Music Blogs

The great Belgian artist Guy Peellaert died on Monday at the age of 74. It's his work you see on the covers of Bowie's Diamond Dogs and the Stones' It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, but his greatest work was the 1974 collection Rock Dreams. Paul Rambali paid homage to Guy in this 1995 piece for MOJO.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Do you still have a copy of Rock Dreams? If you were a rock fan in the early ‘70s, when it was first published, you probably do. If you're a rock fan at all you carry with you the images by Guy Peellaert of a fur-collared Bob Dylan in the back of a limo; of James Brown getting out of his limo to greet his godchildren; of Elvis crying in the chapel; of Brian Wilson in his lonely room. Rock Dreams is one of the masterworks of Pop Art: an advertising-derived marriage of image and text, a marvelous mise en scène of collective fantasy. It remains radically truthful about rock, pop and soul music's founding figures.

The texts by Nik Cohn are the simplest and the richest history of the music ever written--and the nearest any kind of writing has come to a three-minute symphony. The stories told by Cohn in Rock Dreams have since become gospel: told and retold, lately in compendious academic detail. Cohn's rendering of them is a reminder that brevity is the soul of pop.

The book was conceived by Peellaert, who was--he jokes--"39 at the time, and I still am, like Jack Benny." He went to art school in Brussels and was working as a set decorator in Paris, dreaming about rock. "I wanted to make three-minute films of, say, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis as truckers. Jerry Lee ends up in jail for corrupting a minor and Johnny comes to bail him out. Things like that, playing with their lives."

Struggling to think of a scriptwriter for what would have been some of the first pop videos, Peellaert recalled a book he'd read back in Holland: Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, by Nik Cohn. "I got his address and wrote to him. I was broke and I saw this guy arrive in Paris like a star, and I was supposed to pay for his room at the Hilton! But Nik was a gentleman. By the time we reached the hotel he'd figured out the situation. He cancelled his room and slept on my sofa."

When the German producer fell through, Cohn suggested a book instead. "We were playing with mythology," says Peellaert. "We weren't specialists, we were fans." The decisions about the imagery came easily. Buddy Holly became the wet dream of two airline stewardesses, Elvis the wet dream of America. Subconscious sexual motivations were well to the fore and many of the Rock Dreams were unabashedly homoerotic. A butch young Elvis was depicted on a streetcorner, bait for gang-bangers out of Ringolevio; there was Lou Reed biting his painted fingernails, Jim Morrison in a gay bar.

Some of it was iconoclastic, some of it was reassuring. R&B artists were depicted as sexually rampant but fond of home cookin': Big Joe Turner with a broad on each arm and Fats Domino with his band of pickaninnies. Even potentially camp black artists had their kinks ironed out: Chuck Berry was a brown-eyed handsome duck-walker, Little Richard a showbiz holy-roller.

The Beatles, who had successfully mythologised themselves, were the most impervious to Peellaert's imaginings. The imagery in Rock Dreams was The Beatles' own and they had already been iconised in pop--Peter Blake's cover for Sgt Pepper. The Rolling Stones lent themselves better to being depicted as Nazi transvestites feasting on nymphs. And there was a Faustian warning in the final image of Jagger, Jones and Richards strung-out and sated in the bedroom mirror, watching a fresh young woman disrobe.

Ever conscious of their own myths, some rock stars wanted in turn to become Peellaert images. Jagger, thinking he was being ironic, cake walked down a Busby Berkeley staircase in Peellaert's cover for It's Only Rock 'n' Roll; Bowie saw himself as a Diamond Dog, half-hound, half-Starman. Though Peellaert no longer has the original, he does have a photo of the Diamond Dogs billboard on Sunset Boulevard.

Since The Big Room (1986), a book of images of Las Vegas in the making and on the make, Peellaert has worked on movie posters and in advertising. He spent a year creating a huge mural of Gershwin that will provide the backdrop for a documentary by Alain Resnais. Lately, he has been talking with Nik Cohn about a new project. More Rock Dreams?

"No," he says--and don't think he hasn't had offers. "That would be repeating ourselves. In any case, even if the faces and fashions have changed, the themes remain the same."

Read more thousands more rock interviews and reviews at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 13,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.