I'd seen anywhere else.
Rolling Stones Photo Galleries
Hell's Angels at Altamont,
December 6, 1969
On December 6, 1969 the Rolling Stones organized - if that's the right word - and headlined the free Altamont Music Festival at the Altamont speedway in northern California. This was a few months after Woodstock, and there was a general idea that the Stones would have their own Woodstock. It had been scheduled to happen at the Golden Gate Park, but San Francisco officials revoked their permission (if they even had proper paperwork to begin with) at the last minute when Mick Jagger publicly announced that the Stones would be there out of crowd control concerns. It was then supposed to be going to Sears Point Raceway, but that fell through as well. The Altamont venue was finally settled on as late as December 4.
Surprisingly enough, 400,000 rock fans showing up at a place selected within the last 48 hours turned out badly. Four people managed to wind up dead. A couple of people got killed in an auto accident amidst the chaos, and one person managed to drown in a drainage ditch. The famous death, of course, was Meredith Hunter who was stabbed multiple times and kicked to death on film right in front of the stage by Hell's Angels during the Rolling Stones set.
This is just the kind of thing that BEGS for pontification, asserting Big Profound Meaning and so forth. It was the anti-Woodstock, and the dark side of the hippie culture, the death of the 60s, etc. Among other things, the event was immortalized in Don McLean's famous "American Pie" wherein the Satanic Jack Flash was lustfully presiding over the "sacrificial rite." It was the climactic destruction and sweeping away of Buddy Holly's rock and roll "true love ways." It was the final day when the music really, really died.
Obviously, a lot of this stuff is being loaded onto happenstance, which leads to people twisting the actual random chaos of the event to fit their mythologies. For example, it has sometimes been claimed that Hunter was killed while the Stones were playing "Sympathy for the Devil." Obviously that would be perfect mythology, with the whole Satanic "sacrificial rite" angle. In fact, they had finished that song, and were specifically playing "Under My Thumb" at the critical moment- which to me is a more interesting sentiment to be playing out for that event.
Fortuitously, the Rolling Stones had a camera crew filming their tour for a movie, which was eventually released under the title Gimme Shelter. It was directed by David and Albert Maysles. Among several others, young George Lucas was working as a cameraman. A piece of video isn't the same as being there, and you also have to consider all the stuff that was going on that did NOT end up on film. Still, the camera doesn't lie, and it captured a lot of fascinating things going on amongst this third of a million people.
Studying the film, capturing still images and trying to figure out how to edit and present and explain them strongly reaffirms the sense of Dionysian chaos all around that day. For starters, I've rooted out 90 images from that day examining the specific involvement of the Hell's Angels. It can't tell the whole story, but it does give a lot of information from which we can glean some idea of what they were really doing.
Ultimately, the main culprits really have to be the Rolling Stones on grounds of hubris for insisting on going through with this show on less than 48 hours notice in even booking the venue. Famously, they were rumored to have hired the Hell's Angels as security for $500 worth of beer- though both sides subsequently denied it. However, the Grateful Dead had used Hell's Angels for security in the past without incident. Also, the Stones themselves had used the British arm of the Hell's Angels for an "honor guard" earlier that year among hundreds of thousands of fans at their Hyde Park memorial show for Brian Jones without incident..
Still, a handful of bikers providing the main security for several hundred thousand people was dumb. I'd also have to lay some fault on local government. Again, I'm sure that the camera didn't get everything, but from the looks of it there might have been as many as half a dozen cops among that many people. The most I saw was exactly TWO cops on stage after the Hunter killing. I'm not that big on cops, but that was just nuts.
Some of the stuff with the Hell's Angels was probably just them being thuggish because they could. Notably, they bum rushed the stage during the Jefferson Airplane's set, knocking Marty Balin out cold. (Unfortunately, the camera crews got no good footage of that moment.) Obviously he was not creating a security disturbance by playing his set.
Then when a band member said something about it from the stage, an Angel jumped up and seized the mic to tell them what time it was. That was just plain foolishness from the Angels there. In fairness though, who hasn't wanted to jump up on stage with a pool cue and knock out some long-haired pinko singing about peace and love when there's commies needing killed? (I apologize for political editorial.)
Anyway, the Angels were in a tough position, and a lot of their behavior might be written off to legitimate fear. They were in WAY over their heads even just trying to protect the stage- which was only maybe three or four feet high, and thus easily accessible to any crazed fan wanting to jump up- which of course they did. On top of which, there were maybe a couple or few dozen Angels amongst perhaps as many as 400,000 mostly heavily drugged concert goers. Of course, their own heavy imbibement wasn't helping that much.
