www.jonsavage.com

Sorry for break in transmission, have been very busy with Joy Division “Unknown Pleasures” show in Macclesfield. (See pic) Links to a gallery of photos and a video tour will be posted on this site shortly.

Other news is that the Arena “The Brian Epstein Story” is being shown again on BBC4 on the 24th August. (see pic of BE with his factotum Lonnie Trimble in 1965). In the meantime I’d like to mention a few pop culture books that have been recently published and that, given the shrunken review space almost everywhere, you might have missed. First up is Jeremy Reed’s “The King of Carnaby Street: The Life of John Stephen” – a fascinating biography of the young gay Glaswegian who revolutionised British youth fashions during the mid sixties. Researched with the full assent of Stephen’s long-time partner, Bill Franks, the book is full of fascinating detail about the fifties’ gay underground – in particular the ‘Vince’ shops and label run by pioneer Bill Green – and how that impacted upon the avant-garde of modernist fashion that went global in the mid sixties. Digressions include the importance of speed to the emerging mod movement and its philosophical implications, as well as the difficulties and pleasures of an underground gay subculture pre the partial legalisation of the 1967 SOA.

I’d also recommend the latest from Djhistory.com, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s “The Record Players: DJ Revolutionaries”: long interviews with 46 DJ’s, running from the 1940′s (Jimmy Savile) right into the 21st century. The cast includes Jeff Dexter, John Peel, Ian Levine, Tom Moulton, Nicky Siano, Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, Frankie Knuckles….. Check out the interview with David Mancuso from the Loft – ‘I had certain things I wanted to do to send a message, and it had more to do with social progress’ – and his amazing ‘Loft 100″ playlist and then hope that the two double cd “David Mancuso Presents The Loft” comps are reissued so you don’t have to pay crazy prices for them. Finally John Einarson’s “Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love” is the most thorough and solid Love book extant: much new information in this somewhat overtold story, and plenty of detail about the recording of those classic three mid sixties albums and the more varied but rarely dull ones that followed. Einarson has a real scoop: an unpublished Arthur Lee memoir from 2003 and onwards, extracts of which are presented throughout the book. Here’s Lee on Love in 1966: ‘we had the perfect band. There was nothing like it in the world. We had the sound, the look, the crowds and the songs that the youth, and the Hollywood scene, wanted. We were so unique and sounded, and looked, so good, it didn’t seem to matter what colour we were; and that is as good as it gets in this life’.

Tags: "Forever Changes", Afrika Bambaataa, Arthur Lee, Bill Green, David Mancuso, Djhistory.com, Frankie Knuckles, Grandmaster Flash, Ian Levine, Jeff Dexter, Jeremy Reed, John Stephen, Joy Division, Kool Herc, Nicky Siano, Tom Moulton, Unknown Pleasures

Posted on August 23, 2010 at 4:45 pm  5 Comments

Just returned from New York where the Johan Kugelberg’s pop-up/ parasite Boo-Hooray gallery hosted an exhibition of The Secret Public – the montage magazine that Linder Sterling and I produced in late 1977.

Here is a tour of the show, and there is an interview at GQ here.

The Secret Public was originally published by Richard Boon through New Hormones, catalogue number ORG 2. ORG 1 was of course Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch and by a strange and welcome synchronicity the band were in New York the same week, performing their first two albums – Another Music In A Different Kitchen and Love Bites. Playing at Irving Plaza – a beautiful old balconied hall – the group were fantastic: playing all the 22 tracks pretty much straight through at a rattling pace. Driven by drummer Darry Farrant – who was exemplary – they were exciting, intense and extremely good humoured: Steve and Pete were obviously having a ball, as were the several hundred strong audience. Check out Nothing Left:

Even the announcement of a bomb scare – someone had left propane canisters in the back of a nearby vehicle and the police had blocked off a whole section of 14th St and the surrounding area – couldn’t spoil the mood. As Pete Shelley noted, resuming ESP: ‘now where were we?’. They did several encores, finishing with Orgasm Addict, by which time we were damp puddles on the venue floor. The previous night I saw the Stooges play a private party – for Ray Ban indeed – at the Music Hall in Williamsburg (just down the street from the wonderful Academy Records Annex): doesn’t sound that promising but the Williamson era group nailed several tracks from Raw Power – see “Search and Destroy” here:

– as well as great versions of 5 Foot 1 and Shake Appeal. Iggy stage-dived, let his pants hang VERY low, and invited the audience up on stage. I shed a tear during I Need Somebody. So the corporate nature of the event was easily transcended.

