Too Late To Stop Now: More Rock’n’Roll War Stories
book review and interview with journalist Allan Jones
He’s the man who helped Joe Strummer pick his name, and was in dangerous proximity to Ozzy as he “decorated” the Alamo. He witnessed the legendary Stiff and 2-Tone Records tours from the inside out and rode down the Thames with the Sex Pistols as they serenaded Parliament. But despite all that, you still might not be familiar with author Allan Jones—one of the U.K.’s sharpest music correspondents.
Jones, who had zero training as a journalist, innocently answered an ad in early 1974 for a junior reporter/feature writer with Melody Maker—one of the three titanic music papers of the day. A few months later, he’s intercepted a message for one of the other staff writers and suddenly finds himself butting up against the aura of one of his heroes.
“One of the first major interviews that I did after joining Melody Maker was Leonard Cohen and I was incredibly nervous (just) standing at his hotel door, working up the courage just to knock on it and see if he was behind it.”
That encounter and dozens of others can be found inside the pages of his latest book, “Too Late To Stop Now: More Rock’n’Roll War Stories”—the second volume of anecdotes and interviews culled from his experiences on music’s front lines. Therein you’ll find Jones consoling Bryan Ferry about some bad press as the two crisscross a small dune of cocaine; watching R.E.M. play Santa dress up for a Christmas photo shoot at the height of their fame, and being trapped backstage with The Damned as a swell of local Punks are violently trying to dismantle the hall in which they're about to perform. All of these tales and more are delivered in Jones’ wry and insightful prose, where he’s effortlessly able to put the reader at the center of whatever he happens to be jotting down in his notebook.
It's clear from this and the award-winning “Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down” which proceeded it, that Jones covered a lot of ground. From his vantage point, it seems like there was a period beginning around 1976 where he had no need to maintain formal lodgings at all—cranking out ream after ream of copy not too many hours after last call. But the stories are still clear-eyed and vibrantly frank in ways that makes a movie like Almost Famous look like the suburban exercise in Rock journalism that it actually was.
Jones knows when to joyfully exploit a glib moment and when to relent to the darkness, like when he goes into extensive detail with Chrissie Hynde about the tragic collapse of the original Pretenders. And there are times when he dead centers the bullseye while taking the measure of his subject:
“Sting settles into a large red velvet armchair, although you get the impression he’d be more comfortable yet on a throne made of the skulls and bones of his enemies, a snarling jaguar at his feet. His right arm is mostly languidly extended over the chair arm, as if he’s expecting a kitty-hawk, kite or kestrel to fly through the window and land on it…”
And whether he’s sitting down with an iconic tippler like Peter Cook, or a hair trigger temper like the one fastened onto director John Carpenter, Jones never gives you the sense that neither the circumstances or the company he’s keeping are likely to put him off his game. The drugs and the drink may have helped, but only a truly genial and skilled journalist can whittle an invite to tour Sweden not long after sitting down for the first time with a particularly acerbic version of Lou Reed.
Sure, there are loads of journalists who’ve probably seen and been part of worst, but they mostly will go to their tidy graves before they’d fess up to how Tony Iommi wrapped a “chunky wrist watch” around his fist right before he split his face open with it. All the “ugh!” of the industry is delivered with just the same amount of clarity as the “wow!” So for my part you can keep your Rob Sheffield mix tapes and the multi-syllabic fortresses Robert Christgau lashes together. If you want a real sense of what real rock and roll was like on either side of the Punk detonation, then look no further.
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TRACKING ANGLE INTERVIEW WITH ALLAN JONES
Tracking Angle: Is it fair to say that you weren’t easily starstruck?
Allan Jones: “I think that's fairly true. I think I was starstruck with a few people…Bowie…Lou Reed, especially just in the act of meeting him. (But) as soon as we started talking that fell away. If there was anybody that I was in particular in awe of before going into the interview and being generally nervous about it, that dissipated as soon as we started talking. If I could engage their attention and we could start a conversation and I forgot their reputations they would just be somebody that I was really genuinely interested in. So the idea of being starstruck just went out the window as soon as we started talking. You're there to do a job. You weren't there to kind of sit there and admire who you were lucky enough to have ended up interviewing. You were there to get a good interview out of them and being starstruck would perhaps really interfere with that, so that’s something you had to overcome.
TA: The stories in the new book have some connectivity back to some of the things that were in the first collection.
AJ: There are a couple of stories in the new book that refer back to some of the stories in the first book (like) meeting with Joe Strummer for the first time after he left the 101ers and joined The Clash. I hadn't seen him in between because he'd been told by (his manager) Bernie Rhodes not to speak to me because I'd known Joe since 1972…’73 when I was at art school and that was too much history for Bernie. He wanted to eradicate Joe's entire past basically in this kind of almost Stalinesque fashion. As if Joe's history only started from the moment he joined The Clash. And therefore he was very dismissive of the 101ers as the kind of Pub Rock group that Joe had been in previously and who I'd written about quite a lot. There was an incident where I ran into Joe at a reception somewhere and Bernie saw us talking and just kind of just lost it. He was furious that Strummer was even involved in the conversation with me and I was banned from ever writing about The Clash by Bernie at that point who was an obstreperous little man who I hated.
