The Strange Angel

Now here’s a strange one. Like me, you have probably never heard of John Whiteside Parsons (1914-1952). Seems to have slipped out of the history books. Who was he ? The father of the space age and an acolyte of Aleister Crowley.

Briefly, the uneducated Parsons had deep knowledge of explosives and became a leading member of a gang known as the Suicide Squad, who began performing rocketry experiments, funded entirely from their own pockets, in an around Caltech in the 1930s, using junkyards to find spare parts.

When World War II arrived, the US military offered these maniacs funding and this strange gang of misfits evolved into the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), which manufactured the luinar and Mars landers and Voyager I and 2, and now employs 5,500 scientists on a budget of $1.4 billion.

It was Parsons work that produced stable rocket fuel that made the space age possible. But Parsons was equally interested in inner space and became a leading acolyte of the LA-based Crowley lodge, to whom he donated all his salary. This activism attracted the young pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard into his life, who took off with Jack’s girl and most of his money, supposedly for a business deal that never happened, and went on to found Scientology.

While working at Hughes Aircraft in the 40s, Parsons was stripped of his security clearance and almost prosecuted for passing classified papers to the Israelis, who was he hoping to get a rocketry gig from. He ended up doing small sfx for Hollywood movies and was killed in an explosion in his Pasadena backyard in 1952.

Appropriately, a crater on the darkside of the moon is named after him.

The full story is in a new book ‘Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons’ By George Pendle [Orion Books/Harcourt US}

This short account is drawn from Brian Doherty’s review: ‘The Magical Father of American Rocketry’ at www.reason.com. Doherty is the author of another interesting book: 'This Is Burning Man'

Also out there is: 'Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons' by John Carter, with an intro by Robert Anton Wilson.

There is a host of references to Parsons on Google, which contain complete transcripts of his extensive writings on occult matters.

INSIDE JOHN HIGGS: IT ALL CONNECTS

This rambling tale, centering on a bravura trio of books by John Higgs, begins in dramatic fashion. I'm sitting on a bar stool in the Lewes Arms when Adrian rushes through the door. Adrian is in his late '70s, went to art school in the '50s. He holds out this book and says you must read this - and then rushes out again. 

So I was plunged into the world of 'The KLF: Chaos, Magic and The Band who Burned A Million Pounds'. Next I caught sight of JH's recently published book 'Stranger Than We Can Imagine', an alternative view of the 20th century and requested a review copy. Finally came 'I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Tim Leary' which I devoured in about 48 hours. Now I'm trying to draw breath, explain what's happened to me and try and give you some introductory insights into three books which I consider to be of great value and import.

'What was my KLF book but a statement that five seemingly separate stories were, in a certain light, one bigger story? It was my way of saying that the stories of Bill Drummond, Robert Anton Wilson, Ken Campbell, Alan Moore and Doctor Who were parts of something larger, even if none of the characters in that story were aware of it.'

This is a perfectly pitched John Higgs quote. There is something going on here but you're note sure what it is. Are you Mr Jones. It certainly to do with connectivity, synchronicity, magical thinking, new perspectives and alternative angles on 'the truth' which is out there somewhere. Monsieur Higgs is very deft at interweaving and I am sure also at public speaking judging by his timetable of talks.

In case you haven't been introduced, Bill Drummond is one half of KLF, Robert Anton Wilson wrote the Illuminatus trilogy which Ken Campell later staged. Alan Moore is the uber-genius, Gandalfian figure who revolutionised the comic and graphic novel medium and Dr Who is a Time Lord (but you knew that).

The KLF long-story-short story is almost unbelievable. Drummond and  Jimmy Cauty found KLF which becomes a monstrous behemoth that strides the world of dance music, generating number ones across the planet, making millions. Disillusioned by their success, they then seek to remove every single trace of KLF from the internet and the world which they are quite successful at. But how to get rid of the filthy money. Simple: burn a million pounds.  All in all its a wonderful read. Full of juicy quotes, tit-bits of startling information, unusual conjunctions, challenging assertions. It will make your brain fizz.

