“Well, Mr. Phillips, I believe I might have syphilis.”

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waking up the next day to read newspaper columnists describing him as “morally degenerate,” “primitive,” “lewd,” “obscene,” “suggestive” and “vulgar,” with one even saying that he looked as though he’d been doing a striptease with his clothes on. They also said, once again, that he couldn’t sing, and that he was leading kids, by way of rock and roll, into juvenile delinquency and drug-taking. The newspaper barrage went on for weeks, wherever he played. As much as the fans would scream with excitement, newspaper pundits, teachers and preachers would howl with rage.

This is the land of knee-tremblers and wee bastards

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Hot and loud and vulgar music, non-stop for five hours

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To the older generation rock 'n' roll came to mean Teds and violence. There was a riot in Berlin. Some countries banned rock 'n' roll altogether. In Singapore police were called in to stop British soldiers jiving in a cinema foyer after a midnight premiere of Rock Around The Clock. The Rev. Albert Carter of Nottingham denounced rock 'n' roll from his pulpit: 'The effect of rock 'n' roll on young people is to turn them into devil-worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness, impair nervous stability, and destroy the sanctity of marriage.' In Miami, Florida, the head of the local censorship board described rock 'n' roll dancing as 'nothing more than shoving boys and girls around' and 'vile gyrations'! Racialist Asa Carter of the North Alabama White Citizens' Council was scared too: 'Rock 'n' roll is a means of pulling down the white man to the level of the 'Negro'. It is part of a plot to undermine the morals of the youth of our nation. It is sexualistic, unmoralistic, and the best way to bring people of both races together.' Many older musicians hated rock 'n' roll: 'Viewed as a social phenomenon, the current craze for rock 'n' roll material is one of the most terrifying things ever to have happened to popular music ... Musically speaking of course, the whole thing is laughable ... Let us oppose it to the end.'

“The thing about him is that Elvis doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a fuck."

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Between 1963 and 1965, the chimpanzee was very much a part of the Memphis Mafia. Elvis bought him for a couple of hundred bucks. He was a funny little dude. He learned how to dress himself and we had these little suits and ties for him. He learned to do a lot of other things, with Presley’s patient training. He had a dreadful habit of molesting himself in front of ladies, particularly when he had a few drinks. Man, old Scatter was a damn alcoholic. Never stopped drinking. He would get drunk and start going crazy, doing flips all over the house and yelling like a madman. One day when he had had too much to drink, he completely ruined the entire telephone system in the house. It took the telephone repairman three days to fix it. Presley had another little prank, He would dress the chimp in his Sunday best and then put him in the back seat of the Rolls-Royce. A chauffeur-driven rock ’n’ roll singer was bad enough, but a chauffeur-driven monkey? Disgraceful!

In New York, no one knew diddly fuck about Sun Records

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Oh, yessuh, good people, this is ol’ Daddy-O-Dewey comin’ atcha for the next three hours with the hottest cotton-picking records in town—(aside: Ain’t that right, Diz? “That’s right, pahd’ner.”). Yessir, we got the hottest show in the whole country—Red, Hot and Blue coming atcha from W H Bar B Q right here in Memphis, Tennessee, located in the Chisca Hotel, right on the magazine floor—I mean mezzanine floor (aside to himself: Aw’ Phillips, there you go again, you’re always messin’ up!).

what the culture needs is men and women who clearly don’t give a shit

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Blonde Bombshell was indeed made at the end of a period in Hollywood history which gave the Jews who ran the studios a chance to show what splendid work they could do before the Catholics started bullying them. The year after Bombshell, the sexually inadequate Catholic Legion of Decency, which could more accurately be called the Legion of Jealousy, put the heat on Hollywood and by threats of boycotts managed to establish a more spiteful attitude toward sex. No more Louise Beavers getting rough fucks on their days off; there followed the era of sweet nuns in artificial eyelashes and sweet priests like Bing Crosby (who off-screen was a mean, effeminate old drunk). Apart from the Legion of Decency’s fundamental flaw — it assumes that sex is wrong but never explains why — the Legion was intolerable in that it sought to impose a specifically Catholic sexual cruelty upon the general population of non-Catholics. This is simply against the law, but the Legion was tolerated for more than 30 years. The Times puts statements from the Pope on page one, even though they are the mad ravings of a sexual psychopath. The sexual inadequacies of people like the Pope would be none of my business if the afflicted would suffer in silence. But they try to punish the sexually healthy.

