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The retro graphic attracted my attention to this 1973 advert in NME for John ‘Speedy’ Keen’s latest 45, but it was the dildo to her right that made me laugh. Sometimes, Track Records really do seem like the precursor to Stiff.
Who was the illustrator ‘N.R.’?
Single of the month, sort of, in Cream (UK), August 1971, for the 2nd Third World War 45. James Hamilton wrote:
Terry is the mouthpiece of an aggressively working class group called Third World War, who in a so far rather small way have become notorious for their somewhat simplistic sloganeering. They are recognised less for the music they make , which is noisy yet very original, and has a definite ‘sound’ of its own. Their latest single is great fun, not at all controversial, and, as they realised in retrospect , a sly dig at the blanketing anaemia of ‘Country Rock’. It is accurately titled ‘A Little Bit of Urban Rock (Fly BUG 11), it is very tough and gritty, it lasts for over four minutes, and it moves like the clappers throughout.
Fuck yeah! And with a killer live pic to boot . . .
French pic sleeve release
“But do bear in mind that I’d rather listen to the early Pretty Things any day than Neil Young”. Mick Farren’s review of TWW in IT (May 20, 1971)
Here, for your delectation, are two images, both 1974 but never before juxtaposed: the New York Dolls and a crowded rock festival that is being used to market jeans. You wanna know why the Dolls were so important? I think this juxtaposition says it all.
Landlubber were an American company, the advert is from the back of Creem January 1974. I wasn’t familar with the brand, but they were sold in the UK.
I never owned a pair of bell bottoms but I did wear Skinners . . .
In the January ‘74 issue of Creem, their fashion correspondent, Lisa Robinson, reported on her recent visit to Paris and the city’s obsession with denim, which was generally more expensive and better cut than Landlubbers, she wrote, but Parisians were also wearing good looking but poorly made in Spain Lois jeans. The worst aspect of French street fashion she found was the vogue for U.S. college sweatshirts. Oh well, French taste and all that. Meanwhile, the Parisians had shifted their fascination with decadent Americana in shape of the Velvet Underground in favour of the New York Dolls. Anticipation was high for the band’s December Olympia gigs.
Staying with the denim theme her piece is illustrated with four images from the ‘Denim Art Show at the Serendipity in NYC. Included in the exhibit are the jeans James Dean died in (who knew he wore flares?) that are now owned by Jackie Curtis, David Bowie’s rhinestone codpiece and Bruce Lee’s Death Jacket. Second panel below offers three hand painted denim jackets featuring movie stars. The one at the bottom of the frame, Marilyn, should be familiar to anyone who spent too much of their youth staring at the rear cover (above) of the Dolls second album. In his memoir Sylvain wrote that the image on the jacket is of Johansen’s girlfriend, Cyrinda Foxe, not Marilyn as everyone thinks, but this suggests he’s got it wrong: a one-off either way
I can’t make out the artist’s signature but the date is ‘73.
I’ve recently acquired a few issues of Creem circa 1971-75 that between their glossy covers are deteriorating as fast as any 50 year-old British inky. I never read the magazine back in the day, I doubt it could have been readily found in Hemel Hempstead’s newsagents, but since those faraway days it has taken on something of a mythic status, hosting, as it did, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ben Edmonds, Greg Shaw and on occasion Nick Tosches and Greil Marcus. It also, I was surprised to discover, gave fairly regular space for pieces by British writers, mostly from the NME, like Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray. There was a regular column, ‘Letter from Britain’ from the always entertaining Simon Frith, whose singles reviews in Let It Rock easily rivalled his American equivalent, Juke Box Jury, that Greg Shaw put together for Creem and for his own magazine, Bomp.
To some extent the magazine lives up to its reputation, it has a terrific sense of community, between the writers most obviously, but also between them and their readers, which was something NME tried to emulate. But what the British weeklies did much better than their monthly American cousin was to create a sense of an unfolding narrative. NME and Melody Maker pulled their readers into the heat of the action, you can see this clearly in the reporting on and around Bowie throughout 1972, each new move he made was eagerly anticipated, reported on and responded to. The music papers produced a remarkable feeling of immediacy (and intimacy). By contrast Creem is all reaction, everything has already happened. It features last month’s story, NME and MM were about tomorrow.
