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.
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.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il may long remain an enigma wrapped in a zip-suit. But there was one blaring passion on the khaki sleeve. He loved films. A fan of Hong Kong action, horror, James Bond, Elizabeth Taylor – he also authored On the Art of the Cinema and, in the late seventies, became a producer.
In fact, he fast-tracked his career quicker than most Hollywood hotshots – by kidnapping famous South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his ex-wife, movie star Choi Eun-hee, keeping them under lock and key until they helped him make movies. Most notably Pulgasari, a socialist remake of Godzilla.
Relationships got off to a rocky start. Shin says that shortly after arriving in Pyongyang he made several attempts to escape, only to end up with four years at Prison No 6. “Tasting bile all the time,” he wrote. “I experienced the limits of human beings.”
Shin endured four years in the all-male prison – wondering whether his ex-wife was dead – while being fed a diet of grass, salt, rice and Party dogma. When he was finally released in 1983 Kim apologised for the unfriendly welcome, blaming a misunderstandings by officials. He also made a personal apology for taking so long to get back to them, explaining it had been busy at the office.
In the 70s Kim had created the Mount Paeku Creative Group studio – designed to illuminate global cinema aisles with the light of the Korea Workers’ Party. But, possibly under the threat of exile or death, Kim’s creative team faced a communal creative block.
“The North’s film-makers are just doing perfunctory work” he later confided. “They don’t have any new ideas. Their works have the same expressions, redundancies, the same old plots. All our movies are filled with crying and sobbing. I didn’t order them to portray that kind of thing.”
By 1978 Kim Jong-il was firmly disenchanted. But a solution soon presented itself.
Kim Jong-il on set as Producer. Appreciating the power of film, Kim wrote in book On the Art of Cinema that “A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.”
South Korean director Shin Sang-ok, widely regarded as the Orson Welles of the peninsula, had modernised movies when people needed them most. In the wake of the Korean war he make at least 60 movies in 20 years. He and his wife, the well-known actress Choi Eun-hee, were well placed amongst Seoul’s celebrity set.
But in 1978 Shin clashed with the repressive government of General Park Chung Hee. His studio was closed. Kim grabbed the opportunity and lured the two to Repulse Bay in Hong Kong on a bogus business trip. Choi was the first to disappear after heading over to discuss an acting job. Concerned, Shin followed her trail – only to be wrapped in plastic, with a chloroform-soaked sack over the head on his way home from dinner.
And now, having now recruited the best film talent available for the venture, it was time to get down to work. Kim and his expanded company were going to workshop some ideas. “Kim Jong-il was like any ordinary young man.” Shin San-Ok told the BBC in 2003. ”He liked action movies, sex movies, horror movies”. When it came to casting around for subject matter, Shin says there were “fewer restrictions than is commonly believed”.
Choi Eun-hee in Shin’s Flower from Hell. From 1955 to 1985, Choi appeared in eighty-one films. She received the award for best actress at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1985, for her part in the film Sogum
“He listened to me because we were from South Korea,” Shin also told The Guardian in 2003. “Even though we criticised some things, he wanted us to be honest. Others would have been killed for speaking so honestly”.
But all ideas had to be approved by Kim Jong-il as facets of his ideology. In his book On the Art of Cinema Kim compares actors and directors to generals who must master their craft. Kim’s book also suggests that film-makers avoid unrealistic movies about “the colourful lives of flamboyant characters. In the final analysis, a director who pins his hopes on finding a ‘suitable actor’ is taking a gamble in his creative work. And no director who relies on luck in creative work has ever achieved real success.”
Shin soon saw his career resurrected in a way he had never imagined.
Leaving the grass and water behind, Shin was soon promoted with an annual pay cheque of $3m for personal or professional use. He was also mixing in cognac with the higher ranks of the North Korea’s social set.
“Shall we make Mr Shin one of our regular guests?” Kim suggested at a birthday party for one of his generals. Military men meanwhile fawned over the despot-to-be and young women screamed: “Long live the great leader!”. In an exceptionally rare moment of candour, Kim said: “Mr Shin, all that is bogus. It’s just pretense.”
Shin was trusted enough to fly to east Berlin for location shots – shadowed by escorts. He rejected his wife’s suggestion of doing a runner, telling her an escape required planning. Meanwhile, to his own surprise, he found was busy planning the course of his new career.
Kim Jong-il in a former life as a hassled looking Film Producer, 1984 AFP/Getty Images.
Within the new creative parameters, Shin’s work began to flourish. In 1984 he was able to produce what he regarded as his finest film, Runaway – the story of a wandering Korean family of 1920s Manchuria dealing with Japanese oppression.
