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[ZG magazine, Heroes issue, August 1982]

Edie Sedgewick in Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, 1964

“Do you know how to pony?”

Patti Smith, Land, from Horses, 1975

At a time when the ‘hit’ show, single and LP are called Fame (an instruction manual, and of course, pace Ziggy and Sheena, a self-fulfilling prophecy), you might consider that the idea is in the forefront of public consciousness. Paradoxically, this may be so at a time when it is at its most devalued, in traditional terms. Warhol’s famous curse has seeped through avant garde theory into popular practice: as the ritual repetition of the electronic media accelerates into gibberish, then so do those ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ contract. Yet the spell is not broken: the inertia that keeps aloft so many of our institutions, both political and cultural, also keeps the demand for (super-)stars constant, even though the social and economic matrix which fostered that particular demand may well have disappeared forever. Indeed, in a time of monetarist hegemony, our Olympians are chosen for their collusive, bland qualities: fiscal is redacted into spiritual contraction, and any residue channelled into that most obsolete form of worship, patriotism. The secularisation of our daily life is virtually complete; hegemony is a ‘fight for survival’, our current heroes merely a vacuum in an airless room.

“Saints need cash”

Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films, 1973

“To put it bluntly, I think public expectations are too high. We have an end to the language of the Sixties. Today we have got to rid ourselves of these outlooks and look at economic and social matters in a new light.”

Francis Pym, Foreign Secretary, quoted in a London speech, February 2nd, 1982

In this ‘fight for survival’, the iconography, language and institutions of the Sixties recur with monotonous regularity: simultaneously to be deplored – as in radial punk theory (“Never trust a hippy”) or Thatcherite ideology — or celebrated as a “Golden Age” — in pop ideology and design everywhere. But these ‘Swinging Sixties’ are now Sanitised Sixties: the messages of a furious and complex time are now reduced, by politicians and disc jockeys alike, to simplistic element worthy of a time of retraction. Pop songs were better then, weren’t they, and yet the ideals and spirit of the age are now perceived as ‘unrealistic’ — which embraces both wage claims and libertarian demands. Fascination for what appears to have been, and what we are constantly told was, a better time — and envy that we can’t participate — filter our response to what is, after all, living history for many of us. We interpret the Sixties with Eighties antennae; what is missing is a sense of discovery and possibility; what is remembered, squandered opportunities and having to live through the wreckage; what remains, calculation and despair. Grappling too with the inertia of Sixties institutions, we may be in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

“We refuse to recognise that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse…”

C.G. Jung

“Because you’re young (This is the sixties revolutionary hop), Because you’re young (This is the sixties revolutionary hop)”
Theatre of Hate, The Hop, 1982

It is ironic, or simply fitting, that the sound and colours of pop’s “Golden Age” are invoked so strongly at a time when the passing of the idea of ‘you culture’ has retuned pop music to its pristine function of entertainment — show business. The reasons are simple economic and cultural sabotage: punk rock’s apocalyptic rhetoric was only a hair’s breadth ahead of the reality — namely that for a growing number of school leavers and young adults there really is No Future under the old laws. So used are we to a surfeit of brightly coloured playthings, that we take their availability as a constant rather than as an accident (planned) of history. The consumer enfranchisement of that group which Abrams defined in his classic 1959 marketing study, The Teenage Consumer as ‘young people from the time they leave school till they either marry or reach 25′ has now been rescinded, as manufacturers and marketers concentrate on the 25-35 year olds, or the early teens. From being the consumer cuckoo in the Selsdon nest, ‘kids’ are now seen as being a massive social problem: doubly disenfranchised from the right to work, and more importantly, the right to spend, they riot, hang around listlessly, commit suicide or get packed off to the Falkland Islands. If the Sixties marked the apogee of that ideology of youth, when the Beatles, say, could be courted by Harold Wilson, and given MBEs for export services, when it was mandatory to be young, hip and rich, than the Eighties has marked its final demise, unravelled by punk’s ferocious cut-ups and a decayed economy. But you wouldn’t have noticed: the pop charts have never been fuller of de-gutted remakes of 1960s songs, and television producers and radio programmers perpetuate the illusion that to be young is to be part of a swinging, consuming youth community. At a time when a producer can talk about a new pop show as having the same impact as Ready Steady Go, it is hardly surprising that the White E-Type reappears in pop iconography, that “love” is the year’s most over-used word, or that the Rolling Stones play an American tour which nets them millions of dollars and re-establishes them as the heroes of youth. Thus is Chaos redacted into Cash, Satisfaction into We’ll Meet Again and the magic lost. The Sixties return, to reinforce radical conservatism.

“and I’d like to see
her rise again
her white white bones
with baby Brian Jones
baby Brian Jones
like blushing
baby dolls”

Patti Smith, quoted from Jean Stein, Edie, 1982

“Talking about all the people who would try anything twice…”

The Rolling Stones, Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow? 1966

In considering these, amongst other matters, during the course of this year, I have been obsessed, ever a sucker, by two people in particular: Edie Sedgewick and Brian Jones. Their lives are not entirely parallel, yet both may now be seen to typify the age, now the “the Sixties” are far enough away to be considered in the same terms as “the Twenties” or “the Thirties”; the media interest evinced by two biographies and related books — Edie by Jean Stein (“the summer’s hot number” — Time Magazine), David Dalton’s The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years, Warhol and Hackett’s Popism — places them in the Romantic tradition epitomised, at various times, by Chatterton, Brooke, Dean and Vicious, yet also raise the question about our perception of “the Sixties” as history and as “living tradition”.

“Chicks screaming, mania in their eyes, fascinated by their idol Brian Jones, with their arms reaching out for him. A photographer rudely pushes aside a beautiful blonde, to snap a picture of Brian, she stumbles and falls. Seeing this, Brian takes one step forward and VOOM! — in one blow kicks away the equipment with the guy catapulting after it… Olympia, Paris, 1965.”

Anonymous sleeve notes, Cops and Robbers (Rolling Stones bootleg, c.1975)

“The best thing Edie does in Ciao! Manahattan is a scene in the very early dawn. She’s walking on a brick wall near the Fort Lee Castle. An imaginary aerialist, balancing on an imaginary high wire. The way her muscles are moving, fluid at that time, it’s very hydraulic, very much in tune with the wind.”

Huddler Bisby, quoted in Jean Stein, Edie, 1982

Indeed, at this very moment, both Brian and Edie are best seen in terms of PRESENCE rather than achievement, although Brian Jones’ contribution to the Rolling Stones and his Pipes of Pan at Jajouka LP are by no means negligible. What they appear as is a mad, messianic intensity that wiped out any possibility of past or future and zeroes in on a present that had no end. In this concentration, they may well have crystallised the moment, like a Dean leer from 1955, or a withering Johnny Rotten stare from 1976. They paid for it, of course, as did millions of others, partly encouraged by their example: Edie died in 1971 at 28, Brian Jones in 1969 at 26, both from barbiturates, among other things.

This intensity was useful, but by necessity temporary: but the end of 1966, Edie and Brian Jones had outlived their usefulness. Having surrendered both spirit and persona to the psychic vampires — Edie to Andy Warhol, Brian to Mick Jagger, they were left to circle the flame ever closer while the two careerists went on to become Sixties institutions and the Eighties. In this light, a valid question might be: would you prefer to be dead, or Mick Jagger in 1982? Indeed, would you prefer to be dead or Andy Warhol?

“I write the word
SUN
across the dreary palimpsest
of the world”

Harry Crosby, Assassin, 1929

“We need to give a longer evolutionary perspective to these terms by calling all these types — on occasion — Sonnenkinder — Children of the Sun. This extra dignity is appropriate when these young men types are made the objects of an imaginative cult, when a group of people significant in numbers, talent or power idolises the young me as the supreme form of life.”

Martin Green, Children of the Sun (a narrative of decadence in England after 1918), 1977

In the Sixties, many worlds fused, to a degree not seen before or after. If, in the 1920s, the Sonnenkinder were figures like Brian Howard and Harold Acton, figures from a most rarified atmosphere whose power, as devalued in Granada’s Brideshead Revisited is still not lost, then they were far from having a mass audience. These dominant figures, however they moved, like flies in amber, still reproduced the class structure of the time; the mysteries of expression and interpretation were the province of the select few, while the mass were contented with the facsimiles of Hollywood. By 1965 as Greil Marcus had noted in connection with the Rolling Stones, the Bohemian, cultured world of the 1920s Sonnenkinder had merged with all the electronic paraphernalia of the great Pop age: the new heroes could not either be simply aristocratic, or simply popular, as the social changes of the time demanded expression in the medium most suited. Thus, for a time, Edie Sedgewick needed Andy Warhol as much as he needed her, and the mix of deracinated aristo and arriviste artist was perfect. If Andy Warhol took A-heads, transvestites and hustlers uptown with him, then the Rolling Stones took the Bohemian tradition of non-conformism and self-expression that was nurtured by their jazz club roots to a mass, youth audience of a scale and immediacy hitherto unseen, and unreckoned. For a brief time, from 1964 to 1966, the world of the aristocrat and the slum boy, the straight and the gay, the popular and the arcane fused with a reverberation whose effects we are still feeling, even though that mobility or scale had long disappeared.

“Wholeness is not achieved, for frenzy is not freedom”

June Singer, Androgyny: Towards a New Theory of Sexuality, 1977

“You really believed that you were going to travel in this bubble right out the the end of the stratosphere. You weren’t going to have to cope with the normal structures of life and getting older and making a living. Life was going to be completely different.”

Cherry Vanilla, quoted in Jean Stein, Edie, 1982

Certainly both Brian and Edie were at the epicentre of this hurricane. The Sixties have been termed Dionysiac by several commentators, and this would seem apt: “he is treated and educated like a girl and he grows up to be effeminate. Unable to differentiate feminine from masculine functioning in himself, he scarcely know who he is. Like an eternal youth he wanders over the world, changing shape, going mad, drinking himself into insensibility, living the abandonment of total nature and, like nature, experiencing the cycles of death and rebirth.” (June Singer, Androgyny, 1977)

Two images freeze Edie and Brian at their peak: a photo from Vogue, August 1965 catches Edie in the middle of this dervish dance, “arabesquing on her leather rhino to a record of the Kinks” (would that it had been the sublime See My Friends!); an ageless, androgynous mutant, she personifies the spirit of movement and freedom, never once admitting the possibility of falling. The arc of her bare arms and leotarded legs is reproduced by, and and framed in a small wall painting of a horse, a motif that recurs, oedipally, in Edie’s life and later assumed by quintessential fan-turned-star Patti Smith. She is bathed in grace.

