Yardbirds: Three Four Stars and an 8/10 . . . plus!

Grahame Bent for Shindig! (May 2025)

Mark Paytress for Mojo (May 2025)

Claudia Eliott for Classic Rock (May 2025)

Daryl Easlea for Record Collector (May 2025)

Dave Satzmary for Library Journal (March 2025)

Russell Newmark for The Beat (April 2025)

Tony Blackburn Can't Make Your Way

Remarkably, bizarrely, incongruously, the bland of the bland, Radio One DJ Tony Blackburn delivered a rather faithful version of the Yardbird’s ‘I Can’t Make Your Way’. It appears on Side Two of his debut album Tony Blackburn Sings (flat, I might add) sitting alongside Four Tops and Vera Lynn covers. There’s a rather reserved attempt to emulate Beck’s guitar lines and an added backing vocal line “I can’t make it baby’, which I rather like. John Peel introduces Tony’s version [here] so please do give it your full attention

Awhile before Tony got a strangle hold on the Yardbirds’ tune, Texan and one time member of Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps, Scotty McKay, gave it his best shot. As part of the underused Simon Napier-Bell arranged contract with Columbia that gave individual Yardbirds the opportunity to produce the work of other artists, Jim McCarty took his new American friend, who he had met on the Dick Clark Caravan of the Stars tour in 1966, into the studio for a run through of ‘I Can’t Make Your Way’, released in March 1967 [here]. It’s a pleasant enough excursion, piano is the featured lead instrument, but it is all a bit lacklustre, doesn’t over shadow Blackburn’s version, which wouldn’t take that much effort, and is not a patch on Al Stewart’s cover of the Yardbirds’ ‘Turn into Earth’ that Paul Samwell-Smith helmed for Decca (released in August 1966) [here].

For a band that had a problem writing original material the Yardbirds nevertheless oversaw some arresting cover versions of tracks from Roger. Though not from that album, you might also want to tune into Manfred Mann’s Henry Mancini-esque ‘Still I’m Sad’ [here] . . . Down the road apiece, I suspect I’ll be back with more of the same . . .

Recorded after his dalliance with the Yardbirds on the Dick Clark Caravan and his Columbia 45, McKay’s tribute to the band with ‘Train Kept-A-Rollin’ (note the writer credit) is outstanding and even better in the unedited version you can hear here

Bear Family have a very fine compilation of Scotty’s tracks in their ‘Rocks’ series, which comes with a biography that is as detailed as you could hope for. The edited single version of‘Train Kept-A-Rollin’ makes an appearance but not ‘I Can’t Make Your Way’, which was probably because it doesn’t rock.

The Who Take Ronny and the Daytonas for a Ride in the City

Even with a songwriter of Townshend’s capabilities, the Who were never above appropriating a good tune when need demanded: ‘The Ox’ with the Surfaris’ ‘Waikiki Run’, ‘Substitute’ with Robb Storme’s ‘Where is My Girl’ and ‘Cobwebs and Strange’ with Tony Crombie’s ‘Eastern Journey’ are three that spring readily to mind. Moon and Entwistle’s ‘In the City’, b-side of ‘I’m a Boy’, is another, albeit of lesser known provenance, that’s worth noting.

I’ve written [here] about how the duo lovingly parodied surf and hot rod culture with ‘In the City’ by transposing California into London, but until I read Brian Chidester and Domenic Priore’s Pop Surf Culture I hadn’t known that they’d swiped the tune from Ronny and the Daytona’s ‘Hey little Girl’ [here] to give their take extra authenticity. Moon and Entwistle obviously had a liking for Nashville’s finest teen combo having covered ‘Bucket T’ on the Ready Steady Who ep. Both tracks had appeared on the album G.T.O., which wasn’t given a UK release though they had made it across the Atlantic as single cuts on the Stateside label. Whatever the legal niceties or ethics of the Who’s ‘rewrites’ you got to admit they had great taste in pop’s happening sounds . . .

Pop Surf Culture not only led me to score a copy of G.T.O. but also the Wax ‘Em Down comp, which is choc-full of killer tunes that come wrapped in a sleeve copped from an issue of Sports Illustrated that featured on its cover two hot rodders in Ed Big Daddy shirts . . . way cool

The Who and the Young London Look

March 1965 . . . Seventeen magazine runs a 20 page survey of London fashion trends . . . The Who, who were the self-proclaimed face of London 1965 [here], play backdrop in one of the fashion shoots, possibly orchestrated by photographer Joseph Santano.

At least two other images from this shoot are in circulation and Richard Barnes has used the following of the band alone in Maximum R&B. Are there more to be seen?

This one is usually cited as being from the ‘Young London Look’ themed issue but I suspect it’s from a subsequent edition. Joseph Santano is credited lower right

The Yardbirds (and Georgie Fame) also played the role of props in a Seventeen fashion shoot (September 1967)

Fab Goes Pop Art, Op Art or Just Call It What You Like . . .

January 22 1966, FABulous magazine goes all over Pop Art – the trend that is young, expressive, zany, alive, thoughtful and enjoyable . . .

photo Derek Berwin

Anne Nightingale is the issue’s guide to Pop Art and the abstract sounds of the Who . . .

The magazine’s theme is somewhat diluted by putting the non-pop art Moody blues on the cover. Inside Paul Jones puts a decidedly conservative spin on the latest trend . . . anticipating Laura Ashley’s turn to the floral he scorns the geometric. He also disses the label ‘generation’ suggesting a slight against the Who as much as against the notion of a divide between young and old . . .

Meanwhile Keith Richards is in on the scene due to his coat of many colours and not much else and Steve Marriot collects pop art robots . . .

And . . . the Who started the the thing itself moving from Mod to Pop. By the time June Southworth interviews the band, however, they have moved on once more: ‘they’re frank, intelligent boys who play space-age music for a pop art generation, and many generations to come . . .’

Yardbirds – Little Games in the World of Rock

John Cabree’s The World of Rock (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1968) makes a claim to be the first book of rock history [here] which may or may not be true but like all its competitors it would have been out of date even before the author had read the proofs. By the early summer of 1968 the Yardbirds were no more; here though they are still an active force and their Little Games album is given a rare positive spin. Their demise, however, is implicit in their relegation to being a ‘second string’ British act, below even the Bee Gees . . . There really could be no return after that billing

THE SECOND STRING

The new snobbishness among record buyers has had one distressing side effect – the waning interest in the work of the lesser English groups. There are several besides the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, and the Bee Gees who should not be overlooked. The most important of these are the Yardbirds, the Hollies, and the Kinks.

 . . . The Yardbirds were the most exciting experimental rock group of the first several years of the British revival. Always a step or two ahead of the Rolling Stones, they pushed rock further structurally and harmonically any other group. They had a few medium-size hits. their main influence came through album sales to other groups and live appearances (they are the group that breaks up the guitar in Antonioni's Blow Up).

Their biggest problem on record has always been lack of discipline. They would engage in interesting harmonic, instrumental, or structural experiments— baroque chants, electric saws, and so on—and they had, in Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck consecutively, two of the best guitarists in Britain. However they often released tracks that needed to be worked out further in the studio.

On their newest release the Yardbirds are with producer Mickie Most (Herman's Hermits, Donovan, early Animals), and the result is an album as exciting as their earlier ones and a good deal more ordered. The range is wide and the writing is improved.

Highlights include a beautifully commercial song about maturation (“Little Games”); a harsh, bluesy “Smile on Me”; a remarkable fusion of folk rock and Eastern music in “White Summer” ; a gay adaptation of the nursery rhyme “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor”; a thing called “Glimpses”, which sounds as if it might be the theme from a hippie movie; a beautiful folk-rock tune called “Only the Black Rose”; and “Little Soldier Boy”, an anti-war protest, in the background of which there is an ironic trumpet parodying both martial music and Beatles baroque.

Linda Eastman provided many of the book’s choice images

INTRO . . . 1967. Nik Cohn interviews Townshend, Davies and Wood

The short-lived teen pop magazine Intro lasted less than six months – September 1967 to March 1968 – before it was folded into the long-running Petticoat. Until now, hidden in four of those issues were a Nik Cohn profile of Terence Stamp and a limited series of interviews with songwriters. Pete Townshend (of course) opened proceedings, followed by Roy Wood and Ray Davies.

Pete Townshend is a talker. He's sharp, imaginative and comes out with some very funny lines. He tends to shoot his mouth off but mostly talks sense and he's never boring.

Most important of all, he's got his own private progression and, at a time when most of the people in pop keep changing fads as often as they once changed their socks, he jumps on no bandwagons.

 The interview was carried out while the Who were working on Sell Out and songs like ‘Jaguar’ were still in contention, but what leaps out is that the advertising concept – ‘one long mad montage’ –  even at this early date, was figured as only taking up one side.

AD-OPERA

‘For instance, we might start with the four of us in barber-shop harmony, really sweaty and masculine, singing the one word Jaguar’, he says. ‘Then it’d go into some maniacal drumming by Keith, and it’d open out from there into someone like Fenella Fielding talking about Odo-ro-no and then straight on to a song I've written about a girl with smelly armpits. It would all be one continuous ad-opera and we'd make it as fast and insane as we could.

‘I think that it's a logical thing to Progress into writing songs about subjects like these; Jaguars and Odo-ro-no and all the rest. Instead of putting

‘Oh, my heart is breaking’, I put ‘Oh, my arms are stinking’, At least it makes change from the usual draggy old love songs, at least it's a bit more relevant to real lives and problems.

Cohn captures the idea of ambivalence, contradiction and indirection that sits at the heart of Townshend’s writing: ‘His songs are full of calm violence, sober insanity . . .’

