the teenage round of parties, cigarettes, booze and casual sex.

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In February 1966, they made their debut at The Marquee Club in London’s Wardour Street at an event which came to be known as The Spontaneous Underground. The invitations read: “Who will be there? Poets, pop singers, hoods, Americans, homosexuals, 20 clowns, jazz musicians, one murderer, sculptors, politicians and some girls who defy description, are among those invited.” The audience organised its own entertainment. A girl in white tights played a Bach Prelude and Fugue while The Ginger Johnson African Drummers pounded out furious rhythms all around her. The loudest and most outrageous of all were Pink Floyd who played lengthy, muffled versions of ‘Roadrunner’ and Chuck Berry songs, or simply built up layer upon layer of feedback by turning everything up to full volume.

A hip Reg Presley with a Joan Jett beat.

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I called the article "Tales from the Drug Attic" and laid into all the lame contemporary shit that called itself Psychedelic in 1983. Terrible retro groups were recasting themselves as replica-psyche, in response to the Howard Jones-ness of the Like-to-Get-to-Know-You-Well '80s. But, unlike the English northern scene's coy refusal to ever accept a tag of Psychedelia, a crass new US scene was dubbing itself (get this!) The Paisley Underground. These deadly obvious groups were not pioneer music freaks, but cosy A-to-Zetros who had evidently modelled themselves on The Byrds. I had even bought an album called (get this again!) Emergency Third Rail Power Trip by the greatly championed Rain Parade. With a title like that it had to be the fastest most manic thing since Love's 'Seven and Seven Is' ... surely ... Track 1 began at 5 mph and got stuck in cross-town traffic even before the chorus. The vocals were by Raga Knobshiners from Hell, occupying far too much Anglophile 'Bells of Rhimney' airspace. For the article, I decided that my mission was to kick all these psychedelic bandwagoners into touch, arrogantly dismissing whole chunks of '60s music as a waste of hippy time. Instead, I focused on 1965-66 as the classic period. I loved the idea of the young American beer-drinking Rolling Stones copyists taking acid and losing their minds. It was so fucked up, so unintellectual and so innocent. I wrote short intense hagiographies for The Seeds, The Misunderstood, The Chocolate Watchband and The 13th Floor Elevators, littering the article with lies and made-up bits to pad out the paucity of real information.

"Sonny Boy was the randiest man I have ever met, bar none"

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The Stones came down to the Twisted Wheel about the same week as their first album was released and I got a copy of it and I played every original track off the album. I played ‘Walking the Dog’ by Rufus Thomas, I played ‘I’m a King Bee’ by Slim Harpo and so on, I just played all the originals, and they stood there at the coffee bar surrounded by people just looking at them, not talking to them, looking, because they were quite big by then. They knew exactly what I was doing and I suppose most of the kids did as well. I just felt like doing it you know, played all the originals in the same order as the LP, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang because I thought The Stones were being real lazy, just copying other people’s songs and doing a very feeble, white, puny version of them. I actually got on ok with the Stones. Brian Jones bought a copy of R&B Scene off me when I was in London. When the Stones went to The States they got Howlin’ Wolf on prime time national television. Fucking hell, that’s the thing to do! I admire them for doing that.

Imagine the surprise of Roger putting him into the car for the drive from the airport to Manchester city centre, and they’ve just about reached Fallowfield when Jay rolls down the window and pulls out a revolver and starts firing. Whether it was blanks or what to wind Roger up I don’t know.
Roger says “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Screamin’ Jay goes, “Just keepin’ ‘em on their toes man!”
Have you heard the story about them driving through town with Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lightnin’ shouts through the window, “Come on over here baby, I’m gonna teach your pussy to whistle” and Roger’s going, “We don’t do that sort of thing”

 pdf of pix not included in the ebook version

"You think I'm Vince Taylor don't you? Well I'm not, I'm the son of God"

 

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Terry Taylor had left England in 1963 to live in Morocco, where he pursued the life of an expatriate beatnik. He returned to London in 1966 and introduced a new strand of thought into Britain’s burgeoning psychedelic culture: magic. Taylor is a fascinating character, about whom little is known. He is noteworthy in the history of LSD in Britain because his 1961 novel Baron’s Court, All Change, featured the first fictional reference to LSD in Britain: “‘Really?’ my junkie friend said, sounding interested, ‘What’s it now? Bennies, L.S.D., or Nems?’” Taylor had been encouraged to take up writing by Colin MacInnes, and became the role model for the hero of MacInnes’ tale of emergent youth culture, Absolute Beginners.

