by Mick Farren
When they were together, Rotten seemed to be able to exert a mad-scientist control over Sid. ‘Back, Igor! Boring, Sidney!’ The ringmaster lash kept Sid in check during the early days, but later, when Nancy wielded her whip, control was out and black-vinyl death seemed inevitable. I saw no redeeming qualities in Nancy Spungen; a chipped nails-on-a-blackboard horror show with an accent to chill the blood; an overripe USDA peach, doing its best to fall as far as possible from the Middle American tree. With Rotten on the one hand pulling Sid to notoriety and confrontation, Nancy followed a needle dream of junkie domesticity in which she would have all of his attention.
‘Boring, Sidney.’
The word boring became one of the most overworked in the punk vocabulary, and it rubbed me up the wrong way. It may have had its place as the warning to the babbling speedfreak when the noise grew too irritating – ‘You’re boring, man. Fuck off.’ Aside from that, I always considered it the cry of attention deficit, the symptom of the challenged attention span, and punk boredom was universal. They were bored by everything. Sex was boring. Emotions were boring. Compassion and concern were doubly boring. Jaded and pretending to drown in ennui, they adopted the terminally nihilist pose of being so desensitised that no stimuli could work, except maybe hard drugs and high-velocity, electric-razor music. Just to complicate matters, any movement that latches on to self-mutilation attracts the dysfunctionally self-mutilating. The hippies quickly learned how the psychotic, the dregs and the predators were attracted like a magnet to any sub-culture, but unfortunately the punks had to discover it all over again for themselves, and pay the freight of discovery.
Unfocused, short-span, television babies faced a primary dilemma. I can only paraphrase Nietzsche one more tedious time. ‘How long can one be bored with monsters without becoming a monster oneself?’ Does one tell jokes about Dachau to shock, or because they’re funny? Does a nihilist revolution have, by definition, to be treated like an all-too-tedious chore? In the same way, if no future exists, what point in exploration or adventure? And without a future, what use history? Obviously the total denial of historical research was pure bullshit. John Rotten knew enough to do the old Monkees’ tune ‘Stepping Stone’, and even Sid would resort to the Eddie Cochran catalogue when backed into the corner at Max’s. Although to state it openly at the time might have been inadvisable, I saw much of punk as a critique of the Sixties counterculture, in the same way that Marxism is frequently accused of being nothing more than a critique of capitalism. The sad part was that, with their stance of ‘we don’t need no stinking education’, punks remained clueless as to what my generation had actually been about. I recall a totally pointless conversation when I tried to set some sociopathic punk luminary straight on recent history. I think it may have been the acne-cursed poetess and critic Jane Suck. She started the dialogue with a sweeping statement it was hard to let pass.
‘There’s nothing left but mindless fucking violence.’
Now where had I heard that before? ‘You think so?’
‘Peace and love failed, man, and that’s why you hippies are such fucking useless wankers.’
Ms Suck hadn’t seen me in 1969. ‘It wasn’t all peace and love, kid.’
‘Yes, it was. Fucking beads and granny glasses. What a fucking joke.’
I wasn’t aware at the time that part of her vehemence may have been because she saw me as a challenge to her unrequited crush on Julie Burchill. ‘Vietnam?’
(Sniff.) ‘Not the same thing, man.’
‘The Weather Underground?’
‘What?’
‘How about the Manson family?’
‘Not the same thing, man.’
The Clash, on the other hand, being from the Grove, manifested considerably less boredom. In spite of the song ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’, they looked more like an entity I recognised; a pragmatic political rock band with all that entailed, both good and bad – especially in contrast to the Pistols’ uncertainty as to whether they were a band or a Malcolm McLaren conceptual art event. The Clash had an appreciation of both rock history and the immediate surrounding culture, and were ready and willing to embrace both. They had the professed interest in ganja and reggae of a band who cut Junior Murvin’s ‘Police and Thieves’, and they also knew their rockabilly well enough to dig up Vince Taylor’s ‘Long Black Cadillac’. They shamelessly relished all the overgrown schoolboy stuff like war movies, westerns, Mafia folklore and the SAS. They were hip to Vietnam, Fidel, the Spanish Civil War and Chairman Mao’s Long March, the same stuff that turned me on when I was starting out.
