Acknowledging My Influences

Before I post my own stuff on here I want to acknowledge five great music writers who have influenced my thinking :-

1. Nick Kent

The NME from'72 to '74 was a thrill for me each week. I didn't always agree with Nick Kent - he liked the glammy side of things and was often obsessed with style. However he had a genuine passion for the music and a way of writing about it which conveyed its essence to the reader. He introduced me to the roaring hurricane which is Iggy & The Stooges' "Raw Power" - a true classic of thunderous, manic, heavy metal. He also wrote superb investigative pieces on Syd Barrett and Nick Drake, showing a true empathy with the melancholic depth and strangeness of the English muse. Then there was his three-part epic on Brian Wilson in 1975, which gave me such an insight into the spirit behind The Beach Boys music and the mid-sixties LA scene. We had a hero in common - Keith Richards.

He wrote many exciting album reviews and retrospectives - his work on "Physical Graffiti", Nils Lofgren's "1+1", "Blood On The Tracks", and "Tonight's The Night" comes to mind. Two reviews of his stand out in my memory :-

"The Ramones" - he conveyed the revolutionary power of the band's minimalism and righly hailed this as the masterpiece of "moron rock" which it is. Crucially, he wrote about how this music speaks to "us loser white kids". In an interview with Zigzag in 1976 he spoke about how he was thin and weedy at school and didn't like sport. He understands how rock music speaks for the outsider and helps you survive when the world around you is brutish. He spoke for me and countless other nerdy kids who were bullied for being intelligent and struggled to get girlfriends.

"Marquee Moon" (Television) - this review shone like a beacon of hope when it emerged in January 1977. There I was in Oxford surrounded by public school types, and here was a review that spoke of the gleaming guitar of my heroes such as Quicksilver and Country Joe and linked it to this album. I can remember many a late night pouring over this writing and being so glad that someone out there was excited by the same things as I was. The album, when I eventually got it, turned out to be a slight let-down; the guitar-playing is as spectacular as Kent said, but the songs are not all that strong and the singing very weak. The 10-minute title track, though, is one of the few works from the late seventies to match the musicianship and inventiveness of the classic late 60s bands.

It is mainly Nick Kent's enthusiasm, love of everything about rock music, and fresh use of adjectives (such as "bracing chord progression") which has stayed with me and hopefully influenced my writing for the better.

2. Charles Shaar Murray

CSM was also part of the seminal team of writers at the NME in the early seventies. He often infuriated me - he was chronically "politically correct" and so, despite his love of blues/rock which you could see in his early articles, he got himself into the position whereby Jimi Hendrix (being, of course, black and therefore sanctified) was the only purveyor of the genre he allowed himself to like. He also frequently peppered his articles with "hip" Jamaican patois and bent over backwards to deny any "misogynism" in artists he liked. I will never forget a review he did of Ry Cooder's "Bop 'Till You Drop", where he tied himself in knots trying to convince us (and himself) that "The Very Thing That Makes You Rich" - a classic of blues misogyny - was meant ironically.

For all that, CSM was probably the most skilled writer of all rock critics. His 1975 review of Led Zeppelin at Earls Court got right to the core of Zeppelin's aesthetic; he put his finger on the tension between the rigorous control and apparent emotional spontaneity of the music with precision. He did a similar job with The Rolling Stones in 1976 with his famous "dream sequence" and his description of them in concert. He powerfully conveyed the fan's disappointment when a major artist failed to deliver, notably in his review of the Stones' "Black and Blue". At the time (April 1976) the Stones were still seen as unassailable, yet CSM's review oozed the sheer disbelief that such a great band could put out such third-rate fodder. He could be very amusing while doing this too, as in his 1975 interview with Paul McCartney, the theme of which was "how do you tell an ex-Beatle he's made a duff album ?".

For me his most memorable pieces were his 1977 in-depth profile of the revived Johnny Winter (plus his 1974 "Looking Back", which got me buying his records), his review of Patti Smith's "Horses", and his piece on The Clash's "London Calling". I was also always struck by his comments on Rod Stewart, who is surely the greatest artistic tragedy in rock. His vivid language, his ability to convey the environment and context within which an artist was working, and his analytical skills have given me much to think about over the years. According to his website he is now holding writing courses; they must be excellent value.

