‘Rock Dreams’: Teen Fantasies as Art
Dreamer of dreams, born out of
my true time
Why shouldn’t I strive to set
the crooked straight —William Morris
Whenever I want you, all I have
to do is dream —The Everly Brothers
A book called Rock Dreams rippled through the European rock cafe set being touted as… well…the Sgt. Pepper of rock art. The 118 color paintings that make up the book were snapped up by the culture-vultures at $1000-plus each. Naturally enough, one of the first to react was Mick Jagger, who saw pre-publication proofs and immediately invited the Belgian artist, Guy Peellaert, to join the Stones’ German recording sessions and get a taste for their next album cover.
There was an instance in Peellaert’s meeting with Jagger that has stayed vivid in the artist’s mind. The setting was the grounds of a castle near Hamburg, and Jagger, wearing an ankle-length coat, was silhouetted against the sky as he walked away. Standing next to Peellaert was a musician, whom he can only identify as being “jolly and boozy.” “You know,” said the musician, looking at Jagger’s disappearing figure, “it’s the end of an era.” At that moment, Peellaert recalls, he realized that for himself it was indeed the end of an era, the end of a romance with the fetishes and fantasies of pop that had begun in the Fifties and had been exorcised out of his system by three years of disciplined work exploring the mythology and committing the images to paper.
And it was suitable that Peellaert should have reached his conclusion in a scene that has all the elements of a dream itself, containing the heavy sense of flawed reality which radiate from the pages of his book. In Rock Dreams the Stones are featured in several poses, all with strong overtones of baroque decadence. How did Jagger feel about being portrayed as a corsetted, super-realistic drag queen and a Nazi with a kink for pre-pubescent girls? “He liked it … of course,” says Peellaert, with a sly smile.
Sitting in a bar across the street from the modern block of flats in Paris where Peellaert keeps his cluttered, workman-like studio, he explains that his aim was to capture those frozen private moments of the teen fantasy—to put in visual terms the language of rock’s secret society. On the cover of the book, Lennon, Dylan, Jagger and Elvis sit on the counter of a greasy-spoon cafe, four small-town buddies having a coffee and gossiping. Inside the 170-page book, the Beach Boys huddle together under a blanket by the California sea as Dennis Wilson pumps air into a flat tire of their hot rod. Diana Ross cruises through Harlem in a limo, wrapped in fur and oversize rings on her hands, while on the littered sidewalk stands a group of ghetto men, no longer having the will even to look resentful. Brenda Lee poses for a graduation snapshot between her mom and pop. A tear rolls down the cheek of a leather-clad Roy Orbison, as astride his powerful bike he rides alone, Claudette now only a ghostly pillion-seat memory. The Beatles sip afternoon tea with the Queen in Buckingham Palace. Sam Cooke lies dead in his underclothes in a sleazy hotel bedroom.
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