Chapter 12 … Stephen Morris: The Rolling Stone Interview, Part 1

(Author’s Note: On February 9, 2024- exactly 60 years after The Beatles made their U.S. debut on The Ed Sullivan Show- my sons, Jacob and Patrick gave me the present of a year’s membership in Storyworth.com, an online service designed to help people write their own memoirs. Further, Jake thought that the fulcrum of the story should be the year 1971, the year many musicologists regard as one of the most pivotal in pop music history.

The real gift was not the membership, but the opportunity to think about, and record, the most meaningful moments in my life. The challenge for me as a writer was how to take a relatively ordinary existence and make it worthy of a reader’s time. the answer came quickly … make stuff up, lie, pretend! Assisted by Storyworth I could have my visage carved onto Mount Rushmore, have my lifetime achievement awarded by the Kennedy Center, or … be featured on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine! That’s my ultimate 15 minutes of fame (now reduced to 15 seconds by TikTok). Here is the entirely mythical, self-gratifying, two-part interview with Stephen Morris, the cover story in Rolling Stone in recognition of the 50 anniversary of “1971 … The Year the Music Changed.”)

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As part of our ongoing series “1971 … The Year the Music Changed” we’re  talking to Stephen Morris, author of “Old Rockers: The Musical Journey of Grendel” and co-host, along with Greg Morrison of the popular podcast of the same name.

We travel to Vermont to meet with Morris. He lives in rural Vermont, midway between the towns of Bethel and Randolph, in other words “nowhere,” or as he puts it “just southwest of Bumfuk.” We meet on a warm spring day in a small outbuilding that has neither electricity nor water. He says it was built as “a playhouse for grandkids, but these days it’s more of “a playhouse-for-a-game-of-cribbage-with-a-glass-of-wine-house.” His most frequent cribbage opponent is his wife, Sandy Levesque. He is wearing a Red Sox hoodie and jeans that are soiled from “planting peas and onions.”

Rolling Stone: How does it feel to be the spokesperson for the whole generation of garage rockers?

SM: It feels ridiculous, absurd, overdue, spectacular, humbling, hilarious … you want me to keep going? It’s a joke that I’m a spokesperson for anything, let alone a generation. Seriously, 1970 was the most tumultuous of my life. I got out of the Navy, survived the Draft Lottery, graduated from college amidst a backdrop of the Vietnam War, the Trial of Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers. I got married, not once, but twice, to the same girl, no less. I was living entirely on my own for the first time. Well, actually that’s not true, because I was living with my wife, Laura. Looking the rearview mirror I could see in the recent past a moon landing, Woodstock, the Gulf of Tonkin, the assassinations of MLK and RFK … the list goes on. It was not a happy time in America.

Rolling Stone: But, were you happy?

SM: I was ecstatic! I was glad to leave the academic world of Yale; I was married to a lovely woman, I had grand dreams of homesteading in Nova Scotia and becoming the next great American novelist.  I was free of my parents, free of the Navy, and free of Yale. The world was my oyster! You know, that’s a silly cliche! Who thought of that one?

Rolling Stone: New Year’s Eve, 1970 … describe your world as the countdown brings the ball to zero.

SM: My wife Laura was working at her alma mater, Bradford College at that time, so my guess would be that we spent New Year’s Eve in our 3-room apartment at 23 Wonalancet Drive in Haverhill, MA. $28 bucks a week rent. There was no big party, we didn’t have many friends, although my college roommate, Bill Peck lived nearby, so it’s probable that he came over. Maybe drink a little beer or smoke a joint, if anyone had one. It’s so funny … it’s now legal to grow pot in Vermont, so last summer I grew two plants in the garden, and I can’t give the stuff away (laughs).

Rolling Stone: In 1971, a gallon of gas cost 36 cents. An LP cost around $3.00. in 2024, gas costs $3.60, and music is basically free. What does that say to you about how things have changed since 1971?

SM: The change in the cost of fuel is one of the more significant changes of our lifetimes. Those of us who grew up in this area simply considered cheap fuel a birthright. You never worried about the price of gas for your car, or the cost of heating your home.

Every problem that was faced was solved with the same answer … just add more power. Knives and garage doors were electrified. More power! More power! Our soils are becoming depleted? No problem … just add oil (in the form of chemical fertilizers to the ground). Problem solved. As we’re seeing now … problem created.