3. Ian MacDonald

The third of the great NME triumvirate. One of the saddest moments in my life was in early September 2003, when I sat down to relieve myself in the claustrophobically-tiny loo on a jet flying across the Atlantic. I opened my copy of Mojo and read of Ian Mac's suicide. He was a man plagued by depression throughout his life - you could tell that from his 2000 article on Nick Drake - and it had finally overcome him. For me this was one of those moments to go alongside the assassination of John Kennedy and the shooting of John Lennon - a "never forget where I was when I heard" day.

Ian MacDonald was the most intellectually-gifted man to write about music. He managed to bring a rigorously coherent approach to his work without losing his love for the core of rock music. While many critics tried to keep up with the trends (e.g. the rather terminally-hip John Peel), Ian Mac made the argument for his belief that rock music peaked in the 1960s when musicianship, idealism, and energy all collided and colluded. He was not ashamed to advance the view that music has been in decline since then.

Two major works in 1974 epitomise his greatness :-

1. His article on "Todd" by Todd Rundgren, where he picked up on the theme of trying to keep idealism alive in the 1970s which runs through the album. He tackled head-on the cynicism which was the prevailing culture of the time, and invented the concept of the "cosmic buffoon", the artist who stretches himself into areas he cannot comprehend but does so with so much passion that he takes you with him. He nailed down "Todd"'s achievement of facing the prevailing culture head-on, acknowledging the sell-outs of the late sixties, and standing up for idealism and optimism anyway. The album has stayed with me as a full-blown masterwork, a work which sustains its interest throughout and musically and lyrically examines just where rock music and its values had got to at the time.   

2. His re-appraisal of "On The Beach" by Neil Young. Weeks earlier the NME had published a review giving it the standard Neil Young fan's "thumbs down" - i.e. "where are all the nice tunes ?". Ian Mac, over a two-page spread, went through the album song-by-song and line-by-line and showed that it was actually a very brave and penetrating analysis of post-Watergate America and the place of rock'n'roll. He rightly compared the work to John Lennon's first solo album with its starkness and honesty. His argument in this piece was so compelling that it almost single-handedly transformed Neil Young's critical reputation in this country. It also showed me how a gifted thinker with the right heart could illuminate a piece of music in a way that less-rigorous critics could not. It confirmed for me the value of thought, logical argument, and attention to detail in rock writing.

Ian's contribution to the NME subsequently fell away, although there were still high points such as his appraisal of David Bowie's "Low". His last great work was "Revolution In The Head", his song-by-song analysis of The Beatles and the 1966s. As well as the expected close musical analysis, this book contains some moving evocations of just what it was like to be 14-17 in 1967 hearing magical works such as "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane". In his writing he captures the way in which Lennon and McCartney worked with and against each other, and picks up oft-neglected aspects such as the quality of Ringo's drumming (listen to "Rain" or "Day Tripper"). The book also re-dressed the balance of critical perspective on Paul McCartney, who had been so unfairly viewed as the "junior partner" since Lennon's death. This is one of those books which I shall always keep and consult regularly.

Ian MacDonald was a man who expanded the scope of rock criticism and had a very unique voice - the rigorous rationalist who retained his ideals. He could have achieved so much more as his work paid no lip-service to "staying contemporary". His death has left music writing very much the poorer.

4. Robert Christgau

The great thing about New York's Robert Christgau is that he attempted to a) construct a coherent and objective body of criticism based on a defined framework, and b) make this useful and accessible to "normal" people who don't get sent piles of free albums. His approach of declaring his prejudices upfront was behind me doing the same on this Blog; the grading system he introduced for his album reviews (also clearly defined) is also an approach I shall be adopting albeit with some "tweaks".