But this story is more known for spawning Pulgasari; Kim Jong-il’s C grade monster-movie masterpiece. Based on a legend of the 14th-century Koryo monarchy, Pulgasari probably owes most to Godzilla. Shin invited some monster-movie veterans from Japan’s legendary Toho Studio to his own – which now held 700 employees – to help with the movie after Kim guaranteed their safety. The troupe included Kenpachiro Satsuma, the second actor to wear the Godzilla suit; now rubber-bound as the lumbering Pulgasari.
Kenpachiro Satsuma (left) as Godzilla. He was the man behind the rubber from 1984-1995.
Satsuma as the the mighty Pulgasari, North Korea 1985.
Starting out as a dot of rice, Pulgasari becomes a monster of the people. While farmers starve under the king’s rule, the hapless creature comes to life, eats iron, grows, rolls through the countryside unfurling his wrath – past endless scenic shots of the people’s folk dances (as decreed in the guidelines of On the Art of the Cinema) and on to explosive ruin. Pulgasari has since taken a seat on the high right-hand of awful suitified monster movies.
But Kim liked it. In fact, he saw it as a victory. He ordered truckloads of pheasant, deer, wild geese for the movie crew to feast on. Plans were made for a joint venture with a company in Austria to distribute the film. Kim trusted the director to travel to western Europe for a business meeting.
He shouldn’t have.
Shin and his wife decided to strike the iron while it was hot. Ducking into a US embassy, Shin pulled stumps on his NK production company for good. “To be in Korea living a good life ourselves and enjoying movies while everyone else was not free was not happiness, but agony,” he wrote. It was a shame. The next project was inspired by John Wayne’s appearance as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. Both Shin and Kim had long wanted to make an ‘authentic’ version – they both shared enthusiasm on the subject of invading hordes.
The Kim Jong-il Summer Collection. North Korea’s Uriminzokkiri site reported that the dictator’s trademark zip-up suit had become a worldwide fashion craze. The piece quoted an unidentified French fashion expert as saying: “Kim Jong-Il mode, which is now spreading expeditiously worldwide, is something unprecedented in the world’s history.”
After the embarrassing escape of his star colleagues, Kim Jong-il shelved Pulgasari along with every other Shin film, humbly retiring into the role of despot. He never again appeared on a movie credit as Producer.
Shin’s work with Kim yielded seven films. He even introduced the first kiss to North Korean cinema. Pulgasari meanwhile was not seen outside the country until 1998 – during a short and cautiously optimistic moment of openness in the North. The film bombed.
In 2001 Shin Sang-ok planned to screen his favourite work, Runaway, at the Pusan International film festival. Seoul halted the showing, banning any screening that could benefit the North. But, happily, there was one successful instance of reunification. During their stay in Pyongyang Shin and Choi re-married – at Kim Jong-il’s recommendation.
Kim Jong-il’s Pyongyang Picture Show. Seat number presumably stamped on ticket. Image Copyright Malte Herwig, 2008.
Camera-buff Frank Sinatra, working as a photographer-by-the-ropes for LIFE Magazine, circa Fight of the Century 1971.
By Geoff Stanton
It was March 1971 and Madison Square Garden teemed with celebrities, punters, police and paparazzi. The venue was thick with carnival. At its core, a fission of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier preparing to clash. Celebrated artists waiting to paint the event. Burt Lancaster sat in the commentators chair for the closed-circuit broadcast. Frank Sinatra jostling ringside, taking photos for LIFE Magazine. Norman Mailer took the words, with an article aptly titled EGO.
“It is the great word of the twentieth century. If there is a single word our century has added to the potentiality of language, it is ego. Everything we have done in this century, from monumental feats to nightmares of human destruction, have been a function of that extraordinary state of the psyche that gives us authority to declare we are sure of ourselves when we are not” (Norman Mailer)
Muhammad Ali, in a fight that was pitched as the clashing of cultures - "draft dodger" Ali vs "establishment hero" Joe Frazier.
It was more than a meeting of two heavyweights – it was a culture clash. The signature showdown between “draft-dodging” Ali and the Establishment’s hippy-humbling hero, Smokin’ Joe Frazier. The freaks had a hero in Ali, but Frazier was a rolling mass of brute punishment waiting to unfurl.
Ali: “You don’t understand, Frazier will be easier than Quarry or Bonavena. I’ll just hold his head and I’ll tell him, ‘Come on, Champ.’ I’ll just play with him. He’ll be trying all those short hooks and not reaching me and I’ll be moving and saying, ‘Come on, champ. You can do better than that.’”
