Chris Mitchell
Tour diaries have a particular squalid glamour all of their own. First person accounts of frequently excessive life on the road have become a mini-genre within the slew of books about pop music, Hammer Of The Gods and Pamela Des Barres’ I’m With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie being two of its most infamous examples. Neighbourhood Threat, ex-UK Subs guitarist Alvin Gibbs’ chronicle of playing on Iggy Pop’s 1988 Instinct world tour, squarely follows this tradition of describing rock’n’roll hedonism, while Harry Rasky’s memoir of making a film of Cohen’s 1978 European tour has aspirations towards locating nothing less than Cohen’s soul.
While Gibbs uses the traditional rock’n’roll vocabulary – “it was a reckless, outlaw lifestyle” etc. – what’s surprising about Neighbourhood Threat is the relative lack of excess. Iggy’s days of madness with the Stooges are long gone, and both he and Gibbs were happily married men at the time, not above temptation but usually able to resist it. Booze is banned before gigs and Gibbs’ fellow guitarist, ex-Hanoi Rocks member Andy McCoy, gets threatened with dismissal for turning up late and bombed to rehearsals. What comes across most is that Gibbs was aboard a well-honed tour machine in full effect, with the performances coming before everything else, and where the band are just bit players in Iggy’s quest to capitalise on his recent commercial success. As such, the biggest danger is not the continual invitations to excess but the insidious, crushing boredom of being on the road.
Of course, that shouldn’t be taken to mean that the Instinct tour was somehow toothless. If anything, Iggy being straight made him even more dangerous, as evinced by the glorious climax of the book. Iggy and the band take to the stage in Australia only to find it completely covered in huge Pepsi banners against which they’re expected to perform. Iggy promptly starts hurling abuse at Pepsi between each song until his patience snaps and he physically trashes the advertising banners and causes a near riot among the audience. Now that’s rock’n’roll.
Gibbs’ refusal to exaggerate the tour’s events means that the main protagonists appear painfully human at times, rather than the usual musician caricatures. Indeed, Andy McCoy’s attempts to ingest and impregnate anything that crosses his path in the name of some mythical rock’n’roll dream seem somewhat pathetic compared to Gibbs’ and Iggy’s more restrained behaviour. In that sense, Neighbourhood Threat is a great tour diary, because it gets to the truth of being on tour rather than trying to preserve the paper thin veneer of hedonistic glamour always associated with it.
Harry Rasky could do with taking on board a little of Gibbs’ clipped prose in his writing about Leonard Cohen. Rasky’s florid prose style becomes deeply irritating within a few pages and his own overbearing presence within the book acts as a distraction from his actual subject. Rasky tries to make his memoir much more than that, attempting to explain Cohen himself, which is something of a futile endeavour. Where Gibbs has a quiet respect for Iggy, Rasky tends to fawn, and some of the questions he asks of the ever patient Cohen are simply banal. A classic exchange is “What is the most important thing to you?”. To which Cohen responds, “That is a hell of a question for a Monday morning…”
Despite these criticisms, The Song Of Leonard Cohen is essential reading for Cohen fans, because Rasky recorded all of his conversations with the man and so does not have to rely on memory, as Gibbs does, to report what happened. To his credit, Rasky includes long passages of Cohen’s responses without interruption. For less eloquent individuals this could be disaster, but Cohen’s thoughts are almost always carefully considered, beautifully phrased and often amusing – rather like his songs. As such, Rasky’s book shares a similar candidness and absence of caricature with Neighbourhood Threat. Moreover, the film Rasky made of this tour (also called The Song Of Leonard Cohen) appears to be unavailable these days, so this book is the only record of what’s left.
There’s few parallels to be drawn between these two accounts, save the sameness of the tour routine whoever you are. Both convey the feeling of being in eternal transit, lost on a big bus in the middle of a strange continent when you’ve got nothing but your songs for solace. They’re both passionate if flawed accounts written for fellow fans, and if you’ve any interest in either artist, they’re strongly recommended.
