January 1979
Clash of the Feelgood People
Tim (Lott) and I face each other across two large desks in a small office in Mount Pleasant, both of us still slightly stunned by the fact that we’ve actually started the Farringdon Agency and are renting an office and getting phones installed and buying furniture and filing cabinets and stationery and having letterheads and a partnership bank account.
We’ve upped the ante with all the publications and the money is enough to cover everything with a nifty few bob on top. Plus Tim has a regular Capital Radio spot that doesn’t pay much but helps our Farringdon cause look more kosher.
I get about a bit − trips, receptions, fine white lines on the freeway. I am that hitcher . . .
There’s a sudden deluge of tabloid tumbling, of dots and dashes and punchy intros and jaunty exclamation-mark-ridden prose. How about this brazen bunch…
It’s the most bizarre combination to ever hit the charts!
A cowboy, an Indian, a cop, a GI, a construction worker and a leather-clad motorbike stud all extolling the virtues of the YMCA!
That’s the wild and wonderful Village People who sell as many records in the States as John Travolta.
They call their act a celebration of the all-American male − yet their biggest fans can be found in Gay Lib!
‘We go for a Mae Westian approach,’ says David Hodo, the construction worker. ‘When we started, we aimed for a gay audience simply because we’re a disco band, and most of the people that went to discos in the States originally were gay.’
The Village People are the brainchild of French producer Jacques Morale. He visited a bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, and saw a group of male go-go dancers, including Felipe Rose dressed as a Red Indian chief, performing on top of the bar. ‘I decided it was time to have a group specifically for such people,’ he recalls.
So he got the other guys together, dressed them in American stereotype male outfits and took them into the studio. ‘I never thought it would catch on with straight audiences − but they loved it right away,’ says Morale.
The band’s first single, the aptly titled ‘Macho Man’, went platinum. Their stage act is sensational, and the audiences they attract are zanier than the band themselves!
Says Hodo, ‘A lot of people overlook the humour of our act. It’s incredible. We’re not a Gay Lib band, we’re a People Lib band!’
At a recent concert they attracted a record audience of 110,000. When they appeared on a US TV show it got the highest ratings in its history.
The cop − Victor Willis, a high-school football star − maintains he has no connection with gay people. So isn’t it all a bit awkward?
‘Sometimes it gets a bit uncomfortable because I won’t let that sort of image be connected with me. I’m just dealing in disco. Songs like "YMCA", "My Roommate" and "Ups And Downs" can be interpreted either way.
‘It’s entirely up to the listener.’
‘There’s a mystique about us,’ adds Hodo. ‘And women love it because there are six real manly looking guys on-stage.’ The band hope to tour Britain early in the New Year – and that should set the cat among the pigeons… !
(Morali died of AIDS in 1991 and Glenn Hughes, the Leatherman, died of lung cancer in 2001. Village People sold over 85 million records and were awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2008.)
Even the Clash can’t escape my exclamation-mark clutches…!
The leader of Britain’s most exciting band lives in a squat!
Joe Strummer of the Clash, whose new album Give ’Em Enough Rope has shot to number two in the charts, can’t afford a place of his own.
‘People think because you’ve had a few hits you’re rich,’ says Strummer, twenty-four.
‘Bands like the Who and the Stones never got any money until years after they started making hits. I hope it’s gonna be the same with us.
‘But if you think I’m hard-up you should see our drummer Nicky Headon − he sleeps rough!’
The Clash have come in for some heavy criticism recently from those who reckon they’ve sold out.
‘We haven’t changed,’ says Joe. ‘We’ve still kept our integrity and we still know what our duty is − to make a stand. Times have changed, standards are all different. But the music business doesn’t know that. There’s a whole new world of kids out there − but those mugs in the industry close their eyes to it. Instead, they continue to go out at lunch times and get drunk on other people’s money.’
Joe went through a nightmarish time earlier this year when he was frightened of going out alone.
‘It was all getting too much for me. I kept thinking I would be attacked because of what we’ve always stood for.
‘But I soon got over it. You have to or you’re dead!’
Rat-a-tat-tat! Check out Mr Brilleaux…
Doctor Feelgood have found the perfect cure for the winter blues.
While we’ve all been dreaming of castles in Spain they’ve bought one . . . complete with hundreds of squealing pigs!
And the band are hoping to bring home the bacon when they visit their newly acquired pig farm next month.
Lee Brilleaux, the Cockney hell-raiser with the hung-over eyes and the hangdog voice, explains that the Feelgoods had money in Spain which they couldn’t collect.
