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

and that would be Iggy Stooge . . .

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

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

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

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

Sydney Morning Herald (November 1, 1970)

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

Sydney Morning Herald (June 6, 1971)

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

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

Sunday News (July 23, 1972)

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

Sunday News (April 6, 1973)

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

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

New York Sunday News (August 5, 1973)

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

New York Sunday News (August 11, 1973)

Sydney Morning Herald’s Fun House review

Sydney Morning Herald (December 19, 1970)

Go-Karting with The Stooges' Ron Asheton

Keith Moon and Ron Asheton both liked to wear t-shirts, but while The Who’s drummer went through a whole catalogue of POP designs, The Stooges’ guitarist only favoured the one. His shirt of choice featured Stroker McGurk tear-arsing about on a go-kart: ‘fun on wheels – for everyone!’. Tom Medley was the cartoonist, his main gig in the fifties was with Hot Rod magazine (see here). I suspect Ron bought quite a few Stroker T’s, cos he wore it from at least the Autumn of ‘68 to the Summer of ‘72. As a teenager my shirts rarely survived two washes . . .

Outside the Stooge Manor House, September 1968. Photo Ron Richardson in The Stooges: The Authorized and Illustrated Story

Iggy steals Ron’s shirt: The Stooges at the Fifth Forum, July 1969. Photographs by Peter Yates (from here)

Out On The Street: Ann Arbor, 1969. Photo Glen Craig in Total Chaos: The Story of The Stooges

from Ed Caraeff Iggy and the Stooges: One Night at the Whiskey, 1970

Fun House sessions by Ed Caraeff. May 23, 1970

Cincinnati Pop Festival, 13 June 1970. Photo by Tom Copi

King Sound, Kings Cross, London July 15, 1972. Photo Mick Rock

To be continued . . . .

Glam! When Superstars Rocked the World, 1970–74

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote:

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

This beautiful original courtesy of The Seth Man

Paperback: A Band With Built-In Hate

Paperback edition of ‘A Band With Built-In Hate: The Who from Pop Art to Punk’ hits UK streets on July 11, 2022. Get some!

Robert Thom's 'Bloody Mama' Novelization

“The Family That slays Together Stays Together”

Roger Corman’s  Bloody Mama (1970) is a grand guignol take on Bonnie and Clyde-era bandits, riffing to bluegrass, and revelling in its grotesque and petty sadistic acts. In this it falls a good way short of the highs (or lows) of Robert Aldrich’s Grissom Gang (1971), but not many films start with an incestuous gang rape of a child. . .  There again not many novelizations up the ante on such a start, but Robert Thom’s recasting of his own screenplay more than raises the table stakes. Here's the book's opening sentences:

“Kate, soon to be Kate Barker, or Ma Barker, was not beautiful, but men seldom realised it while actually making love to her, or, to be more precise, while penetrating and/or being contained (or reorganized, re-established, extended, drawn, preposterously, into god-like dimensions) by one of Kate’s three, taut, quite unusually lubricious, and, most of the time, phenomenonally responsive (and/or reflexive), infinitely pneumatic orifices. THREE: For eating, for pissing, for relieving her bowels. Kate was a natural!”

In the movie, Bruce Dern’s character makes one of Ma Baker’s boys, Freddie, his jail house punk. Beyond the promise of a beating --  “I’m not gonna hurt you . . . I really like you”  -- the scene doesn’t amount to much, but in the novelisation Freddie slips into a reverie, and has a punk’s pulp dream : 

Freddie had always had a waking dream: He was The Lone Ranger. He had a treasure map tattooed on his chest. The bad men wanted to cut it off his chest: a thin layer of skin and flesh, the minimum of blood. The bad men wanted the map only, not his life, and the bad men had drugged him. He was deep in a cave. The bad men had almost begun the operation. Tonto was on the way. Tonto might rescue him. The man on the floor, gazing up at him, looked like Tonto, Freddie’s Tonto.

Ma Barker: “Lloyd when you’re working on those model aeroplanes you get to acting awful silly.”

“Now I wanna sniff some glue, now I wanna have something to do.”

-- The Ramones

Iggy and the Stooges London Sessions 1972

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside . . . Heavy Liquid and London Sessions

Echo Helstrom – she's good bad but she's not evil

It’s 1957, just a few pages into Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan biography and the author is introducing his reader to Dylan’s high school girlfriend, Echo Helstrom. She’s 15 years-old and Bob has yet to make any impression on her. He’s a ‘clean-cut goody-goody kid’ who lives over the tracks from Echo in the well-to-do side of town. Their paths cross at the drug store where he has been playing upstairs at the Moose Lodge. Echo told it this way:

He walked in with another boy, John Buckland, and they came over and started talking to us. Picking us up, I guess. I think I had on my motorcycle jacket and a pair of jeans. Very uncouth, for Hibbing.

