Long-time NY rock writer Lisa Robinson's memoir was released this week. She's making the promotional rounds, and below are some of her thoughts on the Stones.


Patrick McMullan

From Wade Goodwyn's NPR interview:

How A Music Writer Learned Trust Is The Ultimate Backstage Pass

In the first part of the book, you talk about going on tour with The Rolling Stones. You say that, while it was not that big of a deal to get an interview with , it was really difficult to get — and that became who you really wanted to interview, but it was hard to get into his inner circle.

Well, it wasn't easy for anybody to get an interview with Mick Jagger. There were people waiting for days to talk to Mick Jagger. But I was in a really privileged position in that, because I had written so much about Led Zeppelin, and Mick had been aware of it, he decided, "Oh, let's take her on tour with us. She can help us decide who to talk to in the rock press." You have to remember, this was 1975 and The Rolling Stones were starting to be considered a dinosaur band, because it was at the time of the punk rock scene. I was very close with the CBGB bands and the English punk bands, so I think Mick wanted me along — partly to sort of whisper in his ear to tell him who he should talk to, partly to write about him, because there was no such thing then as a conflict of interest, and partly because he just liked having me around. We gossiped about other people together.

Keith was, of course, very secluded, and not really in great shape at that time to do interviews. I waited for an entire summer to talk to Keith, and I finally did get a bit of a — sort of slurred, slightly incoherent — interview with him. But Keith cleaned up, and I met him as a different person years later. From about 1978 or '79 on, to this day, he is without question one of the most lucid, hilarious, funny, brilliant, insightful, smart guys I've ever talked to. So my instincts were right that Keith would be a great interview. I just had to wait a long time.

You talked about how Mick Jagger was worried of being thought of as a dinosaur in 1975, which, looking back now, seems ludicrous. But it makes me think of , who continues to insist 's best work is still ahead of it, or of Robert Plant at the end of Led Zeppelin. It's not exactly like boxers who can't let go even though they're finished — because, of course, a musician is theoretically never finished — but there can be a similar feeling of desperation.

Bono kept saying, "A lot of bands do their best work when they're young, and then they just bore everybody to death." But, you know, they're musicians — what else do you do? Interestingly enough, Keith Richards never talked about age; he never cared so much. The singer, the frontman, I think, has a different position: Mick Jagger was such an androgynous, gorgeous beauty in the '60s that for him to see himself aging — it's hard, for guys as well as for women. But Keith Richards always had the most, sort of insightful and transcendent view on this. His attitude was that , , all those old blues guys, were in their 60s or 70s when they made the records that first turned the Stones on when they were teenagers. Those guys died on the way to a gig, and that that's how he wanted to go.

Listen > [www.npr.org]

-----

From Maggie Lance's interview in New York magazine:

Q&A: Talking ’70s Rock Style and Life on the Road With Lisa Robinson

You write that because you were one of the few women, some bands were dismissive. How did you react at the time?

Led Zeppelin was the first big band I was around, and Led Zeppelin literally gave misogyny a new meaning. I mean, Jimmy Page was very sophisticated because he had been a studio musician from London, and so was John Paul Jones. But Robert Plant and John Bonham were from the north of England, farms, and to me they were hicks. I thought they were great musicians, but I was not nervous around them. I mean, I was from New York City. Born and bred here — New York woman who had snuck out of her bedroom at 12 to see Thelonious Monk, who was far more sophisticated than these rock and roll guys were. So I wasn’t impressed. I know they thought of me as, “Oh, this is just some chick from rock magazine.” Then they started to have respect for me, because they knew that I knew as much as they did about the music that influenced them.

But in general? Mick Jagger once said to me, “There’s no reason women are on tour unless it’s to @#$%& or because they have a job.” Well, I was there with a job. And the thing is, I was only interested in the music. I was never interested in the drugs or the sex around a tour. I thought it was sleazy; I saw so many people being demeaned in those situations.

What was your relationship like with the women that were around, like wives or girlfriends or groupies?

Well, nobody was really traveling with their wives then, except Mick Jagger was with Bianca. And Keith was with Anita Pallenberg at the time — even though she wasn’t his wife, she was the mother of his children and his constant companion. Led Zeppelin never brought their wives to America. They came to rape and pillage, basically. It was a playground for them. As far as groupies were concerned, if it was a "tour girlfriend" — Jimmy had one of those, Robert had one of those — I wasn’t, like, disgusted by it. It was their choice.

