204
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the new album: final fanfare or faux pas?
the wit and wisdom of a madman
The Doors H Ozzy Osbourne H Bryan Adams H Buzzcocks H Motörhead H John Mellencamp H Ace Frehley
WORLD EXCLUS IVE!
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“THE WEIGHT O F JIM’S
DEMO NS WA S O N U S TO O
Also! ”
The magic and the madness of America’s most influential band how ‘reckless’ made him a superstar
Way more than just the last great punk band
F r One ee! mon th AA
on the MotÖrboat: den of debauchery or lemmy’s retirement cruise?
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Plus... Robert Plant John Mellencamp Ace Frehley The Levellers dream theater & More
cover story
35
The Doors
“In a way Jim got what he wanted. He really was interested in death.”
DECember 2014 issue 204
Features 35 The Doors
They were the most influential American band of them all. In our 20-page special there are tales of darkness, debauchery, magic and mysticism. But first…
35 John Densmore and Robby Krieger
In a world exclusive, Classic Rock has reunited the estranged former bandmates for the very first time in a decade.
44 When The Doors hit London They brought controversy with them when they played their debut UK gigs, but over two unforgettable nights at The Roundhouse it was their incendiary music that did the talking.
46 Waiting For The Sun
Photographer Paul Ferrara takes us through unseen shots from the Waiting For The Sun album sessions.
48 Morrison Hotel
By the end of 1969, The Doors were in disarray. In the midst of the darkness, they dredged up a true return to form with the Morrison Hotel album. But it would be a false dawn for their self-destructive singer.
52 Ray Manzarek
We celebrate the late Doors’ keyboard player.
54 The 20 Greatest Doors Songs Which of their songs light your fire? We pick the ultimate Doors playlist.
58 Bryan Adams
How the star-making Reckless album turned an ambitious kid into the unlikeliest rock’n’roll hero of the 80s.
64 Ozzy Osbourne
A thoughtful and reflective Ozzy looks back on the triumphs, tragedies and occasional idiocy of his life with pride and surprisingly little regret.
70 Buzzcocks
With new album The Way showcasing their classic punk-pop, they prove they’re far from ready for the nostalgia circuit. Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle talk past, present and future.
76 Blues Pills
The music of these 60s disciples does strange things to people – like make them strip naked in public. Look away!
78 Lemmy
Classic Rock puts on its lifejacket and heads to the high seas on the Motörhead Motörboat.
86 The Levellers
Despite being hated by the mainstream music press, they became the biggest band in the UK. With a new ‘best of’ out now, they’re still here – and still angry.
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DECember 2014 issue 204
14 The Dirt
Malcolm Young’s dementia confirmed; Queen to record again? Huge names to gather for new festival in 2015; Led Zeppelin and Spirit battle over who wrote Stairway… say hello to Crobot and Henry’s Funeral Shoe; welcome back Godsmack, Joanne Shaw Taylor and Primus; goodnight Clive Beer-Jones, Raf Ravenscroft, Paul Revere, Rob Skipper…
28 The Stories Behind The Songs Sugar
A song that came into Bob Mould’s head “as I was waking up one morning”, Hoover Dam is among the former Hüsker Dü man’s best.
30 Q&A Ace Frehley
The original Kiss guitarist on old wounds, old habits, his new album and a new Kiss tour that he should be part of.
99 Reviews
New albums from Pink Floyd, Foo Fighters, Queen, Prince, Sixx: AM, Bryan Adams, Monster Magnet, Gong, Jimmy Barnes, Fripp & Eno… Reissues from The Who, Bryan Adams, Genesis, Rory Gallagher, Ian Dury, Iron Butterfly, Quireboys, Suzi Quatro… DVDs, films and books on Jimi Hendrix, Yes, The Doors, Jon Lord, Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney… Live reviews of Robert Plant, Virginmarys, King Crimson, Crobot, Lenny Kravitz, Anathema, Buffalo Summer…
114 Buyer’s Guide Dream Theater
Pushing prog-metal to its limits (some would argue even beyond), they’ve boldly taken the genre to where no band has gone before.
118 Letters
Got something to say? Let us hear it – shout it out loud!
122 Lives previews
Gig previews from Anti-Mortem, Blue Öyster Cult and The Jesus And Mary Chain, plus gig listings – who’s playing where and when.
146 Heavy Load Ian McLagan
The former Small Faces and Faces keyboard player on Rod, Ronnie, Wolf, Marriott and migraines.
