by Mick Farren
Down the Up Rabbit Hole
I had followed the White Rabbit – in this instance, Miles – down the rabbit hole, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone knew everyone else, and I didn’t, and I had to find out everything there was to know as fast as I could, before anyone could figure out that I didn’t really belong there after all. Once again my feelings of inadequacy were brought into play as a means of motivation. And there was plenty to learn, and many strange characters from whom to learn it, in this warren called the underground. They ranged from, at one extreme, an individual called Bart Hughes, a mad Dutchman who believed that drugs were already redundant and all one needed for full spiritual enlightenment was to drill a hole in one’s skull, to Harvey Matusow, an American communist who had informed on his comrades for Senator Joe McCarthy and his FBI Red-hunters, but had then turned around and revealed all in a book entitled I Was a Spy for the FBI.
Both Matusow and Hughes, each in their own way, were typical of the underground before the media furore, and the commercialisation. Matusow was one of the oddities who gravitated to London in 1966–7, as if drawn by the magnet of young raw energy. Hughes, although unique in his theories, was also representative of the diversity that preceded the Peter Max, flower-power commercialisation. His promotion of the idea of trepanation, and quasi-scientific doctrine of brain-blood volume, left me totally cold. I was, and still am, much too squeamish to consider boring a small hole in my skull to allow a greater degree of oxygenation of the brain, supposedly to produce both hallucinations and enhanced mental capacity. The idea may go back all the way to the ancient Egyptians, but forget it. I’ll take the drugs, thank you kindly. Hippie self-medication would cause enough trouble, and I was extremely relieved that DIY psychedelic surgery didn’t catch on, although stories circulated of freaks who’d sought nirvana with a Black & Decker drill.
The disc jockey John Peel proved an important early input. His overnight slot on the pirate station Radio London, entitled the Perfumed Garden, came as close to magic as a radio show can, and mercifully required no brain surgery. You simply lay in bed and listened, while Peel decorated the darkness with both the new-and-emergent and the tried-and-trusted – Between the Buttons, Blonde On Blonde, all the way back to Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. It was on Peel’s Radio London show that I first heard the innovative, the influential and the just plain weird: Captain Beefheart, the Butterfield Blues Band, the Standells, Moby Grape, Buffalo Springfield, the Misunderstood, Richie Havens, Sky Saxon and the Seeds, Tim Buckley, Love and, perhaps most important for me, the Mothers of Invention.
Peel had been a ‘British Invasion’ DJ in California, had left the USA under a mysterious cloud, but brought enough of a West Coast sensibility with him to separate the wheat from the early psychedelic chaff. He also championed home-grown talent, his most notable discovery being Marc Bolan, first as part of the band John’s Children, then on his own, and finally with Steve Took in the first Tyrannosaurus Rex. Peel was also prone to complain between records of the deadly boredom of life on a pirate radio ship in the middle of the cold North Sea. He seemed to like receiving letters, so I started writing to him, commencing a correspondence which would reveal, among other things, that we both had a love for heavy-duty Fifties rock, especially Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis; a retro taste frowned upon by the trendsetters of the day as being too fundamental, but what the hell? It was our secret.
Not all the important music, however, came from the radio or from the United States. Although it would be some months before the major label-signing boom of new ‘underground’ bands, first flourishings were happening all over. Some of the most significant were the shows being staged at All Saints’ Hall in Notting Hill, organised by Peter Jenner and Andrew King, who would shortly form Blackhill Enterprises, organise the free concerts in Hyde Park and, for their sins, become the Deviants’ booking agents. The shows, almost a precursor to UFO, were fundraisers for something called the Notting Hill Free School, which I never really understood or saw in operation.
The main attraction was Pink Floyd. At the Roundhouse the Floyd had been faceless technicians, but now I could see they had two distinct frontmen. Although drummer Nick Mason and organist Rick Wright remained in the dappled shadows of the lightshow, the other two assumed personalities simply because they were standing four-square and casting long shadows on the projection screen behind them. Roger Waters stood tall behind his long Rickenbaker bass, but the member of the band to whom the eye was most naturally drawn was guitarist Syd Barrett. In all respects Syd, with his femininity, psychosis and curls, was the embodiment of psychedelic male beauty. In a satin shirt with puff sleeves and flowing collar, he was Lord George Byron with a telecaster. If only by the perfection of his eyeshadow, Syd Barrett was clearly going to be a heart-throb superstar, unless, of course, he went mad in the process.