Tags: Buzzcocks, Iggy and the Stooges, Irving Plaza, James Williamson, Johan Kugelberg, Linder Sterling, Music Hall Williamsburg, New Hormones, Richard Boon

Posted on May 26, 2010 at 2:30 pm  7 Comments

Like a lot of people, I’m still coming to terms with the news of Malcolm McLaren’s death. Without him, there would have been no British Punk, and no most of us in our present form. Sure, something would have occurred in 1977, but it would have been a slightly sharper Pub Rock, without the art, the danger and the depth. McLaren wanted to shake up the English as hard as he could, and – thanks to the talent and courage of the Sex Pistols – he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. His legacy will be discussed and assimilated during the months to come, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with an excerpt from the interview I did with him for England’s Dreaming in summer 1989. He’s talking about a possible movie script that ties into his managerial obsessions:

‘I want to make the first real truly, gangster movie, along the lines of Long Good Friday, within the context of rock’n'roll. Doing it like Once Upon A Time In America, and doing that whole robber baron trip, from the outskirts of Wolverhampton to London to the big world, the big toughie going to America and acting the big toughie and getting away with millions of pounds and landing in Lichtenstein with further problems and winding up somewhere else in some gigantic wonderful tragedy, a Danton-Robespierre of rock’n'roll history set from the point of view of the London thug entrepreneur, gay managerial circuit. Larry Parnes meets Peter Grant meets Brian Epstein meets Brian Jones meets Tom Watkins.

‘Grant is the core, and he’s a most magnificent character. He’s a Faustian, in a sense, and there’s a fabulous movie there. It’s something that people have touched upon in the odd rock’n'roll almanac, but not given it the true gangsterism, because they can’t associate rock’n'roll with the Richardson Gang. But we can, and we can do it in a gallant way. Just as America made The Godfather, and made the Mafia heroic and interesting and intriguing, something that everyone was obsessed by’.

‘Rock’n'roll has always been treated in a kitschy, campy, happy-go-lucky or silly, looking upon it as some dreadful tragedy. They haven’t looked at it as tough, hard-nosed gangsterism with style. Performance got a little like it, but I think Performance did it in a 60s idiom, but we want to talk about that it ran from ’55 to ’76 to ’85 or whatever. Something that ran the gamut, that gives us a genuine trail. Once Upon a Time in America‘.

You were starting to do that epic myth with the Swindle, weren’t you?

‘Well, the Sex Pistols was more us preventing the whole thing from turning into a dreadful tragedy, and turning it into a fantastic rock’n'roll enigma. That’s what we tried to do, to lie incredibly. We did it quite successfully. Under psychoanalysis, it would probably come out that I was living out my childhood, which is in some respects true, but that’s not what we really cared about at the time. What we were concerned about at the time was just fucking running riot, man. The irresponsible nature of it all was the key to it, and once people started becoming responsible… we prevented it becoming responsible for as long as we could hold out. You never wanted to be part of the New Wave, rock’n'roll liberal tradition, looking like you were doing good things. I never believed that was behind Eddie Cochran, or Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley was a punk rocker, and so was Gene Vincent. So was Marilyn Monroe. So was anybody who was irresponsible and lived their lives in a way that you felt bigger bolder and better than you could. They were punks, they were anti-establishment, and they were gods. Marilyn Monroe today is bigger than ever, and so is Sid Vicious. I don’t see Johnny Rotten in the Lower East Side on a t-shirt. I see Sid Vicious all the bloody time. That’s got to be the difference’.

‘Rotten thought the Sex Pistols were his but the Sex Pistols were nobody’s. If they had any relationship, they had it with Reginald Bosanquet, who came in and bought black rubber knickers from Jordan in the shop, and went on News At Ten wearing them, and when he gave a slight smile, Jordan was supposed to believe it was for her. He was subversive, he was drunk, he was the guy that we all thought was a punk, giving out News At Ten. He was the direct relationship to the SEX shop, in turn a great relationship with the group themselves. It wasn’t the group themselves, it was everybody who was in the path of the media, or had a sense of power that we would consider gods. Old women consider those newscasters gods. We considered him a poor geezer, when he used to come in every morning and give us flowers for Jordan. We loved this guy, even though he was often so drunk he could hardly speak, he was red-faced, dreadfully infatuated with Jordan, and he couldn’t give a shit, and he was a wonderful, wonderful character. It was that character which was part of the SEX shop, of which the Sex Pistols were also a part’.