By late 1966, the “amphetamine-spiked negativity” of the last three or four Rolling Stones singles had wound itself up into a pitch of nihilistic chaos not seen again until a good ten years later. Peter Whitehead’s film for Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow? makes explicit the threat of sexual and social chaos implicit in the song’s careering momentum and garbled curses: shot in stark black and white, the two films cut up shots of the Stones getting dressed in drag for the cover sleeve photo session in tthe East Village, and footage from the concert at the Royal Albert Hall on September 23rd, which ended in a bloody riot after six numbers. The drag section ends with an oblique Brian Jones smile to the camera, while, as the momentum of the hysterical stage performance accelerates through violence and frenzy to complete breakdown, Brian Jones appears from camera right, at the centre of the vortex, doubling up with demonic laughter.

“Brian, who had once described his treatment in a Chicago hospital (following and overdose of pills) with, ‘I had so many tests I felt like a human sacrfiice, seems to have had a premonition – in the story by Brion Gysin – that he was to become the Scapegoat, whose sacrifice would not rener the world but bring down with him a whole era”

David Dalton, The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years, 1982

“I was Girl of the Year and superstar and all that crap. I’d do things like… everythign I did was really underneath, I guess, motivated by psychological disturnances. I’d make a mask out of my face because I didn’t realise I was quite beautiful, God blessed me so… I’d freak out in a very physical way, and it was all taken as a fashion trend.”

Edie Sedgewick, quoted in Jean Stein, Edie, 1982

The evernts of 1965 and 1966 set a pace that was just too frantic; any synthesis that had occurred was too volatile, its overweening ambitions not based on any real foundation. This was hard on some of our protagonists — Jagger and Richard jailed briefly in July 1967, Warhol shot by Velerie Solanas in June 1968, while the declines of both Brian and Edie can be traced from the photographs — and for those that survived meant retrenchment soon after; by the 1970s, the Rolling Stones were “the greatest rock ‘n roll band in the world” — a term that would have been laughed at in 1966 and is laughed at now, and Andy Warhol the “world’s most famous artist”. If Edie and Andy had met Mick Jagger at the Scene, mid ’65, then by 1971 Warhol was busy designing the sleeve for Sticky Fingers the album that, more than any other, turned its back on utopianism for self-indulgence. What a different world.

This utopian synthesis of the mid-60s, however fragile, had had some practical results; what such people as Brian Jones and Edie Sedgewick had lived and hinted at by their undoubted glamour and presence in a dramatic form — the breaking down of social, sexual and psychic barriers – became crystallised in political rhetoric and action, with the rise of the enragés in France, the SDS in the United States, and perhaps most importantly, the gay and women’s movements – all of which, at their inception, retained a playful, dervish quality in keeping with the times. Not for nothing did the Situationists spray “Sous les pavés, la plage” — there was.

Naturally, it would be unwise to push the parallel between Brian Jones and Edie Sedgewick too far, just as it would be unwise to with to emulate or inflate reputations already furred by pop mythology and ritual: zonked 3am phone calls are simply not glamorous. Their particular tragedy was to act out too soon, and too fast, the enormous changes that were occurring in society. Their singular demise meant that others were wary or assuming this vast responsibility. It is interesting to note that, in recent pop history, their presence had been invoked as a kind of touchstone by performers wishing to recapture that dervish spinning motion into synthesis: David Bowie photographed in a Brian Jones t-shirt, or Patti Smith titling her first, extraordinary album after Edie’s oedipal symbol. It is more interesting to consider, however, that the very severe damage done by Punk Rock to pop mythology has stripped the mythology of death away from Brian Jones and Edie Sedgewick enough for us to be able to tear away the veil and interpret their current media vogue in terms beyond mere ghoulishness and voyeurism (although the last two cannot be underestimated); at a time when both Andy Warhol and the Rolling Stones have become figureheads of that 1960s hegemony which explicitly shores up the regimes of the new, rabid Right, the concentration on these two skeletons in their closet merely emphasises the bankruptcy of these fraudulent Olympians, whose actions reflect a world that is being trained not to dream. At a time of fragmentation, envy and cultural impotence, the naked trajectory of these two Sonnenkinder, aptly androgynous, point to a with to recapture possibility and abandon, to restate what still had to be learnt from a complex and maligned age in a new language and a new arena.

After all, consider this dominant cry:

“I’m waiting for something
I’m only padding time
And now I’m all alone
And I don’t care
And I don’t care
And I don’t care…”

Soft Cell, Bedsitter, 1981

Posted on April 17, 2009 at 1:24 pm