The Who Take Ronny and the Daytonas for a Ride in the City

Even with a songwriter of Townshend’s capabilities, the Who were never above appropriating a good tune when need demanded: ‘The Ox’ with the Surfaris’ ‘Waikiki Run’, ‘Substitute’ with Robb Storme’s ‘Where is My Girl’ and ‘Cobwebs and Strange’ with Tony Crombie’s ‘Eastern Journey’ are three that spring readily to mind. Moon and Entwistle’s ‘In the City’, b-side of ‘I’m a Boy’, is another, albeit of lesser known provenance, that’s worth noting.

I’ve written [here] about how the duo lovingly parodied surf and hot rod culture with ‘In the City’ by transposing California into London, but until I read Brian Chidester and Domenic Priore’s Pop Surf Culture I hadn’t known that they’d swiped the tune from Ronny and the Daytona’s ‘Hey little Girl’ [here] to give their take extra authenticity. Moon and Entwistle obviously had a liking for Nashville’s finest teen combo having covered ‘Bucket T’ on the Ready Steady Who ep. Both tracks had appeared on the album G.T.O., which wasn’t given a UK release though they had made it across the Atlantic as single cuts on the Stateside label. Whatever the legal niceties or ethics of the Who’s ‘rewrites’ you got to admit they had great taste in pop’s happening sounds . . .

Pop Surf Culture not only led me to score a copy of G.T.O. but also the Wax ‘Em Down comp, which is choc-full of killer tunes that come wrapped in a sleeve copped from an issue of Sports Illustrated that featured on its cover two hot rodders in Ed Big Daddy shirts . . . way cool

The Who and the Young London Look

March 1965 . . . Seventeen magazine runs a 20 page survey of London fashion trends . . . The Who, who were the self-proclaimed face of London 1965 [here], play backdrop in one of the fashion shoots, possibly orchestrated by photographer Joseph Santano.

At least two other images from this shoot are in circulation and Richard Barnes has used the following of the band alone in Maximum R&B. Are there more to be seen?

This one is usually cited as being from the ‘Young London Look’ themed issue but I suspect it’s from a subsequent edition. Joseph Santano is credited lower right

The Yardbirds (and Georgie Fame) also played the role of props in a Seventeen fashion shoot (September 1967)

Fab Goes Pop Art, Op Art or Just Call It What You Like . . .

January 22 1966, FABulous magazine goes all over Pop Art – the trend that is young, expressive, zany, alive, thoughtful and enjoyable . . .

photo Derek Berwin

Anne Nightingale is the issue’s guide to Pop Art and the abstract sounds of the Who . . .

The magazine’s theme is somewhat diluted by putting the non-pop art Moody blues on the cover. Inside Paul Jones puts a decidedly conservative spin on the latest trend . . . anticipating Laura Ashley’s turn to the floral he scorns the geometric. He also disses the label ‘generation’ suggesting a slight against the Who as much as against the notion of a divide between young and old . . .

Meanwhile Keith Richards is in on the scene due to his coat of many colours and not much else and Steve Marriot collects pop art robots . . .

And . . . the Who started the the thing itself moving from Mod to Pop. By the time June Southworth interviews the band, however, they have moved on once more: ‘they’re frank, intelligent boys who play space-age music for a pop art generation, and many generations to come . . .’

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

The Troggs: 'I Want – You Want'

A recent acquisition of the two volumes of the Best of the Troggs, released in 1967 & 1968, had me heading back to Lester Bangs’ essay from 1971, ‘James Taylor Marked for Death(What we need is a lot less Jesus and a whole lot more Troggs!)’ to see which of the 23 tracks on these comps he had also singled out for praise.

(There are a dozen tracks apiece on the two albums but for an unknown reason the less than essential b-side of ‘Wild Thing’, ‘From Home’, gets a place on both discs).

Turns out Bangs only put seven tracks under analysis on his groin thunder odometer: ‘Wild Thing’, most obviously, ‘I Want You’, ‘I Can’t Control Myself’, ‘Give It to Me’, ‘I Can Only Give You Everything’, ‘Gonna Make You’, ‘66–5–4–3–2­–1’ and ‘I Just Sing’ (which didn’t appear on either of the Best of volumes). Honourable mentions along the way are given to ‘Anyway That You Want Me’, ‘With A Girl Like You’, ‘Girl in Black’ ‘I Want You to Come into My Life’ and ‘Night of the Long Grass’.Bangs kicked off his essay with his preferred trope of directly addressing his reader in what might turn out to be a conversation, debate, argument or rhetorical ramble. I’m not sure he knows which it will be until the piece is done. Here’s the rumpus:

PART ONE: KAVE KIDS

All right, punk, this is it. Choose ya out. We're gonna settle this right here.

You can talk about yer MC5 and yer Stooges and even yer Grand Funk and Led Zep, yep, alla them badasses’ve carved out a hunka turf in this town, but I tell you there was once a gang that was so bitchin' bad that they woulda cut them dudes down to snotnose crybabies and in less than three minutes too. I mean their shortest rumble was probably the one clocked in at 1:54 and that's pretty fuckin swift, kid. Oh, they didn't look so bad, in fact their appearance was a real stealthy move ’cuz they mostly photographed like a bunch of motherson polite mod clerks on their lunch hour, but they not only kicked ass with unparalleled style when the time came, they even had the class to pick one of the most righteous handles of all time: the Troggs.

Perfectly named, the Troggs sprung fully-loaded out of the primal ordure that all great rock n’ roll comes from. Subterranean Neanderthals who briefly stepped into the light to promote a clutch of hit singles:

’Cause this was a no-jive, take-care-of-business band (few of the spawn in its wake have been so starkly pure) churning out rock 'n' roll that thundered right back to the very first grungy chords and straight ahead to the fuzztone subways of the future. And because it was so true to its evolutionary antecedents, it was usually about sex, and not just Sally-go-to-movieshow-and-hold-my-hand stuff, although there was scads more of that in them than anyone would have suspected at first, but the most challengingly blatant flat-out proposition and prurient fantasy.

