Dirty Real – Deadline May 1, 2024

Dirty Real is published on May 1st . . .

Publisher’s Weekly has had a head start:

Dirty Real: Exile on Hollywood and Vine with the Gin Mill Cowboys

Peter Stanfield. Reaktion, $25 (344p) ISBN 978-1-78914-862-6

Stanfield (A Band with Built-In Hate), a film professor emeritus at the University of Kent, delivers a discerning deep dive into counterculture films of the late 1960s and early ’70s. According to Stanfield, such actors as Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson played down the glamour that had previously characterized Hollywood stars in favor of grittier personas that reflected an emerging understanding that movies were no longer “means of escape but a means of approaching a problem.” Astute analysis of key films of the era reveal how they tackled topical issues. For instance, Stanfield contends that Fonda’s The Hired Hand (1971) used the western genre as a backdrop to promote themes of female empowerment, and that Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970) regards with distrust the “bourgeois slumming” of its protagonist, who maintains the privileges of his middle-class background despite seeking out a more “authentic” lifestyle working in oil fields. Stanfield shares Rafelson’s skepticism toward the period’s vogue for authenticity, suggesting that leading actors, writers, and directors showed “an acute nostalgia for the gutter none had known at first hand,” and that the predominantly white casts portrayed a “social realism [that] did not include the reality, or even fantasy, of black lives.” It’s a sharp study of the contradictions of post–flower power cinema.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781789148626

ANOTHER ASTERICK-AWFUL DANCE! . . . The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin – University of Kent 1967 and 1971

I’ve eaten a good many meals in Rutherford Dining Hall, the idea of Led Zeppelin playing there, as rumour had it, seemed as fanciful as them playing the even smaller venue Bridge Place Country Club (now a restaurant) in a village near to Canterbury. I’ve been there once and I can’t figure out where they would have played – all the rooms seem entirely inadequate for a rock band. . .

The Who had played Eliot Dining Hall the year before, which is the same size as Rutherford, holds approximately 600 bodies, but then, as it turned out, the event took place in the Sports Hall and not where I bought chips and beans.

The gig was part of Zeppelin’s ‘Back to the Clubs’ tour and their sixth UK jaunt, the idea was to reconnect with their audience. . . . which Robert Plant, at least for this reviewer, singularly failed to do . . .

Back when they played in Bridge in December 1968, Zeppelin were billed locally as ‘The Yardbirds’, possibly the last time they were promoted as such in Britain.

Before the three original Yardbirds up and quit on him in the Spring of 1968, Jimmy Page had played alongside Keith Relf, Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja for the University’s Summer Ball, 1967 . . . Their performance was slammed in the student paper InCant.

No Ball!

NOT AGAIN! YES, AGAIN I’M AFRAID – ANOTHER ASTERICK-AWFUL DANCE!

The really significant word in the above statement/exclamation is ‘Dance’. Friday the 2nd of June was to be the University of Kent at Canterbury Summer Ball. What we actually got was a rather upper-second-rate hop.

What price non-culmination? About £200 in the red! Much of this debt probably due to the £300-odd paid for 50-minutes’ ‘worth’ of un-danceable Yardbirds.

To cap it all, the buffet served day-old lemon mousse . . . . the horror

In defence of The Yardbirds, there were complaints about nearly every band subsequently booked for freshers week or the end of year ball. You couldn’t dance to any of them and they were always too loud and money was inevitably lost . . . Of all the bands who played the University in the 1960s and first half of the 1970s – Manfred Mann, Kinks, The Move, Procol Harum, Ten Years After, The Who – only Fairport Convention, twice, turned a profit. University gigs were subsidised and always ran at a loss, but lemon mousse, at least, was never again on the menu . . .

The Who Left The Campus Stunned – University of Kent (May 16, 1970)

“Darling, they’re playing our song . . .”

A week before the release of Live At Leeds, The Who played Eliot College Dining Room, University of Kent, on Saturday May 16, 1970. Capacity around 600. It would be the last University pick-up gig they would play before the big American money rolled in and made such intimate appearances redundant.

Published lists give the date of this gig as Friday May 8 but that show appears to have been cancelled and rescheduled for the 16th.

“THE two hour performance given by The Who on Saturday night must rate as one of the most memorable events ever to take place at U.K.C. The total effect of the volume of sound, musical violence and the sheer brilliance of The Who, seemed to leave the campus stunned and drained of energy for days afterwards.”

The reviewer was genuinely beside himself and the occasion deemed significant enough for the student paper, InCant, to devote a whole page to the review. The uncredited photographs are the best that the paper ran of any of the many live events at the University.

Two attendees of the show took a little pause and moved past immediate impressions to give voice to what would become The Who’s defining characteristic post-Tommy, nostalgia

InCant (June 17, 1970)

“the whole evening was pervaded with an air of unreality, an air which surely is present at a Judy Garland comeback or an Alamein reunion, where the audience sit on the edge of their seats waiting for ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow ‘or ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’.”

But if the sense that The Who were trapped by their own history and the demands of their audience, a bigger concern was with rock’s solipsistic turn:

“The mistake so many progressive groups make is to ‘intellectualise’ their music, to make it intricate for intricate’s sake”.

Ann Le Sauvage and David Rooney’s final point in their letter perfectly encapsulated the state of play:

"The Who seemed an image from the past simply because they played to and for their audience and not for themselves; the fact that this is a point at all, illustrates completely our disillusionment with today's popular music”.

Third generation rock and roll could not come soon enough. . . but meanwhile you could play pinball

“Playing pinball is a challenge to modern society. It is man versus machines. You try and beat the machine”.

“Playing the machine is a good analogy with life. You lose most of the time, but you do get occasional replays”.

