There are stories of great artists, men and women who lived years ago in noble poverty, gifted people living solitary lives out of kilter with the world at large. Often these artists were completely misunderstood, and this misunderstanding held the artists in contempt of what their society, or their families, termed normal. This is not to say they were without patrons or lovers, those generous with either their wealth or their understanding. Nevertheless, the few that claimed to grasp the artist’s outpourings were unable to demystify or to convey the riddles held captive in great art and these patrons became more cul-de-sac than conduit. Their admiration and explanations thickened the curious fug, allowing myth to spread as regal blood on common cotton. More often than not, these great artists disappeared from generations of consciousness solely because the people that recorded history deemed them unfit to play their own role in it. Some made a little money in their lifetime, yet in most of these stories the great artist died alone in poverty accompanied only by the tools of their brilliance: a paint brush, manuscript or guitar.
This is not one of those stories. But it is not dissimilar, the main difference being that this great artist is still alive. This is the story of the recording artist Sonny Johnson, a child born into the blues with yellow jaundice and an impresario father. Otis ‘Guitar’ Johnson’s own story is woven to his son’s with greater intricacy than genetics alone. Otis ‘Guitar’ Johnson was a revered and incredibly talented musician who wielded a guitar like a scan that revealed a cancerous tumour. This was a scan that you couldn’t help rubbernecking at. One that delivered news of the impending demise of someone who’d done you wrong, very wrong, real wrong. A scan that modern medicine could perhaps overcome. A guitar that sounded like progress, but one that reconciled the struggles of the past with just three chords from the Mississippi Delta. Otis was a man of Egyptian descent who lived in California, who hailed from an established and notable family, whose brother was Egypt’s longest serving ambassador to the U.S.A. He was a determined man who caused strife amongst his family at the height of the civil rights bloodshed by renouncing his Pharaonic lineage, and declaring himself a proud black man, in order to lend his iron will and beloved Fender Super Reverb to the struggle for emancipation. A man my own father listened to with awe.
Sonny Johnson unwrapped his first guitar, a gift from his father, on Christmas Day 1956. He was just three years old. His mother, Constance, a sincere woman of nurture and tenderness (paradoxically drawn to raw talent and drive), bought him what he’d asked for: an electric train set. That Christmas and the subsequent spring, Sonny chose to play with the train set instead of the guitar. This was a source of friction in the Johnson household, the friction of destiny rubbing up rough against the innocence of want. Destiny was opening up before him while the train set looped round and round, round and round.
By the age of six Sonny proved to be unnaturally gifted in both composition and playing. The hours of writing scores and daily practice his father insisted upon only accentuated his most uneven of gifts. It was as if every novice guitarist who spent idle afternoons hacking out renditions of Stairway to Heaven in the music sections of department stores had their originality snatched from them, long before they were born - at some distant and indeterminable point in the past - by the very Pharaoh King that Sonny had directly descended from.
There is a word, much over used, which has lost all clout and meaning through repeated and unnecessary usage. That word is prodigy. Many recording artists have been called prodigious by the muppet hacks of mass media. I laugh as these commentators take the word in vain, freely assigning it to holiday camp entertainers and mock shaman of the popular song. A true prodigy storms the citadel of talent, adds intensity to creativity and hot breath intimacy to the myriad, renders powerless the idiot wind. Real talent digs a tunnel from window to window, yes, a tunnel, from their window to yours. Jimi Hendrix cried the first time he saw Sonny play and that’s good enough for me.
By the age of eight the precocious prodigy Sonny Johnson had played on stage at the Hollywood Bowl and recorded in the Capitol studios. The recording engineer in Capitol studios at that time was a young blond man with a grand and established moustache. Perhaps it is the angle of the photograph in the studio’s anthology that suggests a Viking linage not recorded with words. But brave warrior or not, he was wise enough to approach the recording process with a wonderfully bounteous set of rules he based upon the ancient Greeks legislation for friendship. With this unorthodox methodology he captured perfectly soul with science and ensured innovation had both weight and reason. It was he who suggested that Sonny use a narrator’s microphone to best capture his elegant timbre. These first forays in the studio calmed Sonny’s not inconsiderable nerves, and from here he went on to play in countless sessions, learning all the time from the day’s finest players, most of whom had recorded for his father’s band.
