Doo-Wop-Sha-Waddy-Waddy – the 1970s R 'n' R Revival Staggers on

Variations on a theme . . . Game magazine in June 1975 ran a seven page spread using four Teddy Boys and a beat-up 1952 Pontiac Chieftan as props. It’s all a little obvious in its hoodlum poses, but the model’s two outfits, what there is of them, look to have been borrowed from the racks of 430 King’s Road. Though I’m no expert, the string vest looks like a leftover from Let It Rock and the black top with asymetrical zips, rips and patches might be something worked up for Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die/SEX.

Bob Carlos Clarke directed the shoot, ‘ A wet dream from those rockin’ fifties’.

addenda: turns out I was part way right on the model’s shirts, the black top, Paul Gorman tells me, is a detourned Let It Rock shirt made for the London R n R Show at Wembley and then cut up for TFTL/SEX. He’ll be posting something on these images and others from Game at somepoint so we’ll know more . . . As for the string vest, who does really know . . . and, I should also add, the Teds, Ian, Pete, Andy and Len were all well-known figures on the London scene, but you can tell that can’t you?

GAME v.1 #3 (March 1974) ‘Teddy Boy Memories’. Why do ‘70s Teds always come from Tooting? Is this Max Needham? Let It Rock gets a mention: ‘pushing drainpipes and brothel creepers to the King’s Road trendies’.

Exploring the 21st Century City: On the GAME with Mick Farren

A chance encounter recently bought me to Game magazine, an example of 1970s top-shelf pornography previously unknown to me (but then I’m not a connoisseur). It was published between 1974-1978 and Mick Farren, I discovered, was a regular contributor. He had earlier paid the rent with fiction and the odd article for Paul Raymond’s far superior Club International, which I’ve documented in Mick Farren’s Fiction Factory. His work for Game appears to have been a more regular gig and I’ll list and comment on whatever reportage I find here; the stories will eventually be grouped together and added to the Fiction Factory page or in a new sub-section.

Photography: Joe Stevens

In early 1975 Farren submitted a two-part article to Game on the pleasure spots of Los Angeles. Part one was subtitled ‘freeways, smog and the superboppers’. The city’s car culture sets the scene before a long dive into Rodney Bigenheimer’s English Discotheque. Farren’s tour guide is Candy, ‘a typical L.A. superbopper, only the last thing she’d enjoy being called is typical. The night we met she was doing a passable imitation of Lana Turner, circa 1948.’ Given the context, the piece is heavily slanted toward the sensational and the salacious, Rodney’s having the ‘exact balance of innocence, fantasy and sleaze . . . the perfect nightspot for the pre-purberty set.’ Farren is less sneeringly patronising than most who wrote about the scene on Sunset Strip and he is unwilling simply to write it off as a ‘pathetic trend that will soon pass. Unfortunately’, he writes,

the same thing was tried with the screaming rock kids of the fifties, or the hippie dopers of the sixties. They grew older, modified and matured, but never basdically changed. It seems unlikely the glitter kids will be any different.’

Six months or so before Farren’s report, Adrian Henri, yes that Adrian Henri of LIverpool’s poetry scene, had also written for Game about Candy and her friends. His piece focused on Star magazine, a short-lived enterprise that documented the lives and fantasies of the kind of girl that spent time at the English Discotheque. His report is a good deal more purient than Farren’s take. If you care to see what they are fussing over the actual magazines have been scanned and made available here

Dave Marsh also covered the scene for Creem (August 1974), his is a much more cynical take:

‘What they think of as English chic is really American cheapo. To dress the way the English starfuckers really do requires money beyond the means of 15 year-olds anywhere’.

Farren’s second piece on L.A. for Game was more directly about the city’s sex economy. He ended the report as if it was one of his dystopian stories; a warning of things to come.

Photomontage by Dave Ashmore

Aggravation Time: Mick Farren v Nick Fury

Sid is geared up as the furthest-out all-time Rock and Roll Superstar – Mister Lizard King in his black open silk shirt, black flowing satin jacket, crotch-caressing codpieced black, velvet trousers, stack-heeled snakeskin boots and a gunslinger’s criss-cross of stud-crusted leather belts . . . Whammm! Blammm! The Power bombs and Energy bolts are exploding all over the stage and Sid starts prancing around doing joyful Hitleresque little dances . . .

‘Look at that’, says Sam over the roar of lusty young throats, ‘isn’t that just like Hitler at Nuremberg?’

It is no more than a bit of marginalia in the history of London’s Underground Freak scene that did not even merit a mention in Mick Farren’s autobiography, but the story of him threatening to go to court over his representation as Sid Barren in Nick Fury’s pulp novel Agro (Sphere 1971) readily caught and held my attention after I stumbled across it in my pursuit of the arcane for Pin-Ups 1972.

The Deviants! I claim my prize . . . Farren as good as openly identified in Frendz as a protagonist in Agro

In late October, early November, 1971, both IT and Frendz published dismissive reviews of the book. The former called it a ‘nasty cheap little tale’, a ‘piece of semi-porn that sets to score off individuals on the scene including Jeff Dexter, Mick and Joy Farren, Buttons, the Pink Fairies and others’. Who was the writer behind the obvious alias? An answer was demanded because Nik Cohn and Mark Williams were getting ‘blamed on the grapevine’. Frendz echoed IT’s demand and called the book ‘crap. Pure 100 per cent crap of the highest order . . . it really stinks’.

