by Nick Kent
We’d never met before but struck up a lively rapport nonetheless. Malcolm McLaren had told me all about him, anyway. His real name was Richard Meyers and he’d been born in Kentucky: he and a school friend named Tom Miller had moved to New York in their late teens intent on becoming published poets. That’s why they’d both changed their surnames: Miller called himself ‘Tom Verlaine’ in homage to Arthur Rimbaud’s dissolute literary sidekick. Both were equally taken with the idea of forming a rock group and Verlaine was already a more-than-accomplished electric guitarist. Hell learned some rudimentary bass lines and the pair duly instigated their first line-up-a quartet known first as the Neon Boys and then as Television.
Unfortunately they soon developed vastly different visions about what their group should be sounding like. Hell favoured shorter, more dynamic songs that gave extensive vent to his nihilistic world view. Verlaine felt intrinsically drawn to the dreamy improvisations of late-sixties West Coast rock and his lyrics often read like LSD hallucinations transposed into text. Their club audiences around Manhattan during the early months of 1975 soon split into two camps: those who came to lose themselves in Verlaine’s ethereal guitar solos and sensitive ‘starvation artist’ persona and those who came to cheer on Hell as he boisterously leaped around the stage singing in a grating voice about being part of ‘the blank generation’, his chosen appellation for the emerging seventies youth mindset.
Malcolm McLaren and the New York Dolls were part of the latter crowd. McLaren in particular was utterly smitten by Hell. He loved his look: the short self-cut electric-shock hairstyle, the ripped T-shirts and thrift-store suits held together by safety pins. His rampant magpie instincts for kick-starting a possible future fashion explosion were suddenly detonated the very moment he first espied the Television bassist in the flesh. Hell’s whole appearance was too radical to make an impact on torpid mid-seventies American culture, but take the same ingredients, repackage them first as costly designer garments to the lovey fashionistas of London and then find a young impressionable rock band to model them and turn those same designs into compulsory high-street rebel-wear for youngsters throughout the British Isles et voilà! Of course, he would only really be stealing someone else’s ideas but basic moral considerations never seemed to invade McLaren’s devious mindset. He was a little man with a big destiny to fulfil and woe betide anyone who underestimated the fact.
For his part Richard Hell saw McLaren as a bit of a con artist but essentially harmless. No one in New York could imagine that the nervous little red-haired Limey who’d briefly convinced the New York Dolls to become Marxist sympathisers-a move that utterly torpedoed their career - was actually going to rob them of everything they were working towards.
At that exact moment in time, the New York scene around CBGBs was ablaze with talent. Patti Smith was about to start recording her debut album, but almost everyone else from Television to Talking Heads was still unsigned and therefore financially reliant on performing live in small clubs. The three acts mentioned had nothing to do with punk rock, however. Smith, Verlaine and David Byrne were all worshippers at the altar of the art-rock aesthetic that came into play in the late sixties with the advent of the Velvet Underground and the Doors, and were now attempting to find new creative avenues for its expression within the dilapidated context of mid-seventies Manhattan clubland.
There were only two real punk bands on that scene. The first was the Heartbreakers, who’d been formed after Richard Hell had been evicted from Television at the end of 1974 by his old school pal Verlaine, and Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan had walked out of the New York Dolls shortly afterwards. This three-some already shared one common bond: drug addiction. At first when they played around Manhattan everyone had dubbed them ‘the Dooji Brothers’, ‘dooji’ being one of many local slang terms for heroin. ‘Catch them while they’re still alive’ became the group’s catchphrase whenever they were advertising one of their shows.
