Rock And Hard Places Part 12

"In 1968, we liberated Paris," Quattrocchi enthuses, "from the banks and the cops-same thing, to me-and we controlled it for fifteen days. To be there, to start a new life without money, was such an exhilarating feeling. People today don't think. They are told the present is the only possible present. This last generation, patrolled by the media, this cop of the mind, has not had a single original thought."

Kids today, tch. Before leaving London, I'd met with Tariq Ali, the writer who was banned from several countries for his writings about and involvement in 1968 risings in Britain, Czechoslovakia, Pakistan and America. He is also publishing a book about the momentous year, and also despairs of the generation born since 1968, blaming "television and rave culture." n.o.body so conservative as an old hippy.

Myself, I'm starting to think that maybe the French are just attracted to drama for its own sake. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: as Europe drifts towards a complacent, centre-right consensus, at least the French are still trying, still clinging to the same wilful belief in the perfectibility of human society that drove them to revolt in 1789 and at regular intervals since. And maybe whatever it is that drives them to bounce bricks off riot police is the same force which has bequeathed us all those exquisitely overwrought films, heroically prima donna footballers and the eternal idea of Paris as a city of possibilities as wide as its boulevards, as grand as its monuments, as provocative as its fist-sized paving stones. We need Paris. We mightn't be able to live up to living in it, but it's nice to know it's there.

"The tears of a philistine are the nectar of the G.o.ds."-GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968 IN ANOTHER OVER-DECORATED venue near the Arc de Triomphe, more people gather to fiddle, or at least rap, while Paris burns, or at least while a few of its citizens smoulder with righteous umbrage. I'm at a party in honour of some new record by some new French hip hop group, clutching a gla.s.s of watery punch in one hand and a raffle ticket (first prize, tickets to the World Cup final) in the other. The homegrown strain of hip hop is enormous business in France, aided by the 40 percent quota of local product that radio stations must play, and by the fact that the mellifluous cadences of the French language are oddly suited to the genre. Tonight, the extent to which the French have coopted hip hop is obvious: the people in here are wearing the latest American street gear, but there's only one place in the world where a rap group would furnish a party with vases of fresh flowers and bowls of wax fruit.

"Those who go halfway down the path of revolution dig their own graves."-GRAFFITI, PARIS, MAY 1968 MY PATH TO Gare du Nord station on my last day in Paris is blocked by a demonstration. I don't know what it's about, and by now I wonder if the demonstrators do themselves. There are people from SUD, AC! and CNT present-one or two of them wave-and though I can't see the bloke with the donkey, I imagine he's on his way.

15.

WHOLE LOTTA FAKE KING GOIN' ON Tupelo, Mississippi AUGUST 1999

THIS TRIP WAS undertaken for The Independent The Independent, who sent me to Mississippi to cover the first-ever Elvis Presley festival to be held in the King's birthplace. In 1999. I recall spending quite a lot of the flight to Memphis, and the drive to Mississippi wondering what had, in previous decades, been discussed at the strategy meetings of Tupelo's Tourist Office. "Well, let's see. We need think of ways to attract visitors to our otherwise largely unremarkable little town, in and around which, frankly, very little of interest has ever happened. Goshdarn it, but this is tricky. If only the most famous entertainer who ever lived had been born here, or something."

While writing this introduction, I discovered that Janelle McComb, whom you'll meet shortly, died in 2005, aged eighty-four. This caused me minor, momentary angst about the disobliging a.s.sessment of her poetry that appeared in the original piece. I've left it as it was, however, on the grounds that while she seemed nice enough and (as her obituaries properly noted) worked hard and selflessly on worthwhile community projects, her poetry really was dreadful. I also looked up Paul McLeod, the tireless proprietor of Graceland Too. According to any amount of startled, bemused, baffled and/ or somewhat alarmed online reminiscence, he's still there-and, according to his own Mys.p.a.ce page, ready and willing to give guided tours twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. I have no plans to return.

There were three or four other British-based journalists covering the festival. The sense of humour among collective hackery on the road being what it is, you may rest a.s.sured that at no point did anyone tire of asking for directions to the hotel, in antic.i.p.ation of the reply, "Down at the end of Lonely Street."

