Give the Anarchist a Cigarette

by Mick Farren

  When the Piccadilly prank was forcibly concluded, the LSC turned its attention to other targets, one of which was the perceived elitism in the underground itself. In this, the street people had something of a point. The underground was elitist, and the alternative society had evolved its own social strata absolutely from the outset. At one end of this caste system, Mick Jagger and the sons and daughters of the nobility lolled in fashionable restaurants like Sloane Rangers on acid, while at the other extreme lank-haired junkies squatted in burned-out basements with the needle and the damage done. It’s been the human way all through history, with only rare and minor exceptions. So what’s the answer? For the LSC, it was the Dalek cry ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’ and seizure of the IT offices. To my mind, the move was nasty, violent, destructive and nothing short of fucking ridiculous, but maybe they weren’t as conflicted as I was. I’d dragged myself up from the House of the Chinese Landlord by a process of self-education and relentless determination. A part of me – the conditioned superego of Freudian capitalism, if you like – felt that I should be rewarded for these efforts and, in some ways, I had a greater right to fun and creature comforts than a lazy son-of-a-bitch who simply sits on his arse cultivating a smack habit and scowling resentment.

  If I seem to be advocating an underground meritocracy, however, that’s hardly my intention. On the other hand, my sympathy for those who felt some form of forcible levelling should take place was strictly limited. It’s too easy an answer; and, in its most extreme form, the one used by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge when they declared the Year Zero, reduced everyone to the status of the most wretchedly poor and illiterate peasant and killed all who weren’t overjoyed by the prospect. I have serious reservations about any revolution that seeks to render everyone equally miserable, with or without the killing fields.

  I guess this is as good a time as any to make a confession. Deep down, I’m a snob. I may care passionately about the rights and freedoms of the individual, but I am also inordinately fond of much that life has to offer. I like books, music and video tapes around me, I like twelve-year-old Scotch, vintage port, ripe stilton, strawberries and clotted cream, cocktails on a sunny afternoon, the paintings of Gustav Klimt, the photographs of Helmut Newton and have a preference for the best drugs available. I’m attracted to beautiful and flamboyant women and, now and again, they are attracted to me. If I’m going to the show, it’s nice to have a backstage pass. I like pedigree cats, exotic aquaria and Japanese animation. When I get really ancient, I’ll probably affect a silver-topped cane in the manner of Quentin Crisp. At the same time, though, I’m certainly not obsessed with money. I’ll go through penury to pursue the realisation of a completely non-commercial creative idea, but I’m not about to subsist on toast and Marmite, and sniff glue while watching black-and-white broadcast TV, just because the Commissar, Führer or Chairman says so. I also believe, down at the real nitty-gritty, that committees and collectives do not produce vibrant media art. Successful group efforts – be they magazines, rock & roll bands, motion pictures or theatrical productions – are benign dictatorships, led either by a small oligarchy or a single alpha individual, and although the voice of the collective does need to be heard, the major decisions are inevitably made by those best at thinking on their feet. This is how things are, and how they will remain, until human nature undergoes a radical change.

  A perfect example of the supposed elitism in the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies can be found in the role of street sellers in the underground press. Modelled on the freelance newsboys who ran down the streets, shouting the headlines, the years before World War I – and crucial to the circulation of what was known as the gutter press – the street sellers at IT and OZ picked up their bundles of papers and magazines, initially on credit, and then hawked them along the tourist strips and through the major hippie enclaves. Now and again a bundle of papers would be ripped off, but the system worked pretty well. The magazines enjoyed a significant local sales boost, and a handy petty-cash flow – more than once, we’d waited around for a big-volume street seller to come in and cash up, so that we could all go down the boozer – and the system provided indigent freaks with some fast change by a process better, and more legal, than panhandling.

