David HepworthRezensionen

I once spent several years of my life trying to track down a deleted LP by the 1970s progressive rock band Van Der Graaf Generator. I can still remember my sheer joy when I finally located the album in a second-hand record shop in Liverpool. It turned out to be one of the group’s less impressive offerings but this in no way diminished my sense of satisfaction at finally having found the wretched thing. I now owned it and that’s all that mattered (must be the hunter-gatherer in me).

I mention this as it’s pertinent to something touched on in David Hepworth’s history of the rise and fall of the 12 inch LP: the pleasure of not being able to hear a record because it had been deleted, or was perhaps just unavailable in your local store, and having to doggedly seek it out. The chase being almost as pleasurable, possibly more so, as actual possession. This is, of course, now an unknown pleasure in a world where pretty much all music ever recorded is permanently available at our very fingertips.

As told by Hepworth the glory years of the vinyl LP ran from 1967 to 1982. As this happens to coincide with the heyday of what is now known as ‘classic rock’ this book is as much a celebration of that genre as the LP itself. He also looks at the way changes in technology changed the sound and nature of the music that was made and how it was consumed.

A Fabulous Creation is part memoir and there are lots of autobiographical reminiscences of Hepworth’s life as a vinyl junky. Pure nostalgia, of course, but he recreates with wit and a certain poignancy an age in which the physical LP was at the centre of millions of young people’s lives. He recalls hanging around in record shops for hours at a time as an impoverished student just to be close to records, gaze at the often astonishing artwork on the sleeves, marvel at the names of bands unknown to him and imagine what sort of music they could possibly make, and hold the records in his hand. It reminded me that listening to music used to be as much a visual and tactile pleasure as an aural one.

This is an amiable evocation of an era when record buying was a hugely lucrative mass market rather than a niche one with an uncertain future. It wasn’t that long ago but in many ways it reads like an account of a lost civilisation. It was a time when many of us music obsessives said, with our latest album held proudly under our arm, ‘it’s only the music that matters’. When we arrived in the digital age and only the music remained, in an infinite virtual library of recorded music beyond the wildest dreams of even the most avaricious 1970s teenage audiophile, we were shocked to realise that the music certainly wasn’t all that had mattered to us after all.

David Hepworth knows his subject and, as he understands, those of us who grew up with music in the late 60’s / 70’s love a a nostalgic look back at times before social media engulfed everything. Though, having said that, it’s great to be able to immediately summon up & hear the music as he talks about it. In many ways it was very boring being a teenager in the early 70’s: Sunday = T.V.’s Songs of Praise. But perhaps for this very reason music was so important, central & a huge emotional escape.

Hepworth’s chapters are by month as he relates the important music goings on, and what a defining year. The Beatles’ members going solo, The Who, Carole King, Led Zeppelin, Marc Bolan putting on the glitter, David Bowie emerging….

I would say this was page-turning but I listened to the audio. Fast-paced & full of facts & interesting anecdotes.

Intressant och läsvärd berättelse om ett fantastiskt musikår. Man flyttas nästan tillbaka 50år i tiden när man läser. Prologen är bäst och sammanfattar och jämför dåtid och nutid på ett fantastiskt sätt.

Terrific chronicle of the US/UK divide from a Brit male born in 1950.½

A fun read with plenty of nostalgia and space for arguing about provocative statements of opinion made as fact. It is probably the comparison of one’s own lived musical experience to Hepworth’s selection of defining “rock stars” which makes this book so engaging, readable and enjoyable.
I was born in the early sixties and the music of the seventies and early eighties were the soundtrack of my life, so I am probably in about the middle of the age group at whom this book is aimed. My musical tastes were for glam rock before I was a teenager and now are more towards progressive rock and country rock, so for me this book is more about the general soundtrack, rather than the music to which I really listened. As Hepworth says, “All history is subjective. This book is no exception.”
But this is well written journalism with plenty of fascinating anecdotes, humour, knowingness and enjoyably arguable opinions to keep me interested. And as written by someone who started working as a music journalist in Britain in the seventies, it also appears well researched about the first twenty years of this survey.

This is a fun book, and Hepworth digs lightly into the life and times of each month of 1971, letting us know what was new on TV, how much gas cost, what the fashions were, etc.

He also talks a lot about (surprise surprise) the artists and the music of each month and makes a good case for it being a banner year for music. And, of course, it was. Bowie put out two albums. Lennon's Imagine came out. As did Carole King's Tapestry. And a ton more.

