Entertainment For Lively Minds
Guy Peellaert - the man who invented rock and roll
I've only just noticed that Guy Peellaert died the other day.
Lots of people have never heard his name but the fact remains that, rightly or wrongly, Peellaert was one of the most influential people in the history of rock and roll music. In 1974 he published a book of his illustrations called "Rock Dreams". This had a commentary by Nik Cohn. In many senses it was the artistic embodiment of the myths that Cohn had described in "Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom". Peellaert celebrated and exaggerated the rebel heritage of pop and he went on to do the covers of "Diamond Dogs" and "It's Only Rock and Roll". I haven't see "Rock Dreams" for years. I've looked on Amazon and it doesn't appear to be in print. That could be because I remember one illustration of the Rolling Stones in Nazi uniforms fondling naked pre-adolescent girls. Nobody batted an eyelid at the time. Less controversially and more importantly, it created a kind of fantasy world in which the true spirits of rock, from Elvis to David Bowie, sat around in bars looking elegantly wasted and eternally outside. Peelaert drew Rock Valhalla for us.
"Rock Dreams" changed things more than we know. Books like this, and the new critical orthodoxy that emerged in their wake in the mid-70s, were hugely influential on people like Malcolm Maclaren and eventually helped bring about a kind of revisionism that still hovers over us today. I started a thread earlier today about old gits in entertainment which led to some interesting reflections on the perceived lack of rebellion in contemporary pop. They include this from Steven C who says "Rock’n’roll was edgy. Whether it was Elvis in ’56, The Beatles in ‘66, the Sex Pistols in ‘77, or genres like rap or grunge, it challenged convention and effected change. It was dangerous."
I wonder whether that's a post-"Rock Dreams" perspective. The Elvis I remember from my childhood wasn't particularly threatening and nor were the Beatles or Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones. They were different, brilliant, original, absorbing and heart-stoppingly exciting but they weren't outsiders. They appeared on the same TV shows as everybody else and, largely, acted like everyone else. I don't remember anyone ever saying "take that filth out of this house" or anything like it. We can all laugh at the scene in "Don't Look Back" where Bob Dylan met the lady mayoress but the fact is that he met her. People only started talking about pop music being dangerous and other-worldly in the 70s and very often they were looking back to something in the past and trying to persuade us that there had once been a Garden of Eden from which we had subsequently been locked out. In many cases they didn't actually remember the original events at all.
So farewell, then, Guy Peellaert. You re-invented the 50s and the 60s sometime in 1973 and then sold your version back to us. More successfully than you could ever have dreamed.
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"20th Century Dreams"
I bought "Rock Dreams" at a remaindered bookshop a few years ago, as well as the equally intriguing "20th Century Dreams":
They're both high quality coffee table books.
Rock Dreams online
It's all - minus Nik Cohn's captions - on Guy Peellaert's official site, I discovered just the other day. Start here, click on "Paintings", then on the mogged-up Dylan.
Thanks for that, Archie
Took me back to The Year Of The Power Cut, and reminded me why I had to hide Rock Dreams under the bed among my, ahem, 'special' reading selection.
It's difficult to imagine
It's difficult to imagine what it was like back in the day when these things were seen as a danger. Was the danger just a Daily Mail (or whatever its contemporary was? - The Daily Mail, I guess) fuelled hysteria?
But I'll tell you one thing, when my dad first heard Heartbreak Hotel back in the 50s he knew from the get go that it was unlike anything he'd heard before. And in that respect I guess it was dangerous. It signaled change, a break against conformity and as far as 50s youth was concerned something to shout about.
The same applies to a kid of 14 hearing whatever a kid of 14 hears for the first time these days. I'm sorry to say but you in your Developed Hell (and me, if truth be told) have no idea what they make of such discoveries. And perhaps while you were recreating light shows in your Turnpike Lane flat back in the 70s you too were missing the point of all this. What did you have to rebel against? I guess the same as the rest of us but I have a feeling you were too caught up in the glamour of rock n roll to really understand what it's like to grow up in a shit-heap council estate in the middle of nowhere (be it in the 50s, 60s or 70s) with the only form of entertainment being provided by your parents, the church or whatever lurked in your trousers. There again, I may be wrong.
