INTRO . . . 1967. Nik Cohn interviews Townshend, Davies and Wood

The short-lived teen pop magazine Intro lasted less than six months – September 1967 to March 1968 – before it was folded into the long-running Petticoat. Until now, hidden in four of those issues were a Nik Cohn profile of Terence Stamp and a limited series of interviews with songwriters. Pete Townshend (of course) opened proceedings, followed by Roy Wood and Ray Davies.

Pete Townshend is a talker. He's sharp, imaginative and comes out with some very funny lines. He tends to shoot his mouth off but mostly talks sense and he's never boring.

Most important of all, he's got his own private progression and, at a time when most of the people in pop keep changing fads as often as they once changed their socks, he jumps on no bandwagons.

 The interview was carried out while the Who were working on Sell Out and songs like ‘Jaguar’ were still in contention, but what leaps out is that the advertising concept – ‘one long mad montage’ –  even at this early date, was figured as only taking up one side.

AD-OPERA

‘For instance, we might start with the four of us in barber-shop harmony, really sweaty and masculine, singing the one word Jaguar’, he says. ‘Then it’d go into some maniacal drumming by Keith, and it’d open out from there into someone like Fenella Fielding talking about Odo-ro-no and then straight on to a song I've written about a girl with smelly armpits. It would all be one continuous ad-opera and we'd make it as fast and insane as we could.

‘I think that it's a logical thing to Progress into writing songs about subjects like these; Jaguars and Odo-ro-no and all the rest. Instead of putting

‘Oh, my heart is breaking’, I put ‘Oh, my arms are stinking’, At least it makes change from the usual draggy old love songs, at least it's a bit more relevant to real lives and problems.

Cohn captures the idea of ambivalence, contradiction and indirection that sits at the heart of Townshend’s writing: ‘His songs are full of calm violence, sober insanity . . .’

 ‘I Can See for Miles’ is discussed along with a recent tour of America and Townshend’s thoughts on the band’s relationship with their audience and how it has changed and in turn changed the Who:

‘The point is that if you're going to reach any kind of communication with your audience, with all the thousands of people that you can't see in the dark, you've got to be prepared to put out a lot of physical energy and sheer hard slogging.

You've got to force them out of their apathy, you've got to shake them up and invade their privacy. You've got to get tough with them.

‘When we were just starting out at the Marquee, three years ago, I used to hold my guitar like a machine gun and I'd mow the entire audience down.

‘I'd start at one end of the room and swing round very slowly until every single person in the audience had been shot. The people at the far end of the line could see me coming and they would try to hide, they'd double up in pain and they'd really be frightened.

At the very least, they couldn't ignore me, they had to react. They didn't want to be killed.

‘That's the kind of communication we had originally and that we've tended to lose. We had to get it back again . . . The audience is king and pop musicians his court jesters’.

 The magazine provided ecstatic reviews of both the single and the album

Rock n’ Roll Revival Time – Intro (January 27 1968)

1967 and Townshend and Cohn’s ideas about the pop/rock moment were completely simpatico:

Last year, the move was progression towards complexity and introspection. Now groups are tired of pretending to be camp intellectuals and want to get back to basics Already the Who, always in the lead with anything new, have started wearing authentic Rocker gear and performing Rock classics like Summertime Blues and My Way as a regular part of their stage act.

‘Pop was getting much too solemn’, says writer/guitarist Pete Townshend.

‘Rock was beautiful because it was direct. hard-hitting, loud, sexy and rebellious. Most Important of all it was incredibly glamorous.

More Nik Cohn HERE & HERE and via the tags below

Today There Are No Gentlemen excepting The Fallen Leaves

Yellow Socks Are Out

As Eric Joy, the tailor, puts it: 'When I first started cutting, in the early fifties, my biggest seller was the single-breasted, button-three in grey or dark blue; ten years later, it was the same; today it's the same; in 1980, it'll still be the same.' . . .

With this, all the bleatings of revolution may begin to take on meaning. For the first time, male fashion won't be just the rich and the chic, sipping Campari sodas at the Arethusa; it will be dealing in millions.

On that basis, this book comes more into perspective. It isn't about a movement but about the roots of a movement; not about change but about the precursors of change. Simply, it's about a beginning.