We as a country and culture drifted along, fat and oblivious, until 1973 (the First Arab Oil Embargo) when the rich, corrupt sheiks said, “You know what … we’re not going to ship you any more oil.” A great nation sputtered, and great nation whined and whimpered, and a great nation realized that those sheiks in their ridiculous outfits had us by the national balls.

Joni Mitchell, back in 1969, told us we had to get “back to the garden.” Some of did, but nearly enough. The sudden recognition of how we had been the architects of our own vulnerability was a shock. For me it was a shock so profound that it redirected my personal and professional life.

An equally profound shift in the music industry occurred between 1971 and 2024, but it happened almost two decades later. I’ll get to that. One thing at a time.

And where did the power/oil come from? Some distant place on the other side of the world, a place where stupid people sold us their natural resources cheap so that we could like kings. Oh sure, a few sheiks got rich in the process, but who cares?

Rolling Stone: Let’s get back to music. 1971 was the year The Beatles broke up. Was that traumatic for you?

SM: Naw … There as no “moment” of the Beatles break-up. It had turned into a soap opera, a protracted, messy, negative drama. Vietnam, the Nixon presidency, the racial tension … it had all gone on too long, and we were ready for a fresh start on something new. The Beatles chapter of our lives had ended, and we were ready to turn the page. For me personally, it was time to turn North and to head back to the garden.

My interest in The Beatles dwindled after the Abbey Road album. They put the perfect punctuation on the era when they said “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” I know, there was a lot of “stuff” after that. They became mired in squabbles, speculations, and business disagreements. John was entangled with Yoko, and everyone was engaged in individual projects.

I never bought a single album by an individual Beatle.

I liked what McCartney was doing with his life. He was married to a sister of one of Laura’s friends, and they had settled on a farm in Scotland, eerily similar to what Laura and I were doing in Nova Scotia. Lennon, meanwhile, was generally making a fool of himself with Yoko Ono, including making bad music.

“Imagine” was the exception, undeniably a beautiful song and a demonstration of his genius. It did not surprise me, however, to learn that it was a song that he was working on for several years—from the “Revolver” days I read somewhere, so it is clearly from the Beatles’ era, not the post Beatles era.

“Imagine” wasn’t a blockbuster, as opposed to the McCartney “Uncle Albert” medley, which shot up the charts to #1. Over time, however, it has been recognized as one of Lennon’s great masterpieces. Deservedly, so.

Rolling Stone: Did you like McCartney’s album “Ram?”

SM: Never listened to it, so no opinion. McCartney stayed on the pop charts, so he seemed to be the Beatle who was “keeping on.” And I totally identified with how he was living his life, moving to Scotland, having his kids attend public school with the locals, etc. I naturally fell into his camp, as opposed to Lennon’s, which involved high art, celebrity, drugs, and boorish behavior.

But, in terms of the music, in the early 70s, it seemed time for us to move on from The Beatles, so that’s what we did.

Rolling Stone: So was 1971 really :the year the music changed?

SM: I thing it was and, ahem (clears throat), since I am a spokesperson for a generation, I think it was for many others, too. But that’s only in hindsight. We weren’t aware of a seismic shift at the time.

Rolling Stone: Seismic change? What does that mean?

SM: It means that the earth shakes for a few seconds and afterwards, everything has changed. I’ve lived through three such eruptions … Elvis, The Beatles, and, to a lesser extent, Nirvana.

Rolling Stone: What about Taylor Swift?

SM: Good question, but I think not. I like her, like her music, and she seems to be a solid citizen, but the girl’s been around a long time. She’s immensely popular … so was Michael Jackson, but seismic? Not by my definition.  Nirvana was only with us for a few short months, but they were an eruption.

Rolling Stone: So why was 1971 so significant?

SM: You had the veterans of The Beatles’s quake- those who survived- growing into their maturity.  By now they had nearly a decade to hone their craft. Their music was better than ever.

Rolling Stone: Examples?

SM: There are many. Look at The Kinks with “Muswell Hillbillies.” Laura and I were in London in 1972 when we started listening to this. The Kinks were at the height of their creative powers and their craft, plus the world was finally beginning to understand them. 

But, the pop music scene had moved on to the next thing, which was glam rock. I could never really get into it.

