The Burn Out and Paul Kossoff--My SF story about Fandom

 

I’m a fan. I became a fan when my musical taste came on-line in late 1971—which I think of as “The year Led Zeppelin IV was released.” Since then, fandom has occupied most of my time, energy, and money. Any attention span I have left over, I spend writing. Sometimes I combine the two, as I did in my story “The Burn Out.”

Fission # 3 

I was born at the wrong time to absorb the British Blues Boom as it happened. Tons of Sobs, Free’s first album from 1969, was on my Must Buy list as I worked backward from ’71. On the list also were Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck. All the heavy rock bands worked the same Blues coalface back then, and the similarities between Truth (Jeff Beck’s first), Led Zeppelin I and Free’s Tons of Sobs are plain. The band slams through such classics as the barnstorming lust locomotive, “The Hunter” (Albert King) and the deathbed macho boast “Goin’ Down Slow” (St. Louis Jimmy Oden, via the Howlin’ Wolf version). Free’s sound is raw and aggressive, testosterone-laden sweat flying from the speakers.

Free comprised four white British teenagers (15-18 at the time of recording) and it seems bizarre that they should attempt songs with lyrics begging the listener to write the singer’s mother and tell her the shape that he’s in (and moreover, that his health is fading and he needs forgiveness for his sins). They do, they pull it off brilliantly, and a lot of that credibility comes from the guitarist, Paul Kossoff, who effortlessly soars through the solos with a gossamer-light feel underlying a snarling attack that rages continually against the dying of the light.

Koss, 17, almost certainly did not know that he himself was going down fast. He was dead inside eight years.

I never saw Free live. The ban split up when Kossoff’s drug problem became too hard to handle. Koss made efforts to get clean but never got back to full health. I bought his solo album, Back Street Crawler (1973) but despite its solid white blues feel, and a guitar sound like heavy whipping cream poured over double chocolate cake, something about it seemed off—it conjured up its own title, let’s put it that way.

When I heard that electric folkie John Martyn had taken the faltering Kossoff under his wing in 1975, I was elated. I put aside my anti-folk bias and ventured to Leeds to see them play together. I went with a friend. As we neared the auditorium in the late afternoon, we heard an inordinately loud Marshall-amplified Les Paul. The rehearsal/sound check was underway. Koss was the only person who could produce those sounds from a guitar, and the realization stopped me in my tracks.

“Probably just a roadie,” my friend said, urging me along. I was 16 at the time and that is still the most cynical thing anyone has ever said to me. I assumed I’d hear more that evening, so I moved on without objecting. My assumption proved to be incorrect.

I wasn’t a big John Martyn fan. I knew his Solid Air of course, and “I’d Rather be the Devil” (Skip James) but I had little interest in a man who was perpetually drunk and had what we nowadays call a “problematic” relationship with women. He was a rowdy folk singer accompanied on this tour by an even rowdier stand-up bass player (Danny Thompson) and a drummer (John Stevens). I didn’t know, going in, that shenanigans had started much earlier in the day. Koss had already got himself punched by the offended boyfriend of a girl he coveted, followed by a beating from Martyn himself for lying about the incident backstage. But I heard about all that much later.

I knew Koss would not come on stage until the encore, but John Martyn kept me interested in the meantime. He played an acoustic guitar with a pickup taped across the soundhole as well as a contact pickup taped to the body. The signal was fed to an Echoplex effects box, producing a hypnotic, pulsing reverberation above which he played chords and melody. Married with his famously slurred voice, the effect was hymn-like and meditative, an effect that was shattered every time a song ended and the band recommenced swearing at one other.

Eventually, Paul Kossoff appeared, swigging from a bottle of Crème de Menthe. The bottle was half empty and Koss made a strenuous effort to finish it during the set. Together the band played three songs.[1] I was delighted to hear him play live but I noticed a significant deterioration between his playing during the sound check and the post beating, post liquor evening performance. He had less than a year to live. Koss died on 19^th March 1976. He was 25 years old.