FOR THE OPENING track of his 1985 alb.u.m The First Born Is Dead The First Born Is Dead, the Australian singer Nick Cave and his band, The Bad Seeds, chose to enshrine the Mississippi town of Tupelo in song. It's a good song, as well, a fine start to a much under-rated record. While the Bad Seeds rumble and clatter with their customary power and menace, like a troop train emerging from fog, Cave appropriates a tone of gothic portent that might have pleased Mississippi's second-most famous son, William Faulkner: "In a clap-board shack with a roof of tin," Cave snarls, "Where the rain came down and leaked within/A young mother frozen on a concrete floor/With a bottle and a box and a cradle of straw . . . with a bundle and a box and a cradle of straw."

It's not a new idea, recasting Tupelo as a twentieth-century Bethlehem-Greil Marcus, for one, is especially fond of it-but it has rarely been expressed so well. "Tupelo" the song, with its echoes of Delta blues and language of deranged prophecy, paints a vivid picture of Tupelo the place: a storm-lashed huddle of lamp-lit shacks housing an itinerant population of dirt-poor factory workers and sharecroppers; a town too windy for birds to fly, too wet for fish to swim, a place forsaken by a clearly disinterested Almighty until a winter's night in 1935, when a young woman called Gladys Presley, who lived with her husband Vernon along Old Saltillo Road, gave birth to twin boys.

"Distant thunder rumble," sings Cave, "Rumble hungry like the beast/The beast it cometh, cometh down/The beast it cometh, Tupelo bound."

The eldest, Jesse Garon, never drew breath in this world, and was buried in an unmarked grave. His younger sibling by thirty-five minutes, Elvis Aron, did rather better for himself.

"Why the hen won't lay no egg," Cave continues, "Cain't get that c.o.c.k to crow/The nag is spooked and crazy/O G.o.d help Tupelo! O G.o.d help Tupelo!"

Nick Cave, to the best of my knowledge, has never been to Tupelo. His heartfelt prayer remains largely unanswered.

THERE ARE THOUSANDS of towns like Tupelo, scattered like carelessly flung wheat across the expanses of the United States. Too small to be cities, too big to be villages (Tupelo claims a population of 30,000), these places subsist on some startling yet strangely dull freak of economics (Tupelo is the second or third largest manufacturer of upholstered furniture in either the world or the United States, or something like that).

Places such as these generally boast a wide, dust-blown and deserted main street, punctuated by the boarded-up fronts of recently-bankrupted family businesses, and are generally orbited by self-contained metropolises of immense shopping malls, owned by the global corporate monoliths that bankrupted the family businesses, and Tupelo does and is. These towns also generally offer, for the amus.e.m.e.nt and edification of pa.s.sing tourists, a site of desperately minor historical import-the termite-chewed remains of a fencepost to which J.E.B. Stuart briefly tied his horse, perhaps-or something more up-to-the-minute, like a giant fibregla.s.s prairie dog.

Tupelo has one natural advantage in the tourism department, though the town makes astonishingly little use of it. Whether out of abashed deference to the Presleyian riches of Memphis, two-and-half hours' drive to the northwest, or due to chronic modesty, Tupelovians seem disinclined to make much fuss. I have come here for Tupelo's first Elvis Presley festival-Tupelo's first concerted effort, forty-three years since Heartbreak Hotel Heartbreak Hotel, to make capital from the fact that one of the dozen most famous people who ever lived spent his first thirteen years within its limits.

Some of the weekend's scheduled events make sense: a performance by Vegas-based Elvis impersonator Trent Carlini, an exhibition of posters, screenings of Presley's still arrestingly awful films at Tupelo's pleasingly bedraggled pink cinema. Others have a certain tangential relevance: a vintage car show in Main Street, a gospel singing compet.i.tion on the temporary open-air stage. Yet others make me feel like I'm spending three days in an episode of The Simpsons The Simpsons-like the "celebrity" bicycle race, which features the local equivalents of Mayor Quimby, Troy McClure and Kent Brockman, and is watched by n.o.body at all. On Sunday morning, a front-page report in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal rather halfheartedly suggests that "Sizzling heat kept daytime crowds to a minimum Sat.u.r.day during day two of Tupelo's inaugural Elvis Presley festival." rather halfheartedly suggests that "Sizzling heat kept daytime crowds to a minimum Sat.u.r.day during day two of Tupelo's inaugural Elvis Presley festival."

