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.
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!”
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.
Signed 'Iggy Pop' – a fan's scapbook
A fan’s photobook of snaps, taken at the Whisky A-Go-Go, up for auction (October 2023) at Bonhams . . . starting price $800 but doesn’t appear to have reached its reserve . . . not sure which of the three runs they had at the venue in 1973 these are from
Billboard (November 3, 1973)
The Actionist – Iggy Stooge in Vogue (August 1970)
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
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)
Marc Bölan Sounds like a Motorbike
October 30, 1965 and Marc Bolan, hyping his first single, ‘The Wizard’, appears in the society magazine, The Tatler/London Life. He looks Dirk Bogarde handsome in his Decca publicity pic by David Wedgbury . . . His disc has an ‘eerie lyric’ that he wrote himself. . .
His name was an invention of his manager, he was going to be called Bolam but Decca mispelled it and now he was Bolan and, then, four months later (February 19, 1966) in his second appearance in the journal he was Marc Bölan; the German umlaut added to his surname which, with the French spelling of his first name, created quite the picture of the modern cosmopolitan.
For an 18 year-old Marc was never less than precocious . . . with ambition to boot. He was, he said, a writer, poet, filmmaker and dramatist . . . who had four, count them, of his compositions under consideration by The Byrds. He hopes to live in Paris . . .
The magazine regularly asked musicians and celebrities to review the latest releases . . . Marc’s comments on the new discs are pitch perfect. Dylan is a ‘truly royal talent’ who makes his ‘guitar sound like a motorbike’, while Nina Simone plays piano like a motor-bike’, descriptions which I can buy. On the whole, The Who’s My Generation album is ‘bad’, he said, but the title track ‘swings’. He thinks that the Charlie Mingus album ‘sounds like everyone at this session was out of their heads’ and, pay attention Pete Townshend, ‘after one track you know where The Who got their sound from’. . . which nails it for me.
Podcast with Mike Stax at Ugly Things
It was a great privilege to be invited to talk to the legendary Mike Stax, editor of Ugly Things magazine. I’ve been a regular reader since issue 13 . . . the one with The Birds on the cover. You can listen in here
What's In A Name? Them Who Are Dissatisfied . . .
Looking for some context to place Mick Farren’s Social Deviants in Pin-Ups 1972, I took a sideways glance at how groups named themselves in the early to mid-1960s. Top of my short list of group names was Them. The pop correspondent of The Belfast Telegraph neatly captured the truculent provovation the band no doubt intended by adopting the pronoun:
He drew grimly on a cigarette and said: “We’re not wanted here. If you don’t belong nobody wants to know you”. He is, in fact, one of Them.
One of them in more ways than one – Billy Harrison.
One of “Them” – that quaintly named Belfast rhythm and blues group which sailed off this week for England – for good.
And one of them – those who find that society is not yet conditioned to really accept them.
For them are a five-strong outfit resembling the Rolling Stones with hair that must be longest in Ireland
Belfast Telegraph (June 12, 1965)
Disc Weekly (February 26, 1965)
From Pin-Ups 1972:
In any revised edition ‘The Dissatisfied’ will be slotted in between The Others and The Measles:
Despite playing with such esteemed Marquee headliners, and getting a stamp of approval from ‘Birds man Chris Dreja, I’d never heard of The Dissatisfied. Turns out there was a very smart looking bunch of likely lads from St. Austell (great band bio HERE) but they formed a year after this Dissatisfied, who I reckon were otherwise known by the much less truculent name The Dissatisfied Blues Band helmed by guitarist Jim Cregan who went on to play with Blossom Toes, Cockney Rebel and Rod Stewart [HERE].
The Dissatisfieds supporting The Yardbirds )ctober 31 1964
nicked from kernowbeat.co.uk . . . forever The Dissatisfied . . .
From the same issue of the Belfast Telegraph (September 26, 1964) in which Them appeared Maureen Cleave gave her opinion of the Bo Street Runners: ‘ugly but memorable’ which in this context seems fair . . .