Then in February 1972 IT published a letter, printed over a caricature of Farren, that accused him of rank hypocrisy in threatening to sue Agro’s author for libel. The charge, it was said, had Sphere withdraw and pulp the pulp within days of it reaching bookshops. Whether or not the novel had any merit as literature, the correspondent, also hiding behind a comic book pseudonym, wrote, the ‘fact remains that the people have been denied the right to judge for themselves because a self-styled “revolutionary” has decided to play the paranoid ego-game and use the legal system which he claims to oppose to effectively ban the book’.

Below a quotation from Agro describing Sid Barren at a gig headlined by the Red Gnomes, Mick Farren penned his pointed response. He had no problem with parody, he didn’t mind his, or other’s, character defects being used (‘God knows they’re obvious enough’), but that’s not what Nick Fury had done. It was the wholesale invention of ‘hang-ups’ behind the most transparent of pseudonyms that peaked Farren’s righteous wrath. The Pink Fairies as the Red Gnomes being only the most see-through of the aliases and no one on the scene could miss who Sid Barren was. Fury hadn’t even bothered changing the names of the two key women in Farren’s life at this point in time, Joy and Ingrid.

Farren explained that he had at first contacted Sphere to find out who was the person behind the mask, but they weren’t telling. They did say, however, that the book was to be turned into a film. One way or another, Farren finds out the author was someone who had ingratiated himself into his life under false pretences. Rather than being a brother Freak, Fury was in fact ‘mainly employed as the house-hippie for a sexploitation movie company’. Now, Farren explained, he could give the author the good kicking he deserved, and risk being busted for assault, or he could get his lawyer to call Sphere. He did the latter and the publishers, as good as acceding to his charge, pulled the book immediately.

Sure I used the legal system to deal with the situation. It was the quickest and easiest way to show Nick Fury what I thought about his book . . . Don’t give me this shit about ‘self-styled revolutionary’ and ‘paranoid ego-games’. I don’t intend to fight my battles with one hand tied behind my back because you think it’s ideologically impure to use a system that I don’t like. The world is not perfect, and hiding behind fancy pen names and throwing shit at me is not going to improve it either.

The quoted depiction of ‘Sid mincing around’ on the stage with the Red Gnomes, ‘grooving on the recognition and adulation’, was not particularly flattering but it was hardly libellous. So what had aroused Farren’s ire?

If finding a copy of The Tale of Willy’s Rats was hard enough, tracking down the Sphere edition of Agro seemed next to impossible. A copy is listed in the British Library catalogue but, like Farren’s novel, it has been ‘mislaid’, which I guess means ‘stolen’. For the best part of two-years I’ve had no luck finding a copy on auction sites or book seller lists. Then I got lucky, through Twitter I made contact with Jonathon Green who kindly lent me the battered copy pictured here.

As it turns out the book does stink and is crap and maybe even semi-pornographic. Around the same time Sphere attempted to distribute Agro it also published Jamie Mandelkau’s Buttons: The Making of a President, which sold as the true story of the London Chapter of the Hells Angels, England. The stories told by both books are fundamentally the same in dealing with the tale of an Ace Cafe Rocker who aspires to be the leader of the most feared and infamous biker gang and the arrival of genuine San Francisco outlaws in London. Where the two differ is in the use of skinheads. Agro gives them equal billing with the bikers, ‘the Underground’s SS’.

I had some hope for the book when early on Fury describes Terry Staines and his brother skins, Chelsea FC’s finest, with an eye for detail that wholly escaped Richard Allen in his NEL published tales of Joe Hawkins. Staines wears a Crombie, ‘the type you only used to see in Burlington Arcade, neatly waisted, with a high, zig-zag collar and a neat breast pocket, showing a flash of Chelsea colours . . . and it feels just right, and he’s the only member of the crew wearing one, so everyone can see he’s the leader, or, as he thinks of himself, The King.’ Other skins in the gang wear sheepskin coats, the kind ‘male models in the ads wear as they drive their Lotus Elans through the overgreen countryside to the rugby club’, while further down the pecking-order two of the gang sport ‘blue knee-length gaberdines,

A little ordinary maybe, but they look good when you wear them unbuttoned and are leaning against the bar with hands in pockets crooked back like you’re about to whip out a couple of pearl-handled colt 45’s in the Final Gundown. Yeah, they look good, but not as good as Crombies which is why Terry is the Leader.

And on the description runs through American windcheaters (Harringtons), Levi’s, boots (Doc Martens and cherry reds) and haircuts:

Most cropheads look ugly; their shaven heads magnify facial characteristics, give them a disproportionate look – big ears, noses and teeth like horses. With The Face added, they resemble coarse, dull-witted peasants, slack-jawed and projecting a mongoloid surliness; giants brought down to size, fumbling over fi-fo-fum.

Elsewhere, other observational bits catch the eye such as Sid listening to the Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’, which, even though the lyrics are misquoted, might just be the first fictional refence to Lou and co: ‘The sounds erupt – raw jangling guitars and an asexual singsong of self-abuse, a plaintive heart-cry of New York street-sophistication’. Such minor things can impress, a snap shot of a moment in time caught through incidentals. But in themselves they are not enough. I can forgive the clumsy story-telling and over reaching for sensation and impact, which comes with the territory, but if I was Farren I too would have drawn the line with the abject description of what Sid gets up to in private with the Velvet Underground and Nico as his personal soundtrack.