Robert began compiling his "Consumer Guides" in the late sixties when working for a newspaper. It consisted of short, pithy album reviews with a grade to sum them up and was aimed at people with a limited budget for buying albums. He then re-worked and compiled these into his "Consumers Guide to the Seventies" book. He has an amazing ability to pack a lot of ideas into a few sentences, and detects themes in records which others have missed - e.g. the stoic pessimism of Andy Fairweather-Lowe's three mid-seventies albums. He also had Abba well sussed - he concludes one brief review with "we have met the enemy and they are them". Some obvious prejudices creep into his work - for example, New York artists tend to get consistently higher grades than anyone else, and English progressive music gets short shrift. However this is thoroughly consistent with his declared principles. I still can't get over the New York Dolls being the only artists to receive two consecutive "A+"s though - but I'm bound to disagree with him sometimes given that my declared prejudices are different !

Christgau was a brilliant and perceptive conceptualist. Right at the start of the Eagles' career, when everyone else was lavishing praise upon them, he saw them for the conceited, cocaine-addled bland-outs which they are. He also came up with the brilliant label of "semipopular music" - this is music which is based upon popular forms but is listened to by a minority rather than a mass audience. This is the sort of music (Van Morrison, Traffic, Big Star, Little Feat, Bevis Frond, Robyn Hitchcock etc.) which has featured large in my listening habits ever since many decent bands stopped taking singles seriously at the start of the seventies, and Christgau, being (like me) a populist, picks out the ironies and implications of this phenomenon. Whereas sixties music aimed to convert the world, Seventies artists aimed to have a dialogue with their audiences; while a source of disappointment to people like me, Christgau rightly points out that a) this is part of the music maturing and b) the act of choosing populist forms is in itself populist even if the resulting music isn't actually all that popular !

There are pearls of insight throughout his writing, and his books are vital reading for anyone wanting to get deeper into the music. I hope I can apply some of his brilliant analysis and epigrammatic writing into my own work.         

5. Greil Marcus

I often find Greil Marcus' work woffly, pretentious, and far too fashion-conscious. The way he fell hook, line, and sinker for punk orthodoxy in the eighties was a major disappointment, and his book about Punk and the Situationist movement ("Lipstick Traces" 1990)  is largely a waste of space. However in the mid-seventies he did write the best book ever written about music, "Mystery Train".

In this book he brought all his erudition to bear in putting rock music in the context of American politics and culture. He showed how the shadow of Robert Johnson hangs over most subsequent American and English  rock music. His chapter on The Band's "Music From Big Pink" highlighted both the particular qualities of the group (three vocalists, five multi-instrumentalists) and the way the album evokes the dark shadows behind the American dream. He also draws out the tragedy of the group; how a great collective fell apart as it became increasingly Robbie Robertson's backing band.

His chapter on Sly Stone is a fascinating insight into black culture and politics in the US. His analysis of "There's A Riot Goin' On" was the first to identify the acuity of Sly Stone's vision and the sophistication of the music; it is single-handedly responsible for the high reputation that complex album now enjoys. He illustrates this by giving us a plotted history of the "Staggerlee" myth and how it relates to the dark themes in the album.

However the part which astonished me most was the "Presliad", which occupies the final half of the book. This is a sustained piece of writing covering the five singles Presley recorded for Sun in the 1950s, as well as commenting on the Comeback TV Special in 1968 and concert appearances in the 1970s. We see in these pages exactly why Presley was the definitive American artist and probably the most important cultural figure of the 20th Century. Right from the start, his records echoed with the sounds and themes of the Blues, Country, and Gospel traditions. Marcus also makes it clear how much Elvis himself had to do with his records; he was a painstaking artist who paid attention to every note, lyrical nuance, and vocal inflection. He reminds us just how explosive a record like "Baby Lets Play House" is. He gives us insight into just how high the stakes were when Elvis did the 1968 Comeback show, and how Elvis was shaking off the film years as he dug back into his music. This is thrilling and ground-breaking writing which is worth any number of reads.

Marcus achieved something similar with his "Invisible Republic" book about Dylan's basement tapes. He describes how he drove through the mountain areas of Virginia while listening to this music, and informs us of great American oddballs such as Doc Boggs whose music lurks in the background of Dylan's 1967 output. In these pages he evokes another America; the odd, eccentric, and wierd back-country regions which lie in between the art & commerce of New York and the showbiz of LA. Having driven across the USA last year, it is now an ambition of mine to go to Virginia and follow the route which Marcus took.

I have always been obsessed with the USA since childhood; Greil Marcus opened me up to the full richness of the culture and environment in that amazing country.