But to be honest, I think you could also make the same case for 1973, 1975-77, and likely 1979 at the very least, if not every damn year of the 70s. It was a great decade for music.

Like I said, a fun book, with lots of interesting anecdotes and mini-biographies. If I have one complaint, it's that the author, who also narrated this audio book, sounds constantly like he's pronouncing The Who's Baba O'Riley song as "Barbra O'Riley".

Which is just weird.

This is a great book looking at the music in 1971. Hepworth does a wonderful job talking about the major players from the year.

The decision to structure this book by the month provides it with the scaffolding needed to discuss such diverse artists. This book discusses The Rolling Stones, T. Rex, The Who, and David Bowie among others. Standing behind everyone in the not so distant background are the various members of the Beatles, who appear at different points of the book because of how intertwined they were in the music industry. Without the month by month structure, the book would have felt very scattershot.

A book like this needs to provide some juicy, unknown details. Hepworth doesn’t just focus on the music. He also talks about their lives, like how some of the stars had to deal with crazy fans while trying to raise families at the same time. But the work dwarfs everything else, another issue Hepworth talks about when discussing the mansions these new stars were buying. The paramount concern for people like Neil Young was that the house have the ability to house a recording studio. Hepworth obviously did some deep research, because I felt like I knew the bands by the end of the book.

This is a great book for the music fan in your life.

I have always been a bit of a quiz junkie, and having been both a lifelong fan of rock music, and a keen reader of David Hepworth's previous books, this book was always going to be right up my alley.

Hepworth has that happy knack of imparting knowledge about his favourite subejct without ever seeming to preach. Here there is a veritabl;e compendium of questions, and some fascinating answers, each with a sagacious gloss.

Highly entertaining and informative.

Subjective, very British, interesting history of rock stars, from the first, Little Richard, to the last, Kurt Cobain. Hepworth's premise is that the age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has ended. Performers are too accessible, too expendable now.

I have not read anything by David Hepworth before, but I quite liked this. It is various columns on mostly rock music, grouped into themes. I really liked the first chapter on The Beales. I also like lists of good songs or albums, like The Great Accidental Trilogies, The Greatest Hot Streak in Pop (Kinks), and the columns about what to play at weddings and funerals. Not everything was great, but the interesting bits were well worth it for this quick read.

Fascinating, well researched account of what it means to be and is demanded of rock stars. David Hepworth gives each year its own short chapter, focusing on a particular incident of such a celebrity.

A couple of times he bizarrely generalises: ‘everyone thought this...’ ‘everyone had this record...’ which reminded me of the crowd chanting ‘we are all individuals’ and the lone voice squeaking ‘I’m not’, which then made me question the veracity of everything else Hepworth stated. But apart from this editorial annoyance I found this book highly entertaining, and it drew back the curtain of mystique from rock celebrity in a way I hadn’t considered before.

"Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994" by David Hepworth, offers a brief history of popular music and its stars from Little Richard to Kurt Cobain. With the music industry now dominated by digital downloads and fleeting moments, the rock star, like my youth, is a thing of the past. The book is set out with a chapter per year, featuring the career progression of a relevant rock identity and a playlist at the end. Good fun and an easy read.

This book starts off with documenting rock and our views of it, and unfurls chronologically, starting of with describing Little Richard, going as far as the current day, and somehow avoids being bitter and dismayed. Rather, the book stands tall with what has happened, what is happening, and how we're actually at our peaks in some ways; while rock stars were gods, and there may never be another rock star again, the current day allows millions of people the same access to means of music production as professionals do. So we're leveraged.

The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. The idea of the rock star, like the idea of the cowboy, lives on. There are still people who dress like rock stars and do their best to act as they think rock stars would have acted in an earlier time, much as there are people who strap on replica holsters and re-enact the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It’s increasingly difficult to act like one or the other and keep a straight face.

In characterizing people as rock stars we are superimposing on them qualities we associated with actual rock stars in the past. It’s only when we describe people who aren’t rock stars as being like rock stars that we get an inkling of the qualities we came to associate with rock stars as a tribe. What kind of qualities? Swagger. Impudence. Sexual charisma. Utter self-reliance. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A tendency to act on instinct. A particular way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes.

Similarly there are qualities rock-star types do not have. A rock-star chef will not refer too closely to the recipe. A rock-star politician will not be overly in thrall to the focus group. A rock-star athlete will not go to bed at the time specified by the coach. A rock-star fund manager will make a huge call based on a gut feeling rather than indulge in a prolonged period of desk research and make a sober examination of the evidence.

