My whole life has been immersed in rock music, often to the puzzlement of people around me. ‘It’s just music,’ they’d say, not understanding how it was so much more than ‘just’ anything, as I read the engineering and production credits.
And doing this job puts you in touch with people all over the world who actually feel the same and are glad to hear from a soulmate. And what I’ve learned from thousands of communications is how similar we devotees are, sharing similar habits and obsessions and having gone to see the same people in concert. However, I’m envious of kids who grew up in American towns who had the opportunity of seeing loads of artists, who never came to the UK.
It’s funny really, at the time, I certainly thought of myself as a bit different as I hunted junk and record shops to expand my collection. But in fact, I was no different from 1000s of others who were probably looking for the same records.
I don’t know if you’ve found this as you traverse the years, constantly learning and absorbing information about bands, but I find myself having knowledge I didn’t know I had! Answering quiz questions on the radio and surprising myself. E.G. Who was the musician who died in the Lockerbie bombing? Well, that was Paul Jeffreys, Cockney Rebel’s original bassist. He was on his honeymoon with his wife. How did I know that? I have no idea. Same as I don’t know how I know that Ten Years After’s first single was called Portable People. And who did Cockney Rebel guitarist Jim Cregan also play for? Did you say Family and Rod Stewart? Extra points if you also said Blossom Toes and Chapman Whitney Streetwalkers
Who was Uriah Heep’s bass player who was electrocuted on stage? Well, the late Gary Thain, of course, who also played in the Keef Hartley Band and was at Woodstock. Who did he replace in Heep? That was Mark Clarke. And which other bands did he play in? Colosseum, Tempest, Natural Gas (which in turn relates him to Humble Pie and Badfinger), and even Rainbow for a brief time, he was on Ken Hensley's solo records too. I do this 'one thing relates to another thing' all the time and I am convinced everything is everything else. It might sound a bit hippy, but it’s obviously true.
And while we’re talking Tempest, how does Allan Holdsworth relate to Eric Clapton? Not obvious, is it? Holdsworth was on one of their two albums and was also in Soft Machine with Jack Bruce of Cream for their Land of Cockayne album. See? I could win you a beer in a pub quiz.
That’s the degree to which I’ve absorbed the whole history, width, and depth of rock music. Entirely useless of course except recently I had an intense discussion about Tim Blake (or High T. Moonweed as he was sometimes known) and his pioneering synthesiser album Crystal Machine album in 1977 into the teeth of punk rock. And I couldn’t have done that without knowing about mid-70s Gong. Suddenly, my knowledge was useful.
Am I making any sense? It seems to me that the whole rock milieu is one interconnected generational web, and all these little points of knowledge eventually link together and I think that’s how I remember them all.
Being slightly unhinged also helps too!
Immersed in rock music...