‘We’ve played shows there, but the money we get is subject to high taxation if it goes out of the country. We heard about this farm-owner who had got into heavy debt, so we used our money to bail him out − and we bought the property. We’ve kept him on as manager but it’s ours − all four acres of it. So now we’re going down in a few weeks to rehearse in the barn where the pigs sleep. Besides, it might be a profitable sideline. You can’t get good bacon in Spain ’cos the pigs are too scrawny. In fact, everything in Spain is skinny − except for the birds! And I like a nice bit of crackling now and again!’
Lee, twenty-seven, is delighted about the success of their new single, ‘Milk and Alcohol’.
‘It looks like being our first Top Twenty record! It’s great because the lyrics are all about how drink gets you into trouble − and everyone thinks I’m a hard drinker. I like a pint as much as the next man, but once reporters see you with one in your hand they think you’re an alcoholic. I go down to the pub most nights because I hate the rubbish they put on the telly.’
Lee, a. bachelor, has never moved away from Canvey Island where he was born. ‘Why should I? I spend most of my time on the road anyway, so home doesn’t have to be some-where glamorous, just where you can hang your hat. Nobody bothers you when you nip out to the boozer for a drink. Only problem is, the pubs close too early!’
(‘Milk and Alcohol’ was the Feelgoods’ only top-ten hit. Brilleaux continued to front the band, through various line-up changes, until his death from lymphoma in 1994. The Lee Brilleaux Birthday Memorial concert is held every year on Canvey Island.)
Next: Bob Marley and Inner Circle in Jamaica
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY
www.wetdreamsdrylives.com
www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives
December 1978
Gerry & the Pisstakers
It’s cold. It’s Liverpool. It’s Devo. I’m talking to the guys in the Holiday Inn lounge.
Devo have just played the local Empire where the five Akron portables pumped it up precisely and with intent. Their indefatigable cohesion galvanised the Pudlians and there was scousely room to breathe at the front.
The crowd more than simply enjoyed the static, they worshipped these bespectacled college kids.
Behind those glasses (which most of them wear off stage too) you get the feeling there’s a world of victims, staring and expecting you to punch them on the nose and kick them in the bollocks.
Their show is Tubes without the Quaaludes, Clash without the accent, Vince Hill without the nose, Boney M without the tits, Meat Loaf without the inches, Blue Oyster Cult without the lasers. Yes, Devo are without.
But within they’re fine upstanding young spectacles with inveterate principles.
They wake up in the middle of the night and cry out, ‘Why are we here? What are we doing? Where are we going? Where’s the toilet? Can I have a glass of water, Mummy?’
The boys have escaped the frenzied mob and are seated around a table reading reports about themselves in assorted music papers. They don’t appear to drink much, smoke much or munch much. They sip tea sedately, and nibble biscuits conservatively. Gerry Casale does most of the talking.
Three fans stroll into the lounge with posters which they ask the boys to sign. They talk of the heavy stewarding at the gig.
‘There's two thousand of you and only twenty of them,’ screams Gerry. ‘If you all worked together you could trample over them. But none of you would do that, would you?''
The fans shrug and walk away. Gerry turns to me. ‘Those bouncers really want to hurt the kids. It’s a totally Fascist attitude and overtly sexual. They hate the kids because they have the ability to get off on something. The kids represent a kind of healthy sexuality. The bouncers feel threatened by this because they see life as a situation that has to be controlled. People like that find jobs where they can give vent to their repression in a socially acceptable way – like being a bouncer. In future we’ll have a say in the security before we set one foot in this country to tour.’
After initial raves, Devo have come in for piss-take upon piss-take in the music press.
‘It was a real Devo situation,’ explains Gerry. ‘We read all the laudatory British press and then came over. We did all these interviews and gave truthful answers to every question. We told them about Akron, we told them about us, about why we wrote our songs, everything. And they really laid into us.
‘What they resented was the fact we didn’t tell them we liked to wank and pull chicks and eat hamburgers and watch TV. We simply told them what motivated us to create.’
Now that’s asking for trouble. Gerry smacks his teacup on the table.
‘Yet they can tell kids to go along to a Clash show and lose their front teeth or an eye and then go back to the factory. See, when they realised we were in no way similar, they got offensive. They found Devo a threat and that’s typically human.’
‘But the press really believe they’re deities − "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away."’
I feel distinctly uncomfortable at this juncture. I adopt the false-laugh method of interrogation. Ha, well, haha, boys, hahaha, your album wasn’t too, hahahaha, hot.
‘It was a three-and-a-half-week Devo classic,’ says Gerry.
‘Today’s noise is tomorrow’s music.’
Hahahahaha, today’s music is also, hahahahahaha, tomorrow’s noise. I sit tight waiting for their reaction.
They laugh.
‘We are sensitive to change and use it. We won’t repeat our music,’ says Gerry. ‘Change is what keeps a band going. What you start out to do is ultimately changed from what you intended. Of course, you could end up like Jefferson Starship, a band who know exactly what’s going to happen to their music at any given time. When you stop moving you become a statue and then you fulfil middle-class expectations.’