Still, even if the locals can't be bothered, I try to enter into the spirit of things, such as they are, and it seems logical to start where Elvis Presley did. The street he was born on is now called Elvis Presley Drive, and the tiny, two-room house that Vernon Presley built in 1934 in antic.i.p.ation of his imminent family is immaculately maintained, and filled with authentic furniture of the period. It is part of a humble complex of buildings devoted to Elvis-there is also a museum, a chapel and a souvenir shop-which is overseen by the Elvis Presley Memorial Foundation of Tupelo, which in turn is overseen by Elvis fan and friend of the Presley family Janelle McComb. "Elvis was born on a Tuesday and died on a Tuesday," she says, at one point. "His life was full of coincidences."

Ms. McComb's enthusiasm is commendable, though she often seems keener to stress her own connections to her hero than she is to impart anything about Elvis himself. The small museum does contain some genuinely fascinating memorabilia but affords undue prominence to the artworks and verse Ms. McComb has created in Presley's honour; the latter, which she reads tearfully aloud, offers little but the awesome possibility that the North American continent contains a worse poet than Maya Angelou.

Tupelo's other Elvis-related sites sulk unsignposted and unlinked by anything so self-aggrandising as a bus tour. At 114 West Main Street, Tupelo Hardware-where Gladys Presley bought her eleven-year-old son an eight-dollar guitar-survives the discounting of the mega-barns on the outskirts. At Lawhon Elementary School, where Elvis attended grades one to five, a peeling artwork on a corridor wall reads "Elvis Was Here" and a photocopied sign in the window observes that guns are prohibited on school premises. Milam Junior High, where Elvis completed sixth and seventh grades before the Presleys moved to Memphis, is a nondescript brown brick bunch of blocks making no outward boast of its famous alumnus. Tupelo Fairgrounds, where Presley played legendary concerts to riotous audiences of hysterical teens in 1956 and 1957, is a ruin.

By far the most interesting relics on view this weekend are those that are only in town for the occasion: Joe Esposito and George Klein, friends and a.s.sociates of Elvis, perform compering duties on the open-air stage. More excitingly, Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana, guitarist and drummer on Elvis's early hits and constant touring companions during the unimaginable years in the 1950s when their employer was inventing rock'n'roll stardom and modern celebrity as he went along, take the open-air stage on the final day.

In sight of the remains of the fairground where, a little over forty-three years ago, they played before a crowd so wild that reporters and photographers were forced out of the front row to seek safety behind the police guards on the stage, Moore and Fontana smile amiably at the few dozen people crumpled in deckchairs in the street, and fall in behind cabaret singer Ronnie McDowell.

McDowell is a capable crooner, who has ghosted Elvis's voice in films, but he knows who's in charge this afternoon, and cedes centre stage as he should. Moore, as venerable and hefty an antique as his Gibson guitar, and Fontana, an extravagantly quiffed vision of rock'n'roll aristocracy, rattle off their parts of songs that can hardly be more familiar to them than they are to anybody who has ever been touched by western popular culture; this muggy afternoon, Moore's exquisitely mournful solo on "Heartbreak Hotel" still rings as true as six strings ever have.

"I can't believe it's forty-three years since you recorded that," says McDowell. "Does it feel like that long?"

"Yep," says Moore.

Over the weekend, there are one or two minor outbreaks of Elvis impersonation on the street corners of Tupelo, but otherwise the festival is devoid of the sort of unselfconscious fanaticism generally held to characterise hardcore Elvis fans. For that, I have to go to Holly Springs, a pretty, well-kept town on the road to Memphis. Here, Paul McLeod and his son Elvis Aaron Presley McLeod operate Graceland Too, a two-storey warren of rooms crammed with testaments to an obsession that might be charitably described as impressively thorough: in the gloomy lounge, six televisions and video recorders run twenty-four hours a day, scanning broadcasts for mentions of Elvis, all of which are diligently noted and filed.

McLeod Sr. personally conducts tours of his home and its immense collection of pointless ephemera. Unfortunately, his unruly top false teeth and congenital inability to construct a coherent sentence prevent him from communicating anything beyond an aura of demented devotion that discourages any questions along the lines of "Why?" or "Who cares?" McLeod, like most people who have sublimated every aspect of their lives to a cause ("I only sleep three hours a day, keeping up with all this stuff"), is initially dimly amusing, eventually extremely tedious and ultimately downright worrying. The reek of formaldehyde that permeates the building is not encouraging.

