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.

Nick Kent is ill . . .

The final issue of Frendz (January 6, 1972) was a thin affair and was not helped by Nick Kent having missed the deadline for his copy. He got his mum to phone in his excuse . . .

Bowie had confused Doug Yule with Lou a year earlier and it seems their identities were still getting mixed up, but, you know, Transformer was still two months away from its November release, so who did know what he actually looked like?

Whatever, the front cover is a graphic delight. A new logo and the use of colour within san serif typefaces that left a now jaded Underground aesthetic behind and signalled the pop/punk age to come. Apparently it is not a Barney Bubbles concoction, but surely that is a Pennie Smith image from July’s King Sound gig?

Regardless of the legend of Nick ‘the zeitgeist-surfing dark prince of seventies rock journalism’ Kent, I find his output in 1972 endlessly fascinating as he works out a stance and discovers his voice. His attitude was already in place with his first published reviews in Frendz (March 3, 1972); his take on Quicksilver and Moby Grape is a quick shuffle through the ashes left after second generation rock ‘n’ roll had burnt out. All he finds is a lingering nostalgia for when The Grape were a ‘genuine rock ‘n’ roll band’, which is as true as anything he ever wrote.

Kent hasn’t yet figured out what the third generation would look like, but he knew Lou Reed was going to be important and that a taste for the pure sixties pop of Motown (and others) was the basis on which the new decade would turn.

. . . and who wouldn’t want to hear that Laura Nyro album after reading this.

When the next lockdown hits, and I find the motivation, I’ll post an annotated bibliography of his reviews and interviews from the year of the pin-up.

Rock Scene (May 1975)

Photographing Iggy and the Stooges at King Sound, Kings Cross, 1972

MICK ROCK WAS NOT ALONE . . .

pic Byron Newman

Much of the research for Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll was with the magazines and newspapers of the era. Not just NME, but now forgotten journals like Strange Days and Cream. The latter had nothing to do with the more infamous American monthly Creem. Quite why it chose such a banal name is anyone’s guess; it ran from May 1971 until October 1973 and published some outstanding pieces by Nik Cohn and early reports by Ian MacDonald and Charles Shaar Murray. Nick Kent’s fulsome tribute to his hero, Iggy Pop, ‘Punk Messiah of the Teenage Wasteland’ appeared in the October 1972 edition. The two images that accompanied his piece, both shot at the King’s Cross gig in July, were credited to Pennie Smith and Byron.

The November issue of Cream had Alice Cooper on the cover and a report on Fear and Loathing in the Top 20, it was illustrated by another image of Iggy at King Sound credited to Pennie Smith. Her work at Frendz and later at the NME would leave a photographic legacy every bit the equal of Mick Rock, but unlike him, her Iggy and the Stooges images have not much featured in her portfolio. I sometimes think, though, we may have been looking at them all the time and taking it as a given they were the work of Mick Rock.

Byron was a new name to me and it took awhile to find out his surname was Newman. With that information he is not so hard to Google. He photographed Bowie in 1972 alongside work for soft porn magazine Men Only and, later, Game. He would eventually make his career (and I guess fortune) with Playboy. Other than the onstage shots at King’s Cross, he also photographed James Williamson in a London cemetery and, in some places, is credited with the only known picture of the Iggy and James working in a London studio during the recording of Raw Power

from the booklet for the deluxe reissue of Raw Power. The Stooges Unofficial Facebook page has posted four more Byron Newman pix from the recording session

One more from Byron, this is from a 1972 edition of the French magazine Actuel. I found this on Deadnest’s facebook page [here]

A fourth photographer at King Sound was Alec Byrne. I’ve not found any contemporary use of his pictures, at least not with his credit, but two are beautifully reproduced in his collection London Rock: The Unseen Archive (2017)

Mojo #346 (Sept. ‘22) plugs Bryne’s book and looks through his archive of images from the gig but only reproduces the one. The outside possibility of a slim dedicated volume is raised and an exhibition in LA this summer . . . O Blessed we would be . . .

additional images have been posted on Alec Byrne’s Instagram: [HERE]

Patrice Kindl was the fifth photographer on the scene, so to speak. His images are known through their use on a couple of live albums, featuring performances from the Whiskey Ago-Go, which were released in France by Revenge in the late 1980s. Cropping and reversing of images might suggest otherwise, but there’s a good amount of duplication across the two sleeves and on the CD Search and Destroy: Raw Mixes Vol. 3 (Curtiss). Getting his subject in focus wasn’t Kindl’s strong point.

Unheard by all but the few hundred in attendance, the images from the gig, however, have left an indelible mark; a set of traces that the next generation, using Mick Rock’s sleeve design for Raw Power as their north star, would follow.

