A Hard Day's Night on The Strip and in the Courts With Peter Fonda

Somewhere in that period between The Wild Angels and Easy Rider, when Peter Fonda was busily trying to reinvent himself as a counter-culture outlaw and deflect attention away from his privileged upbringing, his fantasy and real worlds converged.

In 1966 he had two run-ins with the law, one was easily resolved the other went right to the edge.

***

Fonda spent a good part of the 1960s dismissing his more famous father and sister even as he chased their coattails. He’d appeared in light romantic comedies on Broadway, in the teenpic Tammy Takes Over and been promoted by Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper as the ‘new face’ of 1962. He didn’t need to take on such shallow, inconsequential roles, he had the inheritance left by his mother (she’d committed suicide when he was only ten) on which he could live comfortably. Maybe he just lacked in imagination, but family and such insubstantial employment did give him something tangible to kick against.

The year before reality came knocking, he took acid with The Beatles and The Byrds – a rehearsal for his role as an explorer of lysergic infused mind-expansion in Corman’s 1967 fantasy The Trip. His time spent with musicians also had an influence on his bid to become a pop star, cutting a folk-rock single in 1966 with Hugh Masekela as his producer. One side of the 45 was a cover of Donovan’s ‘Catch the Wind’, on the other was an original composition by then unknown Gram Parsons, ‘November Nights’. Not having much of a singing voice didn’t help Fonda’s hip aspirations and his side-line as a pop singer floundered. He did, however, repay his debt to Parsons by securing a cameo for The International Submarine Band in The Trip. Never the hipster, Corman overdubbed Parsons with the Electric Flag who would feature on the film’s soundtrack album (why pay for more than was contracted?). [HERE]

Having played an outlaw biker, Fonda positioned himself as part of the counter-culture and took his camera onto the streets of Hollywood to capture the nation’s youth in revolt. He was 26 years-old but clearly thought to be a threat to the city’s good citizens and was summarily arrested.

The fracas was a teenage riot which mainly took place on weekends. Discontent had been festering for over a year as businessmen, who wanted to develop Sunset Strip, met head-on with white middle-class teenagers who just wanted to have fun. The police enforced curfew on teenagers finally got out of hand on a Saturday in November 1966. (Events anticipating by over a decade The Clash’s ‘White Riot’ and The Mekons’ ascerbic response: ‘Never Been In A Riot’).

The riots didn’t amount to much but they served as notice and symbol of a generational divide grown exponentially since the previous decade’s moral panics about juvenile delinquency.

Out racing Corman, Sam Katzman was quick to exploit the headlines and teen drama of it all with Riot On Sunset Strip, released by AIP in March 1967. As with the company’s earlier JD movies it was the parents who were to blame . . . It was broken homes that made drug abusers out of nice suburban kids. Viewers got to watch the Chocolate Watchband do great impersonations of the Stones and the Yardbirds, hifi freaks got the best soundtrack album of the era and the rest of us got to see Mimsi Farmer freak-out after some lousy rich boy spiked her drink with LSD.

Peter Fonda being arrested, right of picture

The story even made it to the pages of the British weekly pop press, ex-Beatle publicist Derek Taylor, now working for The Byrds, sent back this report for his regular column in Disc and Music Echo (June 4, 1966)

Fonda successfully argued that he was not a rioter but was on the Strip to document events for a film he was making. Getting out of his other bust that year was not so easy.

During post-production on The Wild Angels, Fonda and three others were charged with possession of marijuana though, as it later became clear, this was not for holding a few sticks of weed but, in Fonda’s case, for being the moneyman behind a dope farm. The court case got underway in December 1966, The trial finished before the end of the month with the jury split and the case against Fonda dismissed when a key witness failed to appear (the suggestion in news reports was that she’d been paid off). The judge left Fonda in little doubt that he considered him to be guilty as charged. When the story had first been reported, it seemed only a few plants had been found in a house in Tarzana that Fonda was said to have rented but which he claimed only to have visited to meet with friends. In fact, ‘large quantities of marijuana were found all over the house’, the judged admonished Fonda, ‘and it is inconceivable that you were unaware of its presence in view of your repeated and prolonged visits there.’

