Greased: two new reviews of 'Pin-Ups 1972'

Grant McPhee reviews Pin-ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll for Into Creative

This publication takes a similar format to Jon Savage’s ‘1966’ to posit the claim that 1972 is another important milestone in ‘the story’ of music. It’s a well-argued point that focusses on 1972 being when Rock ‘n’ Roll went back to its roots, in order to reclaim itself from the patchouli self-indulgence that it had sadly fallen into. Other writers have made a claim for 74/75 being when Rock and Roll went back to basics, but this makes a convincing case that 1972 was where it began. Rather than starting with Dr Feelgood or New York Dolls, we have Bowie and Bolan, Iggy and Lou, Roxy, The Who’s Quadrophenia and most refreshingly, Mick Farren, an unsung hero and huge influence on the soon to emerge Punk sound.

The level of research is quite astounding; I know that Peter meticulously went through hundreds of period magazines, NMEs, Melody Makers, Newspapers, Fanzines and more to ensure historical accuracy, rather than falling into the trap of repeating oft-heard myths. This trawl through culture really pays off as it gives a tremendous sense of period for the reader and envelopes you completely in the world of the greaser as the story emerges.

review published HERE

Simon Wright reviews A Band With Built-In Hate and Pin-Ups 1972 for Only Rock ‘n’ Roll London

Two books from Peter Stanfield which follow the same approach, developing a hypothesis by the careful selection and presentation of quotes from a wide variety of other sources. This means that he will never be one of my favourite writers – I prefer the highly-opinionated school of Nick Kent , Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs – but the material he chooses is for the most part relevant and stimulating and in some cases new to me, so that is enough to make for two entertaining and thought-provoking volumes.

Stanfield also shares two of my prejudices: that the early ‘70s were a brilliant time for music and that the Who peaked with Sell Out and Tommy. Pin-Ups 1972 follows in the steps of Jon Savage’s book on 1966 and David Hepworth’s review of 1971. Unlike these two titles Stanfield makes no attempt to review the contemporary music scene in its entirety but instead zeroes in on a tight and inter-related group of acts including Iggy and the Stooges, the New York Dolls, Lou Reed and Roxy Music, all firm favourites of mine. He notes how Marc Bolan had lead the way, and how Bowie was at the centre of it all. A surprising outlier is the opening chapter on Mick Farren, by then no longer a performer but a full-time writer and generally angry person. Stanfield gives a clear account of tectonic plates shifting within the London music scene and how this helped rock’n’roll shake off the last fringes of the 60’s as these groups evolved a Third Generation Rock’n’Roll, the subtitle of the book.  He is also good on how the seismic eruptions of 1977 started as minor tremors five years previously.

A Band With Built-In Hate is a fine book about the Who that would be better served by its sub-title The Who From Pop Art To Punk. Stanfield spends little time on the implications of the Townshend quote beyond noting that the members of the Who were four very different individuals who did not get on, hardly new news. Much more interesting is what Stanfield has to say about the relationship between the Who and popular culture in general and Pop Art in particular. Stanfield is helped greatly by extensively quoting Nik Cohn, still the most pithy and interesting commentator on the Who in the 60’s. The final chapter is enlivened by a wonderful rejection letter from Townshend to Eddie And The Hot Rods’ record company where he refers to his “meditative Mercedes buying” – truly the Godfather meeting The Punks. As with pin-ups 1972 the book concludes with the influence of the Who on punk, and vice versa.

Academic in tone but accessible in content these two books are recommended to bored teenagers of all ages.

Review published HERE

A Biography – Robert Milliken, 'Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock'

‘If you asked me who was the world’s first pop journalist’, Jim Fouratt told Robert Milliken, ‘in the sense of translating sixties culture, art, fashion, music and politics in a popular way, Tom Wolfe got the credit but I think it was Lillian Roxon. The way she did it was to be in the scene yet objective about it, while Tom Wolfe was around the scene, and reported on it, but never part of the scene like Lillian was. Lillian genuinely loved rock and roll, not just the music but the lifestyle’.

Lillian Roxon: Mother of Rock (2002) is as fine a biography as any I’ve read. From her family’s flight from Nazis to exile and new beginnings in Australia to her death in New York, aged 40, in 1973. In between, Milliken tells the story of how Roxon became one of the significant players in the New York rock scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, one of the movers and shakers who held court at Max’s Kansas City. Her student years and the Australian bohemian scene in first Brisbane then Sydney and her start in journalism are succinctly, but evocatively evoked, before her move to Manhattan, aged 27, as the 50’s tipped into the following decade.

Australian newspaper culture, the nascent Murdoch empire, tabloid journalism and Roxon’s place in this as an independent, career-minded young woman is portrayed with a deft touch that moves eloquently between historical context and her personal situation, both private and public. Roxon and her friends were great letter writers so Milliken has a treasure trove’s worth of material to draw on, which he adroitly pulls together with her published words and interviews with those who were closest to her as friends and colleagues.

Though it is the third act of her story that most interests me, her family’s history and her early life, especially in Sydney, are crisply and effectively etched to provide a sure sense of who she was and where she came from. I didn’t skip a page.

Her relationships with Linda McCartney and Germaine Greer are given generous space, never overbearingly so, but for me that is all peripheral to her friendship with Danny Fields, Lisa Robinson, Leee Black Childers, Lenny Kaye and the like and her mentorship of young writers like Richard Meltzer, who told Milliken:

Compared to so-called gossip writers, when Lillian wrote ‘scene pieces’ she had a playfulness that was so much more authentic, and never nasty or ill-tempered in the slightest. She wrote from a state of genuine affection for probably a wider range of rock-roll characters than any other rockwriter I have any recollection of. The only exception I can think of was Carole King. She hated Carole King (but then so did most of her colleagues).