They also kept things simple. I figured this was because they were preaching revolution to some really dumb bastards. The Clash worked with a highly threatening Fifth Column pogoing and gobbing right in front of them. While Souixsie found anti-Semitism shockingly chic, a sector of the crowd went further, allowing themselves to be incited by grim background figures with lines to the National Front, and a message that fascism was the cure for boredom. I know Nazi regalia – all the way back to the Hell’s Angels – has been displayed to scare the squares, but if the foul ideology comes out of the box right along with daggers and armbands, we have big potential trouble. When their song ‘White Riot’ began to be co-opted by the baby-Blackshirts as a battle hymn for burning Brixton, something drastic had to be done, and Joe Strummer went to some lengths – including a massive espousal of the newly formed Rock Against Racism – to make it clear that ‘a riot of our own’ meant a white uprising against the ruling class, not a fucking race war. He was confronted with the unenviable burden of quickly educating a crowd to whom education – and, in some cases, rational thought – was a major anathema, and I greatly admired the way he went about it.
Country, Blue Grass & Blues
Never was a nightspot less aptly named, but it wasn’t Hilly Kristal’s fault. All he’d really wanted was a quiet little club, under a wino flophouse called the Palace, with Bill Monroe and Willy Dixon on the jukebox, and a clientele drawn from the more discerning of the Bowery drunks and the New York chapter of the Hell’s Angels, who had their club house over on 3rd Street. The full but rarely used name was CBGB&OMFUG, the acronym for Country, Blue Grass, Blues, and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandisers. The destruction of Hilly’s original vision began when the band Television – Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, Richard Lloyd and Billy Ficca – walked in one day looking for a place to play, and conned Hilly into giving them the joint one night a week. Television was short-lived but seminal, and would put out the single ‘Little Johnny Jewel’, a watershed for New York punk. Television was followed into CBGB by Patti Smith and Deborah Harry, in the Stilettos and then in Blondie. Talking Heads talked their way in, and finally the Ramones became long-haired, torn-Levis, resident Neanderthals and hey-ho, away it went. Television’s one night expanded to seven, plus Sunday afternoons, and Hilly found himself presiding over an all-time cultural legend.
In essence, CBGB was the logical extension of Max’s Kansas City. I had not visited New York early enough to have witnessed Max’s in its prime, with David and Angela Bowie sticking Alice Cooper with the bill at the end of the night. I didn’t see Deborah Harry as a waitress or Jackie Cooper giving head in the phone booth. By the time I first went there, it was already down to Johnny Thunders trying to borrow twenty bucks. It was Willy De Ville and Genya Raven onstage, but even they were rapidly heading downtown. The spare-change route from Union Square to the Bowery is a tradition older than rock & roll, older than Huntz Hall and the original Bowery Boys, almost as old as New York itself, and all downhill.
It probably also didn’t help that Hilly had Club 82 just around the corner. Like London’s Roxy, it was a time-honoured drag club, but with a longer and far more raunchy track record going back to the Fifties, or even earlier. It had been annexed like the Roxy, not by punks but by the androgynous glitter kids of Bowie’s Aladdin Sane period, when the Dolls had played a landmark show there in full drag. Whoever took me there had filled me in on the
legend. In days of yore, Club 82 had seemingly been the screaming end. Errol Flynn would attempt to play the piano with his penis, and human faeces had been served as an entrée. When I visited, though, hardly a scream was being raised. Some disgruntled old queens sat at the bar, bitter and reflecting archly how the wannabe young with their Revlon ignorance had killed the Golden Age of Tallulah Bankhead. As Club 82 sank into its Weimar twilight, the Dolls’ followers had only to step across the street.
CBGB can be hard on the recall. I drank there through most of the Eighties and even played the joint when Henry Beck, John Collins, Victoria Rose and I had swamp-surfed in the acoustic, post-art, anti-folk combo called Tijuana Bible. However, I clearly remember that, back in the mid-Seventies, when I was still a visitor from London, I saw the Ramones enough times to be left in no doubt that, within the minimalist tracks of their avowed pinhead simplicity, they were the tightest and most streamlined punk band, bar none.