"My wife told me twenty-two years ago to choose between her and Elvis," McLeod splutters, in a rare burst of lucidity, "so she had to go, 'cos you have to do what makes you happy," and on he goes, a man whose Elvis-in clinical terms, at least-has well and truly left the building.

AT ONE OF the press conferences on the first day of the festival, I speak briefly with D.J. Fontana, all raffish middle-aged affability, a comb protruding from the pocket of his pink bowling shirt. I ask him what he recalls of the sessions that yielded "Don't Be Cruel," "All Shook Up," "Hound Dog," "Any Way You Want Me" and any number of other sounds for which, and with which, this century will be remembered. I wonder whether D.J., Scotty Moore, ba.s.s player Bill Black and Elvis had any inkling at all of what they were wreaking at the time, or whether they just walked out of the studios at dawn shrugging off another average night at the office.

"We were only ever thinking of the next record," says D.J. "We didn't understand what was going on, and to be honest I'm still not sure I do. Elvis never got it. He took one record at a time, one show at a time, always worried that it was going to end. He remembered how he grew up. He didn't want to be poor again."

Rock'n'roll is, still, more than anything else about the desire and the struggle to escape-circ.u.mstances, upbringing, boredom, routine, whatever. Rock'n'roll is also, still, defined by the template established by the high-cheekboned, half-smiling kid from Tupelo, and if his hometown today suggests little else of him, it's very recognisably a place such a driven and restless young man wouldn't want to be. At midday on the Sat.u.r.day of the festival, Tupelo Hardware closes as usual.

16.

TAKE THE VEDDER WITH YOU.

Lollapalooza in America JUNE 1992.

IT IS EXTREMELY weird reading things that you wrote nearly half a lifetime ago, and even weirder to prepare them for repeated public exhibition, especially when your every instinct is to bury them under tonnes of reinforced, lead-lined concrete, around which you then propose to establish a total exclusion zone ringed with razor wire and minefields, punctuated by watchtowers staffed by armed sentries issued with exceedingly relaxed rules of engagement. Such ambivalence is the inevitable consequence of the excruciating experience of encountering a much younger version of oneself, and being uncertain whether to pat him on the head, or slap him upside it.

At the time I wrote what follows, I clearly believed that Lollapalooza and events like it mattered, were important, could change things-despite being informed bracingly otherwise by at least two of the acts on the bill. I seem to have believed that quacking, attention-seeking clowns like the (no longer extant, so far as I can tell) Parents' Music Resource Centre-and other similar simpletons whose sole claim on public attention is how dreadfully offended they have decided to be about something or other-should be either engaged with, or rebelled against. Whereas what I believe now is that querulous buffoons of this ilk should be ignored. And/or, should the opportunity present itself, teased.

I'm at least pleased to detect a note of sour cynicism in my dispatch about the prospect of a Bill Clinton presidency. If I'm honest, I doubt that I'd really picked the then Governor of Arkansas from that distance as a duplicitous, insincere, ruthless, ego-crazed thug who would establish a record for foreign policy incompetence which would have been regarded with baffled and appalled awe down the aeons, had he not been succeeded by someone who made him look like a diplomatic genius to rival Bismarck and Metternich-a successor who would, indeed, have conferred similar honour by comparison upon any given inhabitant of the macaque enclosure at the National Zoo. I was probably just trying to sound wise, knowing and cool-meet the new boss, same as the old boss, and so on.

Most of the artists encountered below are still active enough, in one way or another, that anyone sufficiently interested can find out what they're doing fairly easily. I saw a few of these people again over subsequent years. At some point in the mid-90s, charged with interviewing The Jesus & Mary Chain about their single "I Hate Rock'n'Roll," I took them to dinner at Bill Wyman's theme restaurant in London to annoy them; it worked. Around the same time, I spent a few careful days on tour in Britain with the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, making sure I was nowhere in the ringmaster's sightline when the show reached the point at which Matt "The Tube" Crowley sought volunteers to sup the c.o.c.ktail he brewed in his own stomach. At time of writing, Kevin Westenberg is yet to be troubled by much in the way of peer as a photographer, as may be confirmed at www.kevinwestenberg.com.