"Joe Frazier is an Uncle Tom. He works for the enemy." Muhammad Ali-Training in Miami. The fighter that Norman Mailer said "invented the psychology of the body". Image John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
Ali taunts Frazier at his own training headquarters in Pennsylvania. The photographer John Shearer wondered if Ali realised what was happening here – it would be war. John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
“The two places Frazier communicates best,” wrote LIFE’s Thomas Thompson in a March 1971 cover story, “are in the ring, when a cloak of menace and fury drops over him, and on a nightclub stage, where he sings with strength and sincerity.”
Joe Frazier with his Knockouts. John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
"Frazier felt that he was every bit as articulate as Ali," photographer John Shearer said, "and every bit the showman that Ali was." John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
Ali sparing playfully outside a Miami grocery store, February 1971. As Shearer said: "The man's appeal -- his charisma, his confidence, his strength, his beauty -- drew to him people of all classes, races, and creeds". John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
“Heavyweights are always the most lunatic of prizefighters. The closer a heavyweight comes to the championship, the more natural it is for him to be a little bit insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility he is. It is like being the big toe of God. You have nothing to measure yourself by.” (Mailer)
The War Machine, Joe Frazier. "A Knockout combs and blacks Frazier's beard before a performance," read the caption in LIFE. One of the Knockouts said "Music has brought Joe out, made him a little nicer to people, a little more comfortable to be around." John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
“Sooner or later fight metaphors, like fight managers, go sentimental. But there is no choice here. Frazier was the human equivalent of a war machine. He had tremendous firepower. He had a great left hook, a left hook frightening even to watch when it missed, for it seemed to whistle.” (Mailer)
Ali with his personal trainer, American boxing cornerman Angelo Dundee, resting before the fight.
“It was electric in the Garden that night,” Shearer told LIFE.com. “You know, it was the night of the great showdown between the era’s two gladiators, and there was a sense that the unprecedented hype for the fight might actually fall short of the reality.”
It didn’t.
About to be humbled? "People were there in all their finery," Shearer said, "from the outlandish to the most elegant imaginable. And without a doubt it was a very, very pro-Ali crowd. They all came to see him win, to see him destroy Joe Frazier." John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
Miles Davis mixes in the crowd for the Ali-Frazier fight, Madison Square Gardens 1971. John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
Ali with close friend and assistant, Bundini Brown, shortly before the fight. Brown was the street poet who helped phrase Ali's greatest catechism: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
Many of the greats have shown us that it takes the power of the event, and the fulcrum it generates, to bind the spirit, guide us through turmoil; create sense, certainty, politics, art. Life is uncertain, sure. But nature abhors a vacuum. Or, as Mailer put it: “Within 45 seconds the pattern had begun”.
“I have this visceral belief that he just can’t be beaten,” LIFE’s sports editor, Steve Gelman, said of Ali before the fight. “He’s one of those guys, like [Bob] Cousy in basketball, or Willie Mays in baseball. In their prime they were able to come up with exactly the right physical improvisation necessary to do the job. Ali has more of this quality than any athlete I’ve ever seen. No matter how good Frazier is, Ali will manage to win.”
The fight more than matched the juggernaut of hype. It ran the full 15 round championship distance. Ali weaved his way through the first three rounds, catching Frazier with a series of jabs and hooks as he ducked and dodged.
But Frazier slowly began to dominate.
Catching Ali with a barrage left hooks Frazier squared the champ up against the ropes, delivering a sermon of body blows.
Joe Frazier serves Muhammad Ali a sermon of blows. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
Ali was visibly wilting after the sixth, putting together a flurry of punches, but unable to keep step with the pace he had set himself at the start. But agility and eloquence kept him on an even footing with Frazier. The fight was close until late in round 11.
Frasier and Ali retire into their camps during the middle rounds. Photo: John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
During the 11th round Frazier caught Ali, backing him into a corner with a bruising left hook, tacking him onto the ropes. Ali survived, but the War Machine claimed the next three.
“Frazier moved in with the snarl of a wolf,” Norman Mailer wrote of the middle rounds. “His teeth seemed to show through his mouthpiece … Ali looked tired and a little depressed … At the beginning of the fifth round, he got up slowly from his stool, very slowly. Frazier was beginning to feel that the fight was his. He moved in on Ali, his hands at his side in mimicry of Ali, a street fighter mocking his opponent, and Ali tapped him with long light jabs to which Frazier stuck out his mouthpiece, a jeer of derision as if to suggest that the mouthpiece was all Ali would reach all night.”
At the end of 14 Frazier held a lead on the three scorecards. Early in round 15 Frazier landed a tremendous left hook that put Ali on his back.
Ali, right jaw swollen, recovered quickly from the blow quickly. He stayed the course for the rest of the round, weathering the powerful blows from Frazier.
Boxer Joe Frazier is directed to the ropes by referee Arthur Marcante after knocking down Muhammad Ali. A few minutes later the judges made it official: Frazier retained the title with a unanimous decision.
