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Mother Of Rock
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Lillian Roxon's story is now a documentary but here is the book it is based on. By Des Cowley.
Mother of Rock: the Lillian Roxon Story
By Robert Milliken pb $27.95
Chances are, if you are under forty-five years of age, the phrase “Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia” probably doesn’t mean that much. But for those of us who came of age musically in the tumultuous sixties, in that pre-internet dawn when information of any sort was hard to come by, the appearance in 1969 of the first encyclopedia devoted to rock music was a cause for celebration. The fact that it was written by an Australian, and a woman at that, almost beggars belief.
Roxon was born in Italy in 1932, but spent her formative years growing up in post-war Brisbane after her parents immigrated to Australia. She developed an early interest in journalism, managing to sell her first article to Woman magazine at age fourteen, and later embarking on university studies, initially in Brisbane and then Sydney.
Author Robert Milliken provides a detailed account of Roxon’s formative years; some might argue too detailed. Those interested in Roxon primarily as a music journalist should be warned that Milliken doesn’t touch upon her immersion in the New York music scene until roughly half way through the book. Yet Roxon’s early years are not without interest, touching as they do upon the rise of a new urban youth culture in 1950s and early 1960s Australia. It’s enough to mention just some of the names she connects to at this time: poet Barrett Reid (later of Angry Penguins fame), future novelist David Malouf, film producer Margaret Fink, prominent members of the Sydney Push, proto-feminist Germaine Greer, and journalist and writer Donald Horne.
It was Horne who hired Roxon in 1957 to work on Frank Packer’s Weekend magazine, but a trip to New York soon put her straight about where she wanted to be, and she eventually took a job with the NY bureau of the Sydney Morning Herald, writing on entertainment, the arts, and women’s issues for the Australian, British and US press.
It was in New York that Roxon fell under the spell of the fledgling rock scene, becoming a regular fixture at Max’s Kansas City, home to the Warhol crowd, and the Velvet Underground. She began writing about this new music – the Byrds, the Stones, Dylan, the Beatles – at a time when rock journalism barely existed as an art form, and she counted amongst her peers pioneers like Paul Williams, founder of Crawdaddy, and the infamous Lester Bangs.
Rather than writing from an objective stance, Roxon mingled freely with the musicians, something virtually unthinkable in today’s musical landscape, and her writing was informed by a curious mix of fandom, insider gossip, and gut response.
Her commission to write the first-ever rock encyclopedia came in 1968 from US publishers Grosset and Dunlap. For this gargantuan task, she was paid $2,500 advance. In an age where unlimited information is a mouse-click away, it’s almost unimaginable how Roxon managed to assemble this vast compendium of rock’s early history in a little under a year. As Milliken notes: “Every album, every year, every member of every group had to be researched from scratch.
The book took over her apartment and her life, and was to have disastrous consequences for her health”. It was launched at Max’s Kansas City, and by May 1970, had gone into a third printing. With a single book, Roxon’s name became immortalized in rock history, leading one journalist to anoint her as the “mother of rock”.
It’s arguable that Milliken gives us too little about the making of the Encyclopedia, upon which, let’s face it, Roxon’s fame really rests. I would have liked more detail on how she went about researching her subjects, how she assembled her material. Roxon herself defined her Encyclopedia as having come “out of those nights at Max’s and The Scene”, calling it an autobiography of the Summer of Love. Milliken’s book has relied heavily on Roxon’s own papers, now held at the State Library of New South Wales, and perhaps the evidence is scant.
Much of his focus is on Roxon’s personal relationships, as outlined in her many letters to friends. In particular, Milliken focuses on two difficult friendships that wounded Roxon deeply – her friendship with photographer Linda Eastman, later Linda McCartney; and her brief friendship with Germaine Greer, whose classic 1970 book The Female Eunuch was dedicated to Roxon.
It was during the writing of the encyclopedia that Roxon developed asthma, which would severely affect her health over the following years, and eventually lead to her premature death in 1973, aged just 41 years. Her obituary in the New York Times described her as “one of the leading chroniclers of [rock’s] culture and personalities” and her Encyclopedia as “the most complete book on rock music and rock culture ever written”.
Milliken’s biography of Lillian Roxon was first published in 2002, and while this 2010 issue is described as a ‘revised edition’, it’s unclear what changes have been made to the text. However, a feature of the book is the generous space given over to a selection of Roxon’s own music writings, culled mainly from the Encyclopedia. Her writing style shows itself to be idiosyncratic, personal, opinionated, shot through with a healthy dose of humor.
Given this, it seems only fair to end with a few words by Roxon, in this case writing on Janis Joplin and Big Brother: “No one had gotten as excited about anyone in years as people did about Janis Joplin. She was a whole new experience for everyone. People had to re-adjust their thinking because of her. Her voice, for instance. Chicks are not supposed to sing that way, all hoarse and insistent and footstomping…. She’s so beautiful she takes your breath away, and nothing makes you change that opinion – certainly not the knowledge that at any other time you’d have had to say the girl was homely. She lopes about, dressed like a dockside tart, funny little feathered hats, ankle bracelets, sleazy satin. Her hooker clothes, she calls them, with a hooker laugh. And she drinks. Drinks – think of that – in a drug generation. She drinks Southern Comfort: a 24 year old chick singer with the habits of another generation”.
Like Janis, Roxon would be gone all-too-soon.
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