In 1968 the whole Johnson family went on the road. His mother provided him with tethered stability and home schooled him, not at home, but between gigs in various hotel rooms across America. Sonny ate literature and the attitude of Catcher in the Rye was his favourite main course. He never bothered with dessert, just listened to Frank Zappa and played along in his head. In his thirteenth year, Sonny was invited to perform with Sly and the Family Stone, the Rolling Stones and Stevie Wonder. Otis ‘Guitar’ Johnson politely declined these invites without his son’s knowledge. At the age of fourteen, in his first Rolling Stone interview with a provocative Lester Bangs, Sonny dismissed Eric Clapton as a burglar in a clown suit on the day his mother took his electric train set to the local hospice.
January 1971 saw the release of Sonny Kills the Blues, his first long player released by Arista, home to his father’s catalogue. The fanfare that surrounded the release could barely be described as moderate. Those in the know knew about it, spoke of it frequently in the company of other musicians, but the record failed to reignite the public’s passion for a genre that many considered in need of a lick of paint. The album wasn’t a priority for the record label. They didn’t like its title and believed it lacked a standout radio friendly single. That is not to say it was without songs with memorable melodies. The lyrics captured the spirit of the blues and recast them in a positively brighter yet more enigmatic light. There was also the issue of nepotism. Many of the label’s staff, and in particular the managing director, had a fractious relationship with Otis ‘Guitar’ Johnson. They found him obtuse and hard to handle. They begrudged spending the necessary payola on Sonny to achieve a radio playlist for a record they believed to be too purist, and too similar to his father’s material. The accompanying tour was more of a success. Sonny honed his stagecraft within a handful of shows, and led his band with the skill of a much older and more experienced man. The reviews of these first performances ensured that the tour wasn’t embarrassingly empty. Those that attended found that along with the melodies he crafted, thoughts of Sonny the performer drifted into their minds in the weeks and years after.
It is worth mentioning that this album captured the mind of a young man by the name of Prince Rodgers Nelson. He played along to every single song in his bedroom each and every night long before he dropped the Rogers and Nelson from his professional name. This small fanbase grew slightly when a number of more established artists, including Pink Floyds’s Roger Walters, listed Sonny Kills the Blues as their favourite album of the year. The album was a surprise hit in France in 1972. Sonny played a show in Paris the same year and my father shared the stage with him, the highlight of his spell as a L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poet. I was there too, a wide-eyed child watching from the side of the stage holding his mistress’s hand, wearing crushed velvet shorts and thinking about my mother.
In 1973, a semblance of fame arrived for Sonny. Not the quick and incandescent mode of fame, but the slow and ponderous one, made from metal, that gradual conductor of heat that holds onto Celsius like seventeen year old with a fresh driving license. Not that the sixteen year old Sonny was aware of this growing fame, secluded in the studio, getting down with his Amplex reel-to-reel, taking control of each and every instrument he played. Yet he was unsure and insecure about the work being produced, feeling on some days that it was completely worthless, over formulaic nonsense and a waste of his time. A stabbing sense of corrosion stalked him, pleasurable only for its lack of banality. Then on some days, life was just ok and the best he could hope for was to be just an ok musician. On others, that he might just be onto something, something to work upwards from.