That’s the cue for Bangs to range far and wide over his adolescent wet dreamscapes. His term for the Troggs’ libidinous thrusts was ‘groin thunder’ which was an image as impeccably realised as the band’s name. Its most basic expression, he wrote, is obtained in ‘I Want You’:

This is the Troggs at their most bone-minimal (which is also where they are usually most effective). Like the early Kinks, they had strong roots in ‘Louie, Louie’, which is where both song and guitar solo issue from here. The lyrics are almost worthy of the cave: ‘I want you / I need you / And I hope that you need me too . . .’ The vocal has a musk of yellow-eyed depravity about it, and the singer sounds absolutely certain of conquest-steady, methodical, deliberate. This is the classic mold for a Troggs stalking song.

Bangs developed his line:

‘Gonna Make You’ is more of the same, Diddley rumbleseat throbbing with sexual aggression and tough-guy disdain for too many words, while the flip side of that single, ‘I Can't Control Myself’, begins to elaborate a bit. It opens with a great Iggyish ‘Ohh, NO!’, employs a buckling foundation of boulderlike drums as usual, and takes the Trogg-punk's intents and declarations onto a more revealing level. ‘Yer socks are low and yer hips are showin’,’ smacks Presley in a line that belongs in the Great Poetry of Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

I hear ‘slacks’ not ‘socks’ though maybe the latter fits better with whatever fetish or ‘pube punk fantasy’ Bangs had a predilection for. ‘A two-sided single whose titles were “Give It to Me” and “I Can't Control Myself” was on a collision course with some ultimate puissant bluenose from the start, and sure enough it was banned in America’.

About midway through his essay Bangs hits the caps lock on his typewriter and finally lets loose about why all of this fuss n’ bother over Reg and the Boys is worth his reader’s attention:

THE LESSON OF ‘WILD THING’ WAS LOST ON ALL YOU STUPID FUCKERS sometime between the rise of Cream and the fall of the Stooges, and rock 'n' roll may turn into a chamber art yet or at the very least a system of Environments.

Bangs was not wrong, the Velvets, MC5 and the Stooges, he wrote, all gainfully pushed back against the tide of musical civility but they could not be the primal thing itself, they were all too knowing, too self-reflective, too intellectual. As for the Troggs:

Quite possibly they understood or ruminated about what they were doing on very limited levels. Because that was all that was necessary. Had they been a clot of intellectual sharpies hanging out in the London avant-garde scene, they would most likely have been a preening mess unless they happened to be the Velvet Underground who were a special case anyway. I really believe maybe you've gotta be out of it to create truly great rock 'n' roll, either that or have such supranormal, laser-nerved control over what you are consciously manipulating that it doesn't matter (the Rolling Stones) or be a disciplined artist with an abiding joy in teenage ruck jump music and an exceptionally balanced outlook (Lou Reed, Velvets), or chances right now are that you are almost certain to come out something far less or perhaps artistically more (but still less) than rock 'n' roll, or go under.

From here on in James Taylor and his self-obsessed singer/songwriter peers become the target of Bangs’ ire. But Bangs is soon back on the trail of Reg Presley and co., chasing down the real meaning of ‘66–5–4–3–2­–1’ – the countdown to penetration; the S&M overtones of ‘Girl in Black’ and the anal sex pleasures espoused in ‘I Want You to Come into My Life’ and, of course, the drug scene of ‘Night of the Long Grass’. He spends a good deal of time on ‘I Just Sing’ – ‘an anthem of loneliness and defiant individuality’ that he likens to the Stooges ‘No Fun’ but by this point in his essay the band’s catalogue is looking empty and Bangs is running on fumes.

I’m not a hardcore Troggs fan, other than the two Best of LPs, I’ve a handful of singles and the 3xCD set Archeology from 1992 that Bill Inglot, Bill Levenson, Andrew Sandoval and Ken Barnes put together, the first disc is mostly essential 1966–67 cuts, disc two is filled with not so essential selections from 1967–76. Disc three is the infamous Trogg Tapes . . . Part of the brilliance of Bangs’ take on their catalogue is to ignore the copious amount of filler they recorded, which were anything but explosions of groin thunder. Bangs name checks only twelve cuts (his editor Greg Shaw questioned this self-imposed limit – see above), each Best of has a dozen, and I think that is the perfect number for any Troggs set, so here’s my 2 x 6:

‘Gonna Make You’/’ ‘66–5–4–3–2­–1’/‘I Want You’/‘I Can’t Control Myself’/‘Anyway That You Want Me’/‘Girl in Black’//‘Night of the Long Grass’/‘Mona’/‘I Can Only Give You Everything’/‘Anyway That You Want Me’/ ‘I Want You to Come into My Life’/‘Give It to Me’/‘Louie Louie’.

I’ve dropped ‘Wild Thing’ because I don’t need to hear it again and I anyway prefer those rewrites like ‘I Want You’, not because they refine ‘Wild Thing’ but because they amplify what’s great about it. Bangs’ choice of  ‘With A Girl Like You’ and ‘I Just Sing’ fall short of my other selections because there’s too much Donovan and not enough Bo Diddley in them for my primitive taste buds even if, on the latter, the band put in a little bit of Yardbird-style faux-sitar licks.

