dim lights, provocative gyrations, drug-taking and ‘sexual misconduct’

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‘The Strip was suddenly alive with hairy teen hobos and older hippies in nifty belly-button-baring shirts and little girls with mop straight hair and belted hip huggers settled low and cool on their anatomies. The convergence of social types has created a permanent bumper-to-bumper weekend traffic jam in which it now takes some 30 sardine-like minutes to inch along the strip’s 1.7 miles. Modernist architecture added a celestial feeling to the drive-in restaurants, underground theatres, and coffeehouses, not to mention more than 35 psychedelic/mod nightclubs catering to the scene.’

"I’m in one hell of a mess: I’ve been caught in a toilet."

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Heinz says that sometimes the audience were chanting “OFF” before he even got onto the stage and from there on things got worse: “I was playing Birmingham and getting blokes running down the aisle wanting to jump onstage to thump my head in, throwing cans of beans and covering the group in beans. On that same tour we played Colston Hall, Bristol and my mother came down from Southampton. She was sat upstairs. She came backstage in tears. She could hear the blokes behind her: ‘We’re gonna ’ave ’im now, the bastard, we’re gonna ’ave ’im. Wait round the back.’ My mother’s sitting there listening to it! Imagine how she felt with Teds running up, grabbing the microphone stand off the stage, trying to pull it off me and hit me with it. And Gene Vincent came up to me before that tour ended and said, ‘You’ve got some bloody guts, I would have walked off after one number.’”

black music played by white, working class, bad skin bastards

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People might say, "Well, there's no more Knickerbockers, there's no more Count Five and there's no more Hombres, and there's no more Standells out there." Yeah, but there may be a bunch of people who can give you the same emotional feeling if you spent the time on a Tuesday night to go to the clubs and hear music, you'll see. It's still out there. You have to find it again, because you can only recycle these stories so many times; you can only reissue these songs so many times, and eventually everybody's gonna have these records in their homes. You're going to have all the versions of all this stuff on bootlegs and tape and vinyl. After a while though, you're kid's gonna eat them, you're dog's gonna shit on them and your second wife will throw them out. So why don't you guys go form your own bands, or why don't you go find some and then you'll find some dirty bitches and get laid and you'll have a good time.

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.

cut up body found dumped in two suitcases

                                                                

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"Dunno how to gracefully segue into John Repsch's The Legendary Joe Meek,except to say that Joe was not from California and you won't find a reference to him in Art Fein's L.A. guide,either.At any rate,this painstaking bio attempts to unravel the career of the enigmatic,psychotic,out-of-his-gourd maniac (and I mean that in the nicest way) genius best known for the fabulous Telstar and for the bizarre (and uncalled for) speeding up of Honeycombs records.What had me glued to the book,however, were the twisted Norman Bates-ish psycho/seance/spookerama tales - Joe as a grown up sissy boy (Mum tried raising Joe as a little girl,keeping him in party dresses and hair ribbons,til family complained),Joe's premonitions of his idol Buddy Holly's death & his subsequent paranormal contact with Holly's spirit,his obsession with death,sex & violence,his wacky infatuation with Heinz Burt of the Tornadoes,his paranoia,the satanic voices in his head,an unsolved torso murder(!) and his ultimate murder/suicide,which remains shrouded with mystery to this day.The stories behind Meek's broodingly ethereal instrumentals and slavishly psychological productions become obvious with this probe into what could easily have been a best-selling thriller or a knuckle-whitening movie of the week.A prize read for all ambulance chasin' music lubbers"-Kicks #7