If Hawkwind had one shortcoming at this time it resided in the undeniable fact that their music - live or on record - invariably didn’t sound too good without the listener first partaking in some form of further chemical assistance. This was made further manifest when the group invited me and some other
Frendz
contributors to accompany them to a concert being held in one of London’s college venues in early February. The act performing that evening were label-mates of Hawkwind’s - both were signed to United Artists records - and based in Germany. That’s how I got to see Can playing their debut show in England.
Tago Mago
had just been completed and would soon become available, so the group-a quintet with Japanese vocalist Damo Suzuki very much in the foreground - spent the set further exploring the themes and grooves they’d recently developed in the recording studio. From the moment they began playing, you could tell that these guys were in a different class as instrumentalists. Three of them were master musicians who’d studied in conservatories and who now wanted to liberate themselves from the constraints of academia by playing free-form fusion jams on electrified instruments to stoned hippies. The music had obvious druggy connotations but you didn’t need to be ‘on drugs’ to appreciate it. The spell they cast together was bigger than that.
Over the next two years, I’d come to know the members of Can quite well and can tell you from first-hand experience that they were scholarly types who also liked nothing more than to indulge in magic rituals and take drugs. But there was clearly some method to their collective madness because whatever they
were doing simply seeped into the music itself, to the point where it seemed to glisten before the listener like a snake hypnotising its prey as it coiled its way around the room. Miles Davis had been exploring similar other-worldly musical terrains of late on albums like
Bitches Brew
and
Live-Evil
but Miles’s new music had quickly proven itself too radical and abrasive-sounding for the UK prog bands and jazz-rock-fusion combos still in vogue to attempt to copy; only the German ‘underground rock’ bands of the late sixties had been affected by it, and from out of their ranks only Can had been able to take the basic ingredients-a James Brown funk rhythm and plenty of spacey dissonance from the keyboards and electric guitar - and create something genuinely awe-inspiring. What they were doing back then was never going to trouble the mainstream, but thirty-five years later Can’s musical influence on what passes today for contemporary rock is far easier to pinpoint than the paltry legacies left by Jethro Tull and Yes, that era’s most popular platinum-selling ‘cerebral rock’ entities. In this respect, the Cologne-based outfit played a similar role in the early seventies to the one the Velvet Underground played in the late sixties. When they were both actually in existence, only a few people bought their records or saw them live, but those same few were sufficiently moved by what they’d heard and seen to start their own groups as a direct consequence.
Still, Can’s arrival on the London live music scene was something of a well-kept secret, attended by only a small smattering of ticket-holders and freeloaders and garnering little press coverage. All eyes were fixed instead on another act then working the same circuit to riotous acclaim. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars project was going through the roof. The record wasn’t even out yet but the hype was everywhere in the
press and on billboards, and Bowie was causing havoc throughout the country with his new live show.
These days, when people talk about the end of the sixties they like to say that the decade didn’t actually die until 1974 or even 1976. They’re wrong: the seventies came into full effect in January of 1972 when David Bowie reinvented himself as Ziggy Stardust. The role made him an instant megastar and gave him the momentum to stamp his personality across the new decade in the all-imposing way the Beatles had managed in the sixties. He’d spent years marooned in the backwaters of the music industry but now - royally abetted by a cigar-chomping mega-manager named Tony Defries who modelled himself obsessively on Elvis Presley’s mentor Colonel Tom Parker and a pushy Yank wife named Angie - Bowie suddenly held the keys to the superhighway.
It had started in early January when he appeared with freshly cropped red hair on the cover of
Melody Maker
trumpeting his bisexuality and generally being outrageous. A few short days after the paper’s publication, Bowie had performed his London debut concert as Ziggy Stardust, a show I managed to attend. As he and the Spiders from Mars were about to play their first song, the equipment malfunctioned and there was a sudden agonising silence that was instantly felt throughout the hall. If Bowie hadn’t reacted promptly, he would most likely have been laughed off the stage that night and Ziggy Stardust’s fate would have been seriously compromised. But - being a born trouper - he’d risen to the occasion by injecting just the right hint of self-mockery, pointing to each flamboyant article of clothing he was adorned in and reciting the name of its designer in an exaggerated camp falsetto.
