Author: Logan Rocker

When I was a student I had a very posh and opinionated English tutor. Once we were doing Jane Austen’s Persuasion and he said, out of the blue: “If you don’t like Jane Austen, you don’t like reading.”

I laughed out loud. I hated Jane Austen and I hadn’t read Persuasion, fuck that.

Anyway: I feel the same way about Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, which turns 60 today. If you don’t like it, you don’t like music. You should hand your ears back, check in your critical credentials, have a word with yerself.

Bringing It All Back Home is as punk as Never Mind The Bollocks, it’s as heavy as Black Sabbath (not musically, but lyrically), it is peak Americana, smarter than the nerdiest indie band. It’s a key influence on The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Byrds, even Led Zeppelin. It was so ahead of the curve we’re still trying to catch up, six decades later.

Think about it: In 1965, The Beatles were writing Help!, Ticket To Ride and Yesterday. They were great songwriters, sure, with hooks and melodies to spare – but they were trying to be professional Tin Pan Alley-style songwriters, the authors of love songs and standards.

They need somebody. The girl that’s driving them mad is going away. Yesterday, their troubles seemed so far away.

Dylan, meanwhile, was down in the basement, mixing up the medicine, and taking a chainsaw to Tin Pan Alley conventions. How must Lennon and McCartney have felt when they heard the words of It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)?

“While preachers preach of evil fates/Teachers teach that knowledge waits/Can lead to hundred-dollar plates/And goodness hides behind its gates/But even the President of the United States/Sometimes has to stand naked.”

Stupid, that’s how.

The Beatles met Dylan in the summer of ‘64 and – the myth goes – they turned him on to, like, electricity. Dylan passed the spliff, like “Wha-? You can plug guitars in? I’m gonna try that!” and, as a trade, helped them realise they could do better than all that yeah, yeah, yeah shit.

“I had a sort of professional songwriter’s attitude to writing pop songs,” said John Lennon. “I’d have a separate songwriting John Lennon who wrote songs for the meat market, and I didn’t consider them (the lyrics or anything) to have any depth at all.

“Then I started being me about the songs… I’d started thinking about my own emotions… It was Dylan who helped me realise that.”

There’s a lot of crap talked about Bringing It All Back Home, so let’s look at that for a second. Over-worn cliche No.1: It’s the album on which Dylan INVENTED folk rock, by blending acoustic and electric music with meaningful lyrics.

Yeah, right: cos like, no-one had ever mixed acoustic and electric before. Well, apart from Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker and, ooh, probably 50-100 others.

I mean, yeah: apart from those guys, it was unheard of! No-one had done it!

Dylan’s not even the first white guy. Elvis Presley’s first single, That’s All Right – a title parodied by Dylan on It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) and released 11 years earlier, in 1954 – featured Elvis on acoustic and Scotty Moore on lead electric.

So Bringing is framed as being revolutionary – and it is, but not in the way it’s sometimes talked about. We are ten years or more into the rock’n’roll era by this point, nevermind the electric blues era (T-Bone Walker was releasing records in the ‘40s).

Dylan’s first pass at rock music was only startling to a folkie audience – a well-meaning but conservative bunch of nerds, by all accounts – who considered rock’n’roll an inauthentic confection at best, and cultural appropriation, at worst.

Dylan was shocking the folk audience in the same way that Elvis shocked the country audience, but no teenager listening to the blues or The Beatles (or The Stones, The Animals, The Yardbirds etc) was really going to be startled by this crazy new “beat music”.

What’s shocking and new is the voice. Not just his singing voice – it’s definitely unusual, but he is four albums in by this point. It’s the lyrical voice. Again, people like to portray this as REVOLUTION – Dylan abandoning the language of protest music for psychedelic beat poetry – but that’s not entirely accurate either.

For one, BIABH is full of protest songs and powerful, meaningful, memorable lyrics (“20 years of schoolin’/ and they put you on the day shift”) – no honest folkie could really feel cheated by the depth of the content – but, secondly, Dylan had been breaking the rules of folk songs and conjuring up symbolist beat poetry from day one.

His second album – the first one to really showcase his own material – contained A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall: “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’/I saw a room full of men with their hammers a bleedin’.”

It was his thing. He was a rock’n’roll kid who learned to play like Woody Guthrie, but was born into the era of beat poetry and TV and mass media, a guy directed by Kerouac and Ginsburg (Ginsberg is literally pictured on the back cover of BIABH) to read Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire.

“I listened to the radio a lot and hung out in record stores… and learned songs from a world that didn’t exist around me,” he said.

Dylan’s own sleevenotes on the album reference bluesman Sleepy John Estes, Jayne Mansfield, Humphrey Bogart, Mortimer Snerd (a famous ventriloquist’s dummy), Murph The Surf (an infamous surfer-turned-jewel thief), Allen Ginsberg, Hank Williams, Norman Mailer (“if someone thinks Norman Mailer is more important than Hank Williams, that’s fine, I have no arguments and I never drink milk”), Bach, Mozart, Tolstoy, Joe Hill (NB: not Stephen King’s son), Gertrude Stein and James Dean.

He was a cultural sponge. Where the folkies wanted to keep their music pure – and everything about that word seems suspect now – Dylan had realised that rock’n’roll was the new folk music.