In a June 1971 column for the Sunday News, Roxon wrote:

Carole King may have a number one single and a number one album, but I find her as boring as my girlfriends who are always on the phone to me whining about the problems they have ‘communicating’ and having ‘meaningful relationships’. She is like every messed-up neurotic girl you ever had to confront in group therapy. Sincere, certainly, well-meaning, too - a nice girl, not bad looking, super-talented, but exasperating and totally unexciting. You know, of course, what her success means - that rock is going to go into a ‘Dark Shadows’ period. Those moody broody songs about getting it all together and facing the world bravely are going to take over the air-waves, and then what are we going to dance to? The Pathetique Sonata? . . . You can learn more about being a human being from Tina Turner's body language than from all of Carole's fortune cookie philosophising.

That kiss-off line is so beautifully on point. If you can’t dance to Carole King you can pull back the rug and frug along with Ike and Tina, the Ronettes and the Shangri-las:

A contact sheet showing Andy Warhol attending an event at the Action House nightclub in Island Park, Long Island, New York, 4th December 1966. Among those attending are Nico (top, left), her son, Christian Aaron Boulogne (top, centre). The Velvet Underground were on the bill for the evening, along with The Fugs, The Ronettes (second row, far right) and The Shangri-Las.

RONETTES/There are two kinds of lady singers - the angels and the devils. The angels sing ethereal songs in ethereal voices and wear long, loose gowns. The devils sing earthy songs in earthy voices and their gowns fit where gowns should fit. The Ronettes were every teenage boy's dream of a teenage devil in triplicate. Brazen, shapely and without any illusions about men and sex. They were like girlie magazines come alive and set to music. Their song Do I Love You made the boys feel like men. Nothing psychedelic there, just straight from the hip or wherever.

THE SHANGRI-LAS/From time immemorial the bitch goddess has haunted and fascinated man. And so, of course, has the girl next door. The Shangri-las were both, a real bargain for the boy who wanted everything in a girl and the girl who wanted to be that everything. They played it soft and tough at the same time. Their toughest song was Leader Of The Pack. (He was the head of the motorcycle gang and she was his tough mama. Then he dies. Tough mama goes soft, but not for long. You know whoever gets to be the next leader gets her too. Teased hair, doe eyes, ankle bracelet and all.) It was the necrophilia of it all that shocked the adults, not the funkiness of three bitchy white girls who told it straight out that in motor-bike gangs you don't just hold hands. The Shangri-las were akin to Clyde Barrow's Bonnie, in a reversal of the proverbial image, the velvet hands in the iron gloves.

 

The Ronettes and Shangri-las quotes are from Lillian Roxon’s Encylopedia of Rock. Here she wrote of the Rolling Stones who, unlike The Beatles, ‘had never seen soap and water. And where the adorable little wind-up Beatle moptops wanted no more than to hold a hand, the hateful rasping Stones were bent on rape, pillage and plunder. Well, at least satisfaction . . . No one had ever seen a white man move on stage the way Jagger moved . . .

Right from the start he parodied himself completely but that worked for him, not against him. His lips and no-hips drove every relevant point home; a not-so-distant relative of the Shangri-las’ Leader of the Pack, he laid it on the line. Most of the girls who watched had never before had the word put on them quite so explicitly. It was heady stuff for fourteen-year-old virgins, and others besides.

Milliken spends little time analysing Roxon’s work, he’s content to let her friends and colleagues act as her interpreters. That’s fine, even if it means you have to go back to the work to figure out just why she was held in such high regard. Unfortunately, not much of her writing  is readily available, certainly not in any curated form, and the Encyclopedia is long out of print. If too little of her work is included in the biography (there are some selected writings at its end but these are mostly from the Encyclopedia alongside a few key pieces on the women’s movement, Germaine Greer and Creedence Clearwater Revival). What’s also missing is a more detailed account of how she spent her time and what she wrote about in the last five years of her life, her trips to London, her radio show appearances and her support of third generation rock artists like Iggy and the Stooges, David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the New York Dolls all demand a fuller account.

Even at this late date, I’m going to take a position on defining Lillian Roxon as the ‘Mother of Rock’. It’s a misnomer, the maternal diminishes and marginalises her activity to one of a nurturing figure rather than a full participant with an original and unique voice that is worth listening to in its own right. That said, Milliken has written a studiously researched and eloquent biography. It’s an admirable achievement. Someone, however, needs to supplement Milliken’s book with a reader that genuinely covers the range of her outputs.

Last words go to Lillian Roxon, on moving into new accommodation she had it fumigated to exterminate the pests that Germaine Greer had, to her chagrin, suggested defined her:

I now live alone with no colonies of roaches and one life size poster of Iggy Stooge mother naked to cheer me up.

Richard Bernstein Iggy Pop (1970) edition of 100 silkscreen on paper. 42” x 32” Is that ‘life size’? Yours for $5K from Sotherbys [HERE}

Iggy and the Stooges at Max's – Rock Scene Reports

With the New York Dolls on the cover, Rock Scene (March 1974) ran large with the Stooges’ Max’s Kansas City gigs on July 30–31st and August 6–7th, 1973 (the mag was bimonthly which meant it went to print two months or more before the the date line on its cover).

Lillian Roxon’s death was reported along with a photograph of her kissing Lenny Kaye. They were both at Max’s for The Stooges:

It was a night of feathers and glitter, and crowds of people coming to hear rock and roll. Lillian was working, that’s why she was there – but she knew it was An Event too. That’s why she wore her feathers and makeup.

Lenny Kaye wrote up the report of the gig

Celebrity nights . . . the first two were marred by poor sound, for the second two it was ‘near perfect’

It was almost as if the band had realized that they’d gone as far as they could go in one particular direction, the oft-predicted way of on-stage suicide not to be theirs; they drew back from the edge, wary and knowledgably watchful, all senses alert.

Fred Kirby pictured top right second down filed a report for Variety, published August 8, 1973.

