The Classic Rock Superstar and His Dad Play Benny Goodman

Nearing the studio, the rock superstar, hereinafter TRS, tells his driver Mick to find an off-licence. He need some brandy. He badly needs some brandy. Mic got his job only after first convincing TRS, and then, in turn, TRS’s lawyer and psychotherapist, that he was just the guy to keep TRS on the straight and narrow. When TRS longed for alcohol or one of the substances to which he’d been addicted over the years, Mick was to divert him, and to keep him sober and clean. “But we’ll be late if we do that, guv,” Mick says. “Let me deliver you on time, and then see if I can’t find you some Rémy.” In the back seat, TRS decides not to threaten Mick with the loss of his job, and reverts, with a vengeance, to a habit he finally managed to break at almost 27 — nail-biting. Mick’s never seen him so terrified. 

He is to perform live this evening on In the Midnight Hour With Jewell Flanders, the highest-rated late-night music programme on UK television, but not with what’s left of the group with which he achieved global renown. Jewell’s producers read in TRS’s autobiography about how TRS’s clarinetist dad had led a popular jazz band in the first years of TRS’s childhood, and came up with the idea of dad rounding up as many of his old band as were still alive and getting TRS to play with it. They would perform the Benny Goodman-popularised Stompin’ at the Savoy from 1934. 

TRS rejected the idea out of hand. Before he became a famous rock guitarist and the composer of two of Uncut magazines’s Classic Rock Top 5, Dad never gave him a syllable of encouragement — and eloquent paragraphs of discouragement. “Music isn’t what you’re good at, boy,” Dad had said, smirking, the night the 15-year-old TRS had played for Dad a Hank Marvin solo he’d worked on for weeks. “Think of something else to do in life.” TRS had always thought of it, with great bitterness, as his equivalent of Lennon’s aunt’s “A guitar is all well and good, but you’ll never earn a living with it.”

Within five years of that pronouncement, Dad had given up on trying to earn a living with music, and had opened an antiques shop, while TRS’s group had had a No. 3 hit and performed not only all over Britain, but also in France, Germany, and Scandinavia. In the intervening decades, two of them have died, but they died very rich, the group having been the world’s highest-grossing concert attraction through much of the early 1980s.

They arrive at the studio. An awed production assistant tells TRS, fast running out of fingernails to ravage, that he grew up listening to TRS’s music, and is thrilled to be working with him. TRS barely hears what he’s saying. He can think only of how desperately he wants a very large brandy. The production assistant will later tell his friends that TRS was cold and high-handed with hm. 

TRS enters the soundstage on which his and Dad’s segment will be filmed. Dad, schmoozing with his musicians, loudly proclaims, “Enter the rock star,” and a couple of his lads snigger dutifully. But then Dad thinks better of it and comes over to embrace TRS. It’s all for show, of course — the two men have never actually embraced like this in private. It’s only in the past few years that even the closest fathers and sons have done more than shake each other’s hands manfully. There’s gin on Dad’s breath. 

Jewell Flanders, who made his name playing boogie-woogie piano in a pub rock band of the late 1970s, comes over beaming and says, “I see you two have met.” Two production assistants and a camera operator chuckle dutifully. “Well,” Jewell says, “shall we make some magic?” He seat himself at the piano. As his custom, he’ll be sitting in.

TRS straps on the 1951 Gibson ES-175 he had his guitar tech buy for him especially for this performance. He has made a career of two-note power chords. Many of the chords Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman’s guitarist, played on the original version of Savoy were pretty much unknown to him when he agreed to the gig. He has practiced them twice as diligently as he practiced the Hank Marvin piece at which Dad scoffed all those decades ago, but as he and Dad’s band run through the song together so Jewell’s sound mixers can set their various levels, his fingers feel very thick, and he’s aware of occasional dead strings beneath their tips. Dad says nothing, though. It’s his band he addresses at the song’s end. “Have we still got it, lads, or have we still fucking got it?” They’re all delighted with themselves.

It’s time to record the performance. “I’m the one’s who fucking got it,” TRS tells himself, as he’s always told himself before going on stage, there to battle the flamboyant singer and maniacal drummer for the audience’s attention and love. He needs no brandy now. He has something to prove, and will bloody well prove it!

Or maybe not. He plays a wrong chord two bars into the first chorus and Dad glares at him. Jewell heard it and waves to stop the filming. 

“Bit more demanding, real music, innit?” Dad asks TRS. He’s smiling. Two of his band snigger again. 

“My music’s real enough to have sold 100 milion albums,” TRS says, “and for me to be worth £118 million, and for me to have been able to buy this fucking guitar just for this gig without batting an eye. My guess is it cost more than you’ve earned as a musician in the past 20 years. How are things in the antiques business then?” Having said all of which, he explodes in tears.

The soundstage has never been this quiet. It is full of statues. Jewell Flanders’ mouth hangs open. Mick is the first person to move. He steps between father and son. Having  seen TRS takes his guitar off and hurl it at someone after swinging it around a couple of times by its neck, he is taking no chances. It is his heroism that keeps TRS from injuring Dad with his £4200 new guitar. 

99 Reasons Not to Be Famous (No. 31 Will Amaze You!)

Having had a brief flirtation with fame in early adulthood, and having had famous friends, I believe fame can be summed up as always being able to get a table at a restaurant, but then not being able to enjoy your meal. From the moment you’re seated, people will be gawking at you, straining to overhear your conversation, or coming over wanting to take a selfie with you, or to get an autograph — never for themselves, but always for a third party like a sister-in-law who’s loved you ever since your second album. It wasn’t that she didn’t really like several tracks on the first album, you are to understand. While your soup grows ever colder and your date wonders more and more aggressively if dating a celebrity was a good idea, your uninvited guest will eagerly provide a detailed inventory of which songs he or she did and did not adore.