 ‘I Can See for Miles’ is discussed along with a recent tour of America and Townshend’s thoughts on the band’s relationship with their audience and how it has changed and in turn changed the Who:

‘The point is that if you're going to reach any kind of communication with your audience, with all the thousands of people that you can't see in the dark, you've got to be prepared to put out a lot of physical energy and sheer hard slogging.

You've got to force them out of their apathy, you've got to shake them up and invade their privacy. You've got to get tough with them.

‘When we were just starting out at the Marquee, three years ago, I used to hold my guitar like a machine gun and I'd mow the entire audience down.

‘I'd start at one end of the room and swing round very slowly until every single person in the audience had been shot. The people at the far end of the line could see me coming and they would try to hide, they'd double up in pain and they'd really be frightened.

At the very least, they couldn't ignore me, they had to react. They didn't want to be killed.

‘That's the kind of communication we had originally and that we've tended to lose. We had to get it back again . . . The audience is king and pop musicians his court jesters’.

 The magazine provided ecstatic reviews of both the single and the album

Rock n’ Roll Revival Time – Intro (January 27 1968)

1967 and Townshend and Cohn’s ideas about the pop/rock moment were completely simpatico:

Last year, the move was progression towards complexity and introspection. Now groups are tired of pretending to be camp intellectuals and want to get back to basics Already the Who, always in the lead with anything new, have started wearing authentic Rocker gear and performing Rock classics like Summertime Blues and My Way as a regular part of their stage act.

‘Pop was getting much too solemn’, says writer/guitarist Pete Townshend.

‘Rock was beautiful because it was direct. hard-hitting, loud, sexy and rebellious. Most Important of all it was incredibly glamorous.

More Nik Cohn HERE & HERE and via the tags below

Big Star – Punk Rock 1974

Ah, the thrill of the chance encounter on a wet n’ cold Wednesday afternoon while hiding out in the warmth of a British Library reading room. I had been distractedly flicking through old NMEs when a thumbnail photograph of Big Star pulled me up short. It was illustrating a 1974 article on overlooked American acts, among them Steely Dan, Todd Rundgren, Jackson Browne, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Joe Walsh and the like. But the piece kicked off with Big Star, true unknowns . . .

 This is a band that just won't budge despite the flatteringest reviews imaginable, much of which puzzlement is rooted in the poor distribution job by Stax on behalf of Ardent – mini-concern based in Memphis and run by ex-DJ John Fry.

With the departure of guitarist/writer/vocaliser Chris Bell following the recording of “Big Star 1” some playing-gaps have begun to show on the just-issued “Radio City”, an exotic, meandering production that needs compound listening before it takes hold, but they still do beautifully as a trio.

The band now consist of leader tortured punk-genius Alex Chilton (former Box Tops chieftain), with Jody Stephens on plug drums and Andy Hummel on bass. "Big Star I" remains highly recommended – an immense pop beauty rotating across the breadth of the Sixties' experience, through The Byrds, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin

“Radio City" in probably just as great, but we're still getting into it and we’ll be coming back to it by and by.

This March 1974 sub was most likely written by Andrew Tyler (though Nick Kent would be a good second guess). Promises to follow something up that came to nothing were fairly commonplace in the NME so expecting more after Tyler had done his duty and seen if ‘compound listening’ would pay dividends seemed unlikely to be shared with readers. A week later, however, we have his full review and it’s a beauty, not only because he catches what’s so great about this album but also because he takes the still forming notion of ‘punk’ and attempts to give it some shape and substance. Not as one might expect around Iggy and the Stooges or the New York Dolls, but Alex Chilton two or three years before he was kicking around the Lower East Side and hanging out with the Cramps.

To cap it all he puts ‘New Wave’ together with ‘punk’ in his first sentence and in the second paragraph is calling ‘punk’ last year’s thing. In Tyler’s definition punk is a badge of authenticity worn by ‘true rebels and outlaws’:

 So what do we ask of a rock ’n’ roll outlaw? Only that he doesn't grovel for an audience or the industry, that he moves in a kind of agonised innocence and stays clear of gurus and lefties.

 Tyler’s punk outlaw will be a ‘musical visionary’ but not one parlaying some ‘Arts Supplement bilge’. Chilton fits his bill, ‘Big Star leap past everyone of their American and British contemporaries and set Chilton up as one of the Great Misunderstoods of punk rock’. He celebrates Chilton’s ‘snarl’, ‘nervous raw voice’ and ‘untampered arrangements’ against the ‘studio technicalities’ and reverence of the band’s debut. Radio City is full of a kind of bravado that has been missing since Revolver, he writes (and Nick Kent concurs).

What Tyler has to say about individual tracks you can read for yourself as you ponder the idea of Chilton as ‘tortured punk-genius’. Like with Big Star the history of punk rock could benefit from some compound thinking

For further reading that goes way beyond this footnote head over to Grant McPhee’s deep archeological dig into Big Star’s legend HERE

Postscript

October 1973, NME Teazers column suggests Slade to cover Big Star’s ‘Don’t Lie To Me’ . . . Fabulous

The Troggs: 'I Want – You Want'

A recent acquisition of the two volumes of the Best of the Troggs, released in 1967 & 1968, had me heading back to Lester Bangs’ essay from 1971, ‘James Taylor Marked for Death(What we need is a lot less Jesus and a whole lot more Troggs!)’ to see which of the 23 tracks on these comps he had also singled out for praise.

(There are a dozen tracks apiece on the two albums but for an unknown reason the less than essential b-side of ‘Wild Thing’, ‘From Home’, gets a place on both discs).

Turns out Bangs only put seven tracks under analysis on his groin thunder odometer: ‘Wild Thing’, most obviously, ‘I Want You’, ‘I Can’t Control Myself’, ‘Give It to Me’, ‘I Can Only Give You Everything’, ‘Gonna Make You’, ‘66–5–4–3–2­–1’ and ‘I Just Sing’ (which didn’t appear on either of the Best of volumes). Honourable mentions along the way are given to ‘Anyway That You Want Me’, ‘With A Girl Like You’, ‘Girl in Black’ ‘I Want You to Come into My Life’ and ‘Night of the Long Grass’.Bangs kicked off his essay with his preferred trope of directly addressing his reader in what might turn out to be a conversation, debate, argument or rhetorical ramble. I’m not sure he knows which it will be until the piece is done. Here’s the rumpus:

PART ONE: KAVE KIDS

All right, punk, this is it. Choose ya out. We're gonna settle this right here.

You can talk about yer MC5 and yer Stooges and even yer Grand Funk and Led Zep, yep, alla them badasses’ve carved out a hunka turf in this town, but I tell you there was once a gang that was so bitchin' bad that they woulda cut them dudes down to snotnose crybabies and in less than three minutes too. I mean their shortest rumble was probably the one clocked in at 1:54 and that's pretty fuckin swift, kid. Oh, they didn't look so bad, in fact their appearance was a real stealthy move ’cuz they mostly photographed like a bunch of motherson polite mod clerks on their lunch hour, but they not only kicked ass with unparalleled style when the time came, they even had the class to pick one of the most righteous handles of all time: the Troggs.

Perfectly named, the Troggs sprung fully-loaded out of the primal ordure that all great rock n’ roll comes from. Subterranean Neanderthals who briefly stepped into the light to promote a clutch of hit singles:

’Cause this was a no-jive, take-care-of-business band (few of the spawn in its wake have been so starkly pure) churning out rock 'n' roll that thundered right back to the very first grungy chords and straight ahead to the fuzztone subways of the future. And because it was so true to its evolutionary antecedents, it was usually about sex, and not just Sally-go-to-movieshow-and-hold-my-hand stuff, although there was scads more of that in them than anyone would have suspected at first, but the most challengingly blatant flat-out proposition and prurient fantasy.

That’s the cue for Bangs to range far and wide over his adolescent wet dreamscapes. His term for the Troggs’ libidinous thrusts was ‘groin thunder’ which was an image as impeccably realised as the band’s name. Its most basic expression, he wrote, is obtained in ‘I Want You’:

This is the Troggs at their most bone-minimal (which is also where they are usually most effective). Like the early Kinks, they had strong roots in ‘Louie, Louie’, which is where both song and guitar solo issue from here. The lyrics are almost worthy of the cave: ‘I want you / I need you / And I hope that you need me too . . .’ The vocal has a musk of yellow-eyed depravity about it, and the singer sounds absolutely certain of conquest-steady, methodical, deliberate. This is the classic mold for a Troggs stalking song.

Bangs developed his line:

‘Gonna Make You’ is more of the same, Diddley rumbleseat throbbing with sexual aggression and tough-guy disdain for too many words, while the flip side of that single, ‘I Can't Control Myself’, begins to elaborate a bit. It opens with a great Iggyish ‘Ohh, NO!’, employs a buckling foundation of boulderlike drums as usual, and takes the Trogg-punk's intents and declarations onto a more revealing level. ‘Yer socks are low and yer hips are showin’,’ smacks Presley in a line that belongs in the Great Poetry of Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

I hear ‘slacks’ not ‘socks’ though maybe the latter fits better with whatever fetish or ‘pube punk fantasy’ Bangs had a predilection for. ‘A two-sided single whose titles were “Give It to Me” and “I Can't Control Myself” was on a collision course with some ultimate puissant bluenose from the start, and sure enough it was banned in America’.

About midway through his essay Bangs hits the caps lock on his typewriter and finally lets loose about why all of this fuss n’ bother over Reg and the Boys is worth his reader’s attention:

THE LESSON OF ‘WILD THING’ WAS LOST ON ALL YOU STUPID FUCKERS sometime between the rise of Cream and the fall of the Stooges, and rock 'n' roll may turn into a chamber art yet or at the very least a system of Environments.

