"Mojo covers a lot of the music they (Let It Rock) championed in the early seventies - obscure American funk and old country records that have never gone away, the likes of Bobby Charles. You think to yourself "These records can't have sold more than 50 copies" and "How come I know all 50 people who bought them?" David Hepworth in In their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press by Paul Gorman.
This illustrates to me why you shouldn't trust rock history written by journalists as little as political history written by politicians. If this was Why I Love The Inkies on BBC 4, I'd shake my head and go Naaww, it wasn't like that. Here's a few anecdotes to fill the picture out a bit.
1. The Radio.I have a clear memory of listening to the Saturday tea-time soul show on Radio 1 (though I am actually less clear of the day,time and dj) and hearing Small Town Talk by Bobby Charles, and thinking, I'll pick that up if I see it. I never did pick it up, but that's not the point. Curatorial Culture is full of Peel Rhapsody, but us younger kids remember the breadth of variety of day time radio, the same show playing The Chi-lites 'The Coldest Days of my Life' - Parts one and two!- and all sorts of singer-songwritery sugary spume on Noel Edmonds. The tyranny of the playlist was not yet on the horizon and diversity was mainstream not niche.
2. Record Shops. Small Town Talk was, as you probably know, on Bearsville Records, linked to Albert Grossman's Woodstock area empire. I never picked it up but most record shops had second hand racks or cut outs for the Strapped for Cash. So I was the proud owner of Felix Cavaliere's 'Destiny', 'Runt' and 'The Ballad of Todd Rundgren', all on Bearsville. I don't think I have knowingly ever met anyone who owns the former, though there was a bit of a Todd underground in our school and I remember selling my spare copy of The Nazz' 'Hello it's me' to Neil Thomas. The view that minority tastes did not osmose up the M1 is metrocentric and blinkered.
I would nominate Virgin Records in Birmingham as the apotheosis of the record shop circa 1974-75. You could slump on old chairs or a sofa and sample whatever took your fancy through headphones - sorry,man, "cans"- at earsplitting volume, even if the choice was John Prine's 'Sweet Revenge'. I could never succumb to the listening post of recent years just as I resent Amazon directing me to similar purchases. I remember browsing the racks in Virgin listening to Nils Lofgren's Official Bootleg, a record they couldn't and wouldn't sell cause it was hip and scarce and unavailable. I remember being impressed merely reading the lyrics on the sleeves of Greetings from Asbury Park and Nighthawks at the Diner, the latter a double import and alluringly out of reach, long lines of beatscreed from the very demi-monde Let It Rock and Zigzag were writing about. One last Virgin records anecdote. When I moved to Sheffield in 1976 I was talking to the guy behind the counter about Big Star. I'd picked up No1 Record as a cutout but couldn't get Radio City, another minority taste LP whose influence is inversely proportional to it's availability at the time. A week later I picked up the C90 that the guy had offered to record at home for me, with Radio City topped up with choice bootleg cuts of Tom Petty and suchlike. Now That's What I Call a Music Shop!
3 Home Taping Saved the Music Business. Then, as now, people defined themselves by their cultural choices. You had to search for the Good Stuff, and even the cost of a blank tape meant you had to exercise some discretion, the records you taped didn't suffer from the disposability and replenishability of the download. It took some effort to home tape, in real time of course, Todd Rundgren's Utopia, the longest LP of the day. Anyone who hometaped the triple LP Yessongs had to be so dedicated as to be certifiable. If someone had had Bobby Charles' Small Town Talk I'd have taped it. Some month's ago I downloaded it. I haven't listened to it yet, though a couple of weeks ago came across Yvonne Elliman's version (not bad, but not a patch on Rick Danko's).
4 The NME. I may be special pleading from my own experience here, but the NME was a broad church which preached from a position of proseltyising polygamy. Every Thursday, but every Wednesday in The Smoke. The revisionists would have the period down as greatcoated grebos versus Bowie Roxy, but taste hadn't ossified into tribal conformity in my corner of the Black Country, or elsewhere. Look at the NMEs of the time and you're struck by the fluidity of the culture, as though everything was up for grabs. There's far more country rock, far more blue eyed funk like kokomo or Moon, far more progjazzrock like Egg or Billy Cobham. You could buy it in every newsagent (I bought Veedon Fleece, the NME and Che Guevara's 'Guerilla Warfare' all from
Dillon's the newsagents on Brook Street, Rugeley - What's that about Small Town Talk?) They were broadcasting something, not narrowcasting.
5 The Library. Fill in a card at the branch library next to my old primary school with selections from the roneo'd catalogue and you could borrow and tape Forever Changes, Mythical Kings and Iguana's, the listenable bits of Self Portrait, Poco's Deliverin', Grievous Angel, We're only In It For The Money. Someone at Head Office (no pun intended) was mixing Lord Reith with the NME reviews pages. One day I heard Blonde on Blonde, Horses and the Velvet Underground (a budget compilation) all for the first time. The conduit to the spring at Culture centre was on the rates. When I moved to Sheffield, their library, or my borrowing from it, reflected the Cabaret Voltaire meets Rare and Racy sound smorgasborg of the time and place - Steve Reich, Sun Ra, Keith Jarrett. Nowadays the local library charge the ratepayer £1.50 per CD loan, as though in deference to outmoded copyright laws and The Cultural Health and Safety Committee. The key thing was, unlike downloading, was The Delay, sometimes weeks or months. As any fule kno, delay leads to anticipation, frustration and desire, immediate gratification to regret.
And my point is? Something about reclaiming the reality of life's diversity that some would claim for their clique. The hip were out there, as they still are, looking for the Good Stuff. There's people worth seeking out who are giving the nod to the wise, and generally speaking, unlike journalists, they pay for their records.
Any road, here's Bobby Charles, for all the Small Town Talkers..
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