Short intermission: KLF are or were Discordians, a belief system first popularised by Robert Anton Wilson. The Wikipedia entry is good entry point

Discordianism is a religion and subsequent philosophy based on the veneration or worship of Eris, a.k.a. Discordia, the Goddess of chaos, or archetypes or ideals associated with her. It was founded after the 1963 publication of its holy book, the Principia Discordia,^[1] written by Greg Hill with Kerry Wendell Thornley, the two working under the pseudonyms Malaclypse the Younger and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst. The religion has been likened to Zen based on similarities with absurdist interpretations of the Rinzai school, as well as Taoist philosophy. Discordianism is centered on the idea that both order and disorder are illusions imposed on the universe by the human nervous system, and that neither of these illusions of apparent order and disorder is any more accurate or objectively true than the other. There is some division as to whether it should be regarded as a parody religion, and if so to what degree.

The golden apple symbolizes the eristic principle (disorder). The pentagon symbolizes the aneristic principle (order). 

'Stranger Than We Can Imagine' is a lengthy and studious work from which I took copious notes. Summarising its many levels and subjects is difficult but here goes. 

There is, say Higgs, 'a moment for every generation when memory turns into history...the right time to take stock.' He describes his journey as an 'alternative route through the landscape of the last century.'

The book is constructed of 15 chapters of around 20pp each, which follow an overlapping chronological sequence: Relativity, Modernism, War, Individualism, Id, Uncertainty, Science Fiction, Nihilism, Space, Sex, Teenagers, Chaos, Growth, Postmodernism, Network.
Every one is introduced with an unusual and striking double-page photo that strikes an eerie chord: 

'Science Fiction' has a picture from the set of Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' the girl actress inside the metal girl suit with her helmet off, drinking through a straw from a glass held by a white lab-coated technician. On her other side a man in a suit and tie, holds a hair dryer that is blowing air down into the cracks in her suit. 'Individualism' has a bunch of five sturdy outdoor explorer types posing in front of three tents. The second from left is Aleister Crowley, an image of him which is miles away from the classic caricature.

What is genuinely interesting is that in that period 1900-1912  and post-War the worlds of both science, art and culture were transformed by what Higgs describes as 'genuinely new, unexpected and radical new ideas: atomic science, the birth of relativity and later quantum were being paralleled by The Rites of Spring and the works of Kandinsky, Cubism, Duchamp, Joyce et al . What's more these new ideas seemed to be pointing in a  broadly coherent direction.

Underlining the role of chance, this memorable paragraph about the event that led to World War 1 is a stunner: 

'The initial shooting that led to the conflict was itself a farce. The assassin in question was a Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. He had given up his attempt to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand of Austria followng a failed grenade attack by Princip's colleague and gone to a cafe.' Whilst he was standing outside 'by sheer coincidence the Archduke's driver made a wrong turn into the same street and stalled the car in front of him. This gave the surprised Princip the opportunity to shoot Ferdinand and his wife Sophie... Over 37 million people died in the fallout from that assassination.'

In the work of writers, musicians and artists there were 'persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference' by film makers (Eisenstein), musicians (Schoenberg, Stravinsky), writers (Joyce, Eliot and Pound). A big theme that emerged was 'no single perspective can be considered correct or true.' Knowledge is dependent on the perspective we take.
'Einstein and the Modernists' appear to have separately made the same leap at the same time... [and] 'found a higher framework'.

'There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths'- Nietzsche (1878)

JH incidentally puts forward the hypothesis that Duchamp's 'Fountain' was actually the idea (and work) of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

In the 'War' chapter, Higgs describes the concept of emperors as being 'one of the great constants in human history.' Within a few short years they are swept away in the carnage of World War 1.  Again the 'removal of single, absolute, fixed perspectives.'. Universal suffrage appeared in much of Europe and democracy acquired its own multiple perspective.