 Nik Cohn, Today There Are No Gentlemen (1971)

All the important bands have a manifesto, written or unwritten. These are the rules they live by and the laws that they wilfully break (for a sizable cash advance)

There is poetry in The Fallen Leaves manifesto

 Simple Songs For Complex People.
Punk Rock For Gentlemen.
No Jeans. No t-shirts. No Cover-Versions.
The Fallen Leaves believe in the DIY Punk ethos.
Song, Sound and Performance are all.
Recordings are live, minimal overdubs.
As the self-proclaimed champions of the glorious underachievers The Fallen Leaves ask you to remember … Simple and easy are not the same thing.

 That credo was once shared by Dr. Feelgood; obviously not the embargo on cover versions, but in all other aspects the two bands walk the same line. In 1976 on the Feelgoods first tour of the States, Wilko Johnson explained to an American critic his philosophy:

“we play straightforward . . . We think the simplicity of it IS it . . . If there is no feeling in it, there’s nothing at all.”

photo: Mick Gold

 The Fallen Leaves don’t sound anything like the Feelgoods but they do sound like a good few of your other favourite bands. More importantly they apply Johnson’s ethos with verve and drama and they have in abundance what Nik Cohn loved in certain English bands, flash.

Their latest album is a true testament to that fact, it is the best album since forever (and I bet I’m still humming along with it next year and a good few more after that). Rev. Rob Green sings in a way that tugs at my most romantic inclinations, which is to say I believe him. Sir Robert Symmons plays guitar as if he’d sat a crash course taught by Sterling Morrison along with a few desultory evening classes with Ron Wood at the lectern, circa 1965. The Fallen Leaves also have the best vocal harmonies since The Who in 1966. Their songs are tailored for the ages . . .

Buy the album [HERE] then go see Aki Kaurismaki’s film that shares the band’s name . . . and much of their manifesto.

Nik Cohn – Lost and Found: 'Mad Mister Mo'

Nik Cohn has published only a handful of short stories, ‘Mad Mister Mo’ from the October 1966 edition of King magazine is therefore something of a curiosity piece .

Given that his father was a celebrated history professor I guess you could chance a Freudian reading of this story of Mad Mo the history teacher: ‘He smelled of chalk all over and wore a ragged black gown with holes in it. When he walked, he gathered his black gown in tight around him like a shroud’. He is a monstrous figure who ‘threw out his arms like a mad messiah and he preached me lust and thieving and blashemy. He shouted at me and he said that religion was bad and murder good, love was bad and hate was right’. He preached me the triumphant victories of evil’.

Mo is certainly mad, but is he a tyrant, drunken fool or phantom figure of a child’s imagination?

Illustration by Peter Adkins

King was a fairly high-end men’s magazine, backed initially by Paul Raymond. It ran from 1964–68 when it was subsumed by Mayfair. I like to think its ideal reader found his surrogate in this male model puting some shape into the latest line in car coats – the well groomed man . . .

This issue also featured a piece and photograph by the great Val Wilmer on Thelonious Monk

Following on the heels of Cohn’s story is a report on drugs and Oxford, there’s no writer’s credit, but I imagine whoever penned this piece had some first-hand knowledge of both Oxford and the scene even if the tone is sensationalist.

The image of the student in mortor board and gown transforming into a bird imprinted on a sugar cube is rather wonderful, blocked and trippy even

What really catches the eye is the description of the dealer working the room with a Bob Dylan record under his arm:

The boy in the combat jacket with a face like the lead singer of the Yardbirds, but with a different intention has found a customer. In the airless bedroom, among the socks, he carefully unrolls a cigarette, watched by the young and eager faces of his new-found friends, and spills the tobacco on to the back of his Bob Dylan record.

The Pusher Men of Oxford . . . but ‘with a different intention’. Rave (May 1966)

Anyway Anyhow Anywhere – Intensity and Abstraction

Before Nik Cohn, Patrick Kerr was the Pop Scene columnist for Queen magazine. A choreographer on Ready Steady Go he clearly had his finger on the pulse of what the nation’s teens were getting into . . . He finished his June 2, 1965 piece with a tip-off on the band’s latest release with its ‘weird sound effects’. Two weeks later he provided a fuller appreciation – ‘on stage they are without doubt the wildest’ and they are the world’s ‘first “Op-Art” group’.

Five years later and the single seemed like ancient history, but for Creem’s Lester Bangs’ AAA’s ‘intensity and abstraction’ – a perfect summation – deserved to be resurrected. When everyone else was busy with the rock ‘n’ roll revival, Bangs had became the key archivist for sixties pop of the noisome and psychotic persuasion .