And he goes on into the wild blue yonder . . .
I decide to leave as Gerry admits he finds it difficult to accept the fact that Siouxsie and the Banshees are praised by the rock press and Devo just get systematically slagged.
Don’t know what they’re worried about. Once you start getting ripped to shreds by the press you’re on your way to a fortune.
Bryan Robertson’s mesmerising guitar solo on ‘Still In Love With You’ from Thin Lizzy’s Live & Dangerous album is just about the finest guitar solo I’ve ever heard and I get the opportunity to tell him just that down at the Speakeasy one night.
I swear to God, he starts to weep, gently. Okay, he’s probably pissed and I’m probably standing on his foot, but I’ve never managed to make a rock star cry before – in a nice way − at something I’ve said, and it’s one of the more poignant moments of my life.
Just before Christmas I have a quick chat over the phone with another guitar god, Rory Gallagher, currently on a massive tour. ‘I do enjoy the way I live,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t
change it for the world. Touring is the lifeblood of rock ’n’ roll. All those endless hours of finding places to eat and not sleeping, it’s all part of it. If I took all those things seriously I’d lose my bite. I’m into brass-knuckles music. I want to woo the public.’
The next day I interview the Barron Knights, not really renowned for brass-knuckles music but, hey, it’s Christmas.
Next: Village People, The Clash, Dr Feelgood
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY
www.wetdreamsdrylives.com
www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives
November 1978
The highway's jammed with broken heroes
After the show at the Capital Centre in Maryland, Bruce Springsteen walks into the room backstage with a towel draped over his shoulders, like a boxer who’s just gone the full nine yards. He looks different. His hair has been slicked back and it makes him seem leaner but not meaner.
This feels like a great honour.
He’s extremely polite and has an almost childlike demeanour. He’s genuinely surprised that he’s popular in Britain.
‘I try to do as much as possible,’ he says, of the gruelling nationwide marathon tour. ‘The kids want to hear Born To Run so I sing it. I’ve got some new numbers so I sing them.
‘We originally started off with a two-hour set. But when the tour got under way, we found it impossible to restrict it to that. It’s hard for me to leave anything out. So now I play as long as it feels right. Some nights it’s too long and others it ain’t long enough. Tonight was one night they were about ready for a double dose!
‘I guess most of the songs are pretty durable -- at least, from the reaction they still get, they seem to be.’
Darkness On The Edge of Town is a lot bleaker musically and the trademark cinematic lyrics make way for blue-collar blues.
‘It’s been a real progression,’ he says, in mellifluous five-o’clock-shadow New Jersey tones. ‘The characters on Born To Run and Darkness could be the same people in the same town only years down the line. You can see the difference. It’s, like, older. Some people have called it a depressing album. That’s untrue. It’s just that when you have one successful album people tend to expect the same format for the next one.’
Ah, now seems like the appropriate time to probe. I wonder if his work is autobiographical.
‘No.’
Oh.
‘Oh, sure, some of the characters on a track like Rosalita are people I’ve come across in my life. But my songs are fantasies. Should a song reflect imagery or the performer? You can’t get away from the fact that you’re making the statements -- but then again, is it the song that does that? There comes a point where the song becomes more and more like a movie. And when that happens you cease to become its creator and assume the role of director. You have to be so many different characters and it’s better to let them have lives of their own.
‘My songs have a kinda drive-in quality about them. They may be about factories, they may be about something else. I’m just there, quietly directing.’
So all those songs about crazy gangs in city streets and fights and drinking – you never lived any of that?
‘Not really. I was always pretty much on my own. I didn’t hang out with a crowd or anything. See, ever since I was fourteen I was playing. Clubs, YMCAs, high-school dances, you name it. As a result I felt okay playing to people but not actually being with them.
‘And I’m still like that. I am by myself. If there’s one other person around, well, that’s okay. You tend to find that attitude in most rock ’n’ roll musicians.’
Never in a gang. Wow, and I’d always thought this was one hell of a heavy dude. Er, how about the drinking, then, Bruce?
‘I haven’t taken a drink in around two years.’
Gulp!
‘I guess I don’t really have the time. I never did drink much. Oh, there was one time. For a while I used to hang out with this really big guy -- I mean really big, y’know. And together we’d head out to the bars. I was under age but nobody guessed or cared. We’d really shake those bars down. I had a great time with this big guy. But then I never saw him again.
‘I had time on my hands. Now, I suppose if I wanted to get drunk I’d go to a bar on my own. But I wouldn’t want anybody else to see.’
And what about those early sexual − uh – travels?
‘I was fourteen when I first made love. And when I’d done it I didn’t know if I’d done it or not!’ He starts to laugh, all shy and secretive. Well, at least he’s done something he can sing about.