When I and a famous friend I’ve not seen in decades made plans to meet for lunch recently, he nixed several venues I proposed for fear of being besieged by well-wishers and selfie-seekers. Even as she or becomes able to fly first class anywhere in the solar system, the famous person’s world inevitably constricts unless he or she is that very rare person who likes cold soup and endless flesh-pressing.

What a lot of people don’t understand is that the really nice, adoring fan can be far more exhausting than the abrasive, demanding one who feels, on the basis of having recognised the celebrity, that he or she is entitled to several minutes of the celebrity’s rapt attention. Whereas celebrities can tell — or get their bodyguards to tell — the obnoxious, entitled fan to take a hike, they might very well feel duty-bound to listen patiently while the kinder, gentler fan explains how their music or movie or even book gave his or her life new meaning. 

If I happen to find myself behind Dame Helen Mirren in the checkout queue at Aldi or Primark, it’s very likely to be the most notable part of my day. It will have made not the slightest impression on Dame Helen. What a burden to star in the most noteworthy moment of a succession of strangers’ lives as you move through the world minding your own business! 

Failure is an orphan, while success has many fathers. David Bowie spoke once about how, when he first got huge, he would wake up in the morning to find his house full of people he didn’t recognise, every one of whom would have had him believe his success wouldn’t have been possible without him or her. And Ringo Starr, of all people, has spoken of how, once fame becomes a much greater source of pain than of pleasure, one simply can’t turn it off. Once having become a household name, he or she can become fame’s prisoner, submitting to what amounts to house arrest, moving to a part of the world where the food or water will give her savage diarrhea, or grin and bear it.

In the United Kingdom, and increasingly in the USA, the famous are hounded mercilessly by paparazzi and the tabloid press. The former’s newsstands abound with magazines called, approximately, Celebrites Looking Utter Rubbish Without Their Makeup. Can you imagine how maddening it must be not to be able to leave your home  hung over and rumpled without photographers descending on you, hoping to get damp-underarm shots they can sell to Celebrities Whose Deodorants Don’t Work? And in the UK, the paps will commonly shout things like “I shagged your kid sister last night! Without a condom!” in hope of your turning around looking furious. Fury sells magazines. 

The Awful Conundrum of Superstardom

I’ve come to think there really isn’t much more you can do about depression than you can about your ring finger being longer than your index finger. You can of course undergo psychotherapy,. I have had lots and lots and lots of it — some from nincompoops who spoke of my inability to Establish Boundaries and kept glancing at the clock to see if they’ve earned their $60 yet (this was years ago, obviously) to smart, kind, insightful people who made lots of interesting and maybe even accurate observations that I savoured intellectually. None put a perceptible dent in the ugly black limousine in which my boredom and despair travel. Of course, if psychotherapy doesn't appeal, you can — and, indeed, will be encouraged to — try psychopharamacology. The problem being that the magic little pills that make  you feel marginally less desperate, will also mute your libido. 

Let's face it. If you're born depressive, there really isn't an awful lot anyone can do about it.

When I go into my darkest places, I feel worthless and meaningless, bored and purposeless, a waste of space, in the wonderful British locution, a nobody, a never-was, a loser. But then I think about such notable spiritual forebears as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, and realise that even those with the grandest purposes have spent huge portions of their lives feeling wastes of space. If I were made King of the World, I would expect to be fantastically happy and fulfilled for a couple of weeks, and then, regardless of my grand good works, to feel a piece of shit again. It’s who I am.

All I’ve ever wanted is the Pope’s balcony — to be adored so fervently by so many that a deafening roar of delight greets my every stepping outside for breath of fresh air. But in the past few years, I’ve come to recognise that depression snickers contemptuously even at the mass adoration for which I’ve long longed. 

During my friendship with Rick Parfitt of Status Quo, who were gigantic in the UK, and remain fervently loved both here and in Europe, I saw time and again how he’d get home from a sellout European tour and immediately start trying to drown himself in vodka. When I happened, quite by chance, to bump into my one-time idol Pete Townshend a couple of months ago, he was so disconsolate as barely to be able to speak. 

And now I read that Jim Carrey, who at one time was a bigger movie star than Rick was a rock star, has recently achieved a major breakthrough in his own battle again depression, and is able to describe himself as “sometimes happy”. Whoopee! In his glorious autobiography, Bruce Springsteen, whose balcony the Pope might well wish were his own, speaks of depressions so severe as to be immobilising. 

I get now why so many famous and universally adored musicians, actors, artists, and writers who seem to the untrained eye to Have Everything drink or abuse. Imagine that you enter adulthood feeling not good enough, not loved enough, not something enough. You pour yourself into your art or craft imagining that mass adoration will at long last change that feeling. When it doesn’t, you might be worse off than when you started, for back then, you could at least hope. It must be like being painfully dehydrated in the desert, and realising that you’ve been dragging yourself with the last of your strength toward a mirage.

I suspect that the bigger a star you become, the harder it gets. Imagine that your fans are spending $125 on a ticket to see you perform. At that price, they're going to cut you an awful lot of slack, and to be very intent on convincing themselves they're hearing and seeing something quite wonderful, even though you recognise your own playing or singing as subpar. It's bad enough when, on a night you've performed well, the audience's delight doesn't fulfill you, but wouldn't their deilght at a subpar performance make you feel not just unfulfilled, but mocked? What could be more soul-destroying than the realisation that your audience couldn't tell, or didn't care, if you were awful?