Side one starts off in a hurry with the first three tracks but cools it down toward the end with ‘Anyway That You Want Me’ and ‘Girl in Black’. The last of those two songs comes in at just under 2 minutes and is a solid rip-off of The Who (and all the better for that),  while the cello and violin accompaniment on the former, at least in my imagination, following Bangs’ lead, leaks into John Cale’s contributions to the more melodic songs of the Velvet Underground and in Nico’s solo work. Side two stays in mood with ‘Night of the Long Grass’ followed by two non-single tracks, both something of beat standards. Bo’s ‘Mona’ is perhaps the longest cut from 66/7 that they recorded, it has an extended, by their standards, instrumental section but, unlike the Yardbirds say, they are not minded to do much with it; very Stooge-like in its focus, I think. Rob Tyner has said the MC5 recorded a cover of ‘I Can Only Give You Everything’ when the Shadows of Knight got the jump on them and released ‘Gloria’ so they turned to the next best thing in Them’s songbook. I don’t doubt the truth of that but Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith’s slashing guitar riff on the Five’s single is a straight lift from the Troggs’ version.

The last track on my imaginary compilation, which I’ll call I Want –You Want as it seems to adequately distil down the subject and theme of Reg’s songwriting (or maybe I should name it more simply Come), is ‘Louie Louie’ which is at the very heart of the matter. This album cut is by far the best of the period’s covers by a British band and leaves the Kinks’ tepid version far behind even if it doesn’t quite make the grade of the Sonics, whatever it’s a good place to end things.

In his inestimable study of ‘Louie Louie’, Dave Marsh ignores the Troggs version but he homes in on its most potent progeny, ‘Wild Thing’. Marsh writes,

Art it may not possess, but in its own way ‘Wild Thing’ is a rock ’n’ roll classic. The way it descends to lower depths with each bar is so astonishing, its unending thud so remorseless (the Troggs aren't playing this way because it's effective, even though it is – they're doing it because they can't think of anything else), that it just about takes your breath away, clouds your vision, brings unbidden moistness to the corners of your eyes. Of course, these symptoms might be nothing more than a neurological reaction to the axe murder of Western musical civilization, but let's cut the clowns some kind of break.                                                                            

Bangs would have agreed that the Troggs held no pretension to creating art but they were not clowns, idiot savants perhaps? I like to think of them as carnivalesque jesters capable of upending the courts of Procol Harum, Jethro Tull and the like – a band whose role was to cock-a-snook at those who thought themselves to be the band’s betters.

In January 1965 reader Alex Donald wrote a letter to Record Mirror about Richard Berry’s ur-text, or what he called a ‘pop yardstick’, ‘Louie Louie’:

British pop must be in a desperate state when the whole scene has revolved round one song – The Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie – for months. Besides completely copying the Kingsmen’s vocal and instrumental style, The Kinks rose to fame with two watery twists of this classic, then provided us all with endless amusement by recording it openly [released November 1964 on Kinksize Session EP]. Heinz had his second biggest hit ever with another disguised version of this R&B opus [‘Questions I Can’t Answer’] and recently it has been put out as a single on Philips by someone sounding like an in competent one-man band [Liverpool’s Rhythm And Blues Inc]. The parasites should at least leave off the newer American greats.

The Troggs version was yet to come, but I doubt Alex would have felt more kindly disposed toward it than he did to any other of the British covers. One of the issues conveniently ignored in Bangs’ piece was that, at least to the more hip British ears, the Troggs were always sort of behind the times, their parsing of ‘Louie Louie’ or Bo Diddley’s big beat had long been abandoned by the Kinks and Pretty Things. The Troggs in their company feel like an anachronism, or an echo.

Chris Britton’s slash and chime guitar patterns were very obviously modelled on Pete Townshend (checkout the perfected Who-like guitar chord that introduces the bridge in ‘I Can’t Control Myself’) giving a modern steel-sprung edge to the antediluvian thump of Ronnie Bond and Pete Staples’ rhythm section. Just as complementary to Britton’s guitar shards was Reg’s lewd thug sneer, which was often backed by a simple, most un-Who like, vocal refrain ‘da dah, da dah’ that would be varied, when the need for novelty called, from song to song by using ‘pah’, ‘bah’ or ‘lah’. The Troggs didn’t deal in subtlety, that was their appeal. They weren’t complex like the Who, full of contradictions, rather their method was, as Richard Meltzer called it, ‘blatant overstatement’ that Bangs more pertinently named ‘groin thunder’.

Postscript

In June 1973, Melody Maker’s Roy Hollingworth interviewed Reg Presley in Hyde Park. At age 31,  the singer was a veteran of the music scene, chubby and ruddy cheeked, he spends much of his time with Hollingworth making lewd comments about women who pass by. Once he was a pop star now he is simply ‘legendary’: the Troggs, were a ‘very heavy little band to be sure. “Punk music”, says Reg. “I like that word punk”’.

The band are capitalising on their fabled status and taking their act onto the university circuit:

‘Was at Hull the other week’, said Reg . . . ‘and after a couple of numbers we thought we’d turned up at the wrong gig. I mean people were screamin’ out and clappin’ and goin’ wild . . . I thought Reg old boy, what’s goin’ on here?’

In the State’s the Troggs’ reputation had been enhanced by the use of ‘Wild Thing’ on a Miller’s beer commercial and then the single  is ‘installed on the infamous Nobody’s jukebox, Bleeker Street’ and then word of mouth has done its turn and, ‘so’, writes Hollingworth, here [in New York] starts the Troggs Preservation Society’. Lester Bangs’ piece is not mentioned but Reg’s repeated and enthusiastic use of ‘punk’ to describe his band could hardly have come from a more local source; ‘Wild Thing’ and I Can’t Control Myself’ are ‘very punky records. Hollingworth explains:

. . . everything works in cycles. There’s a progression from a basic quality, through success to an art form – but then it must go back. It doesn’t of course go back to the exact basis it started from. It goes back having collected valid points during its progress. But if it didn’t go back ‘then rock will become as boring as jazz’, as Reg would have it.