There are two stories out there giving a cause of death. The book Heavy Load claims “Unconfirmed reports have Kossoff picking up some pills before the all-night flight ‘off some dozy bird who was hanging around’.” No source for the information is given in the book.[2] Later, it presents this version: 

“Paul’s death certificate read cerebral and pulmonary edema. Drugs didn’t appear to be in his system. Sandie, Paul’s girlfriend at the time, says drugs are what led up to the tragic conclusion that day but did not cause his death on the flight. ‘No one told us that you should not fly with a blood clot condition for about a year,” says Sandie. ‘And after his heart attack and the blood clot in his leg…I think the altitude moved the clot to his lungs’.”[3]

A second book, Free at Last, elaborates on the first claim. Bandmate Terry Wilson is quoted as saying,

 “Paul was on his way out. He'd died earlier; his heart had stopped, about a year earlier in England when we were back there after the first record. Paul was in the hospital and they brought him back and told him if he ever did drugs again he wouldn't live.” Wilson goes on, “There were times when Paul had so many friends around who just wanted to comfort him. […] I walked into his room and he had a couple of his friends there that brought some barbiturates and some other stuff. I walked in and was so pissed at the girl who was there. Her name was Leslie I think, but went by the name of Dale. […] A day later we were on the plane going to New York to play Atlantic Records the new album when Koss died—from the very drugs Dale or Leslie or whatever her name was scored for him. It turned out he had gotten heroin, valium and Seconals from her.”[4]

 

I have participated in various fandoms ever since that late 1971 musical fangirl awakening. Whether it was Led Zeppelin, or Star Wars, or Harry Potter, I’ve long been immersed in fan culture and hung out with the fans. The realization that a fellow fan may have killed a hero of mine really frosted my cookies.

I understand a fan’s dedication to the object of their fandom. The word is a shortened form of ‘fanatic’ after all. Anyone who has observed a weeklong argument on social media over whether a Star Destroyer could defeat the USS Enterprise knows that fandom is serious business, and anyone who has seen a young girl in tears outside a concert hall because she got to touch the star’s hand knows that emotions run sky high. I was 55 years old when my current crush answered a question of mine on a fan forum, and I told everybody who would listen that he’d written back to me. I didn’t wash my eyes for a week. I’m quite aware what a fan will do to get close to a star.

Write what you know, they say. To get the bad taste out of my mouth, I wrote a short story about a tween fan who gives a gift to the member of the boy band she most admires but then has to watch helplessly as the gift puts him on a self-destructive path . I’m a science fiction writer, so the gift is not a drug, but a technology. 

That story, “The Burn Out,” is featured in Fission #3 from the British Science Fictions Association (BSFA). The online anthology is available to BSFA members and the print version can be obtained from Amazon right now.

 

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_at_Leeds_(John_Martyn_album) accessed October 15^th,2023

[2] Heavy Load: Free by David Clayton & Todd K. Smith 2^nd Ed., 2002 p 248

[3] Ibid, p 249

[4] Free at Last: the story of Free and Bad Company by Steven Rosen, 2001 p 168-169

Whole Lotta Long: identity of the Stick Man on Led Zeppelin IV cover revealed

Led Zeppelin's fourth album is untitled. It's known as IV or Four Symbols, or Runes, or Zoso (one of the 'runes' looks like those four letters, stylized).  Back at the time of release, Atlantic sent out type blocks with the symbols on them so the album could be listed and correctly typeset in the Hit Parade charts, but that was of no use to punters, who still couldn't pronounce it. Let's call it IV.

The cover of IV famously shows an old building, half torn down, with a tower block visible through the demolished wall.  On the remaining part of the old wall, there's a photograph of an old man in a countryside scene, bent double under a load of sticks. 

The symbolism seems clear enough-- the old ways are being replaced by the new, and the old man in harmony with nature (taking from it only sustainable twigs rather than destroying it) has given way to a new paradigm. 

Mystery has always surrounded the identity of the old man. The official story is that Robert Plant (the lead singer) found the photo in a junk shop in the British Midlands (alternatively, in Berkshire) and that's it. Fans have sometimes been unable to consider the photo as simply a found object and prefer to read extra significance into the man. The fans' stories have ranged from the photo depicting Aleister Crowley (an occultist - guitarist Jimmy Page is a student of his methods) to the photo showing George Pickingill, a farm laborer more excitingly known as the Father of Modern Witchcraft. 

Good news! There has been a breakthrough in identifying the man and the photographer. The BBC is reporting that the 'original' photo has been found.  I'm not sure what 'original' means in this context, as Plant must have thought he was buying the only copy. (People didn't make a lot of paper copies of photos back in the day.)  The beeb describes it thus: 

The figure is most likely Lot Long from Mere in Wiltshire, photographed by Ernest Farmer.

Brian Edwards, from the University of the West of England (UWE), found the original picture when looking through a photograph album for other research.

"I instantly recognised the man with the sticks - he's often called the stick man," he said.

The article shows the photo in situ on a photo album page, with three other photos taken by Ernest Farmer. The album is dated 1892 in Farmer's handwriting.  The photo itself is labeled "a Wiltshire Thatcher."

Mr Edwards then set about researching thatchers from that time period, and said his research suggested the man pictured was Lot Long, who died in 1893.