Still, you might have a little empathy for this handful of bikers trying to maintain some semblance of control over these enthusiastic fans, some of whom were fighting amongst themselves or just freaking out. Note the freak out boy on the stage two steps from Jagger a minute or so before the Hunter incident. Imagine yourself in the position of a Hell's Angel faced with a few hundred people looking like this:
In the face of this chaos and these numbers, it's somewhat understandable that the Angels' natural reaction was to bust heads and make an example of anybody close who as much as looked at them funny. Basic physical intimidation would be an obvious blunt point in what they would think of to keep the trippin' freaks from completely losing control.
Hey, fear of the Hell's Angels may well have been the thin line that kept the hippies from just stampeding and accidentally killing the Stones themselves. Looking at that crowd, it could easily enough have played out that way. Not even by evil intent, what if a couple thousand of these kids who had thrown off all those crazy societal rules had decided that they had to touch the hem of Mick's garment like Jebus?
Furthermore, there's a distinct sense that the Stones themselves had just such thoughts as they stood there helpless. You could readily see all pretensions to messianic or Satanic status evaporate as Mick desperately struggled to avoid something really bad happening to him standing right then and there. For being the master thespian and author of all evil- the devil incarnate - Mick Jagger really looked like a mere prancing little fairy boy by the end of this. Note his incredibly lame interactions with the audience.
He made repeated threats to stop playing, but even as he's saying them you know that there wasn't a chance that he would dare to do so. Under those completely freaky circumstances, he could very well have been killed, sacrificed on the spot to the god Dionysus like the mother parading down the street with her son's head on a stick at the end of Euripides' play about The Bacchants. There's a distinct sense to their actual musical performance by the end that they were playing as good as if they thought their lives literally depended on it.
Also, the Hell's Angels were pretty heavy-handed, but they were not just completely going nuts. For starters, they came riding their motorcycles right through the crowd to park under the stage- but even with that kind of display, the Angels weren't carrying guns. Their tool of choice was the sawed-off pool cue. That's perhaps got a more intimidating idea behind it, but it's basically equivalent to a cop carrying a nightstick. Depending on training and use, that would not be an entirely unreasonable tool for major crowd control.
Some of that thuggish Hell's Angels behavior earlier in the day during the Jefferson Airplane set might have been considered largely gratuitous. They seemed to be knocking people around to some extent just because they could. Even at that though, one could not entirely unreasonably judge it a public service to give a deserving dirty hippie a good beat down. (Sorry- I was channeling Cartman again there for a minute.)
By the time the Stones hit the stage that night though, the Angels were pretty clearly in a combat survival mode. Looking at the footage, they seemed quite anxious simply to avoid some kind of serious massacre, which this many heavily doped up people could easily have done even just accidentally. They've got an easily accessible three foot or so high stage. What would have stopped them?
Specifically though, the famous climactic killing of Meredith Hunter was absolutely clean as regards the Hell's Angels. There are witnesses claiming that Hunter pulled out a gun, and took a shot in the direction of the stage, supposedly grazing an Angel. I don't know about all of that, but here's the money shot of the whole film where you can unmistakably see Meredith Hunter with a gun in his hand.
So this fool kid absolutely pulled out a gun in the middle of hundreds of thousands of people, maybe 20 yards from the Stones on stage, and with a bunch of Hell's Angels standing there. Folks, Meredith Hunter committed suicide. Crazy sumbitch whips out a gun in a crowd like that, they're asking to be terminated with extreme prejudice. The Hell's Angels were simply obliging him.
Specifically, from the film Hell's Angel Alan Passaro is seen bringing down the knife. He was stabbed repeatedly and stomped to death immediately. He was long dead when paramedics got there. Three years later in 1972, Passaro eventually faced a murder charge, but was acquitted by a jury. I'd figure they'd have to have acquitted just on the basis of the picture of Hunter with the gun in his hand alone, besides any other testimony.
Naturally there was a great deal of controversy after the event regarding the role of the film crew. How much of this chaos came from them doing this whole event as a climax for their movie? The correct answer there seems to be NONE. Watching the whole movie of the tour up to and including the Altamont concert, there's no sign of anything being particularly staged for the camera crews. They had no special access to the Stones personally at any time in the tour, and no sign that I could see of getting any accommodation at all.