I also recall watching the Dead Boys but, needless to say, not the night Stiv Bators got his dick sucked onstage by one of the waitresses. I always seem to miss the significant stuff. Instead of copping the oral and then hanging himself with his belt, his self-destructive shtick of the night was to hurl himself from the stage and smash into a full table of drinks, spilling booze, breaking glass and cutting himself. The damage was fairly impressive, but I figured Stiv had been paying rather too close attention to the combined moves of Rotten and Vicious. I was also grateful he didn’t choose my table to fall into, otherwise I suppose I would have felt morally obliged to smack him. Spilled cognac is spilled cognac.
I know I saw Richard Hell, because when the English touring party that consisted of me, Boss Goodman and NME photographer Chalkie Davies checked into the George Washington Hotel on one particular visit, a package was waiting for us. (I usually stayed at the Washington. Enough cheap Mickey-Spillane, 23rd-Street grime for romance, but not such a free fire zone as the Chelsea. No Viva shrieking.) Hell was on Sire at the time, just as the Deviants had been some eight or nine years earlier, and Seymour Stein had seen to it that one of his publicity people had sent over a bunch of albums, pictures, press releases. I was grateful for the present, but still had a few reservations about Hell. No argument that he was, and still is, a poet of stature among his contemporaries, but I couldn’t resist an uncharitable thought that part of his rock ’n’ roll mystique was down to the rumour that he was hung like a horse. I mean, Hell didn’t sing no better than I did, and I was out of the business.
Where Richard Hell went, also went Legs McNeil, who along with John Holstrom had founded Punk magazine, which had caused a great deal of interest around NME. I think Legs was well aware of that fact because, from the moment we were introduced, he seemed intent on demonstrating how much of a skinny, smart-mouthed, beer-swilling, gadfly irritant he could be – as in actually licking the net stockings of the Bettie Page print on my T-shirt. I decided, with Legs, I only had two options. To swat him or to make friends with this joker-provocateur, and we’ve been firm friends on and off ever since.
I also first met Lester Bangs in the sagging and pasty flesh at CBGB. After the formalities of mutual admiration were over, and we knew each other well enough for me to take him to task, I began to berate him for clinging to rock crit like an accursed security blanket. So much talent being feloniously wasted on silly records and even sillier musicians; get the fuck outta here, Bangs, and write a detective novel, or at the very least some destructured Bukowski short stories. (Don’t forget I was full of my own adventures in science fiction at the time.) The man would snarl and suck on his bottle of Rolling Rock, and I’d wax furious at the waste. Lester was also very taken with the idea of performing. My only advice there was to lose some weight and shave the moustache, but it also caused me to reflect that my own swearing off playing rock ’n’ roll was maybe a little drastic. Tragically, none of the Lester Bangs might-have-beens ever were. The man, failing to heed all advice, was struck down by a fatuous overdose of Valium and over-the-counter flu remedies.
Even before Lester’s demise, or Johnny Thunders determinedly marking himself for death, I wasn’t so innocent as to believe that New York didn’t exact its share of victims. On the other hand, it had a contradictory sense of permanence. In contrast to London, people there seemed in for the long haul. The town was also remarkably free of ageism. In London I had constantly to remind snotty arseholes that I wasn’t any boring old fart from the Sixties. In New York I felt like a gunfighter in my prime with the chops to survive. I found the density of bohemianism in New York guaranteed a lot more people like myself who had bridged the Sixties/Seventies gap – Lou Reed, Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, Deborah Harry, Viva and others of the gang from the Warhol Factory, Jim Fourrat of the Pink Panthers, and street characters like David Peel, the psychotic Yippie Dana Beale, Ugly George. Moondog was always on Sixth Avenue outside Black Rock keeping people honest. In New York I discovered fewer dictates of fashion and a far greater diversity. New York had no unilateral punk style. Willy De Ville in pimp-bebop sharkskin and a pencil moustache, through the Cramps’ proto-gothic, to Dee Dee Ramone, the self-confessed, leather-jacket rent hustler from 53rd and 3rd. Photographer Joe Stevens flourished there with a history all the way back to the days of acoustic Bob Dylan, but was in CBGB every night, lord of the lens. Thus it really shouldn’t have come as any surprise when a short, somewhat strange figure came up to me and asked if I was Mick Farren and, if I was, did I want to make a record?
