Vulgar Tongues

by Max Décharné

  In fact, by the latter half of the fifties, the term far out was so well grounded in jazz circles that it acquired its own ultra-hip slang variant, they don’t run trains there. Its meaning at that time was more elastic, however. Life magazine, for instance, used it in a 1959 headline about the new US space exploration programme (‘LIFE Is With It In A Far Out Era’), then in 1961 applied it to experimental theatre (’Samuel Beckett’s far-out classic, Waiting for Godot, had a TV showing this year to a million viewers’), and cinema in 1963 (under the virtually unintelligible headline ‘Foofs, Spoofs Are Far Out And Big’), before finally reporting on the making of the Sergeant Pepper album with a 1967 article entitled ‘The New Far-Out Beatles’.

  Once again, however, jazz and beatnik language was so successfully co-opted by the hippies of the sixties that to this day far out conjures up that decade. With the rise of the underground press in the second half of the 1960s, such words were then thrown around like confetti, in a setting far removed from the publications of the previous decade, so that by 1970 Oz magazine could be found running a cartoon showing a woman on the phone, entitled ‘The Obscene Phone Caller And How To Handle Him’, in which she is saying, ‘Wow! FAR OUT!!! Really? Hold the line, I gotta go get my dildo! And some dope!’ The times, as Bob so rightly observed, they were a-changin’.

  Tolkien bit my generation

  THE NEW COMMUNITY OF FREAKS, potheads, groovers and so-called beautiful people expressed themselves in the language found in songs of the era, a cross-section of which survives in the small ads they placed in publications such as the International Times, a London newspaper whose original run was from 1966 to 1973. Here was a place to find like-minded band members (‘WANTED: Musically “turned on” Bass and Drummer’), genuine romance (‘THREE RAVERS seek three dolly girls sexual days or nights. Photographs appreciated’, and ‘Due to temporary absence of wife, Kinky woman wanted’) or simply experience the imminent arrival of the Messiah in Berkshire (‘LOVE IN / LOVE OUT! GATHERING of the communes in wooded park. Free food. Light shows – films. 11 am. Big Red God descends from sky. Come in your thousands. Bring friends. Love. Peace’).

  These particular examples appeared between February and May 1968. Readers at that time could also find George Harrison being quoted in an Indica bookshop advert recommending Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda (‘It’s a far-out book, it’s a gas’), while in the same issue, acid guru Timothy Leary was busy as usual spouting the new buzzwords of the doped-up generation in an article entitled ‘You Are A God, Act Like One’ (If you ‘turn on without ‘tuning in you will get psychotically ‘hung up’. Every ‘bad trip’ is caused by the failure to ‘tune in’). His famous phrase, turn on, tune in, drop out, first surfaced in 1966, and then, in their 1967 song ‘A Day In The Life’, The Beatles expressed a serious wish to turn you on, earning a broadcasting ban from the BBC on account of the presumed drug connotations of the phrase. Leary himself had also dipped a toe in the LP market, once in 1966 with a purely spoken-word record titled after his famous slogan, then again in 1967, under the same title, but with a fashionably Eastern-influenced musical backing. There were tracks named ‘Freak-Out’, ‘The Turn On’ and also ‘All Girls Are Yours’ (which presumably came as reassuring news to the man in the International Times small ads experiencing ‘temporary absence of wife’).

  Marc Bolan, who began as a mod ace face, then passed via garage rock and acoustic folk before emerging as a glam rock superstar, had a deep love of words and slang of all kinds, which he poured into his lyrics and his interviews of the time. As he explained to the underground publication Gandalf’s Garden in 1968, promoting the debut LP by his duo Tyrannosaurus Rex:

  Names, strings of words, odd books gas me, names of herbs just break me up, freak me out completely, I can groove a whole story out of just the name of a herb. It represents so many images to me I have to write them down so other people can dig it.