An exemption to the lack of the future tense in Creem is the coverage afforded to the figure of Iggy Pop who runs loose and fast across a number of the issues I have, often he appears as just a note on what he’s doing in London or Hollywood but always with anticipation that he is about to deliver and in doing so change the very fabric of rock culture. Must have been frustrating as hell to have been a proselytiser for the Stooges back in those days, because, at least in retrospect, Iggy was always going to disappoint.
In the news stub above, from January 1974, Iggy is sharing coffee and donuts with Elton John while the Stooges are undertaking a week’s engagement at Richard’s in Atlanta, Georgia. One of those shows was recorded and released in the deluxe Raw Power box from a few years ago and were witnessed by James ‘The Hound’ Marshall, who has written about his teenage road trip from New York to Georgia to see the band [here]. Elton sat through two shows, appearing on stage during one of them in a gorilla costume. He said of Iggy, “I simply can’t understand why he’s not a huge star.’
He should have asked Pete Townshend, he sure knew why Iggy was never gonna clean up. In the same issue he’s interviewed by CSM about Quadrophenia as well as things like Bowie’s Pinups and the overlaps between the two albums, especially as they relate to rock history and rock stars. On the latter, some of CSM’s colleagues think stars should conform to the image of a noble savage. Inevitably, then, Iggy is raised as a sort of exemplar of the type and the conversation skirts around whether he might appeal to the kid in the ‘Punk and Godfather’. Townshend thinks not. Songs aimed at teenagers need to contain ‘a lot of the tight, integrated, directed, pointed frustration of a fifteen or sixteen year-old . . . But someone like Iggy and the Stooges couldn’t grasp that if they stood on their heads, because inside they’re old men.’ Now that’s an image worth pondering over . . .
It may not be by Hipgnosis, but the above is my favorite sleeve from the early 1970s. It perfectly encapsulates 1972 and the rock ‘n’ roll rumble. 10 years later and pop cult sholars would be looking at The Face and writing essays about bricolage and the post-modern, but it was already afoot a decade and more before. Rock ‘n’ Roll is Here To Stay is all about the iconography of youth culture collapsing in on itself – late 1960s American custom choppers, the early 1960s Parisian blonde sex kitten look and, of the moment, London Ted style with 1950’s applique courtesy of Let It Rock. All surface and no depth: a signifiying monkey. How pleased I was then to discover a couple of German variations, which are all the better for checking out the Ted’s opulent waistcoat and the model’s ability to get almost completely prone without toppling off the bike (and she’s wearing neat platforms to boot)
Sounds news item (March 4, 1972)
The cover conception is credited to Pierre Tubbs (great Anglo-French name), photography is by Bryce Attewell, who I presume had fairly steady work at UA as he also took the photos of Brinsley Schwarz on their Dave Edmund produced classic, New Favorites Of (1974), but that’s about all I know. I know even less about the Teddy Boy, though with that hair and those sideburns I presume he was the real thing. As for the BB impersonator I was, until recently, equally ignorant, but in my pursuit of the lost short fiction of Mick Farren (see here) I stumbled across this 1972 edition of Penthouse; she is rather unmissable. Her name, if you believe anything written in the editorial that accompanies glamour spreads, is Karen McCook, 20 years old and a daughter of San Francisco. She was photographed by David Jonathan
Karen’s Penthouse cover image made a hit not only with me, 48 years after the fact, but also with whoever did the marketing for Stoke-On-Trent’s Heavy Steam Machine discotheque, NME classifieds November 1972. PoMo or just plain-old plagiarism?
Those keen to follow Karen’s traces a little further might Google ‘Susan Shaw’ and ‘Mona Solomon’
Suzy Shaw appeared on the cover of at least half-a-dozen Hallmark Top of the Pops albums, circa 1971-4. That whole series is covered in delightful depth here. Some of the shots from the modelling sessions turn up on other budget label sets like the above from the Mike Morton Congregation. See here for more of the same
The biker image does the rounds again on a picture sleeve for a 1977 45 for a German band called ‘Mill’
The November 1975 issue of Game reported that Suzie Shaw was Susan George’s body double in Sam Peckinpah Straw Dogs, which is a good place to pause and reflect . . .