  To the external observer, the relationship between the underground papers and their street sellers would have looked like classic employer/employee inequality. Why, you might ask, in a truly egalitarian set-up, weren’t the street sellers present at editorial meetings and their opinions and ideas routinely solicited? The answer is that, to some degree, they were. It just wasn’t in formal committee. When I was in control of IT, I was obsessed with the impact of each issue’s cover, and regularly quizzed the street sellers as to which ones moved and which didn’t. Some were well aware that a fast-sell cover made them their money with greater ease, and would talk at length about which designs worked and which didn’t, and the features that moved papers and the ones that rolled over and died. I’d have been an idiot to ignore this feedback, but it would have been equally idiotic, in the name of political principle, to give the street sellers carte blanche as contributors and veto power over policy content, except in so far as a number of them actually did join the editorial teams of the various underground papers with which they made their first contact as street sellers.

  The greatest of them all was, without doubt, a legendary kid named Felix Dennis, a rock drummer on the lam from a paternity suit or shotgun wedding in the suburbs. Felix immediately demonstrated a gut genius for the sale, production and promotion of successful magazines, and within a couple of weeks Richard Neville offered him the position of business manager. Today, Felix heads Dennis Publishing and has a net worth of around £300 million, which brings us squarely back to meritocracy again, and the fraught problem of workers’ control, not only of the means of production, but of the flow of information and the individual creativity of the artist.

  Although on a smaller scale, the problem is the same one that John Reed discussed in Ten Days that Shook the World. If the original design of the revolution is to free the individual to pursue his dreams and exploit his potential, what is achieved when the revolution immediately circumscribes the dream and limits the potential? It might be incumbent upon the artist to put himself at the disposal of the struggle, but for that revolution – for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as it was called in Reed’s time – to go as far as wielding total censorship over creativity, forget it. It’s as Pete Townshend wrote in ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ – ‘here comes the new boss/just like the old boss’. If you really want to see the dictatorship of the proletariat in action, don’t look to old-time Soviet paintings and statues; just observe the horror of box-office, bottom-line-driven, Hollywood movies – Adam Sandler, Bruce Willis and Titanic.

  And so, after this loop of digression, we come back to the dilemma created by the London Street Commune. Acting like our Khmer Rouge, they trashed the IT offices, stole typewriters, an Addresso-graph machine. They ripped off bundles of back numbers, which were of little significance, but also destroyed a collection of Hoppy’s photo negatives that extended back more than ten years and were totally irreplaceable. Two things personally pissed me off when Su Small told me about what had gone down. The first was that the LSC should choose to make their point with a revolutionary act that was so chicken-shit and diminutive. Even though they used a crew of bikers and petty criminal low-lifes as their heavy mob, they knew that they’d meet no effective resistance and that any kind of retribution was highly unlikely. They were well aware that even what they perceived as the underground elite wasn’t going to call the cops on them.

  Su had been alone in the office, catching up on some paperwork, when they made their break-in, and they’d seen fit to put their populist frighteners on her. That was the second strike against the LSC in my book. Not that Su was any shrinking violet. Even in the face of their prole bluster, she remained eminently practical. The advertising accounts are a vital driving co
mponent of any magazine and, realising that the Communards and their bike-gang cohorts were bent on removing anything that looked of value, she simply sat on the files, then sneaked them away when she had a chance to leave. For some days – as far as I can reconstruct what I didn’t witness – the Street Commune maintained a kind of feet-on-the-desk occupation, and the IT old guard wandered in and out, having arguments and wondering what the hell to do next. Su’s plan, as far as I could gather it, was for me to amble in like some impartial Man-They-Couldn’t-Hang and put the fear of the absolute into all concerned. In that brief moment I was the rock star who’d just been living in the woods with the bears. Don’t fuck with Dolomite, motherfucker.

  When I first turned up, the fun part was that no one except myself and Su knew what side I was on. I’d already decided I was going to put whatever weight my chips carried behind the old guard. The Commune had upset Su, so that made it personal. I was also completely certain that no Street Commune was going to be able to handle the complexity of publishing and distributing a newspaper, while the old guard had the routine down. No contest. I also discovered, since I’d been off on the rock & roll trail, that a couple of new guys – Mark Williams and Edward Barker, both from Birmingham – had joined IT, and they seemed like the kind of cats to whom I could relate. Mark liked to ride motorcycles at absurdist speed, and his later problematic adventures would become the stuff of local legend. Edward was, to say the least, strange. Young and beautiful, like a curly-haired Brian Jones, he not only drew the most original and surreal cartoons, but at times seemed to actually live in a world where the people around him presented themselves as anthropomorphic comic-strip animals. Edward’s personality was rendered even more appealing by the fact that he frequently had to drink rather a lot to keep the menagerie at bay, a practice that usually left him in a state of befuddled innocence.