And there was Little Richard.

According to Richard, who began burnishing his legend from an early age, he was born deformed. One eye was clearly bigger than the other. One leg was certainly shorter than the other. Hence Richard walked with short steps, which gave him a mincing gait. In the Pleasant Hill section of Macon, Georgia during the Second World War, at a time when sympathy for differences was in short supply, he came in for rough treatment. They called him faggot, sissy, punk and freak. And those were his friends.

Hepworth's language is short, simple, and restrained - and it really works well. His forté is a lot of insight, condensed into producing the facts as he sees them, which are at times surprisingly well put.

Radio was the one medium that could afford to be colour blind. A year earlier, in the summer of 1954, the boy Elvis Presley had made his first broadcast appearance on the Memphis radio show of Dewey Phillips. Dewey made sure that the listeners knew he went to Humes High School. That way they would know that he was white. The colour blindness worked the other way as well. Up in the far north, in Hibbing, Minnesota, fourteen-year-old Bobby Zimmerman had taken advantage of the night-time ionosphere effect to tune in to Frank ‘Brother Gatemouth’ Page who was playing rhythm and blues records on a station out of Shreveport, Louisiana, fully a thousand miles away. Page talked the jive and played the blues but he was no blacker than his pale Jewish listener in the frozen north. On the air you could be whoever you wanted to be.

Oh, by the way, I've never even considered this track in this way:

Its title, if it could be said to have one because nobody had ever considered it fit enough for publication, was ‘Tutti Frutti’. Its subject matter was, not to put too fine a point on it, anal sex. It began ‘Tutti Frutti, good booty’. It then added ‘if it’s tight, it’s all right’. It developed that idea further with ‘if it’s greasy, it makes it so easy’.

This section on how the song was received is brilliant:

Richard called, and many answered. They answered from all over the world. ‘Tutti Frutti’ was covered by Elvis Presley in his first album the following year. It was in the vast white audience to which neither he nor Blackwell had ever given a moment’s thought when they made the record that his sound had its most profound effect. It was released in the UK in January 1957 on the B-side of ‘Long Tall Sally’. David Jones, a nine-year-old at Burnt Ash Junior School in Bromley, later recalled that his ‘heart burst with excitement’. Keith Richards, who was twelve and attending Dartford Technical High School for Boys, said ‘it was as if, in a single instant, the world changed from monochrome to Technicolor’. And Bobby Zimmerman, the boy who’d been tuning his radio to the sound of Shreveport from up there in the Iron Range of Minnesota, led a group called the Golden Chords who appeared in a school concert playing their own version of Little Richard’s song. It was an unimaginably hot, exotic sound to be attempted by anyone other than the people who made it that day in New Orleans, let alone a bunch of Jewish adolescents from the frozen north.

The book goes on with describing the times that Richard set free: Elvis, "The Killer", The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix:

Recalling the events of 1 October, Jack Bruce said, ‘Eric was a guitar player. Jimi was a force of nature.’ Although it purports to be the music of universal brotherhood the world of popular music is anything but colour blind. In the fifty years after Elvis it found scores of different ways of mapping sub-divisions of the music, most of them with at least some racial implication to them. Black musicians are far more likely to be called ‘forces of nature’. This implies that they have arrived at what they do by a different route from their white counterparts. Much as it’s difficult to have a white singer you would describe as a soul singer, so it’s difficult to have a black star you would call a rock star. There are a handful of musicians who’ve walked this very fine line and they’ve been helped by the fact that they were directed from the beginning towards a white audience. Ultimately the thing that elevated Jimi Hendrix above Clapton, Beck, Green and all the other guitar players who came to pay tribute in October 1966 was as much stylistic as musical. It was in the three words that everybody, including Clapton, used to describe him. The real thing.

On Janis Joplin, lovely and doomed from the start:

Before Janis Joplin there was nobody remotely like Janis Joplin. Jazz and blues had produced female singers who sang with similar directness about their thirst or their carnal appetites, but Janis was another thing altogether. She was a white rock star, which meant she was written about in newspapers and interviewed on television. Those things that were implicit in her performances became explicit when she talked about them. When asked how she came to be the singer in her band Big Brother and the Holding Company she said she had slept with the man who was sent to ask her. Furthermore she was so impressed with him she couldn’t say no. ‘I was fucked into it,’ she would cackle in interviews. Nobody had ever heard a woman talk like this. Certainly not for publication. Some of it was an act. Privately she confessed she had actually made up this story as a favour to the man. She seemed oblivious to what this might say about her. Because she was, in the argot of the day, a chick singer who behaved in a way no chick singer had behaved before, her personality was overshadowed by the way she played her gender and even that was overshadowed by the way she boasted about her sexuality.

