Today is the 75th birthday of Elliott Murphy; my favorite rock & roll songwriter of all time. In honor of that milestone I'm running this piece that originally appeared on Pencil Storm, a blogsite to which I now contribute stories. You certainly won't be sorry if you also check out that site.
I was 21 in 1973. I had already been listening to rock & roll for 16 years, thanks to the lucky break of my bother & sister being 10 & 7 years older than me and the fact that my sister Dianne LOVED spinning the radio dial of my sainted Italian father’s Oldsmobile, so that at 5 years old I was already clued in to the first wave of rock & roll - Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.
I thank my rock & roll gods and my Dad that he bought me my first guitar at 16 in 1968. I joined my first band only a few short weeks later. The first song I sang in public was Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” at a classmate’s basement rec-room bithday party. Life was good. By 1973 I had progressed through girl groups, surf music, the British Invasion, psychedelia, nascent heavy-metal, country-rock, sensitive singer-songwriters and prog-rock.
By that time, though, I was itching for a change. From my perspective of the rolling over of rock & roll every 10 years (Elvis Presley 1954 > The Beatles 1964) I was waiting for The Next Wave of Rock & Roll. For me, that next wave’s arrival was Mott The Hoople, The New York Dolls and Elliott Murphy. The Dolls were gonna be the New Rolling Stones, Elliott was gonna be the New Bob Dylan and Mott was gonna be the new Dylan backed by the new Rolling Stones. That didn’t pan out, of course: Mott and the Dolls had broken up by 1975, and I’m forced to admit that (other than with rock critics and rock aficionados) Elliott Murphy never really broke through in any meaningful way. (Though he remains my most prized & favorite rock & roll artist of all time and continues to record & perform to this day; as does Ian Hunter from Mott and David Johansen from the Dolls, 50 years later. Look ‘em up.)
By 1976 my dream of Rock & Roll Regeneration was over. Lee Abrams & his ilk jammed AOR radio down everybody’s throats; tight playlists came in, corprorate-rock (Styx/Journey/Foreigner) flourished, and the likes of Eagles and Fleetwood Mac towered over everything. Rock & Roll had gone from Little Richard to Don Henley in 20 short years. Rock & roll was now safe and neat & tidy. It made me wanna puke. (Of course at that point, punk had to get invented, but that’s a whole other blog for a whole ‘nother time.)
Fortunately for me, the producers of the Midnight Special - the early 70’s late-night rock & roll TV show (along with Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert) - fed a steady stream of the great (and not-so-great) rock & roll artists of the day into American television sets every Friday night. Now they have started putting their clips on YouTube. Here are some of my favorites of those clips.
These clips are not drawn from the Midnight Special, but NEEDED to be included here.
right, Rick Cacchione; hippie, Loggins & Messina and Batdorf & Rodney fan
left, Ricki C; rocker, Dolls fanatic, two pictures worth 2000 words.
Ricki C. is 71 years old and has two drawers full of black rock & roll t-shirts, which he wears incessantly. He also has a hand-tooled leather hippie belt from 1972 that still fits. He has congestive heart failure and prostate cancer and KNOWS that all this rock & roll nonsense has to stop someday.
But not yet.
© 2024 Ricki C.