Hell and Thunders - the group’s two leaders - had enjoyed a brief honeymoon period of mutual admiration but soon fell into open dispute about the Heartbreakers’ creative development. Hell wanted to make edgy art rock based around his bleak poetic insights whilst Thunders wanted to play simple-minded three-chord rock that tallied well with his newly assumed image as a scrappy Italo-American cross between Keith Richards and Arthur Fonzarelli, the hero of mid-seventies TV show Happy Days. Their musical alliance would end in tears by mid-’76, but in April Richard was still a Heartbreaker struggling to keep his band-mates attuned to his artsy sensibility when all they really wanted to do was further promote their own junkie lifestyle to a small, like-minded clique of followers.
Quite sensibly, no one remotely affiliated with the US music industry at the time - or even the incestuous CBGBs scene - felt they had much of a future. Instead all eyes were on a younger act - a quartet from Forest Hills who’d suddenly made a big impression on downtown Manhattan. The Ramones were the real punk-rock deal: four deeply dysfunctional young men who had never darkened the towers of higher education and who therefore felt absolutely no affinity whatsoever with the prevailing ‘rock goes to college’ aesthetic of the early seventies.
Their music wasn’t about intellect; it was all about instinct: geeky three-chord bubblegum rock played with authentic primordial savagery. They sang about their aimless lives as well as their often-morbid fantasies but did so with a kind of understated drop-dead humour that immediately became hugely endearing to anyone hip enough to get the joke. It also made them an instant paradox. How could four guys who seemed so many bricks shy of a full hod still write lyrics so exquisitely laced with deadpan irony?
This was an enigma I found myself confronting during my April sojourn in Manhattan. The Ramones had caused such a sensation in so short a space of time that they’d actually been signed up to a record deal with Seymour Stein’s local Sire imprint by the very beginning of ’76. In fact, they’d just finished their debut album. It hadn’t taken long to record. I was invited up to Sire’s headquarters one afternoon to hear the finished product as it was being mastered.
Only the record’s producer, one Craig Leon, was present in the tiny listening room. After several minutes of superficial banter, he placed an acetate - or maybe it was a tape - onto an extremely expensive piece of recording equipment and cued the first bars of ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’. The opening chords suddenly roared out at us at an ear-shredding volume. And then just as the vocals came in, there was a sudden explosion. One of the speakers had literally been blown out by the sonic bombardment of the music. Leon and I looked at each other approvingly: rock music that shattered everything in its path - it seemed like a good omen for the future.
And the Ramones themselves? Deeply weird, every last one of ’em. Tommy the drummer, the oldest, straightest one, was their leader back then and had elected himself the group’s spokesman in a misguided attempt to play down their general lack of cerebral sophistication. Tommy would go to great pains to promote his group’s ‘normal, blue-collar rock’ agenda and became increasingly frustrated when other members like Johnny and Dee Dee would interrupt him with offhand comments that inevitably showed just how bizarre they really were.
Dee Dee Ramone was already a legend of sorts around downtown Manhattan. I remember walking around the Bowery one afternoon with Richard Hell and seeing Dee Dee on three separate occasions - each time in the company of a different middle-aged, effeminate-looking man. ‘Uh, this is my uncle,’ he’d tell us with a shameful expression on his sweet young face. He was really turning gay tricks to feed his drug habit - everybody knew this. He even wrote a song about his experiences - ‘53rd & 3rd’ - that was included on the Ramones’ first album. But in reality he was anything but proud of his part-time vocation. Johnny Thunders in particular used to needle him about it mercilessly. ‘Hey, Dee Dee Ramone - where’s your fucking uncle?’ he used to shout at the Ramones bassist whenever their paths crossed.
Looking back, the New York scene in 1976 had everything goin
g for it: a diverse range of groundbreaking young bands, a sense of (fragile) community, novel alternatives to style and basic rock charisma and a new attitude for youth at decade’s end to consolidate themselves around. Yet they were still grievously deficient in two key areas: management and media coverage.
Most of the managers floating around the CBGBs bands seemed to be older gay men more interested in coercing young boys into acts of sexual congress than in advancing careers. And media interest in America was minimal at best, especially from national publications like Rolling Stone. The US has never had a weekly music press - apart from industry tip-sheets like Billboard and Cashbox - and the few monthlies available were too stuck in the immediate past to recognise that a new era was dawning under their very noses.