Sid is munching on peppermint chocolates, on his living room walls are posters of Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleever and napalm victims, but in his bedroom the imagery turns to more erotic fare, Elvis in furs, Jim Morrison shirtless in leather pants, freewheeling bikers and pictures of ‘chicks doing weird things with chains’. With cocaine mixing with the soft-centred sweets,  Sid’s senses flare with ‘Flash-back magnesium brilliance’. On the bedroom shelves, books on sado-masochism and concentration camp memoirs are mixed with Debray, Marcuse, The Illustrated Horror Chamber and Torture Through the Ages. In a closet hangs Sid’s leather suit and an S.S. Oberleutnant’s uniform – ‘not real unfortunately, but ripped off from a theatrical agency. It’s lost something of its original sharpness, has gotten rumpled and soiled’. This is less than a sketch for the kind of scenario Liliana Cavani achieved with The Night Porter a few years later. It’s not even the less reputable Nazisploitation of the Salon Kitty variety. Truthfully, it is about as decadent as a box of  mint Matchsticks eaten while playing a round of Mastermind in a tuxedo, yet as a direct attack on what Farren stands for it is undoubtedly libellous.

Quite what Fury had against Farren and why he thought such a scene of cartoon onanistic and fascistic depravation might be included without upsetting the object of his ridicule is lost to history. The story could have lived without it, as could the novel without the character of Sid. Barren appears in two other notable scenes; in one he trashes the offices of an underground paper, stealing the hi-fi and their records, which makes Farren the aggressor when in reality he was the victim. It was the IT headquarters that were ransacked. The second scene is where he shares the stage at the Globe aka the Roundhouse with the Red Gnomes. This is fair enough if you don’t like the man and his particular attitude and style, but I really question the idea of a Pink Fairies gig as a Nazi rally, that’s just dumb spite. And Farren as a Hitler figure? Oh please. While he had on one occasion dressed up in a Nazi costume he had done it with a certain point in mind and not as a fetishistic gesture (more on this in Pin-Ups 1972).

Strange Days #2 (September 1970)

Michel Parry was the name behind Nick Fury, later a prolific writer of fantasy novels and editor of anthologies of weird and supernatural tales. He died aged 67 in 2014. Other than Agro his link to the underground lies in a uncompleted film collaboration with Barney Bubbles, Alice in Wonderland, but even sad talented Barney gets hung out to dry by Parry in Agro.  

Parry returned to the novel with a heavily revised version in 1975. Some of the names are changed, Barney Doodles (see what he did there?) becomes Barnaby Nickle, Joy becomes Gay, Mick aka Buttons, leader of the London Chapter of Satan’s Saints, becomes a less recognisable Dennis with a reduced role and Farren and the Fairies metamorphosed into the generic rock band Wild Childe. Nothing left to get litigious over, besides the new edition was printed by Mayflower who also published most of Farren’s novels in the 1970s.

Whatever, the book still stinks, as do the publishers who used the image of bikers and skinheads indulging in ‘queer bashing’ as its key selling point.  And what was it with the misspelling of ‘aggro’ as ‘agro’? As I said, marginalia and perhaps well left forgotten.

Many thanks to Phyll Smith, Jonathon Green and Andrew Nette, without whom this story would have stayed properly buried.

If you’ve not yet checked out Mick Farren’s Fiction Factory then it is just a hop, skip and click away under ‘marginalia’ in the menu bar: here. For the real deal in 1970s bovver boy youth culture read Tevor Hoyle’s Rule of Night which I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog: here

Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock 'n' Roll

Elvis, Eddie, Chuck, Gene, Buddy and Little Richard were the original rockers. Dylan, The Beatles, The Stones and The Who formed rock’s second coming. As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, the crucial question was who would lead rock ’n’ roll’s third generation?

Pin-Ups 1972 tracks the London music scene during this pivotal year, all Soho sleaze, neon and leather. It begins with the dissolution of the underground and the chart success of Marc Bolan. T. Rextasy formed the backdrop to Lou Reed and Iggy Pop’s British exile and their collaborations with David Bowie. This was the year Bowie became a star and redefined the teenage wasteland. In his wake followed Roxy Music and the New York Dolls, future tense rock ’n’ roll revivalists. Bowie, Bolan, Iggy, Lou, Roxy and the Dolls – pin-ups for a new generation.

Here ‘Tis . . . the first look. From Reaktion, March 2022 . . . Get some!

Pretties For You: Marc Bolan – King of the Stamford Hill Mods

Iain Stewart’s interview with Bolan for Honey begins in medias res, the ‘Revolution is everywhere’, he wrote. But the routine forms of sedition, acted out by the Underground in Ladbroke Grove and its satellites, are momentarily stilled by focusing on what the ‘prettiest little thing you ever did see’ is wearing.

Marc is dressed in velvet trousers, a little jumper which ties at the front and shoes with straps. Against the desires fomented by the dreamers of revolution, Bolan’s small revolt against masculine display – his girlish garb –  may appear insignificant but it would have a bigger role in creating change than any form of insurrection that the Underground was then more loudly advocating.

A cornerstone in many of Bolan’s interviews of the period, and for a year or two after, was a section that reflected back over his Mod roots. In Honey it is used it to suggest his present distance from a base materialistic past.

Clothes were then, I suppose, wisdom and knowledge and getting satisfaction as a human being. In those days all I really cared about was creating a sort of material vision of what I wanted to be like.

But he can’t quite let go of his Mod beginnings. He may be rhetorically dismissing a materialistic Mod philosophy, but he is not rejecting it out of hand. In its place he offered a more positive form of  consumerism – acquisition that has a greater purpose.

If I go out and buy clothes now, it’s either because I feel down or because something looks nice. And if I wear that to do something it’ll make me do it better. But it is not the goal anymore you see.

Consumption as a solipsistic act is spurned, yet the Mod in Bolan remained unrepressed even as he saw the hopelessness of remaining true to its ideal.

if you designed a new suit or a pair of light green shoes with buckles all over them, it was like you conceived it and saved up for it – which might take you three months – and then you got the shoes, and those shoes were, for three months, the only thing that made you go. Whereas now it’s just a day . .