Greased: two new reviews of 'Pin-Ups 1972'
Grant McPhee reviews Pin-ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll for Into Creative
This publication takes a similar format to Jon Savage’s ‘1966’ to posit the claim that 1972 is another important milestone in ‘the story’ of music. It’s a well-argued point that focusses on 1972 being when Rock ‘n’ Roll went back to its roots, in order to reclaim itself from the patchouli self-indulgence that it had sadly fallen into. Other writers have made a claim for 74/75 being when Rock and Roll went back to basics, but this makes a convincing case that 1972 was where it began. Rather than starting with Dr Feelgood or New York Dolls, we have Bowie and Bolan, Iggy and Lou, Roxy, The Who’s Quadrophenia and most refreshingly, Mick Farren, an unsung hero and huge influence on the soon to emerge Punk sound.
The level of research is quite astounding; I know that Peter meticulously went through hundreds of period magazines, NMEs, Melody Makers, Newspapers, Fanzines and more to ensure historical accuracy, rather than falling into the trap of repeating oft-heard myths. This trawl through culture really pays off as it gives a tremendous sense of period for the reader and envelopes you completely in the world of the greaser as the story emerges.
review published HERE
Simon Wright reviews A Band With Built-In Hate and Pin-Ups 1972 for Only Rock ‘n’ Roll London
Two books from Peter Stanfield which follow the same approach, developing a hypothesis by the careful selection and presentation of quotes from a wide variety of other sources. This means that he will never be one of my favourite writers – I prefer the highly-opinionated school of Nick Kent , Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs – but the material he chooses is for the most part relevant and stimulating and in some cases new to me, so that is enough to make for two entertaining and thought-provoking volumes.
Stanfield also shares two of my prejudices: that the early ‘70s were a brilliant time for music and that the Who peaked with Sell Out and Tommy. Pin-Ups 1972 follows in the steps of Jon Savage’s book on 1966 and David Hepworth’s review of 1971. Unlike these two titles Stanfield makes no attempt to review the contemporary music scene in its entirety but instead zeroes in on a tight and inter-related group of acts including Iggy and the Stooges, the New York Dolls, Lou Reed and Roxy Music, all firm favourites of mine. He notes how Marc Bolan had lead the way, and how Bowie was at the centre of it all. A surprising outlier is the opening chapter on Mick Farren, by then no longer a performer but a full-time writer and generally angry person. Stanfield gives a clear account of tectonic plates shifting within the London music scene and how this helped rock’n’roll shake off the last fringes of the 60’s as these groups evolved a Third Generation Rock’n’Roll, the subtitle of the book. He is also good on how the seismic eruptions of 1977 started as minor tremors five years previously.
A Band With Built-In Hate is a fine book about the Who that would be better served by its sub-title The Who From Pop Art To Punk. Stanfield spends little time on the implications of the Townshend quote beyond noting that the members of the Who were four very different individuals who did not get on, hardly new news. Much more interesting is what Stanfield has to say about the relationship between the Who and popular culture in general and Pop Art in particular. Stanfield is helped greatly by extensively quoting Nik Cohn, still the most pithy and interesting commentator on the Who in the 60’s. The final chapter is enlivened by a wonderful rejection letter from Townshend to Eddie And The Hot Rods’ record company where he refers to his “meditative Mercedes buying” – truly the Godfather meeting The Punks. As with pin-ups 1972 the book concludes with the influence of the Who on punk, and vice versa.
Academic in tone but accessible in content these two books are recommended to bored teenagers of all ages.
Review published HERE
A Biography – Robert Milliken, 'Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock'
‘If you asked me who was the world’s first pop journalist’, Jim Fouratt told Robert Milliken, ‘in the sense of translating sixties culture, art, fashion, music and politics in a popular way, Tom Wolfe got the credit but I think it was Lillian Roxon. The way she did it was to be in the scene yet objective about it, while Tom Wolfe was around the scene, and reported on it, but never part of the scene like Lillian was. Lillian genuinely loved rock and roll, not just the music but the lifestyle’.
Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock (2002) is as fine a biography as any I’ve read. From her family’s flight from Nazis to exile and new beginnings in Australia to her death in New York, aged 40, in 1973. In between, Milliken tells the story of how Roxon became one of the significant players in the New York rock scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, one of the movers and shakers who held court at Max’s Kansas City. Her student years and the Australian bohemian scene in first Brisbane then Sydney and her start in journalism are succinctly, but evocatively evoked, before her move to Manhattan, aged 27, as the 50’s tipped into the following decade.
Australian newspaper culture, the nascent Murdoch empire, tabloid journalism and Roxon’s place in this as an independent, career-minded young woman is portrayed with a deft touch that moves eloquently between historical context and her personal situation, both private and public. Roxon and her friends were great letter writers so Milliken has a treasure trove’s worth of material to draw on, which he adroitly pulls together with her published words and interviews with those who were closest to her as friends and colleagues.
Though it is the third act of her story that most interests me, her family’s history and her early life, especially in Sydney, are crisply and effectively etched to provide a sure sense of who she was and where she came from. I didn’t skip a page.
Her relationships with Linda McCartney and Germaine Greer are given generous space, never overbearingly so, but for me that is all peripheral to her friendship with Danny Fields, Lisa Robinson, Leee Black Childers, Lenny Kaye and the like and her mentorship of young writers like Richard Meltzer, who told Milliken:
Compared to so-called gossip writers, when Lillian wrote ‘scene pieces’ she had a playfulness that was so much more authentic, and never nasty or ill-tempered in the slightest. She wrote from a state of genuine affection for probably a wider range of rock-roll characters than any other rockwriter I have any recollection of. The only exception I can think of was Carole King. She hated Carole King (but then so did most of her colleagues).
In a June 1971 column for the Sunday News, Roxon wrote:
Carole King may have a number one single and a number one album, but I find her as boring as my girlfriends who are always on the phone to me whining about the problems they have ‘communicating’ and having ‘meaningful relationships’. She is like every messed-up neurotic girl you ever had to confront in group therapy. Sincere, certainly, well-meaning, too - a nice girl, not bad looking, super-talented, but exasperating and totally unexciting. You know, of course, what her success means - that rock is going to go into a ‘Dark Shadows’ period. Those moody broody songs about getting it all together and facing the world bravely are going to take over the air-waves, and then what are we going to dance to? The Pathetique Sonata? . . . You can learn more about being a human being from Tina Turner's body language than from all of Carole's fortune cookie philosophising.
That kiss-off line is so beautifully on point. If you can’t dance to Carole King you can pull back the rug and frug along with Ike and Tina, the Ronettes and the Shangri-las:
A contact sheet showing Andy Warhol attending an event at the Action House nightclub in Island Park, Long Island, New York, 4th December 1966. Among those attending are Nico (top, left), her son, Christian Aaron Boulogne (top, centre). The Velvet Underground were on the bill for the evening, along with The Fugs, The Ronettes (second row, far right) and The Shangri-Las.
RONETTES/There are two kinds of lady singers - the angels and the devils. The angels sing ethereal songs in ethereal voices and wear long, loose gowns. The devils sing earthy songs in earthy voices and their gowns fit where gowns should fit. The Ronettes were every teenage boy's dream of a teenage devil in triplicate. Brazen, shapely and without any illusions about men and sex. They were like girlie magazines come alive and set to music. Their song Do I Love You made the boys feel like men. Nothing psychedelic there, just straight from the hip or wherever.