Little Richard and Chuck Berry were songwriters and performers, telling stories about life today. Dylan had that too – but his vision was huge. He wasn’t interested in writing teenage anthems any more than he was in “protest songs” – he was channelling the post-war trauma, the history of America, the threat of apocalypse.

And by doing so, he elevated popular music.

He was punk: he showed a generation of singers – from Jimi Hendrix to Lou Reed, David Bowie to Joe Strummer – that they didn’t have to have an enormous range, or look like Elvis, they just had to express themselves.

Bringing It All Back Home begins with Subterranean Homesick Blues – the title alone must’ve made the folkies shiver – the fast vocal rap of Chuck Berry on Too Much Money Business transformed into a barrage of drug paranoia (“the heat put/ Plants in the bed but/The phone’s tapped anyway/Maggie says that many say/They must bust in early May/Orders from the DA”).

Funny, hip, deep yet disposable, it comes on like an ad jingle from hell, a buncha rapped orders – “Walk on your tip toes/Don’t tie no bows” – with the kind of advice people wanted from him (“Don’t follow leaders”) comically undercut by more practical advice (“Watch the parkin’ meters”).

She Belongs Me: a beautifully melodic song of obsession. At the beginning, you’ll do anything for her, he says, but you will end up broken (“peeking through her keyhole/Down upon your knees”). The title is ironic: she belongs to no one.

I knew the phrase Maggie’s Farm before I’d ever heard the song. Maggie’s Farm had a kind of second life twenty years later when Margaret Thatcher was in power in the UK. The Specials and U2 covered it and – a protest song about bosses, drudgery, and conforming (“Well, I try my best to be just like I am/But everybody wants you to be just like them”) – it became a kind of leftist code/cliche: “We’re all working on Maggie’s farm now.”

Dylan is having the time of his life and Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream – with Spike Lee’s dad, Bill Lee, on bass – opens with him dissolving in laughter, guaranteed to get up the noses of the folkbores. Who before him has taken such delight in wordplay and shaggy dog stories? (“I got a coin to flip/It came up with tails/It rhymed with sails/So I made it back to the ship.”)

The B-Side is the “worthy acoustic side”, as though the A-side was a ruse, a tease, Outlaw Blues and On The Road Again suckering those folky fuckers into thinking he’d lost it and then

BLAM! Mr Tambourine Man: an undeniable pop hook and an ode to his own transformative powers, wherever they might take him (“I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade/Into my own parade”).

BANG! Cut the same day as Tambourine Man – a good day on Maggie’s Farm – Gates of Eden and It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).

POW! It’s Alright Ma: stuffed full of astonishing images, and quotable lines:

“Flesh coloured Christs that glow in the dark/It’s easy to see without looking too far/That not much is really sacred”.

“Advertising signs that con/ You into thinking you’re the one//That can do what’s never been done/That can win what’s never been one.”

It’s a song for us working stiffs – “that must obey authority/That they do not respect in any degree/Who despise their jobs, their destinies/Speak jealously of them that are free…” – a nightmare vision that in its very creativity, by giving us those words, makes it everything seem alright.

I mean, fuck it, we’re only bleeding. It’s just a flesh wound.

It climaxes with It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, surely a sister song to It Ain’t Me Babe, a final kiss-off to the folk scene and “protest music”. There’s enough copyists, he says, I’m moving on. Donovan, in particular, was victim to more than a few Dylan eye-rolls at this time and Bob takes extreme delight in playing this song to him in a scene in the documentary Don’t Look Back.

Donovan and co are the vagabonds at his door, dressed in the clothes that he once wore, and it’s time for him to “strike another match, go start anew.”

In the sleevenotes, he talks about being at the end of history (“the great books have been written, the great sayings have all been said”) so Bringing It All Back Home takes us back to the beginning – a primordial soup of folk and blues and poetry.

The artists that followed in his wake took all the parts and built what we now know as rock music. The match had been struck. The fire was just getting started.

Scott is the Content Director of Music at Future plc, responsible for the editorial strategy of online and print brands like Louder, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer, Prog, Guitarist, Guitar World, Guitar Player, Total Guitar etc. He was Editor in Chief of Classic Rock magazine for 10 years and Editor of Total Guitar for 4 years and has contributed to The Big Issue, Esquire and more. Scott wrote chapters for two of legendary sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson‘s books (For The Love Of Vinyl, 2009, and Gathering Storm, 2015). He regularly appears on Classic Rock’s podcast, The 20 Million Club, and was the writer/researcher on 2017’s Mick Ronson documentary Beside Bowie. 

Released in 1983, Born Again is the most controversial album of Black Sabbath’s illustrious career, largely thanks to the controversial presence of Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan. In 2006, Gillan looked back on the chaotic creation of a flawed classic – and the infamous tour that followed.

After eight studio albums between 1970 and 1978 with the original line-up – Ozzy Osbourne on vocals, Tony Iommi on guitar, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward – the band then recorded two classic studio albums with former Rainbow singer Ronnie James Dio, 1980’s Heaven And Hell and 1981’s Mob Rules. When Dio left acrimoniously following the release of 1982’s Live Evil live album, they were left looking for another singer.