Buying clothes is a creative act, an act of Mod-ish discrimination, but keeping up with the pace of fashion is now near impossible; a vogue or an infatuation that once might have lasted a few months now collapses into a day.

The cost of things, a £400 guitar he has just bought, which with inflation is about £5,500 today, is not the criteria by which value is judged. The guitar is a necessity, the expense doesn’t blow his mind, but ‘a pair of shoes was like meeting God – it was a very strong buzz’.

Bolan never lost his Mod attitude to style, the drive to look good, to be an Ace Face, but something else was going on here in this interview from mid-to-late 1970. Even though he is ostensibly promoting A Beard of Stars, and is still some weeks away from Tyrannosaurus Rex’s transformation into T. Rex and the release of ‘Ride A White Swan’, Bolan has started talking directly to what will soon become his primary audience of teenage girls, readers of Honey. He spoke in the same codes they used, which made fashion a measure in their everyday transformation of self. Very prescient that and very Mod.

Have You Heard the News? Good Rockin' With Larry Parnes

Pete Frame, The Restless Generation: how Rock Music Changed The Face of 1950s Britain (2007)

1949–1959, the first ten-years of British pop music – the decade before The Beatles tore it up. The Restless Generation begins with jazz mavens Chris Barber and Ken Colyer, with side accounts of blues fanatics Alexis Korner and Cyril Davis before honing in on the caravan of skifflers that scuffled in the long parade behind Lonnie Donegan. Cutting across their tracks came Tommy Steele in his jukebox shaped charabanc. He brings in tow his own merry band of followers led by Larry Parnes’ circus of curiosities: Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Adam Faith, Vince Eager, Duffy Power, Dickie Pride, Terry Dene, Joe Brown, Johnny Gentle, Georgie Fame and Julian X (the last named wholly new to me). This mad menagerie is eventually eclipsed by Cliff Richard calling all before him. Retelling their storied teenage lives, Frame recalls the countless trips around the streets and alleys of Soho; the idling intent and bursting ambition of the 2i’s patrons and the nights out at cellar clubs and pub backrooms. Bigger stages followed with package tours to provincial towns and pantomime shows that never ended. The monocular-eye of television beckoned with the ‘Six–Five Special!’, ‘Oh Boy!’, ‘Boy Meets Girls’ and ‘Jukebox Jury’; and films too beginning with The Tommy Steele Story (1957). Lurking in the margins are Tony Sheridan, Joe Meek, Big Jim Sullivan, Micky Most, Vince Taylor and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Through it all Decca, Philips, Oriole and the EMI stable released a slew of bad records, a deluge of dreadful imitations of American rock ‘n’ roll that made The Beatles an absolute necessity; the saving grace of British youth.

On two 10" inchers . . . where the restless generation made their recorded entrance

Though the subtitle suggests it is a social history, The Restless Generation is a chronological tale of the era’s singers and musicians, scene-makers and pace-setters’ early careers. Society and politics play a part in Frame’s story but they are way down the call sheet behind biographical detail, anecdote, and the evermore heaving list of temporary creative alliances. Following Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, the second entry in Pete Frame’s Rock Family Trees was ‘Cliff and the Shads’, The Restless Generation expands exponentially on that genealogy, 440 glorious pages based on 80 interviews and a lifetime of collecting ephemeral data, and still I wanted more, or at least a photograph of Julian X.

Here’s a favourite passage with Larry and his boys being interviewed by Chris Chataway for the BBC’s ‘Panorama’ programme:

The reporter turned to the boys: ‘Do you feel manipulated?’ ‘Nah, not really: it all amounts to having faith in your manipulator.’ ‘Do people tell you that your manager is taking you for a ride, making a lot of money out of you?’ ‘Very often’. ‘When your audiences go hysterical and shout and scream, what do you think of that?’ ‘We love it’. As Chataway sat there, at a loss to understand why anyone should want to inhabit such a world, the class divisions fell open for all to see. Chataway, an Olympic athlete with a plum in his mouth and an honours degree from Magdalen College, Oxford, soon to become a Conservative member of Parliament; Parnes, a Jewish trader, nouveau riche; and a bunch of ill-educated working-class lads. The interviewer homed in on Johnny Gentle. ‘What do you do for amusement?’ he asked. ‘I date girls’. ‘Anything else?’ ‘Not really, no’.

Ace Records’ Rockin’ Again at the 2’i’s digs deep into the era’s record legacy. Great notes by Rob Finnis. They Called It Rock ‘n’ Roll has the Decca label hits

At the book’s best, Frame pulls together parallel stories and creates a finely tuned image of the music and the musicians:

Elvis cut ‘That’s All Right’ during his first Sun session on 5 July 1954. Eight days later, Lonnie cut ‘Rock Island Line’. Elvis was 19; Lonnie was 23. Elvis had grown up with a rich diversity of music on the radio, surrounded by rednecks, rustics and blacks, a stone’s throw from the Mississippi River. Lonnie had grown up in East London, hearing only a smattering of black music on AFN and on records at the houses of friends. Elvis took ‘That’s All Right’, a 1947 song by black blues-man Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, and not only personalised but took it to another planet. Lonnie did the same on ‘Rock Island Line’, which he had learned from a 1942 recording by Leadbelly. The same propulsive acoustic rhythm guitar, same string bass driving it along, same souping-up of the original tempo, same sense of urgency and passion. Elvis had a warm, good-old-boy, sultry southern sexiness to his voice; Lonnie sang with a high lonesome nasal whine, a cross between East Virginny and East Ham. Both their styles had developed naturally, almost accidentally, born of admiration for earthy American roots music and uninfluenced by commercial considerations.