Then the power came back on and he and his co-workers -
guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey - immediately went to work. What they unveiled that night was a more upmarket, cerebrally involving strain of glam rock than the fizzy pop/rock then being made by Marc Bolan’s T.Rex or America’s Alice Cooper. Bolan was mainly for the teeny-boppers anyway, whilst Cooper appealed specifically to shock-rock aficionados, but Bowie’s new approach had unlimited commercial range. Teenagers struggling with their sexual identities were able to instantly relate, whilst bookish students and young adults could obsessively sift through the lyrics and unravel subtle references to Nietzschean philosophy. Suddenly he’d struck the mother lode, becoming the era’s most adored teen idol, sex symbol, rock star and Dylanesque pop sage in one fell swoop.
I wanted Bowie to be my first in-depth interview for
Frendz
but his management and press officer were always erecting obstacles; ‘I’m sorry - David’s at the dentist’s all this week’ was one line they kept using on me. What they were really saying was that their client was already way too high and mighty to waste valuable time explaining himself to some small-circulation rag. But then a call came through to
Frendz
headquarters that the MC
5
had freshly debarked from their native Michigan to take up residence in London and try their luck on British shores. Ronan O’Rahilly - an Irish-born would-be cultural provocateur who’d been a prime mover behind the UK pirate-radio boom of the mid-sixties - had bankrolled the move and was now busy contacting the underground press offering access to the group. I ended up doing my first-ever interview with them at their press officer’s ground-floor Chelsea flat in early February.
The MC5 had been a big noise back in early 1969 when their debut album
Kick Out the Jams
- a rambunctious audio vérité capturing
of a typical live performance - was released. A biker named J. C. Crawford opens proceedings with the most unforgettable blast of verbal rabble-rousing ever committed to audiotape. ‘Brothers and sisters, you have five seconds to decide whether you are going to be the problem or the solution,’ he intones mesmerisingly in a hellfire preacher’s resonant baritone. Then the group hit their first chord and you can hear the room they’re playing in being suddenly rent asunder by the sheer volume and intensity of their evolving performance.
The 5 were a truly phenomenal live act - the only white US band who could potentially upstage the Rolling Stones in a concert hall - but they also liked to cultivate a rough and ready image of themselves as ‘anything goes’ political revolutionaries that quickly backfired on them in the marketplace. Elektra, their record label, let them go shortly after
Kick Out the Jams
’ release because their soulmates in Michigan’s White Panther Party had alienated a leading record-selling outlet with a controversial advert campaign in the local Motor City media. Shortly after that, White Panther kingpin John Sinclair - also the group’s manager - was jailed on drug charges and the 5 were suddenly cast adrift from their social circumstances. They signed to the Atlantic label and made a couple of studio albums but never seemed to find a solid supportive fan base outside the Midwest. It was at this point that heroin started finding its way into the less affluent areas of Michigan state and various group members began falling under its spell. Moving to England then was partly a way of distancing the group from bad acquaintances and the dangerous places they tended to frequent more and more whilst still resident in their old home stretch.
The group looked like they’d been dragged through a bush
backwards when I met them. They still talked a lot about starting a revolution but this time it was a less specific revolution of the mind, not one involving ‘drugs, loud music and fucking in the streets’ - their oft-quoted manifesto of yore. Their former evangelical, new-world-conquering ardour was now seriously tempered by an old-world, ever-increasing bitterness about not being more successful in the music business. Their luck had run dry and everyone was suddenly busy being reborn under a bad sign.
