Happy 40th, Glam Rock! My 1972 Diary, September.

Happy 40^th, Glam Rock!  My 1972 Diary

September 1^st

Bought Alice Cooper poster at antique bicycle shop in C[arnaby] Street.

[I remember the poster, but why in a bicycle shop? Those crazy Carnaby Street hippies!]

September 2^nd

Came through London and went to Olympia DIY Ex. Ran out of money. Bought Masai statue though.

[My parents loved the Ideal Home Exhibition. Whether that was "DIY Ex" or not I can't remember. Dad also used to go to Olympia for a big electronics fair we always called the Ideal Ohm Exhibition too.  In those pre-credit card days it was quite easy to run out of money, and dad did. Please note it wasn't me that bought the Masai statue, a two-headed, bright magenta sandalwood monstrosity that scared the daylights out of visitors for years to come. I seem to remember we actually ran out of said money in an Angus Steak House, where we had to hurriedly cancel an order after the soup course and flee.]

September 7^th.

School's back again. And School's Out is now number 11. Big drops.

September 8^th.

I prithee, gentle Samaritan, abolish homework and Sweet and Slade.

[I know I'm celebrating Glam Rock, but I'm me. And anything that could possibly threaten T. Rex in the charts got deprecated.]

September 11^th.

Heavy sounds regale the chart! Up with Mott the Hoople, Alice and T Rex and whoever else. Sink the Stones!

[I don't know what the Stones had done to me, as the album that year was the immense Exile on Main Street. Perhaps I meant something else. If I was thinking of the sublime Rocks Off, Shame on me.]

September 19^th.

Ziggy Stardust for Chief Sewage Inspector! He's insulted Marc.  [Mary] Whitehouse thinks Alice is insulting.

[I think that was the interview where David Bowie called Marc Bolan "prissy and fey and engrossed in his own image", which even at the time I thought was a case of pot/kettle/black.  Mary Whitehouse was a Campaigner for Decency who never did grasp the difference between Art and Having Low Morals. She was the PMRC of her day.]

September 23^rd.

Got tickets for Lindisfarne!

[I was becoming all grown up! Phew, rock and roll!]

Rolling Stones do krispies

A broke sixties Rolling Stones did ads, apparently.

This one could have easily been a single, if you substituted something sufficiently southern and swampy for Rice Krispies.



Polk salad, maybe. Whatever polk salad is.

Happy Birthday, Brian Jones

Today was Brian Jones' birthday.





One of the most influential rock stars of all time.  Someone who understood both his influences and the effect on his influencees.

Spot the Difference

Funny what you learn on the interwebs. On this thread I learned that the cover of It's Only Rock and Roll




is based on a famous picture of a Nazi procession

Yep, so it is.

Who knew? Then again the cover was by Guy Peellaert, who appeared to think all the Rolling Stones were Nazis. He painted them in a famous scene in Rock Dreams that I was going to put here but thought better of it, since it's edging towards illegality these days. But since they knew that's what Peellaert thought of them, why did they ask him to do the cover of IORR? Assuming I've got the dates right. Of course it's entirely possible none of them knew how he'd come up with the arrangement of figures for the cover.

What a beautiful buzz

From Shine a Light, the Rolling Stones live with Jack White. Loving Cup is one of my favorite Stones tracks and this is a nice version which seems to gain added Stoniness from the non-Stones member. I don't know how White does this - older musicians seem to love having him around, and he seems to add something special to them. He's a musician's musician who's popular with the crowd as well, I guess.


(Edit: Actual clip is now unavailable.)

In this case, a lot of the thrill is seeing how happy he is to play with the Stones. Getting a smile from Jagger, a signal to go into the coda from Keef, it makes his night and in turn he makes mine. Dig the accents - Mick sings the first line, Jack takes the second in perfect Jaggerese, which seems to set off some sort of accent-one-upmanship in Jagger. I suppose it doesn't take much with him, but it was odd to hear a little bit of Boston in amongst all that...that...that whatever-it-is accent he sings this in.

If they'd sung the whole of Exile, I'd have been an even happier camper.

Out of Mars Bars

One of my favorite blogs tackled the Rolling Stones Redlands bust recently.

In 1967 the police busted the Rolling Stones at Redlands, Keith Richards' beautiful country estate. Among other things, they found Marianne Faithfull wrapped in a fur rug but otherwise naked. They also found a small quantity of speed, for which Jagger and Richards were convicted of drug possession. The story put about at the time was that MJ and MF had been engaged in chocolatey-goodness-flavored hanky-panky with a Mars Bar. (English Mars Bar, not American. More like an American Milky Way, which is different from an English Milky Way.)

I found this (later) comment from Marianne's biography interesting:

"The Mars Bar was a very effective piece of demonizing. Way out there. It was so overdone, with such malicious twisting of the facts. Mick retrieving a Mars Bar from my vagina, indeed! It was far too jaded for any of us even to have conceived of. It's a dirty old man's fantasy... a cop's idea of what people do
on acid!"

So for a rock band in 1967, speed was normal but shennanigans with Mars Bars were a dirty old man's fantasy – a very revealing comment on the mores of the time.

The full article is on Another Nickel In The Machine here, and there is a lovely picture of the World in Action program where Jagger discussed drugs and other pressing issues with such establishment figures as William Rees-Mogg (the editor of the Times) and the Bishop of Woolwich.

The incidents were parodied in the Rutles movie All You Need is Cash. Unfortunately the Rutles clip is not available on YouTube, so you might take a look at this one instead. This is on the evils of tea.



Is fiction always more fun than the real thing? Probably.

Here's the Rutles' fake headline.



And here's the real headline, being carried by the real Marianne.

Keith Richards had this to say: "The fur rug - yes. The Mars Bar no. We were out of Mars Bars."

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