They had a handful of guys running around with cameras grabbing what they could. As I understand and find fairly easy to believe, they got some of the footage of the Hell's Angels knocking people around actually somewhat surreptitiously. Now, this part is not on film, but from later accounts of the film crew. Apparently though, as trouble started at a couple of points Angels demanded that they not film this part, and the cameraman left the camera running from his shoulder pack as he's physically looking away. That this worked - repeatedly - does not speak well for the high brain power of the Angels.
One thing that struck me a bit sour regarding the finished movie though - and this reflects particularly on the Rolling Stones who financed it, they went through the whole movie without ever even so much as mentioning the name Meredith Hunter or the name of the guy who stabbed him on film, Alan Passaro. They totally, absolutely gave not one bit of detail about the events other than the immediate footage, maybe thirty seconds with some kind of EMT on scene and Mick Jigger's limp reaction to watching the footage again in the editing room. "Oh, it's so horrible."
That's pretty much de-humanizing them, making Hunter not quite human- just a grainy image from a surveillance video. Seems like they'd have spent a minute or so explaining who the guy was and a few details of exactly what happened. That strikes me as an attempt to keep the incident at arms length, not really quite real people.
You can't fault the Angels for killing a guy with a gun in his hand. Still, these Angels on stage a couple of minutes after seem rather unseemly in their giddy high from the blood sacrifice. Jumping' Jehosaphat, from those looks of ecstasy on their faces, you'd think they were getting ready to look for someplace private where they could hump one another in celebration. As the Satanic woodland critters on South Park said, "Blood orgy, blood orgy!"
Naturally, after the event there was all sorts of finger pointing. There was a famous call in show on radio KSAN the next day in which Sonny Barger told what might be considered the official Hell's Angels version of the story. He claimed that the Angels were never told they were supposed to be security. They were just going to get to drink beer and sit on the stage. That claim doesn't quite make sense to me- which isn't to say it wasn't true. He also claimed that Mick Jagger among others was twisting things to set the Hell's Angels up as the goats. I find that fairly easy to believe. They would certainly be the obvious unsympathetic characters to scapegoat.
Probably the best overall perspective on the situation came from Grace Slick on stage with the Jefferson Airplane just a couple of minutes after the Angels had knocked out her bandmate. "People get weird, and you need people like the Angels to keep people in line. But the Angels also- you know, you don't bust people in the head for nothing. So both sides are fucking up temporarily. Let's not keep fucking up."
Pool cues.
http://post.ly/hxPT (this next sentence is my YouTube boast, but it still might be true--let's just say: when I was 16-18 I watched more Gimme Shelter-related stuff than the average guy--and never saw this part)
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Watch Rare 9 Min. Interview with Mick JAGGER
Apture™
One of the best interviews you've probably never seen. And even though he's speaking French, if you don't understand French (it's Mick Jagger speaking French--even I had a pretty good grip on what he was saying, as he breaks into English most of the time).
Interview With John Morthland, part 2
William: Going a little off topic, I'm a big fan of a lot of L.A. bands from the '60s, and reading up on that scene it seems like there was a great deal of animosity between the L.A. and San Francisco scenes of the time. Particularly a lot of condescension towards L.A. bands from the Bay Area scene. Since you were there could you give me some perspective on how you see it?
John: Yeah, there was enmity, sure, you know the idea that L.A. bands were plastic and commercial whores and that San Francisco bands were exploratory and revolutionary. It was a pretty serious rivalry.
William: More recently, you know, there's been a lot of revision looking at how many L.A. bands were really quite good and maybe aged better than the San Francisco stuff.
John: Yeah, sure, the funny thing is unless you're thinking really hard about it, at the time that was going on you could be in the Bay Area as I was and like lots of L.A. bands and still maintain in your head that schism. You know, to this day I really don't much like L.A. In my head I could be a Bay Area chauvinist and still like a lot of L.A. bands. But for that matter, in, you know, in Berkeley-Oakland by the late '60s there was a terrible rivalry between them and San Francisco. The San Francisco bands were Art with a capital A and the East Bay bands were cool and funky and they played clubs and sounded really gritty, and they played songs and the San Francisco bands jammed. And there was a really intense rivalry; these were pretty intense times.
William: Who were some of the East Bay bands?