  As can be seen, there is a significant amount of jazz slang surviving in this typical example of 1968 London hippie language. In those days Bolan could title a song ‘Frowning Atahuallpa (My Inca Love)’, yet switch to 1950s slang when calling a track on the same record ‘Hot Rod Mama’. His song titles over the next few years, not to mention his lyrics, provide a nice cross-section of slang from various decades. For example, the name of the B-side of ‘Children Of The Revolution’ (1972) reached back to the 1940s, ‘Jitterbug Love’, whereas other song titles employed contemporary US slang, such as ‘Rip Off’ (1971) or ‘Main Man’ (1972). One of his biggest hits was ‘Get It On’ (1971), a slang phrase that was defined as follows in Eugene E. Landy’s The Underground Dictionary (also 1971, although oddly the expression was not included in Clarence Major’s Black Slang – A Dictionary of Afro-American Talk, published twelve months earlier):

  GET IT ON v. 1. Have sexual intercourse. 2. Take drugs, 3. Go, leave.

  For its American release, the T Rex single was retitled ‘Bang A Gong (Get It On)’, having appeared over there in a year when a band called Chase had a tune of the same name, and Edgar Winter’s White Trash were also in the market with a different song entitled ‘Let’s Get It On’. The lyrics to Bolan’s song used the phrase in the sexual sense, and this was also very much the case when Marvin Gaye entered the field with his classic 1973 LP Let’s Get It On, as Marvin’s own sleeve notes made clear for anyone foolish enough to think that the title might perhaps mean let’s go, leave: ‘I can’t see anything wrong with sex between consenting anybodies. I think we make far too much of it. After all, one’s genitals are just one important part of the magnificent human body,’Just in case anyone had still missed the point, one track included the sound of two people supposedly utilising their magnificent human bodies for just such a purpose, earning a credit on the sleeve from Marvin: ‘P.S. Those sex noises on intro of “YOU SURE LOVE TO BALL” are Madeline and Fred Ross’. This, of course, was using the word ball as slang for sex – a common enough American expression by that stage, although it could also mean just having a good time. Back in 1958, the title character in ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ by Little Richard sure likes to ball, and radio censors probably assumed that this was a relatively harmless phrase for partying or dancing, but the specifically sexual meaning already existed by that stage, and the phrase had appeared in William Gaddis’s 1955 postmodern novel The Recognitions.

  Crummy bleeding-heart punk with a big mouth

  NOT EVERYONE MAKING A RECORD in the late 1960s was following the Maharishi, dressing up as a medieval bard, getting it together in the country or communing with their inner hobbit. Following on from the earlier primal garage band sounds of The Sonics, Them, The Downliners Sect or The Standells, the hugely influential example of The Velvet Underground, The Stooges and then The Modern Lovers and the New York Dolls eventually paved the way for the initial outbreak in 1976 of what came to be known as punk rock.

  The word punk was an insult worn as a badge of honour. Punk had meant whore since the year 1575, and through its years as criminal slang it had been a term of abuse to throw at both men and women for nearly all of the time in between then and now. Clint Eastwood’s gun-toting title character in Dirty Harry (1971) was hardly looking to flatter his opponent in the final showdown when taunting him with the often-misquoted words, ‘You’ve got to ask yourself one question. “Do I feel lucky?’ Well do ya, punk?’ Similarly, in Donald Hamilton’s 1966 crime novel The Betrayers, the word was used in exactly the same way:

  ‘I’ll just have to kill you, punk.’

  He licked his lips. ‘Don’t call me punk!’

  ‘Why the hell not? You are a punk, just a crummy bleeding-heart punk with a big mouth.’

  When New York punk rock emerged kicking and screaming from a small Bowery club named CBGB, equipped with Richard Hell’s spiked haircut and ripped T-shirt and The Ramones’ buzzsaw guitar sound and leather jackets, it also brought with it a language that suited stripped-down two-minute songs as opposed to some of the meandering, free-form p
rogressive music which had held sway for some years. These were people whose notion of what constituted a decent song title was ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’ (Ramones, recorded February 1976), as opposed to, say, ‘Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)’, a mainstream pop single by the Bee Gees released the previous month, which reached number twelve in the US charts. Back in August 1974, The Ramones were filmed at CBGB playing several songs, including a fine example called, significantly, ‘Judy Is A Punk’, and in the same year the original line-up of the band Television, with Richard Hell on bass, regularly performed his then-unrecorded song which provided the alternative name for the new movement, ‘Blank Generation’.