Either way, Guy was one fuck of an artist.
Look ma, no Photoshop
It's now quite amazing to think that it all had to be done with a real scalpel and real Cow gum and a real airbrush between his teeth.
CAD tools are so standard now that no illustration, however outlandish, can really impress or surprise us any more. But at the time of Rock Dreams we really never had seen anything like it, except perhaps the odd hint in a Maxfield Parrish poster from Athena.
I think you might be slightly wrong
about the Stones. I was born in 56 and so wasn't of any impressionable age when they broke onto the scene but I do recall numerous comments from 'grown ups' about how disgusting they were and the age old comment 'you wouldnt want your daughter bringing one of them home'. They were edgy and to many people they probably were a bit scary.
I agree about Rock dreams though - fantastic piece of work.
Well ...
although I did say that I would bow to your knowledge of rock in days gone by ...
Didn't Elvis outrage the morals of 1950s America? Didn't the Beatles do the same in 1966? Bowie? Punk? Rap?
A large part the thrill of seeing Bowie on TOTP or hearing the Sex Pistols for the first time is that it turns everything upside down. It either shows you the escape route or sends you running for cover.
And if I can repeat myself from that earlier post ... although I never actually blew anything up or ran off to fight with leftist guerrillas in South America, I did buy the ‘God Save The Queen’ 7” in its pic sleeve the week it came out. You knew this was different, and there was a real sense of something subversive happening. Let's say it at least seemed dangerous at the time.
Of course no matter how shocking or outrageous it all gets swept up by the mainstream eventually. But the effects can still be seen in an altered landscape left behind.
I'm no longer watching from the same perspective as I did in 1977 but it seems to me that everything that reaches the 14 year old today is safely pre-packed and pre-sold. Of course looking back this probably applied equally well to the Clash or the Sex Pistols too, but at the time it did feel a little dangerous. I just think maybe the 14 -16 year old raised on an X Factor T4 diet today is missing out on something.
Oh come on...
The Sex Pistols were THE most manufactured band in history! Talcy Malcy just did a better job than most svengalis in convincing (some of) the music press and punters that his band were 'dangerous' and 'subversive;'
As I think I said ...
'pre-packed and pre-sold' applied equally well to the Sex Pistols and the Clash (is this only showing up on my screen?) ... but aged 14 it SEEMED dangerous.
Packaged they may have been...
But that was the genius of MacLaren. People *were* genuinely outraged and shocked. How many councils refused licences on the Anarachy tour? Media driven it may have been, but the sense of fear and excitement was very palpable.
Indeed...
but it was a sense of fear and excitement deliberately engendered by Talcy winding the councils up so as to get the Pistols banned for the publicity.
Once he'd started the ball rolling, the momentum built by itself. Huge publicity for bugger all effort. The man was a genius.
Hindsight is 20/20 and nowadays all pop is hindsight
What's nigh-impossible is separating what things actually felt like at the time from the layers of hindsight that have been put on top of events since. Punk rock was invented by people who didn't remember things from the first time around but had read an awful lot about them. (Managed by a bloke who did remember things and wanted to make a comment on them.) In that sense it was revisionist. It took the bits of the past that suited it and ignored the rest. It's been the template for all pop ever since.
Certainly pre-army Elvis was a controversial figure in some quarters in America but he still played mainstream TV variety shows and was embraced by Hollywood. The Beatles didn't outrage anybody's morals until John Lennon made that statement about "more popular than Christ" and even that took time to become controversial. And he apologised more quickly than Jonathan Ross did. When David Bowie wore a dress it got him on to the cover of the Melody Maker but I don't recall any outrage. It was curiosity. What's the breakthrough moment for him? When he played "Starman" on "Top Of The Pops". It was a hummable chart hit impeccably performed.