“I think you find mainly scientists using the machines – they are more neurotic and that’s why they play”.

InCant (March 18, 1970)

One More Questionnaire: Carm Deleff aka Marc Bolan

AMBITION: to make the transition . . . How many questionnaires did Bolan complete over the years? By 1975 he was a past master at the game and this must be among the best (NME August 30, 1975). OCCUPATION: interior mental decorator. That’ll do me . . . HOBBY: Snurding. Yeah, mine too! And he was always THE Mod – CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS: Stealing a G.S (scooter). Go ahead and dig in while you chew on some alligator steak

Riding the Circle Line to Ladbroke Grove with Alice Cooper

Before Alice Cooper became the big thing and media darlings with ‘School’s Out’ their core appeal in Britain was to freaks and rockers. What you have here is a few choice cuts from before the deluge that mostly focus on the underground press, Frendz and IT in particular. Here’s what Mick Farren and Nick Kent, among others, had to say about the band who ‘act as a mirror – people see themselves through us’.

Alice Cooper’s CBS distributed Straight label UK releases

‘a rock and roll band made up of mean Hollywood drag queens who disembowl chickens and beat each other on stage, and are really the kind of band that I’d like to play in’ – Mick Farren

Greg Shaw, Jukebox Jury Creem

Greg Shaw thinks it is all about the Stooges, he wouldn’t be the last

You wanna know all about third generation rock n roll then look no further . . . . Alice with Steve Mann in Frendz

. . . some more third generation proselytising with Jamie Mandelkau in IT

“Got me so hot I could scream . . .”

‘Alice Cooper are supreme pooff rock . . .’ Mick Farren at his most lazy, touting the consensus.

John Peel, Singles: Disc and Music Echo (March 25, 1972)

‘This really is an odd group to come to terms with . . .’ – John Peel

All change and mind the gap: ‘The sight of rocking hordes of 12+ boppers at Alice Cooper’s Wembley concert would seem to prove that his efforts in the direction of bizzaro teen appeal are paying dividends’. – Mick Farren

Below, Myles Palmer, on the eve of the Wembley concert, gives a perfect summation of where things then stood . . . a worthy quote line in every paragraph, but the conclusion will do: ‘As music it’s not half bad, as showbiz it’s riveting and as trash it is absolutely incomparable’.

Dave “Boss” Goodman arrives late to the party . . . While Nick Kent gets the scoop on the Coop after Wembley (July 1972):

While America sinks in a mass debauch of drugs, sex andviolence, the Coopers just keep on getting bigger and bigger. They are the first of the third-generation rock bands to really make it big, while others like Lou Reed and the Velvets and the Stooges were perhaps too wild and dangerous to catch on The Coopers act, while it is extremely entertaining, is in reality not half as powerful as some would have us imagine.

The Final Fall Into Depravity – New York Dolls Play Warwick

“Yes dahhhlings they’re here. Divinely decadent, superbly sexy, long, lean and licentious – dig this if you can”

Two great plugs for the Dolls in the Warwick Boar, University of Warwick’s student rag, for their show on November 22, 1973 . . .

Given that the text mentions Billy I’d bet it is cribbed from somewhere or other, but it is great advertising copy regardless . . . Below, an editorial from the the same issue draws a parallel between the Dolls and George Melly, which I for one full approve of. . . an encouragement to moral laxity. Let the debauchery begin

Well, did Bert Jansch turn up?

Lesson #2: How to piss off progressive rock fans

Its Inmates Absurd: The Velvet Underground at the University of Kent 1971

“After about the first two years we got talking. . .”

– Maureen Tucker on rehearsing with the Velvet Underground

As a live proposition, The Velvet Underground, sans Lou Reed, existed for an improbable 2 ½ years, which included two tours of Europe in 1971 and 1972. In England, Autumn 1971, most of their gigs were on the burgeoning university and college circuit. On November 4, they made an appearance at the University of Kent. The big recent attractions on campus had been The Who, Eliot Dining Hall, May 1970 and in March 1971, in the Sports Hall, Led Zeppelin. More generally, student entertainment was provided by middle-ranking progressive rock bands – Mick Abrahams, Colosseum, Blodwyn Pig and local heroes Caravan. Kent alumni Spirogyra were an ever present feature. In all likelihood, the bookers thought the Velvet Underground would fit right into this scene. For their drummer, Maureen Tucker, the VU were always the exception to such trends.

The Velvets performed in the Rutherford Dining Hall to a positive response, if the reviewer for the student paper InCant was any indicator. He or she considered them to be a ‘genuine rock and roll band in the American sense, as opposed to the likes of Deep Purple, Black Sabbath’. The reviewer delighted in their choice of covers ­ – Dixie Cups’ ‘Chapel of Love’ and standards ‘Turn On Your Love Light’ and ‘Spare Change’. Lou Reed songs ‘Sweet Nuthin’, ‘Sister Ray’, ‘After Hours’ and, the ‘beautifully corny’ (!?!), ‘White Light/White Heat’ were highlights, with the latter described as ‘funky’ by Doug Yule. InCant’s critic agreed.

The interview with the only original member of the band, Maureen Tucker, is a peach. Asked about the shifts in the line-up, she said:

It’s been such a gradual change that to me anyway there’s been no apparent effect. After about the first two years we got talking . . . it was a mutual agreement that we were kind of getting sick of going on stage playing 30 minute songs. It’s just not original after a while, so Lou (Reed) started writing more four minute songs, rock and roll songs. Now it’s even more regular rock and roll than it ever was.

What happened to Nico? She wanted to go off on her own and be a big star

Like most of the events held by the Student’s Union, The Velvet Underground gig lost money; the organisers putting lack of interest, it was suggested, down to the fact the band’s line-up had changed. On that basis they had tried to cancel but were unable to break the contract. Steeleye Span proved to be a bigger draw.

