Magic Dick - Lord of the Licking Stick!
Writer Nick Hornby was ahead of the curve in some respects when he first starting putting books out two decades back or more although I still have some trouble reading his stuff owing partly to his specific tastes in both football and music and my own personal prejudices in those respects. I'm sure Hornby himself would understand. Still, he was in many ways the big daddy of all us blog ranters, banging on ceaselessly about his pet obsessions without regard for actually being liked by the reader and unapologetic about his tastes and himself.
He also has great, undeniable strengths of course, particularly in terms of his precision, most obviously in his first two books, Fever Pitch and High Fidelity, in nailing certain characteristics of the adult, British male. Maybe the conclusions he came to apply elsewhere too, but I can only speak authoritatively from personal experience for these isles. In particular he hit bulls-eyes in terms of male neediness, our difficulties with the opposite sex, our tendency to make lists, our often illogical and unswerving allegiance to particular sporting clubs, our unshakable sense of certainty that our taste in music is, after all, better than anyone else's. And that's just for starters.
Nevertheless, he gets some things wrong. He supports Arsenal, after all and proceeds to keep banging on about it and them in interminable length and detail throughout the pages of Fever Pitch as if this in itself makes him by default some kind of deserving object for sympathy or pity from those who might not share his particular object of affection. Arsenal Football club, as those even vaguely in the know will realise, are one of the more enduringly, successful institutions in English footballing history. Arsenal fans don't need or deserve a shred of either sympathy or empathy from the rest of us. Their team will no doubt win something this season. If not, the next. The rest of us should be so lucky! As for those who don't even like the sport. God only knows what they think!
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In High Fidelity and most recently in 31 Songs, his written collection of his favourite songs and the memories and emotions they evoke, he did us male music lovers an even greater disservice. He saddled us, by association, with a mainstream, contented and slightly self-satisfied perspective on life and music. There's more to life than Badly Drawn Boy, Teenage Fanclub and Aimee Mann Nick! Jackson Browne puh-lease!
He does pick some good stuff too of course. The book's well worth a read despite this caveat and there are of some notable sections of excellent writing. For example this passage about his first trip to The States as a teenager and how he fell in love with all things American, including the J.Geils Band:
'My father's friend had a son called Danny, who was older than me , maybe twenty or twenty-one and he had long hair and a moustache; he looked exactly like Danny Crudup in Almost Famous. Danny loved his music, and the music I was listening to when I went round to his house for the first time was the live J.Geils Band album Full House. I'd never heard of them, and I'd never heard anything like them: in those days, before they had a big pop hit with 'Centrefold',they played white boy R&B, like The Stones in 1965, but much louder and much faster, with a beserk irreverence and an occasionally terrifying intensity. On the live album, Peter Wolf, the lead singer, shouted out funny, weird or incomprehensible things in between songs: 'On the licking stick Mr Magic Dick!' 'This used to be called "Take Out Your False Teeth Mama.......I Want To Sssssuck On Your Gums" and something that sounds like 'areyougonnagettitmoodogetitgoomoogetitmoodoogoomooomoogetitalldowngetitallrig htgetitoutofsightandgetitdownbaby?' The first thing you hear on the record is a solid slab of crown noise, whistles and cheers and screams, and then a shouted and very un-English introduction from an MC 'Are you ready to get down? I said are you ready for some rock and roll? Let's hear it for the J.Geils Band!'
Nick Hornby - 31 Songs
The J.Geils Band at their peak was a pleasure that was largely denied to British audiences. As Hornby mentions above they only really struck it big here ten years later when they had a couple of Top 20 hits in the early eighties with Centrefold and Freezeframe and toured with The Stones. They were past their best then, Centrefold is a particular embarrassment to listen to now, but Hornby is right in that they were clearly a force to be reckoned with in the early Seventies. On one occasion, the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs played typewriter onstage with them during an encore proceeding to smash it to bits at the end of the song. He wouldn't have done that with just anyone. Possibly, reading Bang's stuff again this week he might have done, so rampant was his ego.
In any case, I've posted a selection from their fine first two studio albums here as well as one of the tracks from the Full House live album that Hornby alludes to above, which interestingly also gets a name-check in the Big Star review I put up a couple of days back and clearly was a staple for American record collectors in the early seventies and the band themselves, something of an institution.
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