That’s fundamentally why the English punk scene exploded with such deadly efficacy, whilst its more creative New York counterpart - and forerunner - spluttered around like a damp squib pinned to a tree trunk. London is a small city inhabited by a media always ravenous to glom on to anything new and potentially provocative and splash it over their pages. Chas Chandler understood this implicitly when he took Jimi Hendrix from New York clubland anonymity in late 1966 and transplanted him to London, where his extraordinary guitar-playing and exotic image could be more effectively assimilated first by the press and then by a mass audience. Malcolm McLaren understood this too. It was one of the few smart insights he ever had as the Sex Pistols’ manager. Another bright ploy he capitalised on was to involve the Pistols’ grass-roots following, the so-called Bromley Contingent, in the group’s early media coverage, thus making it look to all and sundry as though a genuine new movement was coming into bloom. Apart from that, he was way out of his depth and riddled with wrong-headed notions.
His yuppie apologists like to throw around big words like ‘situationism’ and ‘postmodernism’ when discussing McLaren’s questionable accomplishments in the realm of seventies punk management these days, terms inevitably designed to bewilder rather than illuminate. I knew McLaren throughout 1974 and 1975 and was privy to many conversations with him about his personal vision of what the Sex Pistols might represent as a potential art concept. He never once mentioned situationism to me as his guiding philosophy. It only appeared in his interviews after the fact.
No, Malcolm’s real career gurus were the old-school Tin Pan Alley chicken hawks who’d controlled the late-fifties UK rock marketplace. His key point of reference in this domain was Larry Parnes, whom he quoted endlessly. Parnes was a gay man with music-industry connections who ‘discovered’ his acts whilst cruising local building sites looking for attractive young men he could mould into the next Fabian and then exploit mercilessly. Like a pimp, he’d first seduce his quarry with specious promises, then dress them up in a sexually provocative fashion and change their names to something preposterous like Stormy Tempest or Vince Eager. Then he’d put them to work until they literally dropped, always making sure to pocket the lion’s share of whatever monies they managed to generate during their few fleeting months of fame.
Parnes and his ilk would duly be overtaken as pop impresarios in the early sixties by the likes of Don Arden. Arden showed no inclination for ever wanting to sexually molest his young male acts. He was too busy ripping them off and breaking the legs of anyone who fell foul of him. In short, the man was a sadist and a vicious thieving spiv, so warped by his own petty-minded criminality that he was fundamentally unable to see that he could actually make himself more money by treating his clients fairly than he could from robbing them blind.
This was a lesson learned by Arden’s former enforcer Peter Grant - and it was one he would put to spectacular use when he came to manage Led Zeppelin in 1968. It was at this point that UK rock/pop management entered a new era - one where the musicians and performers were finally permitted to share generously in all the wealth they were generating but had previously never seen on their own bank statements.
In later years - the early nineties to be precise - McLaren would become obsessed with Grant’s music-biz accomplishments to the point of trying (unsuccessfully) to produce a film about his life, but in 1976 he was way more infatuated with the ongoing career trajectory of the Bay City Rollers than Led Zeppelin’s globe-straddling antics. The platinum-plated Rollers and their singularly creepy manager Tam Paton were proof enough that the Larry Parnes approach to pop Svengalism was still alive and capable of reaping big financial dividends in the seventies. To McLaren, the teeny-bopper Scottish quintet were the Beatles to his band’s Rolling Stones and in the early days he endlessly talked up the parallel as a way of getting the Pistols established in the public eye.
