British writer/performer Whitcomb (After the Ball, Tin Pan Alley)
offers a long, rambling "journey through the key years of the pop
sixties and the arcane alleys of my imagination" - mixing familiar
rock-history with the story of his own 1960s experiences as
music-fan and minor recording-star. Much of this, especially in the
early chapters, is heavy on distinctly English perspectives and
material: young Ian's love of American music, his distress at
early-1960s British "pop pap." On vacation from Trinity College in
1963, he visited California, discovered the Beach Boys and surf
music: "the end of the Age of Innocence in pop music themes." He
also learned about Woody Guthrie and Phil Spector, whose career he
rehashes at length. ("Like a flying shlemiel, he was to give this
whole seedy little world a grandiose sweep.") And he wasn't
impressed with his first taste of Bob Dylan: wasn't he "a bit of a
throwback to God knows when?" Nor, for that matter, back in
England, did Ian love the brand-new Beatles ("their R&B wasn't
the real thing"), preferring the Rolling Stones and others of the
"British Invaders." Then, with his group Bluesville,
Jagger-imitator Ian finally got recorded himself, with a novelty
hit called "You Turn Me On." So, for a while, the chunks of
music-opinion/history alternate with Ian's tales of touring,
recording, and meeting some of his idols (chats with Jagger and
Brian Epstein). The star-career is short-lived, however: "our
material is too jolly. . .for the new mood" in druggy America. And
the book's final chapters return primarily to free-form essays on
the later Beatles (they had "lifted pop from being pap for shop
girls or dead-end kids"), the Leafy/LSD/Jefferson Airplane
phenomenon, Cream ("the first supergroup"), Jimi Hendrix, Janis
Joplin, and Jim Morrison - with whom Ian had a seedy coffee-shop
breakfast one morning. ("And yet beyond the boy hustler appearance,
I could sense good breeding. . .") Recycled history, so-so
critiques, occasionally amusing I-was-a-rock-star tales - all
jumbled together in an arch, lively, half-absorbing yak for
nostalgic fans. (Kirkus Reviews)
(Limelight). In 1965, Ian Whitcomb's novelty rocker "You Turn Me
On" was number eight on the national charts, along with entries
from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys. In 1966 he
was nowheresville a certified rock 'n' roll flash in the pan. It
is, then, with a survivor's humor that he tells both his and rock's
story from its beginnings in the late fifties to 1969, the year of
Woodstock and psychedelic dreams of universal peace and love. Here
is the saga of the British Invasion, the genesis of folk rock, the
blooming of Flower Power, the Summer of Love and the inner workings
of the pop music biz, brought to life by a true insider who is also
an uninhibitedly acute observer.
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