Back in April 1971, student Helen Chastel had provided InCant with a review of Loaded, soon to be released in the UK. It is one the best summaries of the VU I’ve read.

Proposition: for consistent and versatile genius in rock the Velvet Underground (or V.U.s to the cognoscenti) are equalled only to Dylan and the Stones. Don't ask questions if you dispute it, write your own review. If you deny it, you are a Quintessence or Andy Williams fan and not worth bothering with.

Helen clearly didn’t think they belonged with the progressive mediocrities. She was a total fan, she’d bought her copy of Loaded in Washington last Christmas while on an exchange to the States and she knew someone who knew Lou Reed – ‘virtuoso extraordinaire, ex-child prodigy, now repudiator of drugs and hippies, mythical recluse . . . Sainthood is all in the mind.’

How many recognise themselves in the line ‘The deep sleep of a suburban upbringing can be shattered by sudden exposure to such a group’? Faced with VU & Nico, Helen ‘saw darkness of which I knew nothing, saw an extreme weariness, people born to die. Eliot (her college at Kent) life became petty, its inmates absurd.’ Reed, she wrote, had a ‘clear and cliché-less view of modern city life’, White Light/White Heat extended even further ‘into a chaos of light, blood, heat and noise . . . The third album is a surfacing, a return to verbal precision’. . . Lou Reed, Saint of the City. Helen Chastel, Saint of VU fans. . .

On that same tour of British Universities, the VU entertained Warwick University’s student cohort. Genesis P-Orridge’s COMUS providing support (they also played at Kent in May 1972). Ad and review from the Warwick Boar student paper

‘The Velvet Underground from whom great things were expected . . .’ Like at Kent, attendance fell below expectations.

Where The Who and The Velvet Underground Meet: John Hofsess' Palace of Pleasure (1967)

Inspired by Frank Uhle’s history of Michigan’s campus film societies, Cinema Ann Arbor (2023), I went browsing in the pages of The Michigan Daily. It’s a great resource for anyone with an interest in many of the topics this blog gets obsessed with [HERE] and it’s guaranteed to give up more than a few unexpected delights. A search for the ‘Velvet Underground’ produced among many things an advert for John Hofsess’ Black Zero: screened on October 17–18, 1968 as part of the ‘Underground at the Fifth Forum – Flicks & Jams’ programme – ‘poetry by Leonard Cohen and music by Velvet Underground’ was used to elevate the film’s attraction (and my interest).

 

Canadian filmmaker Hofsess and his kaleidoscopic experimental film were new to me.

Black Zero was described in the advert’s blurb as ‘an underground feature in color which demonstrates that split-screen dual projection can be used more creatively than in Chelsea Girls’. Also included were three lines of press hype: ‘A masterpiece! The finest experimental film in two generations – Boston Avatar. ‘This 1st prize winner is without question a sexual art’ – Vancouver Sun. ‘Filled with indescribable terrors and beauties! – London Free Press

I went looking for those indescribable terrors and beauties . . . I didn’t find an on-line stream but there are enticing extracts, with critical commentary, that are being used to promote a recent blu-ray release of Hofsess’ small catalogue of film works [HERE]. Palace of Pleasure features and pairs, as intended by Hofsess, Black Zero with the earlier Redpath 25.  The original soundtrack is provided by The Gass Company, another unknown, but they have Reed and Morrison’s guitar sound down pat, best heard in Redpath 25. In Black Zero, their instrumental sections feature a Cale-esque viola drone that seamlessly segues into the real thing with the VU’s ‘European Son’ followed by ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’. Hofsess had a good ear.

When his film was screened in Los Angeles in January 1968 it was billed with Ron Nameth’s Velvet Underground: Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which cemented a link with Warhol. Palace of Pleasure, however, is more than that relationship — it is a lexicon of contemporary experimental cinema; equally infused with Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, Stan Brakhage’s abstracts and Kenneth Anger’s oeuvre. Such a lineage should demand that the film be better known, but I’ve failed to find anything in the key histories of the avant-garde. Maybe Jonas Mekas and his peers didn’t take to Hofsess, finding him too derivative. But if cinephiles have ignored or remained ignorant of the film then rock’s cultists should surely have found their way to make the work more visible, especially as The Velvets are not the only contemporary group featured; their two tracks are preceded by two from The Who’s first LP, ‘The Ox’ and ‘My Generation’, which are played in their entirety across Redpath 25.

Bringing together The Who and the Velvet Underground through the filter of Pop Art is not a difficult move to make – see A Band With Built-In Hate – both Cale and Reed have talked about The Who’s influence on their artful dissonance and songwriting, but to see the two groups tethered to each other in an experimental film is suggestive of a more complex set of aesthetic interconnections, less a posthumous theoretical construct than the actual fact of the matter. You can find numerous historical intimations of a pop/art conversation but none, I think, quite so unmediated as found in Palace of Pleasure. Here, at least, Hofsess’ film is entirely unique.

Redpath 25 is the more overtly ‘Pop’ of the two films in its use of a familiar iconography that in one screen focuses on a young woman’s face. Lit by oversaturated red filter, her image strikes a contrast with the monochrome of the Vietnam war actualities projected in the right-hand screen. But, unlike pop art male fantasies that used the objectified figure of a young women to explore cultures of consumption, the fantasia on display here is one of female desire – the woman picks and cuts away at a sheet of silver foil to find packaged behind the film her ideal male lover. Quick cuts to images of male genitals and a view of her fellating the man follow. Meanwhile, masculine fantasies of death and destruction play out on the other screen.