70
Buzzcocks
“We came from art rock not pub rock.” The ‘punk Beatles’ step off the treadmill of nostalgia…
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The Gospel According To
Words: Ben Mitchell Portrait: Mark Weiss
emoirs Of A Madman is an apt title for the sixth ‘best of’ collection of Ozzy Osbourne’s career. Whether it’s snorting ants, pissing on the Alamo or – as the photo opposite proves – shaving his head and dressing up as a satanic butler, he’s spent a lifetime drunkenly going back and forth over that line between normal and utterly batshit crazy. Then there’s another Ozzy Osbourne, the one who doesn’t get written about as much. This Ozzy is a reflective, funny 65-year-old who dwells on his mistakes as much as his triumphs. You can still hear and see in him the working-class kid who grew up on the streets of Birmingham. Granted, he’s still prone to explosions of incredulity and some Olympic-level swearing. This is Deep Ozzy, rather than Crazy Ozzy. That’s the man we get today, looking back on the triumphs, tragedies and occasional idiocy of his life with pride and surprisingly little regret. So sit back and enjoy the thoughts of Chairman Ozzy… Sharon says to me: “We’ll be dead in twentyfive years.” Twenty-five years is nothing. I’m sixtysix this birthday. I don’t feel any different now than I did when I was fifty-six. When I was fifty-six I didn’t feel any different to how I did when I was forty-six. When I was younger I used to say: “Oh, I’ll be dead by forty.” So that was alright until I was about thirty-nine and three-quarters. Then I thought: “Maybe I want to stay around a bit longer.” What do I think happens after we die? I’ll try to send a message back. I think your spirit goes somewhere. I mean, not in the form of me or you or whatever; the energy that we have goes into the universe. When I got fired from Sabbath I thought: “This is it. What can I do now? I’ll buy a bar.” That lasted about a month. My ex-wife [Thelma] asked me very kindly if I wouldn’t mind staying at home and letting someone else run the pub. 64 classicrockmagazine.com
People weren’t coming in because I was mad, and I was drinking the profits every day. That was in Newport, Shropshire. It’s just next door to Staffordshire. I’m told that they still call that place Ozzy’s. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. I don’t like the sound of vacuum cleaners. That drives me nuts when I’m in a hotel. Flymos as well. They piss me off. What values did my father teach me? Get some money and give it to me! No, he would say: “You may not be wealthy and you may not be well-educated, but good manners come cheaply enough.” He instilled in me, from a very young age, ladies before gentleman; just be kind to the opposite sex; you help an older lady across the road or give her your seat on the bus. My father was a stickler for all that. He worked in a factory. Mum was a factory worker as well. We lived in a very small house. There were six of us in two bedrooms. With mum and dad it was eight; there were six kids. We had a bathroom but it was always going wrong. You’d have one bath a month or something because we couldn’t afford the electricity bill. The only holiday I used to have was prison. Well, I had an aunt that lived in Sunderland. That was like going to the Antarctic.
“Pushers of hard drugs should be executed. They’re selling death.” The first thing I do when I get back to England is go to Marks & Spencer. They do the best trifle and chocolate éclairs – real cream. I love them. There’s still a lot of me in England. The house I have in Buckinghamshire is my house. That’s where my anchor is, even though we don’t spend that much time there any more. My wife says: “We should sell up.” There’s something in me that just cannot do that. Because once you’ve sold up you’re fucked.
I now call cocaine “bullshit powder”, because it makes you feel that everyone’s wonderful, that you’re wonderful and you can solve the problems of the world. But it’s all an illusion. I did plenty of it for years. And I’m not proud of that. I think it’s wrong that they put addicts in jail, because it’s an illness. Pushers of heroin and hard drugs should be executed because it’s attempted murder. They’re selling death. On the last Sabbath album there was a song called Zeitgeist. I went: “What does that mean?” Geezer goes: “Oh, it’s German.” I grew up in Aston, not fucking Stuttgart. I miss the Birmingham that I left. Birmingham now has got bigger and they’ve had the town hall done out. If you spend six months away and you go back to anywhere you go: “Fucking hell! How long’s that building been there?” You don’t notice change so much when you’re there. They believe in UFOs and aliens over in America. I think that’s all rubbish. What the fuck would anybody with any intelligence see in this planet? If there is a God, he probably went: “This’ll be a good experiment. I’ll put these things called people on Earth and see what they do.” In no time at all they start killing each other and doing everything they can to fuck it all up. I don’t believe in organised religion, but I do believe in something more powerful than me. Like nature. My favourite thing about school was going home at four o’clock. I hated it. I’m incredibly dyslexic and I have attention deficit disorder. Back then they didn’t understand that. I was in a couple of musical things – we did The Mikado and The Pirates Of Penzance. That was alright. I wasn’t ready for children until I was into my thirties, but you get married, you start having sex and babies happen. I love my kids, but with my first wife I was a married bachelor; I was fucking everything that moved and getting loaded on a daily basis. Sharon was different. She said: ➻
Ozzy Osbourne: utterly batshit crazy, 1982.
