The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music
Nick Kent
Language: English
Pages: 368
ISBN: 0306811820
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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out the contemporary heavyweights. I’d like to work with Quincy. He understands, Prince, he understands. In fact, Prince said to me, “You don’t ask God for what you want, you thank him for what you’ve got already.” Now I’m not a particularly religious person but, hell, I can empathize!’ Max Roach, the great jazz drummer, stated, weeks before the first clumsy return to the stage in 1981, ‘Miles is a champion. Champs always come back.’ With Muhammad Ali brain-damaged, James Brown an egomaniac
need to control my restlessness. That I inherited from my father. He was always on to the next job. That desire and need to do something led me to use stimulants and then sedation to make me stop for a while.” Ultimately you can’t come away without being awed by the man. He helped revolutionize popular music in the 50s. He’s arguably the most charismatic country singer/songwriter since Hank Williams, whilst his songs and whole rebel stance have been a everpresent, all-nurturing influence on the
homophobe), he still looked like Murder Incorporated. He was the Killer right enough. I offered up my firmest handshake and sat facing him. For the next half an hour he seemed by turns heroic, pathetic, comic and dangerous. To quote Marlene Dietrich in A Touch of Evil, ‘He was some kind of man.’ You once did Shakespeare, I began. You played Iago in Othello. ‘That’s right, Kill-uh. And it was the hardest six weeks o’ my life. But I did it. It was rock’n’roll Shakespeare but I learnt all the
just didn’t know how to say no. So, in 1975, Wood filled in on another riotous American tour with them as well as keeping up his Faces duties, but when Rod Stewart flounced out of the latter combo that winter to go solo, the die was well and truly cast for the guitarist with the profile of a kindly jackdaw. Celebrating his new role as foil for Jagger and Richards at his Richmond home that Christmas, Wood waxed effusive to an interviewer about how ‘I think the Rolling Stones bring out the best in
always able to lose himself in the sound of music but the first time he fell hopelessly in love with it was the day at age fourteen when his mother bought him a copy of Four Freshmen and Five Trombones, an album of the renowned fifties harmony group’s honey-coated hush-a-bye-baby vocal stylings. The night he played it all the way through he felt his skin prickle at the back of the neck, the hairs rising all over his body and the white hot flush of communion with something sacred and all-powerful.