Billboard (August 25, 1973)

Iggy’s turn to play the on-looker . . . at Mott the Hoople/New York Dolls afterparty following their show at Felt Forum, Madison Square Garden (August 3, 1973) where Iggy walked into a glass door, hence the sticking plaster . . .

Sounds (August 25, 1973)

also from Sounds (August 25, 1973)

A complete run of Rock Scene can be found HERE

Amphetamine Academia – Ugly Things Review by Dave Laing

I’ve been a regular reader of Ugly Things since 1994, issue 14 when The Birds were the cover stars, so it feels a bit strange and kinda wonderful to find myself in #60 spread across 4 pages. Dave Laing reviewed Pin-Ups 1972 and interviewed me.

Momentous . . . an academic treatise that reads with the manic energy of an early Lester Bangs . . . Opposing views of authenticity, the underground’s clash with the mainstream and art’s clash with artifice and commerce, these are things that went into shaping the music, and Stanfield explores them with an addictive enthusiasm. . . Pin-Ups 1972 will leave you breathless from the number of different ways it comes at the music and reeling from the sheer number of points it makes.  Together with Stanfield’s A Band With Built-In Hate, it presents what I consider to be a new way of writing – amphetamine academia – about what is some of the most exciting music ever made. I can’t recommend it enough.

Dave Laing

These days with inflated shipping charges, Ugly Things is often hard to find here in the UK, but recently I’ve been getting mine from Juno (here). The mag’s home site is here

That Very Bizarre New Group Called The Dolls – Lillian Roxon

Final part of my Lillian Roxon excavation . . . here she sells the New York Dolls

Sunday News (June 4, 1972)

One of the earliest published notices for the Dolls, which prededed their run of 14 Tuesday night engagements at the Mercer Arts Center begining on June 13th (according to From the Archives here)

Sunday News (July 30, 1972)

Lillian is in London to cover Bowie in Aylesbury and Lou and Iggy in King’s Cross, she also takes time out to note that Britain’s top music paper, Melody Maker, have dedicated a full page to the Dolls, unsigned yet trailed as being ‘the best young band ever’. She agrees . . . Here’s Roy Hollingworth’s piece:

Roy Hollingworth Melody Maker (July 22, 1972)

Sunday News (September 3, 1972)

‘thinnner and younger and punkier . . . The manic audience loves them . . .The music is the kind that makes parents crazy. Early push-back-the chairs-and-dance rock-and-roll . . . Everyone and his mother loves the Dolls’.

Sunday News (September 17, 1972)

New Yorks Dolls part of the Rock ‘n’ Rouge clique

Sunday News (September 24, 1972)

David saw the Dolls and he can’t stop talking about them . . .

Sunday News (May 6, 1973)

As with the UK music papers, Lillian plays to the gallery, some of her readers might hate the Dolls but they can’t stop reading about them and letting her know . . . ‘Most of the people you write about are so unimportant in the rock world. For instance, Marc Bolan and David Bowie’.

Sunday News (August 5, 1973)

Lillian’s final despatch . . . Rock n Roll is not dead . . . ‘The New York Dolls are the best, and their album “The New York Dolls”, is the definitively New York sound album. It gets you up and dancing and feeling 14 again’. She was not alone in that sentiment.

Newsday Sunday August 19, 1973. Dave Marsh rounds up the new acts making the scene in New York. Lillian Roxon is pushing the Dynomiters, who I’ve never heard of but then neither have I seen Street Punk listed before (Roxon drops their name in her Australian column, Luger sound familiar (Iggy might produce them) but not New York Central (produced by Lennon!!!). The rest I know about . . . You know, Kiss . .

Rock Scene (March 1974) ran a very similar feature on New York’s up n’ coming that featured much the same line up, but with more pictures. Here’s Street Punk . . . bit of a misnomer if you ask me . . .

NME June 7, 1975. Looking like a bunch of glitter-era hangovers, Lisa Robinson moves the tale of New York’s wannabes toward centre stage: ‘What else is new? Well, the Ramones for one . . .’

Lillian Roxon, Falling For Those Pale Skinny English Boys: Bowie and Bolan

As 1972 moved into the Spring, Lillian Roxon had fallen in love again with pop and the teenage dream. Marc Bolan was her first true love of the new season.

Sunday News (December 19, 1971)

Climbing out of her sick bed, Lillian sets off to meet her new teen idol. She is enchanted . . .

Sunday News (February 20, 1972)

She’ll make at least two trips to London in 1972, in February she was part of the media circus to witness Bowie’s coming out as Ziggy Stardust. The Garbo look has been replaced by short-hair and Star Trek jumpsuits. . . ‘restoring a little of the stud image he’d lost’. The Lou Reed influence on Bowie is pushed to the fore

Sunday News (February 27, 1972)

When in London, go shopping . . . This represents perhaps the earliest US press appearance of Malcolm McLaren and Vivian Westwood’s Let It Rock. Lillian calls it Paradise Garage, which had ceased trading in November 1971. The confusion is understandable, as Paul Gorman reminded me the Let It Rock sign was not in place until March ‘72.

The salesmen have long hair, all right, but it is greased back into high shiny pompadours. When they’re not wearing motor cycle jackets they sport authentic drape shape coats with velvet lapels.

Sunday News (March 5, 1972)

Bad sound and the wrong audience spoilt Lillian’s enjoyment of T. Rex’s Carnegie Hall gig. In her two accounts of the show she mentioned Marc ad-libbing sexually explicit lyrics: ‘You could actually hear people asking each other in amazement if they’d heard right’. So, what was he singing? I need to know.

Sydney Morning Herald (March 5, 1972)

Sunday News (June 18, 1972)

In June she interviews Bowie during a 3 day promotional visit to NYC. Both watch Elvis. Bowie plays on the idea of being a fabricated pop star, imagining a doll in his own image with hair that grows and that can say things like ‘I love you’ and ‘I like to dress up’. Lillian hopes it will come with the full Ziggy wardrobe.

