Exploring the 21st Century City: On the GAME with Mick Farren

A chance encounter recently bought me to Game magazine, an example of 1970s top-shelf pornography previously unknown to me (but then I’m not a connoisseur). It was published between 1974-1978 and Mick Farren, I discovered, was a regular contributor. He had earlier paid the rent with fiction and the odd article for Paul Raymond’s far superior Club International, which I’ve documented in Mick Farren’s Fiction Factory. His work for Game appears to have been a more regular gig and I’ll list and comment on whatever reportage I find here; the stories will eventually be grouped together and added to the Fiction Factory page or in a new sub-section.

Photography: Joe Stevens

In early 1975 Farren submitted a two-part article to Game on the pleasure spots of Los Angeles. Part one was subtitled ‘freeways, smog and the superboppers’. The city’s car culture sets the scene before a long dive into Rodney Bigenheimer’s English Discotheque. Farren’s tour guide is Candy, ‘a typical L.A. superbopper, only the last thing she’d enjoy being called is typical. The night we met she was doing a passable imitation of Lana Turner, circa 1948.’ Given the context, the piece is heavily slanted toward the sensational and the salacious, Rodney’s having the ‘exact balance of innocence, fantasy and sleaze . . . the perfect nightspot for the pre-purberty set.’ Farren is less sneeringly patronising than most who wrote about the scene on Sunset Strip and he is unwilling simply to write it off as a ‘pathetic trend that will soon pass. Unfortunately’, he writes,

the same thing was tried with the screaming rock kids of the fifties, or the hippie dopers of the sixties. They grew older, modified and matured, but never basdically changed. It seems unlikely the glitter kids will be any different.’

Six months or so before Farren’s report, Adrian Henri, yes that Adrian Henri of LIverpool’s poetry scene, had also written for Game about Candy and her friends. His piece focused on Star magazine, a short-lived enterprise that documented the lives and fantasies of the kind of girl that spent time at the English Discotheque. His report is a good deal more purient than Farren’s take. If you care to see what they are fussing over the actual magazines have been scanned and made available here

Dave Marsh also covered the scene for Creem (August 1974), his is a much more cynical take:

‘What they think of as English chic is really American cheapo. To dress the way the English starfuckers really do requires money beyond the means of 15 year-olds anywhere’.

Farren’s second piece on L.A. for Game was more directly about the city’s sex economy. He ended the report as if it was one of his dystopian stories; a warning of things to come.

Photomontage by Dave Ashmore

The New York Dolls in the Denim Age

Here, for your delectation, are two images never before juxtaposed: the New York Dolls and a crowded rock festival that is being used to market jeans, both 1974. You wanna know why the Dolls were so important? I think this juxtaposition says it all.

Landlubber were an American company, the advert is from the back of Creem January 1974. I wasn’t familar with the brand, but they were sold in the UK.

I never owned a pair of bell bottoms but I did wear Skinners . . .

In the January ‘74 issue of Creem, their fashion correspondent, Lisa Robinson, reported on her recent visit to Paris and the city’s obsession with denim, which was generally more expensive and better cut than Landlubbers, she wrote, but Parisians were also wearing good looking but poorly made in Spain Lois jeans. The worst aspect of French street fashion she found was the vogue for U.S. college sweatshirts. Oh well, French taste and all that. Meanwhile, the Parisians had shifted their fascination with decadent Americana in shape of the Velvet Underground in favour of the New York Dolls. Anticipation was high for the band’s December Olympia gigs.

Staying with the denim theme her piece is illustrated with four images from the ‘Denim Art Show at the Serendipity in NYC. Included in the exhibit are the jeans James Dean died in (who knew he wore flares?) that are now owned by Jackie Curtis, David Bowie’s rhinestone codpiece and Bruce Lee’s Death Jacket. Second panel below offers three hand pained denim jackets featuring movie stars. The one at the bottom of the frame, Marilyn, should be familiar to anyone who spent too much of their youth staring at the rear cover (above) of the Dolls second album. In his memoir Sylvain wrote that the image on the jacket is of Johanson’s girlfriend, Cyrinda Foxe, not Marilyn as everyone thinks, but this suggests he’s got it wrong: a one-off either way

I can’t make out the artist’s signature but the date is ‘73.

Iggy and Elton Take CREEM In Their Coffee

I’ve recently acquired a few issues of Creem circa 1971-75 that between their glossy covers are deteriorating as fast as any 50 year-old British inky. I never read the magazine back in the day, I doubt it could have been readily found in Hemel Hempstead’s newsagents, but since those faraway days it has taken on something of a mythic status, hosting, as it did, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ben Edmonds, Greg Shaw and on occasion Nick Tosches and Greil Marcus. It also, I was surprised to discover, gave fairly regular space for pieces by British writers, mostly from the NME, like Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray. There was a regular column, ‘Letter from Britain’ from the always entertaining Simon Frith, whose singles reviews in Let It Rock easily rivalled his American equivalent, Juke Box Jury, that Greg Shaw put together for Creem and for his own magazine, Bomp.

To some extent the magazine lives up to its reputation, it has a terrific sense of community, between the writers most obviously, but also between them and their readers, which was something NME tried to emulate. But what the British weeklies did much better than their monthly American cousin was to create a sense of an unfolding narrative. NME and Melody Maker pulled their readers into the heat of the action, you can see this clearly in the reporting on and around Bowie throughout 1972, each new move he made was eagerly anticipated, reported on and responded to. The music papers produced a remarkable feeling of immediacy (and intimacy). By contrast Creem is all reaction, everything has already happened. It features last month’s story, NME and MM were about tomorrow.

An exemption to the lack of the future tense in Creem is the coverage afforded to the figure of Iggy Pop who runs loose and fast across a number of the issues I have, often he appears as just a note on what he’s doing in London or Hollywood but always with anticipation that he is about to deliver and in doing so change the very fabric of rock culture. Must have been frustrating as hell to have been a proselytiser for the Stooges back in those days, because, at least in retrospect, Iggy was always going to disappoint.

In the news stub above, from January 1974, Iggy is sharing coffee and donuts with Elton John while the Stooges are undertaking a week’s engagement at Richard’s in Atlanta, Georgia. One of those shows was recorded and released in the deluxe Raw Power box from a few years ago and were witnessed by James ‘The Hound’ Marshall, who has written about his teenage road trip from New York to Georgia to see the band [here]. Elton sat through two shows, appearing on stage during one of them in a gorilla costume. He said of Iggy, “I simply can’t understand why he’s not a huge star.’  

He should have asked Pete Townshend, he sure knew why Iggy was never gonna clean up. In the same issue he’s interviewed by CSM about Quadrophenia as well as things like Bowie’s Pinups and the overlaps between the two albums, especially as they relate to rock history and rock stars. On the latter, some of CSM’s colleagues think stars should conform to the image of a noble savage. Inevitably, then, Iggy is raised as a sort of exemplar of the type and the conversation skirts around whether he might appeal to the kid in the ‘Punk and Godfather’. Townshend thinks not. Songs aimed at teenagers need to contain ‘a lot of the tight, integrated, directed, pointed frustration of a fifteen or sixteen year-old . . . But someone like Iggy and the Stooges couldn’t grasp that if they stood on their heads, because inside they’re old men.’ Now that’s an image worth pondering over . . .