Herb Scharfman / Sports Illustrated / Getty Images
It was Ali’s first professional loss. He would not win another world title fight until three and a half years later, on October 30, 1974.
Donald McRae wrote for The Guardian: “There was, of course, a price to pay – for both of them – and the Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City, Manila, on the morning of Wednesday 1 October 1975, was the settling place. The Thrilla in Manila – conceived by Don King, embraced by the dubious regime of President Marcos – reached and maintained such a level of raw intensity that it is regarded by an overwhelming majority of respected observers as the most brutal of all heavyweight title fights. It is no exaggeration to say that either or both combatants could have died.”
Frazier straightens himself up after the fight. Photo: John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
After the Great Fight both Frazier and Ali spent time in hospital. Rumors circulated that Frazier had died. Ali vowed to retire from boxing if they turned out to be true.
They weren’t.
Smokin' Joe and his camp after the main event. But despite his victory, Ali remained the prominent name in Ali-Frazier phenomenon. Ali's shadow stalked Frazier for years. Photo: John Shearer/TIME & LIFE Pictures
Mailer went on to write ‘The Fight’, about Ali’s confrontation with George Foreman during the 1975 World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in Kinshasa, Zaire. In contrast to the wrecking ball of Frazier, Foreman’s deadly character has been described as a potent of “silence, serenity and cunning”. Foreman had also never been defeated. His hands were his instrument, and “he kept them in his pockets the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case”. In Mailer’s own hands, it was another monumental clash of Egos.
Sinatra pursued his singing career.
Towards the end of his life, Frazier claimed he was badly out of pocket – lost many millions lost on land deals and a swindle of business partners. He walked with a cane, but continued to tour with The Knockouts. Of Ali, Frazier commented in 2011 “If I had a loaf of bread, I’d give it to him”.
On hearing of Frazier’s death shortly afterward, the Ego of the battle was perhaps finally laid to rest. Ali said: “The world has lost a great Champion. I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration. My sympathy goes out to his family and loved ones.”
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′
It used to be you could tell a good riot from the soundtrack. Just look at the peasant revolt of 1381 – five hundred and ninety years before Johnny Rotten, its rabble-rousers still being covered by Chumbawamba. The banditry of Robin Hood was later formalised; British communists had a Little Red Songbook “to fan the flames of discontent” while smashing Fascists in the street. The fifties and sixites gave us Folk Music, Frontmen, Highways, Hells Angels – and magazines have long since fossilized the punk and reggae rush through the spot-fires.
Yep, every decent riot needs a good soundtrack.
So what was the soundtrack for looting a Footlocker or nicking a plasma? While the 2011 London riots look familiar against a century of images – hi-res fireballs and swarms of hoodie aside – overt political causes are muted by sheer adrenalin and rage.
But the genuine voices are out there. “We just have to hunt them down,” veteran musician Bruce Cockburn told The Star in 2010, on talking about how music has been forced underground again. “We just don’t hear them. We don’t hear anything worthwhile these days unless we go looking for it.”
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Reg Weston recalled the rioteers ‘Little Red Songbook’ (published between 1905 and 1973, it was originally called Songs of the Workers, on the Road, in the Jungles, and in the Shops—Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent), used during Weston’s involvement in the London riot of 1936. “The fascists were assembling by the Royal Mint” he said. “And police started to make baton charges, both foot and mounted, to try to clear a way for them to escort a march. They did not succeed.”
Oswald Mosley does the two step past adoring fascists at a rally in east London, 1936. Photograph by Imagno/Getty Image
“We sang the traditional working class marching songs and anthems. The Internationale (“Arise ye starvelings from your slumbers”); the Italian revolutionary Bandiera Rossa (“Avanti popoli, alla riscossa”, “Forward ye workers, into the struggle”, “Fling to the breezes the scarlet banner”); the Berlin workers’ song Rote Wedding (“Left, left .. the workers are marching again”); the Polish Varshavianka, and the old Wobbly song “Solidarity Forever”, with the appropriate words: “We’ll hang Oswald Mosley on a sour apple tree … when the red revolution comes”.
“A barricade started to go up. A lorry was overturned, furniture was piled up, paving stones and a builders yard helped to complete the barrier. The police managed to clear the first, but found a second behind it and then a third. Marbles were thrown under the hooves of the police horses; volleys of bricks met every baton charge.”
London bobbies dismantle a communist built barricade near Mark Lane to clear the street for Mosley's fascist march, 1936. Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.
“Back in Stepney and the East End there was almost unbelievable delight. We had won. The fascists had been defeated and humiliated. The police too and the authorities had been proved unable to protect them.”