Meanwhile, in Youtubeland a sometimes great sometimes poor quality video of The Who making merry for Canadian TV has turned up . . . what a beautifully ugly racket they made. According to Andy Neill and Matt Kent’s bible, bits from ‘Substitute’, ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’, ‘See See Ride'r’ and ‘My Generation’ can be heard. The gig was at WestminsterTechnical College on Saturday, 9 July 1966.

My thanks to Dave Laing for the tip-off on this little explosion in SW1

Beatle Crushers by Anonymous

I've been trying to find an elusive advertisement with the tag line: 'The Rolling Stones, the dividing line between art and commerce' that Andrew Loog Oldham ran in Billboard. Stanley Booth’s Dance With the Devil is my source, but a trawl through the on-line archive of the mag didn't turn it up.

Never mind, I found these four.

This is from June 6, 1964 and I reckon 'anonymous' must now be known to all . . . brilliant piece of provocation

From May 1st 1964, a bog standard record label cut n' paste job

From November 1965, a graphic gem. An extraordinary leap in just five months. The image of Jagger confirms Nik Cohn's description of him in Pop From The Beginning as an ‘updated Elvis Presley . . . moved like him, so fast and flash he flickered’.

Photography by Gerard Mankowitz, I believe, and that below

From December 18, 1965. None of these images were used on the sleeve of December’s Children, yet anyone of them might have been

FOUND! The Rolling Stones – ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ (October 1965):

‘the dividing line between art and commerce’

To my mind, this puts the Stones/Oldham squarely into the continuum between the fine and the popular arts as Lawrence Alloway concieved it and without the need to make the case on their behalf . . . It is just the fact of the matter.

Thank you Frank!

Camilla Aisa – Review of 'A Band With Built-In Hate'

Camilla Aisa

Review of ‘A Band With Built-In Hate: The Who From Pop Art To Punk’

Popular Music History, published March 24, 2022

https://journal.equinoxpub.com/PMH/article/download/21897/24797

Cook’s Ferry Inn, Edmonton – learning to lead by following

To anybody who might feel like letting out a sigh and following it with ‘what else is there to say?’ as they face ‘The Who’ in big and bright lettering on the cover of a new book—you have this writer’s sympathy, completely. However, I have some good news for you. Peter Stanfield’s A Band with Built-in Hate is far from being yet another book on The Who. It is much more than that. And Stanfield’s investigation of the band is so consistently wider than simple Who-centred narratives that the book ends up achieving quite a few rare goals (more on this below).

screen grab from Pete Walker’s The Big Switch (1968)

Whilst historiographers and fact-boasting fans might expect the book’s journey to start from Shepherd’s Bush or Acton, it is (rather tellingly) Soho that Stanfield chooses as a starting (and most recurring) location. We’re invited to travel to Whitechapel—where pop music makes its UK ‘debut’ in 1956 at the Independent Group-curated This Is Tomorrow exhibition—before arriving in West London’s well-known (W)holy Land. That’s the thing with Stanfield’s book: from the very first pages he makes it clear that he has no interest in the uninspired retelling of the kind of trivia a quick visit to Wikipedia can take good care of. A Professor of Film at the University of Kent, Stanfield considers The Who—as well as their peers who surrounded the band in their early stages—through a multidisciplinary, dexterous perspective. Crowded Soho is conjured (dirt included) through the posters that populated it, promoting B-movies or upcoming gigs in local clubs.

Portsmouth’s Birdcage Club . . . ‘the pop-art, guitar smashing epic’ and a target to boot.

The very relevance of cinema and visual arts in The Who’s early life is an often-overlooked aspect that Stanfield brilliantly reconsiders. It is thanks to forgotten flicks with nouvelle vague pretensions (and, of course, thanks to Who managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp’s foresight) that we have some of the band’s earliest footage. And thanks to keen attention to contemporary graphic art and its potential, in the mid 1960s The Who were able to offer a palatable preview of both the punch-in-the-gut quality of their live performances and their bespoke take on pop’s developing self-realization: ‘I found Townshend compelling and touching in both his cynicism and self-awareness, but couldn’t help wondering if pop music which, with all its faults, had started as a spontaneous and committed movement, could survive such candour’, George Melly noted in Revolt into Style (1989: 116).