The man who stepped in was unexpected: former Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan. Eyebrows were instantly raised. Wss this the birth of a new supergroup? Or was it the mismatch of the decade? “This isn’t Deep Sabbath, or Black Purple!” insisted bassist Geezer Butler at the time. “Ian Gillan’s joining Black Sabbath. So we won’t be playing Smoke On The Water!”

How those words would come back to haunt Butler. But on paper, there was a logic to the alliance: Sabbath were looking for a singer, Gillan was looking for a band.

“I actually agreed to join the band when I was completely drunk,” laughs Gillan, recalling those hazy, crazy days. “What happened was that I’d split up my band [Gillan], because I’d literally run out of money. I lost my house, my studio – even my car. Anyway, Sabbath had just fired Ronnie Dio, when I met up with Tony and Geezer one day in Bearsville, which is Upstate New York. We got very drunk, and I was literally under the table.

“I’ve not much recollection of what went on. But the next day my manager, Phil Banfield, rang me and said, ‘The next time you decide to make a career decision, consult me first!’. Apparently, I’d agreed in my drunken state to join Sabbath! So, there was no formal offer, just a very drunken discussion – and, as far as I can remember, I remained pissed for virtually the whole time I was with the band.

The addition of Gillan wasn’t the only change in the Sabbath line-up. Original drummer Bill Ward was back, a couple of years after quitting during the Heaven And Hell tour. His place had been taken by Vinny Appice, who opted to leave with Dio to form the singer’s eponymous band.

“Bill wasn’t a very well man, but he was such a nice guy,” says Gillan. “You could never wish to meet a more pleasant person. When he returned you had the whole of the classic Black Sabbath instrumental line-up back together. And let me tell you, they were amazing.”

It was agreed that the newly configured Sabbath would record the album at Manor Studios in Shipton, Oxfordshire, a complex that was then owned by Richard Branson]. But, as the singer recalls, the process was anything but normal. In fact, the whole situation was slightly surreal.

“I hardly ever saw the rest of the guys,” he says. “I’d work in the studio during the day, and party at night. Tony and Geezer would party during the day and sleep at night – or something like that. Here’s how it would work. I’d go into the studio until about 5pm. And as I was leaving, the rest of the guys would arrive. We’d probably talk very briefly, and I’d tell them what I thought of one or two ideas they’d recorded the previous night. They would work until about midnight, then go to a club in Birmingham, and get back to the studio about 8am, at which time I was up and boiling the kettle for my first cup of tea – just as they’d be ready to crash out and sleep! It was crazy, but it seemed to suit all of us.”

The Manor was a residential studio, yet Gillan decided not to stay in the house itself, but pitched a tent in the grounds. It sounds weird, given how big Sabbath – and Gillan himself – were.

“Not really,” he counters. “There was a horrible smell in the house – nothing to do with the rest of the band, I must say! – so I felt more comfortable sleeping in a tent. Beside, the whole time was out of control. There were a lot of strange things going on – explosions in rooms and the like. It was one long party. For my own safety, it made sense to stay out of the way!”

Given their reputation, it should come as no surprise that Sabbath reportedly fell foul of a local vicar, who apparently objected to the presence of rock’s Dark Lords in the vicinity. The truth, though, is a little more ‘cucumbers sandwiches’ than it is ‘midnight exorcism’, though it did inspire one of the album’s tracks.

“One day, it was quite hot, so I flung open the doors to the control room, and the sound was cranked very loud,” says Gillan. “Next thing I know, there’s a vicar standing in the room. He was extremely polite and friendly, but asked if we’d mind turning down what he described as ‘this wonderful music’ – I could tell he was trying very hard not to call it a ‘noise’ – because it was interfering with his choir practice.

“The man was so respectful, and we had no problems in working out a situation so that we didn’t blast out the music during those times when choir practice was going on. In fact, we got on so well that I went for a pint with him at the pub. The whole story’s in the song Disturbing The Priest.”

Another track based on a real life experience during these sessions was Trashed, which was actually inspired by a near-death encounter.

“I was close to being killed one day,” says Gillan, in the sort of voice that makes it all sound as if he were doing nothing more than feeding the ducks. “I was racing a car on a track, when it flipped over and slid on the bonnet for what seemed like ages. If I hadn’t been wearing a helmet, then I wouldn’t have survived. What’s odd is that I’m not sure what made me put on the helmet – but something did!”

The album, appropriately titled Born Again, was completed in just a few weeks. It was released in August 1983 to reviews that were generally positive – many singling out the mighty Zero The Hero in particular as a song that could stand toe-to-toe with the best of Sabbath, though the album’s garish cover – a demonic newborn baby, complete with fangs – was received less well.

The album reached No.4 in the UK – the highest charting Sabbath album since 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. In America, it reached the Top 40 – lower than the two Dio albums, but higher than the final couple of Ozzy-era albums. But while Gillan thinks that the songs were strong, the sound of the album was rather insipid.

“I’ve got monitor mixes of the album that sound fantastic,” says the singer, who reportedly threw a cassette of the final mix out of the window of his speeding car the first time he heard them. “But something went wrong during the final process, perhaps at the mastering stage. It sounds like a blanket was thrown over the whole thing. I don’t blame our producer/engineer Robin Black – he was excellent – but someone has to take responsibility. My theory is that it may be something to do with a certain bassist.”