John: In the '60s the biggest East Bay band was Country Joe & the Fish, and that was the other thing: the East Bay bands were seen as political and the San Francisco bands weren't. There was a terrible split all through the '60s between the political activists and the "turn on tune in drop out" people. That was an incredible schism. Later there was Commander Cody, Tower of Power, Joy of Cooking, and they were really rootsier and funkier, more grass roots in tone, they played in bars mainly as opposed to the Fillmore, which they would play at, but still mainly bars.
But of the L.A. bands I was a huge Buffalo Springfield fan, I liked the Byrds, of course--I mean, everybody liked the Byrds even the people who hated L.A. The first Doors album I loved.
William: I guess the Beach Boys were considered pretty uncool at the time?
John: They were so out of it that no one really thought about them, although people in L.A. still took them real seriously. That whole Brian-is-a-genius mystique really took hold during the hippie era, that was an L.A. thing. Nobody I knew--I mean, that was an embarrassment, people I knew were embarrassed that they ever liked the Beach Boys. And of course within a few years people were coming back to them anyhow.
William: Of course, now there's a huge interest in that stuff again.
John: Yeah, there was a period back then where people hated the Beach Boys and then started coming back round to it again.
William: I do think a lot of the L.A. bands music has aged better than the San Francisco ones.
John: Yeah, I can see that because the San Francisco bands--I liked them almost all when they came out, you know, they were your local bands, but I got tired of jam bands really fast. And for me, of the San Francisco bands, my favorite is that first Moby Grape album and the first Country Joe album, although at the time they came out I wouldn't say they were my favorites. It was not an easy music to get on record, especially back then, the technology just couldn't accommodate a lot of those bands. The people who really loved those bands, you almost had to see them to understand why, because they couldn't do on record what they could do live. And that was another thing, the L.A. bands were all in the studios using all these sound effects and they were not live bands; even the good bands, like the Byrds were very iffy live, and Buffalo Springfield was too for that matter.
William: You currently write for Texas Monthly on a variety of topics, mostly non-musical. How did you make the transition away from music writing?
John: By the mid '70s I was hardly writing about mainstream major label rock anymore. By that time I was writing about country and blues and gospel and reggae. That's just where my interests were taking me. You know, it just reached a point where, and this was like 25 years ago, o.k., the Stones announce a new tour, say '75 or '77, and 100 million words are written about the new Stones tour and they appear in every magazine in the world. I just don't have anything to add to that really. And so part of the way I've kept myself fresh as a writer is to write about stuff that isn't getting written about too much by other people. But that's only part of it, because that's where my interests took me anyhow, you know, I got less and less interested in mainstream rock. I got more interested in blues, jazz, and world music, historical stuff. I left New York at the end of 1984. When I was in New York everything writing wise was very compartmentalized. I wrote about music almost exclusively and that's part of the reason I left. I was all "New Yorked out" is the way I always put it. I had had nine years there and I just didn't want to live there anymore. But it was also because I didn't see how I could do anything but write about music while I was there. Meanwhile I had known Austin Texas for years, had a lot of friends here and had spent a lot of time here as a visitor, loved the music here and also knew I could write about other stuff here. So really when I left New York I became less and less of a music writer.
William: How long have you been in Austin?
John: Since '85. I came to Texas in '84. I first came to Austin to visit in '73. Ed Ward and I came with Commander Cody when he cut a live album at the Armadillo. And I loved Austin and I knew I'd always wind up here. I lived in Dallas for eight or nine months in '84. I edited a magazine there that didn't survive and then I came down here. All through the '70s I was writing a lot about country music, so I was coming down here a lot 'cause that's when the Willie and Waylon and the Armadillo and all that was going on. I was always getting stories down here and I had a lot of friends down here. By the time I moved here I had a lot of good friends here. Joe Nick Patoski, one of my closest friends, I met him in '75 or '76, and I used to always stay with him. And then Ward moved here from the Bay Area. So I've always had a lot of friends and ties here.
William: When did you start writing for Texas Monthly?
John: Not right away, I knew some people there, like Joe Nick Patoski, who had been a good friend of mine for 8 or 9 years by that point. I think as soon as I got here I started to do occasional things, but very occasional. I was still writing a lot about music but at the monthly I was getting to do other stuff. Then in '86 I started to edit an airline magazine, which I really loved. At the time there was a company here that was putting out the airline magazines for Branniff and Continental and Eastern I think it was, and I did the Branniff one. I really liked it, it was fun to edit travel pieces and just to deal with other kind of material. I've never stopped writing about music but it's been a long time since I've written about the popular bands of the day.
