Then again I was always a bit like that. My first favourite band was KISS, less because of their albums (although they did make at least a few classics) but more because of their look. Yet I didn’t get into Leonard Cohen and the like until my mid twenties. Still, it’s unsurprising that, as a debauched degenerate myself, I should be drawn to and interested in the works of those writers and musicians whose lives seemed that bit more extreme than others. Indeed, on closer examination it can be seen that there are many similarities in the lifestyles of excess pursued by both writers and rock stars; priapic, drug-crazed poets were working their way through groupies and mounds of drugs hundreds of years before their guitar-wielding counterparts........and they were doing it so much better.
However, there is a common feeling that poetry doesn't have the same visceral appeal as Rock 'n' Roll, but when one bears in mind that Dylan Thomas, when asked by an inquisitive reader what his poem "The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait" meant, answered, "It's a description of a gigantic fuck" and Byron once wrote in a letter to a friend, that as a poet he was "more interested in cunt than cant," you can see that dusty libraries, and tweed jackets with leather elbow patches were the last things on their minds. In his poem Don Juan
The "free-love" exploits of sixties bands like the Rolling Stones are legendary, one Stones girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, started with Brian Jones and then moved on to Keith Richards (via a brief rendezvous with Mick Jagger). However, some 140 years before, Shelley was touring Europe with his wife and sixteen year old mistress Claire Clairmont. On meeting Byron, Byron had a child with Clairmont and then in true "any hole's a goal" fashion had Shelley too. Of course after such a lifestyle, both Brian Jones and Shelley came to sticky ends - Jones being found face down in his swimming pool, Shelley acting as fishfood after falling off his boat in the Bay of Spezia.
Of course, Byron’s friend Shelley was also very much a rock star of his time. Nicknamed "Mad Shelley" at Eton, he got expelled from University College, Oxford, and married 16 year old Harriet Westbrook. Being a believer in free-love he tried to get his wife to sleep with his best friend, had numerous female "friends" in his "household" then in 1814 fell in love with his friend's 16 year old daughter Mary (writer of Frankenstein
Of course, sex is only part of the story. Many a poet and rock star has liked to dabble with the odd chemical; on a flight back from New York, The Who’s Pete Townsend lunged at stewardesses, stole other passengers food (before spitting it back out at them), shouted gibberish ("We are sitting here travelling faster than a bullet in this supersonic rocket!"), and then got a bag of coke and started throwing it up his nose covering everyone near him (much to their delight, I am sure). On another occasion in an exclusive Parisian hotel, Townsend downed a bottle of champagne, and then promptly threw it back up again into the nearby ice-bucket.......while the upmarket guests looked on. Interestingly, he justified his drinking not by trying to be a Rock star, but by referring to literary figures, trying to rationalise his need to drink by linking it to the boozy tradition of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Still, it's probably best to not even consider what the John Bonhams and Keith Moons of the world were up to at the same time….
But then, such debauchery is surely just a perk of the job? Why else would one want to be a rock star or, dare I say it, a writer? After all, one isn't overly surprised when the likes of Gene Simmons, the bassist with the aforementioned Kiss, and a man who claims to have slept with over 3000 women says that he joined a band because of "Girls. Anyone who says they start to contribute to human culture is full of it. It's girls!", but surely writers and poets are more artistically inclined? Well, no. Byron claimed that as a poet he was "more interested in cunt than cant", which is as good a reason as any for picking up a pen or guitar.
But for some, sex and drugs just aren't enough. Sid Vicious' career in The Sex Pistols came to an end when, after years of heroin abuse he finally stabbed his girlfriend to death in a New York hotel room. He told the arriving police that he couldn't be arrested because he was "a rock star". They were apparently distinctly unimpressed. Not to be outdone by such Johnny-Come-Lately poseurs, Edgar Allen Poe, is suspected of murdering a young girl called Mary Rogers. In true who-gives-a-shit fashion he then wrote a story about the unsolved case virtually pointing the finger at himself. He later died of alcohol poisoning and exposure, having been too arseholed to find shelter in a rainstorm.
So yes. While I am, as this post probably suggests, far too influenced by the lifestyle an artist has (after all, why would I want to crawl into the head of a complete nerd?), I am happy to say that as the years have gone by I have learned my lesson. My musical tastes now include the likes of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Melanie, Bat For Lashes and other people who look like they’ve just stepped up on stage directly from the street (although I contend that Ed Sheeran is still nothing more than a ginger busker. I have only heard a couple of his songs yet such is his image I have no interest in hearing any more – damn, maybe I’m not as mature as I was hoping I was?). That said, as I noted at the beginning of this post, at the age of 40, after hearing the same recommendations again and again from various friends, I finally sat down and read some Stephen King…… and finally realized why he is regarded as the King of Horror by so many.
So who knows? Maybe in another 40 years I’ll sit down and listen to Ed Sheeran? Although I doubt I'll be as pleasantly surprised.
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