The sonic riptide of The Who’s ‘The Ox’ provides a noisy urgency that tugs away at the passive slow burn of the otherwise inchoate death-obsessed imagery. ‘My Generation’ continues the onslaught but also comments on the film frames that follow of white weddings (and marriages that end in court) – Townshend’s mid-sixties bete noir of young marrieds here made manifest. Leonard Cohen’s poetry carries even more of the thematic weight. Black Zero, with the VU, continues the theme of emotional discord over images of a marital bed occupied by a couple who become distracted from their love making, disengaged from one another, when a second man appears; perhaps the one the woman (and Lou Reed) had been waiting forever to arrive?

Los Angeles Free Press (January 5, 1968)

Los Angeles Free Press (June 7, 1968)

“On the same programme will be John Hofsess’ dual-screen Palace of Pleasure and Ben Van Meter’s outrageous Acid Camp” The latter another film I should probably seek out . . .

Black to Comm – Review Pin-Ups 1972

Really pleased by this review from Black to Comm’s Chris Stigliano on his Blog to Comm pages: here (January 3, 2024):

“You like your old rock papers and mags with all of those flipped out "gonzo" writers who either made you glad or mad? Still have those T. Rex singles snuggled in your collection? Did you get your fashion tips from Lisa Robinson's "Eleganza" column (or, if you were a Clevelander, Charlotte Pressler's "Pizzaz")? Well, this one one book, and perhaps one of the ONLY ones extant, that will tell you the plain and simple truth that you were right all along!”

UGLY THINGS – The Creation: In The Beginning

Very pleased to have a feature article in the latest issue (#64) of the great Ugly Things

Copies can be had from here – direct from the publisher or with cheaper shipping in the UK from 14th Floor Music here

There was a small formatting glitch in the print edition and a column of text went AWOL. So, if you’re interested in what Penny Valentine had to say on Ealing’s finest, here’s what’s gone astray:

Teenage R 'n' R: The Shakin' Street Gazette

Launched in October 1973, the in-house SUNY Buffalo State student paper, The Shakin’ Street Gazette, (initially part of Strait) opened with an observation and a statement of intent – a manifesto almost, from editor Gary Sperrazza: teenage music, the punk muse, was back.

Sperrazza summarised what has been lost since The Beatles asked to hold your hand and second-generation rock ’n’ rollers edged into middle-age. Things had got baggy and elastic, the sound of ever longer guitar solos . . . commerce, sell-out, musical redundancy were all in play. But . . .

‘slowly but surely, there has been a trend developing concerning a rekindling of interest in pop consciousness/Teenage music in the 70s. A whole new generation has been weaned on the Beatles and the 60’s, as the Beatles were with Berry and the 50’s . . . There’s hope’.

In Part 2 Sperrazza surveyed the group scene, Brownsville Station, The Sweet (he loved The Sweet), Aerosmith and Slade were the tub thumpers, Badfinger, Raspberries and Blue Ash proffered pastiche, while Wackers and Big Star satirised and Blue, Curt Boetcher and David Beaver (who?) got mellow.

That list is hardly inspiring, but as the paper went through its 18 editions some of those names were dropped and a good many others, now very familiar, would be added.

Part 3 opens with the lyrics of Big Star’s ‘Thirteen’, a pitch perfect introduction. Alex Chilton’s band ‘suppressed masters of pop/rock and Teenage music. No matter how I fight the album always ends up on my turntable’.

Others interested in teenage music are sent off to read Greg Shaw (Lester Bangs would later climb on board)

‘Teenage music is based on a feeling: a feeling you can’t get from any other forms of music. It’s young, enthusiastic, fresh, vibrant, it makes you feel . . .  well, it just makes you feel. . . figure it out for yourselves’

One of the journal’s better, more amusing, writers, who went for that teenage feel, was Joe Fernbacher

Though the review dismisses the Dolls second album, the image of David Johanson on his arse is too good to pass by, fits so well with Fernbacher’s take on Too Much Too Soon’s shortcomings. Obviously a little enthralled by Richard Meltzer, Fernbacher is nevertheless a total pleasure to read, a lexicon of corporeal profanities:

That first LP was good. Real teenage rectal-mucous stuff . . .it kinda left you in the throes of impending formication horripilation . . . it was male dysmenorrehea . . . it was achromatic sonic devolution . . . it was so rock hard that it went nova, and slipped into anaphrodisiac . . . molah gay . . . coin operated hiney-rimmers. . . They were that and much more.

Fernbacher’s take on Silverhead’s 16 and Savaged is equally swamped in bodily exudations. . .

Some of Fernbacher’s later writings for Creem are archived (here)

Bowie's Pinups: Punkoid Wimpasilic Adulation

From Buffalo State University’s student paper, Strait, in its Shakin’ Street Gazette subsection, November 1973, comes Andy Cutler’s veracious take on Bowie’s Pinups and third-generation rock ’n’ roll.

‘the new saluting the old. What more could we ask for to paint an accurate picture of the current trend in pop music’.

On the way to that conclusion, Cutler sputters out a near half-a-dozen uses of ‘punk’ to describe what Bowie was delineating.

1964–67 British beat is labelled as the ‘English punk scene’, which might well be the first time the term for second-generation American suburban teenage delinquent rock ’n’ roll was rowed across the Atlantic to depict Britain’s most blueswailing.

Bowie’s retrospective take on his formative years is figured by Cutler as ‘neo-punk’, which leaves, even before the fact, the 1976/77 version as post-punk.

Rocks Off With Roxon: Lillian Speaks to OZ

OZ #44 (September 1972)

A wonderful interview by Louise Ferrier with Lillian Roxon, given while she was in London to take part in the Bowie hype, July 1972.

