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.
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.
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.
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.”
s
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.
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.
“The Rastas loved John” said reggae icon Don Letts, who accompanied Johnny Rotten to Jamaica in 1978 to scout for Virgin’s Front Line reggae label. “To them he was the punk rock Don from London – they were aware of all the trouble he had stirred up in London. They were into what he stood for and his stance, and they dug it. John just had a vibe you know, people were drawn to him. It was the same in London; it was the same in Kingston”.
When Richard Branson decided to send John Lydon - a passionate reggae fanatic – to Jamaica as an envoy for Virgin, a fusion of punk, dub and reggae was already fast simmering in London. The job was also welcome timing for the Sex Pistols frontman. Since becoming punk’s tabloid gristle Lydon had been stabbed in the street, glassed in the face, raided weekly by police, abandoned in the US after a shipwreck of a tour – even had Parliament clamouring after his neck for “acts of treason”. Scouting a heartland of dub and reggae artists was babylon by comparison.
“The bond was very simple,” Peter Harris, the British reggae guitarist who played on Punky Reggae Party with Bob Marley, told The Guardian. “Blacks were getting marginalised. British Irish kids – like Rotten – and black youths were forced together because of signs on pub doorways that read “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs”, which became the title of Rotten’s autobiography. The punks were the same. They were seen as dregs of society. We were all anti-establishment, so there was a natural synergy between us.”
Natural synergy. Johnny Rotten Lydon with Big Youth, one of the artists signed by Richard Branson's Virgin Records. Image by Dennis Morris.
Jamaica was also Lydon’s last stop before forming Public Image Ltd; the powerhouse of dub-fused poptone that bassist Jah Wobble recalled “would literally make your trousers flap”.
“John already had that spaciousness, that blueprint in his mind long before we went to Jamaica.” said Letts. “He really knew his reggae. I have to emphasise that, him and Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon, Jah Wobble, they understood dub, deeply, they had a lot of music I didn’t have you know. We went to a lot of sound system sessions here in London too, people like Jah Shaka, Coxsonne, Moa Ambessa, so really, his experiences in Jamaica were an extension of what had already been in his mind for years, back in North London.”
Joe Strummer and Don Letts, image by Dennis Morris.
Don Letts facing a line of authority in London's Notting Hill race riots of 1976. He was also walking onto the cover of Black Market Clash, after The Clash used the image for their album.
Rotten arrived in Jamiaca with Letts, journalist Vivien Goldman and photographer Dennis Morris, who had impressed Lydon with his photos of Bob Marley, and had subsequently taken some of the first photos of the Pistols. Branson had them stay at The Sheraton – a salubrious joint with a hotel bar that was a hotbed of rotating talent.
“Knocking back the rum or fruit punches, depending on their religious inclinations” wrote Goldman “are a changeable line-up of reggae musicians. Very occasionally Peter Tosh, frequently a sprinkling of Gladiators, The Abyssinians, I-Roy and U-Roy, and Tapper Zukie and The Tamlins, Jah Lion, Prince Hammer, Johnny Clarke, John Holt, the mighty Culture with the other two Cultures, Robbie Shakespeare, Sly, Chinna, Bim Sherman, Lee Perry, Inner Circle, Prince Mahmoud, Big Youth, The Congos – it got so that you felt like you were wading through your singles collection every time you went to get a glass of water.”
Don Letts with Bob Marley
“We smoked a chalice together with U Roy for breakfast” recalled Letts. “And then went out to one of his dances, miles out in the countryside - quite a long journey by car. I remember the dreads stringing up this sound, and kicking off with some earthquake dubs. Now let me tell you this sound system was LOUD. Me and John literally passed out. I remember hours later some dreads shaking us awake, it was like, “Wake up man, dance done, dance finish now man!” Yeah, it was pretty wild for me and John out in Jamaica. We loved it.”
Meanwhile, Lydon’s ‘Rotten’ moniker got dumped in translation for Johnny ‘Cool’.
Goldman wrote about John’s reputation: “One night John and The Congos, being in an elevated mood on account of nature’s bounty – the cave, and other things – were in prime meditative position. Cedric was regaling us with stories of his past, when a loud buzzing noise intruded on the conversation. Coupled with a strange red glow from overhead. Look up, and what do you see? – a helicopter whirring through the Kingston skies, looking both out of place and rather too militantly low-flying for comfort.
“What’s that for?” snapped John. “There could be a war going on down here, and no one would be able to see it. It’s just to annoy, like a mosquito. Make people paranoid, scared. Keep the population down.”
Roy and Cedric (The Congos) looked at one another.
“Johnny knows,” sighed Cedric.
“Johnny’s seen great heights,” Roy affirmed solemnly.