Funny how preconceived notions get their noses rubbed in the dirt. No matter. This guy could never be a letdown. For starters he’s too sincere and, besides, somebody with a show like he’s got could give an interview with a mouth full of marbles and still gain my respect.
The Asbury Park apparition found himself alone in the rundown seaside resort when his parents upped and headed west to California.
‘I was around eighteen at the time and still at high school. I decided I didn’t want to go with them. I had a local reputation as a musician and I didn’t intend losing that. I tried to live there for a very short time but I soon found out the place held nothing for me. Musically I preferred what was going down in New Jersey. I didn’t need a job to get by ’cos I could make enough money playing in the clubs.’
Jon Landau wanders in. He looks a little perplexed. The wrinkles in his brow suggest it’s time for us to head back to the hotel.
The moment Bruce emerges into the chilly night hundreds of kids who’ve been waiting patiently for a glimpse go berserk. ‘Give me a kiss, baby -- sign this, pleasepleaseplease?’
‘I’ll always love you, Bruce. Ain’t he just so damned cute?’’
He signs everything flashed in front of him. And that smile’s not false. He loves it.
We climb on the luxury tour bus that boasts a colour TV, sofas, beds and built-in stereo and head for the hotel. ‘Hey, ain’t it just amazing?’ he says. ‘I came out on this tour ’cos I wanted to enjoy myself again. I never dreamed it would turn out like this. I’ve done eighty-eight shows, we’ve got thirty-three more to do, and everywhere the reaction is the same. You get the young kids from the suburbs and they’re such a great audience. It’s funny . . . At the start the girls would jump on stage, then, after realising what they’d done, just stand there and freeze. But now they’re getting used to it − and so are their tongues!
‘I like running among the audience while I’m playing, and the other night I thought I’d take a little trip up into the balcony. But as I got in the foyer about ten fifteen-year-old girls hit me. They just grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. I guess they’re more demonstrative at that age. They even come around to my house and wait for hours outside. I got a kid sister back in San Francisco and when she tells her friends who her brother is they go wild. Ain’t it just amazing?’
Bruce still lives in Asbury Park. ‘It’s still the same as it always was. If you got enough gas in your car you carry on to Atlantic City. If not, then Asbury will just have to do. But it’ll always be my home. I like Arizona and Holland. London’s pretty cool too. My first show at Hammersmith three years ago was tough but the second one was great. I guess I’ll never leave Asbury, though . . .’
During the long encores at every show, Bruce asks for the houselights to be turned on, and they stay on till the end while he goes through his usual rock ’n’ roll medley fare. ‘When you see all the people, everybody, right up to the back, it’s such a great feeling.
‘It’s their night. You may get sore, you may get hoarse, but when you see all those kids out there it’s like the first show all over again. They may not have seen you before and they may not see you again, so you’ve always got to make it something real special. If you think like that every time you walk on stage you’ve got it made.’
And, boy, has this guy got it made.
Jon tells everybody to look out of the windows.
‘Willya take a look at that?’ shouts Bruce. The coach is being escorted back to the hotel by a convoy of cars stretching as far as the eye can see. And each car is stuffed full of screaming kids screeching horns, singing Springsteen songs and, of course, chanting, ‘Broooce, Broooce, Broooce.’
‘Wow, that’s never happened before,’ says Bruce.
But it's gonna happen again. And again. And leave us running burned and blind chasing something in the night. . .
I start chasing something in the night when I return to London. Tim and I check out an office in Mount Pleasant. We’re weeks away from unveiling the Farringdon Agency.
Next: Devo in Liverpool
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY
www.wetdreamsdrylives.com www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives
November 1978
Broooced and battered
Photographer Chris Gabrin and I are invited to the CBS offices in Manhattan by executive Perri Chasin to watch a video of Bruce Springsteen in concert, singing ‘Rosalita’. I’ve loved him with a passion since first hearing the Born To Run album. This guy was serious shit.
‘Would you like to see him play?’ asks Perri.
Would I like to live for ever?
‘We’re flying you and Chris down to Washington tonight to catch the show in Maryland,’ says Perri, ‘and we’re trying to arrange an interview, but it’s proving to be a little difficult. See what you guys can do when you get there.’
We can do a lot as it turns out.
Christ it’s hot in here.
The guy behind me is pawing my neck with his heavy on the onions hot dog breath. The fulsome closed circuit system above my head revels in zoom-a-loom close-ups. You can almost see the microbes getting it on in each sweat droplet racing down Bruce’s face.
It's a 15,000 humanwatt heat, fulminating on stage, unleashing microwaves that permeate the cavernous Capitol Center in Largo, leaving the snow covered outside untouched but burning the shit outta them pumping organs grinding away inside.
