Books
Elton John,janis Joplin, Pete Townshend
After Rock Of The Westies matched Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy by going straight into the US charts at No 1, October 20–26, 1975 was dubbed Elton John Week by the mayor of Los Angeles, the singer also celebrating getting a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame by flying his family over from England to watch one of the two gigantic concerts he had scheduled at Dodger Stadium. John also marked the occasion by attempting to kill himself during a soirée at his luxury home. As he recalls with typical candour in his memoir: “I got up from the table by the swimming pool, went upstairs and swallowed a load of Valium. Then I came back down in my dressing gown and announced that I’d taken a bunch of tablets and that I was going to die. And then I threw myself in the pool.”
A deadpan reflection on a frequently hysterical life, Me is a beguiling concoction of decadence and desperation. The former Reg Dwight endured a loveless childhood in Pinner and a wretched pop apprenticeship before linking up with lyricist Bernie Taupin to become one of the most successful acts of the 1970s. Huge sales killed his critical buzz, but he was sufficiently respected by his peers that Neil Young came to his London flat to give him a late-night solo preview of 1972’s Harvest (“a unique arrangement of solo piano, voice and neighbour banging on the ceiling with a broom handle and loudly imploring Neil Young to shut up”).
Impossible wealth prompted a demented 20-year spending spree, the former Watford FC chairman’s mania for cocaine, art and clothes matched only by that of his New York pal John Lennon, whom John entertained at one point with a classy rewrite of one of his biggest hits: “Imagine six apartments, it isn’t hard to do/one is full of fur coats, another’s full of shoes.”
Now a sober father of two, John winces as he recalls his own excesses – neediness and temper, as well as Donald Duck suits and drugs – but as he recalls his trips to the roller-derby with Dusty Springfield, or Katherine Hepburn removing a dead frog from his pool, there are no real regrets. Instead, Me bears vivid witness to garish times. Be glad he lived to tell the tale.
HEADLINING 1968’s American Music Show festival with Big Brother And The Holding Company, Janis Joplin urged the audience to get on their feet and dance. In the process, she managed to incite a full-on stage invasion. “They were pulling on my clothes, my beads, calling ‘Janis, Janis, we love you’,” she wrote to her frowning parents. “Can’t say I didn’t like it, though. Man, I loved it.”
The archetypal white blues singer, Joplin’s hideous insecurities fuelled her unearthly vocal power, judging by Holly
George-warren’s captivating biography, Janis: Her Life And Music. Acne-scarred and awkward, Joplin was ostracised as the only beatnik in Port Arthur, Texas, and was hounded further when she went to the University of Texas in Austin, dropping out not long after being nominated for the annual Ugliest Man on Campus poll.
Moving to San Francisco, she tried silencing her disapproving inner voice through music, drugs, sex and alcohol, with Big Brother’s set at the 1967 Monterey Pop festival transforming her into the voice of a generation overnight. Purists disapproved (the New York Times characterised Big Brother’s 1968 debut Cheap Thrills as “middle-class white kids with long blond hair pretending to be black”) but public adoration provided some consolation as she fumbled towards a solo career, before an accidental heroin overdose killed her on October 3, 1970.
George-warren documents Joplin’s 27 manic years thoroughly, meeting her friends and trying to make sense of her bewildering romantic life, as well as her uniquely masochistic delivery, and how it laid a path that Robert Plant, Axl Rose and – more depressingly – Kurt Cobain would follow. The whole story of a life only half lived.
ARTISTS’ tendency toward madness and self-destruction is one of the themes of Pete Townsend’s debut novel The Age Of Anxiety, which follows two intertwined rock lives. Paul Jackson, the lead singer of ’60s giants Hero Ground Zero, becomes a Lake District wild man after seeing angels during the making of a film not unlike Ken Russell’s Tommy. Reborn as an outsider artist, he is drafted in to provide Yoda-like guidance to successful nouveau pub rocker Walter K Watts, who quits his regular Dingwalls gig owing to auditory illusions, which might be channelling the pain of the universe.
Morrissey’s List Of The Lost reset the bar desperately low for pop-star novelists, and while there is a sense that Townsend’s editor gave up after page 200, The Age Of Anxiety is seriously flawed rather than irredeemably dreadful. Look beyond the stagey dialogue and bewildering denouement, though, and there is a reasonable Haruki Murukami book scrabbling to get out. No Who’s Next, maybe, but not entirely It’s Hard either.