Keith Moon . . . Bridget Riley’s best canvas

The book’s originality in narrating The Who isn’t limited to time (those decisive early steps of UK pop, before the band even came into existence) and place (Soho’s youthful buzz). It also concerns people, or, as one might feel inclined to say reading printed pages, characters. It is clear from the introduction that we’re invited to take our journey hand-in-hand with a few keen observers. Not the band itself, as it might prove either too obvious or short-sighted. Our guides are larger-than-life writers, critics, astute chroniclers, real-life dandies. We meet George Melly (music, television and film critic) right away. And, most importantly, we meet Nik Cohn (considered by some to be the father of rock writing). Perhaps even more than the band themselves, Cohn is the book’s most constant presence.

Bridget Riley ‘Blaze Study’ 1962

Sunn amplifers advert

Revisiting times and places with their most insightful early champions and commentators, it turns out, is more effective than the usual sequence of ubiquitous footage. When it comes to pop creatures as gargantuan as The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or in this case The Who, adopting an outside perspective can be revelatory.

Tour programme USA, 1967

Looking at The Who from an angle that is extraneous to what we might call a rock documentary-like mythologizing approach, A Band with Built-in Hate opens itself to two intriguing prospects. First, it treats its subjects as captivating provocation. The Who’s, and in particular Pete Townshend’s, volatility in embracing the attitude, vocabulary and signifiers of mod or pop art is thoroughly examined. ‘What the Mods taught us was how to lead by following’, Townshend candidly reveals at one point (37). We watch his band enthusiastically identify as mod early on, then dismiss the scene altogether, then proudly reintroduce themselves as pop practitioners: ‘from valueless objects—a guitar, a microphone, a hackneyed pop tune, we extract a new value. We take objects with one function and give them another’, Townshend theorizes in 1966 (76). Now, where exactly does artistic evolution end and well-timed appropriation begin? Stanfield’s book is too discerning to make a point of asking that. Rather, it makes sure that the matter is left open to discussion. Neither apologetic nor accusatory, it gives the reader enough material to thought-fully consider both positions.

The other welcome consequence of Stanfield’s multifaceted approach is that the book proves an absorbing read for avid fans and casual listeners alike. Much like this writer, you don’t need to be a fan of The Who to eagerly devour these pages and their stimulating arguments. At the same time, there is more than enough to consider and explore for completists who have already seemingly read every publication on the band. Also, and importantly, the book sits evenly between the scholarly and the deftly flowing page-turner: a most appropriate middle way, when you remember Nik Cohn praising Who songs for being an ‘obvious reaction against the fashionable psychedelphic [sic] solemnity, against the idea of pop as capital-letter Art [...]. It is all mainline pop, bright and funny and blatantly commercial’ (1967: 13).

As for equally pleasing fans and not-necessarily-fans, here’s where Stanfield’s secret might lie. Often looking from the outside, far from the front row, he treats the non-musical, un-obvious material as much more than mere pretext to explain The Who better. As a result, the reader is more likely to understand the band and their music—as well as the constantly evolving pop culture around them—better.

Where A Band with Built-in Hate’s journey ends is a brilliant insight in itself. ‘My personal motivation on stage is simple’, Townshend told the London Sunday Citizen in 1965 (as quoted in Gary Herman’s The Who, the first publication on the band):

It consists of a hate of every kind of pop music and a hate of everything our group
has done. You are getting higher and higher but chopping away at your own legs.
I prefer to be in this position. It’s very exciting. I don’t see any career ahead. That’s
why I like it—it makes you feel young, feeding insecurity. If you are insecure you
are secure in your insecurity. I still don’t know what I’m going to do (1971: 94).

It is fitting, then, that a book about ‘the new forms of cultural crimes The Who carried out’ would wave its subject goodbye around Quadrophenia. Which is to say, when The Who had indisputably morphed into classic rock and secured a career. When compilation albums and concept albums had become the norm, when stage moves had long been codified and (most dangerously) well accepted. When, arguably, wealth had replaced style. The degeneration of ‘My Generation’, we might call it. It didn’t come without irony or consciousness: ‘I’m desperately trying to sleep off the results of the last leg of the Who tour with a little meditative Mercedes buying’, Townshend would quip after up-and-coming Eddie and the Hot Rods convinced their label to get in touch with him and seek a possible collaboration (229).

Would the Mod Who or the Pop Who hate what The Who had become? And how inevitable was that? It might feel tragic, but that’s not the point. Being a brilliant writer and an acute observer, champion of pop Nik Cohn couldn’t write an obituary. The book leaves us with some words of his that were printed on a promo picture for the band’s 1967–1974 back catalogue: ‘from Shepherd’s Bush Mods to time machine mystic travellers. The Who played longer, harder and straighter, for the people, than anyone else’. What that dash between 1967 and 1974 signified, mattered most to him. Stanfield agrees: ‘The Who made the simple things complicated and the complicated simple; they put pop and art together in a set of couplings which rode the lines between authenticity and artifice, self-determination and co-option, the low and high, the intolerant and the permissive’ (240). When it comes to The Who, duality is key. Thanks also to its own above-mentioned dualities, A Band with Built-in Hate handles this dichotomy in a unique way.

