I SEE A RED DOOR

14 JULY 2006

Sitting in a bar some time around midnight. The bar is the Hermi and it’s in a back street in Vienna. The Hemi is empty save for two men drinking on their own who look like they have been drinking all night on their own and did last night and will be doing tomorrow night. There is also my colleague John Hirst and me. The barman is bringing in the tables from outside. It’s a place for the lost and the lonely but the music being played is not Elkie Brooks, it’s Eric Clapton.

Somewhere else in this city that is celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s death (I wonder what he would have liked to have played at his funeral) are the Rolling Stones. They will have done their show by now. I wonder what percentage of the audience thought they were still the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world. I wonder if Mick Jagger is as knackered as me. And I wonder if he sang ‘Paint It Black’.

The reason why I wonder about Paint It Black in this story and in the story I wrote earlier this evening is that my 11 year old daughter asked me on Thursday evening if I knew how to sing Paint It Black and since then it has been going round and around in my head. When I was in a band called Big In Japan in ‘77/’78, Paint It Black was the only cover version we regularly played. I used to love playing it. It was always my favourite Rolling Stones single.

This daughter of mine has just started getting into music. A few weeks ago she discovered Limewire and has now downloaded over a 1000 songs on to her harddrive. The way she discovers music is the usual peer group stuff but she also gets into stuff from the adverts on TV. Three weeks back she got into the Scottish band Pilot who had a couple of hits back in the early to mid 1970s. It seems they had a song she liked that was used on an advert. She put what she thought was the title of the song into Google and found out it was Pilot. Now she seems to have every song that Pilot ever recorded. Last week she was asking me about the Beach Boys. I wanted to know how she knew about the Beach Boys. She said everybody knew about the Beach Boys.
‘But how?’
‘Because there is this advert on TV that uses the song that goes “We are going to have fun fun fun ‘til her daddy takes the T Bird away.”  I love it and now I’ve got loads of Beach Boys songs and so do my friends.’
‘Wow’.
‘What do the Beach Boys look like?’

 As for ‘Paint It Black’ by the Stones, she has just got this computer game or DVD or something that is like a home karaoke. It seems there are hundreds of songs on it. All sorts of genres.
‘It’s got one section for all those old rock songs you like. Some of them are great.’
Now I didn’t know how to take this. Do I tell her I hate all old-fashioned rock songs and so should she? Or do I take pride in my daughter’s wide-ranging tastes in music and her capacity to appreciate some of the all-time greats of the pantheon of rock classics? Or should I try to explain to her why recorded music is a dead medium, redundant for expressing anything relevant to modern times? Or should I buy her a copy of Blonde On Blonde?
‘Dad, do you know the song ‘Paint It Black’?’
‘Yes’.
‘That is my favourite. I love singing that one.’
‘It is my favourite by the Rolling Stones’.
‘When you come back from Vienna you must have a game with me and see who can sing ‘Paint It Black’ best’.
‘What do you mean sing it best?’
‘On the DVD they have this thing at the bottom of the screen. While the song is playing that shows you how well you are singing, how in time you are, how in tune you are and then it gives you points at the end’.
‘Points?’
‘Yeah, points. A score. I bet I can beat you.’
Do I buy her a copy of Let It Bleed? Warn her of the evils of U2 or throw away her karaoke games and empty her harddrive of any song older than last Tuesday? Or maybe I should go and find Mick Jagger now, wherever he is in Vienna and invite him around to have a go as well. I wonder how many points he’d get.
‘Ok. I’m back Sunday afternoon. I will play you then.’
‘Great.’

Now back to this bar for the lost and the lonely. When I got my notebook and pencil out ten minutes ago it wasn’t to tell you all that stuff about my daughter, it was just me thinking about the Stones that set on that path. What I wanted to tell you was how much I loathe the music of Eric Clapton. On one wall of the bar is a huge projected page from the barman’s iTunes. We can see about 20 tracks all by Eric Clapton, each one more dreary than the one before. I’m sitting here sipping my insipid beer wondering if I’m dreading the unplugged version of Layla that is coming up the song after next more than the one about some slag looking shaggable tonight. At least we have missed the one about his dead kid. I mean how can someone with so much professed guitar talent be so bereft of an original idea?

