ARTICLE ABOUT Elton John FROM New Musical Express, December 26, 1970

Mr. John had amazing success early on and in this short but good article he tells it “all” and is amazed by George Harrison. By the way, $5000 is the same amount as $35,253 in 2021.
Read on!

Elton John commands largest price ever paid

By Ann Moses in Hollywood

IT took ELTON JOHN only one week to become a superstar, in the music industry in Los Angeles. After his nightclub debut at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, BILL GRAHAM, the influential owner of the Fillmore East in New York City, called John to offer him the largest amount ($5,000) ever paid to a new act at the rock ballroom.
UNI, Elton’s American record label held a Los Angeles press conference for the singer in a dark Universal City screening room. When John and his group were seated, he could not be seen, though we were able to hear his replies through a microphone set-up. We could not, however, hear any of the questions from the assembled journalists.
“Who are you here for?” one young man questioned another behind me. “Nobody,” he answered “Me, too,” the other replied. I wasn’t surprised. Along with a small number of the Hollywood pop press, UNI chose to invite high school and college campus newspaper reporters and the result was naturally a press conference fiasco. Many had managed to get in merely to have a closer look at this new star!
It was an embarrassing scene, quite unexpected, in fact, for an artist of John’s stature, however brief that position has been. Even though many questions were irrelevant and others were repeated several times, John seemed unthreatened and answered each with concern and seriousness.
During the course of the “conference,” John did contribute the following comments, “American audiences are much warmer than English audiences. English audiences are more reserved. In England you really have to prove yourself to an audience. Here you go out on a stage and you feel as if they’re on your side to start with. The English audiences have been kind to us, they’re just a little more reserved.
“Bernie (Taupin, his lyricist) and I are sort of like brothers. We’ve known each other for quite a while and we know each other inside out. Even though we’re complete opposites, I usually know what he’s getting at in a song, so it doesn’t matter if I don’t feel the same way, I can sing the song and mean it.
“(The success) amazes me! I can’t believe it. In England it has happened gradually, by word of mouth. But here — I still haven’t taken it all in. I still can’t believe it. It’s really fantastic, but it’s still too quick to think about it.
“Leon Russell is my favourite artist. He’s my idol. He’s the person I look up to most.
“When people say I sound like Joe Cocker they must be deaf. They’ve also said I sound like Feliciano, maybe it’s the dark glasses.
“I’ve been knocked for doing rave-up-type numbers on stage; but it’s spontaneous, I just enjoy what I’m singing and I give it everything I’ve got. If I’m not exhausted when I come off stage, I don’t feel like I’ve done a good show.

Natural

I’ve had to turn people down when they’ve said “Please write a song for me.” I can’t sit down and write that way. Writing is a natural thing and I write a song when I feel like it. For `Your Song,’ Bernie was very hung up on somebody at the time and it just happened.
“The procedure we follow in writing songs is that Bernie gives me the lyrics and I put them on top of the piano. Then when the mood strikes me, I sit down and write. He’s really good. I can’t write lyrics, and he can’t keep time. We don’t collaborate at all. I know people don’t believe it, but it’s true.
“Music is music, whether it’s the Archies or Led Zeppelin. I don’t think there’s any division in music or that there should be. Someone will put this group down or that one, but it’s all music. It’s a thing in England to put down Ten Years After every week. It’s ridiculous.
“Our songs go through different feelings, depending on the mood we’re in. This album is happy, down home. It’s just how we write songs. Our next album is much simpler. What I’m striving for is simplicity in lyrics and simplicity in music.
“George Harrison’s new album just floors me! It astonishes me how he has suddenly emerged as a fantastic writer, probably better than Lennon-McCartney!”
At this point in the already hectic conference UNI executives interrupted John to say that he had to be photographed with some of the record company executives. So as they paraded towards the front of the screening room to be photographed, I made my way out.

If you have a large collection of the following magazines, don`t throw them out, but contact me as I would be very interested in these: Creem, Circus, Hit Parader and Metal Edge.

If you have a music-related web-page where this fits – please make a link to the article. With credits to the original writer of the article from all of us music fans!

ARTICLE ABOUT John Fogerty (Creedence Clearwater Revival) FROM New Musical Express, March 21, 1970

Don`t think I ever printed an article with this band before. They sure had a lot of good songs, and they have been immensily popular in my part of the world. “Play me some Creedence…” have been a demand in many a dance restaurant and at parties at various homes.
Read on!

An 80 buck bummer made us start learning

Ann Moses interviews John Fogerty lead singer of Creedence Clearwater Revival

THEY say that true love travels on a gravel road… that one cannot understand joy without having felt sorrow… that one does not know sweet until they have tasted bitter…
Listen to John Fogerty’s “Lodi” lyric and you know the members of Creedence Clearwater Revival believe in those adages! The song tells of the heartaches of seeking a pot of gold and getting a heart of lead instead!
Music was a part of John Fogerty’s life from the time he was a child: “I think I started singing when I was two. It just happened. I used to sing and dance to ‘Shoe Fly Pie,’ or whatever that song was called. I was a ham.