Paul Gorman’s biography of Malcolm McLaren is a thing of wonder, monumental in size and scope; a definitive account of the man. I burned through its 800-odd pages but paid especial attention to the King’s Road years. His account of Let It Rock and McLaren’s amour fou with Teddy Boy rock ’n’ roll is without parallel, a brilliant encapsulation of the 70’s resurrection shuffle.
His story of McLaren’s interaction with the New York Dolls is also the most authoritative that we have and are likely to get. In Sylvain Sylvain’s memoir he claimed to have first met McLaren in New York in 1971, bought clothes from him and Westwood when they were staying at the Chelsea Hotel. He’s emphatic that their paths first crossed in the spring of that year. He chides others who said it must have been the summer of 1973, he gives his evidence, which all sounds reasonable enough. But as Gorman makes clear in a footnote, that Spring 1971 date is impossible because McLaren was still a student at Goldsmiths and Westwood was still a teacher. Who you gonna believe? Well, not Sylvain who later writes about the halcyon days of 1972, when the Dolls were conquering Manhattan, that he has ‘no idea today of the chronology, if indeed I ever did.’
Even if he spends too much time disputing song writing credits and contesting who was responsible for what, Sylvain’s autobiography is a funfair ride, a pleasure to read, but he is an unreliable witness. That said, Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane is even worse. For all its undoubted charm, his memoir is full of misremembered events, half-recalled occurrences, forgetfulness and simple errors. None of which is surprising as Arthur was pretty much out of it throughout the band’s whole existence. His is a story of an alcoholic stumbling from one blackout to another, from one bad hangover to next, from a desperate and ever on-going search for a bottle and oblivion. His time in the Dolls reads like a nightmare, a delirium tremens. The bitterness he feels towards his management team (and toward Johansen) is palpable at times, he fumes away at being left to deal with things on his own, yet they could hardly take responsibility for his addictions, his acts of self-destruction.
Kane’s time spent in England recording demos in Kent, playing support to the Faces at Wembley and Billy Doll’s sad demise in a bath tub in SW7 is little more than a drunk’s set of impressions, albeit a compelling read. When not recording or travelling to one cancelled gig or barely remembered show, the Dolls hung out at the Speakeasy. One night, the band rouse themselves to get up on its stage and bang out a couple of numbers. A drunk loudly and boorishly heckles them: ‘He kept screaming and cursing at us as we tried to finish one of our songs. He was loud, totally obnoxious, and completely distracting’. The rowdy is Mick Farren.
I couldn’t recall if Farren had mentioned the incident in his memoir, Give the Anarchist A Cigarette, but it’s my favourite autobiography of the 60s and 70s scene, so I was happy to return to it and perform a little detective work. In the past I’ve probably given it too much credence when it comes to questions of fact and veracity, but I know better now. I already knew that Farren had misremembered some things, such as reporting that Lou Reed and Iggy and the Stooges played together on the same night’s bill at the King’s Cross Cinema in July 1972, but that sort of error is easily forgivable – amphetamine psychosis, or too much to drink, or even just the passing of time, can collapse two shows into one, especially when they were only 24 hours apart. But, on the following page, he loses not a day but a whole year, a good 12 months. There’s no mention of his harassment of the Dolls at the Speakeasy, but he was there to watch them at Wembley:
The Dolls set was interesting is so far as bass player Arthur Kane was dressed as a ballerina, but they had very obviously never played to an audience of more than 300 and were lost in front of 13,000 Faces fans in the cavernous and echoing auditorium.
Never mind, because a few days later they are playing Biba’s Rainbow Room and making a lot more sense: ‘They had clearly returned to the Deviants’ ethic that rock ’n’ roll should not be the exclusive preserve of virtuoso players.’ You can’t argue with that, or at least I wouldn’t, but the Dolls played Wembley on 29th October 1972 and Biba’s on 26th and 27th November 1973.
If you want to know what happened and McLaren was involved, you can trust Paul Gorman, and if you want a great read about how pop culture shifted and changed across the course of McLaren’s 30 odd years of stirring it up then I can think of no better guide either.