Readers overly sensitive on the subject of premature departures from this mortal coil by vibrant and amusing souls are advised to skip ahead at this point, while I furnish the dedication of this chapter. It's to the memory of Lush's drummer, Chris Acland, 1966-96.

"THEY'VE TURNED DOWN the cover of Time Time magazine today, you know." magazine today, you know."

So he keeps telling me. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' tour manager, after enduring two days of my nagging, has secured me an interview with the band's singer, Anthony Keidis.

"This is Anthony," says the tour manager, and I shake the hand of the tiny, chunky singer. "Anthony will talk for three minutes exactly, starting . . . from . . . NOW."

Having fun, mate?

"Yeah. Hopefully, we're bringing a slightly diverse collection of musical cultures together. It's a big, fun, wreck-it-up summertime package. It's for everybody. In terms of the political aspirations of Lollapalooza, what you have to understand is that so many of the right wing are such boring people that they have nothing better to do with their time than sit around organising themselves. And what this thing here today does is to help people that are maybe more interested in having fun to broadcast their views to America. And to the world."

The press release couldn't have put it better.

REWIND THIRTY-SIX HOURS or so.

"Sir, I'm calling from the United States customs office at the Canadian border, and . . ."

This, I take it, is not the wake-up call I've ordered.

"Sir, I have a man here who claims you can vouch for him."

This guy really must have the wrong number. I can barely vouch for myself most of the time. I wonder what . . .

"Mr. Mueller?"

Mmm? Vancouver, that's it. I'm in Vancouver. This whole American-Canadian thing is making a bit more sense, now. Some coffee would be nice.

"h.e.l.lo?"

Right. The customs officer gives me the name of the person he's detaining, which, as it turns out, I do recognise. We are going to do a story together. I'm pretty sure that was the idea. He's taking the pictures. It's all coming back to me now. Bit cloudy outside.

"I'll send him on his way then, sir."

You do that.

Only after I've put the phone down do I think to wonder why he's calling an Australian representative of a British magazine to ask if it's okay for a Canadian-born American photographer to drive from Seattle to Vancouver. A slow morning, I guess.

WE'RE LATE. SO late, in fact, that we have missed Lush and Pearl Jam, the two bands I was most looking forward to seeing. We park behind the stage in a vacant lot, which is, in traditional rock festival fashion, rapidly liquefying beneath a steady patter of rain.

Bearded genius photographer Kevin Westenberg and I have come to cover the third and fourth shows of the 1992 incarnation of Lollapalooza. Lollapalooza started life in 1991, as travelling farewell party for the mighty Jane's Addiction, and had been so rousing a success that Jane's Addiction singer and Lollapalooza organiser Perry Farrell had decided to turn it into an annual event. This year's lineup-Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ministry, Ice Cube, Soundgarden, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Pearl Jam and Lush-will play thirty dates in outdoor arenas across the United States and, today, Canada.

The festival has become an immense commercial success, a major talking point and possibly even an election issue. Last year, the Rock the Vote booths that form part of Lollapalooza's accompanying ideological freakshow registered more than 100,000 new voters from one of America's most disenchanted electorates: the young. This year, Lollapalooza is taking place at the same time as a presidential election campaign which, for the most part, is of a sufficient ba.n.a.lity to make the custard pie scene of any Keystone Kops Keystone Kops film look like the zenith of scalpel-sharp rhetoric. Come polling day, voter turnout is antic.i.p.ated to be the lowest ever recorded. Rock the Vote will be looking to register another 100,000 this year, and then some. This may not make much difference to either of the chaps after the top job, but it could make a h.e.l.l of a difference to would-be mayors, judges, sheriffs and dog-catchers all over the country, wherever Farrell's circus wanders. film look like the zenith of scalpel-sharp rhetoric. Come polling day, voter turnout is antic.i.p.ated to be the lowest ever recorded. Rock the Vote will be looking to register another 100,000 this year, and then some. This may not make much difference to either of the chaps after the top job, but it could make a h.e.l.l of a difference to would-be mayors, judges, sheriffs and dog-catchers all over the country, wherever Farrell's circus wanders.

Watching CNN over the past few days, four sequences of images recur. One, George Bush and Bill Clinton-reverse faces of the same wooden nickel. Two, Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman, who still appear sadly unlikely to be chained together and pitched off a high bridge anytime soon. Three, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who seem determined that every television viewer on earth is going to hear about what private and retiring people they are. Four, Ice-T.