These trapeze acts of moods continued to black dog him at home and in the studio, on the long walks he took along the secluded Californian coastline each morning, from first thing to last, in other words: all the fucking time. I was thirteen, and in love from a distance, when my first poem was published in Ambit Magazine. I’d never spoken to my Muse, but planned to show her affection in black, white and rhythm. Running across the village green to the newsagents for what seemed like weeks, each morning I walked back empty handed passed a solitary homeless man. Waiting for the off-license to open, he sat on a green bench that faced an old wishing well. From behind a wild beard, he never stopped muttering or shouting at it. I was never quite sure if he was arguing with the wishing well, or asking it for change. Maybe both. He wasn’t there the day my poem turned up in print, but I told my mother about him as she sat at the refectory table in our kitchen. With my published work in her hand, she told me she’d been to Art College with the homeless man. That he was once a gifted painter always troubled by depression. The word depression just hung in the air.
I became familiar with mental disturbance in my twenties. It arrived wearing the garb of progression, just the right outfit for hijacking my creative plain. It skewed decisions and molested my clarity. For most of the years since I’ve judged myself harshly, and then passed on the standards of my own self-judgement onto other people. Surprised as my relationships failed, I spent dense black time wondering how to manage living alone in such a state, whilst believing that there’s no other place to function creatively. Wretched bouts of depression are difficult to shake. Sonny got to the end of them and then found out it was only the middle. Then, finally, over the course of nine schizophrenic and self-sodomising months he arrived someplace, or someplace arrived at him, a place that allowed for his work to remain rawer and more abstract than he’d previously imagined it to be, perhaps unfinished, unfinished perhaps, but washed in the knowledge that nothing is ever actually at an end.
Sonny recognised that the ear and the brain will often seek out recognition within the sonics of abstraction, so much so that both attribute it freely and falsely. Equipped with this newfound understanding and freed from the veil of form Sonny began to kiss rubies into ears. He composed an album comprised of one single continuous piece of music forty-nine minutes long, a jigsaw puzzle of large pieces interspersed with verses and choruses and melodies, a glorious procession of lips and hands that spliced themselves to the rest of the piece, and worked – when edited – as three as standalone singles. These singles would eventually be termed the Juggernauts of Pop by people that really should have known better. Sonny completed his second album in three weeks flat, and then he ran to find his mother and asked where his train set was.
It is hard to recount what would today be called the hype that surrounded the release of Sonny’s second album Inchoate Information. Hype is perhaps not the best word to use, having as it does attachments of media manipulation at its core, but this was 1976 and the beast of hype was yet to wonder the inexistent internet domain. No one said it was the best album ever with no less than three exclamation marks and two different emoticons. The music stood up to hype, grabbed it by the collar, kneed it in the nuts, then pushed it backwards and threw a thousand gilded plectrums in its nebulous face. Inchoate Information was simultaneously genre defining and genre blurring, a gift to the cannon of music. It unwrapped a new tenderness in melancholy, and captured perfectly the sun kissed coastline much of it had been conceived upon. The vinyl could have been made from sand, its grooves made from tidemarks left on the beach. That is not to say it contained only soppy music for soporific idiots who never listen to lyrics because they consider them superfluous. The as long as I can hum it brigade were captivated by the narratives in Sonny’s songs, became as satisfied as the chin-stokers, became chin-strokers themselves. This was a record that grew goatees and shed preconceptions. Men who adored Babe Ruth and the giants of baseball, men who had only taken music as temporary conquests in the disabled toilets of sports bars, men who proudly considered themselves immune to the poetry of composition became infected with his music and danced with their true lovers in the kitchen to records they’d never heard before. Street hawkers who required opiates and rolled-up fifty-dollar bills to snort themselves into a loaded stupor found a new high in melodious sobriety. All of this was down to his art, the art he provided, the art he made alone. Sonny ruled the airwaves of several nations for a hot summer and a dank winter. The great and the good flocked to his gigs, the talent on show so potent they just had to be there. Eric Clapton agreed to be photographed wearing a clown suit holding the album’s sleeve aloft. Stevie Nicks offered to blow coke up Sonny’s arse. He declined.