Camilia Aisa blogs at https://psychedelicsidetrips.wordpress.com/

Glamour is a Dream Machine Says Nik Cohn

‘Private and Public Glamour, Nik Cohn Sifts the Stardust’ Harpers & Queen (February 1973)

The bookends:

Once, in Las Vegas, I was sitting in the lobby of the International Hotel, browsing through a magazine, when I was suddenly afflicted by a buzzing in the back of my skull. I turned my head: there was nothing to look at but a stretch of bare wall and a corner. I stared at the wall for perhaps thirty seconds, feeling most foolish but unable to do otherwise. The buzzing trapped me; I knew that something enormous would happen.

It did. Suddenly Elvis Presley appeared round the corner, flanked by half a dozen body guards. I will not describe him; he was God. Shimmering, he swept away across the lobby and was gone. After a moment the buzzing subsided and I went back to my magazine.

Yet again, as so often when it comes to matters of weight, I return to P. J. Proby. I remember him once at a concert in Leicester, halfway through a riot, grovelling and shrieking on his knees, when suddenly he stopped dead, stared out into the darkness and, in that curious mock-prophetic style of his, spake with tongues. ‘It seems that I must be the greatest thing on earth’, he declaimed. ‘Why, look at you all – screaming and yelling and fighting, loving me, hating me, dying to touch me, dreaming of breaking my neck. You run behind me like lapdogs and shucks, I don’t even exist . . .’

In between, a disquisition on glamour. What is it? What isn’t it? Who has it? Who doesn’t have it?. He asks everyone, except Bobby Dylan, The Beatles and Timothy Leary. ‘New Generation’ artist Patrick Procktor told him glamour is ‘the essence of irresistible allurement, overwhelming all aesthetic judgements’, which works for me and part explains Cohn’s devotion to Proby.

Glamour changes down the decades marked by how the object of enthralment shifts: the fifties was about a sexual physicality, sixties a counter-reaction with aura replacing a sex-glam syndrome – ‘A triumphant return to freakishness, decadence, insanity; lots of violence, swilled down with a dash of perversity; early and melodramatic death where possible, or at least a glut of suffering.’  

Andrew Loog Oldham had the ‘flair’ that defined glamour in the sixties and Cohn extols his virtues and vices in his profile of Marianne Faithful for Nova (April 1971), who, after the Stones, was Oldham’s greatest invention. When Cohn meets her she has moved away from the pop limelight, living with her child and mother in a timbered cottage in the Berkshire downs. He describes her as overweight and seemingly ‘exhausted and muffled by inertia’.

After the flair of the Sixties, the seventies had nowhere else to go but to turn to nostalgia, glamour as pastiche of lost dreams.

One of his chosen throwbacks, reincarnations, is David Bowie who Cohn had met and interviewed six months previously. Bowie wants to be a star:

Not a Superstar or a Rock star or any kind of star in particular; just a star, period.

And what was a star? He didn’t know, he couldn’t define it, but he could recognise it by instinct. Then he paused, looked coy; ‘a star is me,’ he said, fluttering his lashes, and suddenly it was. 

Harpers & Queen (September 1972)

Rock Dreams, Peellaert and Cohn. Pop’s three generations

As if to make sense of all of this, Cohn returned to his own creation, Arfur the Teenage Pinball Queen. It was a postscript on the media mirage, the ways in which ‘Pop phenomena may be created absolutely out of nothing . . . ‘shucks’ said Proby, ‘I don’t even exist’.

Harpers & Queen (January 1973)

More on Arfur over the page, here

An Introduction to Flash

When he described his pop ideal, Cohn invariably labelled it ‘flash’. The adjective had a peculiarly English application; it was not much used in the pop vernacular of the day by American critics. But it summarized the perfect pop attributes, suggesting in its two syllables the flaring, pulsing surge of the ephemeral pop moment: the splashy, garish display of the pop star; the sharp, concise impression left by the hit of a pop single; the sham, counterfeit emotion used in pop marketing; and the illicit, underworld attraction of flash-men, flash-coves and flash-Harrys who occupied the pop world, especially those trespassers who tunnelled under or climbed over the cultural and social borders of the suburban greylands that restrained others. To have ‘flash’ meant you lived in the moment, without regard for yesterday and without thought for tomorrow. You thrived in an accelerating world, ahead of the game, blazing brightly enough to leave an impression – to have made your mark with attitude and style.