If the album itself was a qualified triumph, the Born Again tour bordered on the farcical. With Bill Ward once again ailing, ex-ELO drummer Bev Bevan took over behind the kit. In August 1983, Sabbath headlined the Reading Festival. Despite their earlier protests, they unexpectedly unleashed a version of Smoke On The Water, living up to those ‘Deep Sabbath’ jibes.

“It wasn’t planned,” protests Gillan. “Tony just went into the riff. I think the rest of the guys did it to help me out. Let’s face it, Ozzy is Black Sabbath’s singer, and I was struggling with songs like War Pigs and Iron Man. It was their way of balancing things. And we did it very well. Not only that, but it got a great response. I don’t think the fans saw it as sacrilege at all.”

However, this was a mere blip compared to what happened on the North American leg of the Born Again tour.

“We had a meeting at a company called Light & Sound Design in Birmingham, to discuss the stage set,” says Gillan. “We were asked if any of us had ideas, at which point Geezer said, ‘Let’s have Stonehenge’. Everyone thought it was great. But, when he was asked how big he envisioned the set being, Geezer just replied, ‘Life size, of course!’. So, it was built, and looked spectacular – I honestly think it’s one of the best Sabbath stage sets ever. But it was too large for a lot of the venues we played in!”

The size of the Stonehenge stage set prohibited Sabbath from actually setting it up on many of the stop-offs. But even when they could fit it onstage, there were still issues.

“The first night we used this set was at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto,” says Gillan. “And it was hilarious – unintentionally so! Our manager Don Arden had hired a stunt dwarf, who was supposed to walk along the top of Stonehenge at the start of the gig. He was dressed as the Satanic baby on the album cover, and was supposed to throw himself off as we began playing, landing on soft mattresses. But I suddenly heard a scream, because the dwarf had hit the hard floor below him.

“On top of that, we had some of our roadcrew dressed up as druids, which would have been very effective, if you couldn’t see their Reeboks peeking out from underneath the robes. The audience just laughed at the whole thing, and I can’t blame them. The effect for which we were aiming just fell way short!”

The ill-fated tour would provide the inspiration for a memorable scene in following year’s This Is Spinal Tap – except that rather than being too large, Stonehenge replica was comically small. “I had no problems in telling everything I knew to the consultants on the Spinal Tap movie,” admits Gillan. “And the results you can see on screen.”

The Born Again tour ended on March 3, 1984. Both parties knew that the alliance that had begun with a drunken night a little over a year earlier wasn’t built to last, and the parting was amicable. The album itself holds a unique place in the Sabbath cannon – seen by some as a misfire, but championed by others.

“I was only contracted for a year, and that was it,” says Gillan, who was already in talks to reunite Deep Purple before the tour ended. “But it was a great time. I believe that the album was very credible, and a lot better than some the band went on to record later. The production is poor, I agree with that criticism. But the songs and performances were real, honest, raw. They represent exactly where we were at the time. I am proud to have been part of Born Again, and to have been able to work with such great professionals was an experience. Perhaps we should have called the band a different name – maybe even ‘Black Sabbath featuring Ian Gillan’ – but you know what musicians are like. We tend to go with the flow. However, it was a great time in my life, and that’s the honest truth. Although looking back, I wonder how I survived!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 155, July 2006

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term “thrash metal” while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021. 

Dennis Wilson made his name as a member of the Beach Boys. But in 1977, he broke away to record a lone solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue. In 2008, Classic Rock looked back on the making of a cult classic – and Wilson’s tragic death six years later.

Dennis Wilson, second born of the famous Wilson brotherhood, was the soul of the Beach Boys. Sure, Brian was the genius, the mastermind without whom they’d never have got out of their Hawthorne garage. Pudgy Carl was the organiser. Cousin Mike Love had the ambition and drive while schoolfriend Al Jardine represented their moral, clean cut code. Dennis was the real deal.

The favourite son of tyrannical father Murry, no one ever imagined Dennis amounting to much other than drumming and exciting the Beach Boys’ female fans. A rugged surfer dude, he epitomised their image but was never the quickest witted fellow. “My little brother Denny? He’s a little dumb,” Brian told anyone who asked.

At least that’s how it was in the 1960s. In the 1970s everything changed. Dennis became the enigmatic, philosophical Beach Boy who released a solo single with Daryl Dragon as Drumbo (geddit?), starred in the cult buddy road movie Two-Lane Blacktop with hip Apple singer James Taylor and then broke out of the fold. His 1977 solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, is now given the same reverence as landmark Boys recordings like Pet Sounds, Surf’s Up and Holland.

The genesis of Pacific Ocean Blue begins during a typically tumultuous time in the Beach Boys’ bizarre career when Dennis is hiding out with some groupies in Seattle. Despite the brilliance of Holland, recorded in Baambrugge in the Netherlands due to chronic tax problems with the IRS, the Beach Boys have hit a slump. Not only are they broke, they’re playing greatest hits medleys for students who despise them. Unable to fuse their new progressive music with a back catalogue that then seems terminally old, one night in 1972 they support the Grateful Dead and are booed off.

Shaken, Dennis calls up an old pal, a 29 year old Italian American all-rounder called James William Guercio. He’s shared stages with the Beach Boys as bass player for Chad & Jeremy, going on to play lead guitar for Frank Zappa, then manage Chicago and Blood Sweat & Tears. He has also directed and produced and written the score for the awesome cops and bikers movie, Electra Glide In Blue, a cynical rebuttal of the whole Easy Rider mythology.

