This year Radioinfo will take you back 50 years to songs from 1974. It was a mighty fine year for music.
I’m taking a liberty with Rock On by David Essex, which was released 51 years ago this week and became the first No 1 (according to The Book) in Australia of ’74. Don Partridge, a writer for British music magazine Melody Maker said on the eve of its release that Rock On was:
“A superb example of economy used for effect.”
There are parallels between the UK’s David Essex and the late US singer songwriter Kris Kristofferson. Both were very attractive men who easily could have been pigeonholed into roles and songs that played off on their looks. Instead, at pivotal moments they shone with their own creations, and were able to walk a far more interesting career path.
In 1973 David Essex’s (real name David Cook, his last name is a nod to his birthplace) career was in the ascent. He’d released several singles, appear in a number of films and played the starring role in Godspell.
David’s record label had tasked him with writing a ballad, to capitalise on the above and he went into a studio with soon to be legendary producer Jeff Wayne to demo what he’d come up with.
What you hear lyrically in Rock On is what Jeff heard that day, with David’s only accompaniment a self-tapped out beat on a trash can. Rather than being deterred Jeff saw this as an idea to be conceptually adventurous, and David felt that together they could make something career defining and more in keeping with the type of artist he wanted to be.
On recording day everyone was looking around wondering when all the other musicians were going to turn up. Once the drum (no snare) and percussion parts were sorted, that left David, Jeff and Herbie Flowers on bass guitar. Herbie died in September this year and played bass and other instruments on more than 500 songs we all know from the 70s.
Herbie had played bass on Lou Reed’s similarly iconic and career defining Walk on the Wild Side in 1972 and had been paid twice his normal session fee of £12 for created a double-tracked bass line, which of course is SO important to the legacy of that song.
He suggested the same idea, to create a polyrhythmic backbeat, for again double the normal fee, for Rock On. It comes in at the 11 second mark of the recording above. If you haven’t identified Rock On from that bass riff within four seconds, frankly you don’t know the song.
The song is featured on the soundtrack of That’ll be the Day (main picture) which David would star in (alongside Ringo Starr, who you probably also recognise on the cover). The movie all 60s music alongside this sparse futuristic number from David, quite incongruously really.
None the less it reached the top ten in the UK and US, a pleasant surprise to David who said that the final product was exactly what he hoped it could be, and even if no one ever had listened to it, it would always be a favourite recording.
David is a one hit wonder in the US, although Rock On would reach No 1 in 1989 when a fellow called Michael Damian re-recorded it. He had a handful of hits here and a truckload in the UK where he has released 26 albums as well as having an illustrious acting career not defined by his looks.
One final note on the legacy of the song. Michael Stipe from REM considers Rock On one of the greatest ever recorded. To pay homage he created the lead single Drive from the band’s best album (in my opinion), 1992’s Automatic for the People, not just with the same sparse sound as Essex/Wayne and Flowers created two decades earlier but even including the line, “hey kids, rock and roll” in their lyrics too.
Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo