by Mick Farren
The man certainly had his wardrobe together, although I was one of the few who realised that he copped the ensemble, the black leather and floppy white Mexican wedding shirts, direct from Gene Vincent – the all-time king of rock rebels and booze fighters. The shirts were Jim’s real innovation. They looked Byronic or maybe Erroll Flynn, and they did a lot to hide an incipient beer gut. It was only later that I discovered Morrison and Vincent had struck up a bar-buddy relationship in Los Angeles, hanging out together in a joint called the Shamrock at the Silverlake end of Santa Monica Boulevard, in what would turn out to be the final years of both their lives.
Long before the idea had even been mooted that the Doors might come to town, I’d listened to the records and even seen the clip of them doing ‘Light My Fire’ on the Ed Sullivan Show, where Jim tauntingly sang the line ‘girl, we couldn’t get much higher’ that the Sullivan censors had specifically vetoed; then, at the end of the song, he fell into a static flounce, the golden iconoclast, holding the vocal mike and its trailing cable like an electric bullwhip. From the very first album, simply entitled The Doors, I had been painfully aware that Jim’s poetry was well in advance of mine, and that I’d need to work extremely hard to surpass what he had already achieved. Then, of course, the bastard had to drop dead, so I could never enjoy the satisfaction of pulling level. Another area in which I knew Jim was ahead of me was the creation of the self-obsessed and self-indulgent myth that genius is pain.
When word began to circulate that not only the Doors, but also Jefferson Airplane were coming to London and would be playing at the Roundhouse, a ripple of excitement ran through the hippie community. Among the Deviants and everyone we knew, the attitude was: be there or be square. Everyone was determined to see the two most important Californian practitioners of the new music. At the same time, a furious bout of ugly infighting ensued over who would promote the show. Unaware, however, of these dubious politics, and only knowing that Steve Sparks had ensured we’d be on the guest list and have access to all areas, I paid off a cab, walked up to the door of the Roundhouse and rather grandly announced, ‘I’m on the Doors’ guest list.’
I said this to soon-to-be writer Jenny Fabian, a well known groupie of the era, who usually commanded the Middle Earth box office, but on this night was overseeing access to the Roundhouse. I suspected Jenny wasn’t overly fond of me, and indeed this was confirmed in the March 2000 issue of the rock magazine Mojo where she wrote, ‘In the 60s I was apt to steer clear of Mick Farren and his noisy anarchic group the Deviants. For a start, I didn’t like the filthy noise they made, and there was something dark and angry about Farren with his wild black frizzy hair.’ Never one to suffer grandeur gladly, Ms Fabian immediately burst that bubble. ‘You’re on Steve Sparks’ guest list.’
‘There’s a difference?’
‘Not really.’
‘So?’
‘So get inside and stop showing off.’
Showing off, however, was the order of the evening, and a good deal of dressing up had taken place among the radical fashion-plates who packed the former railroad shed. It was not only a night to see, but also one on which to be seen; the alternative society at its most social. Among the first figures I ran into was Richard Neville, in flowing, quasi-medieval velvet and a rather fine macramé belt, accompanied by the beautiful Louise Ferrier. Moments later I spotted a character known only as Jesus, who, with his flowing blond locks and spotless white robe, looked exactly like a Pre-Raphaelite Messiah, lacking only the traditional beard. Jesus was one of those freaks who seemed to exist in no other context except mass gatherings. Where he came from, where he went to afterwards and how he survived were a total mystery. He had no visible means of support, no past and maybe no future. Usually of benign countenance and disposition, he didn’t seem too happy about the Doors; something was definitely distressing him. On a bootleg album of the show, a voice can clearly be heard at one point berating Morrison for being a ‘fucking carnivore’. I have always speculated that it was the voice of Jesus.
I had decided to strut my own style in black pants and shirt, and a yellow velvet gunfighter jacket I considered pretty damned cool. Unfortunately Tony and Boss, who’d made it into the Roundhouse sometime during the afternoon delivering a back-up organ that Sparks had wanted for the Doors, had, with their mission completed, both dropped a tab of acid. They decided I looked like Sooty, the irritating television glove puppet with yellow and black fur, who was huge among pre-school viewers. Cracking up at their own psychedelic wit, the two addled roadies started singing the theme from The Sooty and Sweep Show.