‘If you could do anything this year’, Hollingworth summarises, ‘it would be to see The Troggs punking it out for the whole world and making it. It's people like Reg Presley that keep this business sane to a degree . . . ‘We're whap, whap, whap’, said Reg, ‘And I think that’s what it’s about’.

Up on Devastation Hill – Isle of Wight Festival 1970

. . . or ‘sunk ankle deep in urine mud’

Photographs by Jim Marshall and David Hurn

Trouble hit the third Isle of Wight Music Festival when thousands of kids camped on a steep slope which they spontaneously named Devastation Hill. From it you looked down on the 38-acre Festival arena, which was encircled by two sets of nine-foot-high corrugated iron fencing and patrolled by uniformed security guards with snarling Alsatian dogs. There was an excellent view of the action and the acoustics were great. However, the organisers, Fiery Creations had signed an agreement to keep people off the hill, which was National Trust property and not part of the festival site. They might have realised this was a physically impossible task if they had listened, say, to one kid who had taken three days to hitch down from Scotland: ‘All the bread I have is a few shillings for food. I don't have a ticket and I had no intentions of buying one, but I didn't imagine there'd be such a perfect free pitch up here. I was planning on sneaking into the arena if I had to, but I hadn't counted on those bloody dogs. Anyway, I'm sticking here’. He hammered home the last peg of his tent, unrolled a funky old sleeping bag and looked round at the mushrooming population of Devastation Hill. ‘You know’, he said, ‘Some guys were saying we ought to storm the fences and pull them down. Did you ever hear such bullshit? They don't recognize a cool scene when they have one’.

Camped on the Hill and in Desolation Row, a line of polythene and canvas shacks along a hedge, was a contingent of French, Algerian and American anarchists and street fighters engaged in a debate on the dialectics of the festival. Mick Farren, one of the British White Panthers [here], summed up their position: ‘We are saying that rock is an energy source which can be used to move and unite the people, and that its only function as a commodity is as a source of funds for the deprived. We are demanding free admission and free soup’.

Earth was a San Francisco publication, which explains the use of Jim Marshall’s photographs. Equally celebrated for his reportage, David Hurn is a British photographer, as are the writers Peter Stansill and Neil Lyndon. The former was editor at International Times, which might explain why Mick Farren gets a name check, the latter journalist later found infamy with his No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism (1992). The tenor of the piece is end of times . . . urine mud even.

Syndicated John's Children with your local pop-picker Alan Jones

The Staffordshire Evening Sentinel has the scoop of the day . . . Media manipulator, pop-svengali, orchestrator of outrage, Simon Napier-Bell made his biggest splash as manager of John’s Children in a pop column syndicated in the local press. He was no doubt aiming for Atticus and the Sunday Times but ended up with Alan Jones – pop correspondent for the Potteries and all points east . . .

Staffordshire Evening Sentinel (April 8 1967)

On the verge of joining the Who on a tour of Germany, John’s Children were interviewed by Jones for Staffordshire and Lincolnshire’s regional newspapers. Napier-Bell set out the band’s manifesto:

John’s Children are outrageously arrogant because they find other people ugly, devious and boring. They are grippingly honest because they are not sophisticated enough to be devious. They look naïve because they are young, clean and sweet.

Things got easily out of hand; at one gig, the band explained, ‘“We were yelling Sieg Heil, the German marching cry, and the audience were shouting it back” . . . “They liked the sound of the cry . . . Nothing political. They just liked the sound” . . . Whatever they played they liked it loud,’ wrote Jones.

Would they revive the war cry ‘Sieg Heil’ on the German tour? ‘Definitely,’ replied John. Offensive to the German audience? He gasped: ‘Surely not. People cannot be that thick. It is a fascinating beat, that is all there is to it.’ To show his innocence, John claimed he did not know what Sieg Heil meant. But then, that is part of the pop mystic. With a knowing smile, he tried to explain a new single the group were making. ‘It’s about a man who plays funerals in his backyard.’

A slightly longer version appeared earlier in the Lincolnshire Echo

Lincolnshire Echo (April 4 1967)

Because it was a good pop story, Jones willingly played along with Napier-Bell’s game of manufactured outrage; it was good enough anyway for him to construct at least a superficial display of suspended disbelief; certainly seductive enough to have him regularly review the band’s records and to do so positively

Lincolnshire Echo (January 30 1967)

Lincolnshire Echo (May 16 1967)

Lincolnshire Echo (August 4 1967)

Lincolnshire Echo (November 6 1967)

Lincolnshire Echo (June 10 1968)

Surrey Advertiser (March 11 1967)

Jones would continue to review the new pop releases into the next decade and was always happy to boost Marc Bolan from the early days Tyrannosaurus Rex and into the era of Trextasy:

The glamour is what other people see in it. But there’s not much glamour sitting in a studio being photographed. What is exciting is having the vision to see the end product.

Staffordshire Evening Sentinel (October 2 1971)

Leicester Mercury (March 29 1967)

‘Owing to illness Wayne Fontana . . . will be unable to appear

Somerset Guardian (June 23 1967)

‘The first genuine flower power group to visit Nottingham . . ‘

Nottingham Evening Post (July 26 1967)

County Post (September 8 1967)

They call YOU Generation X

‘Roll on death and let’s have a bash at the angels’

– Generation X

When the teen pop magazines eventually picked up on Generation X they turned it into a set of life style tips with The Who, The Birds and The Toggery Five as their models

The Observer (May 17,1964)

Huddersfield Daily Examiner (December 1, 1964)

Wichita Beacon (November 26, 1964)

After You’ve Gone blog has some background on the term ‘generation x’ [HERE] and on the book itself [HERE]

Before Billy Idol’s mob took the name there were at least two other combos, one in Kent the other in Cornwall, who adopted the name and attempted to breakout of village halls

A Kentish Express columnist looks no further than to her darling boy’s school band, Generation X, for this February 1967 piece.