On Ozzy Osbourne's tour with Sharon, Randy Rhoads and Rachel Youngblood:

There was no other way to keep themselves amused so Aycock invited various members of the touring party to come up with him for quick joy rides. On the last of these circuits his passengers were Randy Rhoads, the elfin twenty-five-year-old Californian guitar player who was the star of Ozzy’s new band, and Rachel Youngblood, the fifty-eight-year-old African-American woman who was subsequently described variously as make-up artist, hairdresser, wardrobe assistant and cook. She was the help, Sharon’s live-in maid from back in California. She had joined the tour to help Sharon be Sharon while she was making it possible for Ozzy to be Ozzy.

Neither Rhoads nor Youngblood were keen fliers but somehow on that sunny morning they were persuaded into boarding the Bonanza, a later version of the aircraft in which Buddy Holly had perished twenty-three years earlier. In an attempt to either wake up Ozzy or tease his ex-wife, who was watching from below, Aycock repeatedly took the Beechcraft low enough to buzz the bus. On his third pass he miscalculated, clipped the bus with a wing, hit a tree and ploughed into a nearby mansion, where the plane immediately burst into flames. The initial impact with the bus woke Ozzy and Sharon who stumbled outside to be confronted by the sight of flaming wreckage. There were body parts strewn across the ground. All three who were on the plane died instantly. They had to be identified from their medical records.

After their deaths it was said that none of them had wanted to be on the tour in the first place, that what Randy had really wanted was to go to university and study classical composition, that Rachel had signed up for one last tour so that she could raise the money to buy an electric typewriter for her church, and that it was particularly surprising that they should perish together because she didn’t like Randy and in fact had called him a little white bastard. Clearly the accident was the bus driver’s fault but it seems the kind of grisly, pointless tragedy that could only have occurred in the course of a rock and roll tour. If the passengers had been members of a sporting team on their way to an away game or a touring theatre company en route to a festival it seems unlikely that reluctant fliers would have allowed themselves to be cajoled into getting into a small aircraft to go nowhere in particular with somebody they barely knew.

And what furthered rock?

Meanwhile, far away from Hollywood, far away from this gilded high society, something stirred. The most significant musical moment of 1982 was the release of ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. This would prove to be as significant in its time as ‘Tutti Frutti’ was in 1955. Writing about it in Rolling Stone in September, Kurt Loder described it as ‘the most detailed and devastating report from underclass America since Bob Dylan decried the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll – or, perhaps more to the point, since Marvin Gaye took a long look around and wondered what was going on.’

On "Spinal Tap", perhaps the ultimate film on rock:

31 SEPTEMBER 1983 THE CONTINENTAL HYATT HOUSE, HOLLYWOOD The absurdity of rock stars IN 1983 ROB Reiner, who had made his name as an actor on the TV comedy All In The Family, got together with comic actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, begged a small amount of money from a film fund headed up by Lew Grade and began shooting a modest film. The film they made was to do for the anonymous rock band trying to make a living what Dont Look Back did for Bob Dylan. It had no script; they made it on the fly and improvised the dialogue. The notional band played their own music. Their repertoire featured such self-composed tunes as ‘Big Bottom’ and ‘Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight’. Where possible they shot in real-world rock locations. They filmed at Elvis Presley’s graveside. The end-of-tour wrap party was shot around the pool on the roof of the Continental Hyatt House in Hollywood. This was the rock and roll boarding house that had been known in the days when Keith Moon stayed there as the Continental Riot House. The fictional subjects of the documentary This Is Spinal Tap were Spinal Tap, a band of prog rock plodders from the English provinces. In the film they were embarking on an American tour in support of their new album, Smell The Glove. The three members who mattered – a succession of drummers had all met with unfortunate ends – were David St Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls. All three looked like classically unmemorable members of rock’s army of anonymous foot soldiers. Their faces were slightly too old for their haircuts. These were men with nothing notably wild and untamed about them, men who for the most part lived standard lower-middle-class lives of blameless tedium, interrupted only by the occasional call to go out on the road and play the rock star for the benefit of the concertgoers of Moose Droppings, Ohio. Once there they would be temporarily decanted into a pair of spandex trousers in order to perform an overheated number in praise of their amatory member or their girlfriend’s bottom. Clearly, it was no job for a grown-up. Nonetheless it was the only job certain grown-ups could do.