Which musicians do you think executed their look most perfectly?

Mick Jagger would get done up in some ridiculous costume and I always said to him, “You should go onstage looking the way you do offstage, it’s much cuter.” I think I wrote about this, and he said, “You can’t go onstage looking like some old blues musician.” Well, now he is an old blues musician, and he should go onstage looking like that because it would look better, anyway.

[nymag.com]

-----

Mick Jagger Wore My Underwear, and Other Stories from the Rock World

Tasa Stratis, April 23

Life with The Stones:

“In Los Angeles, Bianca’s bathtub overflowed at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and Annie took photos. In Toronto, [longtime Rolling Stones manager] Alan Dunn informed me that Mick had lost his jockstrap and asked if I had any "knickers" he could borrow. I lent Mick a pair of white, lacy, sheer bikini underpants from Henri Bendel, he wore them backwards…"

[www.elle.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2014-04-25 19:04 by bye bye johnny.

this will be a good one..

Lisa Robinson one of the best. i miss her column in the ny post.(retired) this book looks like a must read !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Currently on Chapter 2 and I'm finding it really interesting so far! I like that she talks about a broad range of groups.

Reg. LR I always think of that Mick in my knickers story . .

Quote
CousinC
Reg. LR I always think of that Mick in my knickers story . .

...Which is in the book of course!

Seems like a very interesting read. Gotta pick that one up.

CBII

Book excerpt in Vanity Fair:

Backstage Confidential

-----

From "CBS This Morning: Saturday":

Just ordered it from Amazon, with a release date the 22th of May.
According to Amazon an hour later I will receive it between the 18th and 25th of JUNE! WTF? This happened with the "Stones gear" book too, Amazon was lightning fast for a decade, now it takes ages. (To Norway)...

Book review in The New York Times:

Definitely Not a Groupie, but Always With the Band

Lisa Robinson’s Rock ’n’ Roll Life in ‘There Goes Gravity’


Hannah Thomson

APRIL 29, 2014
By DWIGHT GARNER

There are a pair of sentences on the first page of Lisa Robinson’s memoir, “There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll,” that make you think her book is going to be a gift, in a Nora Ephron meets Chrissie Hynde sort of way.

“I will always remember 1973 as the year that Eugene from Cinandre ruined my summer because he cut my hair too short,” Ms. Robinson writes. “That summer, I also met Mick Jagger for the first time.” O.K., I thought to myself, I’m in.

In 1973 Ms. Robinson was a young writer for Creem magazine and the British weekly New Musical Express. She met Mr. Jagger at an Eric Clapton concert. He walked over to mock her obsession with rock fashion. In a campy voice, Mr. Jagger said, “Jimmy Page was wearing a pink satin jacket.” Ms. Robinson replied by telling him that his sequined shoes were tacky.

Ms. Robinson seemed to be everywhere in the rock world of the 1970s and ’80s, often as the only woman in a roomful of boys. (“Male musicians in a band are always called ‘the boys,’ ” she explains. “Men who are now well into their 60s — some in their 70s — when they are on tour, are referred to as ‘the boys.’ ”)

She wrote for, or was an editor at, several early rock magazines. She understood fashion and was an eye-popping presence herself. She liked flared jeans and halter tops and huge sunglasses and rarely went to sleep before 4 a.m. She traveled with the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin on tour; she spent a vast number of nights wedged into clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. She carried a tape recorder that was nearly always clicked on.

Ms. Robinson wasn’t a rock critic, one of those “boys who had ambitions to become the next Norman Mailer,” as she puts it. She wrote gossip columns; she did interviews. She was a press liaison for the Stones while writing about them herself. “ ‘Conflict of interest’ was not a concept in the rock press at that time,” she says. She got up close because bands weren’t worried about her. “I was with them to get a story,” she says about going on tour with Led Zeppelin, “not to judge.”

She writes that she didn’t sleep with her subjects (she was married) and rarely, if ever, took drugs, but she was definitely, to borrow part of the title of Pamela Des Barres’s excellent memoir about being a groupie, with the band.