Lillian talks about how quotidian Rolling Stone has become and how fanzines have filled the void it has left, she gives a name check to Who Put the Bomp and Greg Shaw, a thumbs up for a Kinks’ zine, is hip to one by ‘two crazy girls’ called Bilge (gotta read that) and a Linda McCartney hate-zine . . . Mick Jagger’s promo machine . . . The influence of the Cockettes and Marc Bolan on Jagger . . . Lennon and Yoko as media stars . . . Brigid Polk and Warhol . . . Germaine Greer (of course) . . .

On Bowie: ‘I really enjoyed Bowie. I think he is beautiful beyond belief. If you’re going to be a rock and roll star you’d better be beautiful . . . He’s a very sexy act’.

On Lou Reed: He is ‘one of the greatest song writers ever and at the moment is not at the highest point of happiness in his life. I don’t think his performance here would have been his best. His best is unbelievable. He generates incredible excitement’.

On Iggy Stooge/Pop: ‘The first time you see Iggy it is fantastic, but after that it’s not quite the same. The guy who handles David wants to put him in films. Iggy is beautiful. I would do different things with him. English audiences are just stunned when he does his things like prowling out into the audience’.

On being bitten on her tit by Angie Bowie  . . . on bad sex in NYC . . . better in Boston . . . better still with a vibrator . . . on the cut of Tom Jones’ trousers and his shared love for Elvis . . . and EP on politics . . .

I wonder if the transcript or tape of Louise Ferrier’s talk with Lillian still exists . . . the unedited/unexpurgated version would be something else . . .

New York Dolls: Looking For . . . New Stages in England, 1972

There can’t be much on the Dolls in their heyday that hasn’t been excavated, but I don’t recall seeing this photograph or piece from Lisa Robinson before . . . Disc (November 4, 1972). The band are on verge of heading to England for their ill-planned and ill-fated first trip out of New York. Robinson had a regular column, dispatches from NYC, in the paper.

Robinson rehearses the standard line on the band in their early days – “they almost make you believe in Rock ‘n’ Roll again” but that qualification, ‘almost’, grates. She still needs to put in some practice time . . . Still, she very graciously gives a quote to her friend Lillian Roxon . . . See Here . . . though I’m not sure of its actual source.

Johansen was always on form with the killer quote back then:

When those record people come and see us I think we turn them on. Their wives get drunk and start dancing and they go crazy. But then they think about their kids . . . y’know . . .and that’s what stops them. They start thinking about their kids.

Still feels something of a tragedy that they didn’t deliver on the much made promise to be a great singles band . . .

Seven months later Lisa Robinson is back with a report on the NYC underground, the children of The Velvet Underground . . . Suicide are there in the mix with Wayne County the new star of the scene . . .

One year after Lisa Robinson’s report the Dolls make the paper’s front cover

In the Shadow of Centre Point – Peter Watts' History of Denmark Street

Never mind that the subject fascinates, I’d have bought Peter Watts’ Denmark Street: London’s Street of Sound for its jacket alone, which pictures Andrew Loog Oldham, August 1964, whippet short and skinny, striding past Lawrence Wright music publishers. He’s wearing a suede Levi’s-style jacket, trademark shades, open necked button-down collar shirt and trousers that are hemmed an inch or so above his shoes. Like his hero Lawrence Harvey in Expresso Bongo, Oldham has that caffeinated presence that suggests he owns these streets, if only in that moment. Behind him, across Charing Cross Road, is Foyles book shop. Between the spaces he is marking out, to his right, looking on, is a young guy with a Glen Campbell/Wrecking Crew casual style – blonde quiff, suede Cuban heeled boots, tan pants, white shirt, denim jacket – leaning on a big American car with a crushed rear fender – has US culture ever emerged unmarked from its contact with a British reality? American pop, the photograph suggests, corrupted by a youthful English swagger, is going to turn London Town upside down. Change is coming.

 Peter Watts deftly (and very eloquently) maps the transformations that have taken place on this street from the Great Plague to Crossrail, from the Great Beer Flood to the virtual reality of the Outernet. The revolutions wrought by Oldham, the Stones and The Beatles are the pivot around which he works his story; detailing the shift from sellers of sheet music for vocal with piano accompaniment to publishers of music composed, performed and recorded by the artistes themselves.

Until the recent demolitions and building projects, in my imaginary, Denmark Street was unchanged and unchangeable, it had always fallen beneath the shadow of Centre Point, guitars were always its main business and I would always move through it without care or thought, passing quickly on my way to Wardour Street or wherever. Watts causes a pause in this mindless flow so as to take stock of the street’s fabled history, to move off the pavement and into its buildings, to meet the people who worked and lived there, to follow the traces its businesses have left behind; the commerce undertaken in pursuit of fortune small and large.

 Whether the exchanges parlayed were legitimate or illegitimate, selling sex or selling a tune, it all lacked even a thin veneer of bourgeois respectability. With the new developments it is not just the loss of some of the buildings that creates a nostalgia for the place, it is rather the street’s regulation and ordering of permissible activities. I don’t feel a great need for the Sex Pistols’ first rehearsal space to be saved from gentrification, that matters to me as much as a blue disc on the house in Edith Grove to mark where the Stones once lived, nor do I mourn the closing of the 12 Bar Club any more than I do the Marquee, but I do feel the absence of another central London space where, whether fuelled by nefarious business practices or more romantically inclined sensibilities, temporary creative alliances might spark into life and infuse a new generation’s imaginations. Watts’ marvellous history of a small street in London has made me feel that loss more keenly than any other. But yeah, you also need to know about the Great Beer Flood of 1814  . . . that event deserves a plaque.

