this so called guardian book of rock n roll is only about 1% rnr but does have contemporary accounts of Rock Around the Clock cinema riots (1956) , Cavern club sexed up pill-head ravers (1963) , and Mods vs Rockers (1964) from back when "journalists" couldn't give a shit about music/product & covered events/scenes in sociological style.
One 18-year-old, who said everyone in the North was a Rocker at heart, said: "I saw this guy in the Twisted Wheel the other night and he had on all this Mod kit, and I walked up to him and said, "What are you doing, imitating London?" That shattered him.""Of course", another said, "some of them are too daft, you can stand there taking the mickey out of these Manchester Mods and they don't twig. We had a good thing going here until this mod thing came up from London.We were listening to good blues and now these idiots come in with "MOD" written accross their shirts and all they want to do is listen to the Beatles.They're too stupid to see it's all a con."
Reminds me of the story when the Stones walked into the Wheel & Roger Eagle in the DJ booth said nothing but proceeded to play the originals of all the cuts on their 1st lp in sequence,to show them that the Northern kids were hip & not impressed with their copy cat style.
Except... Did the Stones want the kids to be impressed? Weren't the Stones fans of the blues and r&b at heart just the same as those "northern kids"?
ReplyDeleteYeah,I guess. In that Twisted Wheel book Eagle says "I was reminding them that we had been playing those records for ages at the Wheel and that in Manchester we knew where it was at." The further along in time we get, the more embarrassing moves the stones make and the easier to get and better known the original blues/soul stuff they covered is, the harder it is to dig how important and exciting they were at the time for many people.
ReplyDelete