“Johnny Cool, y’know?”
John Lydon's verdict - a good list of reggae artists for anyone to dip into.
Branson’s label ended up signing a number of artists to the label including Prince Far I, Big Youth, Prince Hammer, Tappa Zukie, Sly Dunbar, and The Twinkle Brothers, and many artists already with Virgin also moved to the new label. Back in London the punk-reggae movement was picking up the pace. In 1978 activists started putting punk and reggae bands on together for a series of Rock Against Racism gigs, featuring bands as varied as XTC, Aswad, Generation X, Tribesman, the Slits, Joy Division and Misty – playing to oppose the rising National Front. The gig headlined by The Clash and Steel Pulse in east London’s Victoria Park drew a crowd of 80,000 people.
Johnny Rotten shows his true colours.
But just as punk was eventually submerged beneath a Top of the Pops sheen, by the 1980s reggae acts were also diluting their sound to get hit singles, crossing into mainstream pop with bands such as the Police and Culture Club – something of an eighties signature sound, but several times removed from the bass-heavy grooves of the London and Kingston originals. Groups like UB40, Madness and the Specials are well regarded – not really as reggae or ska bands, but as British pop groups.
Branson’s Front Line eventually folded after two years although some of the artists remained signed to Virgin. In a 2010 interview Letts sounded wistful about the lost chord that music struck in the 70s.
“Right now it feels like punk never happened. All the things that helped create punk rock; racism, recession, strikes – other than power cuts – all the things we had in the late seventies are happening again today. What’s happening about it? I don’t know. All I know is that all the interesting ideas are coming from the amateur and the naive, and it’s increasingly difficult to find anyone who meets those criteria in the west.”
It’s an echo of Lydon’s natural cynicism in ’78 when discussing his efforts to find and recruit players for his new group (which would become PIL). “And I don’t mean mugs and prats and tits and liggers and wankers and madmen with pea-brained ideas about changing the musical course of history” he told Vivien Goldman. “Because we all know that that’s impossible.”
Meanwhile, if anyone chances upon a copy of The Upsetters version of the Pistols’ Submission or Problems, please let Barrelhouse know.
John Olson is best known for his time as a Vietnam War photographer, notably his five days in the terrifying furnace of the Siege of Hue. His war images were confronting, immortal, framed in death.
So it was a surprise that he was commissioned by LIFE Magazine to take a series of portraits featuring rock stars with their parents. “A hell of a lot more difficult and unrewarding than war photography” Olson recalled. The assignment took over a year, and carried Olson from the suburbs of London to San Francisco Bay and Brooklyn.
“Everyone had told me that Frank Zappa was going to be really difficult, and he couldn’t have been more professional,” said Olson. “My father has ambitions to be an actor,” Frank told LIFE in 1971. “He secretly wants to be on TV.” Zappa’s mother had different tabs on her son. “The thing that makes me mad about Frank,” she said, “is that his hair is curlier than mine — and blacker.”
“I got a lot of the drug stories, a lot of the rock & roll stories, and a lot of the anti-war stories” explained Olson to LIFE.com. “So when this story came up, I guess I received it because of my age.”
He had also worked for the rock promoter Bill Graham for several years and had some experience in dealing with rock stars’ egos and unprofessionalism. “But” he said, “without exception, the performers behaved like regular human beings as soon as their parents were around. They were polite, on time and not stoned. That’s the primal power of parenthood, I guess.”
Olson also travelled to Surrey, England, to visit the home of Eric Clapton’s grandmother, Rose Clapp, where her grandson’s lifestyle had brushed off onto her parrot. “Eric’s grandmother left the room, and the parrot talked. It said, ‘Fuck you!’ Mrs. Clapp came back and I said, ‘The parrot talks. What does he say?’ And she said, ‘He says “Gobble gobble.”
So Eric came and we’re talking and I asked, ‘Hey, what’s that parrot say?’ and he looked at me like I was crazy. He said, ‘The parrot says “Fuck you.” “Delaney and Bonnie had stayed in the house for a while and taught the parrot to shout ‘fuck you!’ at anyone who walked past the cage,” Olson told the Guardian. “That was about as rock’n'roll as it got.”
The Jacksons: Michael (front left) and his brothers Jackie, Marlon, Tito, and Jermaine by the pool. John Olson/Time & Life Pictures
“It was very controlled,” Olson said of the Jackson shoot. “As I remember, they followed my requests to a T, and were incredibly polite. The dad was pretty stern.” Joseph had been a crane operator only three years before, but was now relentlessly pushing his kids towards fame – the quest that would shape Michael’s strange future. “It wasn’t hard to know they could go on to be professionals,” Joseph had told LIFE at the time. “They won practically all the talent shows and I wasn’t surprised when they did make it. Because, you see, we were trying awful hard.”
