The World’s Boredest Man

The World’s Boredest Man

ELEGANZA

John Mendelssohn

At the time this was written, many of your glossier magazines were ridiculing Bill Wyman for having been discovered to have kept a barely pubescent Brigitte Bardot lookalike several decades his junior as his personal boytoy. But it just wasn’t fair.

Well, all right. Maybe it was fair. Maybe a 52-year-old man who’d corrupt a 13year-old convent schoolgirl deserves all the ridicule that can be printed about him. But I’m here to tell you that bad Bill also deserves praise a-plenty, for his stage posture was one of the most delightfully funny things about the Rolling Stones in their glorious early days. Jagger might have bent over and wiggled his ass in the audience’s face, Brian Jones might have had the world’s most gorgeous hair, Charlie might have looked absolutely submoronic, and Keith might have been an early master of the stationary duckwalk, but bad Bill very convincingly played the boredest man in the world.

Before Bill, you’ll recall, rock ’n’ roll sidemen were expected to look absolutely tickled to death with whatever the singer was doing. It is impossible to find a photograph of Bill Black, Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana looking otherwise behind the early Elvis, for instance, or the Crickets looking otherwise behind Buddy Holly. Even the Comets, for Pete’s sake, used to seem to be rapturous with glee at the sound of Bill Haley’s voice. But there bad Bill Wyman stood in the early ’60s while a generation peed its pants, nothing moving but his little hands (they’re so little that his bass guitars have to be custom-made to fit ’em!) and his jaw. Bad Bill’d no sooner have gone onstage without his Wrigley’s spearmint than Jagger would have without his lips.

We pause to note that, but not for the influence of the petite Perks (bad Bill’s real name, you see), John Entwistle might have competed for attention with the rest of the Who, and we’d have found them rather too much, rather than the most breathtaking spectacle in the history of rock ’n’ roll. But with bad Bill to look to for inspiration, the so-called Ox was content to look embarrassed by Daltrey’s, Townshend’s, and Moon’s shenanigans, and the rest’s history.

We turn to the cover of Rolling Stone No. 494, on which photographer Albert Watson depicts Bruce Springsteen, wearing a leather jacket of the sort you’d expect to find on someone who eats out of dumpsters, looking pleased about having been voted Artist of the Year yet again. “Grooming,” the fine print on the contents page tells us with a straight face, “by Trevor Bowden for Clive Summers Salon.” As Bruce seems neither to have shaved nor to have brushed his hair in a couple of days, Trev’s duties presumably consisted of telling The Boss, “Hey, you’re beautiful, guy—-I wouldn’t change a thing,” smoking designer cigarettes, nibbling bonbons, and reading the latest Elle while Al clicked away.

Note to Clive Summers: Should Trev ever resign, this column would be only too eager to interview for his job.

Speaking of Bruce, we finally get around to saluting Brian Setzer as the decade’s most profound influence on rock ’n’ roll fashion. It was he who popularized the bolo (or string) tie, he (and the other Stray Cats) whose cartoon-laden arms launched a thousand tattoo parlors, he whose breathtaking Eddie-Cochran-goneberserk coiffure first inspired stylish male children of the ’60s to coax their own hair into ’50s-ish quiffs and DA’s.

The bolo tie, we hasten to add, has become entirely too nearly ubiquitous in the past year, and must soon go the way of platform shoes and bellbottoms. If all four of Big Country wearing bolos to pose for their most recent group portraits left any doubts, the resolutely unstylish Springsteen’s having sported one at the recent induction of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s second batch of inductees obliterated them.

When it comes to to loathing Journey, this column takes a back seat to nobody.

And yet, it’s had to admit at least twice since the dawn of The MTV Age that Steve Perry shouldn’t have been strangled in infancy after all. First, at a time when no other video in rotation seemed to have fewer than six cuts per bar, he made one (“Foolish Heart”) that consisted of a single shot. And then he apparently invited his real-life girlfriend—a notably pretty young woman, to be sure, but hardly the drop-dead sexpot type we’d come to regard as compulsory in rock videos—to appear with him in “Oh, Sherry!”

TURN TO PAGE 54

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 26

We call now on other male stars to follow Steve’s brave example, and to feature their actual significant others in their videos and on their album covers. Yo, Huey Lewis, whose image is that of Mr. Down-to-Earth: Why couldn’t the actual Mrs. Clegg (his real name, you see) have been in the boat with you in your “Stuck On You” video instead of a sex goddess 15 years her junior? And yo, Randy Newman: could the mother of your children not have looked as vapid as she rode beside you through the “I Love L.A.” video as that Bardot-lipped little tramp did? Are we to surmise that the women who are good enough to keep your platinum albums polished and to have a steaming tuna noodle casserole on the table when you get home from concert tours aren’t good enough to be seen with you on videotape? Are the only women the rock ’n’ roll video will acknowledge either performers or stunning?

John Leavy, the deliberately obscure right-wing rock critic, will love this. “See?” he’ll demand. “This is what we’ll have if you keep making fun of Sammy Hagar.” A teen gang from the Moscow suburb of Lyubertsy—and straight out of A Clockwork Orange—seems to have declared war on people with hairstyles conspicuously unlike the Politburo’s. According to the Soviet magazine Ogonyok, this gang, which is known for its rippling biceps, thin black ties, and checked trousers, recently grabbed a hippie as he was strolling along Karl Marx Prospect, minding his own business. They snidely asked him if he lacked the money for a haircut. And then stopped passers-by to ask how they could bear to behold so appalling a person. And then forcibly cut his hair. And then beat him to a pulp.

All of which reminds me too vividly of my own experiences as one of the first 10 longhaired boys on the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles.

Speaking of Mick Jagger, the classical world has apparently produced its own modern version in the form of Ivo Pogorelich, a pianist who recently evoked howls of anguish and the wholesale rending of evening wear when he saw fit to perform in satin trousers that appeared, from several rows back, to be ... (and here we hush our voices)... leather. He’s got a funny name (although not quite as funny as that of Yoyo Ma, the Japanese cellist), he’s prettier than all three of the Caucasians in Duran Duran put together, and he’s Yugoslavian. Look for Sire to sign him.