Classic Rock Issue 207

207

THE FULL STORY!

Black Sabbath H Scorpions H Blackberry Smoke H Jethro Tull H Kid Rock H John Lennon H Skip Spence H UFO

OZZY, GEEZER, TONY, BILL … … MANAGERS, ROADIES AND A CAST OF THOUSANDS TELL ALL!

AS CHOS

EN

BY Y OU !

THE DARK KNIGHTS RISE How the insane 70s incited a musical revolution

t ou b a c i ro e h g n i th me o s s “There wa elt like a cause…” f t I . h at b Sab CD missing? Ask your newsagent

KID ROCK SCORPIONS

The real American badass

Five decades of chaos

MARCH 2015

PRINTED IN THE UK

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Blackberry smoke ufo The rise of the new southern rock heroes

Mogg’s mad world

March 2015 issue 207

Features 32 Black Sabbath

Naked jamming, mountains of coke, knife-wielding fans...

This can only be the story of the four Brummie boys known as Black Sabbath – as told in their own words.

50 Kid Rock

He’s been a motor-mouthed rapper, nu-metal icon, unlikely Nashville country star and now a blue-collar heartland rocker. Will the real Kid Rock please stand up.

54 Blackberry Smoke

Beloved by ZZ Top, befriended by Skynyrd, and Gregg Allman reckons they’re “gonna put southern rock back on the map”.

We joined the band on the road as they met their adoring British public.

60 Skip Spence

The Moby Grape co-founder wrote his cult solo album Oar in an NYC psychiatric ward after threatening his bandmates with an axe. We tell his tragic tale.

66 Hipgnosis

As one half of the visionary British design teams, Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell changed the face of the album sleeve. Here he digs deep into his archive to reveal previously unseen photos – and the stories that go with them.

cover story

32

Black Sabbath

“The critics hated us from day one. All we read was ‘What a load of old crap!’”

Revered rock legends today, but it wasn’t like that in the 70s…

72 The Cadillac Three

The shit-kicking southern rockers celebrate their recent Classic Rock Awards victory by drinking the magazine under the table. Cheers!

74 Jethro Tull

In 1977, punk had killed off prog’s old guard, right? Wrong. Ian Anderson and his merrie men were about to record a ‘folk trilogy’ that would give them their greatest success in years.

80 Scorpions

Rudolf Schenker, Klaus Meine and Matthias Jabs revisit 50 years of non-PC LP sleeves, Siberian beauty queens and the never-ending party that was the 80s.

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March 2015 issue 207

16 The Dirt

Is there a conspiracy to keep Deep Purple out of the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame? Fleetwood Mac ready to hit the studio, AC/DC: Malcolm Young’s heart and lung surgery, and Phil Rudd says: “I want my job back and I want my reputation back”… say hello to Pond and Sons Of Bill, welcome back Butch Walker, Revolution Saints and Venom; goodnight Joe Cocker, Jeff Golub, Robert ‘Rock’ Scully…

27 Raw Power

Flashing the V sign: check out the new Michael Schenker signature model from US guitar makers Dean.

28 The Stories Behind The Songs XTC

Politically-charged song Making Plans For Nigel firmly established the Swindon band as the intelligent arm of the post-punk movement.

30 Q&A Steve Earle

The singer-songwriter reveals all about getting divorced, getting older and finally getting the blues.

87 Reviews

New albums from Blackberry Smoke, Marilyn Manson, Venom, Black Star Riders, Pond, Gov’t Mule, The Vibrators, Thunder, Enter Shakiri… Reissues from Led Zeppelin, Soundgarden, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Manic Street Preachers, Pixies, Rainbow, The Byrds, Todd Rundgren…

DVDs, films and books on Rush, Metallica, Stiff Records, Motörhead, Whitesnake, Anthrax… Live reviews of Queen + Adam Lambert, Manic Street Preachers, Rival Sons, Aaron Keylock, Status Quo, Whitesnake…

104 Buyer’s Guide John Lennon

The Beatle’s solo albums are full of timeless pop, but be prepared for avant-jazz, birdsong and primal screaming too.

108 Letters

Got something to say? Let us hear it – shout it out loud!

111 Lives previews

50

Gig previews from Royal Blood, Zakk Wylde, Nazareth, Colosseum and Jefferson Starship, plus full listings – who’s playing where and when.

138 Heavy Load Phil Mogg

Kid Rock

The UFO frontman talks politics, religion and self-fellatio.

“Making good bluesbased rock’n’roll has been the hardest f**king thing for me to do.”

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W H AT W E D O

SHAD

“The idea was to make something heavier 32 classicrockmagazine.com

IN THE

OWS Between 1970 and 1979, four workingclass heroes from Birmingham took music off into strange and dark new dimensions.

This is the tortured, triumphant tale of Black Sabbath in the 1970s.

Words: Johnny Black Additional interviews: Paul Elliott

than had ever been heard before.� classicrockmagazine.com 33

The original treatment for the Stones’ Goats Head Soup, 1973.

66 classicrockmagazine.com

As one half of visionary British design team Hipgnosis, Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell changed the face of the album sleeve.

Here he digs deep into his archive to reveal previously unseen photos – and the stories that go with them.

