by Andreas Kessaris for Curtains Up!
“Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It’s a scientific fact”
-Homer Simpson
Whenever asked what my dream job would be, I reply with the following: Either film director in the 1970’s (in my opinion the last golden age of Hollywood pictures), writer for Saturday Night Live from ’86-93 (when SNL was in its prime with its finest cast), or rock star from ’73-’84 (the great era of the FM radio arena rock gods who’d release three albums in two years, go on endless, decadent monster tours, and wreck hotel rooms in cocaine-fueled rampages). The last career choice on that list is the subject of What You Want is in the Limo: On the Road with Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and The Who in 1973, the Year the Sixties Died and the Modern Rock Star was Born, the latest non-fiction effort from writer Michael Walker.
As the ridiculously long title suggests, author Walker goes back to 1973, a tumultuous year socially, culturally, politically, and economically, and parallels the courses of three bands (Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper and The Who), their three monumental album releases (Houses of the Holy, Billion Dollar Babies, and Quadrophenia, respectively), and the almost This is Spinal Tap-like pitfalls of their subsequent tours.
Walker sensibly does not focus solely on the band members, but also the support staff, management, roadies, hangers-on, and groupies. He keenly delivers the entire package and paints a compact yet detailed picture of the entire scene, from the roots and prelude through to the aftermath, and leaves the reader without unanswered questions. From page one the author sets the scene and takes us along for the ride, filling us in on how albums were written, recorded, tours rehearsed, and concerts promoted at that time. He not only covers the creative process, but the technical aspects and the origins of rock concert mainstays like adhesive backstage passes and the ubiquitous Marshall amplifier stack.
In reading the book I found Walker to be a skilled and shrewd writer. If there is a weakness in What You Want is in the Limo, it lies in his style. While he penned the best seller Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary Neighbourhood, he is mostly know as a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times and Rolling Stone, among many other publications, and it shows. All ten chapters, including the introduction and epilogue read almost like stand-alone magazine articles and that creates numerous repetitions and redundancies, although I believe they were not carelessly so, (more a matter of technique), and to his credit the book does move at a steady pace, never lagging or tedious; Walker prudently does not dwell on meaningless details. Ultimately the experience was quite satisfying, especially for an old rocker like myself, (I really got a kick out of how Montreal was referenced in the infamous incident in which The Who are arrested for wrecking their suite in the Bonaventure Hotel).
I am a few years too young to have appreciated 1973, the time Walker describes as “a year of cultural schizophrenia that teetered between the sixties and the seventies, steeped in both and resolving neither.” I caught the tail-end of that epoch, (I was barely a teenager when I went see Iron Maiden on their World Piece Tour at the old Forum; my first rock concert and a life-changing experience). Most of the bands from the aforementioned era were either broken-up or way past their “sell by” date by the time I saw them. What You Want is in the Limo made me nostalgic for lost arts like detailed and meaningful album covers and obnoxiously loud arena concerts where musicians egotistically played endless solos and practically fell off the stage in chemically-induced stupors; an age when “rock star” was not some crappy energy drink distributed by scantily-clad women from the back of grotesque pickup trucks on downtown streets, and I strongly recommend it to all fans of classic rock.