Impressionable hippies would tell me the Floyd were playing the sound of consciousness expanding, but I wasn’t buying that one, except in so far as the Floyd did seem to tap a direct line to both the horror and sadness of the tiny human juxtapositioned against the infinite universe, which I discovered from my own neural atrocities is not always the best background abstraction against which to trip. Space isn’t the place. Long before Alien, Dan Dare had taught me that in space no one could hear you scream. The Floyd sang about Neptune and Titan, and setting the controls for the heart of the sun, but all was not science fiction, and I often regretted that the Floyd assumed such a crucially influential role in the London version of psychedelia. They seemed so Oxbridge cold in their merciless cosmos: the Stephen Hawkings of rock & roll. They lacked the Earth-warmth of, say, the Grateful Dead, and things might have been a whole lot different if their sound hadn’t permeated so many of those formative London nights.
From my own position of not inconsiderable paranoia, I can empathise with Syd reaching for a philosophic and audio impossibility, and coming unglued behind the unrewarded effort, but my instinct was that, without Pink Floyd, we might have been a little kinder to each other. Some of these feelings were confirmed by visiting Americans. Chet Helms, when confronted by the early Floyd on a visit to the UK, was less than impressed. ‘I don’t think anyone could play a break . . . all feedback and lights.’
If, on the other hand, you were looking for both the warmth and sexuality of the Earth between electronic journeys into space, another artist provided all that and more, and he first came to me by the unlikely medium of television.
Playing Guitar with His Teeth (I)
As its slogan said, the weekend started there. Ready, Steady, Go! was blasting out of the TV in the kitchen, but I was doing something in another room, one of those tasks that you can’t leave before it’s completed or I would have gone to look very much sooner. An electric guitar had started the intro to a song I’d never heard before, a long rolling, melodic riff, and the guitar was brilliant. My first guess might have been Jeff Beck. It had all the power and attack of Beck, but also a warmth that he never approached. A voice that I didn’t recognise cut in singing. Not a great voice, not Otis Redding by any means, but a voice with a definite appeal, and one whose owner had listened a lot to Bob Dylan’s phrasing. The guy seemed to be singing a song about having shot his woman and being on the lam to Mexico.
‘Mick, quick. Come and look at this!’ Joy from the kitchen.
‘Just coming.’ Irritably, I still had to disengage from whatever task was at hand.
‘You’ve really got to see this guy.’
‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’
‘He’s got hair like you and Bob Dylan.’
The music sounded magnificent, but the first guitar solo was starting. In those days songs were generally not too long. With the exception of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘McArthur Park’, three minutes tops. Joy administered the coup de grâce. ‘And he’s playing the guitar with his teeth.’
‘With his teeth?’ I dropped what I was doing. Enough was enough. I sped to the kitchen and c
aught my first glimpse of Jimi Hendrix just as he was finishing ‘Hey Joe’.
The Highest Percentage of Social Deviants
The band had a name. The Social Deviants. It came from an article I’d read in the Observer about how the London Borough of Tower Hamlets – the new cheesy County Hall name for our manor – had a higher per capita percentage of social deviants than anywhere else in the country. Almost from the moment I thought it up, I hated the name Social Deviants. I think I was excited for long enough to sell it to the boys in the band, but then realised I’d made a terrible mistake. It was just so damned hard to say. In situations where being a rock band was more than enough to earn one a beating from lorry drivers or the constabulary, it didn’t improve matters to come out with some bloody silly group name that implied that one was not only a long-haired poof, but also some child-molesting, axe-murdering junkie pervert. ‘Did you say Social Deviants, sunshine? You taking the piss?’ Thus, over the course of time, it became shortened to the Deviants and, among the hard core, just the Devies.