A smile has been super glued on each and every face. No matter how hard you try it won't peel off. You're stuck with it for three hours. Then you realise there's something wrong with your legs. You know you should sit down because the stewards keep telling you, but they won't respond. It's a three hour clockwork wind up and if you force them they'll snap.
Your eyes refuse to leave his face. The lids won't close because you'll miss something if they do. You're waiting, just waiting to respond. The song climbs to its climax. You're straining to shout. Not yet. Not yet...
"I am a prisoner of rock 'n' roll," he screams.
"BROOOCE, BROOOCE,BROOOCE!"
A Springsteen show is a joyous celebration of rock ’n’ roll the way it should always be played, with huge dollops of elation and passion. Its extravagant length is the fulcrum, its black magic secret the E Street Band, especially saxophonist Clem Clemons, a veritable Empire State of a man dressed in one those fer-lashie white pimp-pusher suits found in Dirty Harry movies.
But when he pumps up that sultry sax swing, it's like you've caught a glimpse of heaven.
The songs mean so much more when you see them performed live. Like you've spent all your life with only one eye and they've just given you another for Christmas wrapped up in starry paper. If they told me I was dying, I'd spend the rest of my life watching Bruce Springsteen.
Thirty minutes after the fourth and obviously final encore hardly anyone has left. That Pythonesque sheep shearing Christian name chant continues long after the show has finished, ‘Broooce Broooce, Broooce,’ and even an announcement over the tannoy that there will be no further encores fails to quieten them.
I’m hanging out with the ‘Broooce’ brigade on the off-chance of grabbing an interview, though it looks a pretty remote possibility. I’d be surprised if the man is still standing, such was the intensity of his performance.
Fourteen-year-old girls queue up at the backstage door armed with photos of their idol and handkerchiefs soaked with tears.
It seems strange that a twenty-nine-year-old New Jersey urban cowboy who talks of love and death and streets of fire should attract the hordes who’ve been playing Andy Gibb records at home before the show.
But it’s the kids who Bruce sings about. It’s their town that rips the bones from their backs, their town that’s a death trap. When he pleads, ‘Get out while you’re young,’ you know he really means it. Suddenly Chris grabs my arm. ‘I think we’re in.’
I follow him to a backstage door, which a mean-looking dude lets us pass through. Chris is one helluva blagger. Three floors up we’re led into a room. We sit down and I frantically write down some questions as we wait for the man to appear…
Next: The interview
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY
www.wetdreamsdrylives.com
www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives
November 1978
Guys & Dolls
In a bar on 42nd Street I bump into ex-New York Doll David Johansen and assure him I don’t want to talk about the New York Dolls because, let’s face it, the New York Dolls are dead. Kaput. And what’s the use of reminiscing? What’s the point of checking out that whole sordid, Biba-stained past?
I mean, who wants to remember all that?
I’m sure the geezer serving cold beers in this bar the size of a high-street barber’s couldn’t give a toss. In fact, he I’m sure he couldn’t give a toss about anything, the way he bangs the bottles on the counter.
I’m sure David Johansen doesn’t care that much either. Just because he happened to front the band don’t mean to say his needle nose is stuck in some gluey groove revolving on a time warp turntable. He’s got a band of his own now anyway. This lonely-planet boy is back to the front.
David has a squashed face but it’s a subtle kind of squashiness, like blancmange. This naturally makes him all the more interesting because every time he opens his mouth you expect his cheeks to wobble. They don’t, of course. Not even a raspberry ripple. Funny how some people make you think of food. I see Johnny Rotten and pilchards spring to mind. Bob Geldof brings visions of meat pies, Kate Bush gherkins, Freddie Mercury walnuts, Elvis Costello peas.
With David Johansen it’s definitely blancmange. I guess that’s what makes him attractive to sweet-toothed women.
He’s often likened to Jagger, but in fact he’s better-looking. Jagger is like a half-eaten jaded jelly. Johansen is pristine blancmange.
‘I’m an unassuming, rambling kind of guy.’ He smiles. ‘I went to high school in Staten Island.’
Seeing how this guy never says ‘er’ or ‘y’know’ or ‘yeah’ but proceeds with a perfect line in spiel, I’m going to take a short break while he, with the aid of untipped cigarettes and an endless stream of Carlsberg, tells a bewitching tale.
See you in a wee while …
‘We lived in a residential area, rather like a part of London, on the Island. There were six of us. My father used to sing Gilbert and Sullivan stuff when he was young before joining the air corps and going off to war. We lived in a real working-class neighbourhood. I remember eating tuna fish a lot, sleeping in a warm place and selling Kool-Aid on the street when I was about six. In those places the most you can hope for is a nice jacket, two or three pairs of pants, a pair of shoes and a job in a grocery store earning fifty bucks a week. There’s a good community spirit.
