Like you'd expect, most of our home-grown bluesmen were lousy. They'd come out of Surbiton, their hair down in their eyes and their Mick Jagger maracas up by their ears, and they'd sing their blues, dem lawdy-lawdy blues, all about those cottonfields back home: the Dagenham Delta.
N. Cohn, Awopbopaloobop Awopbamboom (1969), 162
My own favourite was his [Ringo Starr's] summing-up of life as a Beatle: 'I go down to John;s place to play with his toys, and sometimes he comes down here to play with mine.'
He's solid. When he got married, he chose no model, no starlet, but a girl from Liverpool, a hairdresser's assistant. He'd known and gone steady with her for years. And when all the Beatles went meditating in India with Maharishi, he said it reminded him of Butlins and came home early.
Really, he summarises everything that's est in the English character - stability, tolerance, lack of pretension, humour, a certain built-in cool. He knows he's not a great drummer and it doesn't upset him.
N. Cohn, Awopbopaloobop Awopbamboom (1969), 133
His [Phil Spector's] big stumbling block has been the problem that every major pop success faces and hardly anyone solves: when you've made your million, when you've cut your monsters. when your peak has just been passed, what happens next? What about the fifty years before you die?
N. Cohn, Awopbopaloobop, Awopamboom (1969), 93
Reading about early pop this question keeps recurring. What were pop stars supposes to do next? It's why so many made TV shows. There was no other template. Of course, they didn't imagine what did happen to Phil Spector.
British pop in the fifties was pure farce.
Nobody could sing and nobody could write and, in any case, nobody gave a damn. The industry surivuved in a state of perpetual self-styled hysteria, screaming itself hoarse about nothing in particular.
N. Cohn, Awopbopaloobop, Awopamboom (1969), 54
He [Chuck Berry] was arrogant, rude. When he liked to turn it on, he could be most charming, but often he couldn't be bothered. First and last, he was amazingly mean.
There's an authenticated story about him that, on his first British tour, he used to study the evening paper nightly and check to see if there had been any fluctuation in rates of exchange. If there was any deviation in his favour, no matter how small, he'd demand payment in cash before he went on. On one night, this supplement came to 2s. 3 1/2d.
Still, all of this is irrelevant when you hear his records again.
N. Cohn, Awopbopaloobop, Awopamboom (1969), 36
As a prototype for pop though, Johnnie Ray was much closer [than Sinatra], the Nabob of Sob, the Million Dollar Teardrop himself. If Elvis Presley was the great pop messiah, Ray played John the Baptist.
...
Elvis is where pop begins and ends. Hes the great original and, even now, he's the image that makes others seem shoddy, the boss. For once the fan club spiel is justified: Elvis is King.
N. Cohn, Awopbopaloobop, Awopamboom (1969), 3 & 14
It's one of the cliched laws of showbiz that entertainment gets sloppy when times get tough and, what with the depression, the war and its aftermath, times had gotten very tough indeed. Hemmed in by their lives, people needed to cling tight in the dark of dancehalls, to be reassured, to feel safe again. Reality they could do without.
N. Cohn, Awopbopaloobop, Awopamboom (1969), 1-2
