What I’m Reading: “Dancing with Myself”

In any given decade, one or two musicians discovers exactly the right sound, look, and vibe to capture the spirit of the times. Such “triple-threat” artists are rare. Elvis Presley was one. David Bowie was another.

For many in my generation of kids growing up in the early 1980s, there were two such figures. One was Madonna. The other was Billy Idol. Unless you were a teenager in that dark, troubled time, you can’t imagine what a huge impact Idol had on youth culture. Let’s start with his look, an ingenious mix of pre-Goth romanticism (complete with black leather and rosary beads) and science-fiction cyberpunk (he had the same peroxide blond hair and chiseled features as Rutger Hauer’s Nazi replicant in Blade Runner).

Idol looked like…well…an idol. A pop idol, that is. But it was his sound that really mattered. Just as Elvis took the energy and soul of R&B and turned into something that middle-class, white American kids could enjoy, Idol took the punk sound of 1970s London and turned it into kick-ass American hard rock. His early hits like “White Wedding” and “Mony, Mony” stuck out a mile on FM radio (not to mention MTV, where they stuck out two miles). Not only were his songs vicious and fast, they had an actual beat; you could dance to them. And we did.

In short, Idol did what the Sex Pistols never could: he brought punk to mainstream America.

I remember distinctly the first time I heard him speak on TV—just a quick sound-bite that he gave to a reporter outside some club. He was describing his upcoming tour and he said something to the effect that his usual band would be playing and he would be up-front, “warbling.” For an off-the-cuff comment, it struck me as witty and smart, tempered with just the right hint of knowing self-mockery. (My guess is that not many pop stars would even know what the word “warbling” means, no less use it to describe their own voice.)

And so I was not totally surprised upon reading Idol’s excellent memoir Dancing with Myself to find it sharp, vivid, and engrossing. Actually I should say “upon hearing” it, because my first encounter with the memoir was with the audio-book version, narrated with great panache by Idol himself. In late middle-age, Idol’s famous voice has mellowed into a sonorous baritone, tinged with a bit of gravel from years of smoking and other vices. If a voice can be said to have “character lines,” this one does. It is a singular pleasure to hear him recite lyrics from one of his own idols, Johnny Rotten: “I am an anti-CHRIST / I am an anar-CHIST.”

Wow.

In some ways, Dancing with Myself is a book-long version of the “warbling” comment mentioned above. Idol describes his rise, fall, and rise in rock history with the same intelligence and earthy candor, and more than a bit of humor. The book is also full of surprises, as when he explains his sources of inspiration—a melange of cultural influences ranging from horror films (“Eyes without a Face”), nightmares (“White Wedding”), Japanese disco (“Dancing with Myself”), science-fiction novels (“Cyberpunk”), and the American Civil War (“Rebel Yell”).

But what really struck me about the book is the candor with which Idol (whose real name is William Broad) struggled as a would-be artist in the 1970s. One passage in particular drips with yearning and hope:

[…]the Sex Pistols seemed to be doing things on their own terms. it was a reaction to everyone telling people our age what we should do to succeed. After the Pistols’ 100 Club residency came to an end, my Bromley friends and I would see the band at other several times that summer of ‘76, and we would come to believe that there was hope for our generation. Now it was up to us to start our own bands, following Johnny Rotten’s example of how to make the ordinary extraordinary. The dull gray English skies suddenly opened up to a rainbow of possibilities. The fans embraced safety pins and spiky, razor-cut hair. Although the latter had been around since at least the mods and then David Bowie, Johnny started the home cut, the bad haircut that looked really good.

Of course, no story of Billy Idol’s rock career would be complete without some recounting of his many forays into the attendant pleasures of sex and drugs. Indeed, he begins his narrative with the moment of his near-fatal motorcycle accident, which happened after a particularly brutal night of drug-fueled excess. Although Idol has a tendency to romanticize his Byronesque adventures in sleaze, he nonetheless describes these excursions with brutal honesty, including the infamous moment when he was kicked out of Thailand (yes, the entire county) after a three-week long bender. In the book, he essentially admits that he suffers from ADHD, and I suspect that his struggles with drug- and sex-addiction have as much to do with brain chemistry than with a spiritual quest for experience.

Beyond all this, Idol was a landmark figure of his time, and I found myself liking him a lot.  Beneath the legend, the man named William Broad comes off as clever, passionate, and even a little bit….sweet.

Amazingly, for all his groupie shagging, he also seems to have been something of a crypto-feminist. Take the passage where he describes his friend Steve Severin’s love affair with another of Idol’s idols (and mine):

Siouxsie Sioux was Susan Janet Ballion, a self-described loner who was a fan of the same bands I followed. She left school at seventeen, and her unique fashion style—fetish/bondage outfits that often featured her exposed breasts—turned heads when she began to follow the Sex Pistols…. Steve first met her in late ‘73 or early ‘74, when she lived in Chislehurst, near Bromley. They were really boyfriend and girlfriend, and I was always knocked out for Steve that he had met someone as cool as himself. I was never jealous of them, but in with them as a couple and as as friends, and this feeling grew the more I admired Susan as the type of girl one would wish to find for oneself. She had a larger-than-life personality and was brimming with ideas that flowed throughout the conversation. Susan didn’t feel she had to suck up to males or their ideas or feel dominated by them. If anything, she gave any man she met a run for his money and could put him in his place with a sharp, witty saying that left him nonplussed or mouth agape. She is a liberated woman who is not bound by any other female’s idea of what freedom is. She rules her universe like the deity she truly is. Don’t get in her way, as the forces of the universe will be arrayed against you.

Clearly, Idol belies his own own statement of never being “jealous of them,” and his all-too-clear affection for Ballion in this moment revealed to me the inner appeal of the book—that William Broad is just a really smart, needy kid from Bromley, England, trying to live up to the ideals of artistic freedom that were defined by the giants preceded him. Whether or not he succeeded is almost irrelevant—he gave it a hell of a try.

(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)