We saw The Kinks at Imperial College in London, just up the street from where we lived on Onslow Gardens. Great show. The band had finally worked some things out with the sound, which was always uneven when we heard them in the States. Some girls even rushed the stage a la early Beatles. It was all in good fun.

In our little basement flat, this cassette was on constant rotation with other Kinks’ albums as well as The Who, and, later, Leo Sayer, who hit big while we were there.

Another example would be the Stones. I’d rank “Sticky Fingers” about where I’d rank most of the Stones’s material, just above the mediocre, but this was better than their previous albums and better than any that followed. Their formula of 1. Provocative title + good guitar riff + raunchy posturing + solid back beat is tried and true for an r&b rooted band. It’s a formula that has stood the test of time, although the Stones were never, as they claimed the “world’s greatest rock ‘n roll band.” They’ve always been amusing, however.

Rolling Stones: You mentioned “glam rock.” Why couldn’t you get into that?

SM: A revolution took place in the 1960s. A real revolution that was authentic. Glam rock took the good part of music and gussied it up so that it would play to the cheap seats. It commodified a tribal experience and turned it into a spectacle.

The name says it all. Glam rock is sham rock. Any idiot can put on make-up and a wig. Slade was big when Laura and I were in London (1972/3). “Cum on feel the Noize” was everywhere. The press tried to make them out as the second coming of The Beatles. Obviously, they fell short. It was all appearance and posturing. Very superficial. T. Rex was another band that I couldn’t get into.

Rolling Stone: What about David Bowie? He’s stood the test of time.

SM: True, but his Glam period was good. Luckily he grew out of it. I think he started getting good after “Rebel, Rebel.”

Rolling Stone: A lot of people say that the artists of the 60s were over the hill by 1971? Do you agree with that?

SM: I agree with Ray Davies who said “Let’s all raise a glass to the rock stars of the past, those who made it, those who faded, those who never even made the grade, and those that we thought would never last.”

Rolling Stone: Examples?

SM: The Doors. They were one of the hottest products of the 60s. I remember in my freshman year in college, my friend David Larkin was a DJ at the campus radio station WYBC. The station was sent all kinds of complimentary, promotional, new releases which David would bring home and drop off, saying “tell me what you think.” Most were forgettable, but one, called simply “The Doors” knocked my socks off.

From the opening riff of “Backdoor Man” to the crescendoing wail of “Light My Fire” this album was something special. I was right. So … I didn’t discover The Doors, but I did find them about six weeks before they hit it big time. By the end of the summer in 1967, they were superstars.

Their career followed the predictable arc. The more popular they became, the more indulged they were. The more indulged, the worse the music, the more unsympathetic the personalities. Jim Morrison died in 1971 in a bathtub in Paris, France. It was only 4 years since I “discovered” him, and now I wasn’t overly moved by his death. Such is fame in America. I always wanted it, so that I could reject it. Thank God it never happened, because I’m sure I would have been as vulnerable to its intoxication as every other Tom, Dick, Jim, Jimi, Janis, and asshole.

By the time this happened we had stopped being shocked by the sudden, premature death of one of our musical superstars.

Rolling Stone: But weren’t there heroes of the 1960s who had just worn out their welcome or run out of new ideas?

SM: Yeah, definitely. The Velvet Underground jumps to mind. They were not a band so much as a sensation, with the album cover with the banana that actually could be peeled. The band was an Andy Warhol celebration of celebrity. Glam rock in reverse!

Nico was cool, but not a musician. Her finest moment was in selecting a song written by her then-17 year old boyfriend, Jackson Browne, whose musical legacy with “These Days” has outlasted the rest of the band combined. Lou Reed went on to become a star of some note, but in my eyes, his reflected his ability to hang on to an image of “cool” rather than a reflection of musicality. The reason I don’t remember “Loaded” is because it was probably a load of shit, and by that time, everyone had caught up to the reality of the Velvet Underground.

Leonard Cohen was another artist who just ran out of gas, or who lost interest. I never listened to “Songs of Love and Hate”, because I didn’t want to spend good money to be depressed although I later became familiar with “Blue Raincoat” from  his greatest hits compilations. Sandy and I saw Leonard in concert at Radio City Music Hall when he was 79 years old. He said he was going to start smoking again when he hit 80! Sandy went through a late-in-life romance with his music. Leonard’s best line has always been “They say I know only three chords … I know five!” (Laughs)

Sly Stone, Carley Simon, the Allmans, and The Beach Boys had peaked and were in some level of decline. I owned the “Surf’s Up” album, and the title song is amazing, vintage Wilsons. The rest of the album was not, and shouldn’t haven’t been released. The Beach Boys were in a deep downward spiral. Unlike The Beatles, who all had credible (note the absence of “in”) post-group, individual careers, the Beach Boys, with the possible exception of Dennis, could never do anything other that be the Beach Boys circa 1967.