Ginger Baker with his mother, Bexley, London. "He would bring people over and they would say, 'You realize your son is brilliant,' and I'd say, 'Is he? I wish he was a bit more brilliant at keeping his room tidy.'" John Olson/Time & Life Pictures
“I had worked with Ginger Baker before, I think I had worked with Joe Cocker before, I had worked with Grace before — and some of these people, especially Ginger Baker, the first go-round had been really difficult, nasty,” Olson said. “But when they were with their parents, they were totally different people. Ginger Baker, who had been terribly obnoxious before, acted like a grown-up. I don’t think it had anything to do with respect for me, so it must have been the parents.”
"When he was 4 we used to put him to bed in the day and get him up to play at night for parties," Elton John's mother told LIFE. Reggie Dwight at home with his mother Sheila Fairebrother and her husband Fred. John Olson/Time & Life Pictures
Joe Cocker was "cool and withdrawn — a temperamental mixture of Harold Cocker, his civil servant father who preferred gardening to posing with his famous son, and his outgoing, chatty mother." John Olson/Time & Life Pictures
Richie Havens, the artist who opened Woodstock, at home in Brooklyn. Havens was one of nine kids - in '71 most of the others were still living at home. John Olson/Time & Life Pictures
Grace Slick, from Jefferson Airplane, at home with her mother Virginia Barnett and daughter, China. When Olson had started the assignment she had still been pregnant. John Olson/Time & Life Pictures
Donovan at home with his folks. Unfortunately for Donovan, he was one of the only musicians in the gallery whose career was experiencing a lull, and the photo never made it into the pages of LIFE. John Olson/Time & Life Pictures
"In the last few years we've become good friends. What I like best about him is that he seems to feel no need for me to be like him, so we're not offended by each other's differences," a slightly fresher-faced David Crosby told LIFE in 1971. "Like he knows I get high. He doesn't do it and he doesn't approve of it, but he doesn't inflict his values on me." John Olson/Time & Life Pictures
When former Cream drummer Ginger Baker fled London in 1971 – leaving behind a decade of debauchery and burnt bridges – the hoary legend winched his way into a yet another remarkable chapter of history that has, until recently, largely been forgotten.
“I had to get the fuck out of London,” Baker told Rolling Stone in 2009. He wasn’t kidding – the seventies comedown compelled him to floor the jeep as far as Nigeria. “I told him there was an ocean and a desert in the way,” recalled Tony Palmer, who documented the odyssey in his film ‘Ginger Baker in Africa’. “Ginger said, ‘Great!’ He drove through the desert like he played the drums: he just put his foot down and hoped for the best”.
Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker circa Cream. Image by Linda McCartney
Four years of civil war, disease, starvation, three million dead in the Biafran conflict; Nigeria was having a comedown of its own. It was a long way from the Soho jazz clubs of 1957. But it wasn’t all bad. The oil-rich Niger promised to spill some prosperity and hope into the country on the back of a boom, and, by 1971, many Nigerians started travelling and studying abroad. Hendrix, Traffic, Santana – the blues explosion that Baker and his peers had pioneered – hit the capital in an alchemy of traditional rhythm, afrobeat and electric guitar.
Joni Haastrup had started bluesy outfit Monomono. Laolo Akins, Mike Odumosu and Berkley Jones – Nigeria’s answer to Santana – began BLO, a mix of distorted harmonies, powerful rhythm and soaring lead guitar. The Hygrades, The Wings, The Action 13 – all created an eccentric and liberating meeting point of western pop and african lore; a molten afro-blend of funk-infused psychedelia.
Joni Haastrup with Monomono, in Lagos, Nigeria.
The marriage is gloriously personified in the flamboyant Twins Seven Seven – the man with the pink suit, flares, huge sunglasses and xylophone. Twins Seven was the last survivor in a line of seven sets of twins from the Oshogbo royal family – a region of Nigeria famous for twins. As well as being a painter Taiwo Olaiyi Sala (Twins real name) was also well known as an actor, poet and writer. His music and art were heavily rooted in Yoruba culture and mythology, and the xylophone lines and traditional rhythms create a sound that has been called “ethereal and quite unlike anything else from the time” (Soundway Records). Twins also appears in the film ‘Ginger Baker In Africa’.
Baker took up his sticks, swiftly set up shop, and established West Africa’s first 16-track recording studio. He soon became known through Nigeria as the Oyinbo (white) drummer.