Bangs was not wrong, the Velvets, MC5 and the Stooges, he wrote, all gainfully pushed back against the tide of musical civility but they could not be the primal thing itself, they were all too knowing, too self-reflective, too intellectual. As for the Troggs:

Quite possibly they understood or ruminated about what they were doing on very limited levels. Because that was all that was necessary. Had they been a clot of intellectual sharpies hanging out in the London avant-garde scene, they would most likely have been a preening mess unless they happened to be the Velvet Underground who were a special case anyway. I really believe maybe you've gotta be out of it to create truly great rock 'n' roll, either that or have such supranormal, laser-nerved control over what you are consciously manipulating that it doesn't matter (the Rolling Stones) or be a disciplined artist with an abiding joy in teenage ruck jump music and an exceptionally balanced outlook (Lou Reed, Velvets), or chances right now are that you are almost certain to come out something far less or perhaps artistically more (but still less) than rock 'n' roll, or go under.

From here on in James Taylor and his self-obsessed singer/songwriter peers become the target of Bangs’ ire. But Bangs is soon back on the trail of Reg Presley and co., chasing down the real meaning of ‘66–5–4–3–2­–1’ – the countdown to penetration; the S&M overtones of ‘Girl in Black’ and the anal sex pleasures espoused in ‘I Want You to Come into My Life’ and, of course, the drug scene of ‘Night of the Long Grass’. He spends a good deal of time on ‘I Just Sing’ – ‘an anthem of loneliness and defiant individuality’ that he likens to the Stooges ‘No Fun’ but by this point in his essay the band’s catalogue is looking empty and Bangs is running on fumes.

I’m not a hardcore Troggs fan, other than the two Best of LPs, I’ve a handful of singles and the 3xCD set Archeology from 1992 that Bill Inglot, Bill Levenson, Andrew Sandoval and Ken Barnes put together, the first disc is mostly essential 1966–67 cuts, disc two is filled with not so essential selections from 1967–76. Disc three is the infamous Trogg Tapes . . . Part of the brilliance of Bangs’ take on their catalogue is to ignore the copious amount of filler they recorded, which were anything but explosions of groin thunder. Bangs name checks only twelve cuts (his editor Greg Shaw questioned this self-imposed limit – see above), each Best of has a dozen, and I think that is the perfect number for any Troggs set, so here’s my 2 x 6:

‘Gonna Make You’/’ ‘66–5–4–3–2­–1’/‘I Want You’/‘I Can’t Control Myself’/‘Anyway That You Want Me’/‘Girl in Black’//‘Night of the Long Grass’/‘Mona’/‘I Can Only Give You Everything’/‘Anyway That You Want Me’/ ‘I Want You to Come into My Life’/‘Give It to Me’/‘Louie Louie’.

I’ve dropped ‘Wild Thing’ because I don’t need to hear it again and I anyway prefer those rewrites like ‘I Want You’, not because they refine ‘Wild Thing’ but because they amplify what’s great about it. Bangs’ choice of  ‘With A Girl Like You’ and ‘I Just Sing’ fall short of my other selections because there’s too much Donovan and not enough Bo Diddley in them for my primitive taste buds even if, on the latter, the band put in a little bit of Yardbird-style faux-sitar licks.

Side one starts off in a hurry with the first three tracks but cools it down toward the end with ‘Anyway That You Want Me’ and ‘Girl in Black’. The last of those two songs comes in at just under 2 minutes and is a solid rip-off of The Who (and all the better for that),  while the cello and violin accompaniment on the former, at least in my imagination, following Bangs’ lead, leaks into John Cale’s contributions to the more melodic songs of the Velvet Underground and in Nico’s solo work. Side two stays in mood with ‘Night of the Long Grass’ followed by two non-single tracks, both something of beat standards. Bo’s ‘Mona’ is perhaps the longest cut from 66/7 that they recorded, it has an extended, by their standards, instrumental section but, unlike the Yardbirds say, they are not minded to do much with it; very Stooge-like in its focus, I think. Rob Tyner has said the MC5 recorded a cover of ‘I Can Only Give You Everything’ when the Shadows of Knight got the jump on them and released ‘Gloria’ so they turned to the next best thing in Them’s songbook. I don’t doubt the truth of that but Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith’s slashing guitar riff on the Five’s single is a straight lift from the Troggs’ version.

The last track on my imaginary compilation, which I’ll call I Want –You Want as it seems to adequately distil down the subject and theme of Reg’s songwriting (or maybe I should name it more simply Come), is ‘Louie Louie’ which is at the very heart of the matter. This album cut is by far the best of the period’s covers by a British band and leaves the Kinks’ tepid version far behind even if it doesn’t quite make the grade of the Sonics, whatever it’s a good place to end things.

In his inestimable study of ‘Louie Louie’, Dave Marsh ignores the Troggs version but he homes in on its most potent progeny, ‘Wild Thing’. Marsh writes,

Art it may not possess, but in its own way ‘Wild Thing’ is a rock ’n’ roll classic. The way it descends to lower depths with each bar is so astonishing, its unending thud so remorseless (the Troggs aren't playing this way because it's effective, even though it is – they're doing it because they can't think of anything else), that it just about takes your breath away, clouds your vision, brings unbidden moistness to the corners of your eyes. Of course, these symptoms might be nothing more than a neurological reaction to the axe murder of Western musical civilization, but let's cut the clowns some kind of break.                                                                            

Bangs would have agreed that the Troggs held no pretension to creating art but they were not clowns, idiot savants perhaps? I like to think of them as carnivalesque jesters capable of upending the courts of Procol Harum, Jethro Tull and the like – a band whose role was to cock-a-snook at those who thought themselves to be the band’s betters.

In January 1965 reader Alex Donald wrote a letter to Record Mirror about Richard Berry’s ur-text, or what he called a ‘pop yardstick’, ‘Louie Louie’:

British pop must be in a desperate state when the whole scene has revolved round one song – The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie – for months. Besides completely copying the Kingsmen’s vocal and instrumental style, The Kinks rose to fame with two watery twists of this classic, then provided us all with endless amusement by recording it openly [released November 1964 on Kinksize Session EP]. Heinz had his second biggest hit ever with another disguised version of this R&B opus [‘Questions I Can’t Answer’] and recently it has been put out as a single on Philips by someone sounding like an in competent one-man band [Liverpool’s Rhythm And Blues Inc]. The parasites should at least leave off the newer American greats.

The Troggs version was yet to come, but I doubt Alex would have felt more kindly disposed toward it than he did to any other of the British covers. One of the issues conveniently ignored in Bangs’ piece was that, at least to the more hip British ears, the Troggs were always sort of behind the times, their parsing of ‘Louie Louie’ or Bo Diddley’s big beat had long been abandoned by the Kinks and Pretty Things. The Troggs in their company feel like an anachronism, or an echo.

Chris Britton’s slash and chime guitar patterns were very obviously modelled on Pete Townshend (checkout the perfected Who-like guitar chord that introduces the bridge in ‘I Can’t Control Myself’) giving a modern steel-sprung edge to the antediluvian thump of Ronnie Bond and Pete Staples’ rhythm section. Just as complementary to Britton’s guitar shards was Reg’s lewd thug sneer, which was often backed by a simple, most un-Who like, vocal refrain ‘da dah, da dah’ that would be varied, when the need for novelty called, from song to song by using ‘pah’, ‘bah’ or ‘lah’. The Troggs didn’t deal in subtlety, that was their appeal. They weren’t complex like the Who, full of contradictions, rather their method was, as Richard Meltzer called it, ‘blatant overstatement’ that Bangs more pertinently named ‘groin thunder’.

Postscript

In June 1973, Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth interviewed Reg Presley in Hyde Park. At age 31,  the singer was a veteran of the music scene, chubby and ruddy cheeked, he spends much of his time with Hollingworth making lewd comments about women who pass by. Once he was a pop star now he is simply ‘legendary’: the Troggs, were a ‘very heavy little band to be sure. “Punk music”, says Reg. “I like that word punk”’.

The band are capitalising on their fabled status and taking their act onto the university circuit:

‘Was at Hull the other week’, said Reg . . . ‘and after a couple of numbers we thought we’d turned up at the wrong gig. I mean people were screamin’ out and clappin’ and goin’ wild . . . I thought Reg old boy, what’s goin’ on here?’

In the State’s the Troggs’ reputation had been enhanced by the use of ‘Wild Thing’ on a Miller’s beer commercial and then the single  is ‘installed on the infamous Nobody’s jukebox, Bleeker Street’ and then word of mouth has done its turn and, ‘so’, writes Hollingworth, here [in New York] starts the Troggs Preservation Society’. Lester Bangs’ piece is not mentioned but Reg’s repeated and enthusiastic use of ‘punk’ to describe his band could hardly have come from a more local source; ‘Wild Thing’ and I Can’t Control Myself’ are ‘very punky records. Hollingworth explains:

. . . everything works in cycles. There’s a progression from a basic quality, through success to an art form – but then it must go back. It doesn’t of course go back to the exact basis it started from. It goes back having collected valid points during its progress. But if it didn’t go back ‘then rock will become as boring as jazz’, as Reg would have it.

‘If you could do anything this year’, Hollingworth summarises, ‘it would be to see The Troggs punking it out for the whole world and making it. It's people like Reg Presley that keep this business sane to a degree . . . ‘We're whap, whap, whap’, said Reg, ‘And I think that’s what it’s about’.