Cornish Guardian (January 19, 1967)

‘Generation X the title of a paperback which detailed the wild youth of the 1960s: a rock band of the 1970s . . .’ Bolton Evening News (December 20, 1977)

Clipped pages from Generation X on the rear of The Clash’s debut single

The 1964 American edition, published by Fawcett, uses a reversed and cropped image of rockers and policemen on a Margate street corner. The original below is reproduced in Johnny Stuart’s essential Rockers! (1987)

“Police Notice . . . NO WAITING”

The two rockers to the right of the policemen have been given hair enhancements by Fawcett’s photo editor – quiffs are go!

The Who Left The Campus Stunned – University of Kent (May 16, 1970)

“Darling, they’re playing our song . . .”

A week before the release of Live At Leeds, The Who played Eliot College Dining Room, University of Kent, on Saturday May 16, 1970. Capacity around 600. It would be the last University pick-up gig they would play before the big American money rolled in and made such intimate appearances redundant.

Published lists give the date of this gig as Friday May 8 but that show appears to have been cancelled and rescheduled for the 16th.

“THE two hour performance given by The Who on Saturday night must rate as one of the most memorable events ever to take place at U.K.C. The total effect of the volume of sound, musical violence and the sheer brilliance of The Who, seemed to leave the campus stunned and drained of energy for days afterwards.”

The reviewer was genuinely beside himself and the occasion deemed significant enough for the student paper, InCant, to devote a whole page to the review. The uncredited photographs are the best that the paper ran of any of the many live events at the University.

Two attendees of the show took a little pause and moved past immediate impressions to give voice to what would become The Who’s defining characteristic post-Tommy, nostalgia

InCant (June 17, 1970)

“the whole evening was pervaded with an air of unreality, an air which surely is present at a Judy Garland comeback or an Alamein reunion, where the audience sit on the edge of their seats waiting for ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow ‘or ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’.”

But if the sense that The Who were trapped by their own history and the demands of their audience, a bigger concern was with rock’s solipsistic turn:

“The mistake so many progressive groups make is to ‘intellectualise’ their music, to make it intricate for intricate’s sake”.

Ann Le Sauvage and David Rooney’s final point in their letter perfectly encapsulated the state of play:

"The Who seemed an image from the past simply because they played to and for their audience and not for themselves; the fact that this is a point at all, illustrates completely our disillusionment with today's popular music”.

Third generation rock and roll could not come soon enough. . . but meanwhile you could play pinball

“Playing pinball is a challenge to modern society. It is man versus machines. You try and beat the machine”.

“Playing the machine is a good analogy with life. You lose most of the time, but you do get occasional replays”.

“I think you find mainly scientists using the machines – they are more neurotic and that’s why they play”.

InCant (March 18, 1970)

Where The Who and The Velvet Underground Meet: John Hofsess' Palace of Pleasure (1967)

Inspired by Frank Uhle’s history of Michigan’s campus film societies, Cinema Ann Arbor (2023), I went browsing in the pages of The Michigan Daily. It’s a great resource for anyone with an interest in many of the topics this blog gets obsessed with [HERE] and it’s guaranteed to give up more than a few unexpected delights. A search for the ‘Velvet Underground’ produced among many things an advert for John Hofsess’ Black Zero: screened on October 17–18, 1968 as part of the ‘Underground at the Fifth Forum – Flicks & Jams’ programme – ‘poetry by Leonard Cohen and music by Velvet Underground’ was used to elevate the film’s attraction (and my interest).

Canadian filmmaker Hofsess and his kaleidoscopic experimental film were new to me.

Black Zero was described in the advert’s blurb as ‘an underground feature in color which demonstrates that split-screen dual projection can be used more creatively than in Chelsea Girls’. Also included were three lines of press hype: ‘A masterpiece! The finest experimental film in two generations – Boston Avatar. ‘This 1st prize winner is without question a sexual art’ – Vancouver Sun. ‘Filled with indescribable terrors and beauties! – London Free Press

I went looking for those indescribable terrors and beauties . . . I didn’t find an on-line stream but there are enticing extracts, with critical commentary, that are being used to promote a recent blu-ray release of Hofsess’ small catalogue of film works [HERE]. Palace of Pleasure features and pairs, as intended by Hofsess, Black Zero with the earlier Redpath 25.  The original soundtrack is provided by The Gass Company, another unknown, but they have Reed and Morrison’s guitar sound down pat, best heard in Redpath 25. In Black Zero, their instrumental sections feature a Cale-esque viola drone that seamlessly segues into the real thing with the VU’s ‘European Son’ followed by ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’. Hofsess had a good ear.

When his film was screened in Los Angeles in January 1968 it was billed with Ron Nameth’s Velvet Underground: Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which cemented a link with Warhol. Palace of Pleasure, however, is more than that relationship — it is a lexicon of contemporary experimental cinema; equally infused with Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, Stan Brakhage’s abstracts and Kenneth Anger’s oeuvre. Such a lineage should demand that the film be better known, but I’ve failed to find anything in the key histories of the avant-garde. Maybe Jonas Mekas and his peers didn’t take to Hofsess, finding him too derivative. But if cinephiles have ignored or remained ignorant of the film then rock’s cultists should surely have found their way to make the work more visible, especially as The Velvets are not the only contemporary group featured; their two tracks are preceded by two from The Who’s first LP, ‘The Ox’ and ‘My Generation’, which are played in their entirety across Redpath 25.