With its new addition of Denmark Street to sit alongside Robert Sellers’ Marquee: The Story of the World’s Greatest Music Venue and Andrew Humphreys’ Raving Upon Thames, Paradise Road is fast becoming my favourite publisher, all are beautiful presented, generously illustrated and with stories to tell. Get some!

Inside The Velvet Library

A small stream of new books on The Velvet Underground have joined with Todd Haynes’ documentary to produce yet another upswing in interest in the band; maximum momentum maintained even if, as a fan, you can barely find the energy to pull the cellophane from yet another behemoth record set that you surely already own in multiple versions. The fix is in, the fascination doesn’t pall, the same conjuring tricks still tantalise and please; familiarity and repetition a certain comfort – expectations will be met, satisfaction all but guaranteed.

Everything is known, now only the skill of the story-teller is there to give life to the tale. Chris Roberts is one of the better recitalists, he is an eloquent writer, conversational in style, who promises in The Velvet Underground (Palazzo, 2022) an element of novelty based on his three encounters with Lou Reed. The book is well-designed with numerous, well-chosen, images but, for all that it offers, a reader’s prior knowledge will leave the author behind, racing on ahead of the biographical sketches; his rendering of the chance encounters and short-lived creative alliances that produced the first two albums; the sundering of Reed and Cale’s partnership and the trials and tribulations of trying to achieve popular acceptance, before Reed returns to the family home, suburbia, therapy and prescription pharmaceuticals.

The novelty offered to bring renewed excitement to these story conventions in All Tomorrow’s Parties: The Velvet Underground (2023), Koren Shadmi’s graphic novel, is front and centre. His tale is focused on the relationship between Reed and Cale, the former all ego, paranoia and anger, the latter a bemused and betrayed friend. The story as good as ends with the fallout, missing entirely the third album, before briefly sketching in the run of Max’s Kansas City gigs and Reed’s retreat to Long Island, which make up my favourite set of panels. The characters are all adroitly rendered, wholly recognisable, Nico is surprisingly sympathetic, Cale surprisingly passive in the face of Reed’s excesses. Reed is volatile, self-obsessed, endlessly resentful – a negative presence. Why anyone would put up with him is unanswered. Moe and Sterling, as always, are secondary bit part players, blank buffers – calm, mundane presences to counter Nico, Cale, Warhol and Reed’s overindulgences. Like the high-end boxed sets, the novel is a slick production; its spot gloss perfection somewhat at odds with its subject, yet its deftly rendered caricatures readily escape their packaging.

“New Wave USA’ . . . we’re not talking CBGBs 1976 here . . . The first photograph of the VU to appear in the British music press, Melody Maker (November 25, 1967)

 Dylan Jones’ Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of The Velvet Underground (White Rabbit, 2023) follows the formula first introduced in Jean Stein’s Edie Sedgwick biography (1982) and deftly developed in his earlier Bowie volume: a careful assembly of previously published quotations, supplemented with new interviews, all held together by Jones’ narration and critical interjections. Even if a good number of the sources are known to a reader that familiarity is mitigated by the cumulative effect of the pieces, by Jones’ editorial curation. If the reader’s tendency is to race ahead of Roberts, here the effect is to keep pace with Jones, who pauses the rush with either a new voice, story or comment, such as Jimmy Page watching the Velvets over three nights at Steve Paul’s Scene club or Marco Pirroni’s observation:

At the time I couldn’t discern any influencers the band had. It didn’t sound like anything else. Now I know that all my heroes – Bryan Ferry, David Bowie and Lou Reed – were all obsessed with Bob Dylan.

Where the collage approach is at its weakest is in following up such an insight, pushing the idea just that little bit further. Instead the perspective shifts to another facet of the revolving glitterball Jones is spinning. The polyphony of voices also tend toward recalling the impact of first hearing the Velvets, sometimes years after their demise. The dependence on such after the fact contributors is understandable and the takes of Tracey Emin, Jarvis Cocker or Bobby Gillespie are not without interest, but they twirl the ball away from the history of the band (and give the whole a very British perspective on things). A problem facing all VU chroniclers is that Reed & co. gave so few contemporaneous interviews, the band members and Warhol acolytes’ views are all, therefore, delivered with their own spin on events. The passive voice of the editor in such oral collections means that commentary on the more wilfully self-serving often goes unchallenged, which is not necessarily a problem, or at least it isn’t when it comes to Mary Woronov’s acerbic commentary.

Clipping floating around on the internet, can anyone help identify its original source?

A welcome corrective to the overwhelming focus on the Reed/Cale axis in just about every other volume on the band is Ignacio Juliá’s Linger On: The Velvet Underground: Legend, Truth, Interviews (Ecstatic Peace Library, 2022), an expanded edition of his Feed-Back (Munster Records, 2008), which gives centre stage to Sterling Morrison. The introductory assemblage sets the scene: Bobby Gillespie (again) on the VU as rock’s ‘best kept secret’ willed above ground and into the open by Juliá’s ‘dream power and soul energy’ that is laid alongside the author’s declaration that ‘The legend of the Velvet Underground fades away. It is no more. It's been totally exposed to the light. Their secrets have been revealed and the myth evaporated’. Carried by an occult iconography, legends, though, exist only in the process of their tale being told, otherwise we are dealing with history, and all this productivity being reviewed here suggest the legend is doing more than just sputtering on, it’s the history that is fading.

In his talks with Juliá, Morrison is lucid, thoughtful – centred. He’s not competitive, appears to have no regrets and, like Maureen Tucker, is alarmingly modest in discussing his contribution to the band. There’s a marvellous section where he recalls playing Poor Richards in Chicago while Reed was in hospital with hepatitis:

We played for a week, with all different versions of the songs, with John on vocals, and we did lots of practicing just to make the songs work. It was fun. That was the first time that anybody could go missing and the shows would go on – John or Lou or anybody, it didn’t matter. . . we moved Maureen to bass and rhythm guitar. We got Angus MacLise, the original drummer, back to play drums. So here’s this astonishing incarnation of the band. “Sister Ray” grew out of this one gig.