Although the film makers stated that the misadventures of Spinal Tap were not based on any particular group, many real-life bands fell over themselves to claim that they inspired it. It was in 1983, when the film was being made, that Black Sabbath found that the Stonehenge set they had ordered was too big to fit on the stage. The British blues band Foghat were adamant that their management had once been taken over by a girlfriend of one of the members who insisted on planning their tour schedule according to numerology. They half-jokingly accused the film makers of having bugged their tour bus to get pointers. Every band wanted to own certain scenes. Everybody talked about the time they got lost going to the stage or when their amplifiers picked up the transmissions of a local car firm. Eddie Van Halen insisted on ordering an amp that went up to eleven. That was all part of their way of reassuring us that they were in on the joke. But the core joke of This Is Spinal Tap, that bands keep going long after they should stop because stopping is the very thing they don’t dare do, is too bitter a pill to swallow.

The last part of that paragraph, I love it.

There's a lot more to this book, where Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Queen, "Band Aid", Fleetwood Mac, Bonnie Raitt (!), and others are concerned, so do yourself a service and get this book. It also contains music playlists for every year described.

1971 - Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year by David Hepworth is a look at the revolutionary musical year and how it changed the future of rock music. Hepworth is a music journalist, writer, and publishing industry analyst who has launched several successful British magazines, including Smash Hits, Q, Mojo and The Word, among many others.

I was eight in 1971 and although a bit young to remember most of the year I do remember bits and pieces. It was the year All in the Family aired. I thought Archie Bunker was funny but didn't understand the humor. It was the year astronauts rode the moon buggy on the surface of the moon. In music, how could anyone miss "Joy to the World", "Maggie Mae", and "Me and Bobby McGee". I remember the music because for the large part it is still around. Granted (and maybe, fortunately) the Osmonds’ "One Bad Apple" has gone away.

It was the start of the era where music stayed and although it was still around, bubblegum pop was being pushed aside. The big names came out and moved to their prime. Led Zeppelin, The Who, Pink Floyd, and Black Sabbath all found traction in 1971. The music industry started to change too. No longer was it waiting to play number one songs. It actively searched for them. Stations realised that it was better business to discover new music than merely follow along. I was fortunate to grow up with a very progressive radio station, WMMS, that promoted new bands. It was also the era of album rock and longer songs like "Stairway to Heaven" and the 45 you had to flip over to listen to the whole song "American Pie."

Hepworth examines the stories behind the music how the industry thought they were getting a mediocre album from Carole King. Even the photographer for the album cover arrived to find a frizzy-haired woman in jeans and a pullover sweater. She looked like she was about to go work in the garden not make an album cover. The photographer put her cat in the frame and suddenly "Tapestry" became an iconic album. Tomboy Karen Carpenter came to fame as the drummer who sang. Once she was moved from behind the drums to center stage she became self-conscious of her looks and body which eventually lead to tragedy. December 1970 was the end of the Beatles and 1971 was the year Mick Jagger worked to save the Stones from breaking up. Black Sabbath released “Sweet Leaf” showing that Keith Richards wasn’t the only one who could experiment with guitar tuning. And on the subject of experimental, Pink Floyd released “Meddle”.

1971 was a unique year. Music spread. The “Theme from Shaft” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” brought music to other media. Just a quick glance at the top albums shows how 1971 shaped music -- Led Zeppelin IV, Who’s Next, Hunky Dory, Sticky Fingers, LA Woman, Aqualung, The Yes Album, Pearl… 1971 is a playlist in a year. Even for me, the music from bands and singers I normally wouldn’t listen, Joni Mitchell or Funkadelic, to all made music that I like. Hepworth knits the year together and explains the importance of that year in music combines it with pop culture. One would be hard pressed to find another year that offers the range and quality of music.

