Published by UpShot Productions
Release Date: July 2024
The spirit of Tommy Saxondale is evoked, in a memoir dedicated to “Highway Hypnosis” and the spiritual vibrations of rock and roll.
You only have to listen to the legendary Troggs tapes to realise just how much those individuals on the margins, carrying equipment and operating sound desks have the ability to deconstruct the rock and roll myth with an almost impudent zeal. When you think about it, the whole shebang is a gloriously silly exercise of vanity. Men (for the most part) trying to act out their best Christ pose on stage, surrounded by similar silly buggers with the type of gusto that would make a scurrilous pirate blush.
As a chronicler of such things and with over twenty years of experience in the field, you would think this memoir by Kenny Nicholson would take us deep into the trenches of such insanity, but early on in this book he comes over all coy when announcing that this isn’t really a book based around debauchery. The fallout that comes with it and that even if he could, he wouldn’t have revealed his saucerful of secrets out of “respect” for his clients anyway. Which is a dangerous thing for this type of book to do, to leave out its war stories. What’s left is an authentic snapshot of the machinations of touring rock bands and a love letter to a bygone age, particularly in America in the 70s and 80s, where bands like Milestone and Steel Breeze dreamt big and got to live out their best rock and roll fantasies, albeit at a very basic level.
Where this book works best is in the grey area of its working reality and the dark comedy that comes with it. There’s a stripping away of the glamour of touring, which becomes morbidly fascinating in a strange way. These odd, overworked figures high on “Krell”(Cocaine ) pop up in the book at regular intervals, then disappear without any real fanfare. There’s a sense of hustle too, as Nicholson and his band of rock and roll brothers swerve across America, at times hanging by their back wheels, at times glimpsing a utopian success they probably wouldn’t have known what to do with anyway.
That’s not to say there aren’t moments of real inspiration. Nicholson can write well and his description of an early Black Crowes performance towards the end of the book is as insightful as any rock critic, but in many ways, this books lack of self-awareness gives it a real charm. At one point it even lists the type of flatblade screwdriver needed to remove an electricity breaker panel, and with its constant realist view of the rock and roll life, it favours grind over glamour, revealing the fascinating tribe of workers barely glimpsed beyond the velvet rope.
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The book is available at Amazon
Words by Craig Campbell, you can read more book reviews at his author profile. He also tweets here
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