A Band With Built-In Hate: The Who from Pop Art to Punk

April 1971 edition of Esquire, ‘the magazine for men’, Richard Woodley provided ‘An Introduction to Flash’ for American readers

The ‘flash’ – what others might call ‘style’ – is important on the street. It’s in the clothes, it’s in the cars, it’s in the eyes, the walk, the talk. “you got to have flash”, Jimmy said. “I guess it’s like acting. We all know it’s acting, but people recognise the flash on the street. People get to know you by the flash. They suspect you’re somebody. Like, a lot of people on the street sort of know who I am. They know but don’t know. They know a little. Who’s that? Somebody will say. That’s Jimmy, they tell him. Oh yeah? The dude will say

Woodley’s piece is the story of a Harlem hustler who sells “top-shelf coke. Super-fly.” Whether or not his article was a source for the 1972 film starring Ron O’Neil, directed by Gordon Parks jr., it was certainly part of the cycle of blaxsploitation. Jimmy tells his inquisitor how the game works and as evening falls he looks down on Lennox Avenue where “the pimps’ Cadillacs were beginning to gather and double-park.” Getting ready to join them on the street, Jimmy primps himself before a full-length mirror,

Touching his Afro, smoothing his trousers, touching the butt of his automatic. He started toward the door, then came back to the mirror. He looked straight ahead at himself, icily. Then he opened the apartment door and looked down the hall. He strode to the elevator, got in, pushed the button, and rode down into the Harlem night.

Though sold as an authentic report, the piece reads more like fantasy and not so very far removed from Nik Cohn’s ‘Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night’ (1976) that formed the basis of Saturday Night Fever. It hardly needs retelling that Cohn was cavalier with the facts about the Brooklyn disco scene and imported the language, style and attitude of Goldhawk Road Mods to boost his story. Woodley’s introduction to ‘flash’ feels like he was doing much the same thing.

The story was expanded for Dealer: The Portrait of a Cocaine Merchant (Hardback 1971 and a 1972 pulp paperback the following year). Yeah, you gotta have flash.

Nik Cohn – Stuart Sutcliffe the Fifth Beatle

The Observer magazine (September 8, 1968), the first of two issues celebrating The Beatles.

Nik Cohn sends in his thoughts on the lost man, Stuart Sutcliffe:

If he’d never played with the Beatles, of course, he’d have been forgotten by now, but that doesn’t necessarily make him less intriguing. He never made records and his paintings were only a beginning. The most vivid things he left were Astrid’s pictures of him, the shades and the leather, the gaunt cheekbones, the restlessness, the basic energy and strength. Added up, it doesn’t come to much but it does remain oddly haunting.

More on Marc Bolan’s Toilette

Back in October ‘20 I posted a piece on Marc Bolan’s brief appearance in a December 1971 edition of Club magazine where he talked about buying clothes and his preference for Onyx aftershave and Fenjal bath oil. If he came across as a little fastidious then at least he was being consistent. Nik Cohn made good use of all of this fussiness in his The Who Generation (see previous post) where he gleaned from his old notebooks the perfect quote from Bolan on Mod bathing habits:

When I was in my mod phase, I used to bathe three or four times a day, change my clothes each time and, when I went out, if I splashed my drink on my shirt-cuff or got the slightest stain anywhere, the whole night was ruined, I had to go straight home and rebuild myself piece by piece. It was my duty to myself. I was a superior being, and I couldn’t fall down.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Bolan sphere, Wintergarden publishing, fronting for the Official Marc Bolan Merchandise Company at Easy Action Records, have delivered on a long promised volume of photographs of Stamford Hill’s top face. It is a superlative collection, beautifully produced and designed. See here.

The Who Generation by Nik Cohn

Circus Magazine’s Pinups No. 4: Collector’s Edition $1.95 (1976)

Chris Charlesworth recently tipped me off to the existence of this magazine, no surprise it had passed me by given its exclusive American provenance and that Nik Cohn’s journalism is woefully documented and catalogued.

You can read how the project ended up with Cohn on Chris C.’s webpage (here). Cohn’s 7–8,000 words cover the story of the band from their beginnings up to the release of The Who By Numbers and an immanent American tour, which The Who Generation was intended to exploit. 