  When The Ramones played two hugely influential shows at the Roundhouse in Camden Town in July 1976, they brought their songs about punks, runts and geeks to the London outsiders who were forming bands such as The Clash and The Damned, and were also seen by the Sex Pistols, who had been gigging under that name since the previous autumn, but had not yet released a record. This was a month when primitive things were stirring in the musical undergrowth of the UK, but the overall musical climate was also such that prog rock mainstay Jon Anderson from the band Yes could release his debut solo LP three weeks after those Ramones shows – a concept album about a race of aliens and their journey through space, with the Tolkienesque title Olias of Sunhillow.

  It’s the buzz, cock

  THE SEX PISTOLS WAGED VERBAL WAR on all manner of hippie language, deliberately employing the once-fashionable words of the previous generation – for instance, when filmed by Thames TV’s Today show, on 1 December 1976. When the interviewer, Bill Grundy, sarcastically drew a comparison with the band’s songs and classical music, saying, ‘Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms have all died,’ Johnny Rotten claimed that these were the band’s heroes. ‘Are they?’ asked Grundy. ‘Oh yes,’ replied Rotten, dripping with fake sincerity, ‘they really turn us on.’ In the single ‘God Save The Queen’ (1977), his cry of we mean it, maaan parodied the hippie habit of ending most sentences with the word man – a usage derived from 1940s jazz musicians – and so the lengthened pronunciation, maaan, became a newly minted ironic slice of British punk slang. The first punk band I saw live was X-Ray Spex, promoting their debut single ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’, in October 1977, playing to around fifty people in a half-empty hall in Portsmouth. The tiny advert in the local paper which had alerted me to the show also mockingly co-opted 1960s language, billing them as ‘EXCITING LONDON BEAT COMBO X-RAY SPEX’.

  One of the greatest punk bands of them all took their name from an instance in which outdated groovy language met a vintage cockneyism. In February 1976, a new musical TV series opened on ITV called Rock Follies, written by American dramatist Howard Schuman, who had moved to London in the late 1960s to avoid being sent to fight in Vietnam. Time Out previewed the series in an article headlined ‘It’s The Buzz, Cock!’, which derived from the following dialogue spoken by Julie Covington’s character, Dee:

  It’s the buzz, cock. When you sing the rock music you get this buzz. . . I mean it ripples only not gently, in great waves, arms, fingers, groin, knees, toes, throat, mouth, head, loud, terrifically loud head buzz. . .

  Calling people cock had been a familiar part of English speech dating back to the 17th century – ‘Well done old Cocke,’ says a character in Philip Massinger’s play The Unnaturall Combat (1639) – but was already anachronistic by the mid-1970s, when it was more likely to be sniggered at because of the sexual double meaning, while the rest of the dialogue had more in common with scenes in the 1960s ‘American tribal love rock musical’ Hair by Jerome Ragni and James Rado. Nevertheless, something about the incongruity of the phrase appealed to Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley, and so they duly named their new band Buzzcocks. The fictional all-female group in the series were called The Little Ladies, whereas in real life the pioneering female punk band who formed in London that year chose a defiantly less twee-sounding name, The Slits.

  It was an era in which punk shows were banned from venues, and certain punk records from the radio on account of their lyrics, but it was the Sex Pistols who fought the great punk language battle in the British courts, over their use of the venerable English slang word bollocks, which as standard English dates back a thousand years. As a plain word for the testicles it can be found in everything from Caxton’s The Myrrour of the Worlde (1481) – ‘their own genytoirs or ballocks’ – to the Restoration poems of John Wilmot, and Earl of Rochester (‘the Charmes our Ballocks have’). In the sense of it being a term for an idiot, it was used, for instance, in 1916 by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (‘I’m a ballocks – he said, shaking his head in despair – I am and I know I am’). Numerous British children studied William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies (1954) at school in the seventies – and seem to have survived the experience, despite it containing the phrase bollocks to the rules – but somehow none of this prevented a prosecution being launched in 1977 as a result of the Sex Pistols’ LP title Never Mind The Bollocks. A Nottingham record-shop manager was charged under the 1889 Indecent Advertisements Act for displaying publicity material relating to the album in his window, which resulted in a court case with experts on both sides debating whether the word bollocks was obscene, including John Mortimer, QC, for the defence, who said:

  This is a word that has been used countless thousands of times in this country not just in factories but in the corridors of law courts. It is part of life in 1977. One must consider whether there is a man, woman or child who does not know this word. One wonders whether a word which anyone can find in the dictionary which has been used since Bible times should be singled out for prosecution just because it is attached to a highly popular group of musicians.

