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

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

Sunday News (December 19, 1971)

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

Sunday News (February 20, 1972)

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 The Garbo look has been replaced by short-hair and Star Trek jumpsuits.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

Sunday News (February 27, 1972)

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

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

Sunday News (March 5, 1972)

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

Sydney Morning Herald (March 5, 1972)

Sunday News (June 18, 1972)

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

Sunday News (July 30, 1972)

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

Sunday News (August 6, 1972)

Sunday News (September 24, 1972)

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

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

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

Daily News (September 30, 1972)

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

Sunday News (October 8, 1972)

Sydney Morning Herald (October 8, 1972)

Sydney Morning Herald (December 10, 1972)

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

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

and that would be Iggy Stooge . . .

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

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

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

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

Sydney Morning Herald (November 1, 1970)

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

Sydney Morning Herald (June 6, 1971)

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

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

Sunday News (July 23, 1972)

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

Sunday News (April 6, 1973)

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

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

New York Sunday News (August 5, 1973)

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

New York Sunday News (August 11, 1973)

Sydney Morning Herald’s Fun House review

Sydney Morning Herald (December 19, 1970)

Glam! When Superstars Rocked the World, 1970–74

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

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

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

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

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

 

Footnote:

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

 

This beautiful original courtesy of The Seth Man

Iggy and the Stooges London Sessions 1972

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside . . . Heavy Liquid and London Sessions

Andy Warhol's PORK – The View From The Penthouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fats Domino plays the Club International – David Parkinson was there

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Watts on Pin-Ups 1972 – a review

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

Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twenty-Five Times Around the World with Marc Bolan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aces: the girl group sound in 1972

Photo by Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang (1959)

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

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

Photo by Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang (1959)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Warholed Up with Suicide and the New York Dolls

Suicide: the life and soul of the party

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

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

Suicide were given top billing by Masters:

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

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

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

 

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

More on the Dolls appearance in Pin-Ups 1972

Test Pressing – Iggy and the Stooges 'Raw Power'

In May 2020 a test pressing of Raw Power went up for auction on eBay, the price eventually going beyond the few shillings I had saved, but I kept the images that were posted

Dated December 8, 1972, two months before its US release on February 7, 1973. it should be in a museum or even better in my collection, it’s a one-off (or one of a very few). It would be the jewel in any collector’s crown. – a fetish item for the ages. But, you know, it is just a white label pressing of a stock copy, I’ve got a couple of those and, having not won the auction, I’ve still got the coin in my pocket.

But take a closer look. The timings suggest side one and two were flipped, which adds to the uniqueness. Then look again, side 1 has five tracks, not the four on the release version, and side 2 has only three.

So what was the running order? Dave Marsh’s hyper-enthusiastic review in Creem’s March 1973 edition gives a couple of clues.

He lists the title track as the second band on the top side, so my guess is it still kicks off with ‘Search & Destroy’, but which mix I wonder? Iggy’s? Or Bowie’s as found uniquely on the original UK release? Whatever, ‘Gimme Danger’ is the third track. After that no more clues from DM.

Working with the timings given on the white labels, and some some addition and subtraction on my part, Side 2 must be:

Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell

I Need Somebody

Death Trip

Side 1 then would look something like this:

Search and Destroy

Raw Power

Gimme Danger

Shake Appeal

Penetration

How’s that play in your head? While you’re pondering over this sequence and whether it rolls better this way than it does following Tony Defries’ edict that the songs needed to go fast one, slow one, fast one , as was eventually released, Dave Marsh wrote that their are ‘nine songs’ on the album, not the eight we have and love, perhaps he was shit at counting or adding up . . . or he had a different review copy. Think on that dear collector.

For those Raw Power devotees out there, here’s Mick Rock’s little known review of the album in the UK skin mag Club International (July 1973). More of this kinda thing is buried deep in Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll. Available to preorder or in the shops early next month . . . Get Some!

Rock 'n' Roll's Evolutionary Tree: James Taylor v Groin Thunder

In March 1971 Time put James Taylor on its cover and inside explained that his popularity was the result of the ‘fading out of ear-numbing, mind-blowing acid rock’ and ‘the softening of the youth revolution’. What was being listened to on campuses across the nation was a’ kind of Americana rock’, which celebrates such things as

country comfort, Carolina sunshine, morning frost in the Berkshires. What all of them seem to want most is an intimate mixture of lyricism and personal expression—the often exquisitely melodic reflections of a private ‘I’

Which was why James Taylor was ‘marked for death’ by Lester Bangs who thought the future lay in the past. Pop was evolving into the new chamber music and what he wanted was more groin thunder . . .

The Troggs don’t feature in the magazine’s family tree of rock, Reg Presley never evolved into a balladier like Van Morrison, he never tapped his inner well of melancholy. Such desperate times called for a Manifesto for Third Generation Rock ‘n’ Roll . . . 1972 would right so many wrongs.

The Hard Sell: Pin-Ups 1972

‘This intensely researched, vividly detailed book plunges you into the electric moment of 1972 – as year as revolutionary in rock history as 1967 or 1977.’

Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy and Rip It Up and Start Again

‘Peter Stanfield has scavenged the ruins – foxed paperbacks, illegible underground press layouts, yellowed national newspaper cuttings, tatty pages from Disc and NME and creased copies of curious sex magazines (including Curious) – to join the dots between art and artifice, from avant-garde interiors and anti-fashion boutiques to wayward rockers, glam-Mods and anachronistic Teds. Pin-Ups 1972 is an exhilarating ride through po-mo popular culture at its peak.’

Paul Gorman, The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren and The Look: Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion

Skinhead Apocalypse – The Charlie George Disco Spins on Forever

1971, 13 years-old. I wore Doc Martens, monkey boots sometimes, tonik trousers and orange tag Levi’s, but not a Crombie. My mates had Crombie imitations but I had a Millets parka (what was that about? Some shallow echo of Mod fashion?). I wasn’t a Skinhead or a Suedehead not even a Bovver Boy, though I followed Chelsea as much as any suburban, New Town teen might. We lived for football; at school we played it in the breaks and in PE. We played in the park after school and at weekends we played more football or we played Subbuteo. And we went to football matches; Spurs, Arsenal, OPR and Watford were who my closest friends supported. I went with them to see their teams as much as I went to see mine.

At the youth club we kicked footballs about and watched the girls dance in formation. At my mate’s house, after school, after the kick about, we listened to his older sister’s records, Max Romeo’s ‘Wet Dream’ and Prince Buster’s ‘Big Five’ over and over again. Out of reach, a distant figure, his sister seemed impossibly hip. There was no one in my family like her. But these things soon passed, as orange tag Levi’s were exchanged for Skinner jeans and Sta-Prest for channel-seamed flares. That was the sum of it for me, a fleeting moment before my interest switched from football to music – to Roxy, Lou Reed, Bowie, Alice and Slade.

Illustration by Malcolm Harrison, NTA, that accompanied Basil George’s ‘Let’s Dance’ Game v.1, n.12 (1974)

Late 1974 and Skinheads are figures of the past not only for me but also for Game magazine’s Basil George. 1974 was a long way from the point in time when Skinheads joined youth culture’s ‘long line of apocalyptic syndromes’, he wrote in his introduction to a lurid story about the contemporary dance scene. Since his Mod days at the Flamingo and Marquee, George hadn’t spent much time in the clubs, his last memorable experience on the dance floor had been at another Soho dive as the 60s turned into the 70s:

There in a dingy, smoky tomb I fumbled through a few half-hearted and fearful dances with a succession of apathetic girls with hair so short even the dim, bloodshot light failed to conceal horrifying glimpses of feminine scalp . . . Even more extreme than the short hair of the girls were skinny, but none-the-less menacing boys with their hair shaved to the point of baldness. And the boys all wore check Ben Sherman shirts, old fashioned braces, jeans cut short as much as six inches above the ankle and the mandatory ‘bovver boots’.

This scene was not for him, but the dancers held his fascination. Along one wall, the boys lent back and moved only their hips to the music. In touching distance, the girls faced the boys and moved in time. ‘Sure enough the girls dresses were pushed high up at the front and here and there was the glint of an open fly.’ The dance of sex played on.

Paul ‘Smiler’ Anderson and Mark Baxter, Scorcha! Skins, Suedes and Style From The Streets 1967-1973 (Omnibus Press, 2021)

In Paul Anderson and Mark Baxter’s Scorcha!, a sumptuously illustrated history of Skins, Suedeheads and street style, 1967-1973, you can find numerous examples of the scene described by Basil George, though the prurient aspect, the hitched skirts and open jeans are not on show. Decorated throughout by literally hundreds of record labels, this is a book about music, fashion and dancing. The football side of things is a backdrop, not the centre of the action, which wasn’t quite how some saw it at the time.

Suggs and Paul Weller provide endorsements for the book, not Alan Hudson or Charlie George. Both musicians were old enough to be aware of Skin and Suedehead fashion but, like me, just a little too young to be fully a part of it. Suggs was 11 years old in 1971 when Suedeheads took hold of his imagination, a ‘mind-blowing’ encounter. For Paul Weller, two-years older than Suggs, this style evolution was his formative experience: ‘The music, the look, they’re the things that shaped who I am’.

The fantasy of self-determination that Weller and Suggs longed to emulate, that they sensed belonged to the older style leaders, they will take with them into their respective bands, The Jam and Madness. In turn, what these two do with that fantasy will form the doctrine the book’s authors follow. ‘It was probably around 1970 or 1971, I would have only been 5 or 6 years old’ writes Anderson of his first memory of Skinheads. “I can see them now’ writes Baxter, ‘I was only 8 or 9, but boy, did they make an impression’. Both came of age for the Mod and Skinhead revival. Each generation carried within itself that frisson of envy. With their Mod older brothers, the original Skinheads also shared that yearning desire to have been part of that which is always, tantalisingly just out of reach; a time that seems more exciting, more vital, more alive than the present.