‘Sooty – ever so naughty, Sooty . . .’
Heads turned, people were beginning to look.
‘Get the fuck away from me, you maniacs!’
Unfortunately all evening they flatly refused to get the fuck away from me, and any time merriment flagged for my tripped-out road crew, the Sooty gag reasserted itself. I was never able to wear that damned jacket again without thinking about the wretched puppet.
The first general impression was that the Doors were theatrical and Airplane were untidy. The backdrop for the Doors was a wall of tall monoliths – cleanly matched black Acoustic amplifiers, each with a pale-blue, top-end horn mounted in the cabinets. The Airplane’s gear looked like mismatched luggage, piled up for pure function rather than to impress the masses. The Doors’ sense of theatre was also greatly enhanced by the fact that they were being filmed by Jo Durden-Smith of Granada TV for the early rock-u-mentary The Doors Are Open. Bathed in unnatural brightness by the intense television lights, and surrounded by crews recording their every move with heavy, old-fashioned outside-broadcast cameras, they appeared important. In total contrast, the Airplane played in camouflaged gloom created by the Joshua Lightshow that they’d brought with them from San Francisco.
Maybe I was prejudiced, but Jefferson Airplane came as something of a let-down. Although Russell totally disagreed with me, I found their sound thin and folky measured against their records. Grace Slick and Marty Balin’s voices failed to blend the way they did in the studio, the band seemed less tight and, much as I adored Grace Slick doing ‘White Rabbit’ – and I still consider it one of the all-time great rock & roll tunes – the live version that night totally lacked the power of the classic single. The Doors, on the other hand, seemed louder, tighter and closer to what I’d been led to expect by their records.
Backstage, Morrison had looked tired and a little bemused, a deer caught in the headlights, burned out by all the people attempting to engage him in meaningless conversation, but when he sauntered onstage fourth in line behind the other three Doors, the impact of his charisma was immediate. His most outrageous excesses were still in front of him and, although a little overweight, he came on as boyish, brooding and arrogant, both seductive and confrontational, the consummately confident rock star in the Elvis Presley tradition. Both hands on the mike, one foot back, one forward, resting his weight on the stand. The pose had also been borrowed from Gene Vincent, and would later be adopted and mutated by Iggy, John Rotten, Patti Smith, Stiv Bators and a hundred other punk lead singers in the decades to come.
I really don’t remember the songs Jim did that night or the sequence in which they were performed. I know the set included ‘Light My Fire’, ‘Break On Through’, ‘Five to One’, ‘Back Door Man’, ‘When the Music’s Over’ and the Brecht/Weill ‘Alabama Song’ (Whisky Bar) that Jim had learned from the records of Lotte Lenya. I know the Doors performed ‘The End’, their epic of reptilian patricide and oedipal incest, but did they do ‘Twentieth Century Fox’ or ‘Moonlight Drive’? That’s lost in the winds of time. As I stood in a privileged vantage point, at one side of the stage, behind one of the PA stacks, I was as magnetised as the humblest fan. By far the majority of the audience ate out of his hand, and I was happy to see that those who balked were the same judgmental prig-hippies who were always in my face.
I will admit that some of his histrionics were overdone and gauche. The c
ollapse on the stage at the end of ‘The Unknown Soldier’ was less than plausible. James Brown pulled off his heart-attack routine as a glorious put-on. Jim took himself just too damned seriously and probably needed a couple of roadies to start calling him Sooty. A petulant demand that the TV lights be turned off halfway through the first show also stretched his rebel credibility. He could hardly have been taken by surprise at the Granada crew and its massive cameras. As the finished broadcast would reveal, the same crew had been following his every public move since the Doors had landed at Heathrow, and that he now made an issue of them like some bratty little prince struck me as both unrealistic and undignified. And then there was the now-fabled shaman dancing. We who’d been raised on Mick Jagger’s prancing and Pete Townshend’s windmill really weren’t buying it. The guy wasn’t a natural mover, and like so many white rockers of his generation, Morrison appeared not to have studied what was right under his nose, or at least on his television. A crash course in Jackie Wilson, Marvin Gaye or the aforementioned Godfather of Soul would have instantly put a stop to his quasi-mystic cavorting.