As you say, The Clash and Sex Pistols felt dangerous to you as a 14 year old. That's precisely what they were designed to do.
But isn't hindsight rarely 20/20?
Take the Seventies. What was that decade really like? The received view - the Jonathan Coe/Life On Mars paradigm - is that it was all brown clothes, Dickie Davies's tash, big shirt collars, Austin Maxis, three-day weeks, Vesta curries, space hoppers, Rod Hull and Emu, and, in general, institutionalised naffness and misery.
But those aren't the Seventies I remember. When I think of that decade, the first things that come into my head are Monty Python, Clive James in the Obbo every Sunday single-handedly laying the foundations for how we still approach popular culture, feminism and gay pride bursting out of university campuses into the mainstream of society, Trevor Nunn at Stratford, Andre Previn on the South Bank, Alan Ayckbourn in the West End, Bob Dylan at Blackbushe, Led Zeppelin on tour in a town near you, the world's first successful IVF treatment at Oldham Royal Infirmary, and lots and lots of condomless, STD-free sex.
I'm not saying you had to be there, but those who were might agree with me that the current decade has actually been far more joyless and tasteless than the Seventies ever were.
Happily, the space-time continuum seems to be in good shape
in your neck of the woods, Archie, as that is exactly the decade I remember. Don't forget though that it also included the rebirth of 'Real Ale', The Sensational Alex Harvey Band singing Brel songs about prostitutes and celebrating the joys of group sex, Jon Pertwee and then Tom Baker at the controls of the Tardis, and more Prog than you can shake a stick at. Set the controls for 1970, bugger the noughties.
Hallelujah to that!
(as long as we can avoid the power cuts, three-day week, rampant inflation, strikes and atrocious restaurants)
Oh and I'd like to take my modern car, mobile phone and iPod back with me please.
Rock Dreams
If it's not on Amazon, it's always worth trying AbeBooks.
From an Art point of view
his stuff is pretty awful. Bad realism. Clumsy copies of photos superimposed onto backgrounds with a different perspective. Little understanding of anatomy. Clueless about lighting.
Does Ali (or was he still Clay?) really look to be driving that car? Seek out the Stones as Nazis pic - how big is Jagger supposed to be? See Macca jumping as the fabs flee fom the filth? Where's he jumping from?
I know this isn't what DH is on about above, but puhleeease - after the Word bringing Roger Dean back to the fore lets not have a revival of this stuff too.
Yeah
And Carol Kaye's D string is out of tune on "Be My Baby".
I wouldn't know about that, Archie,
but if you're suggesting I'm nit picking I'd argue that light, form, anatomy and perspective add up to a lot more than a D string on a single instrument.
Depends
See my other post about technology of illustration. Getting Jagger into the right size and perspective is just a couple of clicks and drags these days, as are lighting effects; when Peellaert did Rock Dreams it would have required hours and hours of very tedious slogging in a darkroom - there weren't even scalable photocopiers in 1973!
All I'm saying really is that the execution may not be perfect but the impact of seeing hyperrealist techniques applied to rock stars was huge at the time. And very successful too - when I was at university everybody had a copy of that book.
...and when I was, nobody did.
With Be My Baby - if the bass was so out of tune as to be jarring, we Wordsters would probably not have pretty much given it a universal thumbs up a while ago. The bass is presumably a part of the whole, whereas if there was a bass solo in the middle of it - then the whole track may be ruined. If the drums were out of time then the whole track may be ruined. If the perspective, light, scale etc are wrong, then a hyper-realist painting, to me, is ruined.
I agree
with Bart, just had a look at the link to refresh my memory and if anything, they're worse and even more kitsch than I recall.
No dissing Roger Dean please, his album covers still give me a thrill.
I am so pleased to see this post!
I remember seeing the book (Rock Dreams) in bookshops when it came out. Given I had just started to love the 70s version of the Beach Boys, all beardy and mystical, and the picture of them out "Dead"ing the Grateful, conceptually, justified my decision and choice no end.
Can a clever clogs scan in and reproduce that page for the massive (and for me!), please?