“The Beach Boys were baby shit when Dennis called,” Guercio tells Classic Rock from Caribou, his Colorado ranch-cum-recording empire. “No one’d touch ’em. It was frustrating to see ’em fuck up. They were getting five thousand a night. No sell outs. No production. No show plan. I had Chicago making $100,000 a night, and selling millions of records. I knew that wasn’t right.”

Dennis pleaded with Guercio to move in and usurp then manager Nick Grillo. They worked by stealth. First Jimmy replaced the South African bassist Blondie Chaplin, then he took over the controls working on an 18-month strategy that restored the Beach Boys status, enabling them to reclaim what he called “the legacy of American music”.

By 1975 Guercio’s strategy of playing 168 consecutive one-nighters paid off. The Beach Boys supported Chicago and ended up blowing them away. There were repercussions. “One night I’m looking round and the Chicago wives and girlfriends are on one side of the stage, the Beach Boys women are on the other side – as usual – except one person has moved across,” Guercio chuckles. This was Karen Lamm, estranged wife of Chicago vocalist Bobby Lamm. “There was obvious tension. Dennis was insisting ‘Man, I love this chick, she’s so great’ – which she was, everybody wanted a piece – and there’s Bobby glowering and pretending it’s cool. It got tense. Chicago trashed their dressing room while the Boys’ room is a haven, with Mike Love doing his Maharishi shit. There were a helluva lot of drug issues and bad feeling in the air. I wasn’t committed to Chicago. I was committed to Dennis.”

With his new muse and soon-to-be third wife Karen Lamm-Wilson goading him on, Dennis went to work. In between the fisticuffs and slanging matches that typified his relationship with her he began to play Guercio cassette demos and gave him impromptu live renditions of his new melodies “in hotel bars, on aeroplanes, at soundchecks. I heard it all”.

Guercio ordered Dennis to finish the material, bringing in mutual friend Gregg Jakobson to provide lyrics and structure, and signed the pair to his Columbia-bankrolled label Caribou in the summer of ’76. Dennis’s super subtle songwriting had blossomed. The templates were struck on Be With Me – for the 20/20 album – and Forever – on Sunflower. He’d contributed Only With You and Steamboat to Holland, then soared towards orchestral nirvana with Cuddle Up and Only With You for the overlooked Carl And The Passions.

The dreamlike quality of these songs and the 76/77 sessions that became Pacific Ocean Blue represented Dennis’s soulful side. By contrast he was a notorious hell raising womaniser who’d lost his virginity aged 12 and christened himself ‘The Wood’ – always hard and ready for action.

It was that Dennis who opened the door of his rented house on Sunset Boulevard on an innocuous day in spring 1968 to find one Charles Manson and Family sprawled about. Manson and his army of acid popping nubiles moved their schoolbus, emblazoned ‘Hollywood Productions’, onto Dennis’s lawn and took over with a lethal mix of drugged debauchery, orgiastic sex and mumbo jumbo. They infiltrated themselves so thoroughly into Dennis’s world that the Beach Boys were persuaded to record one of Manson’s ditties, a macabre number presciently entitled Cease To Exist. Wilson and Jakobson enjoyed the sickness but were savvy enough to change the title to Never Learn Not To Love, and adapt the key line to ‘cease to resist’. They had no trouble getting the Boys to put it on the B-side to their Bluebirds Over The Mountain single. Charlie was weird but he knew a lot of girls.

Dennis referred to Manson as ‘The Wizard’. He told England’s Rave magazine “He’s got so many great ideas… he’s fascinating… a real thinker. I like him a lot.” He was less enamoured when Manson one day pulled a knife on him in his own kitchen. “I could kill you now Dennis,” his house guest gloated. “Go ahead then muthafucker,” replied the host, promptly collecting a few belongings and moving out to a hotel.

Although Dennis managed not to provide testimony following the Tate/LaBianca murders carried out by the Manson Family he did tell reporters “I want nothing to do with that man. He’s a sick fuck. A major arsehole… I mean he cut their tits off and everything.” Not a nice Wizard.

A decade later Dennis had problems of his own, exacerbated by a prodigious vodka and cocaine habit and his volcanic life with Karen. During early recordings of Pacific Ocean Blue she unloaded a pistol given him by Guercio into the side of his three day old black Mercedes. “That shook him up” Guercio laughs. “‘Look what she did, man! Three bullets in the passenger side.’ Then he forgot it. They were both, er, a little crazy.”

Another time he ignored her she threw a brick through the plate glass doors of the Beach Boys Brother Studios. It was recovered, tied with ribbon and framed above the legend ‘The Karen Lamm-Wilson Memorial Brick.’ When she wasn’t pouring bottles of booze over the console, Karen was more helpful; she added vocals to the album and co-wrote two songs.

Recording POB wasn’t easy. Guercio and Jakobson recall flushing Dennis’s stash down the toilet with alarming regularity. “But it was often a real pleasure too,” recalls Gregg. “During daylight hours he was more or less coherent and conscientious. He wasn’t big on writing words, so he needed collaborators, but his music was fantastic and he had plenty of lyrical ideas.”

