ROCK OF FUCKING AGES

Since George Bush has done nothing apocalyptically deranged over the weekend, the Democrat demolition derby won’t resume until tomorrow, and I’m absolutely determined not to discuss the Scott Peterson or Kobe Bryant trials, lets talk rock & roll. In fact, let’s talk rock & roll history. A very small and slightly demented part of me still feels that rock & roll shouldn’t have a history, but that’s the same reactionary part that also thinks that rock songs should be 2.45 minutes long, and come on seven-inch, black-vinyl platters that explode after exactly three weeks. The primary and more rational mind, knows damn well that all things are collected, and sold on eBay, and that everything has a history. Modern rock may be more a consumer product than a force for insurrection, Lust For Life may be a cruise line commercial, and the survivors of the MC5 may have sold out to Levis in Japan, but this is not to deny that, back in the day, the changes in the mode of the music soundly shook the walls of the city, and maybe the stories from the day should be recorded for posterity.

The problem that I’m experiencing is that I’ve spent two thirds of a lifetime in and out of the history of rock & roll, and close to more than my fair share of significant events and the damage done, and now I seem to be needed to tell the tale. In the current issue of Mojo, the brit retro-rock mag, I find myself – along with Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, Joe Boyd, Robert Wyatt, Roger Waters, Arthur Bown and a bunch of others – all over an “oral history” of UFO, the formative London psychedelic club. (I can’t offer a link, Emap, the parent corp doesn’t run a free, online version of the mag.) The issue is billed as an “Acid Special” with stories about the Doors, Hendrix, Spirit etc., but much of it seems to have been written by guys who no only weren’t born at the time, but seem to have never taken acid in their lives, and one even has the audacity to claim that this D21C band – the abominable fake Doors with Ray Manzarek and Ian Astbury – might be better than the original, although how he can know, never having seen the fucking Doors with Jim escapes me.

On the whole, though, the Mojo experience was okay. The story of UFO is probably better told in Give The Anarchist A Cigarette, but what the hell? The writer Johnny Black called me. I had just smoked a joint, and I waxed eloquent. I figure the traditional place for the old gunfighter is in the back of the bar copping free drinks while he tells his tall tales. Johnny was phoning from England, so he couldn’t spring for the Jack and a beer back, but plenty have. Unfortunately, a whole new factor has recently come into play with the spread of email. The market used to be flooded with cheap cut’n’paste rock books that recycled other books and magazine interviews ripped off pretty much verbatim. When lawsuits finally caught up with that game, the oral history became the thing. Legs McNeil was the master of that trade, but he always at least bought dinner, and even paid Angie Bowie when she demanded money. And he knew how edit his tapes. Now we have the internet, everything has changed. At least three or four times a month, I receive questionnaires from someone who is writing a book about some facet of the sixties and seventies. At first, I dutifully responded, figuring I was consolidating myself as a (so far) living legend, but, lately, not only are the questionnaires getting longer, but I suddenly twigged that what was really going on. These writers were simply pasting together the ad hoc prose of myself and other old lags. They weren’t even transcribing tape, and certainly not springing from the booze. In fact, we were writing their fucking books for them, one email at a time. One young women, with over twenty detailed questions that needed one or two paragraph answers, grew quite miffed when I told her everything she wanted to know was in my own book, and even had the temerity to simper that she would so much rather have my fresh thoughts on the subject. Right dear, I bet you would. No copyright.

Okay, so I’m damned happy to be a living legend, but the work load is getting absurd, and all these rock histories are pure business and not part of any revolution I’m fighting. I’m not quite sure what to do about it. I know John Hopkins, another grizzled psychedelic veteran, is now charging fifty bucks an hour to reminisce. That seems tacky, but there’s got to be some solution. Maybe I’d settle for a bottle of absinthe in the mail before I start spinning the glory yarns. Doc40 is my labor of love, and, with it, I figure I gave at the office. Comments?

Oh yeah, I’m toying with my own book on the real-deal history of psychedelic music and audio mind-expansion, so publishers take note.

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COMMERCIAL
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MEANWHILE

As I write this, there’s a deranged guy called Dante driving round LA with his dead wife in the car, having just murdered her and burned down the family home. Simultaneously the media is in an uproar about Janet Jackson's right tit being exposed on the Superbowl halftime show. I defy anyone to maintain a perspective as the world abandons logic and probably hope. (But what was that you said? Turn off the TV?)

And Dante and Janet almost causes me to forget that today is Groundhog Day. Go Punxsutawney Phil!

CRYPTIQUE – The plugs may have been rewired.