Arista opted not release his father’s album in the same year. In a meeting between Otis ‘Guitar’ Johnson and the managing director, the managing director took great pleasure in citing from behind a sardonic grin that workload was the reason, workload that the success of his son’s album had forced upon the label. This saw the end of Otis’s relationship with Arista. Blood on the boardroom carpet. Murder in the dancehall.
The full beam of fame unsettled then derailed Sonny. The distance growing between father and son was underscored by the wolfish tricks of rejection that captained Otis’ mindset. This floored Sonny worse than the tumult that had made life near impossible for him during the previous recording process. The second of Sonny’s breakdowns, much more severe than the first, dictated the postponement of the remaining dates on his first world tour. He never made it to England. The dates were cancelled when his depression forced him to stare into an abyss that held his gaze and then some.
Sonny took six years to deliver his third, entirely experimental album, light years ahead of its time, an album he titled Untitled. By this time Arista had been sold. The new owners dropped Sonny two days after receiving Untitled’s master tapes. Sonny withdrew completely, became a complete recluse.
In 1981, 82, 83 and 84 there was no news and no music. In 1985 someone heard something, but told no one, so it was again nothing. I was that someone. In 1987 a deranged tourist was arrested for criminal damage, then deported from America after he drew a chalk outline next to Sonny’s star on the Hollywood Boulevard. That was also me. Then, in 1988, more silence, more space. Rumours of the rift, the chasm between father and son, continued to echo in the absence of melody. Many people took Otis’ decision to decline invitations for Sonny to perform with Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder and the Rolling Stones as proof of his jealousy. In fact he was acting for his family, speaking on behalf of his wife who knew to shield their son from the dysfunctions of intense fame. Lucky Sonny. By 1990, he was only a memory for the few and nothing to the many. New artists were reviewed favourably by new reviewers and he was bleached him consciousness. On a visit to the Mission in San Francisco, early in the morning or late at night, I once saw a man of sixty wearing a t-shirt with Sonny Who? printed on the front. Or at least I think I did.
Enter the Thin White Duke: David Bowie. In 1998 with the funds received for selling Bowie Bonds on the London stock exchange, he started a record label and made its fifth release Untitled. There was no press release with the album, just this quote from Bowie: If I met a stranger with two hours to live, I would suggest spending seventy two minutes listening to this album.
Like a dripping stalactite in an underground cave, Untitled gradually became a lost classic, re-found in the ears of a new and different cabal of enthusiasts. This new audience diligently bought his back catalogue when available, outbidding each other for the rarest records sold by dealers who new knew a good thing when they heard it. This voracious audience wanted more information about what this great artist was up to nowadays, but none was available, so they all just assumed he was no longer with us.
Sonny really came into his own when everyone thought he was dead. His modest back catalogue was canonised. Re-edits and remixes were heard on the dancefloors of Ibiza and all major cities. Various compilations of the sessions he played upon were released. Then the well ran dry.
Otis ‘Guitar’ Johnson died in January 2012, yet even the writers of his numerous obituaries were unable to confirm or deny rumours of his son’s living and breathing status, though they alluded to the rift that the expectations of great art had caused.
Then, out of nowhere, came something unexpected: Sonny Johnson to perform two live shows in London. Blogs were alit. The counters of independent record stores buzzed with questions born out of genuine curiosity. The tickets sold out within 9 hours. Expectations were high.