“Hastily a victory march had been organised to follow the route from Cable Street to Victoria Park where Mosley had planned to address his army. Hundreds joined in. Thousands stood on the pavements and in the roads, clapping and cheering as we marched on. In those days we marched, often in ranks of fours, under the leadership of the ex-servicemen of the not so far away World War I. We marched and we sang.”
A bobbie standing by a burning car, set alight during a communist march in the East End of London, 1936. Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.
Baton charge on demonstrating strikers at Walworth, South London. Image taken during the General Strike, 6th May 1926. Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images.
Woody Guthrie lights up, providing inspiration to the folk singers of Britain. The 'Dust Bowl Troubadour's' music remains a vivid voice and rich oral history.
Bob Dylan in London, 1962. Ewan MacColl, father of the late Kirsty MacColl and legendary British folk singer, sits to the far right. A leading writer of English protest songs in the 1950s, he also wrote the very awesome ‘Dirty Old Town’ – immortalised by The Pogues.
By the 1950s the sounds of US folk singers such as Woody Guthrie had seeped into the working quarters of Britain, much the same way that Dylan would shift its youth culture a decade later. Guthrie had traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California, learning traditional folk and blues songs. His songs recorded experiences in the ‘Dust Bowl’ era of the Great Depression. Known as the “Dust Bowl Troubadour” Guthrie was associated with Communist Party groups throughout his life – but never a member.
“Working people have always known that songs are a good way to say what you got to say about work, wages, school, cats, love, marriage, keeping house or doctors bills. If the fight gets hot, the songs get hotter. If the going gets tough, the songs get tougher.” (Woody Guthrie)
Folk was seized by a politically charged element and used as a standard. Ewan MacColl, father of the late Kirsty MacColl, was a leading writer of English protest songs in the 1950s, with pro-communist songs such as “The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh”, “The Ballad of Stalin”, and songs about the nuclear threat such as “Against the Atom Bomb”. He also wrote ‘Dirty Old Town’, later immortalised by The Pogues.
A young Ewan MacColl.
Notting Hill, 1958 – the riot blueprint for generations. Simmering racial tension and poverty (check out the 1955 Pathe newsreel Our Jamaican Problem) led to the riots of Notting Hill – also eventually resulting in the Notting Hill Carnival, a celebration of diversity and music. Organised by Claudia Jones (black nationalist, journalist, activist and local) as a response to the race tensions of ’58, the festival was a huge success, despite being held indoors. The hippie London Free School reinvented the festival as an outside event in August 1966.
Notting Hill, 1958.
Keep Britain White, Notting Hill 1958.
Meanwhile ... just a little bit of history repeating. A fight between anti-Fascists and supporters of Oswald Mosley's Union Movement at Charing Cross Station in London, 12th May 1963. The UM members planned to proceed to their headquarters in Vauxhall Bridge Road on their May Day march. The march was cancelled due to the escalating tension. Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
“The words ‘protest songs’ give me the willies,” Cockburn told The Star. “They conjure up the worst music of the 1960s – songs like ‘Eve of Destruction,’ which I hated when I first heard it. It’s pretentious posturing, manufactured nonsense, bad songwriting and just plain ignorant, compared to Dylan’s work in the same period. ‘A Hard Rain’ and ‘Masters of War’ are beautifully constructed and artfully created. They hit the right emotional buttons and they nail their targets.”
Iconic protester of the 1960s, Bob Dylan, and natural-born-protester (in the making), John Lennon.
The Rolling Stones scatter the seeds of unrest down the charts, 1964.
The kids are alright...just. Moments before they trash a music hall. The Rolling Stones riot, Zurich 1964, when the rioters soundtrack hit middle class mainstream. Keith Richards said that at this particular riot, girls' underwear was hanging from the chandeliers.
The Rolling Stones riot - images from the Flash Project's Street Fighting Man Exhibition: 50 years of youth protest.
The anti-Vietnam protest in London’s Grosvenor Square, now known as The Battle of Grosvenor Square, was a watershed moment in the rise of Britain’s so-called counter-culture. The target of the march was the United States Embassy, and the resulting riot was the inspiration for The Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man after Mick Jagger attended the rally and got swept up in some of the heat. An enormous crowd began to squeeze into the confined square, with reports that as many as 6,000 to 10,000 people made there way to the protest. The police reportedly handled the protest with kid gloves. Until the protesters tried to storm the US embassy.
Vanessa Redgrave and political activist Tariq Ali speak out against the Vietnam War at a rally in Trafalgar Square. It would shortly move on to Grosvenor Square, London, 1968.
Police confront thousands. Grosvenor Square, March 18, 1968.