The general tone for the MC
5
’s 1972 sojourn in the UK was set shortly after our meeting, when the group were billed to headline a small charity gig in the Ladbroke Grove area. They turned up late and had their set rudely curtailed after two numbers by an enforced power cut. From that point on, bad luck, calamity and public indifference called all the shots on their attempted progress. They were next scheduled to perform a week-long residency at a newly opened West End club called Bumpers. I turned up on the first night to find only two other punters standing around the dance floor in anticipation of the group’s appearance. One was Viv Prince, the Pretty Things’ legendary ex-drummer, generally regarded by those who knew him back in the day as the closest thing to Sid Vicious that the sixties ever managed to vomit forth. The other was a local Hells Angel crony of Prince’s with his left leg wrapped in a cast and a large canine by his side. The MC5 that night quite literally played to three men and a dog. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so bloody tragic. England just didn’t know what it was missing. The country’s concert-goers were still hypnotised by the spectacle of musicians sporting mutton-chop side-whiskers and standing like trees in the wind as they noodled their way into the mists of mediocrity. The MC5’s high-energy approach was simply too dynamic for sleepy
London town and its neighbouring precincts to comfortably relate to. It was a criminal oversight on their part because - despite the ongoing problems - the MC
5
were still firing on all cylinders as a live combo. That Bumpers show - notwithstanding the complete absence of a paying audience - was one of the most thrilling and memorable live showcases I’ve ever witnessed. A masterclass in how to create rock ’n’ roll as a living, breathing art form instead of some corny abstraction.
Being around the MC5 also brought me into contact with my future collaborator, the photographer Pennie Smith. We were introduced at one of their shows. John May had told me about her talents and so I approached her about taking photos to accompany my interviews. She looked at me a bit dubiously at first - but later in the evening she became friendlier and even tentatively agreed to bring her camera along to my next rock-star chinwag.
Getting in Pennie as my creative partner quickly became the smartest move I ever made as a fledgling journalist. Apart from being a brilliant and innovative capturer of photographic images, she filled every room she entered with an air of beauty and mystery, and musicians invariably found themselves irresistibly drawn to her, particularly the old-school late-sixties blues-rock breed who tended to regard me with extreme suspicion. You’d see it when they first clapped eyes on me.
Who is this skinny hermaphrodite and what on earth does he have to say about music to me?
Then they’d see Pennie hovering enigmatically in the background and their icy expressions would instantly thaw.
But at the same time he knows this deeply enchanting woman so he must be doing something right.
The dynamic between the two of us was strong and mutually beneficial, plus you couldn’t ask for a better friend than Pennie, a
genuine paragon of virtue in an all-too-imperfect world: calm, giving, insightful, non-judgemental, devoid of ego and tantrum-inciting. Never took drugs. Didn’t sleep around. A lot of people thought we were having an affair but it was always strictly platonic love between me and her. For as long as I’ve known her, she’s been happily married to the same man - Tony Veseley - another dear friend of mine.
Pennie was there at my side when I got to do my second actual interview. David Bowie was still playing hard to get but his place had been taken this time by an even more auspicious entity: Captain Beefheart right at the top of his deeply wacky game.
Beefheart - alias Don Van Vliet - had been a teenage bosom buddy of Frank Zappa’s and had first come to prominence on the mid-sixties music scene of his native California by fronting a relatively conventional Rolling Stones-styled mop-haired rhythm ’n’ blues combo. But something deeply life-altering had befallen him during this period. Van Vliet’s cousin would later confide that ‘Don was a pretty normal guy’ until one evening he found himself trapped in a drive-in cinema watching
The Incredible Shrinking Man
on acid. After that, his perceptions were never the same. He started talking to trees and believing he possessed supernatural powers. In 1967 he released a potent debut album of psychedelic blues entitled
Safe as Milk
with a stunning guitarist - Ry Cooder, still a teenager - in his back-up ensemble, the first Magic Band. But Cooder quickly abandoned ship when Beefheart experienced an LSD-impacted meltdown during a live performance at the outset of the Summer of Love. No matter: Beefheart simply replaced him with someone almost as good and recorded a second album,
Strictly Personal
, that got released sometime in 1968. Both efforts were roundly ignored over in America
but in England John Peel became bedazzled by them, playing tracks unceasingly on his Radio One
Top Gear
show every Sunday afternoon. Hearing Beefheart’s demented lupine growl blaring out of your little transistor briefly became as common a sonic manifestation of the late-sixties quiet UK Sunday as pealing church bells.