Listening to r & b

“I was 8-years-old. Tom, my older brother, and I were listening by then quite a lot to a rhythm-and-blues station, which was the only current music one around El Cerrito. The rest of it was all the old Tony Bennett stuff. Anyway, there was a group on one of these stations called The Corvetts. I heard their record and at that point I decided, `Yeah, that’s what I want to do.’ I mean, the record wasn’t that good or anything, I just liked the name and I kept thinking: `I`m gonna grow up and have a group called The Corvetts,'”
John began to grow up right then. He got a newspaper route and saved enough money to make a downpayment on a Sears (mail order) guitar on time payments.
He and Tom had “fooled around” on the piano at home, but the guitar was something special to John. He began to teach himself to play immediately.

Most important

Music became the most important thing in his life. In eighth grade, he made up excuses to stay home from school so he could have more time to practice. At the end of the year, he had only attended classes about half the time. He was then transfered to another junior high school which John calls “the greatest thing that ever happened to me.” It was there he met Stuart Cook and Doug Clifford. It was 1957.
“How it happened that we got together — I had a guitar but I didn’t want to lug it to school everyday. There was a piano in the music room at school, so during lunch, I’d play the beginning of `Do You Wanna Dance` over and over and over.
“I’d also play what I knew of `Paul Cool One` and `What’d I Say,’ and after a while kids started gathering in the music room and they would start singing. I never sang, I just played piano. There were only about four songs and then I’d sort of improvise on those.
“Doug happened to see me down there a few times, so he stopped me in the hall one day and said: `Hey, you wanna start a band’ Already I had all mapped out a band and the name and the instruments, but I didn’t know anybody. Doug said he played drums and I said: ‘Okay, that’s one.’
“We tried out a few piano players, but they didn’t work out, so Doug suggested: ‘My friend Stu can play the piano. I didn’t know Stu. But Stu had a music room, a sort of rumpus room, in his house, and since it was impossible to practice at my house, it worked out well having Stu with us. Of course, Tom was singing already with bands in high school.”
In the early days, around 1959, when the group was playing at junior high school sock hops,” John was too self-conscious to sing, so the group limited its act to instrumentals.

No mikes!

“Because we were an instrumental group, we didn’t have any microphones. We had a couple of songs where everybody would scream out ‘Hully Gully!’ or `What’d I Say!’ Anyway, at 13 you don’t have much of a sound!” It wasn’t until 1964 that John began to sing.
It would be many years before Creedence could make it on their own terms. They had to go through a more-than-taxing period as the Golliwogs! Creedence, several years after those early school days, had made the big move of signing a recording contract with Fantasy Records.
As John says: “Remember, there were no major labels in San Francisco and we tried to go on the Los Angeles trip once. All that was was nine million auditions. Put your demo tape in the pile’ and `we’ll call you.’ So Festival was the only way we could make records.”
The President of Fantasy Records, at that time, was also the manager of the Golliwogs. “We were four dumb kids from El Corrito who didn’t know anyone… all we knew was music. This guy, supposedly, had all the connections and all that. He told us how everything should be done and we believed him. For a while. Eventually we got rid of him because we could see that we knew more than he did regardless of who he knew.
“He was in control of the record company and supposedly our manager, and superficially the producer of our sessions. Like we either had to please him or no one.”
In pleasing him, they went through the most depressing and backward stage of their careers. “It’s hard to explain when you’re so close to the situation, to let people know what it’s like underneath, to be the underdog.” John is convinced that this is a major reason it took Creedence so long to accomplish what they have. In fact, Stu, Tom and Doug were so down they were convinced that “making it” wasn’t possible at all!

Nothing happened

There was a period, too, when absolutely nothing was happening with the group. Everyone seemed to be off in different directions. To make matters worse, mainstay John was drafted into the Army, stationed in Portland, Oregon. It was there that John first began to sing.
“I met two other musicians and we found a drummer and a bass player. I was just going to play guitar. I didn’t want to do anything else, but none of them could sing. They tried and I said `That’s awful! I can do better than that.’ So I had to and started that way.”
But when John got out of the Army and returned to El Cerrito, he came back ready to rejuvenate the Golliwogs and passed on his enthusiasm, hoping to use rejuvenate or revival as part of their new name.

