Golden oldies stand the test of time against today’s white noise
We may never have seen Billie Holiday perform sober. There’s a chilling thought. She lived in a constant state of ravage, from booze, drugs and abusive partners.
Billie looks typically worse for wear in the YouTube video of Strange Fruit, a tragic song delivered by a tragic woman – and my nomination for one of the Greatest Music Vids Ever. Neck hairs stand to attention.
As I hunker down on winter nights, trawling the web is far preferable to the flagellation of trash TV. YouTube is a trove of stellar performances – many of them the greatest heists in pop history.
Billie’s attack on Southern lynching is deceptively poetic because it began life as a poem, with language so spare and beautiful that listeners waft in lyricism – before being walloped:
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
Bulging eyes and twisted mouth Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
The sudden smell of burning flesh.
Billie was born to sing it, as a frequent victim of racism herself, and because she was no stranger to pain, albeit self-inflicted.
Which sounds like Joe Cocker’s cue. How do we describe his gobsmacking set at Woodstock: lunatic or genius?
Flamboyant Leon Russell organised the followup Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour. One critic said the title implied a circus, and that’s what you got, with up to 40 musicians on stage.
At the end of it, Joe was broke, an alcoholic and drug addict. He stayed that way for two decades, and was certainly off his face when I saw him perform in Auckland.
Don’t give me that twaddle about rock’n’roll lifestyle. You and I wouldn’t turn up for work smashed, and it’s not on for entertainers, either. Ingest your substances after the gig, thank you. Better yet, make yourself a green tea.
Astonishingly, through the fog of disgraceful concerts in crap venues, not to mention collapsing health from his addictions (which included 40 fags a day), Joe – a lovely bloke when sober, by all accounts – found a good woman, Pam Baker, who kept him upright. A co-dependent, we’d snarl now. In this case, the label is redeemed.
They married in 1987, and one day Joe announced that he was finished with the junk. In an excellent doco on Netflix, Pam says she spent the first year of sobriety expecting him to fall off the wagon at any minute, and the second year furious at him because he’d cleaned up easily – so why hadn’t he done it a decade earlier?
You might say he got by with a little help from his friend – one of the all-time great covers – staying clean until his death from lung cancer in 2014.
Fate has been kinder to Janis Ian.
She wrote her teen angst anthem At Seventeen when she was not much older. Forty years on and now a pensioner, she can stand on a stage half a world away in Japan and have thousands of people sing it back to her, word perfect, in a foreign language to them. For a performer, she says, it doesn’t get any better than that.
You can catch Janis in a 2011 BBC series, Songwriters Circle, with our own Neil Finn, plus Ryan Adams, whoever he may be.
At 17, Helen Shapiro’s pop stardom was almost over. With that rich timbre to her voice, she had her first hit in 1961, aged 14. Type ‘‘Look Who It Is’’ into your search engine, and up comes a Ready Steady Go clip from 1963 where she sings the song while walking along a line of three guys, their backs to the camera. They each swivel to reveal themselves as Beatles John, George and Ringo.
Helen toured Britain that year with the Fab Four as her support act. By the end of the tour, she was their support act.
Prim ‘‘Aunty’’ BBC screened a bunch of cutting-edge pop performances in the 1960s and ’70s. Neil Young fishes in his jacket for a harmonica in the right key, then premieres Heart of Gold for the studio audience. (The clip has clocked up 74 million views.)
Cat Stevens halts the intro to Tuesday’s Dead so one of the band can retune a guitar.
A winsome Joni Mitchell gives the audience a nearly finished song, My Old Man (supposedly about boyfriend James Taylor), accompanying herself on piano. When the number appeared on her landmark album Blue, she’d added another verse.
Make yourself a cuppa for that one. The whole concert is sublime. For afters, you can catch Joni and James together in a John Peel Session – but alas, being a radio gig, no video.
They broke up soon after. Joni had a rival for James’s affections – heroin, the most jealous of mistresses. Finally weaned, he’s grandfatherly cute now, rubbing shoulders with presidents – but, like Eric Clapton, helluva lucky to be here.
A young Joni also guested on Johnny Cash’s TV show. He was no slouch as a singer-songwriter, but his late-1960s show was extraordinary for introducing the outstanding performers of the day, from whatever genre, to a country music audience (Dylan, Ronstadt, Diamond).
Johnny’s own hit, Ring of Fire, was hijacked before his eyes by guest Ray Charles – and no-one was applauding louder than the songwriter.
Cash would end his career by staging a covers coup of his own with Hurt, by Nine Inch Nails, but the video is so funereal it’s almost unwatchable. He died soon after, in the most unnatural of rock passings – old age.
Best not go off to bed with that one choking your brain. Next time, people power salutes Freddie, and Dusty goes down the drain.