E’ più pertinente il sottotitolo originale ‘Senza un attimo di tregua’ che si adatta alla perfezione a un anno intenso nel mondo del rock, contrassegnato dalla frenesia e dal cambiamento tipici del diciassettenne che il genere allora era (e pare incredibile). Al contempo, si tratta di un’età di passaggio verso l’età adulta: ecco l’inarrestabile scivolamento dai singoli ai 33 giri, l’inizio di una prospettiva storica (ovvero i dischi vecchi non sono più anticaglie) da parte di ascoltatori la cui età media stava crescendo.
E’ pur vero però che il sottotitolo italiano è ben presente nel libro, a partire dalla prefazione in cui l’autore mette le mani avanti: quella è la musica dei suoi vent’anni e si sa che ognuno è estremamente affezionato alla propria. Ne deriva un viaggio che percorre l’anno eponimo mese per mese, narrando la genesi e il successo degli album più significativi con relativa contestualizzazione nello spirito dei tempi: il trauma dello scioglimento dei Beatles, il tramonto del movimento hippy, il vacillare di giovanotti nati poveri e travolti da un fiume di denaro e di droga (la deboscia spunta sovente quasi per cercare di tirar giù i musicisti dal piedistallo).
Stiamo parlando di una scena musicale che aveva una rilevanza minore di ora, ma anche un assai più accentuato attrito con la società circostante: il suo concedersi lentamente all’abbraccio dello show-business ne segna il successo e la contemporanea trasformazione. Il racconto su apre con ‘Tapestry’ di Carole Kinge si chiude con Elvis a Las Vegas: in mezzo una marea di aneddoti a volte esilaranti e a volte cupi oltre a una serie di figure spesso costrette ad avere a che fare con il loro mondo impazzito all’improvviso.
Lo stile di Hepworth è intriso di un umorismo molto britannico che gli consente di raccontare i rivolgimenti in ambito musicale (e non) su entrambe le sponde dell’Atlantico - ma il disco dei dischi dell’anno e inglese, of course - con una leggerezza che rende piacevolissimo lo scorrere delle pagine e potrebbe interessare pure il non appassionato. Lo scrittore non si preoccupa di nascondere le proprie preferenze (Marvin Gaye ne esce maluccio assai) e, forte del disclaimer iniziale ripetuto nell’epilogo, innalza il 1971 dove dovrebbe probabilmente stare tutto il periodo che lo circonda: una forzatura che regala però un libro divertente eppure capace di offrire un’ingente messe di informazioni (utilissime le playlist alla fine di ogni capitolo).

I found David Hepworth’s latest book particularly enjoyable. It is, after all, always rewarding to read a book by someone who is clearly knowledgeable about his chosen subject, without ever stooping to patronise his readers. Hepworth has spent most of his working life engaged with pop and rock music, firstly in the music retail industry and subsequently as a journalist or television presenter. In his previous books he has eulogised 1971 as the greatest year in the history of rock (a hypothesis that I found intriguing, even if I would put in a counterclaim on behalf of 1975), and offered a year by year portrait of some of the greatest starts within the genre.

Here he looks at the golden age of the pop and rock LP, starting with the release of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, and finishing in 1982, which saw the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which had, until just a few weeks ago, been credited with the highest certified sales of any album. [Thriller was dislodged from that pinnacle earley this year by the Eagles’ Greatest hits 1971-1975.]

Although Hepworth is a few years older than me, I could clearly identify with the experiences he recounts. As a teenager I used to spend far too much time hanging around my local record shop – the now sadly lamented Castle Records which was located just off the market place in the Charnwood Precinct in Loughborough – thumbing through the new releases and wondering wistfully how long it would take me to save up enough pocket money to buy my next selection.

Hepworth’s principal contention, with which I concur, was that there was something special about LPs. Subseqeunt media may have proved more convenient, and afforded greater quality, but they simply didn’t feel the same, or provoke the same level of emotional involvement. He is careful to steer clear of the debate as to which medium offers the best experience (i.e. is the ‘warmth’ of vinyl, despite its attendant surface noise and vulnerability to damage, better or worse than the often antiseptic quality of digital reproduction?). He is, instead, more interested in the relationship that the buyer had with a new record: carrying it home (perhaps provoking conversations on the bus about the relative merits of the artist over their rivals), the almost ritualistic stages passed when playing it for the first time, and then storing it with the rest of one’s collection.

He then goes through each year in his chosen span, flagging up some of the more remarkable albums that were released. His choices are not always the obvious ones, but he always offers and informative and entertaining explanation behind his selections.

Very entertaining and thought-provoking.

I would be hard pressed to decide whether books or music are more important to me, and I am always pleased when those two pleasures merge, as they did with this collection of articles and observations by David Hepworth. He is certainly well qualified to talk about rock and pop music having spent most of his working life in that field, whether behind the counter of record shops, or later as both a journalist and presenter on programmes such as (The Old Grey) Whistle Test.

