I've done about 500 Nowhere Man interviews over the decades, and for the most part I enjoyed doing them. Sometimes I had fun. One of the first interviews I ever did was with Youngstown, Ohio, radio-talk-show host Louie Free. We hit it off, and our scheduled 15-minute chat turned into a freewheeling four-hour marathon. I returned to Louie's show many times.
But then something happened and interviews began to stress me out. Part of it is that I find talking on the telephone more comfortable than talking on Zoom and Zoom-like platforms. But it also has to do with the fact that only about 10 percent of the people who've interviewed me about Nowhere Man have read the book. Most of them just wanted to talk about John Lennon and the Beatles, and they asked the same generic questions I've answered hundreds of times. For years it didn't bother me. But eventually boredom set in and the media landscape changed. Interviews with podcasters who had micro-audiences were not helpful. That's when interviews began to seem pointless (and stressful). I started telling podcasters what should have been obvious: "Read the book. Our conversation will be more interesting—for you, for me, and for your audience."
Kemdi Nwosu, host of the Rent Free History podcast, did read the book, and it resulted in a very good interview (though my stress is obvious).
Here's how Kemdi describes our conversation:
In this episode we sit down with the author of Nowhere Man, Robert Rosen, to unpack one of the most controversial portrayals of John Lennon ever put to page. From the origins of the book to the backlash it sparked, Rosen walks us through the research, the accusations of deception, and the lasting impact his work has had on Lennon's legacy. We also unpack rarely discussed aspects of Lennon's life, his diaries, personal contradictions, and relationships, including his dynamic with Paul McCartney. Along the way, the conversation expands into a broader look at celebrity myth-making, modern documentaries, and what happens when the curtain gets pulled back on the icons we thought we knew.
Timestamps 0:00 - Intro 1:21 - Portrayal of John Lennon 2:07 - Origins of Nowhere Man 8:24 - Deception 9:35 - The Last Days of John Lennon Book 11:24 - Fan Reactions to Nowhere Man 18:39 - Reading John's Diaries 20:20 - A Different Side of John Lennon 23:48 - Paul McCartney 25:50 - Disney Plus Documentaries 27:09 - Pulling of the Curtain of Celebrities 34:00 - Reflections on Writing, Pushback on Book 38:41 - Outro
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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.
This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich
By Daniel Rachel
Akashic Books
336 Pages
$29.95
"Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It's astounding. And when he hit that stage, he worked an audience." –David Bowie
What was going through David Bowie's head when he said this to Cameron Crowe, who was interviewing him for Playboy magazine, in 1976? Yes, Hitler was a mesmerizing speaker. This is undeniable. But how could Bowie not have acknowledged that the Führer's performance was in service of a war and a genocide that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people on battlefields and in extermination camps? As charismatic as Hitler may have been, is it not deranged to see him as a precursor to Mick Jagger?
But Bowie, in the Führer's thrall, then declared, "I could have been Hitler in England. Wouldn't have been hard…. I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I'd be an excellent dictator." Which is why the title of this book is a Bowie quote. "This ain't rock 'n' roll! This is genocide!" he cries at the beginning of the Diamond Dogs LP.
At least Patti Smith, who, like Bowie, saw Hitler as "a fantastic performer," a "black magician," and somebody that she learned from, recognized that he was also "a hunk of shit."
This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll is a catalogue of the connections between the music industry and Nazism. And the author, Daniel Rachel, seemingly overlooks nobody in the business who has ever expressed a thought about Nazis. Some are pro-Nazi (Kanye West). Some are anti-Nazi (Manic Street Preachers). And one claimed to be anti-Nazi but is actually pro-Nazi (Roger Waters).
A number of the performers Rachel cites, notably the punks of the 1970s, were into Nazi chic and the idea of indiscriminate shock by whatever means necessary. Partial to Third Reich fashions—SS uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss, a member of the Nazi party—some of them wore black leather trench coats, shiny black boots, and Iron Crosses. Others, like Sid Vicious, wore swastika T-shirts or armbands in order to provoke the generation that fought in World War II—because the punks thought the swastika was a cool symbol and many of them were too ignorant to know what it symbolized. They thought the WWII generation took Nazis too seriously.
