In early December 1992, 25 years of age and recently furnished with a decent redundancy package, I touched down at Los Angeles International Airport with mouth agape. The America I’d grown up with, vicariously, through the myriad TV shows recorded in Southern California, was finally right in front of me. And it didn’t feel in any way unusual.
Normally, when you travel abroad, you are immediately assaulted by new sights, sounds and smells. You visit a local supermarket and, by a rite of passage, groceries with amusingly rude brand names bring out the inner sniggering schoolboy in you. But not in LA. There, the sky was as blue as I’d seen it on The Rockford Files and the Six Million Dollar Man, my childhood television staples. The freeways were just as they were on CHiPs, the mountains just as they were used to substitute for Korea in M*A*S*H. And, yes, Santa Monica Beach was just as it appeared on Baywatch. Even the Hollywood sign didn’t seem that startling: “Oh yeah, that,” as I made the first of many ridiculous attempts to find the perfect vantage point in Beachwood Canyon to photograph it.
Of course, I loved it, and that visit to California became the first of many, including two years living there and living the dream for real. Four months after my maiden trip to the US of A, I went to New York (also, the first of many visits since). This proved to be a cultural reawakening of similar stature to my Californian experience, walking the steel and concrete canyons of Manhattan, doing the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tours, splurging on cheaper CDs at Tower Records, eating in diners and enjoying the exchange rate benefit by cleaning out Macy’s of clothing at more than two dollars to the pound. You can repeat these patterns in any one of a number of pleasure and work trips in the 28 years since that first visit.
All of this is brought to mind by Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There, the latest instalment of David Hepworth's impressive run of brilliantly researched book-essays on pop music culture. It starts with the premise of the so-called ‘British Invasion’, the wave of British pop bands which commenced with The Beatles travelling to America in 1964, closely followed by the Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and many others. Collectively, they effectively imported the very rock and roll that had been exported via somewhat nebulous supply lines, be they Elvis Presley’s music heard fertively via offshore radio stations, Bill Hailey’s Rock Around The Clock in cinemas, or the blues records entering Britain via its seaports, which so famously found, in that fateful meeting at Dartford railway station, kindred spirits in Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
Britain, it shouldn’t be forgotten, wasn’t long out of the economic and social austerity of World War Two when John, Paul, George and Ringo landed at Kennedy Airport to make the first of three appearances in February 1964 on The Ed Sullivan Show, the top-rated Sunday evening institution on the CBS network. They had, actually, appeared before on American television the previous November when a news report covered Beatlemania in Britain. Such was the interest it generated that 4,000 fans turned out to meet the band at JFK when they landed on 7 February. While my first visit to the US wasn’t met with anywhere near the same fervour - in fact no fervour at all - Hepworth examines what it must have been like for The Beatles, four twentysomethings from lower middle class Liverpool backgrounds, to suddenly experience an America they probably had significantly less cultural experience of than I had. At least I’d seen Charlie’s Angels on a weekly basis.
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| David Hepworth |
What must still be admired today about the Fabs’ arrival in America - their first live appearance on the Sullivan show garnered an audience of 73 million - is that it established a new relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. Just twenty years before, more than a million GIs had been been based on British shores in anticipation of D-Day, grabbing the girls and splashing their not insignificant disposable income around in country pubs to the annoyance of impoverished, ration book-imposed, horny local adolescents. “We saved your ass,” was probably the inbound refrain. But here, in Hepworth’s book, a reverse tide made gods from state-to-state out of young British men, playing mail order-purchased, American-made Fender guitars, as the rock and roll and blues America had inadvertently sent our way, was brought back in spades by these Limey upstarts.
The Rolling Stones, Hepworth cites, were prime examples of this. Starting out as exclusively a covers band, their evolution into “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” - a description they continue to earn, 56 years later - was founded in America. Hepworth notes that their first signature hit, Satisfaction, came to Keith Richards as a riff while staying at a Florida motel. Lyrically it’s a song about American life, not a lad from a bombsite suburb in Kent who’d never set foot abroad until a couple of years before. Whether Satisfaction was autobiographical or simply a song that worked, it, Hepworth demonstrates, undoubtedly channeled the America that Richards had been infusing via his Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters imports.
While some of these fresh-off-the-boat young men (and they were, exclusively, young men) inevitably found themselves guppy-mouthed at king-sized beds and en-suite hotel bathrooms, as opposed to the provincial B&Bs they’d had to endure in Britain, Hepworth moves on from the initial landings and teen-screamfests to examine how these bands evolved in an America that, itself, was undergoing social movement with the emerging war in Vietnam in the background.
One of the most interesting sections of the book examines what made Led Zeppelin, ultimately, the most successful British band in the US during their tenure. The contrast, Hepworth notes, is that while the early British invaders - even the Rolling Stones - had a certain cuteness about them, which somewhat appealed to American heartlanders, Zeppelin built their case with sex appeal, musicianship, amplification and sheer momentum (so the legend goes, the band were totally different animals while touring the US, or during their notorious stays at the ‘Riot House’ Hyatt hotel on LA’s Sunset Boulevard, than they were when back home in their bucolic English country piles). While U2’s proclivities aren’t as documented - or even existed at all - Hepworth also examines their ambition to conquer America. Arguably, it took The Joshua Tree and all its Mojave desert imagery to do so - but, like Led Zeppelin, they found the US to be a receptive market, and set to master it, “give it what it considers it wants and needs,” Hepworth quotes a modest Bono saying in 1981.
By the time that U2 started to break America, along with bands like Culture Club (with Boy George causing quite the sensation - remember his appearance in an episode of The A-Team?), British bands had blazed a trail. American charts in the 1970s had been dominated by the likes of Elton John, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and even Fleetwood Mac, if you can consider their ‘classic’ line-up three-fifths British. It is, perhaps, no surprise, that American comedy scion Rob Reiner chose, with co-writers and American actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, to spoof a British touring rock band in This Is Spinal Tap. Led Zeppelin’s notorious tours, in which manager Peter Grant literally took suitcases of cash away from gigs, provided a model for British acts to be as gargantuan, stadia-fillingly successful in America.
Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of Hepworth tomes that brilliantly and richly get under the skin of popular music. Like it’s most recent predecessor, Nothing Is Real, and the earlier Uncommon People, A Fabulous Creation and 1971 - Never A Dull Moment it is another collection of artfully considered, not to mention highly entertaining thoughts about the music business. Each has been a superbly researched gathering of thoughts around a single theme - be it the rise of rock stars, the LP as a limited concept, or 1971 as the year everything happened (and forget anyone who says otherwise about ’66, ’67 or ’70…).
The level of detail in Hepworth’s books is always impressive - if you like the history books of an Anthony Beevor or John Julius Norwich you will appreciate the same degree of narrative and insight - but not without the wit that Hepworth has applied in his music journalism career, in particular as editor of Smash Hits and founder editor of The Word, but also his period as co-presenter of Whistle Test with old mucker Mark Ellen. Indeed, I’ve had the pleasure of spending many highly entertaining evenings in both their company for recordings of their Word In Your Ear podcasts, pre-lockdown, in which they gently interrogate authors of similar books about music on their specialist subjects. Hepworth’s own books are also quite substantial, too, which means that, at his current rate of output, another - like the DFS Sale and the Oscars - will be coming around shortly. Which means I’d better get a move on in finishing the new one.
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