Bringing together The Who and the Velvet Underground through the filter of Pop Art is not a difficult move to make – see A Band With Built-In Hate – both Cale and Reed have talked about The Who’s influence on their artful dissonance and songwriting, but to see the two groups tethered to each other in an experimental film is suggestive of a more complex set of aesthetic interconnections, less a posthumous theoretical construct than the actual fact of the matter. You can find numerous historical intimations of a pop/art conversation but none, I think, quite so unmediated as found in Palace of Pleasure. Here, at least, Hofsess’ film is entirely unique.

Redpath 25 is the more overtly ‘Pop’ of the two films in its use of a familiar iconography that in one screen focuses on a young woman’s face. Lit by oversaturated red filter, her image strikes a contrast with the monochrome of the Vietnam war actualities projected in the right-hand screen. But, unlike pop art male fantasies that used the objectified figure of a young women to explore cultures of consumption, the fantasia on display here is one of female desire – the woman picks and cuts away at a sheet of silver foil to find packaged behind the film her ideal male lover. Quick cuts to images of male genitals and a view of her fellating the man follow. Meanwhile, masculine fantasies of death and destruction play out on the other screen.

The sonic riptide of The Who’s ‘The Ox’ provides a noisy urgency that tugs away at the passive slow burn of the otherwise inchoate death-obsessed imagery. ‘My Generation’ continues the onslaught but also comments on the film frames that follow of white weddings (and marriages that end in court) – Townshend’s mid-sixties bete noir of young marrieds here made manifest. Leonard Cohen’s poetry carries even more of the thematic weight. Black Zero, with the VU, continues the theme of emotional discord over images of a marital bed occupied by a couple who become distracted from their love making, disengaged from one another, when a second man appears; perhaps the one the woman (and Lou Reed) had been waiting forever to arrive?

Los Angeles Free Press (January 5, 1968)

Los Angeles Free Press (June 7, 1968)

“On the same programme will be John Hofsess’ dual-screen Palace of Pleasure and Ben Van Meter’s outrageous Acid Camp” The latter another film I should probably seek out . . .

Leaving a Wound: The Who and the New British Invasion

Pete Townshend: ‘We worked hard on “propaganda” for the first three days and I had two stock quotes which everyone wrote down. They were’.

“We want to leave a wound” and “We won’t let our music stand in the way of our visual act”’.

Townshend on top form here in the American magazine Hit Parader (though interviewed by NME’s Keith Altham), never sharper, never funnier . . .

“Murray the K’s wife was on the program,” recalled Pete Townshend in a Hit Parader article from later that year, “She appeared about ten times in a fashion spot with teenybopper girl models – Jackie the K and her fabulous fashion show. The most presentable of the models was a girl called ‘Joy Bang,’ who took a liking to Keith which I think was mutual until she said, ‘You must meet my husband, Paul Bang!’”

Joy Bang: Portobello Road, October 3 1966 . . . She’s standing on a 1960 Buick Invicta painted by BEV (Binder, Edwards and Vaughan) that featured on Kinks budget collection and in a Move publicity photograph. The car and Joy both have a cameo in Jack Bond’s Separation (1967). Excellent profile of Joy Bang HERE

Hit Parader (October, 1967)

Keith now has two ambitions: He wants to become a professional cartoon ‘Like Tom and Jerry’ and get a job in Herman’s new Herne Bay hotel bar as a professional drip tray.

Designed by Hamish Grimes of Five Live Yardbirds and Crawdaddy Club infamy

Fabulous – The High Numbers

The High Numbers in Fabulous magazine . . . The ‘in’ group who are not particularly anti-anything but with a manager who is eloquently ‘in’ . . .

You see, they are up-to-date with a difference. They’re even ahead of themselves

Fabulous (July 18, 1964) . . . was Pete Meaden a hairdresser?

The High Numbers are featured as part of a themed issue of Fabulous (October 10, 1964) on the Rhythm and Blues scene. Editor June Southworth provided the text and in-house photographer Fiona Adams produced the snap.

The Who worked under name ‘The High Numbers’ from July to October 1964, in August they started to work with Lambert and Stamp and Pete Meaden moved on . . .

‘The High Numbers . . . now under new management as The Who’

In January 23, 1965 issue of Fabulous they let readers know of a change in the band’s name . . . ‘They are not the mods that they were’ . . . the date of the gig at the Bruce Grove Ballroom in Tottenham is unknown but Andy Neill and Matt Kent suggest it was prior to the piece published in October.

Boyfriend (August 8, 1964) . . . Pete Meaden doing the business

Pete Meaden had orchestrated his own bit of publicity in Boyfriend six weeks earlier (June 20, 1964) appearing as that week’s featured ‘undiscovered British boyfriend’. The magazine was big on the notion of the undiscovered with the column on unsigned bands beginning in the following week’s edition with The Strides . . .

Meaden himself had two ‘undiscovered’ bands on the books, The Moments (Steve Marriott’s troupe) and a ‘nameless’ band ‘who had just bought out a record’ (?!?) ‘I Am The Face’ . . . in fact available on July 3 when they were called The High Numbers . . . Weird how he didn’t have their name in place to help plug the disc. You can’t help but think his mentor Andrew Loog would not have missed such an opportunity . . .

Cliff’s Column’ in Boyfriend was purportedly written by Mr. Richard but, like the magazine’s Rolling Stones’ column ‘Mod, Mod World’, it was ghost written, unless Cliff was writing himself out of pop music. . .

The urban noir of the image is in key with the idea that they ‘aim to get anything that’s wishy-washy out of pop music – what they play can be summed up as “hard sentiment”’

Weeks later, with ‘I Can’t Explain’ finally a hit, Boyfriend again featured The Who, returning to the Marquee: ‘We hate weak sounds like many of the groups have’.