“I remember being terrified at being chased down by what seemed like scores of mounted police with truncheons flailing about while the square was blocked off so that none who found themselves on the inside could get out” recalled Robert Newsom, from the University of California. “But the police seemed as frightened as the protesters. I remember also seeing Mick Jagger standing coolly on the steps of a house in the square surveying the chaos”
If you are the guy getting his hair pulled, please contact The Barrelhouse. Grosvenor Square 1968.
For the conservative observer of the 21st century, 1968 still delivers apoplexy. “The remarkable thing is that the half-baked and narcissistic ideologies of that dismal 12 months are still with us” moans columnist Rod Liddle in The Daily Mail. “In our schools, in our law courts, in our social services. They have permeated every facet of our lives. A disrespect for authority, contempt for the family unit, multiculturalism, “yoof culcha” and an emphasis upon rights rather than responsibilities. A permissiveness and indulgence shown towards every anti-social phenomenon from the use of illegal narcotics to single mothers and suicide bombers (‘We really need to understand them better’)”.
Strangely enough, Liddle didn’t seem to mind punk when it came around. Perhaps he liked Sid’s shock-value swastika.
London councillor Bernard Brook Partridge didn’t. “Most of these groups would be vastly improved by sudden death” he stoically observed on London’s emerging punk phenomenon. “The worst of the punk rock groups I suppose currently are the Sex Pistols. They are unbelievably nauseating. They are the antithesis of humankind. I would like to see somebody dig a very, very large, exceedingly deep hole and drop the whole bloody lot down it.”
Dig your own hole. Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten.
Punk’s place in the riot littered seventies is well documented. And Anarchy in the UK still ticks every box. Rotten’s ‘just another council tenancy’ bark sounds almost mournful enough to be timeless. And it might be more in step with the personal politics of our day, more so than the socially driven Clash or protest folk and rock of the 1960s.
“It’s a loser’s emblem (swastika), because the Nazis lost the war. It’s ridiculous to suggest we are involved with fascists. All my best friends are black, gay, Irish or criminals.” (Johnny Rotten)
The Clash’s ‘White Riot‘ was written during the fermentation of London’s civil unrest. Joe Strummer, sartorial social barometer that he was, recalled getting caught up in the Notting Hill riots of 1978 under the Westway, along Malton Mews by Ladbroke Grove; starting with a group of “blue helmets sticking up like a conga line”, going through the crowd. It started with one can being lobbed through the air, one man hit – followed by a pelting hail of cans in every direction.
“The crowd drew back suddenly and the Notting Hill riot of 1976 was sparked. We were thrown back, women and children too, against a fence which sagged back dangerously over a drop. I can clearly see Bernie Rhodes, even now, frozen at the centre of a massive painting by Rabelais or Michelangelo… as around him a full riot breaks out and 200 screaming people running in every direction. The screaming started it all. Those fat black ladies started screaming the minute it broke out, soon there was fighting 10 blocks in every direction.”
Joe Strummer developed his love of rock music listening to The Beach Boys - as well as American folk-singer Woody Guthrie. He even went by the nickname "Woody"in his earlier band years. In 1970 his brother David had joined the National Front. His suicide in July profoundly affected Strummer.
Another notorious incident in the build-up of tension was the Southall riot. In the great tradition of Mosley, the National Front met the local candidate for upcoming parliamentary elections, who was pledging to “bulldoze Southall to the ground and replace it with an English hamlet“.
Among the inevitable clashes a young teacher named Blair Peach was knocked unconscious (reportedly by a rubberised police radio) and died the next day. Another victim was Clarence Baker, the manager of the British reggae band Misty In Roots. Baker was left with a fractured skull and a blood clot in his brain. He took a year to recover. Peach later became a national protest icon, memorialized by dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson in his song ‘Reggae Fi Peach‘. Baker’s assault meanwhile inspired The Ruts classic ‘Jah War‘.
The Southall riot that lead to the death of Blair Peach, 1978.
Sloganeering - The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Specials have all peddled their way once again through the standard of riot tunes, with The Kaiser Chiefs ‘I predict a riot’ being the most recent addition to the list.
Between July 3rd and July 11 of 1981 more riots fueled by racial and social discord in Birmingham, London, Liverpool, and Manchester. There were also smaller episodes of unrest in Leeds, Leicester, Southampton, Halifax, Bedford, Gloucester, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Bristol, and Edinburgh.
The Brixton riots were the first real explosion of fury to hit the London Metropolitan Police since it had formed in 1829. The metropolitan police website still calls it ‘the first serious British riot of the 20th century’ to wreak substantial destruction on property.
Amongst the recent media white noise, a spotlight has this time swiveled onto Grime – a sub-sound of UK Garage, breakbeat and hip hop.