Vince Taylor was black leather and chains, the final rocker.

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From the start, Pepsi has been based on a single age-old precept: it's fun to be a freak. And it is, of course. It's fun to get stoned and float on giant cushions, to stay up past your bedtime. And it's fun to visit Hair, to go up on stage and dance with the kids, belonging, and believe that you've had access to secret knowledge, revelations that the straight world doesn't even suspect. It is even fun to be misunderstood, to feel yourself martyred, a rebel and outsider. What isn't much fun, though, is to be punched in the face and thrown into jail. Not at all, it isn't and, therefore, the political and philosophical basis of the movement has been more or less forgotten. In the heart of the Pepsi Rock fan, there lurks a secret shame at the blatancy and vulgarity of the music's past, Elvis in his gold lame suit, Little Richard jumping on the piano and Jerry Lee Lewis so greasy, all those wild and orgiastic exhibitions. Just like the jazz fans of 1960, who preferred Dave Brubeck to John Coltrane, they want it both ways: they want to be hip, to be in the game and yet, in the end, they don't want to get their feet wet.

'gimme some echo and some fuzz and some garbage can sound.'

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The great thing about the Pretty Things was that they didn't give two shits for blues purity, R&B purity, or any other kind of purity, except perhaps when it came to their drugs. They were therefore conceptually free to aesthetically amplify the physical uses to which distortion and proto power chord riffing could be put. Perhaps one downing the PTs was the Downliners Sect who indicated via their roughed up, impolite and impolitic take on the Chess label output that they did not give even a single shit for blues "purity." 

“If a load of fucking mods came up here, they’d be done.”

 

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This book presents two important cultures generated during the 1960s and still widely influential today — the motor-bike boys, sometimes known as rockers, and the hippies, sometimes known as heads or freaks.

“We were at the Alhambra dance and whenever a good record came on with a big beat I had to get up and hit some fucker, or do sommat. It did, it sent me fucking wild … it just sends me mad. I’ll tell you one thing that used to send me fucking mad, that was ‘Revolution’, ‘Revolution’, any rock any one with a big beat in it, the fucking sound, I go fucking wild, I do. Me and Pete, you know, we got banned from a dance, and the police came practically every week because we used to fight every week, couldn’t help it, it used to send us wild. There’d be a perfect stranger and Pete would go and punch his head in, he wouldn’t get back up, only ’cause the records, certain records, they’d send us fucking mad, they would, they’re old beat records. … If I hear a good record it sends me wild, that fucking ‘Revolution’ used to get me mad.”

“Well, like I was with a chick and she was sick all over the floor, man, we were both sort of really spaced out, the room was swirling and I couldn’t tell where I began or anything else, but I got it together to clean up the sick. I wasn’t even revolted by it, I was in there with my bare hands scooping the sick up into a bowl. … They had this bog at Bath [festival], and it must have been a football pitch long, and it was like corrugated iron bent double in V-sections, like on to the other all the way down. And everybody was sort of pissing, it was just people all down this thing, and I was at the small end and it was like a fucking river, I was ‘tripping’ like fuck, and it was beautiful, you know, I got really hung up on the piss. All the dog-ends and matches floating down. It was beautiful, the stink was fucking terrible.”

the creature became uncontrollable and began to gyrate all over the place

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The utterly tasteless drivel of this type of music will no doubt continue as long as we have "lively Radio One" and people like Tony Blackburn who are overjoyed to play Remember You're a Womble several times a week. Elvis shows no sense of responsibility in either his recordings or film career. I know in the last few years Elvis has been unwell, but this state of affairs has been in existence since 1962. With rock music's progression thanks to groups like the Moody Blues and Santana, a new era has been entered. The fusion of different types of music has been attempted and succeeded. What a thought, if we had Elvis, Eric Clapton, Rick Wakeman and say Buddy Rich on one album, backed by the London Symphony Orchestra, what a giant of an album it would turn out to be!

Yootha Joyce: He's a real man, isn't he? I'd swap him for George any day. 
Gary Glitter: When he wiggled those hips the whole place would explode. Even I'm not as naughty as he was.