‘All the guys used to hang out in gangs. My gang consisted of the nuttiest guys around and all the other gangs used to like us because we were so crazy. I never used to fight much; it wasn’t my scene. But I did hang out with one bunch whose warlord used to beat up three guys at a time in a rumble and throw them over his head.
‘I used to listen to Bob Dylan and when I was fourteen I joined a band playing school dates. Sometimes, just for a laugh, we’d throw a musician in because we were pretty bad. I also had this mad girlfriend and we used to write poems to each other.
‘School dragged on. I still get this recurring dream. I’m sitting, breathless, in my old classroom. That’s all it is but it’s a fucking nightmare. See, I used to set the alarm every morning for eight thirty, get up, take a shower at eight thirty-two, dress, shake my hair, dash out, catch the bus, travel the two miles to school and arrive at eight forty-four. 1 got everything down to a fine art so I could sleep till the last minute.
‘But as I got older I just couldn’t get up and my mother would come home around eleven thirty a.m. and I’d still be in bed. I’d just wander round Greenwich Village. School didn’t seem important.
‘Around this time me and another guy used to play acoustics and harmonicas for the Madras crowd. Those guys had check shirts and desert boots and used to hang out at ice-cream parlours. My pals used to find out where we were playing and come around to beat up the Madras mob ’cos they were pretty namby-pamby. They also used to beat up the New Jersey guys who trespassed on Staten Island territory, drinking pints of Tango and pop wines.
‘I was working at a supermarket as a cashier making fifty bucks a week, which was cool. I gave my mother twenty and spent the rest on clothes − T-shirts, black leather jackets and roamers, which were boots that came up to the ankle and made to last for no more than two months. All the girls used to dye their hair black too.
‘Then I moved to the city and joined Fast Eddie and the Electric Japs. We won a battle-of-the-bands contest cos we had a Puerto Rican drummer and a black bassist. The night we won I knew I wanted to be a star. I walked on stage and started singing. Then I closed my eyes ’cos I thought they were going to kill us. But they cheered . . .
‘People said we were the best band around −but that’s ’cos we were the worst. We were entertaining. Bands, that time, made everything look so boring, taking everything so seriously. We stood out because of our conspicuous consumption. Then the New York Dolls. Right?’
Whoops. I’m back.
‘Our lifestyles in the Dolls didn’t radically alter − we always used to stay up all night before we were in the band. I think one of the main things we achieved was to get a lot of record companies interested in bands they would never even have considered before.’
After the band disintegrated − an appropriate word − David was not interested in making any records. ‘I just wanted to sit around and dig myself for awhile.’
It was while he was digging himself he met drummer Frankie LaRocka on the Staten Island ferry and the David Johansen band was born.
He smiles incessantly, like the Joker. He’s a professional raconteur gently unfolding stories that tell you more about the city than the man.
‘This is my life − it doesn’t really change. I’m happy with this band and confident about the future.’
But will it ever attract mass interest?
‘Who knows? But I know one thing − I’d rather be popular in New York, the Shanghai of the States, than anywhere else in this country. This place has more of a creative spirit, streets ahead of any other town.
‘These days, if you’re the hottest band around you have to be homogenised ’cos you’ve got to be hip with the people that eat white-bread sandwiches. Yeah, it’s true. There are actually people in certain States that grill two slices of white bread and then slap another piece of white bread covered in margarine in between and eat it as a sandwich. Who in their right mind wants to be popular with them?’
(David has since appeared in several movies, most notably as a taxi-driving ghost in Scrooged and alongside Mick Jagger in Freejack. He has toured with a re-formed version of the New York Dolls and has contributed songs for movies including The Aviator.
Check out this unusual interview between David and Johnny Thunders outside CBGBs when they look forward to touring with The Pistols and The Clash in the UK on the ill-fated tour in 1976. http://youtu.be/R3jIUjjvjqE )
Next: Bruce Springsteen in Maryland
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY
www.wetdreamsdrylives.com
www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives
October 1978
Thomas the Tank Engine
Within a week of returning to London, I head off to Toronto with PR Alan Edwards and photographer Chris Gabrin in search of a nice Pere…
Pere Ubu cling to Cleveland, the spot that spawned them, nurtured them, and will probably kill them.
David Thomas, singer and co-composer, is a walking Billy Smart’s with eyes that curl away from you like a Victorian fire-eater's moustache. The rest of the band look like they missed the 5.45 special out of Woodstock and have been waiting for the next bus ever since.
They’re gathered in the Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto.
I still can’t figure out on which side of the city the bar is situated because one part of Toronto looks very much the same as another – shops, offices, Dub Housing, roads with cars, people (but not at night). It’s undistinguished, achromatic, and the nearest major town to Niagara Falls.