After London, Iggy got high in the Hollywood Hills and it would not be until 1976 that he climbed down. Nick Kent would remain a true believer, sending back a report from around the time Iggy and Williamson were demoing the tracks that would eventually be released as Kill City. A little earlier Sounds put Iggy on their cover with a report on his Toronto gigs. Inevitiably it was illiustrated with photographs from King’s Cross, uncredited again, but my guess is these are also a mix of Byron and Pennie Smith.

pic. Byron Newman

In April 1974 the NME carried a news item announcing an impending UK tour, nine venues had confirmed, among them the Rainbow Rooms at Biba where the New York Dolls had played. Iggy would also make an Old Grey Whistle Test appearance. Another Pennie Smith (?) image from the London show was used to illustrate the hype. The gigs of course never happened and the King Sound, King’s Cross pictures were left alone to reverberate in splendid isolation until next needed to confirm the image of the World’s Forgotten Boy.

The above was run in the January/February 1975 issue of Edinburgh’s Hot Wacks fanzine (#5) to fill a gap left by the non-arrival of advertising copy from Camden’s Rock On shop. To my radar eye these are not from Mick Rock’s archive, but if not who took them?

Sounds (September 18, 1976) Pennie Smith

Disc (March 3, 1973) . . . Iggy to make film . . . now there’s a thought. Pic is Mick Rock (heavily cropped)

Per Nilsen and Carlton P. Sandercock’s coffee table assemblage of Stooges performances and recording sessions, 1967-74 is as essential as it comes . . . Features a good few previously unpublished Byron Newman images, same for Pennie Smith. Patrice Kindle are mostly familiar but in much better quality . . . Mick Rock and Alec Bryne are not present, too expensive to license I’d guess. Get your copy here

Viv Prince in Novokuznetz

I’ve been crossing paths with The Pretties’ Viv Prince lately, he makes a cameo in Nick Kent’s The Unstable Boys, a model of sorts for the band’s drummer as Phil May was for the singer. I thought of him while reading Nik Cohn’s story of lives lived on Broadway, The Heart of the World, where he says that Russian street gangs named themselves after British beat groups:

Wimp suburbanites chose the Beatles and Rolling Stones; inner-city stylists preferred the Yardbirds or Them. On Novokuz, which must always be the hippest of all, prime icons included John’s Children, the Action, the Troggs.

Sasha himself had been a Fruit Eating Bear, but they were fragile goods and shattered at first contact with Pretty Things who were neighbourhood kingpins. The Things had the deadliest weapons, the sharpest clothes; they looked the most Western. Only the Hi-Numbers dared challenge them.

 Viv had a big role to play in Pretties manager Bryan Morrison’s posthumously published memoir, and frankly the only reason to read what is a otherwise a superficial account of his time as one of the sixties music scene’s prime movers, but it did tip me off to a feature on the band in a 1964 edition of The Sunday Times Magazine, which I found for a pittance on eBay. That’s Viv in the porkpie hat.

He could do Bo Diddley’s ‘a shave and a hair cut, two bits’ better than any other London sticksman and he gave his instrument a prominence unmatched until Keith Moon appeared, but he also gave to the Pretties’ image a much needed element of menace. Without him they just seem placable, unremarkable even. Regardless of Phil May’s long locks, without Prince mixing things up it’s Dick Taylor’s jazz beard that dominates. It’s as if a woodwork teacher had formed a band with a bunch of willing sixth formers .

Here’s The Pretty Things without Viv Prince, this Dutch 45 picture sleeve featuring his predecessor Viv Andrews

And here’s what you get when Prince takes up a pose

Until Lee Brilleaux and Johnny Rotten picked over his style book, Viv Prince stood alone in making a sheepskin coat the coolest look on London’s streets. About as anti-Carnaby Street as you could get

How a sheepskin should be worn, Morlands advert October 1966

Nick Kent - 'Viva Rock'n' Roll Facism'

‘Critic’s Choice’ Let It Rock, January 1974. 30 UK and USA rock critics tell readers what they liked best about 1973. Along with Lester Bangs and Lenny Kaye, Kent liked the Stooges, only he saw them as a call to arms rather than just a good night out: ‘That hordes of deranged mutant-youth will spring up from the suburbs primed on Iggy Pop and wearing Keith Richard death-head face-masks to assassinate John Denver, James Taylor and Carly, and rock-writers who write turgid wank-analysis of Bob Dylan and Professor Longhair.’ Prescient . . .

I’ve kept Mike Leadbitter in the frame because he liked the Flamin’ Groovies’ ‘Married Woman’ 45 and so do I . . .