Others knew full well who the Nazis were and what they did, but felt it was their right as artists to write songs invoking Nazi imagery. They then claimed they used that imagery to condemn Nazism, and in most cases apologized after the fact if their song/video/stage show offended anybody (Lemmy).
This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll is a disturbing book, one I often had to put down to contemplate the information it contains or to google the images it talks about—there are only a half-dozen photos. One image Rachel describes that sent me down internet rabbit holes is a painting from the book Rock Dreams, by the artist Guy Peellaert, published in 1973 (and probably unpublishable today): In a room full of naked, prepubescent girls, Jagger is wearing garters, stockings, and boots, the other Rolling Stones are wearing Nazi uniforms, and Keith Richards, an Iron Cross around his neck, is sipping from a swastika-branded teacup.
I also stopped reading to watch Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 masterpiece of Nazi propaganda Triumph of the Will, which Rachel constantly refers to. I wanted to make up my own mind as to whether Jagger really had copped some of his moves from Hitler. My conclusion: Maybe he did, like the arm movements or walking with his hands on his hips. I also needed to see this documentary to fully appreciate Nicki Minaj's "Only" video, which evokes Triumph of the Will and was released on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. (Minaj apologized if the video or its release date offended anyone.)
And I put the book aside to listen to Joy Division, the post-punk band named after a brothel in Auschwitz where women were forced into sexual slavery. The book's cover illustration, a member of Hitler Youth banging on a drum, is from a 1930s German propaganda poster that Joy Division used for the cover of their EP An Ideal for Living. The band is referenced countless times, as is Siouxsie and the Banshees, because Siouxsie wore those fashionable and provocative swastika armbands.
This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll is as much a book about rock history as it is a book about Nazi history.
This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll is as much a book about rock history as it is a book about Nazi history, a fact borne out in an index of cognitive dissonance—Bono followed by Martin Bormann, Mein Kamph followed by Melody Maker.
And it's a distinctly British book, with British spellings and punctuation (single quote marks where double quote marks would be) and full of references to incidents, bands, songs, and TV shows that are better known in Britain than the US. I was, for example, unfamiliar with the band Throbbing Gristle and their tune "Zyklon B Zombie" that, according to Rachel, sold 60,000 records in the UK.
Among the other bands I've never heard of, probably because they got little to no radio play or mainstream media coverage in America, are Master Racial Masturbation, Cockney Rejects, A Certain Ratio, Theatre of Hate, The Skids, The Exploited, Bethnal, and Body Snatchers. Nor was I familiar with the concert promoters Final Solution or 2 Tone records, whose bands, like Madness and The Specials, were anti-Nazi but whose shows attracted Nazi sympathizers.
Yet I may be the perfect audience for This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll. In addition to my abiding interest in rock music, I, like a number of musicians Rachel writes about—Ron Ashton of Iggy & the Stooges comes to mind—was also fascinated by all things Nazi when I was a kid. My father, an infantryman in WWII, had fought the Nazis in Europe, liberated a concentration camp, and brought home a box of war souvenirs. I played with those trinkets as if they were toys: a Nazi bayonet, a Nazi compass, a swastika flag, and Nazi medals that I pinned to my chest. I first attempted to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was eight; the capture of Adolf Eichmann was one of the most exciting moments of my childhood. And long after putting my "toys" aside, I wrote a book titled Bobby in Naziland (later re-released as A Brooklyn Memoir) about growing up in the aftermath of WWII, in Flatbush, a neighborhood populated by concentration camp survivors and army veterans—a neighborhood suffering through an epidemic of PTSD and one that became the setting for William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice.
Yet even after a lifetime of living in the shadow of the Holocaust and reading about the Third Reich, there were myriad facts and anecdotes I didn't know that Rachel uncovered about the Nazis and their connection to rock music and pop culture.