William: Your book the Best of Country Music, any plans to update it?
John: It went out of print really fast. At the time I wrote it, country music didn't have the across the board following that it does now. There was no alt-country then or anything like that, you know, it was Nashville and L.A. Since then we've gone from LPs to CDs. People are always asking me if I'm gonna revise it, but no, someone on the web revised it and annotated it for the CD era and that's on the web. I'd have to go back and start over from scratch, everything has changed so much since then.
William: What music do you listen to the most these days?
John: I listen a lot to certain kinds of world music. African and Caribbean stuff. I listen a lot to blues and Texas music in general. I listen to a lot of Austin music, 'cause I prefer it, it's where my interests took me to a large extent. I like more of the stuff out of here than anything else.
William: You mentioned how when you and your peers started you were all sort of learning as you went along, I was curious how you feel your writing has developed over time?
John: When I started writing for Rolling Stone, I had studied high school journalism, I had been Editor of my school paper, I had worked for my home town daily, so my background was in daily journalism, to the extent that I had one, but it was fairly significant. I had worked two summers on my home town daily, all kind of beats, I would take the place of whoever was on vacation, two weeks on the police beat, two weeks on school board, I would go out to the Mojave Desert Bureau office for 3 weeks then I'd come back and be on the Sports desk. So my real training was sort of who, what, when, where, why, and that whole daily journalism thing, pyramid style and that kind of stuff.
William: And that in a way was an asset being able to bring that to the table with the early Rock writing?
John: Yeah, 'cause I knew how to go get information. By now I'm sure everybody does. At that time I knew how to go to the police, what to ask them, if we were trying to find info on injuries, how to call hospitals and EMS--for Altamont, for instance--I called around local hospitals 'cause there were really chaotic reports and confusion regarding the amount of injuries and how many were killed. So yeah the daily helped me a lot in that sense, as far as my music writing. When I first started writing, my high school teacher, Sam Feldman, was the faculty sponsor of the student paper and I came on with him as a sports writer and he also moonlighted as a sports writer on the local daily and he got me started there. He quit teaching there before I graduated but we stayed in touch and in the early '70s he came up to the Bay Area where I was staying at the time and we went out to dinner and he was asking me about rock writing and I was joking with him that it was a lot more like sports writing than anything else. I was half serious and half joking. And there are similarities in, say, the use of a lot of flashy adjectives, a lot of personalities on both sides, sports writers were allowed to have a certain amount of flair; in a way, until rock writing came along, sports writing was considered the bottom of the ladder.
As for developing my own style, when I read stuff I'm not really reading other writers to see how they do things, I'm just really reading for pleasure, and I'm sure I take in a certain amount by osmosis, unconsciously, but I'm not someone who reads Faulkner and writes those kind of sentences. So I think when I first started writing fairly well was around '75 or so. And I had been doing it for about five years by then. I was sort of all over, I was looking for a style, I wasn't quite sure what I was doing, I had worked at Rolling Stone, then I had freelanced, then I worked at Creem, and at that time, '75, I had just left Creem. I think my style is pretty straightforward, not a lot of flourishes, not a lot of extra words. So by about '75 or so I'd fallen into that style which I was more comfortable with and since then it's been more a matter of refining that. It's hard to say how my style has developed because I'm not a real stylist like Lester, Meltzer, or Tosches.
William: But your background in dailies continued to inform your writing?
John: I guess, you know, in a way it did. One of the ways I was different from a lot of my peers was that I did have that background in dailies. I sort of knew what the rules were before I went about breaking them. It taught me the rules of journalism and then I figured on my own how and where and when to break them. But at the same time by the early to mid '70s I don't think I could have been a standard daily newspaper writer, because by then I wasn't as interested in following that format.
William: How would you describe your editing style?
John: Because I never had any real training as an editor, I definitely learned as I went along. To the extent that I had a style, I tried to be what's called a writer's editor. My concern was what is this writer trying to say and how can I help him say it better. When I was at Creem, a large number of the writers who submitted stuff were imitating Lester, and not very well. And I can remember telling a few people, "Hey, you're trying to write too much like Lester. You need to try and find you own voice." And some of them went on to be pretty successful doing an imitation Lester. So I tried to be a writer's editor and I tried to make sure that writers found their own voice. Also, you try to match the right assignment to the right writer.