For this rebel, having his father testify on his behalf must have rankled and he spent much effort in subsequent press interviews explaining he no longer smoked or drank anything, Easy Rider soon suggested otherwise.

UPI wire photo December 2, 1966

All the above is a sidebar to a chapter on Fonda’s The Hired Hand for my next book, out sometime in 2023.

Rock Revival, Brighton 1968: Advertisements for Peace

1968 and the rock ‘n’ revival as pursued by The Who was in full-flight with ‘Shaking All Over’ and three Eddie Cochran covers added to their set, while The Move, having put ‘Weekend’ on their debut album, issued another Cochran song on their live EP ‘Something Else’. Mick Farren and his pals kept the flame burning bright in the underground press and with his Deviants kept the faith. He also teamed up with Brighton’s Unicorn Bookshop for a run of posters sold under the tag ‘advertisements for peace’ . . . and there was nary a Teddy Boy in sight among these rock history mavens.

Numbers 1–3 are part of a long-ago acquired batch of posters bought by Vinyl Head, Ramsgate. Each is 30 x 20 inches, published in 1968 by Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton with ‘Production: by Mean & Filthy’.

Unicorn Bookshop was situated at 50 Gloucester Road. It was opened by American Bill Butler and ran circa 1966–1974. Its psychedelic–beat–counterculture goods were advertised by a mural that covererd both sides of the shop front and which has recently been restored to its original glory.

There are a number of blog posts on the shop, John May’s site has one of the more detailed accounts [HERE] and there is also a Butler biography by Terry Adams, which gives some background on the selling and distribution of the posters, but there’s little to be found on their design.

Mean & Filthy was a front put together by Mick Farren and Steve Sparkes – Rich Deakin’s Keep It Together has the lowdown on their activities. A revised version of #2 for a Roundhouse gig (with Deviants 3rd on the bill) is reproduced, along with a Dylan, also a Mean and Filthy production, in Mick Farren’s Get On Down history of the rock poster. Based on a cover for Oz, the Dylan was a big seller, designed by Vytas Serelis, artist, sitar player and friend of Marc Bolan.

As Deakin points out, Farren had laid out the thinking behind the series in a piece for IT. . .

Guevara, Dylan, Hendrix and Eddie Cochran – heroes of the revolution

Paul Kaczmarek, who worked with Bill Butler, has very kindly provided the following information about the various rock related posters the shop printed and sold.

There were only three titles directly related to the ‘Rock Revival’ series:

Rock Revival 1 - Gene Vincent  (2,622 printed)

Rock Revival 2 – Elvis Presley (2,565 printed)

Rock Revival 3 – Eddie Cochran (2,500 printed)

These three, along with the Dylan and Hendrix, were the only Mean and Filthy productions – all first published March 1968. There are three variants of the Dylan poster (black/grey, orange and green versions). They were heavily reprinted in the early 1970s with some 10,000 in distribution. The numbering system used related to the sequence of release and was not a continuation of the Rock Revival series, so Jimi Hendrix was Unicorn’s 14th poster (with two variants), it was also based on a Vytas Serelis illustration. Other posters that are of interest include:

#8 – ‘Beatles scene’ (drawing by Richard O’Mahoney)

#36 – Paul McCartney (PK has found references to this but has not seen a copy).

#37 – John Mayall

B1 – Maharishi and The Beatles (drawing)

C1 – Eric Clapton (PK has not seen a copy only references to it in sales invoices)

The three Rock Revival posters link effortlessly with Farren and Barker’s Watch Out Kids and with the aesthetic of Ian Sippen and Peter Shertser’s Union Pacific label [HERE] . . . This was greaser rock ‘n’ roll for the new generation and Mean and Filthy had their bedroom walls covered.