Continuing the idea of ‘hard sentiment’, ‘brutality’, ‘strength’ and ‘hardness’ are what is said to personify The Who. But the image that sticks is of fans tattooing ‘themselves with their name or small arrow to prove their affection’.

Me and my brother were talking to each other about what makes a man a man . . . .

CODA

Two years before Pete Townshend gifted The Merseys ‘So Sad About Us’ they had their say about The High Numbers’ single

Pop Art Interiors: Pontiac Club – Zeeta House, Putney

‘Pop-art, Op-art and all that similar stuff is beginning to leak out of the avant garde galleries into the field of interior design. The doors open on a beat club in Putney tonight which aims to be the place where all things are happening in the Southern area’.

Charles Greville, Daily Mail (May 27, 1965)

From Ian Hebditch and Jane Shepherd’s essential, The Action: In The Lap Of The Mods (2012). Order [here]

Melody Maker (July 31, 1965)

As much as it was the name that caught my pop-eye – ‘Pontiac Club, Zeeta House, Putney’ – what piqued my interest was the description in Melody Maker’s 1965 cut-out-and-keep guide to London’s beat clubs. It was No.7 on the map: ‘A new action club with pop art décor’. With The Who as one of the named attractions, it was clearly part of the on-going phenomenon of Pop Art into Pop, that ‘leak’ which the Daily Mail’s Charles Greville was referring to when he visited the club on the day of its opening and one then being heavily exploited and led by the ’Bush Boys.

A cursory Google and a quick browse in books you might have thought the club would be discussed in gave up little but a membership card or two, music press adverts and a list of club dates on Garage Hangover [here], which suggests the venue operated for not much more than a year between May 1965 and June 1966.

The club was located in a building designed for the Zeeta Cake Co. that opened in 1938 at the junction of Upper Richmond Road and Putney High Street. There was a smoking room in the basement, the ground floor consisted of shops, a restaurant on the first floor, a ballroom and banqueting hall on the second floor and a bakery and staff offices on the third and fourth. The ballroom had a sprung oak floor with columns propping up a domed ceiling. [For a history of the building see here].

This sequence of images have been copied from RIBA’s webpages

First floor restaurant

Main staircase

The ballroom

Daily Mail (May 27, 1965)

Penny Valentine in Disc listed Johnny and Harvey Riscoe as the club’s owners, but in other accounts Paul Waldman is named as the owner (a June advert in Melody Maker announced the club was ‘now under new management’). The club had been advertising shows at least as early as March 17, but in any event it was Waldman who had invited art students to help redesign the club’s interior. Under the patronage of Sir Hugh Casson, Professor of Interior Design at the Royal College of Art between 1955–75 and director of architecture for the Festival of Britain, students Richard Beal and Alan Saunders were joined by Peter Dale from Kingston College of Art. They painted over the large mirrors that surrounded the dance floor with comic book figures, such as Superman and Iron Man. . . . Donovan was the opening night’s attraction, May 27.

The Kensington News & West London Times (June 4, 1965)

It’s Art Deco interior refashioned for a Pop Art age is a precursor, I think, to Biba’s takeover of Derry and Toms department store in 1973, both buildings were designed by the architect Bernard George (1894–1964)

Biba’s Rainbow Room, where the New York Dolls played in 1973, features a similar domed ceiling design.

Penny Valentine, Disc Weekly (July 3, 1965)

In Disc Weekly, Penny Valentine, described the Pontiac as a ‘sort of pop art club. The walls have been painted by two art students and look like something out of a nightmare with people like Superman in eight foot colour’. Beyond its Pop Art decorations, the appeal of the club was its size, holding over a thousand attendees, it was open Wednesdays through to Sunday, from eight to two in the morning and was unlicensed.

The club instantly became a feature on the city’s gig circuit, offering West London’s premier location after the closing of the Crawdaddy Club at the Richmond Athletic Grounds in July 1965.

Penny Valentine, Disc Weekly (July 24, 1965)

When they played the Pontiac at the end of July, Penny Valentine wondered ‘how many guitars and mikes The Who will demolish tonight’. The band exceeded themselves and even Penny’s expectations, as Andy Neill and Matt Kent note in their chronicle of the band. The Who only managed to play one of their two scheduled sets as they blew out the PA. They did, however, perform ‘My Generation’ for possibly the first time. Though it seems they just missed out on being filmed at the club, acts appearing later in the week ended up playing before cameras even if their efforts were mostly left on the cutting room floor.

Record Mirror (August 21, 1965)

At the start of August, Clarendon Productions spent time at the club shooting scenes for a sequence to be used in one of four thematically linked short films on ‘Romance and Courtship Throughout The World’.  Record Mirror listed possible appearances from John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (featuring Clapton), Graham Bond and, club regulars, The Boston Dexters (The Action would later have the residency). Patti Boyd’s sister, Jenny, played the film’s lead.

The short film eventually appeared in 1966 under the title of Reflections On Love. Approximately three minutes into the eleven minute film ‘the girl’ visits the Pontiac. You can see the double doors, with the star insignia used on the club’s membership card, open onto the ballroom, which is crowded with dancers. The Bluesbreakers are playing but there is no synced audio from the band or anything from arranger Johnny Spence who had been listed as a contributor – the version on YouTube has Kula Shaker delivering the soundtrack. The club sequence has a set of visual effects, colour saturation, that blurs band, dancers and the club’s interior, and is, unfortunately, not much of a rival to Blow Up’s Ricky-Tick recreation, even if the dancers are more animated. It lasts a little less then a minute but some small compensation is that the ballroom’s mirrored walls, columns and ceiling can all be briefly seen.