Creem and Rolling Stone are the only two places where I did much editing. At Rolling Stone I edited mainly the front of the book, the news type stuff, not random notes, the shorter articles in the first third of the magazine, mainly news oriented stuff. At Creem, Lester edited the record reviews, and everything else passed through me, which was sort of the idea of me going there.
William: Who are some of your favorite Rock writers?
John: You mean now or at the time?
William: Both.
John: To be honest with you, I don't read the rock press right now. I still read rock writers but I don't read the music press. Most of the music writing I read is in general interest magazines and weekly papers. In the past, you know, pretty much the same as everybody else's, certain people emerged really early on, Lester, Greil, Meltzer, Tosches. I've always loved Peter Guralnick's stuff.
Later, like, say, the mid to late '70s there was a second wave coming in. And by then I was in New York and there was a first wave of Black writers writing about Black music like Greg Tate, Nelson George, Carol Cooper, and Thulani Davis--those four were all Village Voice writers. Thulani didn't write all that much about music but when she did she wrote about it really well, and the other three wrote about music a lot and are really good writers.
William: What about some of the English writers, the NME people, for instance?
John: I didn't see it that often, that was something you had to go out and buy and I often didn't have the money. But I would say of the English writers, Mick Farren was a writer I always liked a lot. Charles Shaar Murray, I liked pretty good.
William: Nick Kent?
John: He didn't do too much for me, I didn't dislike him, maybe the bands he wrote about just didn't interest me as much. Who else...Charlie Gillett, who wrote one of the first real rock books, Sound of the City, and I always followed him after that. It was an incredibly ambitious book at the time, it gathered so much information that had never been gathered before, in terms of record labels, profiles of the labels, and the identity of that label within the city, regional music.
William: What about the historical fiction book by Mark Shipper about the Beatles--Paperback Writer?. Do you know what happened to him?
John: This is one of the things I've been thinking about since we talked last time and you asked me about really good writers early on that no one's heard of now. The thing is there were some, many I still can't remember the names of now, but a lot of them went on to other stuff as a conscious decision. And he was one of them; I believe he works at an Ad Agency. At that time he did a certain amount of writing for the rock press, mainly for the sort of off the wall press like Creem and a magazine at that time called Phonograph Record Magazine that was a lot more wide open than something like Rolling Stone. And he wrote at places like that for some time but I don't think he ever aspired to be a professional writer. I could be wrong.
When Paperback Writer came out there was absolutely nothing like it at the time, the idea that you could make up the whole history of a band was really great. I think it was eventually picked up by a publisher, but I know he published it himself first. And certainly within the more rambunctious school of rock writers that book was really a legend, and really cool and just a great idea. And actually no one's really done it since, with another band. Lester started to do it with the Stones and he gave it up. I've read some of it and you know, it's hard once you've read Paperback Writer, its hard to read anything else like that, he did it first and he did it as good as it can be done. It's a really amazing piece of work.
William: I've only heard Lester mention the Beatles in passing but in the intro to Psychotic Reactions, Greil mentions that one of the books he had proposed writing was a history of the Beatles to be entitled the "Firstest with the Mostest".
John: Really? I don't even remember that. I don't remember Lester ever aspiring to do a book on the Beatles. Particularly 'cause back then it was so hard to get a book on any rock band published--maybe the Beatles was the only band that you could get one published on.
William: I would be curious about his take on them.
John: Ah, like his take on a lot of bands he went back and forth on them. I mean, if you look at his really early stuff he obviously loved them and then at a certain point he stopped liking them, and then with hindsight what he liked and what he didn't like changed. He blamed them for the death of rock because of "art" albums like Sgt. Pepper and then at a certain point they just became pathetic to him when they were doing all these solo albums. I'm gonna use a piece he wrote in the anthology called "Dandelions in Still Air: the Withering Away of the Beatles" a piece about the solo careers of the four Beatles written about '74. It was published in the Real Paper, which was one of the Boston weeklies, and also reprinted in Creem.
William: Let's talk a little bit about the anthology in terms of its content and structure
John: Sure, you know, the way Greil did it worked so well, that I can't really do that again. I'm grouping pieces, I have about four or five categories. There's gonna be one full chapter and two excerpted chapters from Drug Punk, which is something he wrote when he was still in San Diego. It's nonfiction and in it he talks about how he tried and tried to write like William Burroughs and he couldn't do it but then he realized that he could apply a lot of non-fiction and just write about the world around you. Some of it is really really good and some of it is hardly readable.
William: Did he revisit it and fuss with it?