Sunday News (July 30, 1972)

And then she’s part of the press junket arranged for American critics with a Bowie show at Friars, Aylesbury and the Lou Reed and Iggy and the Stooges sets at King Sound, King’s Cross.

Sunday News (August 6, 1972)

Sunday News (September 24, 1972)

Bolan is back and playing at the Academy of Music, but it’s still not working:

this is a man who should never be allowed to work without at least two hundred screaming young girls crammed into the first ten rows . . . Playing to the torpid mob at the Academy of Music, he was like Raquel Welch trying to do a strip for the Daughters of the American Revolution. Namely, not fully appreciated.

Meanwhile, Bowie is about to make his debut US appearance . . .

Daily News (September 30, 1972)

A star is born . . . whose ‘carefully stylized movements give us an updated (though deceptively frail) ‘70s version of the ‘50s teenage hood’.

Sunday News (October 8, 1972)

Sydney Morning Herald (October 8, 1972)

Sydney Morning Herald (December 10, 1972)

Lou Reed given the ultimate plug for his forthcoming Transformer . . . evil

The sexiest thing since Mick Jagger . . . says Lillian Roxon

and that would be Iggy Stooge . . .

I recently picked up a copy of Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia, the 1971 paperback edition with a new, very short, introduction that tried to capture how much had happened since the book was first published in 1969. CSNY had formed, Led Zeppelin had become the most popular band in the world, The Beatles had quit and the Jackson Five filled Madison Square Garden (and so did Grand Funk Railroad), but the most significant event was that Iggy Stooge had emerged and she was smitten ‘. . . with the sexiest thing since Mick Jagger’.

The Encyclopedia’s 1969 entry for The Stooges is easily missed as it falls under their longer name ‘The Psychedelic Stooges’. That these unknown Detroit hoodlums get an entry while bands with a history and a profile, like The Pretty Things, don’t make the grade might suggest that her friend, and the explorer responsible for discovering the them in 1968, Danny Fields was getting the hype in early.

Intrigued, I went looking for some other things Roxon had written about The Stooges. She was the New York correspondent for Sydney Morning Herald so I trawled through the paper’s archive, which gave me little more than the two articles Per Nilsen cites in his estimable Iggy & The Stooges On Stage 1967–1974. Other than those two, the band made a few brief appearances in the paper. Roxon used The Stooges to illustrate one of the directions contemporary music was heading: the theatrical, shock rock approach shared with Alice Cooper. There’s a note that Astor records have picked up the license for Elektra and will be releasing the Stooges album, and a review of Fun House by Michael Symons. The ‘Some Pop Primitive’ in the headline for the review refers not to the ‘world’s most frantic band’ but to Melanie . . . go figure (see below at the bottom of this post).

Both her Australian reviews of the live Stooges experience are from Electric Circus gigs (October 23, 1970 and May 14 & 25, 1971). A wider search also revealed an audio recording of a two minute syndicated review of the 1971 shows, ‘Can A Boy Named Iggy Be The Silver Messiah?’ which is just a joy to hear. (radio here)

Sydney Morning Herald (November 1, 1970)

His whole idea is to jolt the audience into a state of fear and shock. When he sings to a girl, or to the audience, he does not do it caressingly but with anger and violence. The girl doesn’t know whether she wants to mother him – or back away. Watching the indecision is part of the sadistic thrill of being in The Stooges audience . . .He seems to embody the violence around in America today.

Sydney Morning Herald (June 6, 1971)

The Stooges are definitely the darlings of the avant garde this year. It must be the spitting.

 Other than her contract with the Herald, Roxon also penned a weekly column, ‘The Top Of Pop’, for New York’s Sunday News. It’s a great primer to the scene circa 1971–73. Iggy received a fair number of mentions in the sidebar, ‘Amplifications’, along the lines of ‘Iggy Stooge are you serious about making a movie with Andy Warhol?’ (10/71), Iggy of the Stooges joining Lou Reed and the Flamin’ Groovies in London and references to seeing Bowie in Aylesbury with a strong suggestion that she joined other critics that night at the King Sound gig: ‘Detroit’s Iggy Pop wears his hair sprayed silver off stage. . . (with a well worn Marc Bolan T-shirt) . . . glove-tight studded silver pants, eyeliner and black lipstick.’ (July 30, 1972). All echoing the previous week’s column:

Sunday News (July 23, 1972)

Her first proper review of The Stooges for the Sunday News was of their return, after London, to their home town for a gig at the Ford Auditorium (March 27 1973). Roxon matched her impressions of the Detroit gig with, her longtime favourites, The Kinks in New York. She thought Ray Davis and Iggy were a ‘pair of rock aristocrats’. A strange combination, but they shared an honesty in their art that she appreciated whatever the differences in their performance styles and music.

Sunday News (April 6, 1973)

Gone in Detroit was the glittered torso of the Electric Circus gig, when she last saw Iggy. She wrote, ‘too many people have copied it, and he’s into something a little more substantial than glitter rock, anyway.’ Raw Power is a recent release, a collection of ‘enraged screams’ and on stage, in red bikini briefs beneath ‘an old embroidered and fringed piano shawl tied into an insane little sarong’, Iggy is still, as at the Electric Circus, breaking through the fourth wall, sitting in the lap of audience members, dragging young women on to his podium: ‘there is nothing he wouldn’t do on stage. He’ll do the first stage rape one of these days, and don’t think he doesn’t get close’.

Roxon was an enthusiastic champion of Bowie and Bolan, and helped boost the New York Dolls right from the start. When The Stooges made their return to New York at Max’s Kansas City in July/August ‘73 she covered it along with a review of the first Dolls album

New York Sunday News (August 5, 1973)

A week after that post and three days on from the final Stooges’ gig at Max’s she was dead. Iggy and the Stooges and the New York Dolls her final story.