Review of Dirty Real in Journal of Popular Film and Television (December 2024)

The Last Movie montage from Seventeen (July 1970)

From the late 1960s into the mid-1970s, the traditional wellspring of American cinema was threatened, redirected, and ultimately enriched by the emergence of what came to be known as “New Hollywood.” This was an era in which young filmmakers, actors, musicians, and other creatives carved out a cultural niche which still endures in the imagination and aspirations of many people across the globe almost 60 years later. It is this epoch which animates Peter Stanfield’s Dirty Real: Exile on Hollywood and Vine with the Gin Mill Cowboys, published by Reaktion Books.

The titular “Dirty Real” refers to a decidedly bohemian lifestyle which could include a rootless existence with spartan lodgings when on the road, a cultivated inattentiveness to appearance (clothes/hair/hygiene), conspicuous and guilt free pleasure seeking (sex/drugs/alcohol), and a rejection of the establishment (school/work/family/capitalism), all of which represented an alternative version of that great American ambition, freedom. It was this aesthetic, manifest in the setting, plot, characterization, and soundtracks of several dozen films in the late 1960s-early 1970s which Stanfield posits as the core of the “Dirty Real” canon.

A running theme in the book is the quest for the authentic “dirt,” a commodity which the filmmakers and actors took great pride in pursuing, accomplishing and presenting to an audience with an appetite for such fare and apparently an ambition or fantasy to pursue that life for themselves. Nonetheless, Stanfield argues that these actors, directors, writers, and their productions fell short of legitimacy. In its filmic form it was modification, affectation and ultimately commodification of the genuine Dirty Real. On the faux authenticity of the Dirty Real filmmakers, Stanfield proclaims “the trick they pulled off was to suggest they had gained it by hard-scrabble labour, from experience earned on the road, with sweat and dirt honestly come by. In self-defined exile, with their privilege hiding in plain sight, they had this tale to tell, and they told it with glorious, splendid elan” (40).

The author also notes that this emerging genre was not fully original, but rather inspired by old archetypes which were re-booted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, in New Hollywood’s contemporary action films, the lead characters rode motorcycles and drove souped-up cars (Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, Two-Lane Blacktop), and in the new historical westerns (The Hired Hand, The Wild Bunch, Dirty Little Billy, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) the cowboys and criminals were often morally ambiguous misfits whose licentiousness, remorseless violence, and anti-social behavior is often accepted without the judgement and punishment that was expected in Old Hollywood productions. Stanfield also marks a mid-sixties revival in the iconic films and persona of Humprey Bogart as a benchmark in the rise of Dirty Real. As he remarks, “For the film-makers of New Hollywood, Bogart was not only a figure they might identify with, he was also someone they would refract in their own anti-heroes” (13), albeit in films that were infused with unfettered permissiveness (sex and violence), unvarnished cynicism, ambiguous heroism and without the obligatory happy or just ending.

In one final blow to authenticity of the Dirty Real film community, Stanfield notes the symbiotic, or was it mutually parasitic, relationship between the new American cinema and the rock/pop music of the era. It seems the Dirty Real “street cred” of New Hollywood was enhanced by the close association with the world of pop-rock music, particularly in the eyes of a youthful audience. Putting aside the possible appropriation of pop music’s hip grittiness, it is hard to imagine many of the most iconic films of this era without their rock soundtrack, and it seems beyond question that the music enhanced both the films and the status of the musical acts. One of the unexpected and defining elements of Dirty Real is Stanfield’s analysis of the role of popular music in many of the films and the way the pop/rock culture informed the Dirty Real aesthetic.

The book has eight chapters bookended by a scene setting introduction and brief conclusion. Each chapter is thematic and anchored by a focus on one or more films: Chapter One: The Hired Hand; Chapter Two: The Last Movie; Chapter Three: The Last Picture Show, Five Easy Pieces, and Payday; Chapter Four: The Shooting, Ride in the Whirlwind, and Two-Lane Blacktop; Chapter Five: Cisco Pike; Chapter Six: Dirty Little Billy; Chapter Seven: McCabe and Mrs Miller; Chapter Eight: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

The Hired Hand

The analysis in the chapters is comprehensive in its coverage of each film and its place within the genre and in the zeitgeist of the era. This includes a detailed account of the film’s plot, in-depth character studies, as well as a deconstruction of the central conflicts which drive the story and motivate each role. Stanfield also adroitly links elements of these “dirty” films with dozens of other productions from various decades. Ample time is also dedicated to how the films were received after release, encompassing film critics, box office receipts and the engagement of the general public. Readers who enjoy behind the scenes content will find details on financing, casting, inter-personal drama, and the jockeying for credit and acclaim in the face of success. Additionally, the author offers an examination of many of the actors, writers, and directors who rose to fame in the New Hollywood, in what amount to mini era-specific biographies of personalities such as Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, Monte Hellman, James Taylor, Kris Kristofferson, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, and Bob Dylan. This list of people highlights the predominance of white males in this era, a fact to which the author alludes but does not extensively analyze.

Stanfield supports his narrative with ample endnotes for each chapter, including sources ranging from academic publications to contemporary periodicals to memoirs and mass market biographies. Additionally, there is a bibliography and selected filmography which highlights the films discussed in the text. The book is also populated by thirty-two illustrations presenting movie posters, commercial ads, album covers, and movie stills.

Dirty Real offers great utility in an array of academic disciplines including American Studies, Media/Communications, Musicology, and Film Studies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The book would also be of interest to cinephiles and general audiences because of its engagement with iconic films, music, and cultural touchstones and characters who retain a measure of recognition and relevance fifty years after their artistic hightide began to ebb.

Stanfield’s great accomplishment with Dirty Real is to highlight and cut through the posing pretentiousness of these filmmakers, actors and writers to reveal the cultural/social artifice that imbued so much of the 1960s–1970s New Hollywood filmography. Yet he also manages to express his admiration for their artistic endeavors; he does not discount the quality, value, and impact of many of these films. As Stanfield says, “The films’ characters, as with the actors, writers and directors, were costumed in the pitch that defileth and showed too an acute nostalgia for the gutter none had known at first hand. For a cool moment they almost turned Hollywood into an image of themselves” (8–9).

Madison Ave gets Dirty Real: Left, Dirty Little Billy director Stan Dragoti. Middle, Jack L. Warner, producer, and Cheryl Tiegs, Sports Illustrated cover star and married to Dragoti

Michael McKenna – professor of history, politics, and geography at Farmingdale State College

The Stooges – Born Dead Losers

Decal stolen from the Coop’s amazing Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth collection [HERE]

Asked to curate the thirteenth issue of the New York magazine Art-Rite, Alan Vega pulled together thirteen found images. A jockey sat astride his mount on the cover; a newspaper clipping of a photograph of a hostage-taker moments before he blows his brains out; a photograph of Elvis on stage circa 1956; a pornographic image of a man and a woman, head in his lap, her legs open stretched across the backseat of a car; a horse race photo-finish; Iggy Stooge, on all fours, naked torso, raggedy-arse jeans and wearing a dog collar (he looks like some surf bum the morning after a debauched beach party), probably taken at Unganos; a seemingly random page from a horse racing magazine; a cheesecake shot of body builder and blonde woman in bikini; another shot of a horse race; the Marvel comic book figure Ghost Rider; Willie Deville and his paramour Suzie; the bloody torso of a male corpse in a mortuary; and a detail from a painting by Joseph Catuccio. Beneath the final image the editors placed the following:

We dedicate this issue to the average American searching for excitement. These images, punked out from the ambient culture, are the touchstones of a new sensibility, icons of the dissipations and strengths of the modern spirit. Let the way of life idealized in these pages bring into your home the romance of the underculture – horse racing, white trash smut, greasy rock ’n’ roll, muscles, motorcycles and the end of civilisation.

The magazine was distributed free on the streets of New York sometime in 1977, its mix of imagery akin to Andy Warhol’s monochrome death and disaster silkscreens of the early 1960s. If Vega’s collection did pull from a pop art legacy its mixing of an iconography of the ‘underculture’ nevertheless suggested the new shape of things formed in Warhol’s wake – a ‘punked-out’ street culture, where suburban runaway juvenile delinquents looking for a kiss or a fix have landed face down – the sweet ride to the Lower East Side. . . the end of civilisation.

            On stage Elvis and Iggy suggest a continuity between fifties rock ’n’ roll and the seventies version but also the downturn the form had taken, its dissolution. One of the most memorable graphic images used to promote rebel surfer sui generis, Mickey Dora, was ‘da Cat’s Theory of Evolution’ showing the eight stages of man’s development from the ape ‘Retardess Kookus’ to the pinnacle of perfection ‘Homosapens Mickey Dora’ riding the surf. Vega’s collection has the process going in reverse from Presley leaning over the lip of stage with fans hands outstretched toward him to Iggy Stooge crawling on his hands and knees.

That image of the Stooges as an avatar of rock ’n’ roll’s entropy has become the fixed idea about the band that has travelled down to us through the years, restated in the use of the band’s recordings in films, among them the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys (2002) later turned into a fiction film, Lords of Dogtown (2005), and The Bikeriders (2023) a drama based on Danny Lyons’ photobook from 1968 with the same title.

Dogtown and Z-Boys is as much about creating a legacy for its protagonists as it is a document on the development of skateboarding as a subculture. The filmmakers themselves were the principle participants, their younger selves the skaters who revolutionised the activity. Director Stacy Peralta, a key member of Zephyr competition skateboarding team, the Z-Boys of the title, and co-writer Craig Stecyk, who was responsible for providing contemporary magazines with the reportage that helped propel a bunch of street kids with attitude into the key figures accountable for modernising skateboarding, are both in front and behind the documentary’s camera – they are their own subject.