Here he is, finally in the limelight, but the spot on Morrison quickly shifts away and he is soon back on the periphery of things, stage right, looking in. In band photographs, from 1965/66, Morrison’s face is always concealed behind a mop of long hair, wraparound dark glasses, swirling cigarette smoke. Tall and skinny, cuffed Levi’s worn over black engineer boots, he was the Velvets’ suburban juvenile delinquent figure, a perfect foil for the other three but never the main event. As Juliá’s interviews mount up, with all the old Velvets – Nico, Lou, John, Moe and Doug – and with others who have stories to tell – Jackson Browne, Gerard Malanga, Lenny Kaye and Todd Haynes – as the volume of voices increases, as in Jones’ Loaded, the centre contracts. What were they all talking about? In its parts Linger On is a work to cherish, but as a whole it is a babel of competing voices all demanding equal attention.

That the story’s broad outline no longer need be tendered is conspicuously the case with two lengthy articles by longstanding Velvets’ aficionado, Phil Milstein, in two recent issues of the inestimable Ugly Things. (It’s also worth noting the magazine’s publication of David Holzer’s exploration of Lou Reed’s obsession with the white light mysticism of Alice Bailey #61, Winter 2022). In #55 (Winter 2020) Milstein takes a deep dive into the world of Michael Leigh who wrote the pulp exploitation book from which The Velvet Underground took their name. The topic is, as Milstein admits, peripheral to the main event, even if the book’s cover imagery has been purloined numerous times to ground the band’s interest in the fetishistic and the taboo. Over 11 A4 sized three column pages, Milstein tracks the biography of the author and the various incarnations of his tale of the ‘bizarre sex underground’. It is an epic undertaking, excessive in its obsession and quite marvellous, even if the included photograph of Tony Conrad’s dirtied, torn and frayed personal copy – an occult relic if ever there was one – is sufficient in itself to maintain the book’s iconographic potency.

‘Doug is just plain groovy . . .’ Disc & Music Echo (November 30, 1968)

In Ugly Things #60 (Summer 2022), Milstein is back and surpassing his earlier effort with a 22 page inquiry into the pre-Velvet Underground activities of Reed and Cale, with a focus on the former’s Pickwick-era songwriting and recordings. The research is once more impeccable and just as obsessive – has the flotsam of an exploitation record company ever been picked through with such care and attention as Milstein practices here? I find it all delightful, but to what end, to what effect, does all this expended energy add to the matter of The Velvet Underground?

 The question of why The Velvet Underground matter should surely form the heart of any academic study of the band yet, until now, there has been no such book length exploration of The Velvets. Sean Albiez and David Pattie’s edited collection The Velvet Underground: What Goes On (Bloomsbury, 2022) corrects this situation and presents sixteen essays from academics aligned with a range of disciplines, film, queer, cultural, literary, music and media studies – a good half of the book, however, is less concerned with the band than with its cultural and musical influence on other artists and on the post-VU careers of Nico, Cale and Reed. Though there is a panoply of theoretical approaches in play, none of which would or should bother Milstein, they do share the same desire to focus on an aspect of the story rather than the story itself. With a few notable exceptions, what they don’t share with Milstein is his output’s basis in primary research.

Like all such collections, the editors, as they themselves reflect, are at the mercy of who responds to their call for papers. Such a state of affairs usually leads to a fairly eclectic set of essays and this is no exception, so they will forgive me, I hope, if I only focus on the contributions that play directly to my interests. Their introduction sketches in the broad dimensions of the band’s legacy – cult rebel outliers, inside the Factory with Warhol, their place within the Pop avant-garde and the chance meeting of Cale and Reed (the classically trained musician and the songwriter of pop novelties) whose ambitions coincide, as one slips down and the other climbs up the ladder of cultural capital. Recognising that Cale, Reed and Nico garner most of the attention, the editors finish the introduction by profiling Morrison, Tucker and Yule.

What Goes On has been graced with a superb opening chapter, which puts the band back into the context of 1960s pop culture. Jeffrey Roessner’s ‘Saved By Rock ’n’ Roll: The Velvet Underground In and Out of History’ begins with the image of Petula Clark heading downtown as The Velvets head in the opposite direction in 1965 Manhattan. Countering the idea that they were the supreme rebels, pushing against the flow of their times, Roessner argues you can find analogues for their experiments, for almost every radical gesture they made, among their immediate peers:

Their distinctiveness, then, is less about musical style than about the rejection of the florid psychedelic image and countercultural politics that have become the dominant image of the time.

He moves through the posthumous construction of The Velvets as being a band out of time:

When we say they don’t fit, we must mean that they don’t fit our conception of the era. That’s one clue that the problem is less with the band and more with our restricted, stereotypical view of the era.

Roessner is not out to deny the band’s originality, but to give back to their story some historical context. In doing so he doesn’t denigrate their achievements, instead he enhances our understanding of why they matter. As an entrée to a book of essays on the Velvets it can’t easily be improved upon.