Predating The Crystal’s ‘He’s A Rebel’, The Shangri-las’ bad-boy melodramas, Janis Ian’s ‘Society’s Child’ and a thousand other teen operas, the story told by Echo flips the bad-boy trope and puts the girl in denim and leather and from the wrong part of town. Echo and Bob bond over their shared enthusiasm for the Blues and tear-up the town on his motorcycle. Before he’d graduated, the trope had turned back and the other girls in school look with nervous desire at Bobby Zimmerman, the nice boy turned hoodlum in his ‘big boots and tight pants’. He’s good-bad but he’s not evil.

In Chronicles, Dylan recalled of Echo that ‘Everybody said she looked like Brigitte Bardot, and she did’.

Postscript:

In Toby Thompson’s Positively Main Street: an unorthodox view of Bob Dylan (1972) his ‘gushing' pseudo-new journalistic account has Echo Helstrom at the centre of the story of Dylan and his Hibbing roots. He paints Echo, ten-years or so older, as a free hippie spirit, twisting and twirling away from a conventional image of the small town, High School, girlfriend. She recalls riding behind Dylan on his m’cycle and killing time together drinking sodas but the image of her as a Brill Building fantasy figure, teen-age delinquent, is choked off:

The drone of Muzak could be heard from another room.

“You hear that song!” – Echo shuddered – “the one they’re playing over the speakers? Do you recognise it?”

I listened for a moment and had to confess that I didn’t. It was standard, mid-fifties, C, A-Minor, F, G-Seventh arrangement, I knew that much.

“It’s ‘Angel Baby’, Echo moaned. “Bob used to call me that . . . Angel Baby, I mean.”

“For Christ’s sake”, I said, “Come on, I’m taking you home.”

Echo should have told her story to Nik Cohn, he’d have known both the song and where she was coming from . . . as Dylan would’ve

He don't comb his hair
Like he did before
And he don't wear those dirty old black boots no more

He used to act bad
Used to, but he quit it
It make me so sad
'Cause I know that he did it for me

Shangri-Las ‘Out in the Streets’

The Prefects – Going Through The Motions

I’ve been buying recordings by The Prefects for something like 43 years. It’s not an especially big catalogue of releases, small really, but it is kind of perfect.

I saw them twice, both times at The California Ballroom, Dunstable. The first was bottom of the bill on the White Riot tour and then with The Saints (I think). At the latter gig, Robert Lloyd stood front centre, didn’t move much, and wore a two cowboys cocks-out t-shirt. That might be a false memory because I don’t remember much else beyond that I liked them for their attitude and the noise they made.

After they’d broken up I bought their sole single at Old Town Records, Hemel Hempstead. The bloke who sold it said it was dull and repetitive, or something like that, but I loved it for those attributes and have done ever since.

Somewhere along the line I bought the Strange Fruit Peel session, later the ‘Amateur Wankers’ and the lo-fi live CDs. Both those digital releases are now on black wax, the live one I got just last week. It has some nice repro flyers and Jon Savage’s sleeve notes that might be the best he has done for any band. They probably sounded something like this in Dunstable, but I don't remember . . .

The Who – Everybody's Talking About Pop Art!

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

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

RAVE (July 1965)

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

Clarks goes Pop Art NME (May 23, 1965)

Anyway Anyhow Anywhere – Intensity and Abstraction

Before Nik Cohn, Patrick Kerr was the Pop Scene columnist for Queen magazine. A choreographer on Ready Steady Go he clearly had his finger on the pulse of what the nation’s teens were getting into . . . He finished his June 2, 1965 piece with a tip-off on the band’s latest release with its ‘weird sound effects’. Two weeks later he provided a fuller appreciation – ‘on stage they are without doubt the wildest’ and they are the world’s ‘first “Op-Art” group’.

Five years later and the single seemed like ancient history, but for Creem’s Lester Bangs’ AAA’s ‘intensity and abstraction’ – a perfect summation – deserved to be resurrected. When everyone else was busy with the rock ‘n’ roll revival, Bangs had became the key archivist for sixties pop of the noisome and psychotic persuasion .

Meanwhile, in Youtubeland a sometimes great sometimes poor quality video of The Who making merry for Canadian TV has turned up . . . what a beautifully ugly racket they made. According to Andy Neill and Matt Kent’s bible, bits from ‘Substitute’, ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’, ‘See See Ride'r’ and ‘My Generation’ can be heard. The gig was at WestminsterTechnical College on Saturday, 9 July 1966.