New York Sunday News (August 11, 1973)

Sydney Morning Herald’s Fun House review

Sydney Morning Herald (December 19, 1970)

Glam! When Superstars Rocked the World, 1970–74

Mark Paytress is among the best sleeve note writers, just a notch or two below the master, Bill Millar. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve bought a new package of T. Rex recordings because I wanted, most of all, to read what he had to say. The duplication of Bolan recordings in my collection can take care of themselves but Paytress, despite the familiarity of the material he is annotating and contextualising, is never repetitious. His observations are diamond bright and sharp. He never resorts to cliché. He has always found something new to say and a novel way to approach his story. His writing has added greatly to an appreciation of Bolan’s music.

His Bolan biography stands head and shoulders over any other, by whatever measure Paytress is a fabulous writer and a great story teller.

Glam! When Superstars Rocked the World, 1970–74 doesn’t disappoint. The topic is as familiar as any trend in post-first generation rock ’n’ roll – you already know the story and all its twists and turns. With Glam!, Paytress has not been as inclusive as Simon Reynolds with Shock and Awe (2016) but he is considerably less exclusive than Barney Hoskyns was with Glam! (also with an exclamation mark that promises MORE!), published in 1998 to coincide with Todd Haynes Velvet Goldmine, and my own Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ’n’ Roll (2022). The key figures are of course, Bolan, Bowie and Roxy Music, but he gives generous space to Roy Wood, Slade, Rod Stewart, Elton John, Alice Cooper, Mott the Hoople, Gary Glitter and, I think, most significantly to The Sweet.

Extensively illustrated with a superbly curated mix of agency photographs and pop ephemera, especially the long lost essential Seventies’ adornment of the faux silk scarf, a fashion accessory that crossed-over effortlessly with football culture (I yearn for its return). Glam! is a joy to idly flick through and a pleasure to read. Paytress holds to a rough chronology, beginning with the withdrawal of the promises of the Sixties with the Isle of Wight festival.  That event is figured as a moment of death and rebirth: Hendrix’s overdose and festival dj Jeff Dexter playing, again and again to the huddled masses, a test pressing of ‘Ride a White Swan’. The book’s coda refigures the trope with the death of Bolan and a rebirth with punk.

In between, even the most jaded of readers will find much to amuse, ponder over and debate. You might argue that, because Paytress is telling the story, T. Rex has been given the dominant role. This might be true, but I also think he makes the case for continuing to weave Bolan into the narrative after the rise of Ziggy. The fall of T. Rex is as important as any contender, any bright new challenger on the scene. It also works quite brilliantly alongside the travails of The Sweet: their acceptance that being the puppets of Mike Chapman, Nicky Chinn and producer Phil Wainman will give them the success they couldn’t earn on their own and their bid for autonomy, just as the train they rode on was about to run out of track, is the stuff of pathos. Someone really does need to write a pop history of The Sweet, Chinnichap and the British 70s pop machine. . . Step up, step up right up!.

 

Footnote:

I’ve always cherished Bolan’s wilful, creative acts of plagiarism in his song writing, ‘Beltane Walk’ as a rewrite of Jimmy McCracklin’s ‘The Walk’ and Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘You’ll Be Mine’ for ‘Jeepster’ being the two most egregious or brilliant of the many. Mark Paytress has brought a new one to my attention, Johnny Burnette Trio’s ‘Honey Hush’ as the basis for ‘Jewel’, the second track on side one of the first T. Rex album. Play the two recordings back-to-back to know this to be true, but also to realise just how inventive Bolan has been in making an abstract out of his source material. Marc Bolan – pop genius.

 

This beautiful original courtesy of The Seth Man

Iggy and the Stooges London Sessions 1972

The good people at Easy Action records have just released a double 45 of primo alternate versions of Raw Power era recordings to complement the best collection, without question, of Iggy and the Stooges’ studio outtakes, Heavy Liquid, and to celebrate it being almost 50 years since the King Sound King’s Cross gig. Get the 45s here

Elegantly designed by Dave Twist, the gatefold sleeve features four Byron Newman photographs taken in CBS studios during the recording of Raw Power, three to my knowledge previously unpublished

‘I Got A Right’ and ‘Tight Pants’ are alternates to those featured on Heavy Liquid. ‘Search and Destroy’, ‘Death Trip’ and ‘Gimme Danger’ are from the Raw Power sessions and released for the first-time by Easy Action. They were initially aired on the bootleg Etiqueta Negra de Lugo from ten years back, but good luck finding a copy . . .

One of the five photographers present at King Sound (see here), Byron Newman has around 15 images of the band in the studio, on the stage and out and about in London. Many of these will be featured in Easy Action and Per Nilsen’s book of the band’s live performances, which is now scheduled for the Autumn 2022.

Rear of the bootleg sleeve and the two inners from Heavy Liquid

One of the myths of the album sessions was that Iggy messed up the mix, overloading elements onto a few tracks so that by the time Bowie got involved his options were limited. The CBS studio outtakes show this not to be the case. Moreover, Mike Ross-Trevor, one of CBS Studio’s engineers, chipped into a debate on these matters on a Steve Hoffman forum thread in 2016:

Inside . . . Heavy Liquid and London Sessions

Andy Warhol's PORK – The View From The Penthouse

“The maestro of the monotonous . . . The czar of somnabulism” Penthouse (v.6/n.8, 1971) covers Pork during it’s London run at the Roundhouse in August 1971. The esteemed journal of the arts was unimpressed:

With its unique blend of excremental obsession and blatant nudity, it transmogrifies the wholesome, exciting process of sexual stimulation into a degrading version of amateur night at the sewage works drama society. Warhol, if he’s demonstrated anything, has shown that even by going the whole hog, he can’t produce anything more appetizing than a pig’s dinner

Text was by Roger Finborough and photographs by Amnon Bar-Tur, who would become a regular contributor to Club International

L to R: Dana Gillespie, Tony Defries and David Bowie at The Roundhouse for a night of Pork. A good number of the cast and backstage hands would end up working for MainMan’s New York offices.