A significant trend during the early 1970s in the cover design for reissued 1950s recordings was to wrap them in a vibrant cartoon sleeve featuring teenage girls slurping on overflowing sodas or sticking their butt in the air. 50s teen iconography – saddle back shoes, rolled cuffed Levis, over-rouged lips and pony tails are all there with jukebox and soda fountain used as backdrops. It’s a cute sell but one that is unequivacably sexualised. Teen innocence is but a masquerade for more prurient adult action.
Tipped off by Paul Gorman’s blog [here], I’ve been browsing through early editions of Paul Raymond’s Club International skin mag, circa 1972-75. Among the attractions on offer are some of the era’s best illustrators, many of whom worked on album designs, including Bowie and Bolan’s chum George Underwood. NTA Studio is prominently featured, as is photography from Hipgnosis who frequently collaborated with the Studio’s illustrators, eg. Be Bop Deluxe’s Futurama. NTA’s Bob Lawrie, George Hardie and Bush Hollyhead were used regularly by Club International, including this illustration that accompanied an article on cinema going
Hollyhead and Club International were clearly uninterested in any ambiguity in the cartoon’s depiction of 50s teen activities. When NTA dropped out, Mike Farrell’s illustrations were regularly featured in their stead. He’s the artist responsible for the Bo Diddley and Billy Stewart albums shown above. Farrell did some arresting photo montages for the magazine but here’s a fairly typical illustration. The girl might come straight from the pages of Eerie or Creepy horror comics.
Illustration Chris McQuan, Custom Car (March 1973)
The People, Sunday September 21, 1969, p. 5.
The Deviants rip it up in Hyde Park and in the process get to titilate sunday tabloid readers.
Dave ‘Boss’ Goodman described to Deviants’ biographer, Rich Deakin, the impact of first seeing the band:
From the bottom up, he’s got his Acme cowboy boots on, he’s got his leather trousers on, he’s got his yellow Ben Sherman shirt open to the waist and an enormous great studded belt, and hair that gone completely fucking Hendrix liker . . . and then some. And he just looked . . . you know? . . . this huge broken nose, and he can’t sing a note in tune,, and it was the most fearsome thing the pair of us had ever seen in our lives, and we looked at each other and went, ‘Maaan! What have we let ourselves in for?’
International Times #127 (April 6, 1972)
The revolution will be dressed by Levi’s.
We bring our music to our communities with revolutionary, high-energy bands like the Pink Fairies. Our life style becomes our politics, our politics our lifestyle.
Who are these well-dressed young men?
Norbert Nowotsch has identified John Carding, second from the right, who he met in 1971 when Carding was touring with the Irish band Fruup and used the trip to spread information on the Party and to support its German chapter, which was short-lived. Carding was the report’s author as co-ordinator White Panther Party UK.
Photo by Phil Stringer
My thanks to Norbert
Cosh Boy (1953) is among the new dual format sets from the celebrated BFI Flipside series and its another terrific addition. Like so many Flipsides, the attraction is as much with the extras as the main feature. Of especial interest for me was the 1956 8 minute report from ITV’s This Week programme on the Teddy Boy. Before R ’n’ R had corrupted Britain’s youth, working-class Mike Wood from Hounslow showed a fondness for jazz and a hair style called ‘be-bop’. The cut and perm made a nice set with his barely formed goatee.
With hair done just right, Mike takes his girl to the Flamingo where they dance to The Tony Kinsey Quartet.
Filmed 5 years later, the 22 minute short film by Robert Hartford-Davis, Stranger in the City tracks around London from morning to night. To modern eyes, the Big Smoke seems uncannily empty but as night falls the streets begin to fill up with cars and pedestrians. Outside the 2i’s coffee bar two teenagers jive to the new rock ‘n’ roll they hear in their heads.
Like the images of the Soho strip clubs seen earlier in the film, juveniles loitering in caffeine joints are now firmly part of the city’s attractions. Cliff Richard in Expresso Bongo had put both into mainstream cinema two years earlier.
Who are these jiving cats illuminated by the 2i’s window? One is instantly recognisable as Paul Raven, Decca recording star. He was born with the name Paul Gadd but we know him as Gary Glitter. He looks like Sid Vicious before the drugs hollowed out his cheeks.
Who’s the other, better looking lad? Vince Eager maybe? I dunno. Whatever, a great little film and a great find by Flipside.