I

Words: Mark Blake

n the 1970s, Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell was one of the creative minds behind the design agency Hipgnosis. Powell, along with his partner, the late Storm Thorgerson, stripped away the album title and even the band name, and stuck a picture of a cow on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother and a prism on the sleeve of The Dark Side Of The Moon instead.

Hipgnosis revolutionised album sleeve art with their elaborate and often surreal imagery for Floyd, Led Zeppelin, 10cc, Black Sabbath, Peter Gabriel and more. Hipgnosis folded in 1983 and Powell went on to a highly successful career directing documentaries, films and TV commercials.

However, prior to Storm Thorgerson’s death in 2013, he began collating Hipgnosis’ past work, discovering forgotten negatives and contact sheets, “some of which,” he explains, “had been lying in the bottom of a cupboard for over forty years.”

A new handsome hardback book, Hipgnosis Portraits, offers a journey through a golden age of rock: with unseen outtakes from album cover shoots, rejected artwork and Powell’s previously unpublished photo sessions with some of the biggest bands in the world.

“I captured these artists when they were at their peak,” says Po now. “Floyd, Zeppelin, the Stones – they looked their best, they were playing their best, and they were making the best music of their lives.”

“I told the Stones they’d have to wear tights. Keith said: ‘Yeah. man, whatever.’”

The infamous photo shoot that lay at the bottom of a filing cabinet for 40 years.

A

ubrey Powell: In 1973, Marshall Chess [the head of Rolling Stones Records] asked us to a meeting at Keith Richards’s house in Chelsea, with Mick and Keith to discuss a cover for the new Stones album. They told us it was called Goats Head Soup.

We worked up two ideas – one of the Stones as centaurs – half man, half horse – and another as satyrs – with goat’s legs. At the time the Stones had this satanic image, so putting an animal’s legs on them was seen as devilish. They loved it! I explained to them that they’d have to wear tights for it, but Keith said: ‘Yeah, man, okay, whatever.’

So we booked Bow Street studios in Covent Garden one Saturday, and catered for their every whim – beer, Jack Daniel’s, you name it. They were all co-operative, except for Keith who turned up incredibly late and in a foul mood, and that set the others off. Bill Wyman, in particular, was not comfortable.

Eventually, though, things mellowed. Marshall had asked us to shoot some promo pics as well. That’s when they loosened up, sitting around on this mattress, listening to the music we had playing in the studio, and the vibe improved.

Everyone was happy, and we said we’d mock up the pictures of them with animals’ legs and send them something in three weeks’ time. Remember, this was in the days before Photoshop. In the meantime, though, the Stones did a promo session with David Bailey, including a shot of Mick with a piece of cheesecloth over his face in front of a wind machine. Next thing, we took a call from Marshall, saying they were going with the Bailey shot for the album cover. Very rarely did we work on spec, without getting paid, but we’d done it because it was the Stones.

Mick and Keith kept the rough we had made with the horse bodies. I didn’t know it still existed, until their archivist saw the Hipgnosis stamp on the back, and returned it to me. A year ago, I found the photos from the session in a Gaffer-taped envelope in a cupboard in Storm’s studio, unopened since I’d thrown them in there over 40 years ago. The negatives were still in perfect condition.

I love these shots because they capture the Stones in their prime. Mick looked like Nureyev, and Keith like this gigolo pirate. Very beautiful. They weren’t a sixties pop group anymore, but it was them before they could became gnarled and grizzly. classicrockmagazine.com 67

60 classicrockmagazine.com

Moby Grape co-founder Skip Spence wrote his cult solo album Oar in an NYC psychiatric ward after threatening his bandmates with an axe.

Fifteen years after his death, artists continue to acknowledge his influence.

Words: Rob Hughes

GETTY

t’s April 1999, and some of rock’s biggest and most respected names have banded together to record songs as part of a benefit album for one of American music’s more obscure figures. It’s an impressive line-up: Robert Plant, Tom Waits, Beck, Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli. All are paying tribute to a man whose last meaningful music was made 30 years ago but whose legacy still burns bright.

But there’s another reason they are taking part in this homage. For the past three decades the man in question has been in declining physical and mental health, living on the streets or in care. Most recently he’s been holed up in a trailer in San Jose, California, surviving largely on a diet of anti-psychotic drugs.

Now things have deteriorated further. It’s April 1999 and Alexander Spence – ‘Skip’ to all who know him – has been admitted to the local Dominican Hospital with pneumonia. The doctors have also diagnosed lung cancer. His son Omar arrives with a promo pressing of More Oar, the aforementioned benefit album, and plays it at his bedside. Despite his condition, Skip manages

a weary smile. Within the hour he’s dead, two days shy of his 53rd birthday.

Spence’s death didn’t trouble the notice pages of the dailies, but it was a heavy loss to a significant portion of the music world. His former bandmates in Moby Grape, the Bay Area group he co-founded in the 60s, felt it deeply. As did those he was an inspiration for. Robert Plant had been a Grape fan since his pre-Led Zeppelin days. His next album, Dreamland, would feature Skip’s Song (aka Seeing), a Spence original from 1967. Bobby Gillespie cited him as a key signpost to Primal Scream’s in-progress record XTRMNTR. Julian Cope, Wilco, Chrissie Hynde and Mudhoney were also swift to acknowledge a debt.

These admirers fell into two camps. There were those who adored ➻ classicrockmagazine.com 61

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