During the mid-to-late 1970s the Z-Boys reinvigorated a moribund competition scene, reimagined underused urban spaces as skate parks and remade empty suburban swimming pools into an environment that transformed an activity of mostly linear horizontal movements into a set of abstract vertical actions. They took a leisure hobby and made it into a lifestyle, a worldwide subculture.

Illustrated with a parade of period photographs and 8 and 16 mm footage, the now mature skaters look back and explain what had taken place some 25-odd-years ago – a true insider account, authenticity guaranteed, the story of the team who made skateboarding history. More than that it is a wild ride, brilliantly edited by Paul Crowder. Dogtown’s story is told in a breathless mode, a mobile exhibition on the art of the edit – montaged sequences that mimic the reckless thrill of a series of skating stunts. What aids the film’s propulsive edge is not just Stecyk and Glen E. Friedman’s extraordinary photographs of the young skateboarders but also their use of some 45 pieces of music, mostly contemporary hard rock records, by 30 artists. In 1975 the music would have been a certain kind of teenager’s – those shown in the film – idealised jukebox, one great blast after another.

Opening with Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Ezy Rider’ the film finds an informal correlation between the action shown and the topic of the song, Black Sabbath and ‘Into the Void’, David Bowie and ‘Rebel Rebel’, Thin Lizzy and ‘Bad Reputation’, Pink Floyd and ‘Us and Them’, Ted Nugent and ‘Motor City Madhouse’, T. Rex and ‘Children of the Revolution, all play very similar roles. None though is as effective as Alice Cooper’s ‘Generation Landslide’

. . . la la da de da . . . which is given an extended outing to illuminate the Colgate advertising smile behind which the older generation looks down on their off-spring who are seated among discarded razorblades, needles and other detritus while throwing Molotov cocktails in milk bottles from their highchairs – Alice Cooper’s billion dollar babies, surrogates for the Z-Boys.  The two Stooges’ cuts ‘Gimmie Danger’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ fill a similar role of soundtracking that generational slide into the void.

While I expect a few of the Z-Boys owned Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies album or had found ‘Generation Landslide’ on the b-side of ‘Hello Hurray’, so that recording at least was part of their own personal soundtrack and  no doubt they did attend parties where Bowie and Rod Stewart were played and Peter Frampton and Aerosmith would have been radio familiars, but I doubt the same could be said of the two Stooges’ records. These were certainly overlooked by radio at the time and therefore unknown to teenage So-Cal listeners, and yet the Stooges sound entirely apposite, perfectly placed, the ideal musical accompaniment to the shots of abandoned and derelict amusements that ran along the beach fronts of Dogtown.

That stretch of Santa Monica with its pre-war piers and leisure parks has become a junkpile of twisted steel, cracked concrete and blasted asphalt. The post-war promise of baby boom plenitude – beach blanket parties – has been transformed into a teenage wasteland – and became a surfer and skater’s playground. The kiss of an ocean breeze in ‘Gimmie Danger’ that Iggy sings about, coupled with the messed up, lovelorn, protagonist of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ – a deadbeat figure to mirror the new decade’s dead end kids – are used to emphasise the idea that the skaters are living in the wreck of society. It is here, out beyond the law, where the kids have made their own culture. They did this, as one of the doc’s talking heads said in that space where the ‘debris meets the sea’ – paraphrasing Iggy Pop and James Williamson’s ‘Kill City’.

Even though the use of the Stooges demands a level of historical reinvention that is not the case with the two Led Zeppelin tracks from Presence that appear toward the end of the film, the fact that the Michigan band make a more notable appearance, create a bigger impact than Jimmy Page’s combo, is because they were constructed out of the same raw materials that the skater’s made their world from. By seemingly being ignored back in their day, the Stooges’ outsider status compounded a negationist sensibility – the ‘no’ to the Americann ‘yes’ – which gives them an authenticity that a band like Aerosmith can only gesture toward. Like the Dogtown skaters the Stooges are the real thing – born dead losers who become winners.

(The fictionalised version of the documentary, Lords of Dogtown (2005), stays true to the original soundtrack though less impactful, more subliminal. The two Stooges tracks are ‘TV Eye’ and ‘Loose’.)

That image of the Stooges carrying the charge of a generation in freefall is there once more on the soundtrack to The Bikeriders. It’s a film like Dogtown and Z-Boys that flirts with authenticity. It is filled with the kind of pop and blues one might imagine cluttering up a jukebox in a biker bar but is much too self-aware to be the real thing. When the Stooges come bowling in with ‘Down on the Street’ it is to mark the characters’ end of days, with hard drugs ripping through the gang’s comradery and its leadership challenged. Play The Stooges or Fun House while flicking through Danny Lyon’s book of photographs and interviews with Chicago’s Outlaw MC, published in 1968,  on which the film is based, and you have a seemingly perfect corollary between the book and the record, but it is one that has been learnt – it was never a given that the two might co-exist.

Also filched from the Coop’s collection (and as worn on a t-shirt by a Birthday Party-era Nick Cave

Films like Dogtown and Bikeriders actualise the links that were once hidden or muted between the Stooges, hoodlum cyclists, surfers, hot rodders, rock ’n’ rollers and their Kustom Kulture supply sergeant, Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth. Back then, no one hired the Stooges to appear in a party scene in an outlaw biker movie, or licensed their records for the soundtrack, they weren’t catered to by Roth like he did with the Birthday Party, providing the illustration for their Junkyard album (1982) or by his peer Robt. Williams, who did the same for Guns and Roses’ Appetite for Destruction (1987), though conceivably they might have been.

The undertow created by the use of the Stooges on the Dogtown soundtrack ensures not only the now familiar thrill of hearing authentic 1970’s punk music before the fact of the Sex Pistols or Ramones but it also gives to the filmmakers and skater’s legacy an added layer of hip, a cool façade that is a wholly retrospective gloss. The knock on influence of the use of the band’s music in such films is that future movies about born losers that don’t feature the Stooges’ wah-wah throb on their soundtrack are all but unimaginable. The band have now been moved from the margin to the centre, outsider icons whose image on t-shirts sell in shopping malls like Roth’s once did in Woolworths.

As for Alan Vega he and his partner in Suicide, Martin Rev, they made their big screen impact this year in Civil War with ‘Ghost Rider’ a fitting soundtrack for the end of days. America’s alternative anthem, ‘Dream Baby Dream’, played over the closing credits. Bruce Springsteen’s cover of the later had been previously used in American Honey (2016)

Ugly Things on the Dirty Real

Two new reviews of Dirty Real . . . Frank Uhle has penned the one for Ugly Things and David Pitt for The Booklist. Uhle is the author of Cinema Ann Arbor, which is one of the best film books of this or any other decade, so colour me happy to read his positive take on my book. Pitt’s summary is equally pleasing:

"Stanfield is a perceptive and graceful writer; he imparts knowledge to the reader while never sounding like he is lecturing. ... While this is a period of film history that has been written about before, Stanfield's expertise and depth of knowledge make it feel like this is something we're seeing for the first time."

The Sweet Ride – the best there is at sex, surfing or cycling

I suspect that The Sweet Ride didn’t attract my attention back when I was researching Hoodlum Movies because it is not one thing or another even though it does have scenes with outlaw bikers. Malibu’s m’cyclists take second place to the surfing sequences, which in turn are somewhat overwhelmed by the tennis set and the sexual manoeuvrings of club members. In the end it is only the pulchritudinous attraction of Jacqueline Bisset . . . and the blast of Moby Grape playing house band at the psycho-delightful discotheque that remains in the memory.

Having bought the rights to William Murray’s 1967 paperback original, The Sweet Ride, 20th-Century Fox produced a hybrid drama that studio head, Darryl F. Zanuck, described as ‘tailored especially for youth. About the dropouts who live on the fringes of society, it may serve as an inspiration for those seeking to drop back in’ – sensationalism sold as a cautionary tale. Advertising copy for the film put a little more spice into the mix:

This is a wild trip into the world of the Now Generation. . . from the neon haunts of Vegas, the velvet traps of Hollywood to the Malibu beach parties.

Here are the people trying to make the Sweet Ride, that one moment when you know you're on top and you're the best there is at sex, surfing, or cycling. Add half a dozen beautiful girls to the scene and you get explosive right-now action-packed drama.

The exciting young cast of ‘THE SWEET RIDE’ includes Michael Sarrazin, sensational star of "The Flim-Flam Man," and Bob Denver, a TV favorite from ‘GILLIGAN'S ISLAND’. Gorgeous Jacqueline Bisset, who emerges topless from the California surf only to plunge her co-stars into mystery, violence and romance, joins Michele Carey, Lara Lindsay, Stacy King, and Corina Tsopei - The ‘Psychedelights’ - to give ‘THE SWEET RIDE’ all the sex appeal it can hold!

While in production, The Sweet Ride was described by the trade press as a ‘modern beach-scene drama’ and as a story about the ‘beach life of today’s go-go youth’. Its premise was an update on the out-of-date beach party film – the sweet ride to the darker side of that milieu. Sex, drugs and psychedelic music used to despoil the image of innocence portrayed in the Annette Funicello  and Frankie Avalon bikini beach blanket surf romps.

In 1965, William Murray had reported back to suburbia on the horrors of the Hells Angels for the Saturday Evening Post and had now worked these folk devils into his novel that exposed the bohemian lifestyles of a tennis pro, a jazz pianist and a surfer who live together in a Malibu seafront house. Their everyday world is turned upside down when Vickie ( Jacqueline Bisset) appears topless from the surf breaking on the beach beneath their pad.