Afro-rock had also reached the desks of Britain’s EMI and Decca. Odion Iruoje worked for EMI’s Nigerian office. Early on Iruoje had been sent to London to witness the recording of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album. “What I liked mostly was the discipline and the teamwork,” he once romantically reflected. Iruoje was by now scouting for raw talent across Nigeria. “The bands would come into the studio, set up and within four hours we’d finished a 45. Very professional.” He continued to urge bands to incorporate traditional Jùjú and Yoruba sounds rather than simply aping western groups.
Berkley Jones, Laolo Akins, Mike Odumosu - BLO.
Baker meanwhile made arrangements with the Nigerian Government for ex-Beatle Paul McCartney to record at his own studio when he arrived in Lagos with Wings. But McCartney had other plans. ‘Band on The Run’ was ultimately recorded in Nigeria’s EMI studio. Baker was seriously pissed off. But the skinny ginger had some muscle to flex yet.
In the years since he had immersed himself in the scene, Baker had became involved with the irrepressible titan of Afro-funk and soul Fela Kuti – a force of nature more popular than James Brown (in Africa), bigger than Jesus, a man whose boundless energy was once invested in marrying twenty seven of his back up singers in a single service. Something Jesus could never have done.
When Tony Allen quit Fela’s group, Baker joined to record and tour. He had even joined Fela’s committee – a group that met around an African shaped table to discuss “strategies”. “We used to sit round a table the shape of Africa. Called The African Table. And I was on that committee for two years”. It was here that they discussed what could be done about the evils of a worsening domestic political situation – and possibly Paul McCartney and Wings.
Regardless, Fela called in the army. A forty-strong squad of soldiers arrived at the EMI studios and stopped the session before taking over EMI itself. Baker has his version. “I said, ‘Hey, it is Paul McCartney – we really can’t do this. But they wouldn’t have (stopped) without my intervention. Paul McCartney is an asshole, make no mistake about it.”
Nigeria’s unsung coup is corroborated by ‘company man’ Mark Lewisohn’s liner notes on the finished Wings album: “There was also some tension with the drummer Ginger Baker, formerly of Cream, who had left England for Nigeria and set up a recording venue in Ikeja. Baker wanted Paul to record all of his album at his place, ARC Studio; to keep the peace, Paul promised to go there for a day.” The session did result in one track on the album – ‘Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)’ , with liner notes stating: “Pleasingly, Ginger Baker joined in the fun, playing a percussive tin of gravel on the song.”
Baker also toured Europe and the US with a litany of African musicians as part of his outfit Airforce & Salt (Friday Jumbo, the leader of Monomono was a member of Fela’s group before he joined Joni Hasstrup and bassist Kenneth Okulolo to form Monomono).
Bandleader Tony Allen (above). Fela on stage with Ginger Baker (below).
When Iruoje left EMI in 1978, the tide was turning for the worse. Oil money was being embezzled by corrupt politicians. Crime and unemployment were on the rise. The music industry (notably the single market) dried up as the money disappeared.Fela himself had also become radical. “He was talking about government, politics,” recalled Baker. “He wasn’t playing afrobeat anymore. I told Fela to first make sure he has won the international market before he can start all that.”
It got ugly. In 1977 General Obasanjo’s men, on their first wave of power, raided Fela’s house, assaulting him and fracturing his skull. They also fatally injured his grandmother before throwing Fela into prison. “That event has become a shorthand in the Nigerian press for all the oppressive acts carried out during Obasanjo’s time as head of state,” an anonymous Western diplomat said in a Wall Street Journal story. For the music, it was the end of a golden age.
“In Nigeria things very quickly slip into obscurity because people are always moving forward,” says music historian and Soundway Records owner Miles Cleret. “Nostalgia isn’t as important there as it can be here. Berkley Jones, the guitarist for BLO, is now a property developer. He hasn’t picked up a guitar in 10 years and yet he was one of the most talented guitarists in Lagos. He was a pin-up – a real star.”
“Now everyone’s trying to imitate American rap and R&B,” Iruoje said of the contemporary Nigerian scene. In the end even the biggest acts such as Ofege and BLO never found an audience outside Nigeria. Many smaller names have long been forgotten.
For a comprehensive look at the prime of 1970s Nigerian music, dig into Miles Cleret’s Soundway Records label. Cleret has exhaustively raided the far ends of the earth in his quest for exotic and lost electric sounds – tracking down DJs, distributors and collectors to source vinyl copies of singles and piece together some brilliant stories and compilations.
Ginger Baker has since been chased out of England, Nigeria, Italy and America. Those interested in his story should definitely check out an excellent article by Jay Bulger, following a month with the ginger maniac himself in his South African compound, originally written for Rolling Stone Magazine. Undeterred by violence ‘I bet you expect me to play for you now! Persistent c**t!’ Bulger, is currently finishing a live-in documentary on the man himself.