This passage is so vivid you don’t need to replay the two records back-to-back to hear whether or not he gets it right; agree with him or not, he has perfectly caught the spell both performers had almost simultaneously cast.

While others have told the history of this era, Rob Finnis and Spencer Leigh especially, no one has dealt with it in such loving and lengthy detail, yet something is still missing. While I’ll give anyone who proselytises on behalf of Billy Fury my time, the rest of the motley-crew arraigned here still feel at book’s end entirely interchangeable. I really couldn’t tell you what made Terry Dene different from Vince Eager or Johnny Gentle and, beyond The Sound of Fury and a handful of singles by Johnny Kidd and Vince Taylor’s ‘Brand New Cadillac’, I can’t see myself ever expending the time, enthusiasm and cash to discover more about the music the restless generation made. Nothing Frame writes here drives me toward digging for a lost 45. It’s not the fault of his writing, it’s just how risible he makes their records sound when compared to the originals. Chris Barber, early Lonnie Donegan, Alexis Korner, Cyril Davis they all have my ear, but Tommy Steele too quickly gave up rockin’ with the caveman to play alongside Widow Twankey and a ‘Little White Bull’.

Even disregarding the bad records, something is still lacking; an absent presence that haunts Frame’s tale. The story it seems to me is Larry Parnes, but once again he is principally portrayed as a predator of young men (even in that endeavour he mostly fails to seduce his charges, if you believe what Frame is told). Parnes’ lack of any genuine appreciation of rock and roll, such as that Brian Epstein or Kit Lambert would acquire, further condemns him. In Frame’s tale he’s a shyster and exploiter of talent, not an enabler but someone who staunches the flow of hot blood, cools the sweat, and washes away the grease and grime with pink Camay soap and wraps his stars in cellophane. Parne rubs off their rough edges and tames their wild ways; a process of emasculation that readies them for the variety and pantomime circuit.  This may all be true, but Parnes is here sketched in such a shadowy fashion I can’t help but feel his story is yet to be told.

It is a story that will need to go beyond his sexuality; it would take into account a history of East End Jewish participation in the entertainment industry; give more attention to the death of the variety show, the continued importance of pantomime and the rise of the package tour. If you wanted a little theory in the mix it could play with the concept of a Warholian transposability of stars, or the shifting shape of post-war British masculinity. Most importantly, it should raise questions around the packaging and marketing of pop that is not skewered by a writer’s love of rock ’n’ roll that is fixated on the male fan rather than the female consumer. That’s a book I’d hope Jon Savage or Caroline Sullivan would write. Whoever the speculative author, Pete Frame’s The Restless Generation will be their urtext, the book on which their endeavour would rest.

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.

Lou Reed Told Me . . .

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

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

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

The Who – electronically violent, deafeningly strident

The Who This Month @BrianInAtlanta Tweeter feed tipped me to this Melody Maker review, which perfectly captures the band as both ordinary – tea-shirted [sic] Keith Moon and soberly dressed Townshend and utterly otherworldly. Hawkwind would have nothing on the Who at Yeovil:

The Who have a kind of bizarre science-fiction appeal – electronically violent, deafeningly strident, all rather removed from reality. There is no other group on the current scene remotely like them. . . there was a sort of sensual excitement about the performance – this in spite of the group’s doleful, deadpan expressions.

A Vicious Strangeness: The Who – Punk As Fuck

This bootleg could provide an alternative title and cover image for A Band With Built-In Hate, still might if I live long enough for a second edition. Discogs has it listed as a 1982 release, which I thought was fanciful as pretty much everything seemed to have been sourced from Thirty Years of Maximum R&B and subsequent CD reissues, but Jon Savage Tweeted that he’d bought his copy at the tail end of the 80’s (his is on the Brunswick label, mine is on Reaction). Consensus now appears to be early 90’s with a failed 1990 MCA box set as the source. Whatever, it doesn’t much matter, because this is not about rare cuts, instead it is all about surplus value: it’s the object itself that attracts me.

The image is, I’d guess, from around the time of ‘I Can’t Explain’, Spring 1965. Daltrey has moved back from the microphone, leaving a void at the centre that is now filled by the bootlegger’s rubber stamp. Here are four malcontents, utterly at odds with the conventions of pop promotion. Neither smiles or moody introspection, but a combined look that says not only ‘who gives a fuck?’ but more directly ‘who the fuck are you?’ How did that get translated into the pop conversations of the day?

In June 1965, Alan Smith writing about the band in the NME described the ‘four beatsters from Shepherd’s Bush’ as exuding a ‘sort of vicious strangeness’. But that conversation wasn’t taken up by others for another 11 years.

photograph by PTMadden sourced here

Indicator Columbia Noir #3: Johnny O'Clock

What’s In A Name?

Very proud to have contributed a short piece on a firm noir favorite, Johnny O’Clock, for the new Indicator Columbia Noir box set. They have produced another beautiful package. Five Stars

Below is my original, somewhat longer, unedited piece that I submitted.

Johnny O’Clock – what’s in a name?

Johnny O’Clock is a gambler who doesn’t gamble; a man who tries to stay above the low-life he has to mix with, a patriarch without a family, and a lover without a faithful partner. In a world without honour he tries to be a just man. He is also something of the dandy. As for the film he gave his name to, it was part of the cycle of post-Depression era crime movies featuring punk hoodlums that all had the name ‘Johnny’ in the title. A partial list: Johnny Apollo (1940), Johnny Eager (1941), Johnny Holiday (1941), Johnny Come Lately (1943), Johnny Angel (1945), Johnny Allegro (1949), Johnny Stool Pigeon (1949),  Johnny One-Eye (1950), Johnny Dark (1954), Johnny Gunman (1957), Johnny Rocco (1958) and Johnny Cool (1963). As always, the Western got in on the action with Johnny Guitar (1954) and Johnny Concho (1956), but they were just sideshows to the main event.