John: No, not at all, never revisited it at all. It was written in '67 and '68, so that will start the anthology off. I'm doing a little more record reviews than Greil. That sort of short slashing stuff he wrote, a little bit more in the way of reviews. It's been really difficult in a lot of ways 'cause Greil did a really good job in picking pieces. It's been difficult for me, 'cause so much of what would be my first choice is stuff he already used. There's a little more stuff from out of the way places. I mean, Lester wrote for fanzines, a couple of things that most people haven't seen, there's a pretty good amount of previously unpublished stuff besides Drug Punk. There's a Lou Reed piece and possibly Lester's initial review of Metal Machine Music, which he then expanded on in the next issue of Creem (which is in Carburetor Dung); the first article with Lou during that mid '70s phase when they were really duking it out. Greil didn't use that and I think I'm gonna use that. There's a piece about Nico written for a new wave publication that ran for about three or four issues and went out of business before it could use Lester's Nico piece, then it got picked up by What Goes On, which was the Velvets fanzine out of Boston at the time.
I wrestled and wrestled with some of the unpublished pieces, some of them are so long that I just couldn't use them, but I couldn't find ways to excerpt them either. There is a fairly long one written a couple of days after Sid Vicious OD'd and that ran about 1990 or so in a fanzine that was doing a Lester thing. So most people won't have seen that.
William: Any non-music writing?
John: Oh sure, there is a long fantasy about Jimmy Carter in bed with Jane Fonda that is about 3,000 words, excerpted from a 10,000 word thing that was sort of music--it was about the Reagan-Carter presidential race in 1980. It was about both of them trying to enlist punk rock groups to their campaigns. That piece did appear in total in a fanzine, I'm using just an excerpt; it didn't quite work as a whole piece. There's a piece about California, when he went back to California to visit, that's never been published. There's a piece from the six or eight months he spent in Austin--he wrote this huge piece about Austin bands and Austin music and little pieces of it appeared in little magazines but most of it didn't appear anywhere. And again most of it doesn't make it as a whole piece, but I excerpted about three or four thousand words about him and the Delinquents playing a frat party. There's a piece that ran in sort of a local Austin punk 'zine called Contempo Culture that hardly anyone has seen, and that's just sort of a Lester screed, harangue, whatever. He wrote a piece that was gonna be liner notes in 1980 for this album by this German singing group, the Comedian Harmonists, but the album never came out. Then, three or four years ago it finally got out as a CD; they didn't use Lester's liner notes for the CD booklet, but what happened was the New York Times ran them as just sort of a previously unpublished "Lester Bangs discovers a new kind of music" piece. So that ran 20 years after it was written, but that will be new to a lot of people.
As far as dividing them, I'm thinking about calling one section "Travelogue," 'cause one of my favorite Lester things was when he got somewhere he'd never been, and there's really long piece, 15,000 words, and I've cut it a little bit but not much, that ran in Creem about when he went to Jamaica. That's gonna be in there along with this California piece and something about a Moroccan band he did in the mid-70s. One of the pieces I'm gonna put in there in fact is an interview he made up with Jimi Hendrix five years after Hendrix's death.
And then there's gonna be a section I'm thinking of calling "Pantheon" and that's where I'll put pieces on the people that were his real obsessions: there's gonna be 3 or 4 Stones pieces, two Miles Davis pieces, and the Lou Reed and Nico is gonna go there. There's a Black Sabbath two-parter from Creem that I just wrestled with and could never get to my satisfaction, but I think I've got it in shape now, and that will go there. And this will be considerably shorter than what appeared in Creem. It's been cut and a lot of what was cut was lyrics. There was a little too much interview in it and not enough of Lester writing, so I cut a lot of the interview so you could read more of Lester writing about Black Sabbath rather than Ozzy talking about Black Sabbath. And a Jim Morrison piece will probably be in there too.
William: "Bozo Dionysus"?
John: Yeah, that's the one.
William: That's a good one.
John: The book should end up being about 400 pages.
William: Who are some of the writers from when you were just starting that you feel have maybe been neglected historically?
John: Among neglected rock crits, I can't remember back to my RS days who was great but subsequently went missing, except for J.R. Young, who invented the parable-or-short-story-as-rock-criticism. In the Bay Area, I can remember a guy named Sandy Darlington who wrote mostly for the San Francisco underground weekly, Good Times, and was just one of the greatest among the early rock critics, though he never had a national profile, never pursued it, and I have no idea where he is now or what he's doing.