The novel and film open with a young woman being thrown out of a car and left for dead at the side of the road. While the film is coy about what has happened, the novel is more explicit in detailing the sexual assault she had to endure. The story proceeds from this attention grabbing opening via a set of flashbacks featuring those who have had a role in the events that led up to the opening.

The victim, Vickie, is a movie starlet living a double-life; in love with a young surfer, Denny (Michael Sarrazin), but also hopelessly caught up in the sexual games played her producer. Hollywood glitz and glamour is set alongside the contumacy of Denny and his two housemates who avoid all forms of responsibility. Not one of them is invested in earning a living, Choo Choo Burns (Bob Denver) is a jobbing jazz man who hates rock ’n’ roll, Collie Ransom (Anthony Franciosa) is a tennis bum speeding into middle-age. Ciphers for the bohemian lifestyle of non-conformists. The contemporary sign of the times is the effort they and their peers put into avoiding the draft at all costs; the war in Vietnam is not their concern, and the police, like Vickie’s censorious parents and Denny’s drunken mother, are not to be trusted or held in any form of esteem.

Anthony Franciosa and Bob Denver create a frame for a Moby Grape poster

Their social world includes tennis clubs and dive bars, Beverly Hills mansions and beach-side crash pads, Las Vegas gambling rooms and Sunset Strip discotheques where Moby Grape perform in a swirl of a psychedelic light show with silent Keystone cop movies projected on the walls. In this detonating pop-art inevitable the young dance to the heavy beat sound of Skip Spence and his band mates and have their senses fried in that goofy cartoonish way that Hollywood of the time represented lysergic emanations.

Skip Spence goes full Pete Townshend

Variety’s reviewer was unimpressed: ‘Flat, but briefly exploitable programmer about young people. Needs strong support on grind duals . . . The Sweet Ride could sum up as Hell’s Angels’ Bikini Beach Party in Valley of the Dolls near Peyton Place.’ The film was all of those things and none of them, its hoodlum bikers, led by two familiar faces from previous roles in the outlaw cycle, Charles Dierkop and Lou Procopio, act and dress as if they were an Ed Roth caricature bought to life. Their club is called ‘Freaks’ (‘69’ in the novel) and its members are laden-down with swastikas, Iron Crosses and German helmets and exude not much more menace than Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) the biker figure in Beach Blanket Bingo.

after a raid on the Nazi costume box

Charles Dierkop and Lou Procopio

Similarly the surf scenes are less than spectacular and not enlivened one bit by the appearance of a surf Nazi, Rick the Stuka, who tries to give our hero a hard time. The Stuka is an obvious caricature of Mickie ‘da Cat’ Dora – the hippest of the hip among the real surfing fraternity – but Stuka’s role didn’t add up to much beyond reinforcing the idea that youth subcultures wantonly adopted Third Reich symbolism to make themselves as obnoxious as possible.

The Sweet Ride is a Beat Generation hold-over movie with an acute case of ennui and an inept studio’s attempt to reach the audience attracted by product from independents like AIP and to those whom figureheads like Ed  Roth peddled his goods, putting into play those elements of delinquent outlaw culture it understood as appealing to contemporary audiences. All of this it wrapped around the age-old melodramatic trope of the corruption of the young woman cast adrift in the big city. In its grab-bag approach to popular culture The Sweet Ride can only gesture in an enervated manner to the hip and the cool it so desperately, so very obviously, wanted to emulate. But yeah, Jacqueline Bisset, who steals the show, Moby Grape and a cameo from Lee Hazelwood, his title song sung by Dusty Springfield, might, on a good day, be enough to play out some spare time

Lee Hazelwood and Anthony Franciosa

***

Dusty’s re-recording of the title song was released as a single on Philips, it is marvellous. It was also the lead track on the soundtrack album helmed by Pete Rugolo. The Moby Grape’s contribution escaped inclusion but eventually, in edited form, was released on Vintage: The Very Best of Moby Grape (Columbia, 1993) and Sundazed’s enhanced release of their debut album (2007).

The only digital version currently available (or at least easy to attain) is a 20th Century Fox Cinema Archives release (2013), picture quality is okay but Panavision image is panned and scanned. The film and the Grape sequence are easily found on Youtube.

ZOWIE ONE – The Yardbirds Play New Brighton Tower Ballroom

One of the better discoveries made while researching my Yardbirds book was Caroline Silver’s The Pop Makers: British Rock’n’ Roll, the Sound, the Scene, the Action (Scholastic Book Services, 1966). It is a trove of pop lore with chapters on the Animals, Cilla Black, The Beatles, Dave Clark Five, Alexis Korner, Manfred Mann, Rolling Stones, The Who and the Yardbirds. The latter are singled out to exemplify the daily grind of playing the pop game; as was often the case the ’Birds were given a human, fallible, face and positioned as the anti-stars of the music machine.

Silver was a British writer translating the domestic scene for an American readership while many of the photographs, and all those of the Yardbirds, are unique to this volume. Caroline’s then husband, Nathan Silver was the photographer. If you can find a copy of the book snatch it up quick . . .I’ll be putting up a separate post on The Who’s chapter.

In the dressing rooms members of the groups talked, played cards, or read books and magazines as they waited for their turn to play. Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja, who had spent the early part of the evening visiting Jim's aunt in Liverpool, signed autograph books sent in from the audience. Keith and Sam went off to explore New Brighton and did not return until just before they had to perform. Jeff sat in a corner answering questions put to him by reporters from the local newspapers. "I wish I'd paid more attention at school," he said seriously, as the last reporter left, "because I'd find it much easier to express myself now if I had. What I liked or disliked never seemed to matter at school, but now I'm made to sit up and people expect me to be kind of a radiant person, perfect in every way. And I'm not; I've got terrible faults.It's terrible being expected to be a sort of god, because you don’t know in what way.

Rolling Stones, New Brighton Tower Ballroom, August 1964

The tower and ballroom burnt down in 1969

The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Bob Dawbarn – Nothing but the Truth

Bob Dawbarn, Max Jones, Ray Smith and Robin Rathborne. Snatched from HERE

From the mid-1950s until 1970, Bob Dawbarn [obituary here] was a key figure in Melody Maker’s editorial talent pool. A tireless advocate for jazz, he, like many of his peers, had to adapt his taste (and swallow bile) to incorporate the cuckoo in Trad’s nest, R&B.

In May 1964 he gave his personal response to the Rolling Stones, arguing with his colleague Ray Coleman, who liked the band, that it was ‘farcical to hear the accents, sentiments and experiences of an American Negro coming out of a white-faced London lad’. But more than their inauthenticity or long unkempt hair, the biggest crime the Stones committed, as far as Dawbarn was concerned, was that they didn’t swing.

In the face of rock’s eventual dominance of Melody Maker’s coverage of new musical trends, all to the detriment of jazz, it is quite a feat of perseverance by Dawbarn to have stayed the course and stuck with his job throughout the 1960s. But it is even more surprising to discover that before retiring from the game altogether he did a short stint at Sounds in its inaugural year. Mostly he wrote about his first love, jazz, career overviews of Jelly Roll Morton and Lester Young and the like, but he also returned to those far-off R&B days with a look back at The Yardbirds.

 It is a wholly work-a-day account ,which does little more than reinforce the clichés that had grown up around the band subsequent to its demise, though his first impression of the ‘Birds as the ‘loudest R&B group the world had ever known’ is well worth the price of entry and is undoubtedly true . . .

The motivation for Dawbarn’s blast of nostalgia was no doubt due to Sounds having published a rather splendid interview with Jeff Beck two weeks previously. Asked about his time in the Yardbirds, Beck was candid, thoughtful and, I think, honest in his response, which was certainly not his usual way of weighing up his experience of being the ‘sound of 1975 in 1965’

Looking back, how do you view your time with the Yardbirds now? What was it like?

Great. I was flying all the time in that group, everything was happening. Crawling out from underneath a car and playing in a group was great but on top of that it was such a great group. It was a progressive group at a time when everyone else had stopped, everyone else was just playing stock things but that group was the only one of its kind. It was probably the happiest time in my life.

What do you think would have happened if you could have stayed together?

Could have got worse, could have got better but at the time we broke up there was so much tension in the group that we couldn't have stayed together even if the music was good. And when Samwell-Smith left the group the Yardbirds seemed to lose their goal, he was such a strong influence.

What was it like with Jimmy Page in the group, was it better then?

It was over in a flash, a storm in a teacup, it never had a chance to get off the ground. When Jimmy Page was in, Samwell - Smith was out of the picture altogether, and Page played bass in the beginning. When he started playing guitar, it was about six months after Samwell-Smith had left and not long after that I left. It was a very short space of time when we played together. I repaid a favour, he got me a job with the Yardbirds originally and then he came into the same group and I left him the job of lead guitarist. I got sacked really ... I made it impossible for them to keep me on, I kept blowing dates.

Yes, you had a reputation for not turning up?

Yes.

A fair reputation?

Well, there was always a good reason. Something good on television or something ...

Mary Hughes even . . .

The Most Blueswailing Futurisitic Way-Out Heavy Beat Sound – The Yardbirds

Street date February 2025 . . .

Looking For Trouble – photographs by John Ingledew

After a visit to Southend’s Focal Point Gallery for the travelling show After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989–2024, I wondered whether John Ingledew’s study of early 1980s London skinheads would’ve have met the curator Johny Pitt’s criteria for inclusion despite being made at the beginning of the 1980s while the Soviet empire still appeared to have a future?  

Pitt’s photographers all self-identify as working-class, which might be another reason for his exclusion, but even if John Ingledew does call himself ‘working-class’ he wasn’t a part of the culture he was documenting – he was at the time an undergraduate on a graphic design course at St. Martins.  