The Tavern reflects its mother.
Thomas and company amble on stage. The Big Top looks uncomfortable in an ill-fitting suit that covers his six-foot-two-inch 20-stone frame – it’s a pair of silk pyjamas on a rhino. His brow is perpetually creased, but it’s a feigned seriousness, as is the passion of his pleas to the audience.
Thomas is a unique performer. He looks terribly uncomfortable on stage, like he knows every movement, every word, is a hideous faux pas. Yet you know it’s an act. The guy’s been doing it too long for it not to be. It appears the audience are diehard Ubu fans and they actually call out requests. ‘Hey David, what about some Chinese Radiation?’ ‘We want Drinking Wine Spodyody!’ ‘Blow Daddy-O.’ And when it’s all over Toronto dies again.
There’s no doubting Pere Ubu possess a morbid sensibility − each song is like the dismembered victim of a sex murderer. A leg in the long grass, a head in the hedge, an arm near an arch. All mean nothing until gradually pieced together on the bloodstained pathologist’s slab. lt takes time, but the cadaver begins to resemble somebody, somebody you’ve known in the past, somebody who might have meant something. Long ago.
Backstage, Thomas sucks grass fumes from under a glass, up, up into the wide blue yonder. Almost immediately he has a coughing fit that renders him incapable of speaking. His face puffs up, turns crimson and his eyes bulge. You can just see the whites, which ain’t as white as maybe they should be. He finds a chair and flops, still wheezing. We all take no notice and form an orderly queue behind the grey fume-filled glassful of grass.
The dressing room is tiny and, with Thomas the tank engine in it, positively claustrophobic. He’s wearing a cheap blue mac that’s as ill-fitting as the suit underneath. He looks like a character in a Samuel Beckett play.
‘I was a high-school drop-out,’ he says and, right away, the eyes begin their darting movements -- movements that persist throughout our little tryst. ‘It didn’t seem to make much sense staying on. Everyone appeared to be pretty uninteresting. I was going to be a teacher like my father, but that lasted six months. Then I started writing for a music paper. I wrote under the name of Crocus Behemoth. But I got tired of writing about music. I wanted to go out and do it.’
The room is getting smokier, the Mac is getting bluer, the body bigger, the ceiling lower. I feel like Alice after drinking the shrinking potion.
‘We’re described as an industrial band but that’s wrong. I can understand when some people say our music has nightmare qualities but we’re really a folk band. We approach the whole thing like one. The Velvets used to be described as a folk band.
‘I can’t imagine ever being popular. It would be fun if it happened − I’ve nothing against making it. But I still can’t really see it happening.’
‘Industrial rock is nothing more than a hook. In the early days we used to talk about it and its relevance to Cleveland. But it’s just not important. What is important is getting away from Joe Public expecting something from a show just because he bought a ticket. That’s old thinking. He’s as much part of the show as the artist, of equal importance in fact. I have a job to do, the audience has a job to do.
‘I’ve never gone to a show and expected something. Whether I’m listening to a record in my room, or having some friends round, or watching a western, I never expect to have a good time. That causes too much trouble because then it starts getting into "Am I having a good time or not?" and that’s a waste of time.
‘The only thing I ever expected was to get accepted in Cleveland. I just hoped that at some point, some day, Cleveland would come around. I was wrong.’
(Pere Ubu – named after Père Ubu, father Ubu, the protagonist of Ubu Roi, Ubu the King, a play by French writer Alfred Jarry – have disbanded and re-formed on several occasions, and David Thomas remains the one constant. In 2013 they released the album The Lady From Shanghai)
We stay at a five-star Toronto hotel for three nights during which I get three calls from a local escort service someone keeps contacting in my name, as a joke, requesting a girl. On the third night the very sexy-sounding voice warns me, after I deny yet again booking a girl, to ‘stop pestering us or we’ll have you thrown out of the hotel’.
Alan denies making the calls but his hysterical laughter is a total giveaway.
The three of us then head down to New York for interviews, photos and fun…
Next: David Johansen in New York
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY
www.wetdreamsdrylives.com
www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives
October 1978
The Quest For Blondie Part 2
McSorley’s Old Ale House starts to empty like the glasses and the band decide to move on to CBGB’s.
In the contrived decadence of the club, about as meretricious as the iceberg wino Jimmy Destri mentioned earlier, the four guys disperse, checking out the − uh − depravities and emaciated faces. Someone I’ve never met before hands me a huge bag of coke, which I take with me to the toilet.
‘Hey, I’d like to introduce you to a coupla friends of mine,’ says Clem, when I emerge from the cubicle. He ushers me to the bar and interrupts a conversation between two typical electrical-appliance American housewives. ‘This is Mary.’ She wears golden glasses to match her long, straight hair. Her eyebrows are the same shape as her top lip, which gives her face a strange symmetry.