Despite these reservations, I still came away from the Doors’ show almost as thoughtful as when I’d left Bob Dylan, what now seemed like decades earlier. Jim Morrison wasn’t a significant world-class innovator in the same league as Dylan or Hendrix, but he had advanced the marriage of music and poetry a few significant notches. He had lengthened and expanded the potential of the lyric specifically to tap a more literate heart of rock & roll darkness and give a name to the beast caged in the heart of the city. I was still learning the names, but if nothing else, Jim could goad me to try harder and, in the company I was keeping, God knows I needed that.
You Pretty Things
I’m not sure why the Pretty Things took a shine to us. Maybe they saw us as akin to what they’d been a few years earlier – or maybe they just liked the cut of our surly jib. I don’t recall the exact details of how the two bands started going out together as a double bill, usually booked by some club promoter or college social secretary looking more for the promise of mayhem than music, but I’m certain that happenstance had a hand in it. The most likely genesis is that we were accidentally billed together a couple of times and decided we liked the situation and wanted to do more of it.
The Pretty Things had the double-edged reputation of having almost been the Rolling Stones, and very little that the Deviants could do could top their reputation for unfettered excess. They’d made three classic singles, ‘Rosalyn’, ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ and ‘Midnight to Six’, but, like Van Morrison and Them, they lacked that certain teen-appeal needed to move them into the elevated pop pantheon. Whereas the Stones cultivated a similar unkempt, Neanderthal danger, they still had Brian Jones and Mick Jagger, cute as all hell, no matter how they scowled and snarled. The Pretties, on the other hand, were much more convincing cavemen. The Stones original malchick manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, had been able to launch the massively effective ‘Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?’ PR campaign because, although it would undoubtedly bring shame upon the family, marriage to Mick or Brian – or maybe even the boyish and big-eared Keith Richards – could still remain a fluttering concept in a girlish heart. This was never the case with the Pretties. Their overall demeanour hinted more at assault and cannibalism than at scandalous matrimony. Even singer Phil May, handsome as any Stone, couldn’t save the Pretties from the reputation that always preceded them.
We came upon the Pretty Things in their second, psychedelic incarnation, when the ensemble consisted of veterans Phil May and Dick Taylor, plus Wally Allen on bass, John Povey on keyboards and, of course, Twink, recently defected from Tomorrow, who had replaced the original Pretties’ drummer Viv Prince, who’d become too convivial to continue as a musician. On paper, a show at which the Deviants opened for the Pretties seemed a viable idea; the young pretenders setting the mood of chaos for the old atrocity hands. Abandon aesthetic judgement, and let’s get to it. Unfortunately, as time passed, we began to grasp just how much we could get away with.
At the outset the formula was innocent enough. The Deviants, bowing to the Pretties’ acknowledged pre-eminence, would kick off the show, playing tunes from our album like a proper rock band. With that duty dispatched, we would launch into our mutated version of the Velevet Underground’s ‘Sister Ray’, which went down so well with speedfreaks, but tended to disturb or even enrage music lovers. This was the signal for the Pretties to start moving onto the stage to close the set with what would euphemistically be called a ‘jam’. After a decent interval for the consumption of alcohol, the whole deal would start again. The Pretty Things would take the stage, play a number of tunes – again like a proper rock band – and would then launch into their free-form setpiece, a version of the Byrds’ ‘Why’. (Note that it was always someone else’s composition selected for mangling.) At this point the Deviants would charge onto the stage and elevate matters to full-scale tumult.
On occasion I’d wonder why the Pretties were so taken with all this chaos. As far as I was concerned, they were a proper rock band. They had an album out, S.F. Sorrow, a rock opera pre-dating Tommy by a year or more and a very serious work. With an artefact like that to promote, what made them risk their obvious goal of being accepted as serious artists and not just propagators of outrage, by engaging in all this mayhem? With hindsight, I realise that we didn’t work together all the time, and the Pretties played plenty of shows at which they could concentrate on the music, while the ones with us were their anarchic interludes that made it all worthwhile. These levels of chaos were great for the Deviants and their image of anarchy, so we didn’t worry too much what benefit the Pretties derived from them. The self-interest of the aspiring rock ’n’ roller rarely recognises boundaries.