Ice-T was part of the lineup of last year's inaugural Lollapalooza, and was this year's opening night compere. He is now America's favourite scapegoat, since some or other meddlesome wowser noticed that he'd written a song called "Cop Killer" and recorded it with a band called Body Count. There are few things, if I'm to believe half of what I hear and read, that are not currently his fault. Every time I turn on a television, a concerned news programme is parading one of an astonishing a.s.sortment of mendacious buffoons and blithering jacka.s.ses suggesting, in all seriousness, that Ice-T's faintly amusing but rather silly record is directly responsible for crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy, the fact that kids today don't got no respect, etcetera.

It'd be funny if it wasn't so serious-across America, state congresses are trying to turn themselves into everyone's babysitter. A law recently pa.s.sed in Washington State makes it illegal to sell recordings containing "erotic content" to minors. It is just about likely that this will apply more to the works of Nine Inch Nails and 2 Live Crew than it will to those of Giuseppe Verdi. One of the agitators behind this and similarly dimwitted legislation pa.s.sed elsewhere in the United States is the Parents' Music Resource Centre (the PMRC is also responsible for those cute little stickers that now festoon CD cases in American stores: "Warning: Adult Content," and so forth, though the irony inherent in accusing an Aerosmith alb.u.m of containing any such thing seems to have eluded them).

One of the PMRC's founders, and its major driving force, is one Tipper Gore, a woman who gives every impression of being so comprehensively repressed that it can be imagined she eats bananas sideways. Her husband is a certain Al Gore. So if America goes out and votes for cool, hip, draft-dodging, dope-smoking, saxophone-playing Bill Clinton, the country will be one lucky shot away from having, effectively, Mary Whitehouse in the White House.

If Lollapalooza this year feels less like a rock'n'roll tour than it does a crusade, it may have its reasons. And astonishingly, though I've listened to the entire Body Count alb.u.m at least twice and own several other recordings by Ice-T, I haven't killed a single policeman yet. All that crack must be keeping me calm.

LOLLAPALOOZA'S HEADLINE ACTS play on a large stage in front of the main arena. A smaller stage in a tent just out of earshot of the large stage hosts useless local rock groups from whichever region Lollapalooza finds itself in, and The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow are already getting more press than any other act on the tour, and it isn't surprising. The troupe's performers include Mr. Lifto, who lifts heavy objects with the portions of his anatomy that the rest of us would be least likely to use for the purpose; Matt "The Tube" Crowley, who pumps ingredients into his own stomach down a nasal feedline and then retrieves the result to be poured into gla.s.ses and served to the audience; and The Torture King, who walks on swords and sticks skewers through his face. Though this is only what any sane person would rather do than listen to any of the bands on the second stage, it is undeniably fascinating. At frequent intervals, gaps appear in the standing crowd where someone has fainted.

Lollapalooza's spirit seeks to manifest itself on the concourse area between the two stages. This concourse, squelchy and slippery underfoot, but just about navigable, recalls Glas...o...b..ry's bubbling bazaar of ideas idiotic and intriguing, of merchandise erratic and essential. There's a large metal sculpture that people are invited to hit with sticks. There's a cage in which people are encouraged to take sledgehammers to television sets-sadly, it isn't possible to tune them to MTV first. There's also a gyroscope, in which people can be spun through all sorts of angles and contortions, and food stalls peddling the usual festival fare, in case anyone feels like being ill and queasy but doesn't want to stand in line for the gyroscope.

At a raffle wheel, punters can donate a dollar to AIDS charities in return for a chance to win a backstage pa.s.s-though, having sampled the food in the artists' catering tent, I feel this is no bargain. Other things to spend money on include paintings and sculptures that look like they've either been backed over by a tractor or ought to be, and stickers and badges from the barely countable stalls which are here representing almost every cause on earth. With an admirable sense of fair play, Lollapalooza's organisers invited various anti-abortion groups and the National Rifle a.s.sociation to come along and set up shop, but none appear to have taken up the offer. Lightweights. At least the NRA could have defended themselves.