That sign said, in those big pink sponge letters, ginormous letters, making you think that this is not just another shop on the King Road, selling some third rate St Martin’s fashion school designs, this was a shop selling things you would normally be sending for, mail order, from the small ads of the Observer, and getting it back in a brown paper bag, you didn’t have to think in such a voyeuristic fashion. You could come in and buy it first-hand.

Didn’t Steve have that attitude as well?

Yeah, because Steve was a street kid. If it wasn’t for Steve there wouldn’t have been any group. Steve was the kid that was constantly thieving out of my shop, the one I had to constantly rally behind, and grab, and ultimately, through that grabbing, there was some fatal eye contact. It was like Fagin to the Artful Dodger. You thought, here’s another rogue. Less articulate, but can certainly run faster. It was a character that you couldn’t do other than admire and like. I was seduced by him. It was like Larry Parnes looking at Billy Fury, except that I didn’t go to bed with him. That was the only real difference. You had this marvellous, secret eye contact. You didn’t have to talk about Whistler, or Wilde, or TS Eliot, or Gene Vincent. You didn’t have to talk about any of those things, there was just a sense of understanding. That’s what kept me afloat in that whole gang. It was that. We always went back to it, whether it was the Anarchy in the UK tour, or pissed off in America, you went back and sat next to Steve Jones, and it was alright.’

* The photos that accompany this blog were taken by John Tiberi, aka Boogie – who worked with McLaren from 1977 to 1979 – during the filming of “The Great Rock’n Roll Swindle”. They will be featured in a great new book he is planning which will include his Sex Pistols photographs, many of which have never been seen. For more details, go to: www.johntiberi.com

Tags: "Performance", Brian Epstein, Brian Jones, Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, John Tiberi ("Boogie"), Jordan, Larry Parnes, Marilyn Monroe, Peter Grant, Reginald Bosanquet, Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious, Steve Jones, Tom Watkins

Posted on April 13, 2010 at 12:05 pm  4 Comments

“When there’s too much of nothing
Nobody should look.”

December 2009: Rage Against The Machine organise the music buying public into purchasing more copies of their track Killing in the Name than the X-Factor winner Joe McElderry – Simon Cowell’s choice for the Christmas number one.
Cowell, obviously severely miffed, goes on television news and talks of launching a new ‘democratic’ X-Factor type show where the viewing public vote on ‘important’ issues: Bring back hanging? Eat more burgers? Freedom to be obese?  That kind of thing?? A media circus ensues.

On such occasions we can often turn to Bob Dylan for a commentary – he’s usually been there, mapped out the territory and sung wisdom from his soul. In this case it was one of those misrepresented (by his record company) Basement Tapes recorded at Big Pink with The Band in 1967 after he withdrew from the mercurial maelstrom of 1966. The first verse of one of these songs Too Much of Nothing explains our predicament:

“Now, too much of nothing
Can make a man feel ill at ease
One man’s temper might rise
While another man’s temper might freeze
In the day of confession
We cannot mock a soul
Oh, when there’s too much of nothing
No one has control”

Doesn’t that just say it all?
Over the Christmas holiday 2009 there was far too much of nothing on our freeview/Sky/freesat televisions and on the churning airwaves of our digital multi-choice radios. The cultural fragmentation stimulated and aided by the Internet, I phones, Wii, Twitter and all the rest, means the centre not only could not hold but had melted and flown before our eyes. About 10 million people did watch David Tennant’s Doctor Who on Christmas day but that was about it (and that apparently featured another ‘end times’ scenario for good old planet earth).

It is no surprise that Dylan chose to follow the first verse of his Basement Tape song with a chorus that featured T.S. Eliot’s wives Valerie and Vivienne –

“Say hello to Valerie
Say hello to Vivienne”

Vivienne Haigh-Wood married Eliot in 1915; Valerie Fletcher became his second wife in 1947. This was undoubtedly a nod to The Wasteland, Eliot’s epic poem of emptiness. Of course Dylan had already featured Eliot fighting with Ezra Pound two –years earlier in his own epic Desolation Row. Some critics have written off Too Much of Nothing as a lightweight mundane little song, Paul Williams even positing that the musicians sound bored with the whole thing. However, according to Michael Grey’s research Dylan is drawing from Ecclesiastes when he sings

“Now, its all been done before,
It’s all been written in the book”

which could be taken as a tired philosophy on the pointlessness of it all or as Dylan’s commentary on the treadmill he had found himself on during his break-neck touring and three albums in eighteen months period, for after he’s name checked Eliot’s wives he sings:

“Send them all my salary
On the waters of oblivion”

In Dylan’s case the Basement Tapes represent his quest to escape from the void of nothingness:

“Lost time is not found again”

Odds and Ends

“We’re so alone
And life is brief”

Tears of Rage

“Pick up your money
And pack up your tent
You ain’t goin’ nowhere”

You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere

“Nothing is better, nothing is best
Take heed of this and get plenty of rest”

Nothing Was Delivered

“And after every plan had failed
“And there was nothing more to tell”

This Wheel’s on Fire

These songs lead us on to the redemptive journey through John Wesley Harding to Slow Train Coming and Oh Mercy.

What Dylan is showing us here is that this emptiness, the lack of true culture, the underpinning of a real spirituality leaves society open to all kind of ills. ‘Can make a man feel ill at ease’ – all around we see the fear and anxiety present in the world, which in the third verse of Too Much of Nothing can turn the individual into a liar or make him mean.

Strangely many critics choose not to comment on this song, for example Christopher Ricks and Greil Marcus. Yet it was the first of the Basement Tape songs to be covered by Peter, Paul and Mary charting in November 1967. We could wish for a good strong beefed-up cover version of this song during 2010. It would not chart or sell millions but it would re-contextualise and throw light on the cultural collapse we are currently experiencing. Oh for such intelligence to be given a mainstream voice at this point.

Tags: Basement Tapes, Bob Dylan, Ecclesiastes, Ezra Pound, Joe McElderry, John Welsey Harding, Oh Mercy, Peter Paul and Mary, Rage Against the Machine, Simon Cowell, Slow Train Coming, T.S. Eliot, The Band, Valerie Fletcher, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, X-Factor

Posted on March 24, 2010 at 5:40 pm  21 Comments

With all the various realisations about climate change, the earth’s carrying capacity, the implications of our lifestyle, over-population etc I thought I’d go back and see how musicians past and present have dealt with ecological themes. This is a first-time trawl through the topic, noting that – for all the vitriol slung their way over the last thirty years – the hippies had an active ecological critique and that this found its way into late 60’s and early 70’s music.

One marker of the way that the topic came into public consciousness was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. That year Malvina Reynolds wrote The Rain to protest nuclear testing in the earth’s atmosphere. Two years later, the Searchers recorded a version of Reynolds’ song as What Have They Done To The Rain. The lyric is fairly vague but the Searchers give it their customary sweet, emotional treatment: it made the UK top 20 in late 1964 and you can see it on youtube:

From early 1966, the Yardbirds’ Shapes of Things is a key High Sixties record: a huge UK hit with Keith Relf’s gothic vocals, a super-hot Jeff Beck solo, and the following lyrics: ‘now the trees are almost green/ But will they still be seen?/ When time and tide have been/
Fall into your passing hands/ Please don’t destroy these lands/ Don’t make them desert sands’. They continued this theme on their 1966 album, particularly on Farewell.

The Doors second epic, When The Music’s Over is not overtly ecological – Morrison has a lot to get off his chest – but it does contain the following, haunting section: ‘what have they done to the Earth/ What have they done to our fair sister?/ Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her/ Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn/ And tied her with fences/And dragged her down’.

As early as 1967, there was a powerful ‘back to the land’ movement, away from technology and consumerism and the money machine. For more, see Lisa Law’s book Flashing In The Sixties (US) and the work of Donovan and Vashti Bunyan in the UK (Kieran Evans’ recent film, From Here To Before, is an excellent introduction). Songs about going back to the country are plentiful in late 60’s rock, from Quicksilver’s Shady Grove to Canned Heat’s Going Up The Country to the inevitable Woodstock. (see Guardian blog here).

One of the earliest and most incisive was Neil Young’s Here We Are In the Years, a stand-out track on his excellent (and much under-rated) first solo album. Young relates all the ills of a youth-obsessed, reified consumer society to a lack of respect for the natural world: ‘while people planning trips to stars/ Allow another boulevard to claim/ A quiet country lane/ It’s insane’.

Ray Davies’ concerns about the modern world burst forth on Apeman, a big 1970 hit for the Kinks. ‘I’m no better than the animals sitting in the cages in the zoos, man’, he sings in this catalogue of woes: ‘over-population and inflation and starvation’. Ecology raises its head in the memorable section: ‘I look out my window, but I can’t see the sky/ ‘Cos the air pollution is fogging up my eyes/ I want to get out of this city alive’. Fogging sounds suspiciously like fucking.