Addendum
Rob Finnis got in touch and identified Paul Ravens’ mate: as the ‘one hit wonder Lance Fortune, who scored with 'Be Mine' in late 1959. His real name was Chris Morris and he hailed from Liverpool. Incidentally, Hartford-Davis discovered and managed Paul Raven and got him his first record deal in 1960 which, I guess, is why he makes an appearance in the short.’
Thanks Rob.
Published in early 1969, Queen magazine ran a set of interviews conducted by Jenny Fabian with the leading lights of London’s underground. Among the contenders who answered her questions and sat for photographer Clive Arrowsmith was designer John Goodchild, DJ Jeff Dexter, dancers Mimi and Mouse and, advocate for those incarcerated on drug charges, Caroline Coon. She was also the issue’s fabulous cover star. Offering a leather clad contrast to this small gallery of hipsters are Joy and Mick Farren;
‘We don’t really know why we got married,’ says Joy, ‘because neither of us really believes in marriage.’
Mick, twenty-five, is leader of the Deviants, an extreme underground group who specialise in revolting. ‘We’re a nasty group, and now we’ve started to make a bit of money we’re getting nastier.’
Held against the image of Jeff Dexter in his satin robe, Farren really does look like he lives and loves in the shadows. He couldn’t sing for shit (he called it ‘weird-ass atonal’), but he looked every bit the part.
Clive Arrowsmith is running the images from the shoot on his webpages [here] including some beautiful shots of Caroline Coon. Amusingly he doesn’t recall who the couple are – ‘a rock musician guy and his girlfriend’ who ‘epitimised hippy style of the moment’.
Trevor Hoyle Rock Fix (Futura, 1977)
I’m no expert but this has to be among the best rocksploitation novels of the seventies. Hoyle was author of Rule of Night (track down to May 9th 2019 entry to see what I have to say on that) a novel that puts weight without pretension on the boover boy cycle of pulp originals. Rock Fix effortlessly aims to do the same with the pop exposé.
This is the story of The Black Knights, five northern lads on an endless grind of working men’s watering holes – Hanlan’s Drop Forgings’ Social Club among the more memorable – whose fortune changes for the better (or maybe not) when they meet the pint-sized Phil Martins who helps them get hit records, adulation and drug addictions. The price of fame is high and payment is not long deferred.
Hoyle has an easy almost invisible style to his writing, he’s unobtrusive with a sharp eye for detail, especially the everyday. Past midnight at the Dornan Hotel, Scarborough, the band try getting something to eat:
‘Would a sandwich do?’ the woman said, placing two keys attached to numbered blocks of wood on the desk.
‘Yes. Thank you. What kind have you got?’
‘Cheese,’ the woman sad, and stared him out.
‘I’ll have cheese,’ Ric said.
‘Make mine cheese,’ Dave said.
‘Can I have cheese?’ Andy inquired.
‘Cheese for me,’ Johnnie said.
‘What about you?’ the woman said.
‘Pardon’ Dice said.
‘Do you want a sandwich?’
‘Yes.’ Dice said. He fixed upon her a beautiful smile.
‘Cheese.’
The sandwiches are made of sliced white bread, Stork margarine and Kraft cheese slices and there’s not even a tin of Tartan bitter to help sluice it down.
When the band cut their first record they undergo a name change – God’s Gift – are restyled – white suits – and given a marketing angle to match the theme of their single about a northern girl in search of the bright lights who ends up working the streets. A promotional film and the problem of getting such material on TOTPs is discussed:
It’s time they did something with a bit of gut feeling instead of all those films of pooves walking through forest glades with sunlight in the branches,’ Norman Fowler said. He sat forward. ‘That’s the tack we’ll take. Social realism. A band with something important to say, a moral viewpoint. Get clean away from all this glam-glitter crap and hit them with a social statement. I can see it coming together – a Dylan-style approach but relevant to the ‘seventies. Social problems. Social statements. Social commitment.
No doubt written before punk had claimed any public attention, Hoyle puts the politics of the Edgar Broughton Band into the pop mainstream but then reveals the shallowness of the conceit when the band confect a four part concept album and their management talk of an American tour supporting Jethro Tull.
