The Who London 1965 . . . Ealing Club, Feburary 1965 with Fery Agasi (pinched from **HERE**)

The Who – Maximum R&B Tuesday Nights at the Marquee . . . a 23 week residency that became a cornerstone of the band’s foundation myth. As much as anything we have the classic poster to thank for that impression, reinforced by the one in The Who Live at Leeds package. Yet, the majority of the residency at the Wardour Street club appears to have been advertised not in its maximalist rhythmic and bluesy incarnation but as ‘THE WHO – LONDON 1965’. Sometimes with the hyphen, sometimes not . . .

An original is on the left, above is the Live at Leeds repro

‘Maximum R&B’ was used from November through to December 1964. The Monday Red Lion and Wednesday Florida gigs were in the same week the block ad, below, appeared in Melody Maker

Following the Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp takeover there was obviously an on-going debate over the band’s name or rather how best to present it. The first show of the residency, November 24, they were billed a ‘THE “WHO”’ which seems to have been the case until January 5 when the quotation marks were dropped, though they were back on the 12th and stayed in place until the first gig in February, when they went absent once more. From February 9 until April 6, if you paid to see The Who at the Marquee it was under the banner ‘THE WHO – LONDON 1965’. For the final couple of Tuesday gigs in April, the 27th being the last of the 23, they were simply ‘THE WHO’.

On the Brunswick label for ‘I Can’t Explain’, and in press advertisements and posters promoting the single, there was never any uncertainty over the name, they were just ‘The Who’. The heavily used appendage ‘LONDON 1965’ for the Marquee (and Ealing Club dates in February) was then a statement and a declaration. It was a contract with their audience that laid down the claim that they were not only at the very centre of things in Soho, but they were its centre – ‘right here, right now, we are what’s happening’, it said.

An April ‘65 interview with Kevin Swift, published in the May edition of Beat Instrumental, doesn’t refer to any of this directly, but it is there in plain sight – Stamp and Lambert ‘look upon them as the embodiment of London’s various characteristics’, Swift wrote:

It is quite a valid theory when you consider if for a moment. After all, their act contains an aggressiveness, humour, action and an overall indication of frustration.
London – The Who. The Who – London. Even the name is representative of the anonymity of the big city

**The High Numbers** *Record Mirror* (July 23, 1964)

Before the Pop Art epiphony of ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’, Townshend was already dumping the Mod tag: ‘this was a contrived artificial modness and we wanted to be ourselves’. Lambert’s reference to the band appearing in four films is intriguing. The French TV programme had been trailed in Britain as early as March in Record Mirror, with filming taking place at the Marquee, in Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith, Mods – Seize Millions de Jeunes (Sixteen Million Teenagers – tx March 18, you can find it on Vimeo as originally broadcast). Lambert is the ‘adult’ interlocutor, explaining teenage London. In one shot you see Moon (?) seemingly helping to design the Marquee poster but,The Who’s appearance aside, the highlight is the kids, smashed blocked and dancing like beautiful fools to some other band chopping away on Bo Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love’.

One of the two British TV spots could be Ready Steady Go (tx January 29) and the promotional short for ‘I Can’t Explain’ shot by the two managers and sold to Rediffusion to be used in ‘That’s For Me’ (tx March 15). The film ‘about a stripper’ was Carousella. The reference to it in this NME piece confirming, for me at least, that the band and management had contracted/cleared their appearance with the documentary’s producers, Mithras Films. They were billed as “The Who”. . . Much, if not all, of this on the films is in Andy Neill and Matt Kent’s essential Anyway Anyhow Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of The Who (2007)

Mail Bag, *Melody Maker* (June 19, 1965)

Performing at the IoW Festival with her band using The Who’s gear

In June 1973 Marsha Hunt went to court for an affiliation order that cited Mick Jagger as the father of her two year-old daughter, Karis. Before flying from Heathrow to Rome with his wife and their 18 month-old daughter Jade, Jagger was asked by reporters for his view on the matter, somewhat quizzically he said: ‘What’s the title of her latest record?’. Jagger was too subtle for the reporter for the Daily Mail who didn’t follow up his line of enquiry, but just let the question hang in the air. The answer was ‘Medusa’ a heavy glam rocker on Vertigo. The single was her first release since the run of three singles released on Track between April 1969 and March 1970.

Back then her afro was not girded with serpents, but it was the nation’s most talked about head of hair. It was discussed nearly as much as her TOTP’s performance of Dr John’s ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’ where she momentarily held viewers in thrall with her barely concealed bosom. Such were the days.

The child of a psychiatrist, she had been an undergraduate at Berkeley but quit her studies to travel to London in 1966. She hung around the rock scene, putting herself into Alexis Korner’s sphere, becoming part of Long John Baldry’s show and getting a bit part in Blow Up. In between she married Soft Machine’s Mike Ratledge, but the union didn’t last.