‘They paved paradise, put up a parking lot’, begins Joni Mitchell on one of her most upbeat songs, Big Yellow Taxi; ‘with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot’. The lyrics are straight out of Silent Spring: ‘hey farmer, farmer, put away your DDT/ I don’t care about spots on my apples/ Leave me the birds and the bees – please’. Her quicksilver laugh at the end is a classic moment.

Written by Skip Battyn, Kim Fowley and Roger McGuinn, the Byrds’ Hungry Planet (from their patchy Untitled double) is even more explicit – and prescient: ‘I’m a hungry planet/ Orbiting in the sky/ The things they did to hurt me/Pass on by and by/ Now here I am all alone/ They never ever learn/ Well I had to shake and quake/And make their houses burn’.

It doesn’t stop. There’s Danny O’Keefe with his toxic smog melt-down, 3.10 Smokey Thursday – which you can hear on Meridian 1970. Then there’s Spirit’s Nature’s Way, from The 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus: ‘it’s nature’s way of telling you, summer breeze/ it’s nature’s way of telling you, dying trees…it’s nature’s way of telling you/ Something’s wrong’.

The New Riders of the Purple Sage tackled their topic on their classic first, city-to-country album: ‘Hey look at the green, green tree/ It ain’t quite as green green as it used to be/ And hey, look at the cool clear water/ It ain’t quite as cool and clear
as it ought to be/ And we live in the Garden of Eden, yeah/ Don’t know why we want to tear
the whole thing to the ground’.

The Beach Boys echoed these sentiments on Don’t Go Near The Water, from 1971’s Surf’s Up, albeit tinged with their habitual postivism: ‘don’t go near the water/ Don’t you think it’s sad/ What’s happened to the water/ Our water’s going bad/ Oceans, rivers, lakes and streams/ Have all been touched by man/ The poison floating out to sea/ Now threatens life on land’.

Hawkwind, as was their wont, took everything further and fashioned an epic 12 string drone to condemn Western society on We Took the Wrong Step Years Ago: ‘take a look around and see the warnings close at hand/ Already weeds are writing their scriptures in the sand…The morning sun is rising, casting rays across the land/ Already nature’s calling, take heed of the warning’.

On the classic What’s Going On album, Marvin Gaye added ecology to his list of what is/ was wrong with America on Mercy Mercy Me: ‘radiation in the ground and in the sky/Animals and birds who live nearby are dying/ Oh, mercy mercy me/ Oh, things ain’t what they used to be/ What about this overcrowded land?/How much more abuse from man can you stand?’

With the teen/ ballroom/ gender preoccupations of Glam rock, ecological songs fell out of favour somewhat – although Sparks delivered a vague warning with Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth: ‘when she’s on her best behaviour/ Don’t be tempted by her favours/ Never turn your back on mother earth/ Towns are hurled from A to B/ By hands that looked so smooth to me’.

Despite all the rhetoric, many first wave punks had been hippies, or had been influenced by hippies. The most preoccupied with consumerism and materialism were X-Ray Spex, whose The Day The World Turned Dayglo is a fabulous, totally art-i-ficial dystopia: ‘the X-rays were penetrating/ Through the latex breeze / Synthetic fibre see-thru leaves/ Fell from the rayon trees’.

Fast-forwarding well into the next decade, R.E.M.’s Cuyahoga took its title from the famously polluted Cleveland, Ohio river that caught fire several times during the 20th century, most notably in 1952 and 1969. In calling for a new national vision, the lyrics relate this environmental disaster to the country’s industrial past: ‘Our father’s father’s father tried, erased the parts he didn’t like’.

And from around the same time, Mr. Fingers had this super-graceful vision of another world, a Distant Planet where they can be free from racism as well as environmental and economic degradation: ‘you can eat the food around you, you will hunger never more’. Yet they know it’s a pipe dream: ‘distant planet, distant planet, far far away’.

I’m sure there are many more examples with the rise in environmental consciousness. Any thoughts?

Tags: Cuyahoga River, Danny O'Keefe, Donovan, Hawkwind, Jeff Beck, Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Kim Fowley, Lisa Law, Malvina Reynolds, Marvin Gaye, Mr. Fingers, Neil Young, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Quicksilver, R.E.M., Rachel Carson, Sparks, Spirit, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, The Doors, the Kinks, The Searchers. the Yardbirds, Vashti Bunyan, X-Ray Spex

Posted on February 17, 2010 at 2:11 pm  12 Comments