In keeping with the cover image, there’s lots of sex talk (and some action). Most of it takes place in the back of the band’s van, sometimes in an alley. It is always coarse and desperate stuff, no love, no romance, no sentimentality. Hoyle captures the group’s casual misogyny and racism, which he never overtly condemns, but leaves the reader with little doubt where he stands on such commonplace matters.
There’s no rock ‘n’ roll flash on display here, no Bowie or Bolan stars in the making, just working-class lads bonding together on stage and at the bar in the Sunderland Boilermaker’s Club who almost get what they wanted.
While browsing through the incomplete holdings of Friends/Frendz in the British Library I found an advert for the new ‘British Rock Paper’ Strange Days. As luck would have it the library did have the entire run, which unfortunately only amounts to 4 issues that were kicked out at the fag end of 1970. The paper promised to give serious coverage fo the rock scene, offering an alternative to the just launched Sounds, funded by Rupert Murdoch, and the dreary MM and NME. Mimicking the fold over cover of Rolling Stone, the first issue put Elvis in gold lame suit on the front and ran with the first of two lengthy features on the IOW festival. Alongside whatever band was currently in the frame, The Who, Humble Pie, P.J. Proby (one for Nik Cohn), The Pretty Things, Eric Burdon, and the Mighty MC5, it also so covered things like god-rock, kids-rock, black rock and white soul, and reggae as the true underground music. Other aspects of youth culture got a good shake, most especially motorbikes. In the first issue you can find out where to get your bike chopped, 2nd ed has an article on speedway, and in the last issue the distaff side of things is given space with a photo essay on ‘Sister in Leather’:
Supplementing, a no doubt, meagre return on sales and advertising space, the editorial team also ran a m’cycle despatch company. Editor Mark Williams had previously looked after the rock section MusicIT at International Times, he later wrote the first book on road movies: ‘the complete guide to cinema on wheels’ published by Proteus in 1982, which I bought back in the day and have had ever since. In the author’s blurb he describes himself as having rode Harley-Davidsons all over the place, having seen Two-Lane Blacktop six times and once owned the same model Mustang as McQueen drove in Bullitt. He lives, it is written, mainly in airport lounges. A tip of the old chapeau to Mr. Williams for being so cool and for being well ahead of the curve with Road Movies and Strange Days.
Given that the politics of the rock festival loom large in the editorial content it was no surprise to see the thoughts of Mick Farren given space. After all he had had a hand in the organising of Phun City and did help pull down the fences at the IOW. What took me by surprise was the picture that sat above the article’s headline. Here was Farren and a motley crew having just raided a theatrical costumers (or maybe Ron Asheton’s house). I’ve not seen this picture before, but would be interested to know if it has circulated much since and just what the story is.
Th einside story of the paper’s demise . . .
The early seventies rock ’n’ roll revival threw out some unexpected contributions to the trend, but none more strange than Bert ‘Play in a Day’ Weedon’s Rockin’ At The Roundhouse. The music is a so-so set of instrumentals, covers of Duane Eddy, Johnny Kidd, Elvis, and some originals. Nothing here to get the Roundhouse freaks moving. By way of explanation for this bit of exploitation of the youth scene the cover notes tell us: ‘A few months ago Rock gradually started to come back into the pop scene, and a big Rock Revival show was put on at London’s Roundhouse - the mecca of pop and beat music. All the rock stars were invited to appear, and the concert was a big success, but the hit of the show according to the press was not surprisingly guitar star Bert Weedon.’ At which point Fontana get him to put this album together. Sticking Weedon on the cover would have blown the ruse so they went for this blonde model in a superb Hell’s Angels t-shirt, and a studded leather jacket draped over her shoulders. The bit of dog chain she’s pulling on adds a touch of violent frisson to her display, well that’s the pose anyway: Altamont via The Bath Festival . . .
‘Keef’ gets credit for the photograph and album design. I’m guessing he’s Marcus Keef, aka Keith MacMillan (1947-2007) who was responsible for a slew of Vertigo label albums. See here and here
The album was twice reissued on Contour, once with the original art work and the other time with a moustachioed Bert kicking out the jams – you can see why the original went for the blonde . . .
In the words of Duane Eddy: ‘Bert is a great guitar man’ but not much of a looker . . .