Terry Ork resembled nothing more than a short, gay, amiable werewolf, and, as I understood the gist of the conversation, he wanted me to cut some tracks. I figured it was just some New York, ripped-in-the-small-hours flattery by a guy who’d been scared by a Deviants record when he was a kid. Cutting cynically to the chase, I demanded to know when this mythic session – which would be my first time in a studio in seven years – might go down. I expected some vague maybe-baby, I’ll-get-back-to-you, but to my surprise Terry replied, ‘Wednesday.’
‘Wednesday?’
Wednesday was just forty-eight hours away. Maybe less; the night was already late. Boss was with me on this particular trip, so I looked at him for some kind of reinforcement. ‘Think I should do this?’
‘What have you got to lose?’
On that count I wasn’t sure, but offering me time in a studio is like offering a narcissist a room full of mirrors. ‘Going to come along with me?’
‘Wouldn’t miss it.’
Maybe I should have had a bit more initial trust in Terry Ork. He had, after all, been the manager of Television, shot dope with Jim Carroll and had a history going all the way back to the Sixties Warhol Factory. The project in hand was the creation of two albums, one consisting of weird and unlikely people singing songs by or associated with the Rolling Stones, and another of equally weird people singing the Phil Spector catalogue. Both were forerunners of the tribute CDs that have grown so tedious in recent years, although we didn’t know it at the time. What better vehicle could there be with which to sneak out of retirement? Besides, I was in New York; if I fucked up too badly, who in London was going to hear about it? As it turned out, I couldn’t have been more in error. I did fuck up (depending on how you looked at it) – and not only did everyone hear about it, but they actually heard it.
The studio where Terry had recording time was a couple of hours out of the city in White Plains, and the plan was that we would take a train from Grand Central. This was sounding better and better; not only a recording studio, but a train ride.
‘So who’s the band going to be?’
It seemed that the whole deal was being produced by a guy called John Tiven, now a well-placed face in the modern music business. He would play guitar and keyboards, if we needed them. To this day I do not recall the name of the bass player, but I won’t forget the drums were played by Marc Bell. Marc had been the drummer with Wayne/Jayne County and Richard Hell’s Voidoids, and would very shortly join the Ramones, changing his name to Marky Ramone.
I still claim that Marc was the instigator of all the trouble. The arrangement was that Boss and I would meet Marc at Grand Central, I think at around ten in the morning, and travel up to White Plains together. All went according to plan. The only change was that I’d invited along a back-up singer called Janis Cafasso, an ex-girlfriend of Johnny Thunders (there seemed to be a lot of his ex-girlfriends) to help me out with the vocals. I think a sub-text motivation was that working together in the studio might be the prelude to an out-of-town romance, but I never found out if this was to be, as whisky became my only preoccupation, aside from the music.
As we settled into our seats Marc produced a pint of Jack Daniels from inside his coat, like a gambler pulling out a marked deck. Boss glanced in my direction as Marc took a swig and passed me the bottle. Boss knew how I could be after a breakfast of straight bourbon, but I was heedless of the look. I was nervous, and embarking on an adventure, goddamn it. At the studio, more Jack was waiting. I’ve never found it an effective production technique to get the performers blind drunk, but, on the other hand, I wasn’t the one producing the sessions, and in those days I was rarely able to resist a bottle in front of me. Better than a frontal lobotomy, as the old joke goes, but in this instance, not by very much.
As requested, I had selected two songs – one by the Rolling Stones and one by Phil Spector. The Stones song was ‘Play with Fire’, the Spector tune was the Teddy Bears’ hit ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’. Terry also wanted me to cut a version of ‘Lost Johnny’, a song I’d written with Lemmy. If all went well, in addition to the cuts on the two projected albums, he might also put out a single. Okay, cool, and the band went to work putting down the tracks. I managed the guide vocals with only a couple of shots from the second bottle of Jack, then began on the finished vocal of ‘Lost Johnny’. So far, so good.