“As the glaziers and magistrates go to work after four nights of riots across London and the UK,” wrote the Guardian after the August 2011 riots “the search for understanding and the finger of blame are simultaneously pointing towards the MCs and rappers who Bizzle told me in January were ‘the real prime ministers of this country’”.
“For Professor Green, a top 10 artist, like Chipmunk and Wretch, and one of the MCs who has been most eager to illuminate the causes of the riots, it’s a story of a country that has elected to forget about many of its young people. ‘What needs to be understood here is there is a lot of anger in the underclass’ responded Green. “And a lot of the youth aren’t quite sure where to aim their anger. There are also a lot of underprivileged children who’ve grown up without boundaries”
The Guardian goes on to describe Grime’s place in the recent unrest:”Grime describes the world politicians of all parties have ignored – its misery (eg Dizzee Rascal’s Sitting Here), its volatile energy (Lethal Bizzle’s Pow), its gleeful rowdiness (Mr Wong’s Orchestra Boroughs), its self-knowledge (Wiley’s Oxford Street), its local pride (Southside Allstars’ Southside Run Tings), down even to minor specifics. When some Londoners expressed their surprise and admiration at the quasi-vigilantism of “Turksec” in Dalston and Hackney, the north London Turkish community who fought off looters with a mixture of togetherness and baseball bats, most grime fans’ first thought was Wiley’s offhand lyric: “I had this Turkish bredrin from school, all his family were gangsters.”
“People concerned about the issues that have always troubled us are more likely to turn to Facebook to find a like-minded community than to sing songs in the streets, the way we did in the 1960s,” Cockburn told The Star. “There are plenty of protest songs out there, but they just aren’t part of the cultural mainstream any more. Radio doesn’t play them, and people don’t seem to do things together, as a community. We’re all connected individually to some kind of device, working alone, amusing ourselves alone, enlightening ourselves alone.”
Yet the roots of rhythm remain. Even if thirty million CDs did go up in flames at the Sony warehouse.
“They called John Cassavetes a cinema-verite director in one of the obituaries. That’s French for ‘the cinema of truth’, the kind of documentary film-making where the director stands back and doesn’t interfere, while things happen naturally. John Cassavetes never made a cinema verite film in his life. He was always in there up to his neck, swimming against life and shouting instructions to those in his wake. But don’t take that as a criticism. Cassavetes made films that gloriously celebrated the untidiness of life, at a time when everybody else was making neat, slick formula pictures.” (Roger Ebert, ‘Awake in the Dark’ 1989)
“He deliberately tried to keep you off-balance, so you wouldn’t bring out old-fashioned technique and old ideas” said Peter Falk. “But it was impossible. I didn’t understand him. I wanted to strangle him.” In 1970 the volatile friendship of Peter Falk and John Cassavetes yielded Husbands; criticised – by Ebert amongst others – for rambling scenes, chaotic turns, infantile meandering. Fair enough. But the story of male friendship remains genuine and true to form – a testament to the friendship that actually broke through the sweat-session improvisations and, for Falk and Cassavetes, endured through to the director’s death.
Pitched against Cassavetes’ creative momentum, Falk’s quiet instinct was not far from Columbo’s own shrewd intellect – the eternal TV detective to whom the great actor remains spliced. But his work with Cassavetes thoroughly wrenched the man from the mac. “There was no character” he later later admitted. “There was me.”
“You never knew when the camera might be going. And it was never ‘Stop. Cut. Start again.’ John would walk in the middle of a scene and talk, and though you didn’t realize it, the camera kept going. So I never knew what the hell he was doing. But he ultimately made me, and I think every actor, less self-conscious, less aware of the camera than anybody I’ve ever worked with.”
Cassavetes’ work was usually about the personal politics of strain; women go mad (or start off mad), men stay lost, dark, rebellious. His story pitch is bare, ripe with alienation and anger. Husbands was the story of three friends – Falk, Cassavetes and Gazzara – fast approaching forty, angrily aging in a fuel of alcohol and frustration, yearning for the freedom and the strength of youth. After a funeral of a friend they go on a bender that takes them as far as London and almost beyond return.
But Falk’s introduction to the idea actually began en-route for a hot dog. Recognising Cassavetes at an LA Lakers game, they began talking respective projects. Cassavetes’ contempt for the Hollywood system was clear – he impulsively agreed to work on Falk’s project because he respected his previous work, refusing to listen to an obligatory pitch. Cassavetes also had an idea about three old friends who went on an epic drinking binge after the death of a friend – he thought Falk would be perfect for a role.
Brother, can you spare a dime? Peter Falk, John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara at the bar, working those extras. 1969.
