“So many tickets down the Scene, honey. They’re like to blow a fuse.”

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We walked through the doors and up some steps but got stopped by the bouncers. I said, ‘We are invited by Keith,’ to which he replied, ‘Yeah and plenty of others. No tickets. No entry.’ A few minutes later Keith turned up. I told him that we were having trouble getting in. ‘Right’ he says, and goes and demands that the manager comes and speaks with him. The manager appeared and Keith explained that he had invited some friends down from London and the bouncers wouldn’t let them in, but there was still a no ticket, no entry type attitude. ‘Hmm,’ says Keith, ‘Have you ever seen The Who play without a drummer? I tell you they are bloody awful.’ By this time there’s a reasonable sized group that had gathered around us, all listening to what was going on. The manager seeing this eventually gives in and says it’s okay for Keith’s friends to go inside. To this Keith turns to the crowd and shouts out ‘the manager says that any of my friends that don’t have tickets can go in. Who doesn’t have tickets?’

Each of the Pink Fairies arrived bearing the head of a dead pig on a pole

 

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Other staunch allies in combating the mod/skinhead problem were a motley bunch of Jewish East Londoners known as the Firm. The Firm were ex-mods themselves, but of the earlier, stylish variety whose twin dedications were music and creating mayhem and chaos wherever they went. Led by the dire duo of Peter Shertser and Ian Sippen, the Firm had taken a bunch of acid, but managed to retain a highly mutated version of the traditional mod obsession with making and spending money. They’d grown their hair and now dressed in sharp, custom-tailored suits of the most outrageous fabrics they could find. These bespoke monsters were made by an elderly tailor in the East End to whom they would present lengths of William Morris curtain material and demand that he sew it according to the same pattern as a three-button Tonik. At UFO, the Firm’s capacity for confusion and disorder reached inspired peaks. They spiked a number of people, attacked the more disorientated hippies with water pistols and let off an assortment of fireworks right on the dance floor.

They were weird and different and didn't play songs like everybody else

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Lester Bangs: Rolling Stone had flown me up to San Francisco to check me out, since I had been writing for them for about six months. I guess they wanted to see if I was executive timber. I guess I wasn't, because not only did I get moved from Greil Marcus's to Langdon Winner's house after about two days, but I thought it was as curious that they sat around, not even smoking pot, but listening to Mother Earth and Creedence with absolute seriousness, as they were bewildered by my penchant for guzzling whiskey all day while blasting 'Sister Ray' at top volume ... to make a dismal story mercifully short, I discovered a magazine in Detroit called Creem, whose staff was so crazy they even put the Stooges on the cover. Of every issue! So I left my job and school and girlfriend and beer-drinking buddies and moved to Detroit, where my brand of degenerate drool would be not only tolerated but outright condoned, and over the five years I worked at Creem we used our basic love for it to exploit the punk aesthetic and stance in just about every way humanly possible.

He wanted the "burlesque sound" from his drummers, a sensuous beat

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the band was also a magnet for the strange, drawing all sorts of people off the streets to rehearsals and performances. One of the most bizarre of those who turned up was Yochannan, one of many eccentric blues singers (like Dr.JoJo Adams and The Sandman) who could be seen on weekends on Maxwell Street and at local blues clubs like the Green Door. Yochannan had many stage names, including the Man from Outer Space, the Man from Mars, and the Muck Muck Man, and declared himself a descendant of the sun. Dressed in turban, sandals, and red, orange, and yellow "Asiatic" robes, he was always quick to hold forth to anyone on his private philosophy. And when he performed he was unpredictable and crude, often working bawdy material into the last song he sang at club appearances. His performance was wild, and Hattie Randolph remembers a gig with Yochannan in Kokomo, Indiana. "It was a big package thing. There was a band for dancing, a comic, a blues singer ... and Yochannan was on the show. When he started his act and began leaping over tables, one woman jumped up and shouted, "He's possessed! He's possessed!" and ran out of the club."

long-haired dope-smoking street-fucking rock-and-roll maniacs

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An editorial in the Detroit Free Press thundered against the love-in: “It was not the love which got out of hand on Belle Isle Sunday. It was the hate. The outcasts of a decent society, the organized motorcycle gangs like the Outlaws, revel in harm and destruction. …The love-in was invaded by the greasy-haired, filthily dressed hoodlums who would probably come unglued in a bathtub. Instead of soda pop, pretzels and garlands of dandelions, they brought beer, wine, motorcycles and an itch for a rumble.” Yet again there were calls to get tough on crime. Letters to the papers encouraged the police to be less lenient on the city’s youth and their belligerent subcultures and for the hippies to join the real world. Many commentators dismissed the love-in as part of a wider malaise of a society that had no respect for authority. Earlier in the month, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey had traveled to West Berlin, where his visit was disrupted by hippies carrying what appeared to be a bomb. On inspection, the incendiary device was nothing more than a pie. The European new left understood that stunts, pranks, and spectacles generated disproportionate amounts of free publicity. In Germany the left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof wrote in the underground magazine Konkret, “It is thought rude to throw custard pies at politicians, but not to welcome politicians who have villages wiped out and cities bombed. …Napalm yes, custard no.” The slogan Custard Yes, Naplam No became one of many used to demonstrate against chemical warfare in Vietnam.