An essay submitted on a favourite topic at Hawthorne High School in 1961 – he was expelled at 16 for throwing a screwdriver at a fellow pupil – illustrated his naive poetic sensibility. “Sports car racing is very dangerous” he wrote. “Just think, you’re going about 120 miles per hour down a curved mountain road, then you have to make a hard right or left. The main thing is you have to keep your eyes on the road, not in the deep blue sky.”

Released in September ’77, Pacific Ocean Blue (working title Freckles) developed his nature boy character. Art direction was provided by old friend Dean O. Torrence (of Jan & Dean fame). They went to Maui for the shoot. “Both the setting and Dennis were very photogenic,” Torrence remembers. We went for an everyday, snapshot approach. He was a pal so it was like a vacation until Karen turned up. She was just around, like Yoko Ono. A real coupla handfuls. They both were. One night she told Dennis I was having an affair with her. Which I wasn’t. He liked her intensity and the chaos. Made him feel in love.”

The beatific tone of the music informed Torrence’s approach. “He always had a dommed surfer look, kinda glazed, wanting to be someplace else, even when he’s in paradise. But he was also heaps of fun. We shared a Go-Karts business, Race ’Em, Break ’Em & Wreck ’Em. He liked living on the edge, or over the line was even better.”

Pacific Ocean Blue gained rave reviews on release, selling 200,000 copies – much to the Beach Boys annoyance. But Dennis didn’t find fulfilment. He continued writing and recording in a frenzy for what became Bambu – unreleased until now – named after his favourite rolling papers although by now Jakobson was exhausted and left the technicalities to engineer John Hanlon.

On New Year’s Eve 1977 Dennis and Karen took heroin together for the first time, beginning a woeful trajectory that would see him being kicked out of the Beach Boys. Frequent spells in rehab couldn’t turn him around. He divorced Karen, remarried her, divorced her again and then shacked up with wife number five, Mike Love’s daughter Shawn.

Throughout the 80s, Dennis was drifting in and out of relative destitution. Large royalty cheques were squandered in week long drugs and drink binges, short lived sports cars and ne’er do well hangers on. He was forced to sell his beloved boat, the Harmony, weeping when it went at knock down in auction.

A few weeks after his 39th birthday Dennis was back on the water on friend Bill Oster’s boat – the Emerald – moored at Marina Del Rey. It was December 28th and the Pacific Ocean was chilly and grey. By late afternoon Dennis was stoked. He’d downed a bottle of his favoured Delray vodka and gone diving, fully clothed, hoping to recover possessions he’d thrown overboard during the turbulent last days with Karen.

After three fruitless attempts he emerged clutching a smashed silver framed photo given to him as a wedding present by the man he called Jimmy G. “It was a beautiful Tiffany piece I gave them along with the silver handled 9mm pistol she shot up his car with,” says Guercio. “He was so ecstatic he dove in again.”

What happened next, according to the story Carl Wilson told Guercio, is that “Denny hit his head on the bottom of the boat and got concussed. He was such a good swimmer and such a jock, even though he was alcoholic. He came up three times gasping for help. The others thought he was goofing around. He wasn’t.”

Against the wishes of Shawn, Dennis’s ashes were buried at sea, following the intervention of former girlfriend Patti Reagan. In a moment of black farce Shawn requested the Police song Every Breath You Take be played at the memorial service because it was Dennis’s pop song du jour. That idea was nixed and Farewell My Friend from Pacific Ocean Blue blew its haunting melody over the weeping mourners

And so the death of a Beach Boy came in a watery grave, although Dean Torrence wasn’t overly surprised. “Actually, I thought he’d OD, or crash his car. Having surfed, sailed, fished and drag raced on Daytona Beach with him all those times I didn’t think he’d drown. But he wasn’t a happy man. The odds were against him in life and in love . The thing is, if you keep on stomping on the floorboards, one day they’re going to give in.”

Originally published in Classic Rock 124, September 2008

Max Bell worked for the NME during the golden 70s era before running up and down London’s Fleet Street for The Times and all the other hot-metal dailies. A long stint at the Standard and mags like The Face and GQ kept him honest. Later, Record Collector and Classic Rock called.

Pearl Jam had well and truly set out their stall by the start of the 21^st century. From 1994’s Vitalogy onwards, they were a band prizing career longevity and artistic gallivanting over commercial success and heavy rotation on MTV. Nowhere is that clearer in some of their choices for an album’s lead single. Given To Fly, from 1998, and 2002’s I Am Mine are two of the band’s most exhilarating anthems but they are red herrings when you look at the wider picture, songs that seemed to suggest that Ed Ved & co. wanted to become U2 with distortion pedals (Given To Fly) or a grittier R.E.M. (I Am Mine). No, they didn’t want to do that. What was really going on at the time was something a lot more experimental and wilfully provoking.

One of their strangest and most haunting single releases turns 25 next month. Nothing As It Seems, a song that heralded their sixth album Binaural, is up there with 1996’s Who You Are for sheer oddness as a comeback song. Those who were expecting Pearl Jam to keep on rockin’ in the free world were about to get a shock or three.