I can’t imagine the East London chapter of the Hells Angels would have given their approval to Bert’s Rockin’ at the Roundhouse as they did to Mick Farren album Mona – The Carnivorous Circus, also released in 1970, which featured an incoherent Angel telling it like it is . . .
While we’re on the subject of East London Angels, it’s time to give this 1973 Paladin edition of Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils & Moral Panics a showing. Punk DIY ethos on full display here . . . as it is on NEL’s 1971 publication of Chopper by Peter Cave where the biker dress-up box is filled with their dad’s war souvenirs
Where’s the original from? Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, 1970? Isle of Wight? Weeley? Wherever, those are superb homemade patches, 666, 13 & 1%er.
My thanks to Eddie who tipped me off to this album and for the gift of the Cohen book
screen grab from BBC Man Alive ‘What’s The Truth About Hell’s Angels and Skinheads’ (Dec. 1969) – smells like teen spirit
Falling over (again), Frendz #17 (December 23, 1971)
Friends #22 interview with Terry Stamp and Jim Avery: ‘this is class resentment, class rage, class anguish . . . The Third World War is a London group virulent with London resentment’. It’s Hammersmith v Knightsbridge, says Avery. Their ambition is to stir things up, they don’t expect to sell, but they do want to influence the next generation: ‘young musicians who haven’t got anywhere, and who are not even musicians, and who are going to to say “You are just saying what we want to say.”’ And all said while playing Monopoly.
What with the dire state of things out here in No Deal Poundland my music of choice has hardened and nothing fits the bill better than Third World War’s ‘Ascension Day’. You can hear it here. Chopper guitar ahoy!!
Where does the wood cut, if that’s what it is, of the woman being protected from a beating by a cove come from? It’s used in the booklet that came with the 3rd Deviants album (see previous posting)
The third and final Deviants’ album lacked any track or personnel information on the sleeve and came supplied with a chapbook of sorts.
Accompanying the credits was a short rant from Mick Farren that included a manifesto of a kind:
For the past 13 years Rock & Roll has been the secret language of a generation, despite lapses into gibberish and side-tracks into academic obscurity. Rock & Roll is a secret language that the rulers cannot understand.
Which raises the question of how well kept was that secret?
Scans of the complete text and some background on the album can be found on Richard Morton Jack’s blog, Galactic Ramble . I hope he doesn’t mind me ripping off the three I’ve used.
letterhead, circa 1972, for Sippen and Shertser family of labels
Like the Union Pacific releases (see below), Ian Sippen and Peter Shertser’s collections of postwar blues wore their underground credentials on their sleeves.
I’m guessing the early releases were all unlicensed, certainly the first issue on Red Lightnin’, Buddy Guy’s In the Beginning (RL001), looks like a bootleg with its cheaply printed monotone matt image pasted onto a blank sleeve.
Later pressing of the label’s early titles were treated to slick upgrades. OZ’s Felix Dennis was responsible for the design of the first four volumes: Little Walter (RL002), John Lee Hooker (RL003) and Albert Collins (RL004). Denise Brownlow was credited for the design work on the five issues released by Syndicate Chapter and for the various artist compilation Blues in D Natural (RL005). The two subsequent Red Lightnin’ releases employed the graphic talent of J. Edward Barker, Mick Farren’s pal and illustrator at large for International Times and Nasty Tales.
Barker’s design for the label’s 7th release, Junior Well’s In My Younger Days, uses a photograph that looks as if it has been cropped from a minstrel scene in a Hollywood movie, though not one known to me. Whatever its provenance, it pulls in the same direction as the ‘Three Ball Charlie’ image on the front of the Stones’ Exile album. Both albums were released in 1972. The double LP anthology When Girls Do It (R.L.006) also sports a Barker design.
The three panels are fair summations of his interests and art: the mirrored picture of monks with pasted on devil’s eyes in the gatefold; montaged found images clipped from erotica and porn (lesbian, school girl and a Weimar-era nude) that surround a photograph of the Daughters of the American Revolution (with Abe Lincoln glued over the face of the sitting dowager and the open palm placed like a cockerel’s crown on her head) are in keeping with the aesthetic of the period’s underground publications: male adolescent salaciousness at the apparent service of political satire. On the sleeve’s rear you get a feast of backsides; this 1930s fetishism plays to the album’s title – the posterior posturing as gratuitous as anything on the front. It also echoes figures used on Barker’s sleeve for the Pink Fairies’ What A Bunch of Sweeties, another album from 1972. Fair enough?