  In a few short days it became clear that my assessment of the LSC’s expertise in the magazine business had been entirely accurate. They didn’t have a clue and, after hours of face-saving and pointless discussion, they melted away, and life at IT coagulated back to what passed for normality. (I firmly believe the time wasted in arguing about political trivia is why revolutions are lost, or annexed by the slaughterers.) The Communards put out, I think, one issue of something called The International Free Press, which not only featured unreadably convoluted polemics, but was as drab and grim as a wet Sunday in Marxist Albania. I’d done absolutely nothing to solve the IT crisis, but seemed to be getting the gunslinger points for saving the day, so good for me. Feeling better about myself, I decided it was the time to face the alcohol. I made contact with Twink and Took again and arranged for a welcome-home night. And where do we go? Why, down the Speakeasy of course, which was about as politically incorrect as a lad can get.

  Speakeasy, Drink Easy, Pull Easy

  It was hard to tell whether Ginger Baker was fucked-up or just in an extremely foul temper. He sat at the end of the Speakeasy bar, right by the door, and insulted people as they entered and left. I think Baker’s intention was to provoke someone into taking a swing at him, so that he could have an excuse to pound them to pulp before the bouncers dragged him off. As I exited for a piss, he started on the subject of my hair. It was the latter days of Cream, and Eric Clapton had put in the curlers to look more like Hendrix. I told Baker my fucking hair grew like that naturally, he told me I was a fucking liar, and the next move on his obvious agenda was that I should try and hit him. Fortunately I was still sufficiently on top of things to reject the provocation. I simply turned my back. He might have come off his stool after me, but I doubted it. He was a star, and he wanted the fight brought to him, but I wasn’t going to oblige. I’ve learned never to get physical with a drummer. No matter how destructive and wasting their lifestyles, all that pounding makes them strong of arm, bull-headed and hard to stop.

  From Scott Walker to Johnny Thunders, the Speakeasy was the late-night, rock & roll rendezvous. The pubs might shut at eleven, with five minutes’ drinking-up time, but the Speak served booze until 3 a.m. and then allowed its patrons another hour in which to loiter while emptying their bottles and glasses. Located in an anonymous basement behind Oxford Circus, the nightclub had opened a couple of years before flower power, during the throes of the Swinging London, Bonnie & Clyde craze, and the decor was Prohibition chic with an ornate coffin just inside the entrance and lots of blown-up sepia prints of Al Capone, Frank Nitty and Pretty Boy Floyd.

  The Speakeasy was not only the place for late booze. It was also where the girls were; one of the city’s high temples of the groupie culture that would so fascinate the media. The lipstick killer parade of assumed boredom, platform shoes, scarlet talons, transparent chiffon, fishnets, false eyelashes, appliqué glitter, hotpants, short-short dresses and attitudes of superiority would continue for more than a decade. Much has been made of the oppression of women in rock & roll. Was the groupie a brainwashed victim craving a second-hand and illusionary contact high, or an independent woman making her own choices, fully in control of her own body and sexuality? Germaine appeared to cleave to the former in both word and deed when I knew her, but in later life I understand she has recanted her former hedonism.

  My own observation was that, at least in the limited context of their rock & roll nightclub domain, the women wielded the true power. They manipulated, they inspected, they selected or rejected. They dictated the pecking order and set the rules. Some, like Bebe Buellin – whose liaisons were legendary, but is now better known as the mother of actress Liv Tyler – promoted the concept of the muse, the mistress-goddess who provides the artist’s crucial motivation. I must confess I’ve never bought into the muse theory. I don’t know about other guys, but I am absolutely sure that my allegedly creative outpourings have been the sole and exclusive product of my own warped imagination and nothing else. That does leave me open to the suggestion that I might have done a whole lot better if I’d got myself a muse, but I still don’t think I’m buying it.