"They were such hicks, these goat-ropers from Kerrville"

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THE THING THAT CATCHES YOUR EYE IN THE DIMLY lit, smoke filled room is the gilded dragon, suspended above the bar and tables. The smoke, reflected from a few well placed lights, suggests an incense burned to the gods that have no knowledge of you or I ... but the eye of god is not important here ... there is another eye (i), and this eye (i) gazes into the op-art syndrome ... through the scene that changes, though things die ... there is a girl. She is wearing funny clothing. She is wearing an outfit that is called an Op-art outfit ... Op being short for Optical. But still it moves, one can follow the bouncing ball, as it were, follow the polka dots, spaced just right, oh yes, spaced just right, etc. the tune is not music, rather a pulsing something that pulsates, a throbbing that continues to throb ... she moves, and the stripes and circles move with her ... unreal images splattered upon a moving canvas ... and now, the whole floor is aflame ... moving in unreal movements, while dancing girls, oh so young, pantomime the act before its meaning ... resurrect Van Gogh, in sun-splotched splashes ... yielding to the dance the age demanded, and so, one after another the pieces fall into place. the age demanded ... this needs no introduction ... and yet, there is a girl with tight thighs who has forgotten what it is to touch while dancing ... until she remembers and the movement stops. frozen, like a firefly trapped in amber, there is a sound that goes beyond all motion, it ripples off the walls like silent laughter, settles like darkness of an ocean. here, at least for one, the eye emerges belted by the bass drum's throbbing pedal. we cannot understand what they are doing ... but we like it, are drawn to it like a magnet ... it makes no sense, which is nonsense ... still it moves.

welcome to the night scene ladies and gentlemen welcome. don't mind the freaks. their screams are adequately covered by the sound of heavy feet ... running swiftly.

Having joined a psychotherapy class for couple of weeks, Roky enrolled in the prison band. There was an existing traditional country band but Roky started a rock band, calling it the Missing Links. Although the lineup varied, the most stable one featured Roky backed by a collection of truly crazed and sick individuals. Roky's new friend John Walcott, second guitar (shot and killed his father, mother and sister while high on glue; Roky wrote "For Jimmy" in Openers for him), Charles Hefley, bass (raped a policeman's daughter, stabbed her with a screwdriver and killed her two infant sons by throwing them into the Trinity River; he later won custody of his own two children and disappeared, and is still at large), a deaf tambourine player (participated in the gang rape and murder of a twelve-year-old Houston boy and stuffed his body into an abandoned refrigerator) and a drummer (shot and killed an impound clerk after his car was wrongly towed).

bonus pdf

"A cow has horns at the front and a twat at the back."

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Balfe carelessly played with a spilt sachet of coffee complement on the glass table-top. All Colin's powders had long since been snorted, but he still handed a blade to Balfe, maybe out of wishful thinking.

Two minutes later, Troy and his posse of females piled into the bedroom. He saw the mound of coffee complement which by now had been chopped into four lines by Dave Balfe.

"Hey, baby, is there enough for me there?" Troy's nostrils flared in a macho post-coital kind of way.

"Sure, Troy. Take the biggest."

Troy Tate carefully took his cleanest, largest Irish note, rolled it lovingly into a neat thin stem and held it delicately but firmly over one end of the white lines of powder. He looked around at his adoring girlfriends, flashed us his best James Bond smile and, with perfect and unconscious comedy timing, said, "Too much of this stuff can make you stupid." Then he put the whole lot up his nose.

Balfe, Gary and I were down the corridor in a second, screaming in disbelief, hysterically crying. 

a couple of links

 

at exile on moan street

 

 

at blue beat in my soul (new pdf link 31/10/12)

 

With 20/20 hindsight, it's easier nowadays to explain the Group Sounds period as a business phenomenon rather than as a musical movement, for the power was forever to remain in the hands of heavyweight management companies such as Watanabe Pro. and Asuka Pro. These big management companies paid their stylists to spot potential idoru, or lead-singer material, to overly dress and colour-code their young charges, to coiffure and manicure, paint and powder them, until many groups who had been signed up as wildly unpredictable longhairs found themselves so battered and brutalised by their arduous journey through the Group Sounds management blender that their record and TV debuts bore little or no resemblance to the refusenik bedroom ensemble they had started in the first place. Inconsistency became the order of the day, as GS outfits such as the Golden Cups - who played live shows full of screaming feedback and delivered blazing B sides of Leaves/Love/Blues Magoos informed punk rock - were still forced, through razor-sharp management contracts, to appear on TV performing creepy ballads that made them sound like whingeing ninnies. The Cups' light and breathy version of the Classics IV's 'Spooky' epitomises this approach, the original's tough chiming guitar and desperate vocals here replaced with a string section straight out of 'A Walk in the Black Forest' and zippy and overly loud apeman snare-drum fills.