Collect the Set . . . Rock 'n' Roll Stars Vol. 1–4 (Joy Records 1972)

These four volumes of reprocessed stereo cuts from Vee Jay’s catalogue have intrigued me for years as I chanced upon bits of the covers’ Teddy Boy. Finally found the complete set in Ramsgate’s Vinyl Head. Compiled in 1969 by Joe Fields and Richard Robinson (Groovies and Lou Reed’s producer?) with sleeve notes by John Gabtree who wrote The World of Rock, a 1968 paperback history. You have to hope the book had a better copy editor than his sleeve notes which places Sun Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. . . .

The Teddy Boy figure was obviously a substitute design for the UK edition, the American version had been released earlier on the Buddah label in an anonymous jacket. The 1972 British edition was very much of its moment, as was the album’s theme – ‘First Generation: Rock/Blues/Early Soul’ – when the notion of a ‘third generation’ was being cast around by the likes of Alice Cooper and Nick Kent. Things were moving fast . . .

Gabree began his story at a Filmore East gig, headlined by Three Dog Night and Sha Na Na, with a showing of the Chubby Checker movie Twist Around the Clock (1961). In 1969 the Rock ‘n’ Roll Revivial is revving up so some history is needed: Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, etc. are the first generation then come the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he wrote. But as yet no third generation is nominated, just the first murmurs of the resurrection shuffle.

Fats Domino plays the Club International – David Parkinson was there

Fats Domino’s sell-out Hammersmith Odeon appearance in April 1973 was covered by Waxie Maxie in the July ‘73 issue of Club International (volume 2, number 7). As per his self-given remit, his lead into the story managed a sex scenario that featured rock n roll records and a little ultra violence between the day’s youth cults . . . Perfect Max in fact. Fats bought his own band, which must have disappointed the Allstars, but none of that matters much because we’re not here to celebrate Teddy Boy Rock ‘n’ Roll, Mr. Domino or even Mr. Needham. My purpose here is to give your peepers the chance to glance over David Parkinson’s photographs. The one above being all you will ever need to see in order to understand the appeal of rock ‘n’ roll in 1972–73.

I can’t let this post go by without also noting that this is all in the same issue that David Parkinson ran a spread on Malcolm McLaren’s Let It Rock clobber that ran for seven pages. Style and attitude never better displayed . . . visit Paul Gorman’s webpages for a fuller account of Parkinson, Mclaren and Club International, be warned you will get lost in there: https://www.paulgormanis.com/

For anyone looking to track down a copy of this issue of Club International here’s the cover, which features Iggy Pop on stage at the King Sound July 1972 gig, as photographed by Mick Rock

Any Wild Yahoo British Group – The Rock 'n' Roll AllStars

I was not very generous toward The Rock ‘n’ Roll Allstars in Pin-Ups 1972, in all fairness to them my issue was as much to do with Max ‘Waxie Maxie’ Needham using his porn connections to drag them into the degrading (for everyone involved) scenario in Curious magazine’s Pillow Book as it was for their insipid cover version of T. Rex’s ‘Get It On’. Small amends then, but here’s some extra observations, a few images and cuttings.

The band’s recorded output was pretty meagre, one LP, one single, one EP, and appearances on two compilations all put out by budget label B&C where they were joined by The Wild Angels and fellow Curious magazine freaks, Arnold Corns. The label was an off-shoot of Trojan. The initials stood for ‘Beat” and ‘Commerical’, which is naming things as they are I reckon.

Their debut 45 is a fair effort at pitching themselves as both true to the Teddy Boy Rock ‘n’ Roll ethos and to the novelty pop market (Philips in Germany released it in a neat picture sleeve). ‘Baby Can You Feel It’ nicely foreshadows the hits of Showaddywaddy, but completely lacks Mike Hurst’s production ability (and budget). The Fats Domino cover ‘It Keeps Raining’ was their real statement of intent. In a Beat Instrumental feature from November 1971 they explained that they had ‘gone for the New Orleans type of rock and roll’. Lots of saxs ‘is the sound we have and I feel we could confidently back Little Richard or Fats Domino if they ever came over here. Our sound is what these men are used to’. Not the Gene Vincent sound that drummer Billy Williams’ previous band The Houseshakers trade in then. Regardless of these fine points of distinction between the bands on the circuit, ‘The Allstars are not just a bunch of fellows jumping on a rock and roll revival bandwagon, or a band aiming at sending it up. They are truly dedicated Teddy boys with a great deal of experience in the R&R field.’

Needham, who was the band’s manager, made sure they got maximum coverage in his Record Mirror column ‘Waxie’s World’. The thing with Max, however, was he had trouble remembering whether he was writing for the Soho skin trade or the pop press.

I can forgive him his peccadilloes when the link is this crazy: ‘Shelia was twenty-nine years of age, married with three children all skinheads’. Caught by her husband in bed with Jailhose Jim Bennett, she’s now staying at her mum’s where she can play the best of the wild Yahoo British groups as she rubs up against Jailhouse Jim.

His readers held a debate about the merits of Waxie’s approach. Here’s their verdict (below the great pic of the Sunsets)

Both the Curious and Beat Instrumental pieces were promoting their Party EP, which is 14 minutes of standard covers with crowd noises and, I think, Waxie doing the cheerleading. It is just about the worst thing that came out under the Rock ‘n’ Roll Revival of 1969–73, and there is plenty of competition for that accalade. It’s not just that their versions are no better than a budget TOTPs album, and ‘Get It On’ is an absolute travesty, it is the fact it is all done without any style and zero attitude, not even the frisson of a sexual fumble in the dark. Cut on the cheap, the EP didn’t even come with a picture sleeve FFS! Most of the tracks are scattered across the Rock ‘n’ Roll Party compilation, the louder mastering doesn’t help much.