Not only did we have a name, but we had a guitar player who’d actually showed up for more than three rehearsals. His name was Clive Maldoon, a South London boy who wanted to be either Pete Townshend or Roy Wood of the Move. Clive was an enthusiastic if uncouth youth, which fortunately meant that he was infinitely loyal to the worst impulses of rock & roll, which I happily indulged. We also acquired a drummer who proved bizarre even by our standards. Benny was a born-again Zionist. He wore mohair suits and bow ties, and idolised Joe Morello, the drummer with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, which meant that his idea of psychedelic percussion was constantly to shift from time signature to time signature, a demented exercise that caused Pete (also a closet modern jazzer) to do things to his bass that might have been Charlie Mingus, but were more likely sheer incompetence, while Maldoon slammed out all the feedback that his yobbo heart desired. Ralph had unfortunately returned to Newcastle for the benefit of his health, so no keyboard buffered the mania. In these modern times, which have seen the likes of Trent Reznor and Thurston Moore, this might sound like a perfectly viable recipe for success. Back in the Summer of Love, though, just about everyone hated us, and I’ll freely admit that we served up plenty to hate. If the sound wasn’t ugly and intrusive enough, or the raps sufficiently offensive, there was always the Social Deviants’ lightshow.
It had been impossible to keep Alex Stowell out of the band. When he discovered that the Social Deviants ‘didn’t need a harmonica player’, Alex decided he was going to be the lightshow. First in his room in Martin’s house, and then in the rehearsal cellar under mine, he went to work with industrial-strength lightbulbs, strange reflectors, what looked like bits of old telephone switchboards, sheets of plywood and a mile or more of wires of different gauge and colour, doing a passable impression of a B-movie mad scientist.
At first we were quite convinced that all Alex was going to achieve was his own electrocution, but slowly the chaos was compacted until he had the mechanism relatively portable and ready for the stage. If he had learned anything from the giant sphere of vending-machine cups, it was that his inventions should at least fit through the door. In its finished form, the Stowell lightshow consisted of a large box like an amplifier, which contained all the relays and what-have-you to run the system. Two huge boxes, some five feet by three – his version of ‘speakers’ – housed a dozen 500-watt lamps. Where other lightshows were projected behind the band, and sought to synthesise some mellow psychotropic experience, Alex aimed these blinding beams directly into the retinas of the audience and synthesised something akin to advanced brainwashing by the KGB. In the middle of it all stood Stowell himself, right there on stage, like a red-bearded Borg, with wires and electrical contacts attached to his hands, playing this arcing, crackling guitar-like unit of his own creation.
To everyone’s amazement, this unlikely combo actually went out and played in public. Happenings at the Roundhouse, some odd experimental gigs at the Marquee and Pink Floyd’s efforts at All Saints’ Hall were enough to convince a few club owners and college social secretaries to take a chance with this new underground thing. It seemed vaguely fitting that we should open for the Creation, an art-mod band, third-string variation on the Who, riding high with their quasi-hit ‘Painter Man’, whose act featured energetic spray painting of backdrop canvases instead of smashing their instruments. The East London speed-freaks who had come along to see the Creation didn’t seem to mind us too much. Maybe we weren’t too good, but what the fuck? At the other extreme, whoever hired us to open for Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band was either a moron or a bastard, because it almost resulted in us being terminated with extreme skinhead prejudice.
It was somewhere down in the hinterlands of the South London suburbs, at some old palais de danse that actually had functioning curtains. We probably should have had more sense than to take the gig in the first place, but a gig was a gig. Washington, although he never really made it on record, had one of the top live bands in the country, playing mainly covers of Stax and Motown, to a huge and fanatical following of skinheads who greeted their hero with their very own ‘Sieg heil’, near-Nazi chant.
‘Gee-no!’
‘Gee-no!’
‘Gee-no!’
‘Gee-no!’
A rabble-rousing black DJ introduced us. ‘And now, a big hand for . . . the Social Deviants!’
