mum was not a square, she bleached her hair & had massive knockers

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When I wasn’t conducting deviant sexual experiments with high-powered vacuum cleaners, the work with Benham’s usually involved servicing boiler rooms up in the West End. But the one job which stood out involved heading north into the wilds of Willesden. There was a Wall’s sausage factory up there, and I remember having to see them slaughtering the fucking pigs. These weird dudes with aprons covered in claret were doing the deed. The strange faces these guys had – they looked like lunatics. The pigs came in off a lorry and got shuffled into these little pens, then the geezer would put the big electric prong on them. Before there was time to see if they were dead or not, they’d get hooked up by their hooves and sent whizzing up this fucking conveyor belt with their back feet at the top and their heads hanging down. First they went through this furnace which would burn all the skin off, then they’d be washed clean with jets of water. The poor cunts didn’t stop on the conveyor belt till they were in a packet. I remember watching up to the point where the geezer with his big knife slit open the stomach and all the fucking claret came out the middle of it. That place was just a fucking hellhole and I’d never seen anything like it. Not even when Chelsea played Leeds.

Iggy laying on the floor asking Clive Davis to piss on him.

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Peter O’Toole came into the back room one time and was just sitting there drinking and the usual crowd was there. Ingrid Superstar was doing some number and there was a photographer in the room taking pictures and the flash would go off. Peter O’Toole was getting visibly crazier and crazier and started to appear very irritated. Mickey walked into the back room and Peter O’Toole called Mickey over to his table. “Excuse me, but could you tell those photographers enough is enough. I am here privately and do not wish to be harassed.” Mickey said, “You’re here privately, what does that mean?” He said, “Those photographers, they keep taking pictures of me.” Mickey said, “They aren’t taking pictures of you, they’re taking pictures of Ingrid.” He said, “But I’m Peter O’Toole.” To which Mickey replied, “Oh, are you a painter?”

"It’s raw, mind you. Fucking raw, if you ask me, but it’s different."

 

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In every picture we’ve seen of these guys they’ve looked great. On the cover of this, their debut album, they just look plain ridiculous. They look like they’re commiserating backstage after placing ninth to thirteenth in America’s Hottest Transsexual Contest. They don’t look chic or edgy or like the look is natural to them, which is how they’ve looked in every shot we’ve ever seen of them before. Here, in black and white, beneath a stupid high-school lipstick graphic, they look like some art department’s idea of what the Dolls should look like. They’ve been around for five minutes and they’ve already caught the down escalator and descended into parody. The singer, who has until now made a living out of looking like Jagger’s mutant kid brother, now looks like Jagger’s elderly auntie from Palm Springs looking down the back of the sofa for a gambling chip. He’s got a perm. A perm, for Christ’s sake. They should have just lined up in an alley in the Bowery, handed a Kodak Instamatic to a wino, and said, “Here’s ten bucks, take some shots, buddy.”

I lost my mind. It was so fucking nasty and sexy. Dirty music.

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“I was sitting there and watching the Cramps, they were out of tune and falling all over the place. It was a trainwreck, so when they finished their audition, Hilly told them that they had failed and they were practically crying. I told them they could play at Max's, as long as they showed up with a tuning machine. They came down a couple of days later and Jayne will tell you, people were looking at me with that expression of what the hell was I thinking? I said, "Just wait, you will see." Suicide played on the same bill as the Cramps and it was a perfect match up. You have the hillbilly version and the New York City Times Square version.” Lux Interior: "We opened for Suicide a lot. We couldn't believe it. Marty was great at what he did, but Alan ... if somebody got up to go to the bathroom, he'd leap up and take the mic stand and block their path with it. He'd do stuff like that all the time intimidating the audience. It could get really scary sometimes."

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.

wearing a miniskirt but no knickers, the latest trend among the hippies?

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We’re not a nation of prudes whatever anyone thinks. It’s only when you come on television you’re led to believe the people of Britain are very delicate flowers who must be nurtured and not offended. Unfortunately, the people who dislike us or who are critical of the BBC are very vocal and well-organised, viz. Mary Whitehouse. She says, ‘I have 800,000 people who all agree with me, this is obscene.’ But it’s nothing against the 18 million people who actually enjoy it. They don’t actually fill in questionnaires and say, ‘Yes, I’d like to see more filth on television.’

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.

THE MAGAZINE THAT DOESN’T KNOW WHEN TO QUIT!

pdfs of all issues - 1GB! - here

Slash: Tell us about the clubs in N.Y.

Lux: CBGB's is really the only club.

Slash: What about the "downtown bands"?

Lux: My personal opinion is, I think it's a good thing to keep those damned art-rock bands separated some place where they can drop out of art school and work out their neuroses! They don't know anything about rock 'n' roll. You can't dance to their music and I couldn't care less about it. I'm not interested in music you can't dance to. Get them out of the bars and put them in a loft!

Ivy: There are a lot of bands trying to get in at CBGBs but the art bands are keeping them out, they're cluttering up the place. They should call their music what it is. They should play for the artists in Soho. 

Lux: This "new wave," I don't know what it is. When rock 'n' roll changed to rock, it became acceptable. When punk rock changed to new wave it became acceptable and all these muck people started moving in.  Robert Christgau from the Village Voice despises us, so he won't write anything about us except snotty remarks and put-downs. He does not understand a goddam thing on what this band is about in the least. A hundred people told me the show we did at CBGB's was the best they'd ever seen and the review in the Village Voice called it "calculated ... sterile ... boring ... "

People say we're abnormally sex obsessed, like it's an unusual leaning

 

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I had to stand out and look in the windows, but there were these girls, just the sexiest girls that you've ever seen in the tightest clothes and the one great dance was the Bug. I thought it was the greatest one ever, 'cos they'd just do all this stuff, they'd move around and touch themselves all over, searching themselves as if they had a bug on them, just like a cat or something, and they would just be grabbing it from every place they shouldn't have been, and then finally they'd grab it, and they'd throw it on the person next to them and then that girl would start doing her dance - oh, man. It was kind of a dance; it was more like a conniption fit, but wow, a very sexy dance.

Joey was born with a malformed Siamese twin growing out of his back

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Grandpa Al Lewis’s politics were radical and to the left. There in the living room, with his cigar and classic New York accent, Lewis argued for the abolishment of New York’s harsh Rockefeller drug laws and the establishment of universal health care. John wasn’t into it.

“You give these lazy immigrants something free like that and you’ll never get rid of them.”

“Who wants to get rid of them except you?” Lewis said. “They built the country. Do you know how many Chinese immigrants died pounding out the Union Pacific Railroad, my friend? Hundreds!”

I had to laugh hearing John warn us about immigrants taking free stuff. All his T-shirts came from the band’s merchandise. He never under any circumstances bought underwear or socks. His mother always bought him a ton of them for Christmas and that was all he ever needed. John’s yearly wardrobe budget was zero dollars and zero cents.

Grandpa Al was more than a left-winger. He was an eccentric and one with a delusion here and there. He told us he served on the legal defense team of the 1920s anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. There was no doubt Grandpa would have if he could have, but he was about eleven years old at the time. He also informed us that in the sixties he met Charles Manson, who babysat his sons. “He was a gentleman!” Grandpa said. Hearing this, Dee Dee started talking about his own sons, who didn’t even exist, and about his fictional days fighting the Vietcong. Someone should have grabbed a tape recorder, because this was an album.