His inspiration was Bruce Davidson’s Brooklyn Gang (1959) whose photographs too might fit  After the End of History’s further criteria to explore ‘the challenges and beauty of contemporary working class life’ though his work comes three decades too early and from the wrong side of the Atlantic. John Ingledew’s subjects are indisputably working-class but his images are of a journey that takes them faraway from any notion of pride in either their class identity or their subcultural affiliation. To my eye their life-choices (if that’s what they are) and whatever life-energy they have is entirely entropic –­ a spiralling down into a void. There’s no transcendence, no sense of a passage in time that will be outgrown like in Chris Killip’s The Station shot in 1985, a study of kids at a Gateshead punk club, or even with those youths Ingledew photographed for his classic study of Chelsea fans, A View from the Bridge (1998).

I can see the link to Davidson, Killip and others who have documented youth subcultures, and even to some of the work featured in the Southend show, but Ingledew’s subject’s connections with one another appear to be a sharing of nihilistic traits more than, say, any communal enthusiasm for Prince Buster, Discharge, Kerry Dixon or whomever or whatever.  In their embrace of nothing these skins have more a kinship with Larry Clark’s death tripping speed freaks in Tulsa (1971). 

The cropped hair, boots and braces all signify subcultural bona fides but these are youths lacking in the more refined style espoused by Two Tone and late 60s originals. Their gear is as shabby as their tattoos, which even today, in an age where facial decoration is fairly common-place, still shock – these are disfigurements, acts of self-harm, and not by any measure of taste, either good or bad, an enhancement.

And yet there is respect in these photographs, which is what I think John Ingledew brings to the situations he documents and gives to those he photographs. Unlike Larry Clark he may not have been part of the pack he was photographing but there’s also nothing voyeuristic or exploitative in his images; like Bruce Davidson and Chris Killip he had earned his subject’s trust. Looking For Trouble has my respect – Ingledew’s eye is true.

https://moonboy.space/

Dirty Real – The Wall Street Journal Knows . . .

As the 1960s ended, dirty was the thing to be. Uncleanliness was next to earthiness, and earthiness meant authenticity. After "The Dirty Dozen" (1967), movie-theater marquees bloomed with filth. Soon came "Dirty Heroes" (1967), then the Frank Sinatra vehicle "Dirty Dingus Magee" (1970) and then, most memorably, "Dirty Harry" (1971). Other movies, if not exactly smash hits, sounded the theme: "Dirty Little Billy" (1972), "Dirty Weekend" (1973), "The Dirty Dolls" (1973), "Dirty Mary Crazy Larry" (1974). Around the same time, boomer taste decreed that the artistic output of previous generations was irreparably phony, so young revolutionaries set out to find new ways to contrive verisimilitude—to make their artifice "real." To bring some sense to these linked fixations is the pursuit of "Dirty Real: Exile on Hollywood and Vine With the Gin Mill Cowboys," an essay collection by Peter Stanfield, a professor emeritus of film at the University of Kent. His focus is mostly on what might be called the meta-westerns—or anti-westerns, or acid westerns—of the late 1960s and early '70s. These works commented on or subverted the conventions of the genre, sometimes straying into the foggy realm of the experimental.

Mr. Stanfield's takes are entertaining, erudite without being abstruse, and often amusingly contrarian. They have the feel of an academic version of Quentin Tarantino riffing on the hidden themes of his favorite obscure movies, pausing from time to time to sample from critical opinion and toss in some behind-the-scenes gossip. A Life magazine reporter visiting the set of Dennis Hopper's "The Last Movie" (1971) observed that "by 10 p.m. almost 30 members of the company were sniffing coke or had turned on with grass, acid or speed" and was startled to find an unknown young woman in a drenched nightgown standing on a ledge outside his window in the rain asking, "Do you mind if I come in?" After "Easy Rider", starring Peter Fonda and Hopper (who also directed), proved to be an unexpected box-office sensation in 1969, ancient studio bosses, hopelessly out of touch with the youth culture, either departed the scene voluntarily or found themselves pushed out. The Fondas and Hoppers took over, like court jesters handed the keys to the kingdom.

And how did they do? They lived up to the verdict on the 1960s that Fonda delivered in "Easy Rider": "We blew it." In "The Last Movie," Hopper plays a movie stunt coordinator working on location in Peru (where indeed "The Last Movie" was shot). The film was meant to serve as a harsh commentary on America's alleged depredations as a colonial power, but Hopper took the critique "to another level," Mr. Stanfield writes admiringly. Hopper implicated himself and his film crew "as being equally guilty in the process of destabilizing and despoiling an indigenous culture and society in the name of his art and the financiers who . . . bankrolled his movie." Nearly everyone loathed the film, which was barely released. "Every bit as indulgent, cruel and thoughtless as the dream factory films it makes such ponderous fun of," declared Vincent Canby in the New York Times. Hopper found himself escorted from Hollywood's throne to its doghouse. He wouldn't direct a film again for nine years. Yet Mr. Stanfield makes us want to see his infamous failure for ourselves: "If Hopper's modernist aesthetic was secondhand, a set of borrowed elements from the avant-garde . . . in the context of a well-resourced Hollywood movie it was nevertheless utterly unique."

Mr. Stanfield is splendid in his exegeses, not least in such films as "The Hired Hand" (1971, starring and directed by Fonda) and "The Shooting" (a 1966 Monte Hellman film that starred Jack Nicholson and Warren Oates). He makes both of these forgotten items sound vital and meaningful. Hidden within "The Hired Hand," a leisurely film in which Fonda and Oates play two wanderers who stop at the home of the Fonda character's estranged wife, Mr. Stanfield finds a meta-theme about cycles of return: "The story places beginnings up against endings, motifs of leaving echoed as returns, moments of drift refigured at their most amorphous as points of decision." Similarly, "The Shooting"—a baffler in which two men (Oates and Will Hutchins) and a gunslinger (Mr. Nicholson) are hired by a mysterious unnamed woman for a tracking expedition that seems to lead nowhere except a fatal shootout—strikes Mr. Stanfield as an existential tale of nihilism and despair. Though it showed at a French film festival in 1966, American audiences didn't get a look at it until its modest general release in 1972. "Vagueness and doubt, enigma and mystery, questions without answers run through the film as if they were a vein of pyrite, attractive in itself but still fool's gold," writes Mr. Stanfield, not disapprovingly. What was supposed to be the journeyman Hellman's breakthrough as director, a car-racing movie and disguised western called "Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971), also turned out to be too arty by half. Despite Esquire calling it "the movie of the year," it wasn't "the cultural event its financial backers thought they were buying," writes the author, but rather a film with a "dedicated sense of ennui and estrangement." Hellman (who died in 2021 at age 91) never did have a hit, though Mr. Tarantino is a fan. Notional revolutions sometimes have a way of sputtering out. Mr. Stanfield notes that in the 18 months it took Hopper to edit "The Last Movie" in 1970-71, taste had already begun to change. By 1973, when Sam Peckinpah's anti-western "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" flopped ("a film about the monetization of the West"), the culture was feeling nostalgic for simpler times: "The Sting," "Paper Moon" and "American Graffiti" all appeared in 1973 too. No one wondered what any of them were about. The punks and rebels learned what many other artists have discovered to their frustration: The audience gets a say in how your career goes.

By Kyle Smith

Mr. Smith is the Journal's film critic.

Mike Jahn – Making The Scene with Iggy and Lori

First published in August 1970, The Scene is subtitled a ‘documentary novel’ that cuts between the fictitious story of starfucker Lori Thomas and interviews with anonymous real-life players. The book exploits the same prurient material on groupies as Jenny Fabian’s 1969 tale, Rolling Stone’s cover story on electric ladies from the same year and the film Groupies (1970). The title refers to the rock scene, the groupie scene, making the scene and to Steve Paul’s Scene club, New York, where Lori works the angles with touring British groups, sucking and fucking her way to oblivion. Before she makes the ultimate scene Jahn chucks in a deux ex machina and resets her sights not on bedding the next superstar but on becoming one herself.

         Before her debut performance, Lori reflects back on seeing The Stooges making their scene at The Pavilion, Flushing Meadow Park a year earlier:

Lori lay in bed thinking. Last summer she spent one weekend out at The Pavilion, which is in the middle of the 1965 World's Fair site in New York. It was beautiful – rock and roll and beautiful – and she had never seen anything like this kid, this kid Iggy, the lead singer for The Stooges, formerly The Psychedelic Stooges. Iggy had acquired a reputation as an oddity. A beautiful, strange oddity from Ann Arbor, Michigan. She had heard of him from a lot of people and saw ads in The Village Voice that showed Iggy lying on stage with the microphone stuck in his mouth like a Tootsie Roll Pop. He was lying on his stomach eating the microphone and behind him the bassist was smiling and pushing the tip of his bass into Iggy's ass. Or at least that's the way it looked. She had flipped, she remembered, really flipped!

The show was their New York debut, one of two sets the Stooges played in support of the MC5. Jahn had covered the gig for the New York Times where he emphasised the band’s performance art credentials: ‘The Stooges probably belong Off Broadway more than to the world of rock ’n’ roll . . . They are best classified as a ‘psychedelic’ group. Their loud droning sound is spiced with the slippery notes of Ron Asheton, a guitarist, and the guttural howlings of a singer, known only as Iggy. . . He goes through simple but tortured gymnastics built around a Midas-like ability to turn everything he touches into a phallic object. He caresses himself, he rolls and squirms’.

