves inside out and disappear up their own fundamental orifice in a cloud of what may well have been cocaine-fuelled ego battles. That’s the way it looked from where I was at the time. Not that I was paying much attention.
Fleetwood Mac? Well, suffice it to say that everything after the last of the original lead players departed is the musical equivalent of an extended soap opera and leave it at that.
All of those statements are, of course, my own highly biased and slightly exaggerated personal opinions.
So I’m not going to suggest that music I wasn’t inclined to explore very far doesn’t have a place in the history of rock’n’roll, or in the wider field of popular music, whatever that strange beast is.
The four bands I mentioned were tremendously significant to a huge number of people, but I never bothered to listen too much and don’t have anything to say about them. That might seem like writing the history of the twentieth century without referring to either of the World Wars, the Holocaust or the Great Depression, but I’m not writing the history of anything beyond what Hughesy listened to between about 1966 and the present day, so if I didn’t listen to it it’s more or less irrelevant.
Even if it is, effectively, the elephant in the room of popular music.
So what am I interested in? The Beatles, based on the article in Rants?
These days, despite the arrival of the long-awaited remasters of their entire oeuvre, not very.
Don’t get me wrong. I doubt that there has ever been a single musical act that has been as pervasive as the Beatles were from the time I first noticed them around the start of 1964 and the effective end of the Beatle era in the early 1970s. The Beatles provided a major part of the soundtrack to those years, played on the radio, on record players, in garages where bands were rehearsing and in the dances where those bands took their first steps on the path to musical stardom (or not, as the case may be).
Within a decade that era was gone, except for the memories of those who lived through it. When I arrived at work the day after John Lennon was shot, monstrously hung-over and badly in need of sleep after an attempt to play the entire Beatles box set from Please Please Me to Abbey Road I found myself confronted by inquiring minds that wanted to know who this John Lennon was, whether the Beatles were better than Kiss and why their mothers had cried when they heard the news.
Those bullets cut down an important figure, but the Beatles were, by that time, well and truly in the past.
Like most other music fans my age, I started listening to the radio in the fifties, continued that into the sixties, got caught up in the Beatles era like everyone else I knew at school, and started buying records in 1966. As a result I’ve spent a considerable chunk of the last forty-something years listening to music and have directed a substantial chunk of my pay packet over the years towards the various record labels, magazine and book publishers who have provided much of the material that lines the walls of my office.
On the other hand, given a lack of a working turntable and a disinclination to shell out anything on their woefully neglected CD back catalogue, I don’t think I’ve played a Beatles track in something like fifteen years.
So we’re talking about forty-five years of listening, on and off, starting with the Top Forty and gradually heading away from the middle of the road towards the roadside ditch, to paraphrase Neil Young’s explanation of Time Fades Away and Tonight’s The Night as his follow-up to Harvest.
Which resulted in a musical universe that I’m quite happy with, thank you very much. It’s a world where Richard Thompson tops the charts, Little Feat are sitting on the highest level of the Rock Hall of Fame, the band playing in the beer garden at the local pub is Los Lobos, Derek Trucks is a megastar and a three disk recording of an Allman Brothers Band concert from New York’s Beacon Theater is close to musical nirvana.
If there’s anything that I’ve missed because of the odd offhand dismissal of some major artist as overrated, irrelevant or unworthy, it’s my loss.
Trust me, I’m utterly and totally comfortable with that.