I can remember early to mid-70s Creem writers like Joe Fernbacher and Robert Hull and others who, for the most part, gave up writing, though some are still involved in other aspects of the music world. I think most of the good ones who gave it up did so because it was always a sideline. Some good ones gave it up because for whatever reasons they just couldn't make a living at it. But I'm talking about the ones, like, say, Tom Smucker, who preferred to keep regular jobs and write about music very selectively on the side, and with a few exceptions very few really good, occasional writers find the atmosphere or outlets anymore to pursue it that way.
Among other later critics that come to mind, punk produced Mary Harron (now a successful film director), Gina Arnold, and Don Snowden (who eventually moved towards blues, jazz, world); post-punk Ann Powers, Lorraine Ali, and Chuck Eddy, the best rock critic there ever was who mostly celebrates stuff other rock critics can't stand. Somewhere in there is Robert Gordon, whose It Came From Memphis is the best unknown rock book I know of aside from the Mark Shipper Beatles satire we already discussed. Many good ones went into other kinds of writing and/or editing: Daisann McLane is a travel writer; RJ Smith is an editor/writer who still writes some about music. Dave Hickey went to New York City from Texas in the early '70s to edit Art in America, became a really fine rock and country music writer, and is currently one of the nation's leading art critics; I was completely unaware of him until he began writing about music for Creem, the Village Voice and Country Music magazines, but I've continued reading him after he went back to art as his primary subject, even though it's a subject I'm generally not very interested in. He's not neglected, but the late Robert Palmer was one of my absolute favorites, and probably influenced me as much as any other music writer did, if only because we liked so much of the same music and he was arguably the only one who could write equally well about everything from punk to mainstream rock to blues and jazz to world music; he's also one of the few with a strong technical knowledge of music who didn't let that get in the way of being able to discuss what really mattered to someone listening to music as a pure fan, with no technical knowledge, like me. Gene Santoro is the closest thing we have today to a Palmer, though I don't believe he's quite as well grounded technically. I really miss Paul Nelson, whose work was so emotionally honest that it helped keep me honest. I really wish Stanley Booth published more often. Michael Corcoran is the only rock critic today I read real regular, because he's in my hometown daily, and he's my current fave; he'd be among my faves even if he wasn't the one I read most often, 'cause he's just such a strong writer. I really love the work of Gerald Early; though nobody thinks of him as a music writer, he is a contemporary African-American cultural commentator whose subject is often music, and I lap up anything I can find by him. Among Brits I neglected to mention, Simon Frith, in Creem of the '70s especially, was just so intelligent and engaging. More recently, Barney Hoskyns.
Today, I also like, and regularly visit, even if sometimes I don't wind up reading much, Jason Gross's Perfect Sound Forever and Sarah Zupko's Pop Matters online.
William: What are your thoughts on how music writing has evolved, and its current state?
John: Well, you know, everyone always asks that and the answer is pretty obvious. It's become really institutionalized and tame and not very interesting, although there are still excellent writers out there working. Among the younger ones, they come up having studied a form and they sort of execute the form. I don't see much in the way of individuality there, of really thinking about the stuff as opposed to evaluating it for a marketplace. There's very little sense of discovery in it anymore, most people are working a form, basically. And there are a million reasons for that. At one time there were so few people writing about it there was sort of a feeling of discovery with all of them. And now it's in every daily paper, it's everywhere. What once used to be called music writing is now celebrity journalism. I read very little rock writing, very little music writing. Like I said, at one time there was so little of it that you could read it all. And now there's so much of it that you can hardly make a dent in it and I don't even try. I have favorites and I read them when I see them.
I like to read and I have very little free reading time, but I tend not to read the music press too much. I tend to read novels and general interest magazines. But I find that in general music writing is often better in the non-music publications because in the general interest publications there's no dependence on the record companies for ad revenues. And so the writers tend to have freer reign. So I find the best music writing to be in the non-music publications and that's all wrong, you know it shouldn't be that way. I mean the best sports writing is in sports magazines, the best food writings in food magazines, why isn't the best music writing in music magazines?
Back to part 1 of John Morthland interview
The Rolling Stones
"Jumpin' Jack Flash"
"Love in Vain"
"Under My Thumb" (stopped then restarted because of fights breaking out)
"Live with Me"
"Gimme Shelter"
"Little Queenie"
"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"
"Honky Tonk Women"
"Street Fighting Man"
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