Someone must have liked the crowd noises between the songs on the EP because they are back on their sole album Red China Rocks, which does have one of the period’s great sleeves as compensation. . . Chairman Mao in drape and creepers . . . and, as my mate Eddie says, a Clash bootleg sleeve before the fact. Rather than develop the New Orleans side of things the album retreats back to Houseshakers’ territory. The world did not need another cover of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ but, that said, it is all a significant improvement on the Party EP and with Perkins’ ‘Dixie Fried’ and, what must be one of the first British covers of a Charlie Feather’s number, ‘One Hand Loose’, I do believe I can hear Crazy Cavan coming down the line. . . . cut loose!!!

Bush Hollyhead’s illustration for a 1972 Club International special on Fifties revivalism goes places the Rock n Roll Allstars led by Waxie Maxie were never going to get

Peter Watts on Pin-Ups 1972 – a review

A terrific review of Pin-Ups 1972 by Peter Watts (Uncut, Time Out etc) from his Great Wen blog [link here]. How could I not reproduce it . . .?

Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll

That headline is not a phrase you hear much of – or in fact at all – these days, but in 1972 it was a much-discussed concept that attempted to define the music and performance of the early 70s as demonstrated by the likes of David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music, New York Dolls and T-Rex. As author Peter Stanfield explains in his fabulous new book Pin-Ups 1972 about the London music scene in 1972, this went by other names too – Fag Rock and Poof Rock being just two of them – which is a reminder of how insensitive even the progressive rock papers of the time could be.

That distance between then and now is the focus of Stanfield’s book. So much has been said and written about the 1970s that it’s easy to believe we all lived through them and already understand everything there is to know, but by going back to the journalism of the time, Stanfield demonstrates how writers were attempting to comprehend the music of the time without benefit of hindsight or obscured by four decades of received wisdom. Stanfield has devoured the journalism of 1972 – underground, national press, music weeklies, colour monthlies, even soft porn titles – to examine the music through a detailed reading of the writing of Nick Kent, Nik Cohn, Richard Williams, Michael Watts, Simon Frith, Mick Farren, Chrissie Hynde and many more – not just their greatest hits, but deep cuts that even they will have forgotten writing.

We see these writers in real time try to get to grips with the ambiguities and contradictions of third generation rock and Stanfield writes in an approximation of these pioneers, dropping theories, connections and cultural references with intoxicating verve, daring the reader to keep up and learn something. Look it up or go with the flow, your call.

What is third generation rock? By this reading, the first generation were the original ’56 rockers – Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard – and the second generation were those that grew from R&B – the Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks, Floyd, Zeppelin and you know the rest. Third generation were those that followed, essentially the ones who had more time to understand the grammar, scriptures, cliches and language of rock and roll and then tried to do something different with it – even if many of them, Bowie, Bolan, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop for starters, had been making music for almost as long as the second generation.

It’s a slippery concept (whither Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies?), as such genre-defining often is, but that isn’t really the point. What compels is the approach of exploring the acts through the media of the time. We see hippie journalists struggle to accept the sudden elevation of Marc Bolan from underground hero to teenage fantasy, haphazardly chronicle the New York Dolls’ ill-fated trip to London in 72, or write in awe of the arrival of the semi-mythical Iggy Pop and Lou Reed when the pair come and live in London (Lou Reed settling down in Wimbledon of all places). How do you make sense of Bowie and Roxy Music, when they are happening right in front of your eyes and you have no real frame of reference? The latter explains why for much of their first year, Roxy are likened to Sha Na Na: when something genuinely revolutionary happens, critics are left grasping for comparisons – only later are they able to go back and make it all fit together. But watching that struggle, and the sheer intellectual effort demonstrated by so many writers of the time, is fascinating and a little humbling. The through-line to punk and indie is clear to us but obviously was unknown at the time, and despite walk-on roles for Malcolm McLaren and Glen Matlock, Stanfield wisely leaves that largely unsaid, helping to seal 1972 into its own time capsule.

That makes this very much a book for those who enjoy historiography and media studies almost as much as they love rock and roll. What you don’t get is recycled anecdotes, biography or even too much in the way of music criticism – although the reappraisal of Bowie’s Pin-Ups is magnificent. Stanfield is more interested in the wider culture, with rock being as much about performance and publicity and fandom as it is about chords and melodies. Which for the writers and musicians of 1972, it almost certainly was.

Twenty-Five Times Around the World with Marc Bolan

Three Marc Bolan related things recently encountered and that I think are worth sharing:

First is from November 1971 Beat Instrumental mag with Bolan as the cover star.

Second is from Simon Reynolds’ Shock and Awe Blog (link here)

Third is an interview with Tony Visconti from the April 2022 edition of Record Collector

‘Marc Bolan – Hot Rods and Hot Love’ . . . A title primed for the time, not a hint of the mystical, instead shiny hard chromium heat and flash. Mirrored shades reflecting back trashy American automobiles customised to go go go . . . Steve Turner’s piece promised to get inside Bolan’s fixation on car imagery, but it hardly starts the quarter mile. I’d hoped for a little more on the car/sex conflation but pickings are meager. You’d do better to head off to YouTube and watch Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos once more (link here) and switch ‘Dream Lover’ with ‘Hot Love’ . . . What you do get, however, is a splended kiss-off line: ‘I’ve been round the world 25 times faster than anyone else.’ Pure Bolan that. . .

The cover image of Bolan staring back at the camera is the counterpoint to the photographs Simon Reynolds looks at, each belong to that moment where Bolan thought of himself as occuppying the middleground between Led Zeppelin and Eddie Cochran . . .