My thanks to Dave Laing for the tip-off on this little explosion in SW1

The Wire – a review of 'Pin-Ups 1972' by Dave Mandl

The Wire #461 (July 2022)

A splendid review by Dave Mandl illustrated by a killer Stooges photograph. The Wire knows . . . Where all good magazines are sold – 'Get Some' as Mick Farren would say

Beatle Crushers by Anonymous

I've been trying to find an elusive advertisement with the tag line: 'The Rolling Stones, the dividing line between art and commerce' that Andrew Loog Oldham ran in Billboard. Stanley Booth’s Dance With the Devil is my source, but a trawl through the on-line archive of the mag didn't turn it up.

Never mind, I found these four.

This is from June 6, 1964 and I reckon 'anonymous' must now be known to all . . . brilliant piece of provocation

From May 1st 1964, a bog standard record label cut n' paste job

From November 1965, a graphic gem. An extraordinary leap in just five months. The image of Jagger confirms Nik Cohn's description of him in Pop From The Beginning as an ‘updated Elvis Presley . . . moved like him, so fast and flash he flickered’.

Photography by Gerard Mankowitz, I believe, and that below

From December 18, 1965. None of these images were used on the sleeve of December’s Children, yet anyone of them might have been

FOUND! The Rolling Stones – ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ (October 1965):

‘the dividing line between art and commerce’

To my mind, this puts the Stones/Oldham squarely into the continuum between the fine and the popular arts as Lawrence Alloway concieved it and without the need to make the case on their behalf . . . It is just the fact of the matter.

Thank you Frank!

Andy Warhol's PORK – The View From The Penthouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviews of Pin-Ups 1972 from Shindig! and Vive le Rock

Camilla Aisa – Review of 'A Band With Built-In Hate'

Camilla Aisa

Review of ‘A Band With Built-In Hate: The Who From Pop Art To Punk’

Popular Music History, published March 24, 2022

https://journal.equinoxpub.com/PMH/article/download/21897/24797

Cook’s Ferry Inn, Edmonton – learning to lead by following

To anybody who might feel like letting out a sigh and following it with ‘what else is there to say?’ as they face ‘The Who’ in big and bright lettering on the cover of a new book—you have this writer’s sympathy, completely. However, I have some good news for you. Peter Stanfield’s A Band with Built-in Hate is far from being yet another book on The Who. It is much more than that. And Stanfield’s investigation of the band is so consistently wider than simple Who-centred narratives that the book ends up achieving quite a few rare goals (more on this below).

screen grab from Pete Walker’s The Big Switch (1968)

Whilst historiographers and fact-boasting fans might expect the book’s journey to start from Shepherd’s Bush or Acton, it is (rather tellingly) Soho that Stanfield chooses as a starting (and most recurring) location. We’re invited to travel to Whitechapel—where pop music makes its UK ‘debut’ in 1956 at the Independent Group-curated This Is Tomorrow exhibition—before arriving in West London’s well-known (W)holy Land. That’s the thing with Stanfield’s book: from the very first pages he makes it clear that he has no interest in the uninspired retelling of the kind of trivia a quick visit to Wikipedia can take good care of. A Professor of Film at the University of Kent, Stanfield considers The Who—as well as their peers who surrounded the band in their early stages—through a multidisciplinary, dexterous perspective. Crowded Soho is conjured (dirt included) through the posters that populated it, promoting B-movies or upcoming gigs in local clubs.

Portsmouth’s Birdcage Club . . . ‘the pop-art, guitar smashing epic’ and a target to boot.

The very relevance of cinema and visual arts in The Who’s early life is an often-overlooked aspect that Stanfield brilliantly reconsiders. It is thanks to forgotten flicks with nouvelle vague pretensions (and, of course, thanks to Who managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp’s foresight) that we have some of the band’s earliest footage. And thanks to keen attention to contemporary graphic art and its potential, in the mid 1960s The Who were able to offer a palatable preview of both the punch-in-the-gut quality of their live performances and their bespoke take on pop’s developing self-realization: ‘I found Townshend compelling and touching in both his cynicism and self-awareness, but couldn’t help wondering if pop music which, with all its faults, had started as a spontaneous and committed movement, could survive such candour’, George Melly noted in Revolt into Style (1989: 116).

Keith Moon . . . Bridget Riley’s best canvas

The book’s originality in narrating The Who isn’t limited to time (those decisive early steps of UK pop, before the band even came into existence) and place (Soho’s youthful buzz). It also concerns people, or, as one might feel inclined to say reading printed pages, characters. It is clear from the introduction that we’re invited to take our journey hand-in-hand with a few keen observers. Not the band itself, as it might prove either too obvious or short-sighted. Our guides are larger-than-life writers, critics, astute chroniclers, real-life dandies. We meet George Melly (music, television and film critic) right away. And, most importantly, we meet Nik Cohn (considered by some to be the father of rock writing). Perhaps even more than the band themselves, Cohn is the book’s most constant presence.