July 1967 part of the Long John Baldry Show

She’d achieved some notoriety for her part in the cast of the London presentation of the ‘American tribal love-rock musical’ Hair. The show opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in September 1968, Robert Stigwood was among the producers. It was the first new production to be staged following the abolition of theatre censorship, which meant more than the usual fuss was made over its celebrated nude scene. The Stage reported positively on its premier though it also noted the show was greeted with ‘cheers and boos’. It made no attempt to explain just why there was such consternation in the audience, but then they’d not previously encountered Mick Farren who was living above the theatre at the time:

When the wretched show first opened we gullibly took the advertised nudity and audience participation as an open invitation to stroll into the auditorium and maybe even play an impromptu part in the proceedings. We discovered the error of our assumptions the first time we tried it, when we were immediately and bodily ejected by the burly commissionaires who hadn’t been told about the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
– Give the Anarchist A Cigarette

Track ad in *Zigzag* for ‘Walk On Gilded Splinters’ with David Bailey photo credit

In April of the following year, Billboard reported that Track were rush releasing her debut single, produced by Tony Visconti for Tony Hall Enterprises. It entered the Record Retailer charts at 46, earning her the TOTP’s appearance, but didn’t get any higher. In September Rave magazine reported she would shortly have an LP released and was ‘spending her time modelling and making live bookings’. She was among the acts who appeared that month at the Isle of Wight Festival. The Daily Mirror reported she would perform ‘topless’. She didn’t, but the tabloids ran pictures of her regardless. Who could doubt she was a better prospect than the festival’s headliner, Bob Dylan?

*Daily Mail* ‘wriggles and writhes’ over Marsha Hunt

The *Daily Express* gets in on the action . . .

Two further singles followed, in November and then in March 1970, but the album remained in the vaults, perhaps because of her pregnancy. It would eventually be released in December 1971, too late to build on all the publicity she garnered over the previous two years. It was also too late to exploit her return to public performances when she shared the stage with P. J. Proby in Jack Good’s Catch My Soul – a rock musical version of Othello, which she joined 12 months earlier.

What Josephine Baker was for Parisians in the 1920s Marsha Hunt was for Londoners in the 1960s/1970s.

To tie-in with her appearance in the show, The Guardian ran a short profile of the single mother, the interview was overripe with racist and sexist tropes of the kind that had been a staple of her media profile since her role in Hair. The reporter described her afro as a ‘black golliwog fuzzball’ and thought that she ‘resembled ‘a cross between a Hottentot and a 50oz ball of wool’. She was to the mainstream media and to the Underground as Josephine Baker had earlier been for Parisian sophisticates – an exotic American delight. In the editorial that accompanied her Patrick Litchfield images for Vogue, she was described as a ‘jungle cat, cave-girl kitten, all-American girl’. She was extraordinarily beautiful but, like Jimi Hendrix before her, she was expected to play to British racial stereotypes.

IT advert which beggar’s belief . . . In the following issue they apologised. Didn’t Track provide their own print ready materials?

Those prejudices undoubtedly filtered into the decisions made with regard of the type of music she would record for Track; it would certainly have been a factor in her cover of Dr. John’s ‘I Walk On Gilded Splinters’ from his celebrated 1968 debut Gris-Gris. The New Orleans voodoo schtick worked easily with the image of her as a sexual primitive doing the ‘danse sauvage’ for the counterculture. Tony Visconti tightens up the extended meandering of the original, which ran just over seven minutes, to construct a more concise, pop orientated three minute potion. Hunt doesn’t sing the song as someone in thrall to the needle, which is how Dr. John positioned himself, but as the enchantress Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen, casting spells. There’s no ‘I’ in the title of Hunt’s version. Otherwise, Visconti’s production is remarkable true to the original’s arrangement. The congas pattering out the rhythm.

*Daily Express* review: ‘she looks like a delicious golliwog’

The blueprint for the single was taken up again and used for what would become the album’s title track, Bobby Goldsboro and Kenny O’Dell’s ‘Woman Child’. The two tracks echo with a taint of the bayou and French Quarter, with Cajun accents and voices that have breathed in the same foul air as Buddy Bolden. The single’s flipside swaps Louisiana witchery for the more materialist interests of Marc Bolan’s ‘Hot Rod Poppa’. It is a liberating switch. The shift from ‘Mama’ to ‘Poppa’ somewhat effaced Bolan’s conflation of gender and sexual positions, with his greased up Levi’s and baseball boots above his head, to make the song much less ambiguous. Hunt’s version has a revved-up phallic charge; a propulsive glide that was already there on the much earlier John’s Children’s version. As the lead track on My People Were Fair . . . album, ‘Hot Rod Mama’ sounded more a rattling T-Model struggling to make the quarter-mile on the long drag down Ladbroke Grove. Hunt’s version put it back into the race.