Anderson and Baxter have pulled together a fascinating array of first-hand accounts and primary source material, published and private, that makes Scorcha! easily the most important text on the topic – as definitive in its own way as Richard Barnes’ Mods and Johnny Stuart’s Rockers are with their subjects

According to the co-authors, one of the earliest media reports on Skinheads was carried in Rolling Stone (#38 July 26, 1969) of all places. This is somewhat less surprising if you know that the feature appeared in the short-lived UK edition and not in the American version. It was published early enough in the scheme of things that the youth cult hadn’t yet been fixed to the point where its name could be agreed on. In ‘Skinheads and Cherry Reds’, Gerry Stimson wrote:

They are the people you may see on the fringe of things, at free concerts shouting out for their favourite football team when everyone else wants to listen to the music, hanging around outside the Roundhouse trying to annoy people with long hair, or you may see them just hanging around on the street. They are the kids who have short cropped hair, wear boots and levis with braces. They don’t really have a name, bullet-heads, spike-heads, thin-heads, bother boys, or agro boys.

In February of the following year, American Rolling Stone (#52) did get around to covering Britain’s latest youth craze, by then it had been named. Like Stimson, Jan Holdenfield focused on the Skinhead’s antipathy to Rock culture and their identification with football, but also provides some class analysis. In ‘Skinheads: Working Class Gladiators’, he wrote:

British football has a glamour of its own, provided by often-pretty/always-tough players from the working class who have made it on grit and physical style. Rock stars are heroes for the middle classes.

That’s a cultural shift, from music to football, that Pete Fowler, writing at the height of T. Rextasy, thinks tells a tale worth listening to in order to demolish the idea that Marc Bolan, third-generation rock ‘n’ roller, had universal teen appeal like Elvis and the Beatles had with their respective audiences. Bolan doesn’t compete with them in terms of sales and is, anyway, Fowler thought, a ‘self-made Fabian’ rather than Elvis’ heir. More significant than any of this was the schism in teen culture, which meant T. Rex could never compete with those who went before. The Rock/Pop audience had fragmented, a division that was exposed by the cult of the Skinhead.

 Fowler reckoned the Skins to be ‘by far the biggest single group among this country’s teenagers . . . For every one little middle-class girl with sequins around her eyes, there must be two-dozen in their two-tone Mohair suits. It’s a walk-over’. The Skins predecessors were the Mods but unlike them that culture was intimately linked to pop music: ‘If the Mods idolised their Faces, the Rock stars in return loved the Mods – it was this dialectic that was responsible for all the good things that happened in British Rock in the mid-60s’. Except for The Beatles, the Mods’ favourite groups were all accessible, you could see them at ‘your local Big Beat Club’. My generation was a united generation. The international success of British groups destroyed that intimacy as did the internationalisation of rock music with the shift in focus to the West Coast sound, all indicative of the fact that Rock had been ‘taken over by students’. ‘1967 was the great divide for Rock’, it became music for the court of intellectuals and stopped being accessible and meaningful to all. The arrival of the Skinhead in 1969 symbolised the backlash to this state of affairs.

The rejection of Rock’s new community of long-haired students is mirrored in the Skinhead’s embrace of black American and West Indian music. This was not self-indulgent music, but music for dancing. The scene is not the live gig but the club disco. When the key venues for Rock shifted from clubs to university halls the audience changed, working-class kids were shut out.

Music, Fowler convincingly argued, was not central to Skinhead culture as it was for the Mods, it was peripheral; football was at the core of their style. The distinction, Fowler suggested, is similar to that between George Best, who personified a Mod’s consumerist instincts, and, Charlie George, who despite his long hair, embodied the Skinhead’s attitude that was best displayed when he raised a two-finger retort to Derby fans after he scored for Arsenal: ‘When the Skins root for Charlie George at Highbury – they are rooting for themselves’, wrote Fowler. Just as the Mods who danced in front of The Who at the Railway Hotel were doing it for themselves.

This, really, is why Marc Bolan isn’t as popular as he likes to make out. He’s made no positive impression on the Skins at all. Bolan is popular . . . but the basis for his support is very narrowly confined. To be accurate, Marc Bolan is idolised by Grammar School girls between the ages of 11 and 14. (Skins who might buy T Rex records to dance to, don’t idolise or identify with Bolan at all).  

. . .

The bovver boys look like becoming the first major sub-cultural group not to produce any major rock stars! They, for Rock, are the lost generation . . . The survival of Rock has depended on its position as the core of Male Teen Culture. But the bovver boys have rejected Rock’s traditional status which explains the lack of vitality in British Rock in the early 70s.

If this is true, and I think it is, then the significance of The Jam and Madness lies less in their role leading a Mod and Skinhead revival than in the idea that they put bands, not football, at the centre of that resurgence. In doing so they created a circuit with the original Mod movement that Skinhead culture had broken. Audience and bands were reunited, music was at the very heart of the revival’s subcultural activities and interests. Scorcha! reflects this aspect of revivalism in the way in constructs its history of Skins and Suedeheads as foremost a music and fashion phenomena when some might well argue it was really all about Charlie George.

Pete Fowler’s essay ’Skins Rule’ was first published in Charlie Gillett (ed.) Rock File (NEL, 1972)