THE SHANGRI-LAS/From time immemorial the bitch goddess has haunted and fascinated man. And so, of course, has the girl next door. The Shangri-las were both, a real bargain for the boy who wanted everything in a girl and the girl who wanted to be that everything. They played it soft and tough at the same time. Their toughest song was Leader Of The Pack. (He was the head of the motorcycle gang and she was his tough mama. Then he dies. Tough mama goes soft, but not for long. You know whoever gets to be the next leader gets her too. Teased hair, doe eyes, ankle bracelet and all.) It was the necrophilia of it all that shocked the adults, not the funkiness of three bitchy white girls who told it straight out that in motor-bike gangs you don't just hold hands. The Shangri-las were akin to Clyde Barrow's Bonnie, in a reversal of the proverbial image, the velvet hands in the iron gloves.
The Ronettes and Shangri-las quotes are from Lillian Roxon’s Encylopedia of Rock. Here she wrote of the Rolling Stones who, unlike The Beatles, ‘had never seen soap and water. And where the adorable little wind-up Beatle moptops wanted no more than to hold a hand, the hateful rasping Stones were bent on rape, pillage and plunder. Well, at least satisfaction . . . No one had ever seen a white man move on stage the way Jagger moved . . .
Right from the start he parodied himself completely but that worked for him, not against him. His lips and no-hips drove every relevant point home; a not-so-distant relative of the Shangri-las’ Leader of the Pack, he laid it on the line. Most of the girls who watched had never before had the word put on them quite so explicitly. It was heady stuff for fourteen-year-old virgins, and others besides.
Milliken spends little time analysing Roxon’s work, he’s content to let her friends and colleagues act as her interpreters. That’s fine, even if it means you have to go back to the work to figure out just why she was held in such high regard. Unfortunately, not much of her writing is readily available, certainly not in any curated form, and the Encyclopedia is long out of print. If too little of her work is included in the biography (there are some selected writings at its end but these are mostly from the Encyclopedia alongside a few key pieces on the women’s movement, Germaine Greer and Creedence Clearwater Revival). What’s also missing is a more detailed account of how she spent her time and what she wrote about in the last five years of her life, her trips to London, her radio show appearances and her support of third generation rock artists like Iggy and the Stooges, David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the New York Dolls all demand a fuller account.
Even at this late date, I’m going to take a position on defining Lillian Roxon as the ‘Mother of Rock’. It’s a misnomer, the maternal diminishes and marginalises her activity to one of a nurturing figure rather than a full participant with an original and unique voice that is worth listening to in its own right. That said, Milliken has written a studiously researched and eloquent biography. It’s an admirable achievement. Someone, however, needs to supplement Milliken’s book with a reader that genuinely covers the range of her outputs.
Last words go to Lillian Roxon, on moving into new accommodation she had it fumigated to exterminate the pests that Germaine Greer had, to her chagrin, suggested defined her:
I now live alone with no colonies of roaches and one life size poster of Iggy Stooge mother naked to cheer me up.
Richard Bernstein Iggy Pop (1970) edition of 100 silkscreen on paper. 42” x 32” Is that ‘life size’? Yours for $5K from Sotherbys [HERE}
Iggy and the Stooges at Max's – Rock Scene Reports
With the New York Dolls on the cover, Rock Scene (March 1974) ran large with the Stooges’ Max’s Kansas City gigs on July 30–31st and August 6–7th, 1973 (the mag was bimonthly which meant it went to print two months or more before the the date line on its cover).
Lillian Roxon’s death was reported along with a photograph of her kissing Lenny Kaye. They were both at Max’s for The Stooges:
It was a night of feathers and glitter, and crowds of people coming to hear rock and roll. Lillian was working, that’s why she was there – but she knew it was An Event too. That’s why she wore her feathers and makeup.
Lenny Kaye wrote up the report of the gig
Celebrity nights . . . the first two were marred by poor sound, for the second two it was ‘near perfect’
It was almost as if the band had realized that they’d gone as far as they could go in one particular direction, the oft-predicted way of on-stage suicide not to be theirs; they drew back from the edge, wary and knowledgably watchful, all senses alert.