An International Times editorial assistant plays the park bench perv . . .

Given Visconti’s close relationship with Bolan, it’s not particularly remarkable that he would offer his songs to Hunt, but it is surprising that she recorded so many and did them so well. Track followed ‘Gilded Splinters’ with a Bolan double-header of ‘Desdemona’ and ‘Hippy Gumbo’. The latter more a drift through Little Venice than a walk down Bourbon Street.

Kit Lambert and Vicki Wickham (co-writer with Simon Napier-Bell of ‘You Don’t Have to say You Love Me’ and producer on Ready Steady Go!) get the production credit for ‘Desdemona’. They stay pretty true to the John’s Children original with their arrangement but bring in an electronic piano that bounces things along and has Hunt chasing after the tune. The effect is to leave the punk sneer of Andy Ellison’s vocal, backed by Bolan and The Who inspired psychedelics of over-amped guitars and cymbal splashes, a long way behind.

Zigzag #6 front page pin-up of Marsha in the graveyard — *Zigzag* #6 front page pin-up of Marsha in the graveyard

‘Hippy Gumbo’ didn’t make it to the album with ‘Hot Rod Poppa’ and ‘Desdemona’, which is a shame, but a fourth Bolan cover was included, ‘Stacey Grove’ from the album Prophets Seers and Sages. The Tyrannosaurus Rex version is a whirling incantation about a man, a nice cat with a hat full of wine, who picks ticks off his dog, Hunt’s recording is gifted a fuller arrangement with wind instruments and a harmonium creating a rich texture, but leaves out the quirks.

Though Bolan and Hunt had a romantic fling, he didn’t participate in the recording of his own songs but did provide a screeching back up vocal to her cover of The Supremes’ ‘My World Is Empty Without You’, which is from the same school as Vanilla Fudge’s overblown ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ .

Track ad in *Zigzag* for ‘Desdemona’ or is it ‘DesdAmona’?

Kit Lambert produced the two sides of Hunt’s final Track single, the top-side a cover of Paul Simon’s ‘Keep The Customer Satisfied’. On the downside was an undistinguished original, ‘Lonesome Holy Roller’. Both tracks a let-down after the pop frenzy of the predecessors. The Simon and Garfunkel tune made it to the album, a 12 track affair pulled together from various sessions by Track staffers Mike Shaw and Bill Curbishley — it’s a hodgepodge. If Visconti had been left to bring it to fruition the LP would have been a whole lot more coherent, I’d wager. The Americana of ‘Long Black Veil’, Dylan’s ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’, the pastiche spiritual ‘Moan You Moaners’ and even Traffic’s ‘No Face, No Name, No Number’ are all unremarkable, plodding vamps that distract from the pop urgency of Bolan’s songs and the witchery of ‘Gilded Splinters’ and ‘Woman Child’.
The album finishes with ‘Wild Thing’ making that Hendrix/primitive connection. Ron Wood, Ian Maclagan and Kenny Jones are said to be the key players, and I can believe that as I can the rumour that Pete Townshend laid down the slashing guitar. Apart from listing the producers, the album doesn’t give any credits other than a mysterious thanks to ‘“George” at Apple Studios’; The Faces no doubt remained anonymous for contractual reasons. It’s a shame they didn’t do more with Ms Hunt.

Marsha Hunt as The Seeker or a Storyville chippy. Track ad in *Zigzag*

Were other Bolan songs recorded by her? Probably not, but I like the fantasy of a ‘Marsha Hunt Sings the Marc Bolan Songbook’ album. What we do have are the four tracks which would make for a superfine 12” EP, with ‘Walk on Gilded Splinters’, ‘Woman Child’, ‘My World Is Empty Without You’ and ‘Wild Thing’ as a bonus disc. Whatever the format and track running order, Marsha Hunt’s sessions with Visconti, Lambert and Gus Dudgeon deserve a decent reissue.

Bolan’s songs from before the golden age of his big hits are all highly idiosyncratic and personal, intimate turns, performed as if he were playing in a cramped and damp parlour in some Notting Hill dump of a house. To hear them appropriated by someone else, even with the continuity that Visconti provides, is to realise just how deceptively well-crafted his songs are – perfect pop vignettes, like no others.

German Polydor and UK Track releases. The latter has a very cheap flmsey card cover, same as the label’s Backtrack budget releases. The Polydor is full laminated so that’s the one to get!!!!

German reissue of *Woman Child* retitled *Dedemona* and German and French pic sleeves

Reverse of German reissue and French, Norwegian and German pic sleeves

Keith Moon does his bit for Marsha and Track Records . . . *Club* (January 1971)

Cheese cake for the men’s mags. Club July 1970