‘Hi.’ ‘And this is Marge.’ She’s heavily tanned and her skin has suffered slightly. Her smiles are a little tired. ‘Hi.’ ‘They’re the Shangri-Las!’ I have visions of waking up in a hospital bed with a nurse above me full of re-assurance and comforting words: ‘You're okay now. You've just been in a state of shock for awhile. Take it easy . . .’
When I was twelve the Shangri-Las had epitomised everything that was dirty and sexy. Libidinous teenage punkettes inhabiting a voodoo vestibule where jailbait languished on stained plastic sofas. I remember seriously starting to think about thighs when I saw them singing 'Remember (Walking In The Sand)' on Top Of The Pops one Fireworks Night. I’d never heard a song quite like it before. Time kills. To be confronted by these thirty-year-old women makes me suddenly a mite depressed.
And, believe it or not, they're making a comeback. Well, just these two, Mary Weiss the blonde in the brunette pack, and Margie Ganser.
Maybe Mary’s singing voice still overflows with that rub-sucking venom. ‘We broke up originally,’ says Mary – straight voice, like the steam from the spout of a kettle – ‘because we were young and there were too many people out there trying to squeeze every last drop of money they could get their hands on out of us. That left a really bad taste in our mouths.
‘For a long while we've been running away. But now it's time to face the music. Besides, the business was much more dangerous in those days. There's a child in my soul and I don't want it to die. I can't let it perish. When that goes you're dead.
‘I really got screwed up when the band split. I was nineteen. I'd never been out with anyone while I was on the road. Christ, I'd been a rock ’n’ roll star at fifteen and I was only just getting over my first period.’
Margie tries to talk over the band on stage (it was audition night and they were playing 'God Save The Queen' like they were a Woolworths cover job or a too-dark Xerox). ‘We never knew what was going on. How could we at that age? We got to do things 15-year-olds never dream of. It started off with high school dances - we were younger than the punters - and it just escalated. We played parties where the kids used to make their own wine because we were all under age.’
Mary looks tired. She offers to drive me back to my hotel. In the car she says they met with little success at New York record companies. ‘They expect us to be completely punk. Y’know, they say things like "How does it feel to be the Queen of Punk?" And one guy wanted us to be the female equivalent of the Ramones. I’m twenty-nine years old. I’m serious about my music. I don’t care for punk that much.’ I say I’ll call her for some more gen. She says okay. I say goodnight. She says seeya.
‘Hey, what happened to you last night?’ says Clem the following evening, straightening his collar in the dressing room at My Father’s Place. ‘We had a real great time. After we left CBGB’s we all went on to Max’s Kansas City and met up with Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe. Real nice guys.’
My Father’s Place is a club on Long Island about forty minutes’ drive from Manhattan, and Blondie are playing two shows tonight. It’s a converted bowling alley and the long tables where the punters sit are the original lanes. Pin-table pyrotechnics with free pizza thrown in. Backstage the Greenwich weirdos are out in force. It’s all prurience and strawberry-blancmange brasses eager to lavish praise on what looks like becoming New York’s creamiest cult band.
Debbie doo-doos past in white culottes, takes a seat opposite a reporter from the strike-ridden New York Times and churns out the same old spiel while doting dykes strain their ears. A guy comes to the door and asks a sound man for Debbie’s autograph. As he says the words ‘Debbie Harry’ his hand automatically reaches down to his crotch and he mimes a jerk-off, smiles and leaves.
Blondie are as big in the States as they were in the UK a year ago − in other words, they ain’t big. My Father’s Place seats about five hundred, all diehard fans who gasp the moment Debbie appears looking like Sandra Dee on sulphate. Blondie’s three-minute bam-bam is the ultimate in pop perfection. Sanguine satisfaction in every root-e-toot-toot nuance, in every aphrodisiac phrase.
The set is predictable. Highlights from the first two albums, a substantial segment of Parallel Lines and the obligatory ‘Get It On’ encore. The only real difference is the slight corpulence around Chris Stein’s stomach and jowls. The second set is the same, except for Debbie’s loose-fitting orange dress. But the audience is cut by half, and most of them are the first-set patriots. Still, The World About Us was never like this. And they’ve already found their Shangri-La in the verdant pastures of the English charts. But will they ever make the ‘Leader of the Pack’?
I have a drink with Debbie at the bar after the gig and she tells me she loved my interview and thought the Venus in blue jeans line was neat. I think I’m in love.
Again.
Next: Pere Ubu in Toronto
Adapted from the book Tell Me When by Barry Cain
© Barry Cain 2013
Check out Barry’s new novel, Wet Dreams Dry Lives http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00H0IM2CY
www.wetdreamsdrylives.com
www.facebook.com/wetdreamsdrylives
