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)

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

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.

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.

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.

Philip Castle's Airbrushed Retro-fitted 1950s

1974 Dutch only collection of R ‘n’ R hits on the Arcade label, as seen on TV or ‘Van de Radio en TV-Reklame.’ Clearly an attempt to ride on the back of the American Graffiti phenomenon, which is more than a guess because lead track, side 2, Flash Cadillac’s ‘At The Hop’ is tagged as ‘Featured in the Universal Picture American Graffiti.’ The album’s pulling power is boosted by two commissioned Philip Castle illustrations placed on the inside and the outside of the gatefold.

The originals, unadorned with graphic and track information, are reproduced in his 1980 collection Airflow (Paper Tiger).

Castle remains best known for the work he did on Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange publicity materials, where his clear affinity with the fetish pieces of Pop artist Allen Jones was put into play [here]. When he wasn’t taking adolescent delight in rendering phallic objects, jets and cars, threatening full penetration with a fifties styled pin-up airbrushed into a hard chrome sheen, he specialised in retro-fitting the decade’s icons, James Dean, Johnny Cash and Elvis, as man-machine conflations for the 1970s. The women, Monroe, Hayworth, Fawcett-Majors, Dolly Parton are offered to the male gaze as android fuck machines.

Mott the Hoople’s essential 1972 collection of Island era recordings, Rock and Roll Queen, is wrapped in one of Castle’s illustrations. The repeating mirror images of Monroe reducing Pop Art iconography to a set of fast-dry, hard, scratch-proof textures that reflects back only its own vacuous surface qualities.

When the first UK paperback edition of Cohn’s Pop from the Beginning was being readied in 1970, Castle must have looked like the perfect choice to render the flash of the pop moment, five years later with the cover for George Tremlett’s cut n’ paste job, The Who, his work had become all formula.

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.

Nik Cohn Sells The Who

Advertisement in Zigzag #43 (July 1974)

Nik Cohn, Market (Penguin, 1970)

Searching for gold in dusty, crumbling racks of old seventy-eights, chipped and derelict, bad tunes, forgotten singers, syrupy violins. And lurking in there somewhere, treasure, Little Richard or the Coasters or Jerry Lee Lewis, some early and orgiastic, wild rocker. . . He searches for an hour without luck, rack after rack of dross, his eyes get tired and his fingers are thick with dust . . . But when and if he occasionally does find something, an original Johnny Otis, the waiting and time wasted doesn’t matter, he wraps it up in his coat like stolen goods, spiriting it away through the market and onto his player at something near a run. Then he sits poised above the soundbox, and the music goes round and round, almost obliterated by the chips and the scratches and the crackles, but there all the same, deep down, a pure gem. His day made.

Nik Cohn’s Market was first published in hardback by Secker & Warburg in 1965, when it eventually made it into paperback in 1970 he excised virtually every section that was once topical and could therefore date his story. Much was lost . . . including the above.

Nik Cohn Market (Secker & Warburg, 1965)

‘His nose is particularly keen, and he has no intention of letting us forget that urine and intercourse are of the essence of everyday life. The style is hip, hectic, American-orientated; but Mr Cohn’s stumbling prodigality would make less than a warm response ungenerous.’

Montague Haltrecht, The Sunday Times (November 21, 1965), 33.

There’s no overarching story, no central character, no defining event. The market is the place where lives flow, eddy and then pass on. Relationships and networks are defined in terms of exchange; grafted, bartered, borrowed, stolen, bought and sold. Money isn’t given it is taken. Whatever is being exchanged in the market’s stalls and streets, the public house, the pub, is the space where those transactions are finally adjudicated. Alcohol lubricates every exchange, every trade. The market is sodden with beer, wine and spirits. In these dingy places, there are no moments of transcendence or even a carnivalesque pretence of escape, just the temporary distraction of P.J. Proby on a jukebox, the sound and lights of a pinball machine or the promises found in the racing papers. The drudgery of life is mediated through bad sex and another bottle.

Blind drunk; only on her feet by instinct, stumbling and weaving, lurching across the corridor – her stagger is a bad caricature of walking. Her hair is straggling down into her eyes, and she wears so much running paint, mascara, her face looks like an oil painting that someone smudged over with a mop.

Evening Standard (November 23, 1965)

How many 19 year-olds would be capable of writing this regardless of who their mum and dad was?