  The presiding magistrate, Mr Douglas Betts, eventually conceded the point, seemingly through gritted teeth: ‘Much as my colleagues and I wholeheartedly deplore the vulgar exploitation of the worst instincts of human nature by both you and your company we reluctantly find you not guilty.’

  Or, as most punks had long since concluded, legally speaking, the whole case was bollocks from start to finish.

  TEN

  BURN, BABY, BURN

  Crumpet by gaslight

  ALTHOUGH SOME RECORDS HAD MANAGED to slip through a fair amount of double entendres in earlier decades, as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, censorship gradually eased even more, to the extent that slang references to sex and drugs in the lyrics and titles of songs became more openly acceptable. Sometimes they were surprisingly overt. A prime example would be Max Romeo’s classic Jamaican rock steady single ‘Wet Dream’ (1968), which – in addition to its shy, retiring title – also enthusiastically included slang words such as crumpet and fanny, with a chorus in which the singer repeatedly begged the object of his affection to assume a horizontal position so that he could push it up.

  It might be assumed that such a record would have difficulty in gaining airplay and sell only moderately, and certainly the BBC responded to its lyrics, as they had so often in other cases dating back as far as the 1930s, by imposing a ban. However, despite this, ‘Wet Dream’ spent nearly three months in the UK Top Twenty. A glance at the Melody Maker listings for the second week of July 1969 shows the record sitting happily right above ‘Get Back’ by The Beatles, ‘My Way’ by Frank Sinatra and ‘Give Peace A Chance’ by the Plastic Ono Band. Further up was a new entry from some band called the Rolling Stones entitled ‘Honky Tonk Women’, and near the top was ‘In The Ghetto’ by Elvis Presley, so not much competition there, then. By August, it was still going strong – and also sharing the spotlight with that classic piece of heavy-breathing romance, ‘Je T’Aime. . . Moi Non Plus’, by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin – finally slipping down the Top Twenty at the end of September, just as a newcomer called David Bowie was on the way up with a song named ‘Space Oddity’. Strange to say, however, when radio stations these days frequently replay the classic hits of the sixties, they generally forget to programme Max Romeo
’s biggest hit.

  Near-the-knuckle songs from the Caribbean were hardly unusual at that time. Jamaican rock steady singer Lloyd Terrel (aka Lloyd Charmers) issued ‘Bang Bang Lulu’ (1968), with lyrics that dated back to the 19th century in British and American versions, generally under the title ‘Bang Away Lulu’. Then there were calypso artists such as The Mighty Sparrow from Trinidad singing a pimp-flavoured song disguised as the tragic tale of someone forced to part with the family pet, ‘Sell The Pussy’ (1970), or The Merrymen in Barbados boasting about the dimensions of their ‘Big Bamboo’ (1969), in which a man’s girlfriend rejects sugar cane on the grounds that ‘she liked the flavour but not the size’.

  If all this sounds as if popular music was becoming ever more suggestive as time went by, consider for a moment the songs of million-selling Lancashire ukulele singer George Formby, such as ‘With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock’ (1937) – banned by BBC radio for its various penis-themed double entendres as our hero’s rock becomes sticky or gets stuck in his pocket, or the winsome ‘I Wonder Who’s Under Her Balcony Now’ (1938) with its cunnilingus subtext, in which he imagines his ex is being kissed beneath the archway where the sweet william grows.

  Jamaican ska and blue beat music of the 1960s was a solid favourite with the early mods in the UK. The latter term was basically an alternative name for ska, inspired by the UK record label Blue Beat, which released much of this material at the time, and indeed the words blue beat featured prominently in the collage of phrases which made up the cover of the original 1964 edition of Deverson and Hamblett’s Generation X. Millie Small enjoyed a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic with her blue beat cover of a mid-1950s song, ‘My Boy Lollipop’. (The original, a US recording from 1956 by a teenager from New York, Barbie Gaye, is a ska recording in all but name.) When Smash Records then released Millie’s My Boy Lollipop LP in the US in 1964, they billed her on the cover as ‘The Blue Beat Girl’, alongside the following handy explanation for record buyers: ‘Some call it blue beat – others call it the Jamaican ska, but whatever you call it, it’s a great new dance step.’