A dirge-y psychedelic-rock epic written by bassist Jeff Ament, a few records earlier it might have found itself as a B-side but Pearl Jam in 2000 were pushing their weirder side to the fore. Elevated by some mesmeric Mike McCready guitar parts and a restrained, contemplative vocal from Vedder, it stands as one of the most curious and out-there releases of their illustrious career.

Recalling its creation in the band tome Pearl Jam Twenty, Ament said he wrote and demoed the track back home in Montana. “That song was kind of a little sad, minor key drone that I took to the band with full lyrics,” he said. He elaborated on its origins speaking to MTV. “It was just a little ditty on a demo that I played some hand drums on. I spent quite a bit of time with the lyrics and I think Stone heard it and said, ‘Let’s try that one’.”

Watching one of his songs get put in the hands of his bandmates was an awesome experience, he explained. “I can almost kind of stand back and just watch this great band play a song and take it to a completely different level,” he marvelled. “Mike and Ed, they have that ability where they can really raise the level and anything that they play.”

You can hear Ament’s original demo version, which featured on the soundtrack to their Cameron Crowe-directed documentary, here:

To take it from demo stage into something that could become more fully-formed and Pearl Jam compatible, Ament had a challenge for his lead guitarist. “The idea was that at the beginning it was going to have a real heavy Pink Floyd vibe,” he stated. “So I went to Mike McCready and said, ‘I need you to make this song happen. It isn’t going to be good enough unless you come up with some that’s just unreal’.”

The guitarist picked up the gauntlet and then some, using David Gilmour’s monumental licks on Floyd’s classic Comfortably Numb as a launchpad and delivering one of his most memorable, squawking guitar parts.

“Nothing As It Seems gave me a chance to really stretch out as a player,” McCready told Guitar World at the time. “I’m using this crazy, giant Fender pedal on the song, which is supplying all of the wild, swirling, distorted sounds. It sounds like a plane going down!”

That pedal used to create his part’s distinctive, sprawling sound, incidentally, ceased to work not long after recording, meaning he could never again fully replicate it onstage.

Released on April 25, 2000 in the US and a week later in the UK, Nothing As It Seems did not fly in high up the charts, reaching 49 on the Billboard Hot 100 and a mildly successful 22 in the UK. But as a document of a band trying to discover who they were and who they could be in the wake of a monstrously successful early period, it makes for an important entry in the Pearl Jam catalogue. Yes, better was to come. But Nothing As It Seems was vital in helping them get there.

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.

During a career that dates back to 1969, ZZ Top have toured with some of the rock’n’roll’s finest, and were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2004 by Keith Richards – ZZ Top themselves having performed the honour for Cream in 1993. In 2009, gentlemanly singer and guitarist Billy Gibbons lifted the veil on a few of the famous friends he’s made while travelling the rock’n’roll highway.

Jimi Hendrix

We toured with him in 1968. It was a real mind-bender and eye-opener to say the least. As most now know, Hendrix, either consciously or subconsciously, made a decision to invent things to do with a Fender Stratocaster that it had not necessarily been intended for. He did it very well, too. I was 18 at the time, and somehow the organisers saw fit to book us in the hotel room across the hall to his room. That was convenient to allow me to ask him the obvious question: “How do you do that?”

I remember that this was a long time before hotels had stereos in their rooms, and each day there would be the delivery of a rather heavy and cumbersome hi-fi console player that was the size of a small Buick. It was dutifully installed for Hendrix to be able to listen to his favourite discs. The one I really remember him playing the ass off was the first Jeff Beck Group album, Truth. Hendrix was mad about it, totally OTT about Jeff’s playing. Oddly enough, Hendrix was all too willing and ready to include blues licks in his arsenal of guitar offerings, which had fallen out of favour in the States with most black entertainers.

I got to play on stage with him at the time, which is quite well-documented, but it was what went on behind the scenes that really captured the magic of the moment.

BB King

We’ve been friends since 1972. Our first encounter was way before then, back in Houston, Texas. But our first professional engagement was in 1972. I was backstage in my dressing room when he took an interest in my guitar and wanted to see what it felt like. I was only too happy to say yes. At the time, I was playing some pretty heavy-gauge strings, and BB said to me: “These are mighty heavy. Why are you working so hard?” He handed [his Gibson guitar] Lucille over to me and said: “Give this one a go.” I discovered the strings were extremely light, which kind of made perfect sense.

The Rolling Stones

The Stones had accepted an offer to make an appearance in Hawaii in 1972. It was three shows: a Friday night, a Saturday afternoon matinee and a Saturday evening. When the announcement was made it seemed that every band on the planet was vying to land the opening slot. Even today The Rolling Stones are ‘it’ as far as most bands are concerned. Somehow we got the call to take those three dates in Hawaii.

I remember walking out on stage in our standard attire of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat – which was something of a mystery to people back then – and someone in the front row shouted out: “Oh my God, they’re a country band!” Obviously that wasn’t particularly fashionable at the time. So we realised we had to get stuck in straight from the get-go to shake off this misleading image.

But we got along famously with the Stones and managed to hang out with them for a few extra days. We were just hanging out on the beach and sipping cool libations; Keith was totally living the rock’n’roll lifestyle at the time. But what a lot of people don’t know or realise is Keith’s unending devotion and calling to being what is true as a musician. That was very apparent then, although I have to say he was certainly a lot more colourful when it came to the extra-curricular stuff.

