Biography – Page 2 – Ash Clifton, Writer

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.

One of the many things I learned from Rod Stewart’s memoir, Rod: The Autobiography, is that the technical process of recording a studio album is very strange. For instance, the lead singer usually records his vocal track in a soundproofed room, by himself, wearing headphones so that he can listen to the band’s instrumental track.

It seems a very sterile and artificial process–not at all what one pictures when imagining a rock singer at work. And so I was impressed to learn that Stewart has always rejected this technique, insisting on recording all tracks directly with his band:

When we were recording, I liked to be in the sound room with the band, walking around with a microphone in hand, so that I could look them in the eye, interact with them, perform with them, basically. I think it slightly startled the engineer, who was more used to having the singer isolated behind screens, or in an entirely separate vocal booth. I remember hearing how Frank Sinatra had once been parked by an engineer behind a screen in a recording studio and he had made them take it down. In order to sing, he needed to feel the sound of the orchestra hit him in the chest. I guess this was my own version of that.

It’s interesting that Stewart draws a comparison between himself and Sinatra. As I learned from James Kaplan’s fine bio of Sinatra, the great crooner himself exerted tremendous effort when preparing for one his recordings. He was known to read the song lyrics aloud to himself, almost like prose. He felt he had to discover the emotional truth of the lyric before he could sing it, and if that truth was not forthcoming, he would nix the song.

Category: Biography

What I’m Reading: “Dancing with Myself”

What I’m Reading: “Rod: The Autobiography”