But it’s when he is singing a blues song that he’s got my goat well and truly tethered (anyone for a game of mixed metaphors?). How can anybody allow him to record a blues classic when he knows all he can ever do is make a mockery of it? How can he allow himself? He should be done under the Race Relations Act or something. What makes all my prejudices against Eric Clapton a bit weird is that I used to love Cream, the short-lived super group he was in during the 1960s.

Last week me and two of my sons, James (19) and Flint (6), sat down on the sofa together to watch School Of Rock starring Jack Black.
James said ‘Everybody should be made to watch this film. It is the only film that has ever got right what rock ‘n’ roll is about.’
Flint wanted James to start teaching him how to pay the guitar immediately. I don’t think he knows I can play. I will keep that a secret. The reason why I am mentioning School Of Rock is that there is one bit where there are a few bars of ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’, by Cream. It leapt right out at me screaming, ‘Bill! This is what music should sound like!’ I tried to ignore it so it screamed even louder at me, ‘You know I’m better than any piece of rock music that has been recorded in the last ten years!’ I succeed in ignoring it and just got on with watching the film, laughing at Jack Black’s body movements and cheering at the bits we are meant to cheer at.

But now in this late-night Vienna bar, I am wondering how Eric Clapton can be responsible, if only partly, for some of the greatest rock recordings ever made and then be content to spend the next 30 years churning out drivel. And just as we are about to hear the unplugged version of ‘Layla’ the barman clicks his mouse and Eric is no more. He is replaced by the unmistakable intro to ‘Boom Boom Boom’ by John Lee Hooker. The relief washes over me. If only all music could be this good. ‘Boom Boom Boom’ is followed by other Hooker classics from the 1950s. How could Clapton as a grown man ever consider  recording blues songs when he knew all this sort of perfection had already been reached 30 years earlier? ‘Because I can’ is never a good enough answer.

A conversation of sorts starts to develop between John Hirst and myself. The central theme to this conversation seems to be ‘Can only young men make truly innovative music?’ I try to argue the case that there are plenty of men (and I’m afraid it’s men and not women that we are discussing) making innovative music well into their later years. Beethoven for one. His late string quartets were like no other music ever made. Miles Davis was well into his 40s when he did Bitches Brew, where he single-handedly announced the end of modern jazz. And this was from a man who had had a big part in inventing it in his early 20s in the late 1940s.

Wouldn’t it have been great if Eric Clapton, or even better the Rolling Stones, had made a record in their late 40s that had suddenly rendered the making rock music a completely redundant thing. Is this making any sense outside the confines of this bar some time after midnight?

I mean, there is no way that Miles Davis in his late 40s would have been playing tacks from his Birth Of Cool phase from the late 1940s or even the Kinda Blue phase from the late 1950s. The man moved on. Burnt bridges. Tried things out, made mistakes and fucked up but still always searching for that door in his head which had not been opened before.

Why has rock music always been stuck in a rut of peddling its own past? You know if you had been stupid enough to have bought a ticket to see the Rolling Stones tonight you would have seen a bunch of pensioners still trying to pretend to be in the first flush of manhood, singing songs that in no way reflect the lives they are leading or even the thoughts that are going through their heads.

It is too late and maybe I have drunk too much to make any more sense out of these thoughts. At a later stage in this book I want to return to the subject of the rock band. Maybe dedicate a whole chapter to exploring why the rock band was potentially the greatest art form of the 20th century, one that was squandered.

Tonight I will try and find my way back to the hotel while singing ‘I see a red door and I want to paint it black. No colours anymore I want them to turn back.’