The curtains opened and just one look was all it took. The skinheads saw us in our self-invented hippie outfits and didn’t hesitate. Straight at the stage, at us – like one of those Chinese Red Army human waves out of the Korean War. Have you ever seen a drummer wrap his arms around his entire kit, pick it up and run? Not easy, but Benny accomplished it. As the singer, I was lucky; I may have been closest to the lynch mob, but I had no equipment to save, and even a microphone stand with which to defend myself. This was Benny’s last show as a Deviant. He might have entertained fantasies of joining the Israeli army, but to be lynched by skinheads was definitely not part of his agenda.
Whether this incident was the trigger or not, Benny went and was quickly replaced by Russell Hunter, a curly-haired chemical adventurer whom I found via contacts at UFO, and who would remain more or less on the drum stool for the first full phase of the Deviants, then go on to do his time with the Pink Fairies in all of their incarnations; he would also become the bane of my life for the next three years. Initially Russell was a definite step forward. He was a more conventional rock drummer than Benny, if coming straight from the Keith Moon school could be defined as conventional. He also took an instant, if amused, dislike to Clive Maldoon, saddling him with the nickname ‘Grobber’. But, most important, he seemed unfazed by the idea of joining a band who ‘can’t fucking play’.
The ‘can’t fucking play’ accusation was tossed at the Social Deviants over and over again, until it became one tired bloody mantra. Of course we couldn’t play, you retard sons-of-bitches, but we made one hell of a ragged and magnificent din. Who set the goddamned rules, anyway? This was the Sixties and rules were being smashed right, left and centre. Cutting-edge performance art had the Living Theater, and the legendary Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who amputated pieces of himself for the paying customers, and supposedly bled to death after hacking off his own penis; and Otto Muehl, who killed poultry and tossed teargas into his audiences. Who was taking it upon themselves to decide that the Social Deviants were somehow not deserving of a hearing? The world of rock & roll, despite its pretensions to hell raising, exposed itself as tiresomely conservative, with extremely limited criteria of what was ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
Playing Guitar with His Teeth (II)
I knew I couldn’t survive without seeing Jimi Hendrix live, and when I read in the Melody Maker that he was going to play at the Marquee, I knew I had to be there, come hell or high water. Hendrix had already played at the Bag O’ Nails, and, according to local rock gossip, had completely freaked out Jeff Beck, motivating him to phone Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton immedia
tely and tell his fellow guitar gods that he’d just seen the end of the world as they knew it.
Of course, Beck eventually calmed down, and Townshend and Clapton were not instantly consigned to the labour exchange, but that still didn’t preclude the fact that a dramatic stranger had arrived in town, with a potential majesty to rival that of Charlie Parker, Robert Johnson or even Elvis Presley.
On the appointed night I arrived at the Marquee in what I figured was plenty of time to be assured of getting in, but already the line was halfway down Wardour Street. All the usual suspects were hustling pills to the waiting crowd, just like when the Who had played their residency, only now acid was being offered as a new and radical alternative to SKF Dexedrine and French Blues. I knew the capacity of the club, and the situation looked hopeless. The crowd on the street could fill the place twice over. So what could a poor boy do? I decided the best thing was to go into the Ship, the pub that during the day was the watering hole of the British movie industry, and which, at night, served as an annex to the Marquee. Perhaps with a pint in front of me I could rationalise this crushing disappointment in the making.
The Ship is a long, narrow pub with a bar that runs half its length and then curves around to the wall. The seats next to where the bar meets the wall have always been recognised as the best in the house. They give the occupant uninterrupted eye contact with the bartender, a clear view of who is coming in and out and an area of defensible space in which it is hard to be bothered by unwanted conversationalists. All in all, this was an ideal place for Jimi Hendrix to be sitting, should he have wanted a quiet drink before his set at the Marquee. Ideal it might have been, but it took me totally by surprise to find that the man himself was actually seated there, with the hair, the scarves, the jewellery and wearing the black Victorian hussar’s jacket from the famous photographs by Gered Mankowitz, or one very much like it. He was talking to an attractive blonde, and was protected by a four-man phalanx of burly roadies and minders.