When self-absorption mixed with cocaine and champagne at the Chateau. . . but before that you could go around the world with T. Rex 25 times faster than with anyone else . . .

Aces: the girl group sound in 1972

Photo by Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang (1959)

On Friday nights Evie would go with her friend Sue to the ice rink, it was the place to see other teenage girls and talk about boys. In an elaborate ritual, she curled her straight hair and held it in place with clouds of hairspray. The fix rarely lasted the first part of the evening. Evie’s ritual eventually abandoned when Aces showed up at school. Aces shunned Julie, the most popular girl, and hung out with Evie. She now lets her hair stay straight, Aces preferred it that way.

His given name was Rhett, but he had had a tattoo of aces done while in Liverpool touring Britain with his father, an actor, so Aces was what he was now called. Before Evie met him he’d been expelled from his previous schools, at Le Conte he stayed away from the in-crowd, he followed his own path and took Evie on a date in a stolen car

Photo by Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang (1959)

It wasn't just the way his yellow eyes stripped the plaster off the walls that threw the school open for grabs. And it wasn't his black hair that fell to his chin in the front in criminal defiance. It was that the girls went along with him at once, all the whole school did.

Who could resist the way he threw back his head and slapped his thigh in unheard-of abandon, in our starved colony? He dressed in black, black motorcycle jacket, black shirts, black Levi’s and black boots with his black eyelashes framing his acetylene eyes that flickered out in pure hate at the concepts of anything being "for your own good" or anyone "who knew best”.

His report card noted his high IQ but also his ‘poor attitude’. Eve and Aces’ chaste love affair ended after the ride in the stolen car, and then he vanished. A little while later Eve learnt from Aces’ only friend, Louie, that he had been busted. ‘Grand Theft Auto?’ she asked. ‘No’, replied Louie, ‘Grand Theft Yacht’. He’d stolen the boat in Balboa and was heading for Tahiti when the coast guard stopped him.

Evie learns that ‘power was the quality of knowing what you liked’ and she now knew she’d much rather head for Tahiti than go to the school dance.

Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz, from which this story is taken, was published in 1972. That year and in the next few years to follow American music, like its British counterpart, was obsessed with the 1950s and early 1960s, especially with the girl groups, The Ronettes, The Shangri-las, The Crystals. Their sound was echoed and refracted by the New York Dolls for sure, but it was even more present in Bette Midler’s debut, with its cover versions of ‘The Leader of the Pack’ and The Dixie Cups’ ‘Chapel of Love’. The album opens with the invitation Bobby Freeman made in 1958, ‘Do You Wanna Dance’? This was not pastiche but a tribute to her roots, Greil Marcus wrote. Laura Nyro’s Gonna Take A Miracle, backed by Labelle, was also a heartfelt homage, it included ‘the great R&B hits that Laura once wailed where the echo was best: in a New York subway station’, ran the tag-line in the record company’s advertisement for the album. She covered the songs she felt Smokey Robinson, Phil Spector, Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye had written especially for her.

In Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow: Girl Groups from the 50s on . . . Charlotte Greig wrote about how those ephemeral, disposable, records produced by Shadow Morton, Leiber and Stoller and Phil Spector worked their magic on an audience of teenage girls and just why someone, like Nyro, might think those songs spoke directly to her and about her experiences. It is a brilliant book, one of the best written on pop music.

If young women like Babitz, Midler and Nyro were looking back at the figure of the bad boy, who features in these songs and in their teen dreams, others looked to exploit that nostalgia. Before punk was ‘punk’ it was a bad boy with a DA and an attitude

‘OK Punks . . .’ Sha Na Na and Brownsville Station set the pace for the Ramones and the rest of the New York mid-seventies scene . . .

All this and so much much more is in Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll and, yes, Nik Cohn too

All Warholed Up with Suicide and the New York Dolls

Suicide: the life and soul of the party

Club International v.1 #4 (October 1972) Photographs by Dave Grey and Pete Miles

One of the more pleasing discoveries made while trawling through bound copies of Club International in the British Library reading room was the story told by Englishman Dick Masters of his first trip to Manhattan. He was there to take in ‘The Flowering of Freakiness and Finery, New York’s finest aggregation of freaks, fashions and friends ever assembled under one roof’. The 1972 ‘Everything is Everything Costume Ball’, organised by Tony and Laurita Cosmo, was being held in the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel . . . and everyone who was anyone was present. Musical entertainment was provided by Suicide and the New York Dolls. The latter, unfortunately not pictured, but Alan Vega was front and centre surrounded by partygoers, Warhol superstars and the City’s most beautiful.

Suicide were given top billing by Masters:

[They] created the most evil, menacing atmosphere I’ve ever felt at any sort of performance. He [singer Alan Vega] could only be for real . . .His moans and screams grew frantic as he lashed himself with the bicycle chain. Everyone watched in silence as he pulled out a knife and stabbed himself in the face and chest. . . he smashed the microphone into his teeth and leapt into the audience, lashing out at everyone who couldn’t move fast enough.

The shock effect of witnessing Vega in full attack mode was echoed that year by Roy Hollingworth in his report in Melody Maker (October 21, 1972) of Suicide at the Mercer Arts Centre:

It is a heady stark trip. The starkest trip I’ve ever seen . . . It was fascinating. How two people could create such a thick wall of sound and atmosphere was an unbelievable achievement. It roared, and groaned, and the singer smacked himself on the head with the mike a couple of times, and then fell in a heap in a corner –  and whimpered. Was this the end of music as we know it? Oooh it was creepy.

 

Who was Dick Masters? Is that a pseudonym? Was he the gay porn star you encounter when you search for him on-line? Or is that someone else? Did he write elsewhere about his New York adventures or on anything else for that matter? Questions . . .

More on the Dolls appearance in Pin-Ups 1972