TV, 60's garage punk, comic books, jungle movies, deep-ghetto R&B

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The Cramps' first 45 was just about as gonzo as their second, and hoisted them as a mutant compliment to the Ramones & Dictators' corner of the New York underground. "Surfin ' Bird" was the band's five-minute mutilation of the Trashmen frat fave, commonly called "the worst song of the 60's" by squares who didn't know any better. Ivy and Brian Gregory create a dense aural cave for Lux Interior to wail and cry in, and the Cramps again proudly exhume the corpses of their rock heroes - bones, worms and all. The treatment given to Jack Scott's "The Way I Walk" is more reverbed, rollicking and loose .... the rockabilly hustle of the original is slowed down to a leering, sexed-up and fuzzed-out swagger. They continued this winning streak for quite a few years, cashed in (relatively speaking) on their own image around '85 or so, and were last spotted playing as Camel cigarette sponsors at kool niteclubs nationwide.

Times don’t change, but haircuts do, same old bullshit for me or you

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It didn’t take long for Russell to find his way around the capital’s hip and happening scenes, gravitating towards clubs like Tiles, Whiskey-A-Go-Go, and the Flamingo, where Geno Washington and other soul music was played. The Flamingo was particularly notorious as a pill den, probably a hangover from its reputation during the mod heyday.

It was reasonably easy to get pills in many clubs. Russell mentions one seedy club that used to be accessed through a car park round the back of Piccadilly: “If you wanted to go in the club you gave them five shillings and if you wanted drugs you gave them a ten shilling note. It was well accepted that if you gave them a ten shilling note then they’d give you four blues and you didn’t go into the club. It was a desolate, bomb site car park and there were the remains of an old building, the cellar of which had been propped up and turned into a club.”

But the club scene was changing, and the mod scene was fast fading with the emergence of psychedelia. By the autumn of 1966 Russell discovered a club called UFO, situated in the basement of an Irish dance hall in the Tottenham Court Road called the Blarney Club. It was here that Russell would meet up with Mick Farren and become, in 1967, a Social Deviant.

the place exploded: 400 deranged teenage freeks screamed in unison

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The band refused to alter their amplifier settings and the police moved inside and shut off the power. The enraged audience started yelling: "Power! Power!! Power!!!" Tyner started running it to the people about the pigs and how they're trying to cut off our power on all levels. The saxophones and gongs and bells and drums came out as Tyner was rapping, and then everyone merged in a non-electric orgy, chanting and dancing around and jumping up and down with glee in the face of the outraged police bandits. A police official in a white shirt with gold trim came up to the stand where I was playing my saxophone and handed me ... a ticket! A ticket! For having "a noisy band"! I took one look at it and then tore it up in his face. We matched our magic against the pigs' brute tactics and it worked - any respect any of the people there might have had for "law and order" just disappeared. All this bullshit was totally unnecessary - we just wanted to do our thing, but the police just won't let that happen without trying to stomp us out. The old people seem to want to pretend that the world is just the way it is on television, and that other peoples' lives have no validity. They don't want people to know that men have cocks in their pants, that women have tits and cunts under their clothes, that people can say and do whatever they want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, that their guns and orders and phony laws and honkie power are all bullshit. People are getting hip to all of the old people's lies and perversions, and they aren't gonna stand for it much longer. We sure aren't!

That was what the Beatles and Rolling Stones did - they stood up there with their long hair and their guitars and their prototypical alienated stance and said Come on people, we don't haveta stand for these old creeps' shit no more, look how far out we are and we're getting away with it! They told us we had to go to college or get a job, but we ain't going for it - we're gonna play our rock and roll music and have a good time and there ain't nothin' they can do about it at all! Let the good times roll, because we're gonna get high and we're gonna fuck any time we want to and we ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more! It's just like we heard Gene & Eunice tell us a long time ago-

"You can do what you wanna do, I don't care,

I dug your conversation and it ain't nowhere!"

Far out! For years kids had been stumbling around in the dark muttering things like this to themselves, scared they were going crazy because it went against everything they'd always been taught, and now there were these maniacs on the radio shouting it out for everyone to hear!