Call of the
wild From the Great Northern Wastes – well, Vancouver – came Bryan Adams, armed with only a set of blue-collar anthems and a well-placed innuendo. This is how the star-making Reckless album turned an ambitious kid into the unlikeliest rock’n’roll hero of the 80s.
I
Words: Paul Elliott
t was the summer of ’84. Bryan Adams was in According to Adams, these three words “changed New York City, working on the follow-up to his everything”. The next day, he was on a plane back to breakthrough album Cuts Like A Knife, which Vancouver. He called Jim Vallance, his co-songwriter, had sold a million copies in the US. The new and told him: “We need to pump up the volume on songs he’d recorded were good. He was sure of this.” With his manager’s words still ringing in his that. And he had what he considered the perfect title for head, Adams chose two tracks that could be “taken a rock’n’roll album: Reckless. But still, he had a feeling in up a notch” – One Night Love Affair and Summer Of ’69. his gut that something wasn’t quite right. In addition, he and Vallance wrote a new song from Adams and his producer Bob Clearmountain were at scratch – a song that answered Bruce Allen’s question The Power Station, a famous recording studio on West in the most emphatic fashion. Its title: Kids Wanna Rock. 53rd Street in Manhattan. They were on the final stretch: The three tracks were re-recorded using a drummer nine tracks had been recorded at a different studio, Little that Adams discovered playing in a ska band in a strip Mountain Sound in Vancouver, the Canadian city where joint. And with that, he knew, at last, that he’d nailed it. Adams had lived since he was a teenager. Now they were With Reckless, Adams found a niche that was all his applying the finishing touches, own. As a rock record made mostly vocal overdubs. But while for radio, it plugged into that Clearmountain was happy with mainstream audience dominated what they’d got, Adams was not. by Bruce Springsteen, John His instinct told him they Cougar Mellencamp and Don needed something more, but Henley. But Adams was of he was too close to it to figure a different generation to those out exactly what was missing. established big-hitters. He turned He was also fatigued. He and 25 on the day Reckless was released Clearmountain had been working – November 5, 1984. His hard the graveyard shift, from six rock sensibility – explicit in Kids Bryan Adams o’clock in the evening through Wanna Rock – was something that to six in the morning. Adams was also sleeping on spoke to fans of Van Halen and ZZ Top, and the way the couch at a friend’s house because he was sick of he sang, belting it out like a young Rod Stewart, gave staying in hotels. him that extra edge. With Reckless, Bryan Adams would But in his tired mind, one thing was certain. This knock the ball clean out of the park. was no time to be dropping the ball. In 1981, after his hirty years on, Adams is returning to the album debut album had flopped, he had joked about naming that shaped his career and changed his life. the second Bryan Adams Hasn’t Heard Of You Either. Three There is a deluxe edition of Reckless released on years on, his mood was more serious. With Cuts Like November 10 and a UK tour to follow where Adams A Knife, he’d gotten his foot in the door. With Reckless, will be performing the album in its entirety. he intended to bust it wide open. Everything about this On one of the last warm days of the summer, he’s record had to be perfect. at his office, a converted mews house just off the King’s Adams summoned his manager Bruce Allen to Road in London, close to the Thames. He has lived in New York for a playback of the album. Allen’s verdict this area since the early 90s. The office is simply was straight to the point: “Where’s the rock?” ➻
“I never wanted to be a singer. If I could have been anyone it would have been Ritchie Blackmore.”
T
58 classicrockmagazine.com
Bryan Adams in ’85, about to take the rock world by storm.