In his novel, Jahn’s three column inches are amplified and expanded – Iggy’s embodiment of carnal expression now pushed to the fore:

There were maybe 2500 people sitting on the flat concrete in front of the stage. The floor of the pavilion— the old New York State Pavilion from the fair—is a hundred-foot map of New York State. The stage is set at about Canada. The bathrooms are just south of Long Island. The group was introduced to all these people sitting on the ground on a cool, windy night. The drummer, guitarist, and bassist took the stage and tuned and Iggy walked up a ramp and onto the stage. He was wearing tennis sneakers and dungarees cut down to make shorts. Nothing else. He is about five-foot-eight and very wiry. He walked on the stage and right as he did somebody yelled, ’Iggy sucks off Jim Morrison’. Iggy reacted like a psychedelic spring. ‘Suck my asshole’, he screamed. He walked on stage and the set began. The music was all one—all one big clap of sound that sort of rumbled and droned ominously. No part, save an occasional guitar riff of merit, was separable from any other. All attention was on Iggy, and the group provided his soundtrack.

Per Nilsen and Carlton Sandercock, The Stooges: The Truth Is In The Sound We Make (2022)

He held the microphone and moved. He moved like no other performer she had ever seen. I mean, Lori thought, I have seen unusual performers. Peter Townshend is pretty strange in the way he moves. Jim Morrison is weird in a camp way. Frankie Gadler of NRBQ is strange. But this kid Iggy Stooge, this former high school valedictorian and most-likely-to-succeed was like nothing else. He held the mike with all this droning, cataclysmic noise behind him, and he bent at the waist. He bent over backwards and he nearly touched his head to the floor. He massaged the mike stand. A photographer standing there remarked that Iggy was incredible because everything he touched turned into a cock! He jerked off the mike stand. He was on his back writhing on the stage, he was on his feet leaning to gravitationally impossible angles, holding the mike stand and singing about not having any fun. No fun. He represents the sexual boredom of the seventeen-year-old radical, it seemed. This is his thing; the thing that made him popular with the New York rock and hip literati. He went to the drummer and took a drum stick and scratched his chest and stomach until he began to bleed! No fun! He is turned off by society and so he is totally turned inward, to himself. Autoerotic rock and roll! He can't get it outside so he gets it inside, by turning everything he touches into a cock! Fantastic, Lori thought that night. Iggy scratched his chest and belly with a drum stick and then with his fingernails, and then he was singing right by the edge of the stage. He was singing about fucking you, and doing this to you, and he was pointing at a girl sitting a few feet from the stage, sitting with her gorgeous blonde ass on top of Syracuse! Then, a kid a few feet behind her gives Iggy the finger! This kid with short hair and a college jacket gives Iggy Stooge the finger. Iggy stops singing, crouches. Gets down on all fours. Then he springs, he springs into the audience, and lands on all fours a little bit in front of the kid, who now is wondering why he is here. Iggy is on all fours, and he has this very bad expression on his face, and from the stage behind him this music is pounding and crushing across Flushing Meadow Park. Iggy is on all fours, with this very bad expression. He is staring at the kid who gave him the finger, and slowly he begins to walk, on all fours toward the kid. The kid begins to sweat and look around for friends. There is a noise. The audience stands up, and Lori cannot see. There is shouting and much pushing and all 2,500 people are standing, straining to see. Iggy is in the middle of the crowd for another minute or so. Then you see him crawl back on stage, out of the crowd. The crowd is aflame, for reasons they do not know. Iggy is challenging everything they have come to accept about concert relationships, and about male sexuality. He is so goddamn sensual. The males with the short hair and the Corvettes feel it and they don't know what to do with the feeling. Some of them are throwing containers of orange drink at him. Iggy is back on stage. Still on his hands and knees he crawls across stage and grabs the guitarist. Instantly, the Midas touch; the guitarist turns into a phallic totem. Iggy drags him down, still playing; the guitarist is still playing. Iggy hugs his legs for a time, then lets him go and crawls off.

Iggy crawls off behind the bank of amplifiers that rim the back of the stage. He is behind there for a few minutes, the music crashing, and then the spotlight picks him up crawling out from behind the amps on the other side. Rock and roll! What is going on? Iggy can be seen at the far right corner of the stage. He gets into a racing start position. He stands like a sprinter ready for the race. Then he sprints wildly across stage at full speed and does a perfect racing dive into the audience, which is still standing! Head first, hands first! He makes it all the way to Albany, feet together, hands together in front of him, and crashes onto the milling heads, taking out about twenty-five people! There is more screaming and pushing. Everyone is trying to see, jumping to see. You can't see. Lori couldn't see. A minute goes by and Iggy crawls back out of the audience and onto the stage. He stands and finishes the song and the group walks off. They have been onstage only about fifteen minutes.

A month or so after the book’s publication in October 1970, using the release of the Stooges’ second album Fun House as an excuse, Jahn returned once more to the Flushing Meadow Park performance; this time in his widely syndicated column ‘Sounds of the 70s’:

Peter Townshend of The Who used to destroy guitars at the end of a set. On those occasions, the audience would be drawn, transfixed, to the scene of the destruction like the traditional moth to a flame. With Iggy it is the same thing. He writhes. He moans. He seems totally self-involved. He rubs his body, he con-torts, bending over backwards until his head nearly touches the floor. He rolls his tongue around. He makes grotesque shapes with his lips. He is very ugly and precociously sexual. The audiences love it. They don't understand it. Neither does he, most likely. But they are drawn to watch him with mouths agape.

Watch the freak! It’s great fun.

Consider this episode from the Stooges' concert of last year at the Pavilion in New York. The Pavilion is the former New York State Pavilion at the 1964-65 World's Fair. The ground is a giant map of New York State. For this occasion, the stage was set up along the Canadian border. The other end, the men's rooms, were just south of Long Island. The audience was seated on the floor, on top of New York State.

Iggy did his normal writhing, then spotted a blonde sitting on Syracuse. He stared at her a long moment until a kid behind her made an obscene gesture in his direction. Iggy sprang into the audience. He landed on all fours and began crawling toward the kid, slowly. Just as he reached him, the audience stood up. Much pushing and screaming for a few min-utes, then Iggy crawled back out of the audience. He crawled to the guitarist, pulled him down on the floor, mauled him for a few minutes, then let him go. Then Iggy disappeared behind a bank of amplifiers, emerging on the other side a few minutes later. He got to a racing start position, sprinted across stage, and made a perfect head-first racing dive into the audience, knocking down about 25 people in the vicinity of Albany.

Earlier in the show, he took a drumstick and raked it across his chest until he started to bleed. After another concert he was heard to lament the fact that he hadn't bled enough. While the previous routine was going on, the band never let up for a second on its wall-of-music. A full-color, four-part-harmony version of this episode is included in my just -published novel, The Scene.

Everybody has something to sell.

         Six months later Jahn once more brought up the subject of Iggy this time because artist Richard Bernstein also had something to sell: nude portraits of the Beatles, Jim Morrison, Candy Darling and Iggy; the latter one of ‘the new toys of New York pop society’. Jahn thought the Iggy picture was a ‘masterpiece. It’s an actual photo, of the real Iggy, shot by fashion photographer Bill King and turned into prints by Bernstein. “I’ve been selling it from my studio to a lot of people in the music scene”, he says. “Everybody has one”. This edition is only 100 copies. The print shows Iggy leaning slightly to one side, absent-mindedly scratching one arm’.

One proud owner of a print, Lillian Roxon, had it prominently displayed in her apartment [HERE] – giving her no small pleasure

For more on the Stooges’ Flushing Meadow Park sets see Michael S. Begnal, The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967–71: Lost in the Future (2022)

Up on Devastation Hill – Isle of Wight Festival 1970

. . . or ‘sunk ankle deep in urine mud’

Photographs by Jim Marshall and David Hurn

Trouble hit the third Isle of Wight Music Festival when thousands of kids camped on a steep slope which they spontaneously named Devastation Hill. From it you looked down on the 38-acre Festival arena, which was encircled by two sets of nine-foot-high corrugated iron fencing and patrolled by uniformed security guards with snarling Alsatian dogs. There was an excellent view of the action and the acoustics were great. However, the organisers, Fiery Creations had signed an agreement to keep people off the hill, which was National Trust property and not part of the festival site. They might have realised this was a physically impossible task if they had listened, say, to one kid who had taken three days to hitch down from Scotland: ‘All the bread I have is a few shillings for food. I don't have a ticket and I had no intentions of buying one, but I didn't imagine there'd be such a perfect free pitch up here. I was planning on sneaking into the arena if I had to, but I hadn't counted on those bloody dogs. Anyway, I'm sticking here’. He hammered home the last peg of his tent, unrolled a funky old sleeping bag and looked round at the mushrooming population of Devastation Hill. ‘You know’, he said, ‘Some guys were saying we ought to storm the fences and pull them down. Did you ever hear such bullshit? They don't recognize a cool scene when they have one’.

Camped on the Hill and in Desolation Row, a line of polythene and canvas shacks along a hedge, was a contingent of French, Algerian and American anarchists and street fighters engaged in a debate on the dialectics of the festival. Mick Farren, one of the British White Panthers [here], summed up their position: ‘We are saying that rock is an energy source which can be used to move and unite the people, and that its only function as a commodity is as a source of funds for the deprived. We are demanding free admission and free soup’.

Earth was a San Francisco publication, which explains the use of Jim Marshall’s photographs. Equally celebrated for his reportage, David Hurn is a British photographer, as are the writers Peter Stansill and Neil Lyndon. The former was editor at International Times, which might explain why Mick Farren gets a name check, the latter journalist later found infamy with his No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism (1992). The tenor of the piece is end of times . . . urine mud even.