Cream

Make no mistake, ZZ Top didn’t just happen upon becoming a trio because it was easier; it’s a lot more challenging. But Hendrix and Cream were at the top of the chart as far as ZZ Top’s book was concerned, and it was through those early influential days of attempting to emulate those sounds and styles that brought us together. It was a real honour to be associated with Cream and bring them into the spotlight at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.

I met Clapton in Houston, Texas. Cream had been booked to appear on an early US tour, and a local promoter who booked that tour also owned a venue where [Gibbons’s pre-ZZ band] The Moving Sidewalks used to rehearse. Clapton was curious to see what the local music scene was like and he dropped in to have a look at the venue. We were on a break, met him, and we got along quite well. Back then, talking about music was the order of the day, and we just got a lucky break meeting him.

Nickelback

Ha ha ha… Rockstar was quite an unexpected success. We were touring the US, up the North West. It was the day before our own show, they were playing and we were curious, so we popped down to catch the band’s performance. You have to note the great vocal stylings that Chad Kroeger can bring to the party. Man, he can sing for days.

Anyway, after that inauspicious first meeting, when the time came for them to get back into the studio, I believe Chad had the idea to complete Rockstar as a studio-based song. He had most of it but felt he needed something extra, so he called me up to see if we could make some sense of it. He dreamed up the vocal inflection that I sang, and I reckon it came out okay.

Kid Rock

I spoke to him just only this morning. He’s working with Rick Rubin. I was keen to ask him a few questions because we’re about to start working with Rick just after the first of the new year. There was dead silence. And I said: “Well, I’m waiting. What’s it like working with Rick?” And he says: “I’m still trying to figure it out!” Ha ha ha. He says: “We’re making sounds, but I’m not sure I can describe it yet.” So we’ll see. Kind of exciting news.

Hank Williams III

He’s another talent. He’s frighteningly the ghost of his grandfather [Hank Williams]. Good grief. He sounds like his grandad and he’s a living example to back up the idea of genetics skipping a generation. His old man [Hank Williams Jr] is really quite different from his dad. But come around to the generation after and it returns right to his granddad.

He’s a great entertainer himself as well. He’s torn between keeping on the tradition and his real passion, which is grindcore to the end. That’s his true love. I was lucky enough to work with the New Orleans drummer Joe Fazzio, who holds down a spot with Hank and also played with Superjoint Ritual. And he was telling me that they’d go out as a double bill, and Hank III would give his audience fair warning that the first half of the show would be to the delight of those who liked country music. Then he’d say: “We’re gonna take a small break now, and those who can’t take it better leave the building, cos we’re going to get real heavy.”

Jack White’s another very interesting character. And quite a talent, I may add. He has my vote of confidence inasmuch as his personal preferences are never allowed to be ignored. And he is quite vocal about how he wants to do things. He’s either quite strident about whether he knows exactly what he wants, or even if he knows nothing it doesn’t stop any forward motion. He works all the time, too, he’s got something going on all the time. And I like his approach to that end. He says it’s a stimulus rather than being exhausting. Some folks would buckle in the face of such a work schedule but he’s honest about it and he gets off on it.

I was a big fan of Ministry from their early days. Again, Houston, Texas springs to mind. They blew through town playing a weekend warrior venue, at a place called Numbers. This was a wild venue, with the stage in the middle of the room and the audience on all four sides. It was such an insane place, and its reputation drew in the fiercest of the fierce, which meant the owners had to put up chicken-wire around all four sides of the stage. Jourgensen made the most of it, climbing around like a caged beast. I knew right then that this was a guy for me. We stuck around and became friends from that moment.

Much later he was recording at Sonic Ranch Recording Studios, a superb outfit that houses three studios. It’s one of the biggest in the world and even has its own pecan orchard. Al was wrapping up this Revolting Cocks album and he offered me to pop along and lay down some slide guitar work. That was a perfect time for some rocking and rolling.

Muddy Waters

We had Muddy on tour with us back in 1983, right before he passed on. It must have been the Eliminator tour, and we had him along and got to know him and his band. It was quite illuminating.

I actually first met him back in 1976. Dusty Hill’s brother, Rocky, was a shining light in chasing down these blues masters and bringing a significant amount of attention to them, and he introduced us back then. We were interpreters, they were the inventors. But Muddy, well he was just something else, man.

People ask what I listen to, and there’s a certain sprinkling of contemporary sounds like Jack White and the Black Keys, but I have to say it’s a slim list from the modern side. But going way, way back, we’re still listening to stuff that came out between, say, 1949 to 1957, people like Muddy Waters. It’s the stuff that I keep on going back to. It’s very enduring.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 140, December 2009

Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.

On September 20, 1976, the Sex Pistols performed at the opening night of the 100 Club Punk Special, a two-night ‘festival’ showcasing the UK’s emerging punk scene, alongside The Clash, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Subway Sect.

The band will open this year’s Teenage Cancer Trust week at the Royal Albert Hall on March 24, with support from Kid Kapichi and The Molotovs.

“After an incredible 2024, we are itching to get going again this year and what better way than on home territory at a venue that wouldn’t have let us near it back in the day!” Steve Jones stated when the show was announced. “Albert will be turning in his tomb. It’s an honour to help this great charity.”

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.