The Rolling Stones in ’69.Acid For
The Children
Flea HEADLINE
Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist’s
childhood: full of fear and Fear.
The bad news
is that this
autobiography
ends as Tony Flow
& The Majestic
Masters Of
Mayhem (soon to become Red
Hot Chilis) take the stage for
their first show. The good news
is that there’s a second volume
to come, and that in it Michael
‘Flea’ Balzary is unflinching in his
portrayal of his awkwardness
when confronted with women;
his thieving; his bed-wetting; and
his drug use. Most of all, though,
it concerns his unrelenting
search for a father figure after
Michael Snr returned to
Australia when Flea’s mother fell
for a drugging, drinking jazz man
during their New York stay.
Instead, Flea found Anthony
Kiedis. The feral pair cruised
their way through Hollywood’s
underbelly until Flea joined Fear,
Kiedis began to write poems,
and the two of them starting a
band together became the most
natural thing in the world.
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John AizlewoodLive From
The Astroturf,
Alice Cooper
Dir: Steven Gaddis
Fiends reunited
Currently wowing the film
festival circuit, Live From The
Astroturf chronicles the
extraordinary route super-fan
Chris Penn took to reunite the
four surviving members of the
original Alice Cooper line-up.
Penn, whose Good Records
store in Dallas, Texas does promo
in-stores for local punters, started
out by booking Dunaway to sign
copies of his autobiography. An
idea was then floated that
guitarist Michael Bruce and
drummer Neal Smith could
maybe come along to play a few
tunes, and before your could say
‘Billion Dollar Babies’, Cooper
himself (coincidentally in town
for a show of his own) was
taking to the store’s makeshift
stage to play the longest set with
his former band since 1974.
It’s an honest, warm, feel-good
movie, and the band’s central
performance (with Ryan Roxie
standing in for the late Glen
Buxton) is triumphant, emotional
and an absolute must-see for all
self-respecting Cooper fans.
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Ian FortnamForeigner
Double Vision:
Then And Now EARMUSIC
On DVD and CD, the past and
present in perfect harmony.
For Mick Jones,
the guitarist who
has led Foreigner
since 1976, the
Double Vision: Then And Now
tour – featuring old and new
versions of the band – was always
going to be emotional. No more
so than in a moment captured in
the performance from Michigan
in 2018, when Jones introduces
Lou Gramm, Foreigner’s singer in
their golden days. As he says
Gramm’s name, he is in tears.
The show begins with the ‘Now’:
the current line-up, fronted by
vocalist Kelly Hansen, majoring on
vintage hits, from Cold As Ice to
Juke Box Hero. And then the ‘Then’:
Jones joined by Gramm and the
other four guys in the band in 1979- Al Greenwood, Ian MacDonald,
Rick Wills and Dennis Elliott. With
Gramm’s tone still intact, they
knock out tunes from that era as if
they’d never been away.
In the encore, Foreigners now
and then come together for the
band’s most heartbreaking song,
I Want To Know What Love Is, and
their raunchiest, Hot Blooded. For
Gramm, too, it was poignant. He
says of Jones: “We’ve had our
ups and downs, but I love him.”
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Paul Elliott
The Ballad Of
Jethro Tull
Mark Blake ROCKET 88
The definitive story.
Blimey, this book is a challenge –
in the best possible way. Author
Mark Blake has done a superb
job in marshalling the multitudes
involved in this lengthy tale,
turning their thoughts and stories
into a cohesive chronology. And
it’s a riveting, albeit epic, read.
Overseen with diligence and
objectivity by mainman Ian
Anderson, this book will keep
Jethro Tull fans enthralled, and
will also appeal to those who
have only a passing interest in one
of prog’s most important bands.
There are also loads of unseen
photos from personal collections,
adding to the quality of the
narrative. There are two editions:
the ‘Signature’ version is limited
to 500 copies, each signed by
Anderson and with a seven-inch
single recorded specially for the
book, the other is the less
expensive ‘Classic’ edition.
The Ballad Of Jethro Tull is a fine
distillation of a massive career.
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Malcolm DomeGET
TYST
UF
F94 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
BOOKS^ &^ D
VDsJust A Shot Away:
1969 Revisited Vol 1
Kris Needs NEW HAVEN PUBLISHING
Excellent, moving memoir by veteran music journalist.
T
he slew of 50th-anniversary
reissues and accompanying
retrospectives is in danger of
reducing the year 1969 to a set of
truisms: Altamont, Manson, The
Beatles falling apart, the hippie era in
decline... Which makes Kris Needs’s
perspective on the year (the first of two
volumes) so much more valuable. He
only turned 15 that year – on the day
Brian Jones died. The mid-teens are the
years in which the feelings of future
music aficionados are most intense,
full of epiphanies and discoveries
crashing on the virgin sands of an open
mind, ands so it was with Needs. He
grew up in Aylesbury, far from the
world’s rock’n’roll centres, but that
only increased his longing for new
music, borrowed, saved up for, read
about in magazines like Rave and
Zigzag (a prototype for the yet to
emerge 70s-style NME) or listened to
on John Peel’s radio shows.
It’s also fortunate that Needs was no
monomaniac, a Zephead or soulboy or
Stones obsessive. His embrace of new
music was truly catholic. All of which
makes Just A Shot Away such a vivid
snapshot of the first six months of 1969,
with great new music, black and white,
teeming and pouring in from all sides,all genres. Vol u m e 1 takes in The Beatles,
the Stones, Hendrix and Cream,
naturally, but also Beef heart, MC5, Sun
Ra, Sly Stone, Silver Apples and Albert
Ayler as well as more obscure acts
whose f lame died out too quickly, such
as Kaleidoscope, It’s A Beautiful Day,
Judy Henske, or perennial esoteric
figures such as Moondog.
Needs mixes memories of seeing
Hendrix for the first time at the Albert
Hall, being beaten up by a skinhead and
experiencing records played on a club PA
system loud for the first time at Friars in
Aylesbury with career sketches of key
artists, often drawing on subsequent
interviews with them for added
hindsight, Keith Richards, John ‘Drumbo’
French and Nico among them.
The book is overshadowed by the
death of his longtime partner Helen
Donlon in 2018, shortly after he began
writing it. An author herself, she had
encouraged him to write the memoir,
and he reshaped it with her thoughts
and advice in mind. For all that sadness,
Just A Shot Away: 1969 Revisited Vol 1 is all
about the joy of fresh discovery, of
coming of musical age; 1969 as a year of
blazing light, not darkness.
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David Stubbs