‘marathon freaky hard-rock'. . .’ review of White Light/White Heat by, I guess, Hugh Nolan. Disc & Music Echo (June 8, 1968)

‘A hippy must . . .’ review of White Light/White Heat in Record Mirror (June 8, 1968)

Johnny Hopkins and Martin James follow up with an essay that could not, in turn, have been better aligned with Roessner than if it had been commissioned by the editors, perhaps it was. The joint authors’ concern with the contemporary pop scene of the sixties is less with the overlaps the Velvets shared with the American counterculture than with their place in a transatlantic network. Despite never having played London and with only a few traces left in the contemporary British music press, the links were, as they show with numerous primary sources, tangible. Countercultural communications through outlets like Better Books and International Times fostered the already fermenting Pop Art connectivity of Warhol’s artistic enclave with his British counterparts, while the personal connections of Cale and Nico coalesced with the London-centric nature of the pop scene circa 1965 and into 1966 with the repeated Atlantic crossings of The Beatles, Stones, Animals, Yardbirds and The Who. Of all the aspects discussed and analysed in the volume it is this one I find the most intriguing. Into this communal hothouse of cultural exchange figures like Barry Miles, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, Mick Farren, Mike McInnerney, Ken Pitt and his charge, David Bowie, Simon Napier-Bell and The Yardbirds flit before the eye – filtered through high expectations of the imminent arrival of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable on English shores. One of the great ‘what ifs’ of pop history.

It’s a shame that an essay could not have been found on the impact of the band and their connection with Warhol on the British art school scene, developing perhaps the insights given by Michael Bracewell in his study of Roxy Music on the trans-Atlantic connection between Newcastle and Manhattan, orchestrated by Richard Hamilton and experienced by his student Mark Lancaster. Nevertheless, Hopkins and James’ piece is followed by another strong entry, Glyn Davis on the link between Warhol’s filmmaking and participation of The Velvet Underground in that practice. Symphony of Sound (1966) and The Velvet Underground in Boston (1967) are held up for brief consideration alongside Nico’s appearances in shorts and in Chelsea Girl, but it is the ‘Screen Tests’ that are the focus and how these, in turn, became part of the EPI experience –‘aural and visual agitation combined’ where total cinema met total rock ’n’ roll.

‘Raving, out-of-tune, distorted sound . . .’ review of White Light/White Heat by Allan Evans in New Musical Express (June 1, 1968)

‘Utterly pretentious . . .’ review of White Light/White Heat in Melody Maker (June 7, 1968)

And on the good stuff rolls with Thom Robinson’s study of the literary underground – Grove Press  – and its impact on Lou Reed, which adds depth and weight to the too readily tossed about remark that Reed brought a literary sensibility to the band’s music. The interlacing of the Press’ story with Reed’s reading, his participation in the literary community at Syracuse University, is as fascinating as it is enlightening. Robinson has rifled through the archives of the University’s newspapers to place Reed’s juvenilia within the context of the day, especially the sensation and outraged caused (and courted) by Grove Press. Through the twists and turns of his story, readers, if they so wish, can make a connection back to Millstein’s research on Michael Leigh to think anew about what the ‘underground’– literary, cinematic, musical – meant then and now.

With the first four essays this volume marks itself as essential for even the most jaded VU head. While for me these initial contributions represent the book’s highpoint there are 12 further essays to pursue: on musicology and archetypes; Lou Reed’s Great American Novel’; Nico, cultural accreditation and experimental rock; solo careers through the ‘long-1970s’; the influence on Ziggy Stardust; Berlin, 1973 & 2006; Nico, Cale and Eno in Berlin; Metal Machine Music; Jonathan Richman; Live: Take No Prisoners – improvisation and performance; Songs for Drella; and finally Cale and Reed in the twenty-first century. Collectively these 12 chapters make for a lively, insightful, critical account of post-Velvet Underground activities. On the other hand, over emphasising the participants’ solo careers produces a centrifugal force that pulls attention away from the putative object of interest.

Beyond all the clatter and clutter these various volumes testify to the still far from faded legend of The Velvet Underground:

It's a hundred years from today, and everyone who is reading this is dead. I’m dead, you’re dead. And some kid is taking a music course in junior high, and maybe he’s listening to the Velvet Underground because he’s got to write a report on classical rock ’n’ roll and I wonder what that kid is thinking? [here]

–      Elliott Murphy, liner notes to Velvet Underground Live: 1969

We’re halfway there now and I wonder if Elliott Murphy is still wondering? I am . . .

 

Recent reissue/upgrade of Sweet Sister Ray boot . . . just like . . . dose yerself before and after reading . . .

Sister Ray . . . ‘The most ugly, yet most hypnotic performance in rock history’ New Musical Express (July 15, 1972)

Tyrannosaurus Rex – Debora/Deborah (Made in Japan)

I’m not in the habit of buying reproductions but as I’ll never be able to afford (or justify) the price of an original Japanese release of ‘Debora’, even if I could find one for sale. I had no option but to fall for this Summer 2023 repress. It is, apparently, an exact copy, and I can well believe that, quality of the printing and paper weight seem just right . . . and who could not love this sleeve? A real bonus is the cutting of the disc, which is superb – stunning MONO that is a very close to the UK issue, if not also exact. Kudos to Kenji Yoshino, mastering engineer, and Kazumi Tezuka, cutting engineer.

The single is part of a Japanese Universal series of rare sides. My sincere hope is that they now turn their attention to John’s Children’s ‘Desdemona’, even though Bolan doesn’t get pictured on the sleeve, MC5’s ‘Tonight’, black leather jackets, and a box set of The Who’s ‘60s Japanese releases . . .

Nik Cohn, Queen (May 8, 1968)

Chris Welch, Melody Maker (May 25, 1968)

Two short profiles of Marc and Steve promoting the single in Queen and Melody Maker, Nik Cohn providing what I think is a definitive appraisal, not a word I don’t agree with. Record Mirror’s colour shot of the band is damn near perfect too . . . Marc’s exaggerated Dylanesque haircut never bettered

Derek Johnson, New Musical Express (April 27, 1968)

Penny Valentine, Disc & Music Echo (April 27, 1968)