I hope you had a good Bank Holiday break. I spent a very enjoyable chunk of it reading the new Carl Hiaasen novel – excuse the shameless self-promotion, but you can read an interview I did with Hiaasen over on my blog. But now we’re back in the office, and it’s my pleasure to introduce you all to the new issue of Uncut, which goes on sale tomorrow.
Bob Dylan’s on the cover of the new Uncut, which goes on sale tomorrow, July 31. The occasion? The release of The Bootleg Series, Volume 10 – Another Self Portrait (1969 – 1971) a typically fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of the Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait and New Morning sessions.
I would have bought the issue of Melody Maker in which I first read about Bruce Springsteen on my way into the art school in Newport, where in March 1973 I was in my last term, only a few months away from moving to London and not long after that fetching up on MM as a junior reporter/feature writer, a turn of events that was wholly unexpected and still seems somewhat unreal. Anyway, that was all to come. That Thursday morning, as ever in those days, I picked up a copy of MM at the paper shop at the top of Stow Hill, then eagerly devoured it on the bus into town.
There’s a lot to be said for the charisma of premature death. And the manner of his particular dying – turning blue on a motel floor at the age of 26, his heart fatally faltering, ice cubes being stuffed up his ass in a pathetic attempt to bring him back from the brink after one binge too many – booked Gram parsons an automatic place of honour in a rock’n’roll Valhalla already overcrowded with dead young heroes, Jimi, Janis, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and more already among its spectral population when Gram died in September, 1973.