  Jenny Fabian, on the other hand – whose roman-à-clef, Groupie, set half London substituting the real names for the pseudonyms (although they were able to stop when the full directory was published in OZ) – appeared to take an entirely different stance; groupie-ism was a grand and decadent game, an almost eighteenth-century merry-go-round of couplings and partners, and in that magically erotic interlude between the pill and the retro-virus who dared won. Miss Pamela Des Barres adopted a more Reichian view, seeming to believe that rock & roll was the essential energy, and that the groupie was an indispensable component in its orgonomic generation, but what would you expect from someone from southern California?

  In the early days of the Speakeasy, the sexual hierarchy was simple and market-driven. The male musicians’ desirability was linked directly to the top-forty performance of their singles. As the album took over as the primary medium, the situation became more idiosyncratic. The demi-god status of members of global mega-bands like the Stones and Led Zeppelin set even the hardest and most calculating hearts a-flutter, and Jimi Hendrix was the apotheosis of the unspeakably desirable voodoo child, but not all were judged simply on their record sales and tour grosses. Frank Zappa, who sold comparatively few records on the platinum standard, was continually surrounded by eager, if not always exquisite, young women; but then again, Frank was both a supporter and promoter of groupie culture, with his championing of the GTOs, the LA groupie vocal group, and the Plaster Casters of Chicago, two strange young women from Illinois who collected models of the erect penises of the loud and famous.

  Perhaps I can only talk with this kind of detachment because, despite my best efforts to behave like some obnoxious little rock star, I hardly figured in the groupie pecking order; little commercial potential and, as Jenny Fabian said, too ‘dark and angry’. Sandy was always the babe magnet, culminating his groupie contacts with an affair with Miss Pamela, who tells in her book, I’m With the Band, how she broke his heart when they split. I can’t say I personally
noticed any outward manifestation of this heartbreak, although Sandy drank so much it was hard to tell what he might be feeling.

  Although some of the boys prowled the club with their metaphoric dicks hanging out, others of us simply got drunk, took drugs in the bathroom and made stumbling yahoo nuisances of ourselves. In my time at the Speakeasy I witnessed many world-class drunks in full cry. I recall Greg Allman in the restaurant, face-down in his soup and in danger of drowning like Grandpa in the TV show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. I will never forget the towering figure of Howlin’ Wolf, drunk out of his sexagenarian mind, advancing on a table of petrified party girls, phallically waggling a Shure vocal mike clutched to his crotch, proving that the real Back Door Man was just too much for them. One especially spectacular night Keith Moon, who was pretty much the Speak’s resident nuclear attack when off-duty from the Who, arrived with the notorious Oliver Reed in tow, plus Peter Sellers in a long leather coat and a Nazi helmet, which the ex-Goon referred to as his ‘drinking outfit’.

  Not content merely to watch, the specific coterie with which I hung out felt, by macho necessity, compelled to create our own less-celebrated mayhem, which put us in decisive opposition with the club management. The serious business of the club was overseen by a duo of Italians – Mino and Bruno – whom we all imagined were made mobsters. Mino and Bruno commanded the door, and their vision of a nightclub in no way encompassed whisky-swilling ruffians of bad character and dubious financial resources, like Twink, Took and myself. The only one of the supposed Mafia crew that seemed to like me was Luigi, who ran the restaurant. Early on, in the course of some idle conversation, he discovered my partially cultivated taste for Italian cuisine. The food in the Speakeasy was hardly fit for a dog and the menu included a cunningly dangerous Chicken Kiev that, when you stuck a fork in it, spewed super-heated butter in all directions. As I came to know him better, I asked Luigi why the food was so disgustingly awful, and he gestured resignedly to the tables of rock & roll drunks. ‘Anything else would be pearls before swine.’