I'm back in the main arena in time to see The Jesus & Mary Chain, and the weird thing is that I can actually see The Jesus & Mary Chain. After years of watching the perpetually scowling Reid brothers in dismal, dank clubs where they were barely visible through the billowing fogs of dry ice and iridescent crosshatches of laser, this afternoon matinee appearance takes some getting used to. It's not like I seriously suspected that Jim and William usually spent their daylight hours hanging upside down in caves, but the outdoor life really doesn't suit them. All things considered, they're on good form: "Head On" is emphatically reclaimed from The Pixies, and "Happy When It Rains" is, as usual, life-affirmingly upbeat yet ineffably melancholy, which is something of an ironic double-bluff with a one-and-a-half twist, given the conditions (p.i.s.sing down, by now).

Soundgarden have tattoos, and guitars that go, "Skreee! Widdly widdly widdly!" Not a problem if you like that kind of thing, and most people here seem to. The enormous, threshing moshpit in front of the stage is by now giving rise to impenetrable clouds of steam, as the cold rain fizzes against acres of hot skin. Ice Cube gets everyone to shout "Yo-oo" and "Motherf.u.c.ker," which is quite good fun the first half dozen times, but eventually starts to sound like bingo evening down the Tourette's Syndrome support group. I've got no problem with swearing loudly in public, but I prefer to do it as and when I see fit, rather than on demand. Ice Cube asks that everyone "Wave your hands in the air like you just don't care." I don't get involved with this, because I don't really understand the request. I don't understand the request because I am not normally given to expressing indifference by waving my hands in the air. I reach a compromise, and wander off to pay attention to something more interesting like I just don't care.

Backstage, a hara.s.sed-looking little chap is scuttling about muttering in some species of euro-accent. He looks as haunted as the Somme, and almost as muddy, though by this stage the latter is something we have in common. He recognises me from somewhere, though I don't recall where.

"I am tour managing Ministry," he says, as if that explains his panic, and it probably does.

"Alain Jourgensen is saying he will not play the show unless I get him a limousine to take him from the tour bus to the stage."

Well, it is all of forty yards.

"He wants one with horns on the front."

I don't imagine anyone's going to get in his way.

"No, like a cow's."

He drifts off, carrying my sympathy with him. The job of the rock'n'roll tour manager combines all the least savoury aspects of baby-sitting and zoo-keeping, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. While I sit in the catering tent nursing a coffee, Ice Cube walks in, entourage in tow. He's finished his set and is after some water to take back to his bus. If I were a proper journalist, I'd go over and pester him. But I don't have to. Because somebody who clearly is a proper journalist does go over and pester him.

"Hey, Ice . . . "

The reporter is wearing a khaki overcoat and a red woollen bobble hat and is carrying a radio microphone.

"Could you tell me who your favourite homeboys are?"

He is not, after all, a proper journalist. He is either the bravest man in the world, or a moron with a fanzine and a death wish. So far, my money's on the latter.

"Are you missing your 'hood?"

This really is sensational stuff, though, as breathtakingly tactless as heckling at a funeral. There's surely nowhere further this bloke can take this, unless he's going to black himself up with boot polish, get down on one knee and start doing "Swanee River." Ice Cube regards his interrogator with the bemused contempt of a rhinoceros who has just been witlessly satirised by a ferret.

"Get a job, a.s.shole," he grunts, and stalks past.

A tough act to follow, but Ministry manage. Jourgensen is delivered to the stage by the requested limousine, and leads Ministry's set of deranged electronic rockabilly from behind a microphone stand festooned with the skulls, spines and other skeletal remains of goats, rodents and sundry roadkill. Ministry, uniquely in rock'n'roll history, have a full-time bone roadie on tour with them, whose sole job is the augmentation and maintenance of this grisly prop. From where I'm standing, next to the stage by the entrance to the photo pit, I can see the medics under the stage dealing with the evening's first casualties. They wheel one kid past me on a stretcher, unconscious and covered in blood-there have been actual riots less worthy of the description "riotous" than what's going on in the arena now, although, the steady stream of wounded aside, it all looks bizarrely amiable. Red Hot Chili Peppers are fantastic for about the first fifteen minutes, which is as long as it takes for them to demonstrate that they are yet to have the second idea of their career.

There's not much going on after the show, as most of the tour buses have long since started hauling their star cargo south to the border. Westenberg and I determine to suck the very marrow from the nightlife of Vancouver, and are back at the hotel by eleven.