There are some strange ellipses in Cohn’s history, there’s nothing of any consequence on A Quick One and The Who Sell Out doesn’t even merit a mention; lost too in despatches are ‘I’m A Boy’, ‘Happy Jack’ and ‘Pictures of Lilly’. Much was left in the editor’s waste bin, I would wager. Pity.

Nevertheless, there are things here to thrill Who fans and Cohn-ites alike, he is particularly good on Tommy.

But this is how it begins:

First of all, The Who were Mods. And Mod, in its own way, was a true pop religion. . .

No question, they [Mods] were most strange. Undersized, very young, white faced with exhaustion, they seemed almost like alien beings, pill-head Martians, newly emerged from time-warp.

Cohn describes his first encounter with the band, at the Marquee on a Tuesday night late in 1964, having been dragged along to see them by Kit Lambert: 

No amount of pre-hype could have prepared me for the furore they whipped up in person. They were, no question about it, the most volcanic group that I had heard in my life. Come to that, I’ve never heard their equal since.

In contrast to the ‘updated beats’ look of the Rolling Stones and all the ‘grubby’ Rhythm and Blues bands that followed:

Out of nowhere there came the Who, the diametric opposites. Their music was as wild as anyone’s, or wilder, but to look at they were positive choirboys. Snow-white Mods, gleaming and precise, in their Union Jack jackets, Mondrian T-shirts, Malibu jeans. It was like reading Clockwork Orange after Howl, watching James Dean after Ernest Borgnine.

Somehow the spotlessness made the underlying violence all the more powerful, the anarchy more seductive. ‘Nice boys committing one murder is far more shocking than a pack of degenerates committing ten,’ said Kit Lambert and, watching the Who that night, it was true, murder was the only metaphor that one could possibly use.

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

Great photo spread for the Pretties in Star Club News (July 1965), Viv looking fine in a Thank Your Lucky Stars tee and ubiquitous sheepskin

Mod RIP: Nik Cohn – Ready Steady Gone.

Outside of Pete Townshend and the Who, Nik Cohn’s favourite topic in the 1960s was the Mod phenomenon, so it was a buzz to find this August 1967 article on the death of the youth cult, freshly killed by 10,000 flower-children.

Cohn thought Mod was an entirely new concept of youth, unlike Teds, for example, they owed nothing to past generations; ithey weren’t concerned with adult opinion. Teds revolted against their parents because they wanted to claim a masculinity; boys wanting to be men. Mod wasn’t rebellious in this way, because the boys were ‘unmasculine’. They wore make up, constantly changed their clothes and ‘completely rejected women’. Anyone over the age of 25 wasn’t alive and they weren’t inspired by Hollywood, which is to say America.

They had no heroes but themselves and they produced their whole litany out of nothing. . . They were exquisite, self-involved and undemonstrative.

‘Mod was a ‘very homosexual thing’, a 19 year-old Marc Bolan said of the scene he helped make happen five years earlier:

The music and the dancing and the scooters and pills came later. I’d say that Mod was mentally a very homosexual thing, though not in a physical sense. I was too hung up on myself to be interested in anyone else and, anyhow, I was still very young.

But Cohn doesn’t leave it there, he thinks the homosexual element was a working-class co-option of the old public school attitude to sex . . . ‘Later, it became very fashionable for Mods to go to bed with famous show-business queers and take money for it. . . Homosexuality was accepted, respected and completely assimilated into Mod life.’

Marc Bolan aka Mark Feld was among the prototypes, Chris Covill, 21, from Shepherd’s Bush, is a second generation Mod, (pictured top right). He told Cohn about the Crawdaddy Club and seeing the Stones every week, about money spent on clothes, on going out and on pills. He spoke about the action on Hastings’ beach and the emergence of the false Mod.

You can imagine Covill as a kind of model for Cohn’s hero in Saturday Night Fever:

Mod used to be something serious – now it’s been taken over by a lot of silly children. You see them in their old leather coats, green or red, and they’re all sick. Everything stands still and the point is gone.

Covill said he been working hard and had ‘met a lot of people in pop and I’ve got myself on to a good scene.’ Cohn doesn’t let on who in pop Covill is making out with, nor is there much about Feld’s transformation into Bolan, except to say in passing that he is a singer and songwriter who has made a few records but not had any hits.