Bridget Riley ‘Blaze Study’ 1962

Sunn amplifers advert

Revisiting times and places with their most insightful early champions and commentators, it turns out, is more effective than the usual sequence of ubiquitous footage. When it comes to pop creatures as gargantuan as The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or in this case The Who, adopting an outside perspective can be revelatory.

Tour programme USA, 1967

Looking at The Who from an angle that is extraneous to what we might call a rock documentary-like mythologizing approach, A Band with Built-in Hate opens itself to two intriguing prospects. First, it treats its subjects as captivating provocation. The Who’s, and in particular Pete Townshend’s, volatility in embracing the attitude, vocabulary and signifiers of mod or pop art is thoroughly examined. ‘What the Mods taught us was how to lead by following’, Townshend candidly reveals at one point (37). We watch his band enthusiastically identify as mod early on, then dismiss the scene altogether, then proudly reintroduce themselves as pop practitioners: ‘from valueless objects—a guitar, a microphone, a hackneyed pop tune, we extract a new value. We take objects with one function and give them another’, Townshend theorizes in 1966 (76). Now, where exactly does artistic evolution end and well-timed appropriation begin? Stanfield’s book is too discerning to make a point of asking that. Rather, it makes sure that the matter is left open to discussion. Neither apologetic nor accusatory, it gives the reader enough material to thought-fully consider both positions.

The other welcome consequence of Stanfield’s multifaceted approach is that the book proves an absorbing read for avid fans and casual listeners alike. Much like this writer, you don’t need to be a fan of The Who to eagerly devour these pages and their stimulating arguments. At the same time, there is more than enough to consider and explore for completists who have already seemingly read every publication on the band. Also, and importantly, the book sits evenly between the scholarly and the deftly flowing page-turner: a most appropriate middle way, when you remember Nik Cohn praising Who songs for being an ‘obvious reaction against the fashionable psychedelphic [sic] solemnity, against the idea of pop as capital-letter Art [...]. It is all mainline pop, bright and funny and blatantly commercial’ (1967: 13).

As for equally pleasing fans and not-necessarily-fans, here’s where Stanfield’s secret might lie. Often looking from the outside, far from the front row, he treats the non-musical, un-obvious material as much more than mere pretext to explain The Who better. As a result, the reader is more likely to understand the band and their music—as well as the constantly evolving pop culture around them—better.

Where A Band with Built-in Hate’s journey ends is a brilliant insight in itself. ‘My personal motivation on stage is simple’, Townshend told the London Sunday Citizen in 1965 (as quoted in Gary Herman’s The Who, the first publication on the band):

It consists of a hate of every kind of pop music and a hate of everything our group
has done. You are getting higher and higher but chopping away at your own legs.
I prefer to be in this position. It’s very exciting. I don’t see any career ahead. That’s
why I like it—it makes you feel young, feeding insecurity. If you are insecure you
are secure in your insecurity. I still don’t know what I’m going to do (1971: 94).

It is fitting, then, that a book about ‘the new forms of cultural crimes The Who carried out’ would wave its subject goodbye around Quadrophenia. Which is to say, when The Who had indisputably morphed into classic rock and secured a career. When compilation albums and concept albums had become the norm, when stage moves had long been codified and (most dangerously) well accepted. When, arguably, wealth had replaced style. The degeneration of ‘My Generation’, we might call it. It didn’t come without irony or consciousness: ‘I’m desperately trying to sleep off the results of the last leg of the Who tour with a little meditative Mercedes buying’, Townshend would quip after up-and-coming Eddie and the Hot Rods convinced their label to get in touch with him and seek a possible collaboration (229).

Would the Mod Who or the Pop Who hate what The Who had become? And how inevitable was that? It might feel tragic, but that’s not the point. Being a brilliant writer and an acute observer, champion of pop Nik Cohn couldn’t write an obituary. The book leaves us with some words of his that were printed on a promo picture for the band’s 1967–1974 back catalogue: ‘from Shepherd’s Bush Mods to time machine mystic travellers. The Who played longer, harder and straighter, for the people, than anyone else’. What that dash between 1967 and 1974 signified, mattered most to him. Stanfield agrees: ‘The Who made the simple things complicated and the complicated simple; they put pop and art together in a set of couplings which rode the lines between authenticity and artifice, self-determination and co-option, the low and high, the intolerant and the permissive’ (240). When it comes to The Who, duality is key. Thanks also to its own above-mentioned dualities, A Band with Built-in Hate handles this dichotomy in a unique way.

Camilia Aisa blogs at https://psychedelicsidetrips.wordpress.com/

Fats Domino plays the Club International – David Parkinson was there

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Watts on Pin-Ups 1972 – a review

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

Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twenty-Five Times Around the World with Marc Bolan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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