That Very Bizarre New Group Called The Dolls – Lillian Roxon

August 2, 2022 Peter Stanfield

Final part of my Lillian Roxon excavation . . . here she sells the New York Dolls

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)

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)

‘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’.

New Yorks Dolls part of the Rock ‘n’ Rouge clique

David saw the Dolls and he can’t stop talking about them . . .

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’.

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 . . .’

Test Pressing – Iggy and the Stooges 'Raw Power'

February 14, 2022 Peter Stanfield

In May 2020 a test pressing of Raw Power went up for auction on eBay, the price eventually going beyond the few shillings I had saved, but I kept the images that were posted

Dated December 8, 1972, two months before its US release on February 7, 1973. it should be in a museum or even better in my collection, it’s a one-off (or one of a very few). It would be the jewel in any collector’s crown. – a fetish item for the ages. But, you know, it is just a white label pressing of a stock copy, I’ve got a couple of those and, having not won the auction, I’ve still got the coin in my pocket.

But take a closer look. The timings suggest side one and two were flipped, which adds to the uniqueness. Then look again, side 1 has five tracks, not the four on the release version, and side 2 has only three.

So what was the running order? Dave Marsh’s hyper-enthusiastic review in Creem’s March 1973 edition gives a couple of clues.

He lists the title track as the second band on the top side, so my guess is it still kicks off with ‘Search & Destroy’, but which mix I wonder? Iggy’s? Or Bowie’s as found uniquely on the original UK release? Whatever, ‘Gimme Danger’ is the third track. After that no more clues from DM.

Working with the timings given on the white labels, and some some addition and subtraction on my part, Side 2 must be:

Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell

I Need Somebody

Death Trip

Side 1 then would look something like this:

Search and Destroy

Raw Power

Gimme Danger

Shake Appeal

Penetration

How’s that play in your head? While you’re pondering over this sequence and whether it rolls better this way than it does following Tony Defries’ edict that the songs needed to go fast one, slow one, fast one , as was eventually released, Dave Marsh wrote that their are ‘nine songs’ on the album, not the eight we have and love, perhaps he was shit at counting or adding up . . . or he had a different review copy. Think on that dear collector.

For those Raw Power devotees out there, here’s Mick Rock’s little known review of the album in the UK skin mag Club International (July 1973). More of this kinda thing is buried deep in Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll. Available to preorder or in the shops early next month . . . Get Some!

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

October 11, 2021 Peter Stanfield

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.

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.