One story I hadn't heard was how, in a London underground station, Keith Moon, dressed in full Nazi regalia, came upon an unattended announcement booth, picked up the microphone and said: "All Jews line up here, ready to be gassed." Nor had I been aware that the SS lightning-bolts emblem is almost identical to the last two letters of the Kiss logo or that Sid Vicious wrote the Sex Pistols song "Belsen Was a Gas." And in a useful comparison to Donald Trump, who, like Hitler, is a megalomaniacal tyrant with dreams of domination, the Führer's chief architect and minister of armaments and war production, Albert Speer, said of Hitler's endless monologues, "One of the reasons he gathered so many flunkies around him was that his instinct told him that first-rate people couldn't possibly stomach the outpourings."
This, and so much more, can, for your reading horror, be found in the pages of This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll.
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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.
A detail from the "Orwell and Truth" exhibit on display in New York University's Kimmel Windows Gallery, on LaGuardia place and West 3rd Street, running through December 1.
I rarely let other writers speak for me, but I've made an exception for George Orwell.
The other week, I checked out "Orwell and Truth," in NYU's Kimmel Windows Gallery. It's a collection of diary excerpts, handwritten letters, photographs, manuscript pages, first-edition book covers, and wonderful quotes.
It traces the development of Eric Blair, from a "lower-upper-middle class" British boy born in India in 1903, to George Orwell, author of such classic novels as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. The corrosive effect of propaganda and the dangers of totalitarianism are the exhibition's main themes.
But of all the quotes the exhibit highlights, it's the one above, from his essay "Why I Write," that got my attention—because I've recently beaten a 90,000-word manuscript into good enough shape to give to my wife (and editor) to read. That was a six-year journey, occasionally exhilarating but more often horrible and exhausting, just as Orwell says. Though I think his comparison to "a long bout with some painful illness" is overstated.
He said it when he was diagnosed with acute tuberculosis while writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, between 1945 and 1948. His physical and creative struggles became one and the same. He died from the disease in 1950, a year after the book was published.
I do agree that a demon drove me to complete every book I've ever written. And if it's not some hellish creature, then I must be insane to have devoted my life to writing books in a post-capitalist society ignorant enough to twice elect a man who so perfectly embodies the totalitarianism Orwell so perfectly describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.
I went to the New York International Auto Show, which is running at the Javits Center through April 12, with the idea that I was going to do a photo essay on electric cars. What could be more topical with the ongoing Iran war and the price of gas topping $4.00 per gallon? And I was going to concentrate on Chinese electric cars, some of which are striking in design and more affordable than any electric car sold in America. But this year there were no Chinese cars on display. Nor will they be for sale in the U.S. anytime soon—thanks to tariffs, national security issues, and protectionist trade policies. (Move to Canada if you want a Chinese car.)
And though there were plenty of electric U.S., European, and Asian cars at the show, the only one I shot was one that doesn't yet exist (see below). As environmentally friendly and economical as electric (and hybrid) vehicles are, the ones that do exist are boring to look at. They all share a similar aerodynamic design and are almost indistinguishable from one and other. Instead, I shot the cars that caught my eye, the ones that struck me as rolling works of art. Two were from the past and one is from the future.
Chevrolet is calling this Corvette concept car "pure, sophisticated sculpture" and an "electrified vision of the future." It's not all that different from the 2026 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Coupe, which is available as a hybrid containing a V-8 engine and an electric motor.
And speaking of sculpture, check out this 1935 Auburn 851, part of a display called "Automobiles of the Great Depression." The car originally sold for $2,245, could achieve a top speed of more than 100 miles per hour, and its fuel economy wasn't atrocious: 18–20 miles per gallon. The 851 shows up during the "New Amsterdam Inn" scene in the 1936 Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers film Swing Time. Should the Iranian war drive the world into another depression, perhaps we can look forward to seeing an updated electric version of the Auburn cruising our streets and highways again.
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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.