Searching

“We were all searching for this new name. I was watching TV on my mother-in-law’s colour set and the first thing that came on was a beer commercial — you know how TV is — they’re selling that `greener pastures on the other side’ trip. I wasn’t listening to the words, I was just watching the pretty pictures. The jingle was saying something about `cool, clear water.’
“The thing that came on right after that was an ad for clean water, sponsored by the left-wing of the government. Anyway, it was this little kid running through the woods, and he comes to a river and it’s full of old tyres, automobiles and garbage. This ad was in black and white and it was such a contrast to the other thing, the idea stuck in my mind.
“We had already been fooling around with Creedence. It was in, then it was out, then it was in again — like that. It was in with a thousand other choices.
“It could have been Rufus Clearwater Revival or a bunch of other alternatives. Then it just came out — Creedence Clearwater Revival.”
But the new name for the group did not mean a new way of life or prosperity — not yet. Did John have some kind of insight that kept him going through all the hard times?
“It was that way on my part and a super naivety on their part. Like if they knew then what they know now, and I was telling them all the stuff I used’ to say, they’d laugh and say: ‘Let’s quit.’ We all sort of agreed that all it would take is a good record, but they weren’t really convinced. So I’d make up little rallying cries.
“In the middle of ’67, we had to drive all the way down to this place called Patterson, California. I remember it was a really long drive and it was freezing, freezing cold. We got 150 dollars. It cost us 30 dollars just to get there. Two agencies were involved and they each took ten per cent. So we ended up with about 80 bucks.
“I really got mad because I knew when we got home the next Monday we’d begin rehearsing as if nothing had happened, as if it wasn’t a big bummer. So I got really angry and pointed it out at the time, on the way back, instead of waiting until Monday, I kept saying: ‘You wanna do this the rest of your life or do you wanna get busy and start learning something?’ So whenever we ran into a bummer show after that we said: ‘Remember Patterson?’ like they used to say: ‘Remember The Alamo?’ But we worked harder.”

Problems still

Still their problems were not over. Until August of 1967 they all were forced to hold down jobs outside of their music! “We did everything. The only one that was even semi-involved with music was my job at Fantasy Records as a shipping clerk. Stu was in school, Doug was a janitor for a while, Stu drove a truck for a while, Tom and I both drove trucks.”
With some kind of driving ambition and insight, John maintained his confidence for he knew the main thing was to learn how to play the music. Because we were really crummy. I was convinced that we really didn’t deserve to make it until we were good enough.
“As soon as we got together and really learned how to play, then maybe we could gripe about not making it. While we sure didn’t know much about music, we sure did a lot of griping about not making it!”

If you have a music-related web-page where this fits – please make a link to the article. With credits to the original writer of the article from all of us music fans!

ARTICLE ABOUT Jethro Tull FROM New Musical Express, December 6, 1969

Just a short one with Jethro today – as a very great story with them is coming to this blog tomorrow.
Read on!

Ian`s suspicious

revealed to Ann Moses in Hollywood

BETWEEN Jethro Tull’s typically exciting and well-received first show and his second late show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium (a second show was added when the first sold out), I spoke with wild looking, yet articulate Ian Anderson.
Their beautiful performance that night had the audience cheering and some were even dancing in the aisles.
I asked Ian if this was his favourite type of audience. He surprised me with his answer: “I feel pretty suspicious when I see people screaming or dancing in the aisles because I don’t think people can dance to the music we play with any degree of honesty to themselves.
“If they dance to our music they’re more likely to be going through some sort of physical release, which they might as well get from going swimming or horse riding or something!
“The music we play is quite involved musically and it isn’t conducive to dancing. I prefer to see people just sitting in their seats and it’s quite nice when they go through an audience response thing, cheering and clapping when you come on, and it’s nice when you go off and it’s nice to do an encore, but beyond that I think it is a bit unnecessary that they show any undue signs of appreciation!”
It’s a curious thing recently the way a small number of British groups are enjoying such enthusiastic popularity here in the States without the help of hit singles or even any single releases at all! I asked Ian why they hadn’t tapped the huge singles market.
“I don’t know very much about who buys singles, why they buy them and what sort of music they will buy, so it’s rather difficult for me to put together something for the American singles market which is both representative of the band’s style and is a satisfying piece of music for the listener. I don’t know just what to write for the American market.
“In England, obviously from living there, I’m more familiar with the way in which to set about writing a single. But the time will come when we can attempt the same sort of thing here.”
Even without single success, Jethro Tull has continually stayed high on the album charts and sold out concerts wherever they go. Since Ian surely had the answer, I asked him what he felt gave a group lasting power.
“I think they must have some sort of musical integrity which is apparent to the public. They mustn’t be too obviously jumping on a bandwagon or pampering to the tastes of the public.
“They must also play something which is probably of a style which is peculiar to them. In other words, they must be an individual sounding group. These days, I suppose it helps if you can back all this up with being real people.
“You have something to say and you have some valid reason for doing what you’re doing. Not just doing it to make money, which everyone hates and quite rightly.”
Sounds like an accurate picture of Jethro Tull!

If you have a music-related web-page where this fits – please make a link to the article. With credits to the original writer of the article from all of us music fans!