To him - like Parnes and Paton - the whole pop process was divided into two neat sub-headings: the puppets and the puppeteers. Musicians were the puppets, born to be endlessly manipulated like slow-witted peasants. The managers meanwhile were the string-pullers, the men with the plan, the princes guiding the paupers. Jones, Matlock and Cook never questioned McLaren’s basic scruples or possible hidden agenda in his dealings with them - how sweet to be an idiot - until it was far too late. But John Lydon was onto him pretty much from the get-go.
When Lydon joined the Pistols in the autumn of ’75, McLaren should have sensed that he was bringing in someone who might soon turn out to be a thorn in his side. Unlike the other three, Lydon - though still a teenager - had a mind of his own. It wasn’t a particularly attractive or well-ordered mind - the guy was often on acid - but he was certainly its only occupant and wasn’t about to let some King’s Road fashion ponce claim squatter’s rights in it and then brainwash him into a state of pop-star servility.
McLaren and Lydon’s relationship at the outset was strained at best. I spent an evening with them one night in October at the Camden Town club known as Dingwalls. It was the first time I’d ever encountered the future Johnny Rotten. He wasn’t yet the viper-tongued larger-than-life entity we read about nowadays. He was sullen and withdrawn, an obvious victim of chronic shyness. He was physically fragile too and strangely sexless. At one point, an attractive woman approached our table simply to compliment Lydon on his (suspiciously Richard Hell-like) hairstyle. The gesture appeared to totally unnerve him. Straight afterwards he bolted from his chair and ran out of the building. McLaren and I looked at each other quizzically. How could a wallflower like this credibly front a band who called themselves the Sex Pistols?
Of course, we all know the answer to that question more than thirty years later. Lydon quickly banished all traces of post-adolescent wimpiness from his public persona and promptly rose to the occasion with a scary single-mindedness. Shortly after the Dingwalls incident, McLaren and the group invited me to one of their first-ever public appearances, at a party held by an effete artist and social gadfly named Andrew Logan.
There were only about thirty people present, amongst them Mick Jones and Brian James, both still in the process of forming bands of their own. Lydon was saucer-eyed from the LSD he’d just consumed, the other three were drunk as lords and their repertoire that night consisted of only one song - the Stooges’ ‘No Fun’ - played over and over again until a seriously disturbed-looking Lydon began smashing up his mike stand. At this point Logan swanned over and suggested that maybe their set had reached its fitting conclusion.
It had been an odd spectacle to say the least, rather like seeing the early Stooges fronted not by a young white James Brown but a teenage version of Albert Steptoe, the miserable-old-geezer from much-loved British sitcom Steptoe and Son, instead. It was a mad blend to aim for and yet somehow it worked. Lydon’s very sexlessness and physical fragility only seemed to make his stage presence all the more menacing. He represented a radical departure from the conventional lead-singer-in-a-rock-band stereotypes of the time. His vocal range was limited to no more than three notes and its tone was instantly harsh and grating. It was an instrument that was nonetheless ideal for projecting a sense of overwhelming contempt over any subject the singer chose to sink his mangled teeth into.
Things changed radically within the group once they started getting written about in the UK press. As soon as Lydon saw his face staring back at him from the pages of the music comics, he was never the same again. His ego suddenly exploded to sky-rocket proportions, as did his sense of personal power. But this was only to be expected: after all, he was still a teenager whose childhood had been blighted by recurring bouts of chronic illness that had left him mentally disorientated until his adolescence.
McLaren’s reaction to sudden infamy though was even more dramatic and he had fewer excuses. He was considerably older than everyone else and therefore supposedly more mature and level-headed. And yet a full personality transformation occurred within him the moment his group started getting fêted by the media. Fame lifted up her skirt to him and little Malcolm became utterly transfixed by the sight he beheld. It ruined him for the rest of his life.
At the end of April ’76 he came to visit me, and his personal metamorphosis was obvious from the moment he entered my living room. Gone were the slight stutter and air of self-conscious nervousness that had so defined his demeanour in the immediate past. He now walked with the cocksure air of a young prince mingling with his lowly courtiers.