Fred Kirby pictured top right second down filed a report for Variety, published August 8, 1973.
Billboard (August 25, 1973)
Iggy’s turn to play the on-looker . . . at Mott the Hoople/New York Dolls afterparty following their show at Felt Forum, Madison Square Garden (August 3, 1973) where Iggy walked into a glass door, hence the sticking plaster . . .
Sounds (August 25, 1973)
also from Sounds (August 25, 1973)
A complete run of Rock Scene can be found HERE
Amphetamine Academia – Ugly Things Review by Dave Laing
I’ve been a regular reader of Ugly Things since 1994, issue 14 when The Birds were the cover stars, so it feels a bit strange and kinda wonderful to find myself in #60 spread across 4 pages. Dave Laing reviewed Pin-Ups 1972 and interviewed me.
Momentous . . . an academic treatise that reads with the manic energy of an early Lester Bangs . . . Opposing views of authenticity, the underground’s clash with the mainstream and art’s clash with artifice and commerce, these are things that went into shaping the music, and Stanfield explores them with an addictive enthusiasm. . . Pin-Ups 1972 will leave you breathless from the number of different ways it comes at the music and reeling from the sheer number of points it makes. Together with Stanfield’s A Band With Built-In Hate, it presents what I consider to be a new way of writing – amphetamine academia – about what is some of the most exciting music ever made. I can’t recommend it enough.
Dave Laing
That Very Bizarre New Group Called The Dolls – Lillian Roxon
Final part of my Lillian Roxon excavation . . . here she sells the New York Dolls
Sunday News (June 4, 1972)
One of the earliest published notices for the Dolls, which prededed their run of 14 Tuesday night engagements at the Mercer Arts Center begining on June 13th (according to From the Archives here)
Sunday News (July 30, 1972)
Lillian is in London to cover Bowie in Aylesbury and Lou and Iggy in King’s Cross, she also takes time out to note that Britain’s top music paper, Melody Maker, have dedicated a full page to the Dolls, unsigned yet trailed as being ‘the best young band ever’. She agrees . . . Here’s Roy Hollingworth’s piece:
Roy Hollingworth Melody Maker (July 22, 1972)
Sunday News (September 3, 1972)
‘thinnner and younger and punkier . . . The manic audience loves them . . .The music is the kind that makes parents crazy. Early push-back-the chairs-and-dance rock-and-roll . . . Everyone and his mother loves the Dolls’.
Sunday News (September 17, 1972)
New Yorks Dolls part of the Rock ‘n’ Rouge clique
Sunday News (September 24, 1972)
David saw the Dolls and he can’t stop talking about them . . .
Sunday News (May 6, 1973)
As with the UK music papers, Lillian plays to the gallery, some of her readers might hate the Dolls but they can’t stop reading about them and letting her know . . . ‘Most of the people you write about are so unimportant in the rock world. For instance, Marc Bolan and David Bowie’.
Sunday News (August 5, 1973)
Lillian’s final despatch . . . Rock n Roll is not dead . . . ‘The New York Dolls are the best, and their album “The New York Dolls”, is the definitively New York sound album. It gets you up and dancing and feeling 14 again’. She was not alone in that sentiment.
Newsday Sunday August 19, 1973. Dave Marsh rounds up the new acts making the scene in New York. Lillian Roxon is pushing the Dynomiters, who I’ve never heard of but then neither have I seen Street Punk listed before (Roxon drops their name in her Australian column, Luger sound familiar (Iggy might produce them) but not New York Central (produced by Lennon!!!). The rest I know about . . . You know, Kiss . .
Rock Scene (March 1974) ran a very similar feature on New York’s up n’ coming that featured much the same line up, but with more pictures. Here’s Street Punk . . . bit of a misnomer if you ask me . . .
NME June 7, 1975. Looking like a bunch of glitter-era hangovers, Lisa Robinson moves the tale of New York’s wannabes toward centre stage: ‘What else is new? Well, the Ramones for one . . .’