 The cycle followed a long lull in the production of gangster films, a result of the moral backlash to movies such as City Streets, Public Enemy, Quick Millions, and Little Caesar (all 1931).  With the wartime and postwar relaxation of its regimen of self-censorship, Hollywood again exploited the figure of the hoodlum. This time out, however, the gangster’s ethnicity was less readily identifiable as Italian in origin. As a name, Johnny may not, as with Caesar Enrico Bandello (Little Caesar) and Tony Camonte (Scarface, 1932), been specifically Mediterranean in origin, but it could still carry the taint of the inner-city; suggesting a character raised in the tenements, educated on the streets and, depending on the name it was coupled with, still hold ethnic connotations. As the diminutive of John,  ‘Johnny’ was also juvenile, and it was certainly déclassé – entirely lacking in middle-class respectability.

In 1944, Dick Powell was looking for a little bit of that taint of the low to help revitalize his career. He had just turned 40 and the role, as a juvenile romantic lead, that he had once taken in films such as 42nd Street and Footlight Parade (both 1933), was no longer an option. Like Humphrey Bogart a little before him, he reinvented himself as a tough guy, beginning with the Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder My Sweet (1944) and followed by the equally hard-boiled Cornered (1945). The two films had been produced and directed by Adrian Scott and Edward Dymtryk respectively, both would be caught up in the Communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy-era. The third in Powell’s run of tough guy films, Johnny O’Clock was directed and written by Robert Rossen, like Scott and Dymtryk also a one-time member of the American Communist Party. Filmmakers such as these brought to Hollywood a tougher, more authentic view of crime and the city; one that was formed by a direct experience of Jewish American ghetto life. The class politics of Rossen’s film may not be as pronounced as it is in his Body and Soul (1947) or in Abraham Polansky’s Force of Evil (1948), but it’s still right there on the surface, if you care to look.

‘“Johnny O’Clock”, that’s a funny kind of name’ the hotel desk clerk tells J. Lee Cobb’s policeman, Koch. The straight life isn’t for Johnny, he doesn’t get up until nine, PM that is. When more respectable folk are starting to think about going to bed, Johnny’s day is only beginning. His daily routine is an inversion of the good citizen’s and his domestic life is equally strange . . . He’s woken by Charlie, a younger, more obviously, proletarian man, who moves around Johnny’s apartment with an intimate’s familiarity. Over breakfast, Johnny gives him a shirt, in return Charlie gives Johnny a watch engraved with ‘To my darling with unending love’. Before there is time to do a double-take on this queer set up, Charlie explains the gift is from a dame. The relationship between the two men, nevertheless, remains entirely unsettled.

In the hotel lobby, Johnny passes a lecherous eye over a woman, caught in the act by Koch, he tells the policeman it is a habit; giving himself an alibi for a crime unspecified. Crime and sexual deviancy, in the parlance of the day, had long been figured as synonymous in Hollywood’s films, think Tony Camonte’s incestuous desire for his sister in Scarface or Rico’s unspoken love for Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) in Little Caesar. There are no shortage of women in Johnny’s world, most who make clear their availability, he can even play a convincing paternal role with Harriet (Nina Foch), though Koch misreads his intentions toward her. His one-time lover, Nellie (Ellen Drew), and now wife of his partner in crime, Guido Marchetti (Thomas Gomez), still wants Johnny; she gave him the engraved watch. But it’s with Harriet’s sister, Nancy (Evelyn Keyes), that the romance is played out (or begins to unravel). Nancy is smitten by Johnny from the moment they meet. Inevitably, she is curious about Charlie. ‘He’s my man’ Johnny says. ‘You say that like you’re used to it’, she replies. ‘He’s a guy who just got out of the jug, I give him a place to live. He’d cut off his right arm for me, right up to the elbow’, says Johnny, making the relationship between the two men even less comprehensible to her.

Johnny’s world is covered in a shroud of deception and dissembling. ‘What’s it all mean?’, asks Nancy admiring the Jose Clemente Orozco painting hanging in Johnny’s apartment. He tells her it can mean whatever you want it to mean, and then he tells her it is a reproduction and the fireplace it sits above is also fake and that things, anyway, look better with the lights off. She agrees with him, nothing is to be trusted , and yet she still wants Johnny to say sweet and pretty things and let her pretend they are true.  He kisses her but she pulls away and they then throw words at each other. The scene fades on a kiss and returns with Johnny having changed out of his Prince of Wales check suit into evening attire. What happened in that fade between the costume changes? Did they make love? The look they give each other could be post-coital or it could be so much more innocent. ‘You look nice’, she tells him. ‘A showcase for the suckers’, he says. ‘Let’s make the words mean what they say’, she says.

Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes admiring his print of Jose Clemente Orozco’s Zapatistas

What’s being teased out here is Hollywood’s time-honoured dance of ambiguity, what happened in the temporal elision is for the audience to decide. The story moves on regardless of whether their relationship went no further than what we actually see. It is the same for what goes on between Johnny and Charlie, are they friends or lovers? The homoerotic charge in their relationship is at times so strongly signalled it surely must have pulled asunder the Production Code tenet to use deniability whenever a film has the potential to become controversial, either sexual or political. But the censor’s notes on the screenplay offer not even the smallest of hints that there was ever any possibility of a misunderstanding of what went on between the two men.