Starting out as a live television star of the 1950s before leading an actors workshop when he made the acclaimed Shadows, Cassavetes had long turned his back on Hollywood and become an outsider. He pitted himself against the system, struggling to finance and distributing his own films at a time when getting a non-studio film into theaters was virtually impossible.
Peter Falk, by contrast, had started with a master’s degree in public administration and worked as an efficiency expert before deciding to take a chance on an acting career. Despite being remembered for Columbo, he had two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor in 1960 and 1961—for his roles in Murder, Inc. and A Pocketful of Miracles.
“Because we keep forgetting that we’re in a bad situation – that’s what make it seem terrific” explains Cassavetes to Falk and Gazzara at one of their intensive work-shops, where they comb through the bar scene in countless ways. The story interested Cassavetes less than the “unguarded moments” he could catch on film, and in many ways the sweat sessions would trace the heat necessary to prep them.
“The only good part about the story was that it served as a basis for us to use for our individual expressions” said Cassavetes. “Actors will put their money where their mouth is, and directors won’t – that’s what it boils down to in my book.”
The alchemy of amateur and professional actors – with some performances from extras that Cassavetes claimed ‘are better than professional actors’ – produced a long, but innovative and genuine film that left Falk (who reportedly even got mugged for real while filming in New York) recharged, invigorated and slightly beweildered. “I had no idea what Husbands was about” he admitted after the shoot was through. “After it, I told him, ‘I’ll work with you as an actor, but not as a director’”.
John Cassavetes, 1969
Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. Improvising or not? You decide. 1969
A scene that may have come straight from a Husbands improv featured on The Dick Cavett Show, where Falk, Cassavetes and Gazarra were invited to talk about the film. The three emerge comfortably scotched and in a cloud of cigarette smoke. True to form, Falk tries to give a serious pitch several times before being interrupted by a dancing Ben Gazarra, a commercial break and an unexpected swizzle upon Cassavetes’ shoulders.
Sony, not sure what to do with it all, labelled the film “a comedy about life, death, and freedom.” Cassavetes meanwhile had to cut it by an hour and a half to get it down to contractual length. Columbia, the studio that produced the film, cut another eleven minutes off it anyway following some negative reviews and audience walkouts.
But the film was also praised for its innovation and genuine sense of camaraderie. Life Magazine featured the three friends – John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk – as its cover story in May. And the friendships endured. Cassavetes subsequently directed Falk on A Woman Under The Influence, regarded as his masterpiece, and the lesser lauded gangster flick Mikey and Nicky. He also appeared with Falk on Columbo.
“Can you recognise a difference between real sentiment, and sentimentality?” Falk ultimately challenged Dick Cavett’s audience. “We made a picture that doesn’t have any sentimentality in it. But has a great deal of feeling in it. It has the kind of emotions that we all experience, but you really don’t see on the screen. The kind of emotions that get lost – but they’re no longer contrived in our film. They’re genuine. Delight, hope, irritation, frustration, anger, friendship, love. Beweilderment, confusion. They’re all there. Go see it.’
Falk may well have agreed with Roger Ebert when he said “I met Cassavetes a few times and then I understood his films in a better way. They were like he was. Now that he is gone his films will have to speak for him, and few directors have left behind work that duplicates more exactly the pleasure of being in their company”.
A common sight in the ghettos of Kingston back in the 1970s was Charlie Ace’s colourful Swing-a-Ling mobile recording studio, a moveable feast of sound from which Ace handed vinyl pressings like leavened bread for the crowds. Footage of the man at work is pure vintage. “C’mon mon, I’ve got a lot of people to serve today!” he hectors one dawdling customer who pisses him off. Working from a converted Morris van, most of the material Charlie sold was his own.
Charlie Ace's Swing-A-Ling van, Kingston 1970s.
Born Vernel Dixon, Charlie Ace in fact remains one of music’s largely forgotten deejay originals. Initially making a name for himself after working with Lee Scratch Perry, cutting “Django Shoots First”, “The Creeper” and “Cow Thief Skank”, and delivering the goods for Vincent “Randys” Chin on “Country Boy”. He also worked on the 1973 Rasta classic “Father and Dreadlocks” for Coxsone Dodd. He put out a number of records on his Swing-A-Ling label included “Firing Line” – a reworking of a popular disco hit – credited to Charlie Ace & the Inswings and released in the summer of 1974.
Charlie Ace, the man and his work, certainly deserve a place in history - along with his iconic truck.
Tragically, he was shot and killed in 1980 – although details of the exact circumstances of his death remain unknown. It is a fate sadly not uncommon among a number of Jamaican reggae artists. In 1987 reggae star Peter Tosh was murdered in Kingston by gunmen, while fellow Wailer Bob Marley himself only just had a narrow escape after gunmen broke into his home in 1976.
