Sex and Drugs and...long hair...

July 24^th – It’s 2014, so that’s 32 years from 1972…not a different time-zone or anything is it?

I figure that one of the hardest things when you’re writing a factional movie script, well the thing I find hardest, is to keep it real, to not let fanciful cleverness overtake you and make what was a perfectly believable script onto a vehicle for ridicule.

This can happen with even the most sure-fire of works. A script lifted from a best-selling novel say, The Beach or Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, can (and has) bombed; why, even something as supposedly cast iron and seminal as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band can’t guarantee a smooth ride from disc to celluloid. As a bonus to this blurb, the film of the album (you couldn’t make this stuff up, could you) the film of the album opened on this day in 1978 and dropped from sight in the passage of a frame so poor was its adaptation and reception. For this one they not only threw money at it but talent too, all to no avail, thereby disproving the popularly held theory that although you can’t polish a turd you can roll it in glitter. Not in this case; even the sweepings from a week’s run of Priscilla would be insufficient.

That’s why some of the tales from the road in the rock business read like the stories made up during some drug-fuelled nightmare. Some of these tales are apocryphal; Keith Richard snorting the ashes of his father with some coke; Ozzy Osborne snorting ants. Some are more prosaic; DMX’s criminal record, say, or Nikki Sixx’s dislike of hospitals. Some are downright foolish; how Chumbawumba got their name, say, or Jennifer Lopez’s rider, but one thing that can be said about the world of rock is that it stirs people to doing strange things, dangerous things, deadly things.

Since I first heard him, I’ve had a high regard for Johnny Winter. His performance, his ability, his rearrangements of standards (both blues and rock) and the gaggle of musicians (anybody who includes Rick Derringer in their band has got my vote…rack up some of Derringer’s work, you’ll not be disappointed…then reflect on the fact he was playing second guitar to Mr. Winter…that’s how good Mr. Winter is). His version of the Stones, It’s All Over Now is the standard by which every attendee at a Stones’ concert needs to have in order to judge the creative ability and output of the Stones’. Their original version doesn’t even come close to Mr. Winter’s rendition…and they wrote the damn thing! Johnny’s brother, Edgar, also had a band, White Trash, and Edgar was every bit as talented as his brother (have a listen to his version of, Tobacco Road…so left-field it’s startling; that’s him on sax and vocals btw).

Bobby Ramirez was the drummer in White Trash in the 70’s; he had long hair. Nothing unusual in that, the time the band were active and it was happening for them.

On this day in 1972 he was beaten to death in a bar in Chicago because some of the drinkers in that bar took exception to the length of his hair.

1972.

Just 32 years ago.

Don’t know about a different time-zone, that reads like a different planet.