By August 1967 Bolan had quit John’s Children and had formed Tyrannosaurus Rex (see Cohn on their first single and Bolan’s history here) . I haven’t found much on Covill, but Andy Ellison, in an interview published on the John’s Children website, says he was one of their roadies and hung out with them. And Cohn once had a ten percent share in John’s Children. The rest was owned by Simon Napier-Bell, or at least a large portion. He is thus the absent-presence in all of this.

 A month earlier, in a July 1967 survey of the ‘Love Generation’ in Queen magazine, Napier-Bell had told Cohn:

 One lives from day to day trying not to be bored. The things one does to avoid this boredom depend on one’s degree of intelligence. Intelligent and creative people have to do the most extreme things and, therefore they often seem outrageous.

17 year-old Geoff McGill, another Mod from Shepherd’s Bush, stood in for Cohn’s third generation of Mods, he ‘represents the Face at its most bored.’ Meanwhile, no one is listening to Covill’s ‘nostalgic stories about the battles of Brighton and Hastings, the 15-years-olds don’t understand and aren’t interested. Already, the fanatic young days of Mod have become as distant as past wars are always bound to be.’

Boredom, boredom, b’dum b’dum . . .

Andrew Loog Oldham Says . . .

‘. . . music was life-confirming, problem-resolving, and everything that mattered started with a count-off and a look.’

You’d not be surprised to find exactly that sentiment in something Nik Cohn wrote, I think.

Nik Cohn - Alan Aldridge - David King - Track Records

In his pop column for Queen, Cohn was a tireless booster of Track Records. Not only for The Who, but for near anybody who appeared on the label, though he had less than kind things to say about John’s Children. Label and author also shared graphic designers and illustrators. Above Alan Aldridge and below David King. Neither book design has subsequently been reused and, hence, each new edition has lost a little of the original’s frisson.

Greil Marcus on Nik Cohn

Greil Marcus’ webpages recently uploaded his introduction to Cohn’s AWopBopALooBopLopBamBoom (aka Pop From the Beginning) that hitherto had only been available in a 1999 French edition. It should have been included in all subsequent editions, and in any yet to come . . .

Reading, you can at any time feel as if you’ve slipped out of this book and into Treasure Island, out of the late twentieth century and into the eighteenth—here managers are pirates and singers are cutthroats, beggars, and whores impersonating aristocrats when they’re not nice middle-class people impersonating cutthroats, beggars and whores. Business is plunder when it isn’t pedophilia; art is appetite when it isn’t a decent way to kill time. The result is not a diminution of the pop romance but, really, its literary invention. As Cohn moves his story through the years, a sense of loss and corruption takes over: the corruption in which predictability replaces ignorance, expectation replaces chance, a forty-year career replaces saying your piece and disappearing whence you came, craft replaces inspiration, and rationality replaces stupidity. Even before Cohn gets to 1966, the golden days always seem somewhere back over that last hill. And, as this book ends, it was all over more than a quarter century ago.

click here to read the introduction in its entirety.

Ian Penman on Mean Streets (Sight and Sound)

A superb essay from Ian Penman, he captures the film better than any other critic and he’s so good on the music.

Sight and Sound (April 1993)

Howard Hampton, is pretty good on the film too, just not as fine as Penman.

NEARLY A QUARTER of a century has passed since Martin Scorsese opened Mean Streets (73) with the fated beat of "Be My Baby." The film stands as the most enduring, not to mention thrilling, union of film and rock sensibilities. It's an infinitely seductive vision of a world where human and musical passions are one, the soundtrack elaborating and intensifying the movie's meanings. . . This was the first film to truly integrate rock into its narrative, transforming Kenneth Anger's iconographic abstractions (which bordered on camp) into a new form of heightened, pop-operatic naturalism. Scorsese's images were extensions of - and commentaries on the music. . . . Mean Streets has a funky city-of-night sheen that echoes rock's synthesis of the mythic and the quotidian; it reinvents film in terms of rock as much as the contemporaneous early works of Bruce Springsteen reimagined rock in terms of Kazan, Dean, and Brando, of West Side Story as Scorpio Rising. 

Howard Hampton, ‘Rock’n’ Roll Movies’ Film Comment 33:2 (1997)

Nik Cohn Sells The Who

Advertisement in Zigzag #43 (July 1974)

Nik Cohn - if the hat fits

Nik Cohn proving the old adage a hat makes the man in a portrait by Amy Arbus that accompanied a 2011 New York Times profile here

Nik Cohn - 'Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night' (1976)

A fascinating interview with James McMullan who provided the sharply observed illustrations that accompanied Cohn’s story is found here