TA: It is because England is a fairly small country that you got to see so much music during the Seventies? You certainly seemed to cover a lot of ground.
AJ: There was so much going on, I felt like I didn't want to miss a moment of it. So I would go out you know nearly every night. But yes, you did build up a certain resilience to everything. There were a lot of stimulants around. I mean the Punk scene was rife with amphetamine sulfate and sometimes you just took it just to keep going. You'd get home at four or five in the morning but have to be in to work by 10 or 9 30AM. And there'd be another gig to go to that night or there might be a party during the day. The workload was pretty formidable at Melody Maker in those days. I mean you could end up writing three or four features a week, plus album reviews, plus live reviews and then there would be you Mondays where you were meant to keep the day as free as possible to write the news stories that the News Editor had been too lazy to write. So every day was very very busy. I mean it never stopped.
TA: As someone who’s older now, have you made peace with things like Emerson, Lake and Palmer and the Prog bands who were generally outside the kind of music that you wound up writing about?
AJ: Absolutely not. No. If anything they have less value now as far as I'm concerned than they they did at the time. I mean I like The Nice, which is the group that ELP came out of, but when it all became so pompous and the music aspired to symphonic values and there were suddenly these triple albums like Yes’ “Tales From Topographic Oceans”…I mean, God…those records would never improve with age.
TA: Would it be fair to say that you were always drawn to stuff that spoke more to the working class? I mean, it’s not like you were hanging around and doing amphetamine sulfate with the members of Ultravox.
AJ: (laughing) I never wrote about say Ultravox or Visage. They really didn't need to speak (to me). The new Romantics generally seemed like a perma-tan hen party. It wasn't to my taste at all. I mean I remember people whose tastes I generally shared getting terribly excited about something like ABC. But it just sounded like a clunkier version of Roxy Music. And it wasn't because they kind of dressed up. I love a lot of dressing up (like) Alice Cooper or Ziggy Stardust…great…fine. But I draw the line you know at wizards hats and capes.
TA: Did you wind up maintaining friendships with any of the artists you wound up covering multiple times like Lou Reed?
I never had a sort of correspondence with any of these people. The only times I met Lou were when I was working and I was interviewing him. I did get a couple of letters from him and he sent me a couple of books. I think he sent me a Delmar Schwartz collection, but we never really kept in touch. Although I was friendly with a lot of the groups that I interviewed and I would see them socially, I was always a bit reluctant to try and foster a greater friendship which would have been a fragile thing anyway. Because you know you're only you one bad review away from falling out of grace with anybody that you think you're friends with. I mean I was friendly for a long time with Elvis Costello, but the first kind of critical thing I wrote about him he really got the hump about it. Even the people who say that you know they're insensitive to reviews, they're usually lying through their teeth. I mean they do read everything and you know they can be very sensitive. It’s a curious thing. They suddenly feel betrayed.
TA: Is there someone who you never got the chance to interview who you would have liked to?
AJ: Well you know Dylan would have been the ultimate in many ways, although I must confess that whenever Dylan had a new album out, and although I was fairly sure he wouldn't be available for interviews, I would have sleepless nights or I would wake up in a cold sweat having dreamed that I'd had a call saying ‘Bob's available for interview. Can you do him tomorrow?’ I mean where would you start? It would that that would have been the most intimidating thing I think. But yeah there were loads and loads of people I would have loved to have interviewed. Some of them were already dead…Gram Parsons…Tim Buckley. I mean I would love to have interviewed Laura Nyro, who I idolized. “New York Tendaberry’ is one of my favorite albums, but I never did. Nico for some reason (as well) although she was often available. I don't know Chuck Berry? Jerry Lee? Bobby Bland? I mean an endless list really.
TA: Do you feel like there’s a publication out there now who covers music in the way that the English papers used to at the height of their powers?
AJ: Not that I'm witness to. I don't read a lot of music magazines anymore. I still get Uncut sent to me every month and I go through that. There's a sense of deference that’s returned to music journalism that I always felt uncomfortable with. I prefer more of a disruptive approach I guess. There are very few music magazines left in England. We have Mojo, Record Collector and Uncut. (And) in terms of major cover stories, there's only 12 or so artists that they can rely on to actually sell issues. Which is why Uncut still labors under the pretense that Neil Young is making interesting work. Every time Neil puts out an album they do a feature and it often harkens back to the Doom Trilogy as much as it does to the new work. But they couldn’t admit to even some small degree that Neil hasn't recorded a decent album since about ’78…’79. ‘Psychedelic Pill’ was a great album but a lot before and certainly after it have been desultory. But they could never admit that because it means that they wouldn't get another Neil cover story. So I really get frustrated by that. There's nothing contentious in any of the interviews I read. You know artists deserve to be treated with respect, but there's always a room for a little irreverence surely.