Even after watching Johnny blow his pose of cool detachment, when he learns he’s been betrayed and savagely rips apart the shirt Charlie is wearing, we might have to accept that the erotic charge is not there at all; Johnny is just angry. Maybe seeing their relationship as sexual is just the effect of viewing the film with a modern sensibility; a viewpoint that puts us in a superior position from which to monitor the machinations of the characters. Such a position mirrors that taken by Johnny when he stands on a staircase above the bent copper who is trying to muscle him aside for a spot in Marchetti’s set up, or when he looks down on Guido’s vast living room that seems to have dropped a floor below the apartment’s front door, or when he takes the high vantage point from which he can survey the players in his casino. In these scenes, Johnny appears to have it all under control, though as we learn that is far from being the case. Maybe today’s viewer is just as deceived. Perhaps no one knows what time it really is, not even Johnny O’Clock.

Manhandling Charlie, Johnny rips off the shirt he gave him. Orozco print, once again in the frame. Hats off to Jeff Billington for saving my embarrassment after I mis-identified the painting as being by Diego Rivera (I blame Frank Krutnik)

Book Musik Podcast 045 – A Band With Built-In Hate

“The Who – colourful to see and hear, and probably the only group whose records disintegrate half way through”

– Record Mirror Nov. 20, 1965

Find out why by tuning into the latest episode of Kimley and Tosh’s Book Musik Podcast: http://bookmusik.com

Kilburn & the High Roads Play the Penthouse Suite

May 1974 and Kilburn and the High Roads are profiled in Penthouse by Steven Fuller. He dishes the dirt on ‘hard times in the world of pub rock’. The photographer is not listed, shamefully, as the images of Ian and the band are wonderful.

Dury discusses his life growing up, polio wards and school, his adolescent sex fantasies (this is Penthouse after all), his love of rock ’n’ roll, and gives a role call of his favorite movies and film stars. Key Largo, Kiss of Death, The Wild One, Somebody Up There Likes Me, The Magnificent Seven, The Vikings and El Dorado. He sent Robert Mitchum a picture he’d done of him playing the town drunk in the latter, the star wrote back. Most of all he likes Lee Marvin:

I did a drawing of Lee Marvin in Don Siegel’s The Killers, I did a silk screen. It was just after he’s been shot, it took me eight days to do the head . . . He’s just about to shoot Angie Dickinson and she begins to plead for her life and he says, ‘Lady, I ain’t got the time.’

Pop Conversations – The Who Meet Nancy Sinatra

You’ll find few advocates for The Who’s ‘Call Me Lightning’. In fact, I’ve never read a word in its defence. Released it seems on not much more than a whim, a stop gap exercise between The Who Sell Out and Tommy or between ‘I Can See For Miles’ and ‘Magic Bus’. It touched #40 in the American charts, but was hidden beneath ‘Dogs’ on its first UK release, so doubly damned as that’s another forgotten 45. It was dismissed by Townshend at the time as ‘unrepresentative’ of the band’s current sound.

For me it is precisely its outlier status within The Who’s oeuvre that makes it a small treasure. I like their quirks, the second side of Ready Steady Who EP and things like ‘Waspman’. Their ephemera keeps the canon fresh, stops it from going stale. Anyway, Townshend was wrong. It was perfectly representative of what the band were doing in 1968, at least an aspect of what preoccupied them. It sits well alongside the Eddie Cochran covers, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, ‘Young Man Blues’ and the like. ‘Call Me Lightning’ is part of that return they made in ’68 to teenage pop, a restatement of the ethos of rock ’n’ roll as deadly fun.

For many commentators it remains no more than a throwaway homage to Jan and Dean, but like Townshend they too are wrong. The song’s  ‘dum–dum–dum–do-ays’ are more Dion and the Belmonts, New York doo-wop, than California surfing harmonies, equally loved by the band though they might be. The recording has an aggressive masculine spirit that is shared with ‘The Wanderer’ and is not there at all on ‘Little Old Lady (From Pasadena)’ or ‘Dead Man’s Curve’; it trades in a braggadocio wholly avoided by the West Coast duo.

The Who had already borrowed wholesale from Dion’s ‘Runaround Sue’ for their Talmy produced, yet at the time, unreleased novelty record ‘Instant Party Mixture’, which is a hoot; a paean to wacky cigarettes. The subject matter undoubtedly as responsible for its nixed release, coupled with ‘Circles’, as was the copyright implications of its pilfered tune.

The song had been in Townshend’s portfolio since at least 1964, the reason for its return, I like to think, was that it now had contemporary currency. In the Autumn of 1967, Nancy Sinatra released ‘Lightning’s Girl’. Lee Hazelwood’s composition would have been a perfect number for the Ronettes or the Shangri-las, which is to say it is as late to the party as the Who’s tune. ‘Lightning’s Girl’ is a warning from a girl to a boy, whose attention is unwanted, to stay away, otherwise he’ll have to answer to her boyfriend – Lightning.

Here comes Lightning down the street
While you just stand there talking
If I were you I'd start to move
And tell my story walking
About a hundred miles an hour!

If you want to know more about this cat called Lightning, well Roger can tell you:

See that girl who's smiling so brightly
Well I reckon she's cool and I reckon rightly
She's good looking and I ain't frightened
I'm gonna show you why they call me Lightning

And his ‘XKE is shining so brightly’, which if you know your Jaguars, as Pete certainly did, then he also has ‘grace . . . space . . . and pace’, which is another good reason to call him Lightning.

Maybe I’ve misheard what this is all about, but to me it sounds like a great pop conversation: ‘Call Me Lightning’ is best taken as an answer record to ‘Lightning’s Girl’. It’s the kind of exchange pop once had around Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog’ with Rufus Thomas’ howling out ‘Bear Cat’ in return, or ‘Judy’s Turn To Cry’ as Leslie Gore’s answer to her own ‘It’s My Party’, or Neil Sedaka singing ‘Oh Carol’ and Carol King responding with ‘Oh Neil’, or, my favourite, The Satintones telling The Shirelles it’s ‘Tomorrow and Always’ in answer to ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’.