My thanks to Phyll Smith, Don Lickley, Paul Kaczmarek and @heaven_mirror for feeding me with material and insights. Paul’s book, Poetry, Publishing and Prosecutions – Bill Butler and Unicorn Bookshop is due to be published in 2023

Nik Cohn – Lost and Found: 'Mad Mister Mo'

Nik Cohn has published only a handful of short stories, ‘Mad Mister Mo’ from the October 1966 edition of King magazine is therefore something of a curiosity piece .

Given that his father was a celebrated history professor I guess you could chance a Freudian reading of this story of Mad Mo the history teacher: ‘He smelled of chalk all over and wore a ragged black gown with holes in it. When he walked, he gathered his black gown in tight around him like a shroud’. He is a monstrous figure who ‘threw out his arms like a mad messiah and he preached me lust and thieving and blashemy. He shouted at me and he said that religion was bad and murder good, love was bad and hate was right’. He preached me the triumphant victories of evil’.

Mo is certainly mad, but is he a tyrant, drunken fool or phantom figure of a child’s imagination?

Illustration by Peter Adkins

King was a fairly high-end men’s magazine, backed initially by Paul Raymond. It ran from 1964–68 when it was subsumed by Mayfair. I like to think its ideal reader found his surrogate in this male model puting some shape into the latest line in car coats – the well groomed man . . .

This issue also featured a piece and photograph by the great Val Wilmer on Thelonious Monk

Following on the heels of Cohn’s story is a report on drugs and Oxford, there’s no writer’s credit, but I imagine whoever penned this piece had some first-hand knowledge of both Oxford and the scene even if the tone is sensationalist.

The image of the student in mortor board and gown transforming into a bird imprinted on a sugar cube is rather wonderful, blocked and trippy even

What really catches the eye is the description of the dealer working the room with a Bob Dylan record under his arm:

The boy in the combat jacket with a face like the lead singer of the Yardbirds, but with a different intention has found a customer. In the airless bedroom, among the socks, he carefully unrolls a cigarette, watched by the young and eager faces of his new-found friends, and spills the tobacco on to the back of his Bob Dylan record.

The Pusher Men of Oxford . . . but ‘with a different intention’. Rave (May 1966)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lenny Kaye wrote up the report of the gig

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

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

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

Billboard (August 25, 1973)

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

Sounds (August 25, 1973)

also from Sounds (August 25, 1973)

A complete run of Rock Scene can be found HERE

Amphetamine Academia – Ugly Things Review by Dave Laing

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

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

Dave Laing

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

That Very Bizarre New Group Called The Dolls – Lillian Roxon

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

Sunday News (June 4, 1972)

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

Sunday News (July 30, 1972)

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

Roy Hollingworth Melody Maker (July 22, 1972)

Sunday News (September 3, 1972)

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

Sunday News (September 17, 1972)

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

Sunday News (September 24, 1972)

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

Sunday News (May 6, 1973)

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

Sunday News (August 5, 1973)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday News (December 19, 1971)

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

Sunday News (February 20, 1972)

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

Sunday News (February 27, 1972)

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

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

Sunday News (March 5, 1972)

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

Sydney Morning Herald (March 5, 1972)

Sunday News (June 18, 1972)

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

Sunday News (July 30, 1972)

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

Sunday News (August 6, 1972)

Sunday News (September 24, 1972)

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

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

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

Daily News (September 30, 1972)

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

Sunday News (October 8, 1972)

Sydney Morning Herald (October 8, 1972)

Sydney Morning Herald (December 10, 1972)

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

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

and that would be Iggy Stooge . . .

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

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

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

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

Sydney Morning Herald (November 1, 1970)

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

Sydney Morning Herald (June 6, 1971)

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

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

Sunday News (July 23, 1972)

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

Sunday News (April 6, 1973)

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

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

New York Sunday News (August 5, 1973)

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

New York Sunday News (August 11, 1973)

Sydney Morning Herald’s Fun House review

Sydney Morning Herald (December 19, 1970)

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

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

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!