Though it seems to float freely around on Facebook this is musician Steve Van-Deller’s membership card, he still plays in the Putney area – Google him. He recalls the Bluesbreaker’s gig with Clapton and T-Bone Walker as two standout shows at the venue. In an email to me Steve wrote:

‘I remember being very impressed with the interior, but I was only 15 going on 16 at the time . . .The club had a great vibe . . . The Action were brilliant when they had their Sunday residency, and the Boston Dexters were a great soul covers band too’. 

‘We are creating, a modern-day pop image in our own style’, one of the designers told The Kensington News and West London Times, ‘We made pop art into an interior, instead of leaving it on a white canvas’. Peter Dale added that he would be ‘rather pleased if people don’t like it’.

THE WHO – LONDON 1965

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.

Melody Maker (March 20, 1965)

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

Beat Instrumental (May 1965)

THE WHO – PRIMITIVE LONDON 1965

Record Mirror (December 19, 1964)

The High Numbers Record Mirror (July 23, 1964)

August 8, 1964

New Musical Express (April 23, 1965)

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)

Screengrab from Carousella

Mail Bag, Melody Maker (June 19, 1965)

What's In A Name? Them Who Are Dissatisfied . . .

Looking for some context to place Mick Farren’s Social Deviants in Pin-Ups 1972, I took a sideways glance at how groups named themselves in the early to mid-1960s. Top of my short list of group names was Them. The pop correspondent of The Belfast Telegraph neatly captured the truculent provovation the band no doubt intended by adopting the pronoun:

He drew grimly on a cigarette and said: “We’re not wanted here. If you don’t belong nobody wants to know you”. He is, in fact, one of Them.

One of them in more ways than one – Billy Harrison.

One of “Them” – that quaintly named Belfast rhythm and blues group which sailed off this week for England – for good.

And one of them – those who find that society is not yet conditioned to really accept them.

For them are a five-strong outfit resembling the Rolling Stones with hair that must be longest in Ireland

Belfast Telegraph (June 12, 1965)

Disc Weekly (February 26, 1965)

From Pin-Ups 1972:

In any revised edition ‘The Dissatisfied’ will be slotted in between The Others and The Measles:

Despite playing with such esteemed Marquee headliners, and getting a stamp of approval from ‘Birds man Chris Dreja, I’d never heard of The Dissatisfied. Turns out there was a very smart looking bunch of likely lads from St. Austell (great band bio HERE) but they formed a year after this Dissatisfied, who I reckon were otherwise known by the much less truculent name The Dissatisfied Blues Band helmed by guitarist Jim Cregan who went on to play with Blossom Toes, Cockney Rebel and Rod Stewart [HERE].

The Dissatisfieds supporting The Yardbirds )ctober 31 1964

nicked from kernowbeat.co.uk . . . forever The Dissatisfied . . .

From the same issue of the Belfast Telegraph (September 26, 1964) in which Them appeared Maureen Cleave gave her opinion of the Bo Street Runners: ‘ugly but memorable’ which in this context seems fair . . .

The Who Rave On With Alan Freeman (February 1966)

This late 1965 interview with Alan Freeman, published in the February 1966 edition of Rave, is the best contemporary summation of the breakneck speed of change in pop that the band were now pushing. The shift away from Mod and then Pop Art is discussed: ‘We found out Mods were just as conformist and reactionary as anyone else’ . . . ‘So far as The Who are concerned, the pop art image that stunned listeners last summer with things like “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” is already a dead carcass’ . . . staying ahead of the pack was the only consistent philosophy, innovation and renewal – ‘searching endlessly for newer musical forms that would reflect nobody’s ideas but their own’.

Townshend reiterates the importance of creative violence in the band’s acts of reinvention, comparing what they do to the everyday violence of bar-room fights, dance hall punch ups and war in Vietnam – all ignored by the man in the street. But ‘immediately a bit of property is smashed up he goes potty and cries out about senseless destruction’.

‘I reckon it’s this unfortunate national knack of putting higher value on things than on people that has made The Who the most unpopular group in pop’, wrote Freeman. And, as if to echo Kit Lambert’s claim that the band were involved in a ‘new form of crime’, one that attacked bourgeois propriety, he noted that the band were now starting to attract ‘quite a few gamblers and reformed villains who turn up at various parties and first nights. And I’ve heard some of them raving about the Who’s records’.

Townshend digs deeper into the art influences on his auto-destruction, including Metzger’s idea for ‘putting up statues with weak foundations so that they’d all fall down inside a year’, which was new to me. All this emphasis on violence and aggression was clearly understood to be the prelude that logically ends in the group’s own demise; its self-destruction: ‘It doesn’t matter in the long run. Eventually we’re going to destroy ourselves as a group. It has to happen sometime’.

Enjoy!

The Who – Everybody's Talking About Pop Art!

“That knockout mod group, The Who, have begun a fantastic craze for Pop Art. And though it took lead singer Roger Daltrey over half-an-hour to explain to me what Pop Art was all about, if you want to learn fans, you can do it much faster”

RAVE (August 1965) gives you the lowdown on what Kathy McGowan says London has gone mad for . . .

RAVE (July 1965)

‘THE POP-ART SINGLE!’ ad in NME (June 4, 1965)

Clarks goes Pop Art NME (May 23, 1965)

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

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/

Lou Reed Told Me . . .

Photo: Bill Ray (from Life magazine’s 1965 Hells Angels assignment)

Lou Reed, the leader of the Velvet Underground, told me that the 1965 Who electrified him into writing songs for the Velvets, which connected with the street lives of the kids around the jukebox, rather than with their fantasies – whether plastic or plausible.

Geoffrey Cannon, ‘The Who on record’ The Guardian (September 3, 1971), 8.