So says John Densmore, one of the two surviving members of The Doors. With a new DVD, Feast Of Friends, on the horizon, what better time to celebrate the most influential American band of them all? In this 20-page special there are tales of darkness, debauchery, magic and mysticism. But before all that, in a world exclusive, Classic Rock has reunited Densmore and estranged bandmate Robby Krieger for the very first time in a decade. GETTY
he two surviving members of The Doors sit at either end of a leather couch, as far away from each other as possible, a palpable sense of unease separating them. “This doesn’t happen very often, so you must have some pull somewhere,” guitarist Robby Krieger says wryly. Krieger and his former bandmate, drummer John Densmore, have come together in the LA offices of the company that manages The Doors’ estate. They’re surrounded by mementos of their success, which began further along the Sunset Strip at the fabled Whisky A Go Go club back in 1966. Even a year ago, getting the two of them together anywhere other than a courtroom would have been unthinkable. Densmore and his ex-compadres spent much of the past decade embroiled in a lengthy and acrimonious legal battle over the use of The Doors’ name, and he and Krieger only reconciled after the death of keyboardist and founding member Ray Manzarek last year. Even today there’s a whiff of residual tension. Densmore, dressed all in black with his thick grey hair swept into a ponytail, is blunt and domineering; Krieger is frail, quiet and calm, his benevolent manner in stark contrast to Densmore’s more impatient state. The pair are here to talk about their much-anticipated new DVD, Feast Of Friends. Shot in cinéma vérité style, the film chronicles The Doors’ summer tour of 1968. Inter-cutting live footage with candid moments away from the stage, it provides a close-up view of life on the road with the group as they were on their way to becoming one of America’s most influential and revered bands. “We’ve pilfered from it in the past,” says Densmore. “Let’s see the whole damn thing as it was intended.” In the 43 years since the death of the band’s iconic singer, Jim Morrison, reams have been written about The Doors, much of it by Densmore himself. “Don’t believe all this shit I wrote,” he barks when one of his lines is quoted back to him. Now, as he and Krieger come face to face with each other, and with their past, we get to hear the real truth of what it was like to be in The Doors. Words: Kevin Murphy
Whose idea was it to finally release Feast Of Friends? Robby: I don’t know. Maybe the fans. We interact
they’ll see him as a real person… how brilliant he is, a real person.” Talking to the priest and stuff like that. I know that always bothered Ray a lot, the fact the movie… As good as The Doors movie was – I thought it was a great rock’n’roll movie – the script was just so stupid. John: Wait a minute. It’s really good but it’s stupid? Which is it? Robby: As a rock’n’roll movie, it’s good. I think it’s one of the best rock’n’roll movies out there. John: Oliver chose to do the tortured artist, and he showed a lot of the torture. Robby: He showed a lot of the drunk, none of the guy who was a real person. John: The only thing that bothered me is it didn’t have enough of the sixties for me. Robby: It didn’t have enough of the guitar player for me.
a lot online with the fans, and I think they really wanted to see it – the whole thing, rather than just pieces stuck into other films.
Why now? Robby: Maybe we need the money now. John: As the late, great Ray Manzarek would say, it’s
an alignment of the stars. It’s a cosmic conjunction of planets that made this moment happen.
Was the release of Feast Of Friends in any way prompted by the passing of Ray? Robby: No, nothing like that. Did you initially have any reservations about making the film? Robby: I thought it was kind of a waste of money, actually.
How do you feel now? Robby: I wish we’d done it more now. I wish we
Was it painful or joyful watching the footage this time around? Robby: It was fun because I hadn’t seen it for a long time all together like that. It was very enjoyable.
John: To me it was poignant. Two Doors are gone,
and seeing Jim and Ray on the sailboat at the end, 36 classicrockmagazine.com
it’s very touching. It has the beautiful adagio for strings, and you’re seeing this beautiful sailboat, and Jim, and Ray. It’s powerful.
Will it shed a new light on The Doors? Robby: I think so. I even said to myself: “Man, when
people see this who have already seen [Oliver Stone’s 1991] The Doors movie, and they think that’s how Jim was, that he was a total idiot, and now
documentary, Mr Mojo Risin’: The Story Of LA Woman at the [Los Angeles] County Museum. They wanted a Q&A, and we did our blah, blah, and it was really cool that we played music for ten minutes – just the guitar and hand drums. We hadn’t played these songs in a long time. It was sweet, man. For me, in four bars I was back. It was the old days. ➻
PORTRAITS: TRAVISS SHINN / TOP: GETTY
had done all of our tours like that, with a film crew.
The two of you were involved in a long and bitter legal battle. What brought about the reconciliation? John: Time. Passing of Ray. Robby: All of the above. We still hate each other. John: There was a screening of another
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