Ms. Robinson later became a music columnist for The New York Post, and is now a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. “There Goes Gravity” is her attempt to put her busy life into context, to tell some good stories, to speak about being a rare female journalist in rock’s early period. She gets some of this done. But “There Goes Gravity” is an oddly desultory book, often a joyless data dump, padded with long quotations from stale interviews.

Part of the problem — it’s hard to put this delicately — is that Ms. Robinson isn’t an especially careful writer. The clichés sometimes come two to a sentence: “The entire MainMan staff was living the high life — lavish hotel suites, catering, plenty of drugs — and traveling hither and yon.” She tends to declare the most obvious things about performers (“Bono had a charismatic stage presence”) and to miss why they matter to so many people.

By the end of this volume, she’s begun to ramble. About eating cheeseburgers with Eminem, Ms. Robinson says: “I then went off on a tangent about how it makes perfect sense that I don’t like to fly. If you can’t even get a cheeseburger the way you order it, I asked, how are we supposed to expect that airplane pilots know what the hell they’re doing?”

Ms. Robinson frequently reminds us how much time she’s spent with musicians. On Patti Smith: “I must have hundreds of hours of tape.” On John Lennon: “We talked that day for hours.” On the rapper Proof: “Proof and I talked for several hours that day.” She is clearly an insider. She introduced, she tells us, David Bowie to Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, and Ray Davies of the Kinks and Chrissie Hynde, who would later become a couple.

Yet you rarely feel you are getting a privileged look at these people. About traveling with bands like the Stones, she declares, “If you’re not having sex with someone on a tour, or participating in the drugs, you really are on a different tour than everyone else.” There’s a remoteness to much of this material, and Ms. Robinson seems remote from her earlier self.

This memoir has its small joys, for sure. The author confronts Keith Richards over his infamous allegation that Mick Jagger has a small penis. Ms. Robinson once lent Mr. Jagger a pair of sheer bikini underpants, in which he was photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Ms. Robinson tells Mr. Richards that Mr. Jagger “actually has quite a big one.” He replies, “Mine’s bigger.”

She is shrewd on Michael Jackson’s breathy public voice and his more commanding private one. She knew all the early rock critics and was certain Richard Meltzer was going to be the famous one, not Lester Bangs. (“Death can do that for a career.”) Her descriptions of parties can be droll: “Uri Geller was there, bending spoons.”

She is deft on the hierarchy of backstage passes. Among her friends is Fran Lebowitz, who sometimes pitched in on headline ideas for magazines Ms. Robinson wrote for. Among Ms. Lebowitz’s were: “Average White Band — I’ll Say.”

When Ms. Robinson interviews a rock star, she tells us, she sets up not one but three cassette recorders. No technical malfunction is going to thwart one of her sessions. In “There Goes Gravity,” it becomes clear she has it all on tape. You wish she’d gotten more on the page.

[www.nytimes.com]

Mostly good review, thanks BBJ. I'm adding this book to my stack, hope to get to them all this summer.

Sounds like an excellent beach book. Always wondered what Lisa was up to these days.

I put a hold on my library's copy. Some brats put holds before me, so I'll have to wait some weeks to get it.

Quote
Title5Take1
I put a hold on my library's copy. Some brats put holds before me, so I'll have to wait some weeks to get it.

Best not to stand in front of T5T1 in the check out line...

Quote
latebloomer
Mostly good review, thanks BBJ. I'm adding this book to my stack, hope to get to them all this summer.

mostly negative, really, but perhaps the book is worth a read anyway.

I read all the book's Stones parts and some others. Some interesting and entertaining stuff. But what came to mind was Ronnie Wood saying on his radio show that he was once interviewed by Patti Smith when she was still a rock journalist and he thought, "She seems too clever to be asking musicians questions the rest of her life." And he wasn't surprised when Smith went on to greater things. I bet Ronnie never had such a thought regarding Lisa Robinson. (For one thing Lisa says that Mick said at the Stones' Rock n Roll Hall of Fame induction, "Jean Paul Sartre said, 'Americans are funny people. First you shock them, then they put you in a museum.'" Mick said he was quoting Jean COCTEAU. How hard to double check that??)

Looking forward to reading it. LR was like a rock and roll primer to me in the pages of Cream magazine, and her various columns. She seemed to really respect the people she circled with.