Great pop is always in conversation with itself

Light In The Attic have just released a double album of Nancy’s best. After having only ever heard these recordings on budget label releases, it is a sonic revelation. As always with LITA the packaging is to die for.

More on Marc Bolan’s Toilette

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

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

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

The Who Generation by Nik Cohn

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

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

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

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

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

But this is how it begins:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Viv Prince in Novokuznetz

I’ve been crossing paths with The Pretties’ Viv Prince lately, he makes a cameo in Nick Kent’s The Unstable Boys, a model of sorts for the band’s drummer as Phil May was for the singer. I thought of him while reading Nik Cohn’s story of lives lived on Broadway, The Heart of the World, where he says that Russian street gangs named themselves after British beat groups:

Wimp suburbanites chose the Beatles and Rolling Stones; inner-city stylists preferred the Yardbirds or Them. On Novokuz, which must always be the hippest of all, prime icons included John’s Children, the Action, the Troggs.

Sasha himself had been a Fruit Eating Bear, but they were fragile goods and shattered at first contact with Pretty Things who were neighbourhood kingpins. The Things had the deadliest weapons, the sharpest clothes; they looked the most Western. Only the Hi-Numbers dared challenge them.

 Viv had a big role to play in Pretties manager Bryan Morrison’s posthumously published memoir, and frankly the only reason to read what is a otherwise a superficial account of his time as one of the sixties music scene’s prime movers, but it did tip me off to a feature on the band in a 1964 edition of The Sunday Times Magazine, which I found for a pittance on eBay. That’s Viv in the porkpie hat.

He could do Bo Diddley’s ‘a shave and a hair cut, two bits’ better than any other London sticksman and he gave his instrument a prominence unmatched until Keith Moon appeared, but he also gave to the Pretties’ image a much needed element of menace. Without him they just seem placable, unremarkable even. Regardless of Phil May’s long locks, without Prince mixing things up it’s Dick Taylor’s jazz beard that dominates. It’s as if a woodwork teacher had formed a band with a bunch of willing sixth formers .

Here’s The Pretty Things without Viv Prince, this Dutch 45 picture sleeve featuring his predecessor Viv Andrews

And here’s what you get when Prince takes up a pose

Until Lee Brilleaux and Johnny Rotten picked over his style book, Viv Prince stood alone in making a sheepskin coat the coolest look on London’s streets. About as anti-Carnaby Street as you could get

How a sheepskin should be worn, Morlands advert October 1966

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

1967/8: Summers of Love Blues with The Who and Eddie Cochran

April 1968, The Who have added three, count ’em, three Eddie Cochran numbers to the set-list for the Filmore East gigs – ‘Summertime Blues’, ‘My Way’ and ‘C’mon Everybody’. In 1967, between the release of ‘Pictures of Lily’ in April and The Who Sell Out in December they laid down two studio versions of ‘Summertime Blues’, the first as a potential single, the second, alongside ‘My Way’, for possible inclusion on the album. What was it with The Who and Cochran that led one American journalist to report that Townshend carried tapes of the rocker wherever he goes?

The band were not alone in making a down shift in gears back to rock ’n’ roll as a reaction to the swerve taken during the high-days of psychedelia. The Beatles, the Stones and The Move, among others, felt the curve away from the music’s founding roots was too steep and attempted a recalibration, but if The Who were following a general trend then their latching on to Cochran, if not unique, had a depth and reach that exceeded the likes of Blue Cheer.

Nik Cohn thought Cochran played ‘pure rock’, whatever that might be, and he was ‘a composite of a generation . . . a generalised 50s blur’. Greil Marcus considered ‘Summertime Blues’ the ‘grammar book of rock ’n’ roll language’, but you might say the same of Gene Vincent and ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’. Or maybe not, Vincent was too much of a greaser, much more of the pool hall punk than Cochran, whose performances and songs spoke more clearly to a suburban teenage dissatisfaction than to an urban disaffection. Cochran wrote teenage anthems, he worked the high school beat and the soda hop, Vincent came from the world of juke joints and honky tonks, he smelt of reefer and whiskey. In Cochran’s world, dad busted up your fun. Vincent was sui generis, without parents: it is unimaginable to think of him sitting down to Sunday dinner with mom and pop. The differences are there in their individual performances in The Girl Can’t Help It. Cochran is projected into the family home via the television set, Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps are playing in some downtown rehearsal space uninvited to the party.

You might pull on Vincent’s leather jacket, like countless British rockers did, but you could only mirror back his stance and hang on to the microphone stand in a pose that mimicked him. You couldn’t better Gene Vincent at being Gene Vincent. But Cochran, his stance and pose, The Who could own. They could remake him to fit their purpose, with Townshend incorporating, as Charlie Gillett wrote, the rock ’n’ roller’s ‘chunky, resentful guitar’, while Daltrey and Entwistle could play teenage parts with a knowing wink as a counter to Moon’s arrested development.

a very rare tri-centre promo edtion . . . a homage to the original London release I believe

Graeme Thomson's Mail on Sunday Review

It could have gone all so horribly wrong, seven books and my first review in the mainstream media, but I survived. So, Graeme Thomson, thank you, especially for the great pull quotes:

‘The best parts of the book mirror the best of The Who, fizzing with ideas and connections’

‘This book vividly reanimates the nasty, transgressive scene-shaping thrill of their beginnings’

Publication Day – A Band With Built-In Hate