The Barrelhouse is founded on anarchy, artistry and all that has wrought a century of rock 'n roll, film, fashion, jazz, blues - with a few cultural smokestacks in between.
“Cinemas, dance halls and other places of entertainment in South east London are closing their doors to youths in ‘Edwardian’ suits because of gang hooliganism…The ban, which week by week is becoming more generally applied, is believed by the police to be one of the main reasons for the extension of the area in which fights with knuckle dusters, coshes, and similar weapons between bands of teenagers can now be anticipated…In cinemas, seats have been slashed with razors and had dozens of meat skewers stuck into them” (The Daily Mail announces the birth of Teds, 27.4.54)
“A night out with the Teds was generally a good crack – sometimes some violence, some vomit on the carpet, but generally a rock’n'roll party” photographer Chris Steele-Perkins told the Observer. In 1976 he went on Teddy Boy safari, jostling his way through the drape jackets of Old Kent Road and into a rockabilly backwater.
This was the same ground where the original bad boys crawled from the grim ruins of blitz. They had been London’s original 50s ‘folk-devils’; vicar-scaring lads in Edwardian suits – a post-war aberration that hijacked Savile Row fashion and cultivated it with a quiff, flick knife, violent riots and rock n’ roll. By 1976 it was hemmed in by Mods, Rockers, the loom of punk.
“I wasn’t a Ted” said Steele-Perkins “but it was easy enough to fit in. I was the bloke who took photographs”. Despite threats of Teddy extinction, between a watershed 60s and volatile 70s, the resurgent scene was as virile as ever. The Adam and Eve and The Black Raven rattled with Bill Haley, Nancy Whiskey, Billy Fury. And the legendary Flying Saucers and Crazy Cavan played The Castle, blew the ceiling. It was enough to make any skewer-fearing cinema seat roll a mile.
While the 70s are occasionally maligned now by Teds as “the bad days when Showaddywaddy took the mickey, took their drape jackets and turned them into kitsch day-glo fun” (from the definitive Edwardian Teddy Boy) – their spirit is incarnate in Steele-Perkins’ photos of jive-pianist ‘Fingers’ Lee, Tongue-Tied Danny, Fifties Flash, The Adam and Eve, The Castle, other pubs where Teds emerged from the woodwork – along with their new blood.
“At the Black Raven pub in Bishopsgate, on Friday nights, it’s as if the 1960′s had never been” reads an article from The Sunday Times, 1970. “The bar is filled with men wearing the classic costume of the historic Teddy Boys: drapes, crepes and bootlace ties. Deafening music from the juke-box insists on the simple beat of early rock ‘n’ roll”. Black Raven proprieter Bob Acland told the Sunday Times: “The Teds aren’t a broken army, all gone down a hole like rats.”
“Half-a-dozen just happened to walk in” said Acland, on the beginnings of the Ted revival in The Black Raven. “Some of them was original Teds, some was the younger brothers of Teds who remembered the good old days. The word got round – I don’t waste money advertising”.
“From 1976, if you were living in England, it was hard to keep track of the sheer number of rockabilly reissues that started to appear” recalled Max Décharné, in Rocket in My Pocket. “Chiswick Records had put out Vince Taylor’s ‘Brand New Cadillac‘, and when the same company started the Ace label they gave the world another chance to hear all kinds of fine items, like ‘Tennessee Rock‘ by Hoyt Scoggins & The Saturday Night Jamboree Boys”.
“Of course, in 1977 punks and Teds were supposed to be knocking hell out of each other, and many of them were, but I was seventeen that year and spent much of it buying the likes of Gene Vincent alongside records by The Clash, and Sonny Burgess at the same time as Richard Hell and the Void-Oids. It all sounded as though it came from the same three-chord rock n’ roll spirit as far as I was concerned. Not everyone agreed.”
A gauge of the times was Malcolm McLaren’s 1971 Kings Road ‘Let it Rock’ shop, stocking original fifties clothing. In 1974 the name of the shop had changed to ‘Sex’ – famously magnetising a clutch of ‘street urchins’ and alchemising (according to McLaren) into punk. In 1977 the store became known as ‘Seditionaries’ and the transformation was complete. A few items of Teddy Boy gear hanging between fetish wear, outrageous T-shirts and leather.
“I remember going to see X-Ray Specs in 1977. When we left the building a sizeable number of local Teds – full grown men at least a decade older than us – were waiting across the street looking to batter some punks” writes Décharné. “There’s no room in circumstances like that trying to explain how many Eddie Cochran albums you’ve got at home”.
“The Teds were different from the Punks in that there was so many ages” says John Lydon in No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish. “There was the older lot, all the dads, along with younger kids. The Punk thing was very young. It was like going out and fighting old men, kind of ridiculous really’. While still Johnny Rotten, Lydon had occasionally dressed in the full Ted regalia – convincingly enough to cross lines unmolested for a drink at The Roxy.“One week I looked like a complete Teddy Boy. I used to enjoy quaffing my hair up. Teddy Boys were the enemy. Therefore they interested me”.
“I do remember someone going on and on about how he was going to ‘get that Ted at the bar’” said Fiona Dutton of Roxygoer, “who was in fact Johnny Rotten. He hadn’t recognised him’ .
A more productive battle came to a head on Saturday 15th May 1976. A five-thousand-strong mass of Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls from around the UK assaulted Central London, marching onto the BBC in a national campaign for more Rock n Roll to be played on the radio; numbers rallied by the lack of authentic Rock n Roll on the airwaves.
The march swarmed onto the BBC Broadcasting House and, in a move that would have made Mahatma Gandhi proud, peacefully submitted a petition and taped pilot Rock ‘n’ Roll show. Their caravan was a success. The BBC created a weekly Rock n Roll Show on Radio 1 late on Saturday afternoons.
In 2003 Steele-Perkins made an interesting revisit to the Teds from ’76, to find that their biggest enemies hadn’t been the Mods or the punks – but time; cancer, baldness, old age. But for many the fire never went out, only flick knives and turf-war traded for more sartorial conservation, circa 1953 standard. The Edwardian Teddy Boy site says this “involves the wearing of Drape jackets with 3″- 4″ lapels, minimum use of velvet apart from the collars and cuffs (or none at all) and 16″ bottom trousers with turn-ups”.
“They form a strange kind of community, but it had been that strange community which first fascinated me all those years ago” said Steele-Perkins. “They have held on to something that was important to them. Kept faith. Those markers that once quickened our youth can still drive our dotage”.
All hail rock n’ roll. What it all comes down to.
Originally published in paperback in 1979, “The Teds” was re-issued in 2003 by Dewi Lewis and can still be found – check out Magnum’s page on the book.
“Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit – so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc – as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl – so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.” (Step 5 in Nazifing Jazz, as recalled in Josef Skvorecky’s ‘Bass Saxophone’)
The day the Nazis rolled tanks into Paris – the land of “Americano, nigger, kike, jungle music” (Goebbels, 1939) – the cave-clubs of Saint Germain dimmed. Montparnasse went quietly. Pigalle’s cosmopolitan nightclubs folded and the Champs-Elysees muted the footlights. In fact, two million Parisians had already left town. Many jazz-junkies, gypsies, peddlars of swing, negres – all now in danger of being freighted to their death – considered catching the A-Train elsewhere. Paris was preparing to go underground. But the Gestapo went straight to work. Loudspeakers declared a curfew of 8pm. Arrests began.
“It is better to be frightened in your country than another one” said Django Reinhardt – the most famous jazzman ever to live in the alphabet city. He had good reason to be nervous. A member of the Manouche ‘gypsy’ family – part of the French speaking Romany tribe – over one million of his kin would be gone by 1944. Reinhardt would try to escape Paris twice, but be turned back. Instead of escape, his gypsy legend grew and in the heart of Nazi Occupied Paris the enduring spirit of jazz took another turn.
Django Reinhardt spent his time during the Nazi Occupation oscillating between a suite on the Champs Elysee and gypsy encampments. In hotel room circa 1945 with gypsy singer Sonia Dimitrivich. Getty Images.
“You who have been to Paris, just imagine this picture” wrote LIFE Magazine in 1940. “At the Palace de la Concorde no such merry-go-round of honking autos, screaming news vendors, gesticulating cops, gaily chatting pedestrians. Instead depressing silence, broken only now and then by the purr of some German officers motor as it made its way to the Hotel Crillon, headquarters of the hastily set up German commandery. On the flagstaff the swastika fluttered in the breeze, where once the Stars and Stripes had been in the days of 1919 when Wilson received the cheers of French crowds from the balcony”
Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had his own plans for the weekend. He’d drafted a scheme; a schedule to reopen Paris as a jaunty, gay, bustling showroom for New Europe. During the war it would be a recreational city, if only to draw a breath. Within weeks of bagging the Hotel Crillon, theatres and nightclubs would begin to reopen. The city’s cinemas and opera houses, draped in swastikas, would refill and brothels reopen. Soldiers, Officers, SS, wary Parisians; all mingled at tables. The caviar tones of Johnny Hess continued. Edith Piaf performed, Coco Chanel entertained Nazis.
It was a strange reconcile. Paris was a hot bed of bona-fide jazz-loving, leaf-smoking, jew-friending ‘degenerates’. And while Hitler’s army were arresting musicians, shutting down swing-joints, storming cabarets that housed the “rhythms of belly-dancing negroes”, Django and the Hot Club of Paris were reinventing it as a gypsy-slang.
During the 30s the success of The Hot Club Quintet transformed jazz from a WW1 Americano import into the lingua franca of popular jazz. Their groundswell of popularity would lead to a residency in the celebrated clubs of Montparnasse, with a fanbase that included jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. The clip below shows the original line up bunkered in a bar setting, a vitalised core in situ, 1939.
They would all follow very different paths during the war.
Django himself might have been top of the Nazi hit-list. He had risen from the obscurity of a ‘gypsy’ camp. He liked billiards, he liked to gamble. He liked making friends, he liked music, his lifestyle was seen as vagabond. Hot Club collaborator and violinist Stephane Grappelli told The Guardian that when they got offered their first recording in 1934 by Charles Delauney (France’s supreme jazz expert), Django didn’t even appear – Grappelli found him in a billiard hall.
Hot Club clarinetist Hubert Rostaing said the best way to hear Django Reinhardt was to wait after the concert, and on the other side of the street. It was a minor miracle the Hot Club existed. But by the time war broke in 1939 Django’s new, taut ‘small string’ sound swept the city with colossal results. A powerfully quick improvisor, Django pioneered and defined new territory as a modern guitar soloist.
Michael Dregni best sketches the itinerant genuis: “His story was told like a fairy tale on the café terraces and in the fashionable salons. It was repeated in reverent tones among jazz acolytes. He was spoken of in awe as a child prodigy who never grew up, an idiot savant of jazz, a noble savage let loose in cultured Paris. His was the kind of modern fairy tale that Paris loved – even demanded – of its celebrities. “
But Paris was now dangerous turf.
An isolated city. André Zucca took these colour photos for Nazi magazine ‘Signal’, using rare Agfacolor film supplied by the Wehrmacht. Controversy over the depictions of ‘Parisian life as usual’ continues to this day.
Cinema Parisiana, colour photos of Paris under the Occupation by André Zucca.
Hats and coats, Paris occupied. June, 1940. Image by Roger Schall.
“Paris is dark at night now. Probably not until the war’s end will the great red lights of Moulin Rouge turn again. The small nightclubs that used to fill Montmatre and Montparnasse are also dead or dormant. Parisians have no theatre yet, no cinema, and one of the most frequent questions asked us is: when are we going to get American films? (LIFE Magazine correspondent Charles Wertenbaker, on the Nazi’s ultimate legacy in Paris, 1944)
German soldiers outside a Paris cafe on the Champs Elysees, Bastille Day 1940.
Entartete Musik – meaning ‘not of our kind or race’ – or more figuratively ‘abnormal, depraved’. The poster advertising the Degenerate exhibition of 1938.
The popular ‘Degenerate Music Exhibition’ of 1938 left little to the Nazi imagination. The Nazis had seized a huge assemblage of artworks; anything that might have been Jewish, Bolshevik or abstract – compiling them as an example of ‘degenerate art’. Graffiti trained above the exhibits, scrawling its way past the ‘negroid’, the Jew-infused classical or ‘popular’ music. Jazz was depraved jungle-junk. The New English Weekly more eloquently explained; the Nazi ‘felt the Hebrew uses jazz and like methods to iron out racial differences and produce a general neurasthenia in which Hebrew influence may ascend among peoples.’
Paris remained under blackout orders for a while after the Nazi arrival; streetlights painted blue. Many of the African American musicians who played the jazz clubs had sailed from Le Havre, expecting the worst. Not surprisingly, the original Hot Club Quintet were amongst those to disband. Django’s other half, Stephan Grappelli, sailed for England, guitarist Marcel Bianci was soon interred by the Germans, bassist Louis Vola bound a boat for Argentina. Other illuminaries also joined the exodus.
Guitar Oscar Aleman headed for Spain, hoping to catch a ship home to Buenos Aires. He was halted at the Spanish border, his tricone guitars confiscated, melted down for the war effort. German-born singer Eva Busch was arrested by the Gestapo the third day of her show at the Paris ABC Music Hall, and made a prisoner of Ravensbrück for three years. “The hatred kept me alive” she said.
Django would try to leave twice during the Occupation, only to be turned back. In the early days he and other Romanies simply left the town, avoided the road, stayed in hiding. They retreated to the depths of la zone, bordered by forests and mountains.
Palaise de Reinhardt, with the family. Django and son Babik.
Django teaches his son Babik some guitar.
Jewish refugees from Germany holed up in the cellar of an abandoned factory, chez violin and guitar.
“After the German patrol passed by and we believed the coast was clear the tables were pushed back and the dancing began. As soon as the alarm was given the tables were set back in place and everything became orderly again” (Pierre Fouad on the Nouveau Hot Club’s early gigs under the Occupation)
As time went on there was little choice but to work. In need of a living, Django made his way back to Paris. On October 4th 1940 he was offered work playing guitar at the Cinema Normandie on the Champs Elysee, between Nazi approved films. He had to submit his song programs to the propagandastaffel before the guitar was propped.
Despite the challenges, it was here Django unveiled the Nouveau Hot Club Quintet de Paris. It comprised a sound that Michael Dregni describes as ‘light and airy and held to earth by Egyptian drummer Pierre Fouad’. Reinhardt had replaced Grapelli with Hubert Rostaing, who himself had been tuning his craft in the cabarets of Morroca and Tunisia. They soon picked up a new following.
To avoid Nazi suppression the French had dropped the term ‘swing’. Jazz standards were re-titled in French. ‘St Louis Blues’ became ‘Tristesses De St Louis’. ‘I Got Rhythm’ became ‘Agate Rhythm’. Tunes were often given titles that would not betray their origins, such as ‘Blues in C Sharp’. They began playing, with composers’ names changed to French ones.
In his book ‘Bass Saxophone‘ Josef Skvorecky also recalls the rules that were set out to purify the music if it had to be performed.
Parisian Jazz – “La Revue Negre au Music-hall des Champs-elysees” with Josephine Baker.
Nazi nightlife in Paris. Image from Patrick Buisson’s book ’1940-1945, Années érotiques’.
Nightlife in Paris during the Occupation. Image from Patrick Buisson’s book ’1940-1945, Années érotiques’.
Paris under the Occupation. Image by Roger Schall.
The Nazi version of Eddie Cantor's 'Makin' Whoopee'. This rare Nazi jazz recording was made exclusively for shortwave broadcasting to Great Britain, USA and other enemy countries.
Ludwig “Lutz” Templin, bandleader of the jazz ensemble who also recorded as “Charlie and His Orchestra”, rearranging American jazz hits with revised Nazi-approved lyrics.
Despite musical cleansing, Goebbels couldn’t compete with demand. German soldiers overtook the clubs, where the lights were warm. For their own pleasure German Officers cordoned off the Russian Casonova and Sheherazade cabarets, where the Ferret brothers played (another band of accomplished gypsy jazzmen – and Django’s biggest rivals). Amid war and food shortages Pigalle and Montmartre came to life once again.
In early 1943 the famous Abbaye club also reopened as Le Chapiteau. The previous owner’s burlesque styled parodies of Hitler meant he was now enjoying an extended holiday in Monaco to avoid the Club’s new Nazi patrons. Le Chapiteau had become a favourite hole-in-the-wall for many Gestapo and pro-Nazi French.
Goebbels, meanwhile, pegged jazz as an opiate. He put commissioned Charlie and His Orchestra (or “Bruno and His Swinging Tigers“) to swiftly begin recording and performing Nazi versions of popular jazz hits, a sanctioned Reichsministerium. Charlie were broadcast in medium-wave and short-wave bands across the Channel and Atlantic – the sonic equivalent of letter drops in jazz.
Despite the lyrics written by the Propagandaministerium, the group was Germany’s leading swing outfit and a competent group. They made over ninety recordings between 1941 and 1943. Their band leader was permitted by Nazi command to travel to neutral and occupied countries in order to collect jazz and dance music. He also knocked around in the rarefied dens of Paris, mixing with the bands of the day.
Meanwhile, the Hot Club had also been busy. Its three-story headquarters had become a meeting place for the French resistance.
La Place Blanche café (in 1940) opposite the Moulin Rouge cabaret. Reserved for the exclusive use of German soldiers during the occupation of Paris.
“Anything that starts with Ellington ends with an assassination attempt on the Fuhrer!” (Gestapo SS-Sturmbahnfuhrer Hans ‘The Fox’ Reinhardt, interrogating teenage swing fans 1944)
Luftwaffe Officer Dietrich Schulz-Köhn (aka “Doktor Jazz”) had been a long-time follower of the Hot Club’s music. It was known that other Germans would spend hours in his room listening to this variety of “Americano nigger kike jungle music”. During the German occupation he provided a temporary shelter of sorts – simply by frequenting the Hot Club as a patron.
For the years of occupation many people had relied upon the power of protection. But things were becoming increasingly uncertain. A person could easily be shot at whim. They could easily be included in a deportation order. Those offering protection could easily lose their power or be deported. Survival couldn’t be guaranteed, and the gap was closing.
Luftwaffe Officer Dietrich Schulz-Köhn (aka “Doktor Jazz”), Django Reinhardt, four Africans and a Jewish musician – outside La Cigale, a jazz club in Paris.
“The Officers of the Club liked me coming there” said Schulz-Köhn in later years. “Especially in uniform as they were sometimes raided by the Gestapo. (The Gestapo) would find the place full of letters, magazines, records with labels – all in English and this was no laughing matter at the time. So they could use me as a signboard to prove their innocence and reliability”.
But in in October 1943 the Gestapo made a definitive raid on the Hot Club headquarters. They took into custody Charles Delaunay, his secretary and the Hot Club President of Marseilles. “They wanted to know where to find our resistance leader” said Delaunay. “I was fortunate enough to know enough of the German that was spoken preparatory to each question. Never have I talked so much or so well.” Delaunay was eventually released a month later – with a shadow of Gestapo not far behind. His secretary and the Hot Club President were not as lucky.
They were sent to the camps. Both perished in the gas chambers.
Nouveau Hot Club Quintette de Paris. Date unknown.
In the isolated city, jazz broke further from its American roots. While continuing to tread carefully for their own survival, players such as Reinhardt had charged the music with new potency and, despite the best efforts of Goebbels the his Charlie cohorts, jazz remained an undefined danger zone.
The Zazou fad was the first youth ‘movement’ to openly claim a patch and square itself against the hooks of German occupation. Its battle issue was non-conformity. In 1942 the Nazi-run mag L’Illustration attacked the Zazou style; men wore a ‘lumber jacket, which they show an unwillingness to take off, even when it’s soaking wet. The women wear cheap furs, turtle-necked sweaters and very short pleated skirts. They are armed with vast umbrellas that remain obstinately folded whatever the weather’. By 1944 seventy-eight anti-Zazou articles were published in the pro-Nazi Vichy Govt press. Zazous were lazy, vain, ‘Judeo-Gaullist shirkers’.
Their beating came highly recommended.
Round-ups began in bars. Zazous were roughed up on the streets. The Fascist youth organisation Jeunesse Populaire Française adopted the slogan “Scalp the Zazous!” – perhaps this sounded better in French. Zouzous were set upon with hair-clippers by squads of young fascists. They were beaten, arrested, sent to the country to work the land. Before long many Zazous went underground, ducking for cover in basement clubs and jazz halls.
By 1944 seventy-eight anti-Zazou articles had been published in the pro-Nazi Vichy Govt press targeting the louche phenomenon of work-shy Zouzous.
‘Work for Germany? I’d rather die!’ ‘Bravo! Young man, don’t you like Germany?’
And as the Allies began bombing closer to the city, the Nazi round-ups increased. In 1943 the German Kommandantur of Paris requested that Reinhardt and the Nouveau Quintet of Paris be summoned to Berlin to play for the Nazi High Command. Django made excuses. The Kommandantur insisted. Django decided to hit the road.
Filling his Buick from a wad of gas coupons, Django skipped town with his wife. They headed to the German-Franco border, with the plan to escape to Switzerland. When the car ran out of gas, they sold it and brought themselves tickets for a clandestine truck to take them across. That night, passing through the border, the truck was subjected to a search. They were found and turned back with a warning.
While he planned his next step, he moved his family to Thonon, where they lived near the Savoy Bar. This place was the genuine melting pot – full of jazz-loving Nazis, gypsies and Zazous who had left Paris. Django began playing here, as well as various parties around the area. He became a regular at functions thrown in Chateau La Folie owned by the Schwartz family and set on a leafy acreage. But the Occupation continued to tighten its grip. The Schwartz family were denounced by the gardener’s son as Jews – they were deported and perished in the camps.
The Gestapo took over the estate.
Django decided to try and get to Geneva via the West. Again, the venture failed. He was also told not to try and escape France from the North because of German U-Boats. Instead, he and his pregnant wife decided to hike the Alps to freedom. They met their guide at a cafe. They were overheard by a German officer. They were all arrested.
Under interrogation, his British Performing Rights Society card was confiscated and he was declared a spy. Finally the officers brought in the local kommandant to continue the questioning. The kommandant was a jazz fan; Django and his wife were released.
They returned again to Paris.
Paris, 1944. Sniper fire shortly after the liberation. LIFE/Time Images.
On June 6th 1944 The Allies invaded France at Normandy. The German occupation of Paris ended on August 25th, 1944, when General Jacques Phillippe Leclerc’s Second Free French Armoured Division, supported by the US Fourth Infantry Division, entered the city. Only days before the liberation the Nazis murdered several thousand Roma and Sinti ‘gypsies’ at the Zigeunerlager in the Auschwtiz-Birkenau concentration camp.
As the Council of Europe described it: “Germans who took part in the slaughter later described it as the most difficult moment in the war for them, as Romani women struggled to hang on to their children. The crematorium burned all night”. Around 600,000 to 1.5 million Roma were exterminated during the Holocaust. One of Django’s cousins had faked his identity as Django in an attempt to save his own life – without success.
Paris itself only barely escaped destruction. Hitler had ordered German commander, General Dietrich von Cholitz, to leave the city in ruins. Cholitz turned fate and disobeyed – he left it intact.
As the world struggled to recover Django reunited with Grappelli. Together they toured the US with Duke Ellington. In 1949 he eventually sold his Paris apartment, bought a Lincoln, attached a trailer and hit the rural back-roads of France. He later hooked up a larger caravan for his mother, who had been living in an old converted Citroën. Reinhardt would occasionally visited Paris for a show – getting by on the wad of banknotes he kept under the pillow.
The basement of the Caveau de la Huchette, one of the first clubs to open after the war. It filled instantly with soldiers – mostly Afro-American.
Despite Goebbels best efforts the music could never be contained, quarantined or owned. The music leaves a legacy – as well as a brilliant but haunting accompaniment to the uncertainty, terror and mass obliteration that tore through those years.
Check out the fascinating but graphic clip of Europe on its knees by 1944, to the gilded music of Lili Marleen - a wartime favourite on both sides of the front. Django’s melancholy war-inspired Nuages, below (here recorded on electric) was another track that walked the lines, elevating him beyond the divisions – and onto stardom – during his years in Occupied Paris.
“He did more for the guitar than any other man in jazz” Stephane Grappelli told Melody Maker following Reinhardt’s death in 1953. “His way of playing was unlike anyone else’s, and jazz is different because of him. There can be many other fine guitarists, but never can there be another Reinhardt. I am sure of that.”
I highly recommend LeoTaurus1975 on youtube for a comprehensive look at the music of the times, along with some great clips of the time. Michael Dregni’s book on Django is also worth a delve, as well as a great gypsy-jazz homage site at http://www.paulvernonchester.com.
‘Miracle Mike’ with stand-in rooster head, 1945. Mike toured sideshows for 18 months after surviving a decapitation. Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
I’ve been getting a bit high-brow at The Barrelhouse lately, so here’s a story about a chicken with no head. As LIFE Magazine explained it, in 1945 Mrs. L.A. Olson, wife of a Colorado farmer, “decided to have chicken for dinner. Mrs. Olson took Mike to the chopping block and axed off his head”. The axe failed to cleanly clip the brain, instead creating a super-bird that refused to die.
Miracle Mike’s plight lead him out of the barnyard and into the limelight; for the next year and a half he starred in sideshows, acquired a promoter, appeared in LIFE Magazine, accrued a closet of stand-in rooster heads and was waited on feather and claw with suitcase and drop-feeder. True to rock star status he finally died in a motel somewhere in the Arizona desert.
Not for the fainthearted.
Mike the headless chicken on top of the world, and also a lawn mower. Fruita, Colorado, 1945. Image by Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
“Mike the headless chicken in his Colorado barnyard, with fellow chickens” LIFE Magazine 1945. To dispel theories that Mike was a hoax he was taken by his owner to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City to establish his authenticity. Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
The suitcase used to nurture Mike. Includes an eye dropper for delivering sustenance through the hole where his head used to be. Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Mike resting at home, 1945. Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Promoter Hope Wade with money-making Mike. Fruita, Colorado, 1945. Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Mike’s genuine head was reportedly eaten by the cat. He gathered stand-ins on the road. Image by Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
October 22, 1945 Issue of LIFE Magazine.
For the dirt on Mike’s legacy – including an annual Mike the Headless Chicken Festival in Colorado and Fan Club – take a look at his dedicated website.
Willie and his comrades. Andrew Sweeney, Girl, Lonely, Willie and friends shooting the movie “Without a uniform.” Volgograd, 1988. From the archive of Villi.
With anti-establishment act Pussy Riot now performing from a cage, it’s interesting to see how their own antics have carried on one particular Soviet tradition. And despite Putin’s best attempts to muscle in on the music scene – witness his moving rendition of Blueberry Hill – the KGB crooner might have his work cut out for him.
Since its underground rumblings in the 1980s, Russia’s punk subculture has had a fair bit of practice in bringing it to the people. The Soviet Union’s first punk band, Civil Defence – or Гражданская Оборона – or GrOb (ГрОб, Coffin) for short – had to duck and weave both censors and KGB. And they still found time to release illegal recordings; apparently known as “Bones” – homemade bootlegs often made from discarded medical x-rays.
In the 1970s and 1980s a growing surge of blackmarket fashion and underground music – openly challenging the Soviet-grey old-guard – delivered a dawning sense of freedom. By the mid-80s a tide of avant-garde artists, punks, rockers and psycho billies were roaming the streets, often meeting with spontaneous public performances – and the occasional police crackdown. Fashion shows could easily devolve into raucous rock gigs; catwalks and gigs colliding in places as diverse as Sergey Kuryokhin’s Popular Mechanics Group, the Sovincenter Hall, squats, concert halls and busy city streets.
As the Russian subculture site Kompost declares: “The subcultural people, who established their own market of attributes, had already formed their ideas about the standards of appearance”.
Soviet punk, 1980 – the beginning of the aesthetic war between “Soviet couture” and black market fashion.
‘Mrachnyĭ’ makeup. A common trend of the 80s. Leningrad, 1985 From the archive of Tania Gangrene.
‘Robot’ with ‘Nightingale’. ‘Nightingale’ was the Russian name given to the breed of Leningrad drinker who would stay up all night drinking and singing. 1983. Photo by Alexander Boyko, from the archive of Ruslan Ziggelya.
‘Buster and Dill’ just before the storming of the Nigerian Embassy, Moscow, 1987. Photo from the archives of Yaroslav Maeva Misha Bastera.
Sasha Surgeon, Moscow, 1989. Photo by Petra Gall.
Igor Gans at the entrance to the hall, “Tyazheloĭ athletics” in Izmaĭlovo, performances 1987. From the archive of Dima Sabbath.
Doing the twist – or tvistuny. Subculture, Leningrad, 1984. Photos from the archives of Tanya Aleksandrovoy.
Russian Mod with tapedeck, Chelyabinsk, 1985. From the archive of Gosha Shaposhnikov.
“Teddy Boys”. Beer on the Fontanka, Leningrad. In 1984. Photo by Alexander Boyko, from the archive of Ruslan Ziggelya.
Two rockabillys from St. Petersburg, members of the band Swindlers, 1989.
Psycho Billys, 1986, Leningrad – now St. Petersburg.
Moscow, 1980s. The new wave of fashion not drafted by State; includes flares, leopardskins, 50s quiffs and denim.
The new generation of street punk, Moscow, 1992.
Quasi-Western Rambo style. A punk and a ‘Ljuber’ in a photo studio in Moscow, 1988. The so-called Ljuberi were a youth group from the Moscow district satellite Lyubertsy
Punk performer Buster Misha, 1988 – around the time the Govt sent him to work in a dairy for violating some Soviet rules. Misha Buster was just 13 when he dipped into the scene. He took his name from Buster Keaton.
Every subculture needs a motorcycle gang. Russia’s ‘Night Wolves’, 1990 Moscow.
Rebels at the Kremlin. Russian rocker Andrei Melkijy, Dima Sabbath and Sasha Lebed Sabbath demonstrate the dress code in 1987, Red Square.
Moscow’s ‘street punks’, 1988. Soviet uniformity being subverted – courtesy of black market retailers.
Three Russian metalheads scare an old lady. Misha Buster commented: “fear and laughter – that was our trademark.”
A photo of aimless rage, vandalism, and the urge to destroy everything they get their hands on. 1990′s somewhere, Russia.
“The music and lyrics of punk rock provoke among the young fits of aimless rage, vandalism, and the urge to destroy everything they get their hands on. No matter how carefully they try to clean it up, it will remain the most reactionary offspring of the bourgeoisie mass culture.” (Pravda, official newspaper and mouthpiece of the USSR)
On May 9th 1991, 24-year-old poet and singer Yana Stanislavovna Dyagileva (Яна Станиславовна Дягилева,) known as Yanka (Янка) left her Novosibirsk country home, never to be seen again. Yanka was Russia’s own Patti Smith, her delivery thoughtful and message sharp. On May 17th her body was found in the Inya River. Her death officially remains a mystery – although there was apparently no water in her lungs and a fractured skull. The fact that she was married to the singer from Yegor Letov may not have helped. Her record sales have grown since her death.
J.M.K.E. was one band whose name made it beyond the Iron Curtain. Civil Defence also survived into the post-communist years, releasing a number of albums and gathering a large following. Unfortunately lead singer Yegor Letov (Его́р Ле́тов) reportedly died in his sleep two years ago.
Yanka (Янка), Russia’s Patti Smith.
My sources are a bit unclear on this one, but I believe it is a photo of Yanka being escorted to an old fashioned correctional gig. Anyone know for sure?
Andrew Kisanov, Gustav Guryanov and Viktor Tsoi in the music video “We saw the night.” Leningrad, 1986. Photo by Harry Assy
Old and new, Moscow 1980s.
State prosecutors yesterday demanded three years each for the Pussy Riot members in a corrective labour facility, after their public anti-Putin performance protest in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They each received two years – on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. In response to that, it’s worth reading Tolokonnikova’s closing statement before her sentencing (and there’s nothing wrong with Socrates):
“Socrates was accused of corrupting youth through his philosophical discourses and of not recognizing the gods of Athens. Socrates had a connection to a divine inner voice. What did that matter, however, when he had angered the city with his critical, dialectical and unprejudiced thinking? Socrates was sentenced to death and, refusing to run away, although he was given that option, he drank down a cup of poison in cold blood, hemlock”.
“And I hope everyone remembers what the Jews said to Jesus: “We’re stoning you not for any good work, but for blasphemy.” And finally it would be well worth remembering this description of Christ: “He is possessed of a demon and out of his mind.”
“We were looking for authentic genuineness and simplicity and we found them in our punk performances” (closing court statements, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Pussy Riot, 8 August 2012)
The motley collection of videos below include:
1. Civil Defence’s ‘I Don’t Believe in Anarchy’,
2. “Yanka” Dyagileva
3. Viktor Tsoi “Change” that concluded the 2011 protest anti-Putin Twitter/Youtube protest.
“Some of the photographed documents are like open wounds. A hastily pencilled suicide note reads: ‘Goodbye earth, all is lost’. Another, apparently written in blood, says ‘Be prepared, you die soon’. There are obscene drawings and messages left at crime scenes by safe crackers and burglars. One, signed ‘Apache’, compliments the victim on the robustness of their safe; another thanks the home owner for the whiskey” (John Doyle, City of Shadows)
It’s a book that gives you ideas. If you’ve got a chain-smoking drifter lurking in the back of your head, or a killer stealing your thoughts, you might finally catch them here. The photos have been exhibited in Sydney a couple of times – but their story is still worth repeating.
When a flood deluged an old Sydney warehouse back in the 1980s, The Historic Houses Trust shifted around four tonnes of boxes, cartons and crates of old Kodak neg. What they cracked open was a lost covenant of crime photos, dated from 1912 to 1960. Con-men, prostitutes, itinerants, gangsters, the aftermath of murder; all caught in the flash-lamp of bygone police investigations, details of which had been long since lost. Lives and motives cut largely adrift – not for the first time.
What remains is raw – sometimes graphic – testament to their characters. Several years ago the writer John Doyle was brought on board to salvage these moments from the glass plates and acetate. Groaning ledgers of long-since forgotten mug-shot, murder scene, mishap and tragedy could now easily satisfy any director’s casting book or story-board. Doyle has done an extraordinary job, compiling a strangely intimate tour through the under-tow of a city’s dead in his book City of Shadows.
Mr Skukerman, or Mr Kukarman, or Mr Cecil Landan, glowers from across the years. The NSW Police Gazette Sydney notes he ‘obtains goods from warehousemen by falsely representing that he is in business’.
Harry Williams, sentenced to 12 months hard labour on March 1929 for breaking, entering, stealing. The Police Gazette reported that Williams consorted with prostitutes and ‘frequents hotels and wine bars in the vicinity of the Haymarket’.
Walter Smith after a battering, somewhere in Sydney, Australia, 1924. Smith was listed in the NSW Police Gazette, 24 December 1924, as ‘breaking and entering’. He was sentenced to 6 months hard labour.
‘Harry Leon Crawford’, charged with wife murder. Crawford was soon revealed to be in fact Eugeni Falleni, a woman and mother, who had passed as a man since 1899. In 1914 Falleni married Annie Birkett, who later told a relative she had discovered ‘something amazing about Harry’. Birkett disappeared. Falleni went on to appear in numerous mug shots through the years, becoming the notorious ‘woman-man’ killer in the press.
Mug shot of Thomas Sutherland Jones and William Smith, 15 July 1921, Central Police Station, Sydney.
The handwritten inscription reads ‘Frederick Edward Davies stealing in picture shows and theatres, Central 14-7-21′. Police held petty theft in particularly low regard – this may be why Davies is photographed front of the toilet stalls.
Thomas Bede, Central cells, 22 November 1928. The man who refuses to open his eyes for a photo. Police had to scratch this script back-the-front on the plate – so this would have been doubly annoying.
“To meditate on the uncensored history presented in these photos is to be made aware of two things; the power, strangeness and vulnerability of all human life and the need to document, resolve and rationally explain its infinite capacity for aberration” (Peter Doyle, City of Shadows)
It wasn’t until the formation of the Scientific Investigation Bureau (SIB) in 1945 that a standard procedure was enforced for mug shots. Before then, there was an enormous degree of creative license for everyone involved. The images often capture the subject in a full-blooded moment, with no consistent mode of framing or standard composition to constrain.
“Despite the elegant formal arrangements…we are left with the impression of a black and white world that is fraught with pain and misadventure. A place that the era’s magazines, travel brochures and up-beat newsreels ritually ignored.” observes Doyle. “Men and women recently plucked from the street, often still animated by the dramas surrounding their apprehension”
Vera Crichton, 23 (left) conspired with two other women to ‘procure a miscarriage on a third woman’. She was ‘bound over to appear for sentence if called upon within three years’. E. Walker was believed to be a vagrant. Her head was probably shaved in the cells due to lice.
Convicted of using an instrument to procure a miscarriage. Janet Wright was a former nurse who performed illegal abortions at her house in Kippax Street, Surry Hills. One of her teenage patients almost died after a procedure – Wright was sentenced to 12 months hard labour. Aged 68.
‘Tilly’ Devine sentenced to two years gaol for slashing a man’s face in a barber shop with a razor. She would become Sydney’s best-known brothel madam, her public fued with sly-grog queen Kate Leigh (below) provided endless media fodder at the time. The war between the two has since been elevated to city folklore. Aged 25
A young Kate Leigh, 1915.
Some hard drinkin’ years later. Kate Leigh as Sydney’s now notorious sly-grog baroness and underworld figure, 1930.
Inscribed Hayes, date unknown – probably early 1920s.
Alfred Ladewig, alias ‘Tiny’. Police Gazette Sept 1920 reads that Ladewig was charged with ‘stealing by trick’ the sum of two hundred and four pounds.
It wasn’t until the formation of the Scientific Investigation Bureau (SIB) in 1945 that standard procedure was enforced for mug shots – until then dance routines were obviously acceptable. Friends of the missing Rene Flowers – clearly a vaudeville performer – flaunt it.
Teenager Annie Gunderson was charged with stealing a fur coat from a Sydney department store called Winn’s Limited, in 1922. Police records do not indicate whether the fur she is wearing is the stolen item. Aged 19.
Wharf labourer William Stanley Moore ‘operates with large quantities of faked opium and cocaine’ and ‘associates with waterfront thieves and illicit drug traders’.
W. Cahill, the tough guy’s Russell Crowe, hits 1923 to do some crimes. Details unknown.
Bad boy Sidney Kelly, June 25, 1924. Offences included shooting, and assault. In the 1940s was a pioneer of illegal baccarat gaming in Sydney. This NSW Police Gazette: “Illicit drug trader. Drives his own motor car, and dresses well. Associates with criminals and prostitutes.”
Kong Lee makes numerous appearances in the NSW Police Gazette. A ‘safe blower’ and ‘thief’, and is noted in 1929 as having recently been seen riding trains ‘in the company of card sharpers and spielers’.
‘Ah Num’ and ‘Ah Tom’ some time in 1930. The ‘D’ prefix on the photo indicates it was taken by the Drug Bureau. Num and Tom don’t appear in any records – their names may have been conjured for the paperwork.
The lads busted. Not for long perhaps? Hampton Hirscham, Cornellius Joseph Keevil, William Thomas O’Brien and James O’Brien – July 20, 1921
All together now. ‘Group of criminals, Central 1921′ (unnamed). The woman on the left is believed to be Eileen Leigh or Barry (daughter of Kate Leigh). The man third from the left in that row may be the pickpocket and three-card trickster known as Frederick Mewson, and the man far left in the front row is likely the pickpocket known as Norman Smith.
“Child unknown found wandering at large”. Mid 1920s, details unknown.
Hazel McGuiness, 26th July 1929, Central cells. Details unknown.
May Russell, 31st January 1922, Central cells. Details unknown.
Ah Chong, 11 July 1928, Central cells. No listing for Ah Chong found when this photo was taken, but an Ah Chong was convicted on two charges of receiving in 1922. He also received twelve months hard labour.
Mrs Dorothy Mort was having an affair with a strapping young doctor and Test Cricketer, Dr Claude Tozer. On 21 December 1920 Tozer visited her home to break off the relationship. Mort shot him dead. She was found covered in blood with a gunshot wound to her breast, and under the influence of a narcotic. Tozer was found in her drawing room, shot in the back of the head, the temple and the chest. Dorothy Mort has rebuttoned his vest over the chest wound. The case stirred a media sensation.
Dr Tozer visits the home of girlfriend Dorothy Mort on 21 December 1920. It didn’t go well.
Exterior, scene of car crash, from bridge onto storm water canal cover, early 1940s. Details unknown.
Underneath a bridge, inner city Sydney, a bottle Waterbury’s Compound – a popular tonic and cough remedy – by the dead man’s side. It is unclear whether he fell – photographs suggest the possibility.
Probably mid 1940s, details unknown.
Published in Sydney newspapers in 1933, as a practical demonstration to a sceptical press and public that police could operate undercover. The men seen here are a mix of detectives and civilians. The figure third from the right is believed to be Sergeant Frank Fahy, aka “The Shadow” – the force’s most effective undercover operative at the time.
The International Workers of the World, or ‘Wobblies’, carried out ‘direct action’ – sabotage – in Sydney in 1916, agitating for the release of their leader, Tom Barker. Barker had been jailed for sedition after making an anti-war speech in the Sydney Domain. It was seen as the modern equivalent of terrorism. Cotton waste, turpentine, phosphorous and kerosene, were allegedly found during police raids in Sydney and the ‘IWW Twelve’ were convicted of conspiracy and sedition. All received long jail sentences.
The most popular camera with crime and press photographers was the large format 4×5 Speed Graphic- made famous by Weegee. It had a large flash unit attached that could light up an entire room. It was difficult and hard to focus in low light, with ground glass and rangefinder focusing.
Probably late 1930s, early 1940s. Details unknown.
The scene where criminal heavy John Frederick ‘Chow’ Hayes shot boxer William ‘Bobby’ John Lee, at the busy Ziegfeld Club, 22 May. Hayes shot Lee in front of friends and other underworld figures, in a revenge attack. He was reportedly provoked by the line ‘you wouldn’t do it here, with all the lights shining and all the people around’. ‘Chow’ shot Lee five times. Lee refused to identify Hayes on the way to hospital – where he died that night. Hayes was not convicted.
According to the Police Report: “Four detectives went to the flat, climbed in a window and found the bodies lying on the bedroom floor. Investigations led the police to form the opinion that while Mrs Anderson was seated on a chair in the lounge she was shot. A trail of blood indicated that as she jumped up from the chair she knocked it over and then staggered towards the door. The detectives think that Anderson caught hold of her, knocking the wireless set against a sideboard. He then dragged her into the bedroom and as she slumped dead on the floor he shot himself. He fell across his wife’s body and the revolver was found under him.
Bedroom, with bloodstained bed reflected in dressing table mirror. Details unknown, late 1930s.
Safe break attempt at the Camellia Grove Hotel, now the Sports Bar, Henderson Road, Alexandria.
Three men demonstrating self-defence techniques. Details unknown, late 1930s.
Of the assorted types, Doyle says: “The subjects of the Special Photographs seem to have been allowed – perhaps invited – to position and compose themselves for the camera as they liked. Their photographic identity thus seems constructed out of a potent alchemy of inborn disposition, personal history, learned habits and idiosyncrasies, chosen personal style (haircut, clothing, accessories) and physical characteristics.”
So, given the passage of time, this collection reminds me a bit of the epilogue line at the end of Barry Lyndon: “It was in the reign of King George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now”.
The latest exhibition from the ongoing discoveries in the archive was Collision: Misadventure by Motorcar – featuring car crashes and traffic accidents in Sydney between 1920 and 1960.
Nick Cave cocoons himself in purpose – and various accessories – while writing ‘And The Ass Saw the Angel’, Berlin 1986.
Geoff Stanton
Every desk tells a story. Take a look at your own. It may be the only place you can keep ordered; a solitary cove where you can wind life back, expand the surface and skim like a stone. I prefer to sink into mine. For this I recommend two empty bottles of red, a deck of beer coasters, maps, plots, coins, scrolling notebooks and a cup of loose pens. Pitch them headlong into the task. And turn off the computer. Ditch the facebook, the email, the blog, all the crap.
I was recently inspired by Jonathan Raban’s ode to writing aboard his sea-faring crib in Journey to Juneau: “With the floor sashaying underfoot, the chain rumbling on the sea bottom, and the view from the boat’s window’s revolving slowly on the tide, I found the equilibrium I was prone to lose on the unstable land. On winter mornings I’d fire up the heater, light the lamps and work with an intense single mindedness that evaded me at home. The creaks and groans, the smells of parrafin and diesel, were conducive to thinking and remembering”.
But whether it’s via a hatch, a cup of tea, a bottle of whiskey, a pool of blood, four walls of chaos and a nap - the desk is a great helm. Here’s a classical tour of some of the big guys; their desks, methods, modes for writing the masterpiece that will keep the ghost lingering.
Dalton Trumbo gets down to work, Mitzi Trumbo/AP Images
Hollywood heavyweight and screenwriting legend Dalton Trumbo. He did most of his writing sitting in the tub, working on a tray suspended over suds. According to his wife, he’d spend days in the bathroom, writing, soaking and smoking – Kirk Douglas remarked that Trumbo sometimes smoked up to six packs of cigarettes a day.
The picture comfort is instructive; next time you’re wasting time in a bath, remember it was here Trumbo wrote films such as The Sandpiper (1965) for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, The Horsemen (1971) for director John Frankenheimer and his last film, Papillon (1973). And all that after he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950 – during which time he focused his skills on letter writing. Although he did posthumously win an Academy Award for secretly writing Roman Holiday (1953).
Truman Capote and his big ideas, 1977, Arnold Newman.
Inspiration. A glass of sherry in one hand and a pencil in another. “I am a completely horizontal author” Truman Capote told the Paris Review in 1957. “I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand.”
Ernest Hemingway at the Standing Desk on the Balcony of Bill Davis’s home near Malaga, Life/Time Images.
Hemingway wrote 500 words a day – mostly in the mornings to avoid the heat. A prolific writer, he also knew when to stop. In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934, he wrote, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
Hemingway discovered the standing desk method from his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins, after an injury prevented him from spending prolonged amounts of time sitting down. In the 18th and 19th centuries, nearly everyone used a standing desk. AE Hotchner recalls Hemingway’s home set-up in Havana, in Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir:
“In Ernest’s room there was a large desk covered with stacks of letters, magazines, and newspaper clippings, a small sack of carnivores’ teeth, two unwound clocks, shoehorns, an unfilled pen in an onyx holder, a wood carved zebra, wart hog, rhino and lion in single file, and a wide-assortment of souvenirs, mementos and good luck charms. He never worked at the desk. Instead, he used a stand up work place he had fashioned out of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.”
“I hate writing. I love having written.” Dorothy Parker, Life/Time images.
“Ducking for apples” said Dorothy Parker. “Change one letter and it’s the story of my life.” Dorothy Parker; American poet, short story writer, critic, satirist – and yet another blacklisted name during the 1950s. In her day she was known as a ‘wisecracker‘ – a label that may have been applied to Oscar Wilde had he been born in New Jersey – but one Parker despised. Yet her literary output and reputation for sharp wit has endured.
Dorothy Parker in the midst of writer’s block. She sent this telegram to her editor, Pascal Covici, as she couldn’t bring herself to look him “in the voice.”
Asked by a journalist during an interview, “Where’s the best place to write?” Parker replied, “In your head.” And her head was clocked in constantly, from speakeasies through three marriages (two to the same man – “I put all my eggs in one bastard”), the heavy drinking and smoking and some unhappiness. But her style and wit continue to entertain readers. “I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.”
Nearly finished? Lost in spools. The draft of Jack Kerouac’s Beat-defining phenomenon ‘On the Road’ appeared to the world in April 1951 as a single 36 metre (120-foot) role of paper.
Fueled by the same fever as his characters, Jack Kerouac racked a word-count to help him set course for a complete novel. “That’s not writing” Capote famously remarked,”that’s typing”. But when the whiskey and malt loosened its grip, habits at the Kerouac table-top were disciplined. From the time of first novel The Town and the City Kerouac kept a log; between 1,000 to 5,000 words a night.He also created a formula to mimic the ‘batting average’. The goal was a .400 batting average – on par with Ted Williams.
Kerouac’s fierce verbal also invoked a set of commandments, tacked on the wall of Allen Ginsberg’s hotel room in North Beach a year before Ginsberg published Howl.
“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy. Submissive to everything, open, listening. Try never get drunk outside yr own house. Be in love with yr life. Accept loss forever. Believe in the holy contour of life. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better”
After hours. Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsber, 1959. Image John Cohen/Hulton Archive
Alfred Hitchcock with his 1930′s Black Underwood typewriter – and cocktail bar. “More work was done on the script in the evening over cocktails, than any other time” said collaborator Charles Bennett. Life/Time images.
“In the morning, I used to get up and pick up Hitch in Cromwell Road, where he lived, at ten o’clock exactly” says screenwriter Charles Bennett, who collaborated with Hitchcock from his earliest ‘talkies’ – including The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 – establishing the innovative wit, freshness and originality Hitchcock subsequently demanded of his writers. “He would be sitting on the curb waiting for me. And then we would go to the studio where we would discuss the script and what I was doing with it”.
“Then at about one o’clock, everything would stop, and we’d go to lunch, always at the Mayfair Hotel, and have a wonderful lunch. Then come back and at that point, Hitch would usually go to sleep in the office, and I would do a little work, and possibly doze off too slightly. At about five o’clock, we would go back to Hitchcock’s flat where we would start having nice cocktails for the evening, and talk more and more and more about the script. And I think more work was done on the script in the evening over cocktails, than any other time.”
Tennessee Williams faces a terrible question, Life/Time images
“I write as soon as I get up in the morning – facing that terrible question as soon as possible. Some mornings I get up and what I’ve been working on is repugnant to me. So then I shift to some other thing I’ve been working on. I find it absolutely necessary to have two things going on at once, then I can shift back and forth” (Tennessee Williams interview with John Gruen, 1965)
William Faulkner, 1943. “My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey. Life/ Time images.
“I can’t write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman” said Patricia Highsmith, Tom Ripley creator, and bringer of many other thrillers – including Hitchcock’s ‘Stranger’s on a Train’.”I have Graham Greene’s telephone number, but I wouldn’t dream of using it. I don’t seek out writers because we all want to be alone.”
Roald Dahl in his writing hut.
Roald Dahl created space the same way his mind burrowed out a giant peach; fantastically. He believed a writing space should be highly personal. His writing hut was closed to everyone, including family. A wing-back chair hollowed out to comfort a bad back, a writing board made from wood and green baize fitted across the arms. An electric heater hung directly overhead.
The hut was also decked with curios and artifacts; a piece of his own hip bone, his own preserved spinal shavings, fossils, magazines, fan letters, old photos, family totems, bookmarks drawn specially for him by friend and illustrator Quentin Blake (he only ever seen the interior once) and an enormous ball of wrapper foil slow-built from years of lunching on Cadbury’s chocolate.
Now that the great writing chair is empty you can take an interactive tour of the hut.
“As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I’m not sure that I’m going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says ‘you are nothing’, I will be a writer.”, Hunter S Thompson.
Hunter S. Thompson is best known for writing in a spin of campaign trails, Hell’s Angels, Holiday Inns, Wild Turkey, mescalin and an occasional lawyer. But while attending Columbia University School of General Studies and taking creative writing, he also worked at Time for $51 a week as a copy boy. During this stint he would sneak off into a room with a typewriter and rewrite his favorite author’s books, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gastby and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, before moving on.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you’re trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I’d like to work for you. (Thompson’s Cover letter to Vancouver Sun, looking for a job, 1957)
Henry Miller in his office
Euchrid’s Crib, Nick Cave in Yorkestrasse, West Berlin, 1985, Image by Bleddyn Butcher.
Human song-sheaf Nick Cave has replaced harmful addictions with work since the eighties, and implies as much himself: “Writing is a necessary thing for me, just to keep myself level. It has beneficial effects on my life”. When he bunked down in Berlin to write the And the Ass Saw The Angel, it seemed his method was not so different from songwriting – or taking drugs. “I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can’t really find a way to change those things.”
And isn’t that what it’s all about?
“More Things to Remember…”, Nick Cave, Melbourne Arts Centre
Dr Alfred Kinsey and Kenneth Anger unearth Aleister Crowley’s Satanic frescoes in Thelema Abbey, Sicily.
Geoff Stanton
“As Keith and Anita learned more about the powers of darkness, they grew secretive. They knew the subject frightened me, and they got rid of me when Kenneth Anger or other demonic friends came to call. Keith was impressed when Kenneth ticked off all the great artistic rebels who’d flirted with black magic – Blake, Byron, Oscar Wilde, Yeats and De Quincey…” (Tony Sanchez, Up and Down with the Rolling Stones)
There is something largely missing from popular cinema and music these days, and that’s Satan. I might be sounding old-fashioned – but Satanism had some style. While 1969 turned many things bad – Hells Angels, heroin, peyote, Charles Manson, Dick Van Dyke – Kenneth Anger’s pact with the devil was reaping psychedelic fruit. Anger was a powerful force. His grasp of the symbolic – reckoned with the Satanic creed of ‘Do What Thou Wilt’ – alchemised into works such as Scorpio Rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother, and dealt the decade a final score.
And along the way he also scared some people. In fact, his “awesomely evil 11-minute masterpiece” Invocation – starring himself, Anton LaVey (the High Priest of the Church of Satan), Charles Manson sidekick Bobby Beausoleil (later to serve life imprisonment with Manson for first degree murder), and featuring documentary footage from a satanic cat funeral, a ceremonial skull smoking session, a mummified psychic and a synthesized Moog soundtrack by Mick Jagger – was not as out of this world as the man himself.
Kenneth Anger, camera in crowd, shooting footage that will end up in ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’.
“We all were just a little afraid of Kenneth” said Tony Sanchez, the Rolling Stones’ drug manager, in his Stones biography. “Again and again inexplicable things involving him would happen. Once, for example, Robert Fraser arranged an opening party for some white sculptures that John Lennon and Yoko Ono had created. I saw Kenneth clearly at the party, but when I went across to talk to him he seemed to have vanished.
“I thought little of it at the time until that afternoon when Anita, Marianne, Keith and Mick all said that they too had seen Kenneth but had been unable to find him. ‘Anyway’ said Anita ‘it’s very strange because Kenneth told me he wouldn’t be able to come to the exhibition because he was going away on business in Germany’. Kenneth didn’t return to London for two weeks, and by then numerous people all remarked on having seen Kenneth across the crowded room, but had been unable to speak to him. Eventually we asked almost everyone who had been there if they has spoken to him – and none of them had”.
Kenneth Anger sporting his trademark Lucifer tattoo.
The myth of Kenneth Anger quickly spread through the shakers’ inner circles. The Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithful, Jimmy Page – all were eager to move in its current. “Kenneth Anger told me I was his right hand man” Keith Richards told Rolling Stone Magazine. “It’s just what you feel. Whether you’ve got that good and evil thing together. Left-hand path, right hand path, how far do you want to go down? Once you start there’s no going back.”
By ’69 Anger was considered a fierce original in Europe and the United States – both influential and genuinely independent. From his early 1947 film Fireworks, through to Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and Lucifer Rising (1972), Anger became, as Jonas Mekas put it “one of the most complex personalities working in cinema. Whatever he does, be it cinema or life, he does it fully, to the bottom… Kenneth Anger, the True Cosmic Explorer.”
The Kenneth Anger enigma begins in 1935, back-dated by his own hand, where he claimed to have performed the role of the Changeling Prince in the Warner Brothers film A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Whether or not the child was him is debatable – studio key books state the character was played by a girl named Sheila Brown. Anger’s biographer denies this. Bullshit or not, the claim somehow adds to Anger’s ability to transcend the chair.
“Kenneth Anger claimed to be a Magus, though he refused to reveal whether toad sacrifices had been necessary for his promotion” wrote Sanchez. “What is indisputable is that Anger does appear to have certain powers, and he has been linked with extraordinary incidents.”
Kenneth Anger/ Sheila Brown as The Changleing Prince from 1935′s Midsummer Night’s Dream. IMDB goes with Brown. His later work Rabbit’s Moon was also influenced by this film.
At the Cinémathèque Française, 1955.
With an interest in the occult piqued at an early age by Frank L Baum’s Oz books, by the 1950s Anger was travelling the Satanic grottoes of Europe – voyaging firstly through Italy to make a film about the sixteenth century occultist Cardinal d’Este, before emerging in Paris around 1955 (where he met Jean Cocteau). He continued to produce short films, filming 20 minutes of footage for his film Rabbit’s Moon (set under a blue filter, it involves a clown longing for the moon) at the Films du Pantheon Studio. When the studio closed the production down, footage was stored in the labyrinthine archive of the Cinémathèque Française.
In 1955 Anger spent three months in Cefalu, Sicily to shoot a documentary about Aleister Crowley’s frescoes in Thelema Abbey. The Abbey of Thelema was a small villa establised as a temple and spiritual centre by Crowley in 1920. The name was taken from Rabelais’ satire Gargantua and Pantagruel, where the Abbey of Thélème was an ‘anti-monastery’ in which inhabitants spent time “not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure.”
Thelema Abbey, Cefalù, Sicily, circa Kenneth Anger.
Early Hollywood star Jane Wolfe at Abbey of Thelema at Cefalù, Sicily. She lived there from 1920 until it closed in 1923. Wolfe kept records of magic practice, later published by the College of Thelema in Northern California, as The Cefalu Diaries. She gave up a Hollywood career to join Crowley.
Anger’s film would have made an fascinating excursion – complete with shuddering organ, grotesque undercoats and a resident evil, no doubt. But unfortunately it has been lost. “The film was made for Houlton Television which was a branch of Picture Post – an extinct British Magazine.” said Anger “They lost it. I tried to find it and it’s untraceable. I lived in Crowley’s house, alone, but that kind of thing doesn’t bother me. I had to. It was the only way to get it done.
“I spent three months there scraping the whitewash, which had turned to stone, off the walls. They were still there – all those hyper-psychedelic murals: goblins and demons in fabulous color, scarlet and pumpkin-red. Actually they were good paintings, similar in feel to Ensor”.
But it was the 1960s that truly brought the demons to the surface.
Satan was getting a lot of press. And Anton LaVey – founder and head of the Church of Satan – was spearheading business. The symbolism and ritual of the occult appealed to the anti-establishment; hippies were looking further than flowers, thinkers were pressing the boundaries. On the screen, occult-obsessed films had sprung from the drying patch of Hammer horror – movies such as Eye of the Devil (starring Roman Polanksi’s beautiful but doomed wife Sharon Tate), The Devil Rides Out, The Devils Own and – perhaps – later on The Exorcist. Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby was the cream of the crop – LaVey adding it was “the best paid commercial for Satanism since the Inquisition.”
Anton LaVey in Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Brother Demon. He plays … Satan! He would later be technical adviser for The Devil’s Rain, a story of a cult of devil worshippers starring Ernest Borgnine, William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, and John Travolta.
In 1966 blonde starlet Jayne Mansfield - reputedly a Church of Satan Priestess (following some publicity shots she did with LaVey) - stole the headlines after being virtually decapitated in a car accident, alongside boyfriend Sam Brody. Anton LaVey, reportedly obsessed with Mansfield, took it badly. He had put the curse on Brody.
Gossip now dragged Satan through the undertow of magazines and media. And LaVey seized the wheel. In 1969 he publicly married journalist John Raymond and socialite Judith Case, performed a satanic funeral of Navy machinist-repairman Edward Olsen at Treasure Island (reciting the eulogy while a Navy musician played Taps), performed a satanic baptism on his own 3-year-old daughter Zeena (who chewed gum throughout), appeared on Johnny Carson’s seventh anniversary show and released the Satanic Bible.
A Satanic wedding in the 1960s.
Satanists Michael Aquino and Anton LaVey with Sammy Davis Jr, Circle Star Theater. Davis reportedly noticed Anton LaVey in the front row, and gave him the Sign of the Horns. He was later presented with a second-degree certificate, medallion, and membership card for the Church of Satan.
LaVey and Jayne Mansfield in a series of publicity shots, shortly before her death.
It was also around this time Anger began to gather a reputation. And around the time he started working on his opus, Lucifer Rising.
Again to Sanchez: “His life’s work was to have been a film of homage to the devil, Lucifer Rising. For the role of Lucifer Anger employed a good looking young man named Bobby Beausoleil, who played guitar with the Californian rock band Love. Mysteriously, after many months of filming, Beausoleil appeared to go beserk and carried out a singularly bestial murder which ended with his writing on a wall with his victim’s blood”.
Rumour has it that Beausoleil was kicked out by Anger after he hid an enormous parcel of marijuana in house. Anger later claimed that the guitarist took the footage for Lucifer Rising with him, and buried it somewhere in Death Valley. Kenneth Anger therefore placed ‘the curse of the frog’ on him – by trapping a frog in a well.
It was not long afterwards that Beausoleil became associated with the Manson family and murdered music teacher Gary Hinman – after a bulk sale of LSD to some bikers went bad. He is currently serving a life sentence for first degree murder.
Bobby Beausoleil on the doorstep of Anger’s Russian House, ‘Do What Thou Wilt’. Bobby Beausoleil did, and is now spending his life in prison.
The role of Lucifer was subsequently offered to Mick Jagger, with Jimmy Page brought in to compose the soundtrack. Page’s interest in the occult is well known – from the early seventies he owned an occult bookshop and publishing house, “The Equinox Booksellers and Publishers” in Kensington High Street, London. The company published a facsimile of English occultist’s Aleister Crowley’s 1904 edition of The Goetia. Page had also purchased and lived in Crowley’s estate of Boleskine – an old home by the side of Loch Ness in Scotland, originally purchased by Crowley because its isolation and layout reflected the order required to speak to spirits, as per instructions found in the The Book of the Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin the Mage.
“I feel Aleister Crowley is a misunderstood genius of the 20th century” Page told Sounds Magazine in 1978. “Because his whole thing was liberation of the person, of the entity, and that restrictions would foul you up, lead to frustration which leads to violence, crime, mental breakdown, depending on what sort of makeup you have underneath. The further this age we’re in now gets into technology and alienation, a lot of the points he’s made seem to manifest themselves all down the line.”
For personal reasons – heroin – Page never completed the job. What he did deliver was twenty-three minutes of music three years later – five minutes short of Anger’s demands and the final cut. Page recently released the recording as ‘Lucifer Rising and Other Soundtracks’ in 2012.
Anger’s view of Page has meanwhile soured over the years. “He’s a multi-millionaire miser,” he told Mark Berry, in a great interview for Bizarre Magazine. “He and Charlotte, that horrible vampire girl – the druggie that got him on heroin – they’re both junkies. They had so many servants, yet they would never offer me a cup of tea or a sandwich. Which is such a mistake on their part because I put the curse of king Midas on them. If you’re greedy and just amass gold you’ll get an illness. So I did turn her and Jimmy Page into statues of gold because they’ve both lost their minds. He can’t write songs anymore.”
The final soundtrack was delivered – remarkably – by the incarcerated Beausoleil. And it is quite stunning; an hypnotic reel of looping psychedelic guitar, with ancient harmonics fuzzing at the core. It was Anger’s most expensive film because it involved a trip to Egypt. In the film Marianne Faithfull played Lilith – a demon. “I said to Marianne Faithfull, don’t bring any drugs because they’ll execute you” recalled Anger. “So she hid her heroin in her makeup box underneath her face powder. I think she was powdering her face with heroin.”
Marianne Faithfull before The Sphinx as Lilith the demon, in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising.
And the hallucinogenic stories from The Rolling Stones camp meanwhile continued to flourish. Tony Sanchez relates Anger’s participation in the wedding of Kieth Richards and Anita Pallenberg – which he suggested be a pagan ceremony. He then explained that the door of the house where the ceremony is held must be painted gold with a magical paint containing special herbs, which represent the sun.
“The next morning I was awakened by Anita yelling hysterically to Keith from the hallway” says Sanchez. “I pulled on my dressing gown and ran downstairs to see what all the commotion was about. ‘Look Tony, look’ she screamed pointing to the door. I was astonished to discover that it had been fastidiously painted inside and out in gold. ‘It must have been Kenneth, but I can’t work out how he did it’ said Keith. ‘The security people put the strongest lock you can buy in that door, and there’s no way anyone could have got a spare key.’ ‘It must be another of Kenneth’s powers’ said Anita. ‘It means he can fly into the house anytime he wants to’.
On the subject of magic, Anger cryptically told Mark Berry: “I never talk about it with people that aren’t magicians. Because they would think you were a fucking liar.”
Anger himself offers a more sober assessment of his transmuting abilities. In Out! Demons Out!: An Oral History of the 1967 Exorcism of the Pentagon, Anger recalled his method of infiltrating the Pentagon to attack Mars, the God of War. “I just walked right in. I had studied how the Pentagon staff were dressed, and I was just like them. I wore a dark blue conservative suit. I even had a small American flag on my lapel. There were these hothead lefties, who, their idea was they would take over and kill the capitalists – not very practical.
“I had a map of the Pentagon. I went into every single men’s room and left—in a place where it was bound to be discovered, usually on the seat —a talisman which was written on parchment paper, drawn in india ink. Each one was drawn individually using one of Crowley’s talismans as my guide. They probably could figure out it was something occult. They know about those things, and they have a reference library.”
“He’s still our ruling god. Mars loves bloodshed, and he is a force that’s still operating in the world—it’s a force that according to modern thinking is irrational, but nevertheless there. Freud would have called it the unconscious or something but I believe that these are actual living entities. Not ‘living’ in the way like humans living and breathing, [but] living in a way that are much beyond our capacity, because they’ll never die.
“I didn’t stop until I had scattered all 93 of my talismans—because 93 is a sacred number for Crowley. Then I walked out, it was all very inconspicuous. The security guard looked at me and gave me a nice look, like we’re all looking after each other. If I’d been stopped and put in handcuffs that would’ve been unpleasant. That isn’t the way I want to spend my time in Washington—I had a ticket to the opera for later that week.
Film makers Donald Cammell, Dennis Hopper, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Kenneth Anger. Message to Hollywood 2012: Pull your socks up and make some decent pacts.
By the 1980s Anger was living largely in retirement, screening his films at universities and film festivals. He was also living off the pulp-gossip of his Hollywood Babylon books 1 and 2, which trawled through the scandalous underbelly of Hollywood stardom. They contained highly litigious litanies of debauch and revelation (including the Fatty Arbuckle sexual assault scandal, the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the Hollywood Blacklist and the murder of Sharon Tate) most of which continue to be debunked. Film historian Kevin Brownlow criticized the work, quoting Anger as saying his research method was “mental telepathy, mostly”. A documentary of Anger called Kenneth Anger’s Magick was also released around this time. Its director Kit Fitzgerald claimed Anger told her he was now so broke he had been forced to sell his air conditioner.
Anger has said Hollywood Babylon 3 has been written, but is on hold in his top drawer – he can’t afford the inevitable litigation from The Church of Scientology. He has called today’s Hollywood a “dried-out prune of a place”, with stars that are not worth gossiping about. “I covered most of the people who were interesting to me in the first two books.”
Mental telepathy – mostly.
But among the murders, madness, drug addictions and demons, the best of Kenneth Anger stands out for the hypnotic power of his films. “Like many people, I was astonished when I saw Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising for the first time,” Martin Scorsese said in an introduction to the released DVD. “Every cut, every camera movement, every color, and every texture seemed, somehow, inevitable, in the same way that images of the Virgin in Renaissance painting seem inevitable—in other words, pre-existing but dormant, and brought back to life through some kind of evocation.” Anger’s splicing of pop soundtracks with imagery – as far back as 1964 – is also regarded as pioneering, influencing Scorsese’s generation first-hand.
And whether his other-world powers remain intact or not, Anger today remains a rarity and a raconteur, stranded somewhere between Old Hollywood and modern oblivion. He remains both reviled and respected. Depending on where you stand.
As mentioned, there are a number of interesting interviews with the man. Check out Mark Berry’s intriguing chat with the bloke. Below are videos Lucifer Rising, Anger’s commentary on Invocation of My Demon Brother and lastly his 2004 revisit to the Crowley’s Thelema Abbey.
Cab Driver Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.
“It was raining hard in Sydney. I needed one more fare to make my night. A lady up ahead flagged to wave me down. She got in at the light” (almost the lyrics to Harry Chapin’s Taxi)
I was recently digging around some photos of Sydney’s Kings Cross and uncovered a series of photos by Rennie Ellis. They were shot over a six month period during 1970 and early 1971, when American servicemen from Vietnam jostled money through the bars and strip joints alongside bikies, hippies, oddballs and junkies. Everyone was, as Barry McKenzie might have said, “as busy as a one-armed taxi driver with crabs”.
Rennie Ellis’s 1971 work captures the Cross at its eccentric and seedy best. A mesmerising gateway into what he called “the surface glitter and underground guts of the Cross”
"The underground guts of the Cross". Bouncer, Kings Cross Strip Club, 1970, Image by Rennie Ellis.
“Sydney was, in effect, a tabula rasa. Unlike the cities of the Old World, no slow sedimentation of history lay beneath its streets. Old World centres founded in Roman or medieval times grew organically… Cities of the New World sprang into being, often at a single, identifiable moment in time” (John Birmingham, ‘Leviathan – The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney‘)
The Sydney of 1970 had not shifted far from its origins – except perhaps for a quick roll in the glitter. Back in 1788 the first freight-loads of male and female convicts were dumped together two miles west at Sydney Cove just as a terrible storm hit. It took several barrels of stupefying rum – thrown in courtesy of some relieved and exhausted Officers – to turn the scene into a full-blown squall of lightening, liquor, filth and fornication.
But the seed scattered in virile soil.
US Servicemen at the Golden Orchid, Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.
Midnight Show, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.
Between strips, Kings Cross 1970, Image by Rennie Ellis.
Officers on the beat 1970, Image by Rennie Ellis.
US Serviceman with Kings Cross girls 1970, Image by Rennie Ellis.
“The scene which presented itself beggars every description: some swearing, others quarreling, others singing, not in the least regarding the tempest” (Arthur Bowes Smyth on Sydney’s first landing, 1788)
By the early 20th century the Kings Cross district had become Sydney’s bohemian heartland. It also provided ground for a notorious turf-war in the illegal alcohol trading – known as sly grog – between Sydney’s celebrated crime matriarchs Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh.
In 1970 the neon protegee – set behind the spooling enclave of exclusive 19th century terraces - had refined history into a red lather of lights, action, sordid glam, the eccentric and the criminal.
Snake Woman, Kings Cross 1970, Image by Rennie Ellis.
MC, Paradise Club, Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.
Carlotta & Electra, Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.
Carlotta, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.
“Some call it Australia’s Barbary Coast – and there are a few pirates there for sure. Others call it Sin City – and here’s some of that around too. One Sydney Alderman wants it cleaned up. Another says it is worth a million a year the way it is. If you can believe what you read about it the inhabitants make their living out of baccarat, dope, witchcraft, prostitution, stripping – and selling each other salami.” (ABC TV, 1969)
By 1970 Abe Saffron – known as Mr Sin – ruled the roost. It was during his reign Jim Anderson shot dead Donny ‘the Glove’ Smith dead outside the Venus Room – now a less salubrious Backpackers Hostel. Australia’s celebrated witch Rosaleen Norton held court. Free love was for sale at the artists open residence The Yellow House. The area was a certified home to artists, writers, poets journalists and actors – including Australia’s Peter Finch and Chips Rafferty.
Property of Hells Angels, Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.
Auntie Mame, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.
The Witch of Kings Cross, Rosaleen Norton 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.
Tattoo Girl, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.
Working Girls, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.
Peace sign, The Yellow House, Kings Cross 1970-1971, Image by Rennie Ellis.
Yellow House Kings Cross 1970-71, Image by Rennie Ellis.
Top of the hill and left at the Coke sign, Gov. Rainy evening Kings Cross 1966 Fairfax Images.
Kings Cross 1970, Image by J Fitzpatrick.
Rennie Ellis went on to photograph bar rooms, strip joints, celebrities – with a seemingly boundless backstage pass – around the world. He also caught some great AC/DC dressing room moments with Bon Scott in 1977.
His photo gallery captures the great Australian cosmopolitan throughout the decades, from the beehives and rockers of the sixites to the hyper-colour of the eighties and ninties – with sex throughout. Ellis passed away in 2003. Kings Cross has since been tidied up some – instead it is now littered with plaques commemorating the characters who once coloured the area.
Before his ferocious ascent to Hollywood new-guard and celebrated psychotic, a young Dennis Hopper kept the flame guttering through photography. Parties, bar rooms, film sets, diners, bull fights, friends, artists, riots, bikers, the backrooms of celebrity – through the blizzard of the sixites Hopper was never without his camera. “I never made a cent from these photos” he said. “They cost me money but kept me alive … They were the only creative outlet I had for these years until Easy Rider. (After that) … I never carried a camera again.”
In the early years he had pocketed a handful of roles, notably alongside friend James Dean – as a member of the juvenile delinquent gang in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and in Giant(1956), as the sensitive son of Texan oil millionaire Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor. He also carved a niche for himself as slightly psychotic villains in westerns such as Gunfight at the OK Corral(1956) (“I don’t know why I get into gunfights. I guess sometimes I just get lonely”) and From Hell to Texas(1958).
Hopper with Natalie Wood and James Dean, 'Rebel Without a Cause' (1955)
But when his then-wife Brooke Hayward gave him a 35mm Nikon camera for his birthday in 1961, he dedicated himself “like an alcoholic”. Along with the film icons and rock stars, Hopper’s exceptional work captures many watershed moments of the 1960s, such as Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery Freedom March, as well as the Sunset Strip curfew riots and Monterey Pop Festival. “I wanted to document something. I wanted to leave something that I thought would be a record …whether it was Martin Luther King, the hippies, or whether it was the artist”.
Hopper recalled that it was Marlon Brando who got him involved in one of the most volatile events – the Selma-to-Montgomery March. “He pulled up in his car and said, ‘What are you doing day after tomorrow?’ and I said, ‘Nothing,’ and he said, ‘You want to go to Selma?’ and I said, ‘Sure, man. Thanks for asking me.’ [Then at the march, police] dogs were biting, and people were being bombed, and it was like, ‘Where are we?”
After being prevented by the authorities from reaching their final destination of Montgomery in two previous marches, the civil-rights campaigners finally arrived in the Alabama state capital on March 25, 1965.
By 1971, following the success of Easy Rider, Hopper was bankrolled by Universal with $850,000 and given total creative reign to produce whatever he wanted. His 2010 obituary in The Guardian makes for colourful reading:
“He moved to Peru with a cast and crew for a self-penned, directed and edited meta-monstrosity, The Last Movie (1971). The film starred Hopper as a stuntman with a Christ complex on the set of a western being directed by Samuel Fuller, the film, made for the stoned by the stoned, was stoned by the critics.
His eight-year marriage to Brooke Hayward, the daughter of actor Margaret Sullavan, had meanwhile ended in divorce. In 1970, he married Michelle Phillips, of the Mamas & the Papas - it lasted eight days. (“The first seven days were pretty good,” Hopper once commented.) In the same year, a raving, naked, drug-fuelled Hopper was arrested while running around Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Before The Last Movie’s release, Hopper wrote and appeared in an autobiographical documentary, The American Dreamer (1971), which showed him editing The Last Movie at his home in Taos, New Mexico, spouting hippy philosophy, taking baths with women and shooting guns. In the same year, a raving, naked, drug-fuelled Hopper was arrested while running around Los Alamos, New Mexico. This sealed his reputation as the most flipped-out man in the movies, and he spent the next 15 years in foreign films, personal projects, and low-budget arthouse or exploitation movies.”
But his photos remain a tribute to Hopper’s lucid eye, brilliantly capturing the moods behind the moments. He is today also remembered as an accomplished painter and sculptor, and a well-connected personality on the American art scene.
“I didn’t use a light meter; I just read the light off my hands. So the light varies, and there are some dark images. Also, I’m sort of a nervous person with the camera, so I will just shoot arbitrarily until I can focus and compose something, and then I make a shot. So generally, in those proof sheets, there are only three or four really concentrated efforts to take a photograph. It’s not like a professional kind of person who sets it up so every photograph looks really cool.” (Dennis Hopper).
Shortly before Hopper passed away in 2010, Viggo Mortensen called his friend of 20 years “a complete and fertile artist” who was “a constant source of ideas, inspiration and humour for his friends and colleagues”. Since his death Hopper’s photos have been exhibited extensively around the world, and his work beautifully presented in Taschen’s ‘Dennis Hopper: Photographs 1961-1967′