The conjunction of rock’n’ roll revivalism, blues resurrectionism and the freak underground is fascinating in itself, but it also had me searching for some kind of appreciation, book or webpage on J. Edward Barker. I haven’t found much yet. Until then, there is always his and Farren’s Watch Out Kids, also from 1972 (a productive year)
Barker to the left, Farren to the right
A recent bit of deep digging uncovered Transfusion: Rave from the Grave – Blast From the Past Vol.1 (Union Pacific, UP004). The compilation features the Del Vikings, the two Ronnies – Self and Hawkins – Conway Twitty, Nervous Norvus, Everly Bros, Al Downing, John Greer, and Vince Taylor and the Playboys with ‘Brand New Cadillac’ – a great collection. What sets it apart from, and at odds with, other early 1970s compilations is its sleeve featuring a typically salacious panel from a Robert Crumb comic. No Teddy Boys in the company of a Bardot-like leggy model and a late-sixties styled custom chopper, nor fifties convertible outside a diner, not even a Rock-Ola jukebox. Pasted together in 1972 by Ian Sippen and Peter Shertser, the album connects the period’s rock ’n’ revivalists with the British underground culture of the day as represented by the likes of International Times, Mick Farren and the Pink Fairies.
Volume 2, Loose Ends (UP005) is an all-instrumental collection bookended by Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson and The Fireballs. In between, Duane Eddy battles it out with the Fenderman, Jerry Lee Lewis and a half-dozen other contenders. The sleeve continues the graphic connection with the underground, featuring a tattooed greaser mauling a hot chick in a state of dishabille who threatens to stab him in the ‘puddin’. The panel is given a context of sorts by the incongruous tag-line: ‘Sexism is out! If you like pussy: treat it equal.’ It’s culled from the back page of George DiCaprio and R. Jaccoma’s Greaser Comics (New York: Half Ass Press, 1971), which suggests a transatlantic counter-culture mirroring of interest in rock ’n’ roll.
‘A new exciting label featuring oldies but goodies, rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll’
Sippen and Shertser were Jewish East End Mods who made a name for themselves on the scene as The Firm. They ran in the same circles as the likes of Miles at Better Books and IT fame, and Dave ‘Boss’ Goodman, later Pink Fairies roadie and manager of Dingwalls dance hall. The Firm were involved in the UFO club, helping Mick Farren to keep out ne’er-do-wells when they weren’t pulling pranks on John Peel. With such connections, and a deep love of American rhythm and blues, the duo helped to produce and distribute The Deviants’ debut album. They sold the LPs’ American rights to Seymour Stein’s newly formed Sire records and then acted as talent scout for him, the results of which included an album they recorded in 1968 in London with Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton and another in 1969 by psych blues rockers Sam Apple Pie.
Shertser is a singular contributor to Jonathan Green’s pop-vox history of the sixties underground, Days in the Life (1988), which is where most of the references to him and Sippen are drawn from, including Clinton Heylin’s Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry (1994). The Firm were responsible for the first tranche of illicit Dylan, Stones and Beatles albums in the UK. The two volumes of rock ’n’ roll obscurities and hits are essentially bootlegs; there is nothing to suggest these tracks were licensed. Other releases on their Union Pacific label included collections of Eddie Cochran, Link Wray and Little Richard rarities.
Ian Sippen went missing, presumed drowned, in Morocco in April 1973. Shertser continued to run Red Lightnin’ and associated labels (Syndicate Chapter), which he and Sippen had set up in 1969.
You can read Greaser here. The hard-on in the pop corn seen in Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) gets an earlier recounting. Perhaps, like the filthy lyrics in ‘Louie Louie’, this courtship ritual is part of American teenage folklore.
Depending on which version you’re looking at, the Pink Fairies debut 1971 album, Never Never Land, has the legend ‘Long Live Rock and Roll’ on either its inside sleeve or on its rear cover. The illustration that adorns the front is about as rock ’n’ roll as Robert Crumb’s fedora.
Mick Farren in International Times #161 (August 1973)
. . . and in Peter Shertser’s own words to Roy Carr, NME (May 25 1974)
