The Beach Boys are changing a tyre on their hot rod in the pouring rain. (Excerpt from The Guardian)
A young, deliriously handsome Jim Morrison poses in a leather bar for an admiring audience of old queens, one of whom bears a weird resemblance to the older Roy Orbison. In a high-school locker room, muscular jocks taunt a weedy, nerdy young Phil Spector.
On a London park bench, a hirsute, grimily tramp-like Ian Anderson tempts a small girl with a lollipop. A drunken, bleary Jerry Lee Lewis, still clad in gold lamé, clutches a bottle as he staggers down a Memphis street. Diana Ross glides through the ghetto in her limo, watched by the street people and the homeless. Ray Davies, accompanied by a young woman pushing a pram, trudges wearily through the rainy streets of a rundown working-class neighbourhood.
None of this ever happened in real life, of course: and if it any of it did, no photographs exist to prove it. Instead, these are all tableaux from Rock Dreams, the remarkable 1973 collaboration between Nik Cohn, the godfather of British rock journalism whose Awopbopaloobop Alop bamboom is still an essential text, and painter
Guy Peellaert, who later went on to provide the cover illustration for David Bowie's 1974 album Diamond Dogs. Cohn and Peellaert set out to create a fantasy history of rock, depicting the greats of the era as they exist in the imagination and in the worlds created by their music, rather than in the mundane world of everyday reality.
Thus it is that we see Tina Turner as both a proud Deep South haüsfrau, and as the soul-rock goddess fellating a microphone. We see The Rolling Stones as the ultimate decadents: all togged out in Rocky Horror Show dominatrix-drag or Nazi uniforms, and Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Keith Richards as crashed-out junkies in a sleazy hotel room. (Strangely enough, another illustration shows Richards in a pirate costume some 30 years before Johnny Depp borrowed his persona wholesale for Pirates Of The Caribbean.)
Guy Peellaert was a Brussels-born artist. He worked as a painter, illustrator, graphic artist and photographer, with shows around the world. Peellaert’s creations are a beautifully unique blend of comic-style illustration, American Pop Art and psychedelia. He was a bit of a pop culture junkie; the artist survived on a steady diet of music, magazines, books, rock memorabilia, and pulp literature. Peellaert’s first major success was with a comic strip published in 1966, “Les Aventures de Jodelle,” followed by “Pravda, La Survireuse” in 1968. His comics were pop art masterpieces filled with sexy heroines kicking all sorts of ass!