As a teenager, The Old Grey Whistle Test was a fundamental part of my life, and the post mortem of the various acts at school the following day was just as earnest as our Monday morning discussions of the weekend’s football results. David Hepworth understands all that because, as is clear from the pieces in this book, he went through all that himself. His extensive, perhaps even encyclopaedic knowledge of popular music, acquired through his professional involvement, is matched by his enthusiasm as a fan.

In this collection Hepworth addresses a number of issues, including explains the changing nature of the role of the drummer within a band, and how the development of regular and reliable drum machines has affected the whole process of compiling a single. He also offers up a thoughtful piece on why so many veteran bands and solo performers carry on despite their advancing years, and more particularly why they continue to tour. For big bands, life on road has become almost an industry in itself, with implications for a considerable number of interested parties whose finances are also inextricably linked with those of the headline act.

Hepworth’s insight in informed, informative and engagingly written.

David Hepworth – music journalist and writer, who has won numerous awards for his work, here presents a book which – as the subtitle suggests – catalogues the rise and fall of the rock star. Hepworth believes that there are no more bona fide rock stars; there are pop stars and other music stars, but rock stars were something else entirely (with the ‘rock’ part of the term not necessarily referring to that genre of music). And that something is a mystique, an allure that celebrities can no longer have in this age of social media, where nothing is secret and the smallest details of a star’s life becomes public knowledge almost immediately.

He charts this journey from 1955 to 1994, in an unusual and extremely readable way. Every year he takes a significant day from one rock star’s life, that had an effect not only on the person in question but on the world as a whole.

There are far too many to list, but all the major stars you would expect appear here: Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones, Bowie, Springsteen, Prince, Michael Jackson. And there are others – Bob Geldof (his day being Live Aid), Freddie Mercury (the day he died), Duran Duran (the making of the controversial Girls On Film video), Buddy Holly (also the day he died). Each chapter is short – less than 10 pages – and ends with a list of significant singles and albums from that particular year.

I found the book absolutely fascinating, and even when a chapter featured someone I am not particularly interested in, such is the writing that it made me interested. This book can either be read in huge chunks, or you can dip in and out of it, but whichever way you choose to read it, I highly recommend it to anybody interested in music and stardom.

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.

Quotes

Being a rock star, as Bruce Springsteen said to me thirty years ago, retards adulthood and prolongs adolescence.

-David Hepworth (Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of Rock Stars p 5)

(For an Early Reviewer copy)
David Hepworth makes a bold claim, right on the front cover. Even before starting, I had my doubts about music converging in one year to breakout and release a torrent of great music and genres that would continue for decades. In reality, the music scene is small, and artists tend to listen to great music, which helps to propagate award winning, multi-platinum material. What Hepworth shows us, in amazing detail, linking people and events by strands, is a domino effect in history (like James Burke's "Connections"). Happening in a studio on the other side of the world, amid cables, amps, guitars, sheet music and people, ripples to the other side, then echoes on for months. Our ears were blessed every day with the music that came out in the early "70s, we rejoiced in it with free radio, until the decades lapsed. Hepworth reminds us to dig out the old vinyl or tapes, and listen again.

David Hepworth has a long and impressive track record as a music journalist, and be brought to bear very effectively in his previous book, 1971: Never A Dull Moment. In that book, he offered a detailed annal of that year, analysing the most successful music that was released and setting it in its historical and social context.

In this latest book, he takes a different tack on the upper end of the rock music world. His basic premise is that the age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has now passed into history. Starting in 1955, he moves through each of the next forty years, profiling a range of leading musicians through the prism of one particular day that would prove to be a significant axis point in their careers.

Hepworth is very knowledgeable about his subject, and knows how to construct a compelling argument. His pen portraits of the various stars he selects are clear and engaging, and he manages to bring his subjects into sharp focus. As will always be the case with this sort of book, I did not always agree with his selections, or his conclusions. I could, however, always follow the logic of his arguments.

There were some occasions where I think he felt constricted by his own choice of format, and there were a couple of years for which his arguments were slightly contrived. They were very minor failings, though, and as a whole, the book gives an interesting and coherent insight into the history of rock stardom. I always enjoy reading books by people who know their subject, and can express their own enthusiasm for it clearly, without seeming to preach, and that is a skill that Hepworth has in abundance.