They never came close to recapturing their brief magic. “Surf’s Up,” the song, not the album comes the closest. It’s another Carl Wilson vocal, I believe.

Hey … you want a beer!

Rolling Stone: (Morris goes into the main house and returns with a tall glass with a frothy head. “My homebrew,” he announces proudly. “I’ve also got blackberry wine that you can sample, or some of my homegrown pot!’ I politely decline.) Let’s keep going with the music, then we can move along to some other things. What artists were just hitting their strides in 1971.

SM: Carole King comes to mind, Joni Mitchell, for sure, and Marvin Gaye, too, although I was  a big fan of his genre. What tragedy … shot by his own father.

Rolling Stone: Tell us about the other two.

SM: I was happy to move along from the disintegration of the 60s self-indulgence to the more measured maturity of the 70s, and no one personified the changes more than Carole King. Here are a few reasons why:

1. She was there. She was in the Brill Building churning out hit after hit in the early 60s.

2. She had written a lot of songs that went beyond the genre of 60s’ pop. When you learned that something like “I’m into Something Good” by Herman’s Hermits was hers you’d think, “Oh, I thought they were just growing up on their own.”

3. In her own interpretation (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”) her music took on a new and nuanced depth and meaning.

4. Her new material like “It’s Too Late” was subtle beyond what we had come to expect from pop music.

5. Surprise … She was a terrific performer!

6. The title and packaging of “Tapestry” reflected the sense of maturity we were sensing in our lives. We’re no longer kids, and that’s ok.

Carole King helped an entire generation turn the corner into adulthood. Me? … age 23, just graduated college, recently married … I was turning the page as well.

And Joni?? … Joni Mitchell was another of the musical artists that we adopted as we exited adolescence and entered into young adulthood. I was first exposed to her in college by listening to Tom Rush, who included several of her songs on his “Circle Game” album. “Tin Angel,” “Urge for Going,” and “Circle Game” were both pleasing tunes, but also had a depth of lyric and emotional sensibility that we rarely glimpsed in popular music.

We (that is, “me” and a zillion others) went from discovering Joni via Tom to discovering her for ourselves. There was her first album, then “Ladies of the Canyon,” then “For the Roses,” then “Blue,” then “Court and Spark.” I may have the sequence wrong, but they were all great works of art that commanded our attention throughout the 1970s.

In later years these performers remained, more or less, in our lives. Joni, alas, turned away from pop and descended into less accessible stuff. (I ran into her once in a tiny jazz club in NYC.) Tom Rush resurfaced when Laura became Program Director for Chandler Music Hall. He became her first sold out show. I even did a telephone interview with him for The Herald. I did a second one a few years later when he was booked to perform at our 50th Reunion gathering for the Yale Class of 1970.

Most recently Joni has been the honoree at the Kennedy Center for winning some lifetime achievement award for whatever. She’s now back performing, albeit about two octaves lower. Joni (always just “Joni”) is, was, and will always be.

Rolling Stone: I know this is an unfair question, but if you had to point to just one song that captured what was going on in the music world in 1971, what would it be? 

SM: Actually, this one is easy … “20th Century Man” by The Kinks. This is one of Ray Davies’s best, a visionary view of the culture at the turn of the century. “This is the age of machinery, mechanical nightmare …” Apochalyptic future “Controlled by civil servants, and people dressed in grey.” He clearly would prefer to live in the past. “I’ll take Rembrandt.” Match this lyrical genius with a great guitar riff, simple, yet driving, and an octave jumping vocal and you’ve got one of the best Kinks songs ever. (Also, a shout out to Mick Avory’s drums.)

The 1960s was all about music, but in 1971 the times they were a’changin’. Other forms of expression, such as film, were ready to be front and center.

Rolling Stone: Stop right there! That’s a perfect segue into tomorrow’s session, when we turn away from music to see what else was going on in the world of art. So we’ll see you tomorrow?

SM: Same time, same place, same channel.