The gig we played at Chelsea College was a prime example of just how few boundaries we did recognise, and it may well have established some benchmark in the molestation of an unsuspecting crowd. The specific boundary being challenged in Chelsea was part chemical and part culinary, and involved the thesis that eggs and LSD do not necessarily improve a rock & roll show, especially when added to the usual menu of booze, hash, a bit of speed and maybe a couple of mandies. The gig was to take place in the college refectory, canteen or whatever they called the large room where the students chowed down. It was right there on London’s King’s Road, a hometown show without any 200-mile drive afterwards. All we had to do was to get on and do it, and after that we could take a cab and go nightclubbing. At least, that was the plan, until the eggs and the acid came into the picture. Where the acid came from, I’m not sure. I’m not even sure which of us actually took it, except that it wasn’t me. The eggs, on the other hand, were right there waiting for us. About eight dozen of them. The canteen kitchen had been made into a makeshift dressing room for both bands – not an unusual occurrence at a college gig, but often a somewhat unwise decision. An industrial-strength catering facility can invite a considerable amount of looting on the part of both musicians and roadies. Usually, when a kitchen was turned over to multiple rock bands, most of the food and other perishables were locked up, battened down or generally stashed out of harm’s way. At Chelsea College, however, some cook, scullion, dishwasher or whatever had really fucked up. He or she had left out this huge mass of eggs, hundreds of the little organic spheroids in those impacted cardboard trays, a veritable monolith of poultry produce, standing unprotected on a stainless-steel counter. When Russell Hunter first saw them, he instinctively knew. ‘This spells trouble.’
The potential for trouble was compounded by the fact that, at any gig within spitting distance of the metropolis, one could count on a gang of supernumeraries all ready and willing to get onstage with the more usual suspects. These agents of disorder would include the aforementioned and still grossly convivial Viv Prince, possibly with ‘Legs’ Larry Smith (the drummer from the legendary Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and drinking companion of Keith Moon) and Steve Took, who, on rare occasions, mig
ht bring along a highly bemused Syd Barrett. Steve Peregrin Took – as he called himself – was then in an uncomfortable partnership with Marc Bolan in the prototype model of Tyrannosaurus Rex, the duo version of what would be the hit band T-Rex. Bolan and Took tended, back then, to squat cross-legged on the stage and augment their basic guitar and bongoes formula with all manner of toy instruments. The pair had commenced their career busking for hippies in the natural echo chambers of the pedestrian subways under Marble Arch, but with the backing of John Peel, and the cuddly charisma of Bolan’s newspaper smile, they had made records, found management and become highly successful among the bopping elf-lovers of hippiedom – the ones so full of happy-happy Toytown mysticism that they’d sooner die than brave an evening of the Deviants or the Pretty Things. Unfortunately Took was then in the process of kicking over the gossamer traces, and was determinedly hanging out with the bad boys. This resulted in an ultimatum from Marc and his management to cease playing with the likes of us, quit getting fucked up or be fired from the very lucrative pop venture. Took’s reaction was to get fucked up even worse than usual. Accordingly Bolan fired him and went on to be a teen idol, while Took became a permanent fixture among the Ladbroke Grove degenerate elite. Ironically both men died within a couple of years of each other, Bolan in a car crash and Took from choking on a cocktail cherry while drowsing on heroin.
Back at Chelsea College, however, with Took still alive and kicking, all commenced according to the formula. Immediately ‘Why’ was under way, Twink got up from his drums and headed for the front and centre mike. This actually didn’t make too much difference because his kit was immediately commandeered by Russell, Povey, Took, Sandy, Viv, ‘Legs’ Larry and maybe Phil, who then proceeded to provide a violently passable imitation of hostile natives in a Tarzan movie, pounding themselves to bloodlust frenzy. The guitarists, plus Wally on bass, isolated themselves, away from potential flying objects, and attempted to keep some measure of sound going.