I knew this wouldn't be a keeper, but I could get hold of a library copy? 'Never a dull moment' is perhaps a stretch, for both the year and the book - unless like the author you 'were born in 1950. For a music fan that's the winning ticket in the lottery of life'. I would like to have been born a good thirty years earlier, but only to go see Queen, who had only just recruited John Deacon to play bass in this year, so - meh.

The 'month by month journey through the past' covers bands and artists from Bruce Springsteen and Slade, Carole King and the Carpenters, Nick Drake (no idea, but he died young, not even making the 27 Club) and Led Zep, the Stones, Jim Morrison, Marc Bolan and Cat Stevens, George Harrison, Roxy Music, the Beach Boys and - yes, of course - David Bowie. Again and again and again. A good mix of US and UK artists, though, when I was expecting a purely British experience. The author also wanders off on tangents to recall Tower Records, Mick Jagger's wedding, the generation clash between 'serious people who fought in the war and pranksters with long hair who just wanted to enjoy things', Glastonbury (see previous), the Concert for Bangladesh, and the first 'reality TV' show, The American Family.

Subjective in his nostalgia, Hepworth doesn't hide how unimpressed he is by Marvin Gaye or how much he lerrrrvs Rod Stewart, which is fair enough, but saying that Yoko broke up the Beatles is a bit cliched. On top of the playlist for each month, there is also a suggested listening list of the year's top 100 albums, so interesting, amusing in parts, and instructive - but to get the full flavour, you probably had to be there.

I'm not sure I agree that 1971 is "the year that rock exploded", but the author makes a good argument. The book is well written, with an engaging style that's easy and fun to read. Each chapter covers one month in 1971, ending with a list of songs and/or albums the author feels were pivotal to the future of rock music.

One area where this book excels is in giving us an inside view of the music industry, with the interplay between the major artists and the major labels of the time. We see how musicians had to fight the status quo in order to make the kind of music they wanted. The downside is that Hepworth presents this information as if it's unique to the year, but this same trend continues today, with labels demanding more of the same regardless of what musicians or bands wants to create. Often the albums that explode on the charts are not at all what labels expect, as Hepworth shows with Carole King's Tapestry. While this is a continuing trend, Hepworth definitely makes a case for 1971 being the year the rebellion began.

Hepworth does little to explore the politics and social changes surrounding and influencing the music of 1971. The social climate had as much to do with rock's rise as it had to do with mainstream society's resistance. I would have liked a better sense of setting to help substantiate Hepworth's claim of 1971 as the pivotal year in rock. I think it's worth mentioning that, while the content covers both the US and the UK, this book has a very British feel. The author is British, and I'm not sure he fully grasps the social climate of the US back in the early '70s. This might explain the glaring absence of discussion on the issue.

Along with stories of musicians and the albums they were making, we're given insight into how record labels and radio had to adapt to the explosion of rock music into mainstream society.
As a focused exploration on rock's evolution, this is an interesting read well worth the time.

*I was provided with an advance copy by the publisher, via LibraryThing.*

David Hepworth’s theses is that 1971 was the most important year in the history of rock/pop music. It was the year of innovations in how albums were made. It was a year of great albums made that still endure today, like ‘Tapestry’, ‘Led Zeppelin IV’, ‘Every Picture Tells a Story’, ‘Sticky Fingers’, ‘Blue’, ‘Pearl’, ‘Madman Across the Water’, ‘Harvest’, and, of course, ‘American Pie’. It was, actually, the year that albums became more important than 45 rpm singles. It was the year the Beatles were no more. The technology of making music and recording it changed. Arena rock started, as opposed to playing in clubs and halls.

Each chapter is one month in the year 1971. He doesn’t just tell us what was released by who; he goes deeper into the rock scene, covering things like Mick Jagger’s wedding, various rock stars battles with drugs and alcohol, and what producers and managers were doing. Some of the people he covers really never went anywhere. Being British, it’s seen through a British lens, but there is plenty about the American scene.

Was 1971 the most important year in rock history? I don’t know. I was surprised to find that ‘Blue’ and ‘Tapestry’ came out in ’71; they were such a seminal part of my teens (I could sing every word of both those albums) that I would have sworn they came out earlier. Likewise, I would have sworn Elton John, Rod Stewart, and Van Morrison became really big before that point. But he’s got the dates correct; that music was just so important to me that it colors my memories of the era.

It’s an interesting book- I read it in two evenings- but oddly unstirring. Hepworth is a reporter, not an ad man, and he gives us just the facts, ma’am. But the facts showed me what was below the surface of the music I came of age to.

Excellent.