I was fortunate enough to attend the second show. There is a single Russian word that means at once to purge fear with boldness and to treasure fragility with confidence. Yet even this word: очковтирательство, which has no direct English translation, is insincere or insufficient to explain the symbiotic relationship between Sonny and his band. It was more than need and more than pride, something rare and dignified, rarely seen in public. Sonny’s guitar playing – untouched or accentuated as it was by his years in exile – captivated all to the point of silence. The last notes of individual stanzas were released on the brink of rapture, allowing momentary collective euphoria between artist and audience. Singing with his eyes closed, he’d forgotten many of the lyrics to the album that made his name, as if recalling them was also recalling the abyss that surrounded them. The band understood. Keeping perfect time they looped around his bad memories, only for Sonny to return to the moment unaware of which verse - or what song - to sing. This most audible of shortcomings conspired with gremlins in his amplifier and led most of the reviewers to use the word shambolic. The Twittersphere was alight with pissy salvos, one hundred and forty character character assassinations. Only one broadsheet reviewer understood the link between his difficulties and the difficulties performing the songs from Inchoate Information. The same reviewer commented that Sonny held onto his guitar like a life raft, he was wrong: he held onto it like it was his mother.
My father pushed and pushed until success’ car ran me over. I know about expectation and I know about art. In 1984 I was a much fêted author, a young man who won a prodigious first novel award at an inaugural awards ceremony that’s long since ceased to exist. They said I intoxicated fiction with a new vividness of colour. They saddled me and I bucked. I ran to the brown and lost my best decade to a crippling heroin addiction. In that time my publisher merged, or was merged upon, I never quite found out which because the editor I kept at needle-marked arms length was made redundant by a managing director he never met. I got the bullet too, right between the dilated pupils.
I forgot much in the deep funk of opiates, but not the fact that Sonny had written to me via my American publisher in 1985. By 1986 he had stopped replying. In 1987, I planned to look for him, but my book tour of the West Coast was cut short after a prolonged binge that ended with my arrest for more than just the possession of chalk on the Hollywood Boulevard. The content of those letters eluded me for years. I spent so long strung out that even writing them seemed like something that someone else did. At their heart was, I believe, a discussion of meaning and expression: the meaning of expression and the expression of meaning. I remember one exchange around Huxley’s famous quote ‘after silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music’. Did his proclamation go too far? Does language only limit us to the prescriptive attachments contained within it? Is to be without words sufficient? Or do poetry and music contain a third space, a gap between inferences that provides the inexpressible feeling?
In a period of mass consumption we wondered how long the gap would have to flourish. I know for sure that we wrote about fortunate artists who had the liberty of time to grow and explore, to raise new meaning in music with emotional intelligence. We felt that the ascending Cult of the New was grinning at us with an ever-greatening intensity. He said that the affliction of short attention spans would become omnipotent, that it would move expectations of creativity from the country to the city.
Maybe he was nearly right. It seems that people do want the great artist, but they don’t want to wait for them to grow. People want new old: instant heritage a go-go. They want history, but they want it now. Wearing the emperors’ new clothes and fed upon strap-lines, we’ve been taught to greet gradual steps with ennui, to adore the turn that resides in the future, to keep the wheel turning and to run, run, run. But it’s starting to slow. It’s natural to crave bona fide identity when caught in the triangle of entitlement, instant gratification and the permeating guilt of receiving them both. Maybe we’ve approached a point in history where pop culture’s past has greater velocity that it’s present.
I think Sonny Johnson will be just fine. There are brands that seek to harness and exploit the authenticity he has. They seek only to create a simulacrum of truth, aping the freedom of madness on the open road to give their product a compelling provenance, all to make you buy it. I know this because I’m a copywriter nowadays. I write copy. I provide content for fashion brands and hooky auction houses, adding varnish to the flatly untrue, in order to pay my non-fiction household bills.
But I am a realist. One who realises my chances of reappearance in bookshops is slim. I’m too old to die young and not old enough to be rejuvenated: the ghost of letters in literature’s middle distance. To get the new novel I’ve been writing published perhaps I’ll fake my own death, or follow my mother into suicide. I don’t know which one is which any more, or which one is more profitable.
I could never do it, too in love with words and with music as I am. When you’ve those two supreme components of rejuvenation in your corner, it’s hard to deny the gift of hope. I’ll die old and happy, probably unread but kicking hard against the very last word.
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