What follows is the birth of 'individualism' with Aleister Crowley singled out as a leading influential figure, who considered us to be 'self-centred rational agents with free will.' Mussolini coins the terms 'fascism' and later Ayn Rand  invents 'objectivism'.

'Id' begins with the premiere of the 'Rites of Spring'. Picasso, Proust, Gertrude Stein, Ravel, Debussy and Cocteau were all there. 'The wild and irrational premiere', says Higgs, was 'followed by global descent into total war' in what he later calls ' a perfect storm of technology, nationalism, individualism and the political rise of psychopaths.'

'Uncertainty' leads us to logic and paradox, Bertrand Russell and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Niels Bohr, one of the father's of quantum mechanics' says: 'Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.' One of the most surprising discoveries about the atom was that it was mostly empty.The sub-atomic world was 'a fuzzy sea of guesswork and speculation' which could be changed by the very act of observation. A particle could be in two places at once. 

These discoveries were unsettling. Higgs writes; 'Just as our conscious minds were only a bubble of rationality in a larger unconscious mind... so the physical world of matter and comprehensible cause and effect was just a hiccup in a larger reality....Our world, both mind and matter, was a small bubble of coherence inside something so alien, we haven't even been able to find adequate metaphors to describe it.'

'Science Fiction' as a term was named in the 1920s. J.G. Ballard considered it 'the last genre capable of adequately representing present day reality.' 

Higgs spends some space and time discussing Carl Jung's 1959 book on UFOs, written when he was 83. The first sighting by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 had triggered of a wave of other reports of sightings of alien craft. People had always seen, lights, gods, angels and visions in the sky but the emergence of this new 'alien' version of the 'other' intrigued Jung. he thought it represented 'a huge change in the collective unconscious. 'UFOs to Jung,' say Higgs, 'were a projection of Cold War paranoia and the alien nature of our technological progress. He recognised that the phenomenon told us more about our own culture than it did about alien spaceships.'

'Nihilism' is a rich vein in post-war times. After Hiroshima and the Holocaust, existentialism thrived - 'life is meaningless and the experience of existing in the present moment is all that matters'. The gang's all here: Alex Trocchi, Beckett, Camus, Sartre and, in the US, The Beats, where it got mixed up with beatitudes, satori and other forms of eastern mysticism. The 'I Ching' and the 'Tibetan Book of the Dead' were consulted. It was about the here and now, loss of ego and a connection with something larger than the self. Higgs explores also Joseph Campbell's 'monomyth' 'The Hero's Journey' - his own invention that he projected onto the stories of the ages. Hello Star Wars!

'The Bomb' and 'Space'. The first begins with Russia's first nuclear test (August 1949) which triggered the space race, fuelled by weapons technology. Higgs interestingly focuses on the Russian space programme and Sergie Korolev its visionary architect. The Big K got the Sputnik up there (4th Oct 1957) and Gagarin in orbit by 12th April 1961 with much in between. When he died in 1966 the Russian space programme collapsed and the US became the ascendant.  

We also meet Marvel Whiteside Parsons, who loved blowing things up and became the co-founder of the US Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Did I mention that, during the same period, he was running an occult commune in Los Angeles based on Crowley's teachings. Also Werner von Braun, architect of the Nazi V2 rocket programme, built with slave labour, who was smuggled to the US in  Operation Paperclip and masterminded the US space programme.

'Sex' touches on Marie Stopes, suffragette and contraceptive pioneer, Betty Friedan and The Female Eunuch as well as the prosecutions of Henry Miller and 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and the fact that in 1974 the Paedophile Information Exchange was receiving funding from the Home Office. In 'Teenagers' there is talk of the growth of individualism, counter culture and Thatcherism.

'Chaos' begins with Lorenz's  mathematics, the 'butterfly effect' and the emergence of order in chaos. The wonderful Benoit Mandelbrot reveals that reality is fractal and chaotic. This Higgs links to James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis and the vision of earth and life working together as a self-regulating organism, life generating conditions for life. Gaia.

'Growth' examines the rise of corporations, hardwired to perpetual growth and the rise of the environmental movement. The uncomfortable truth is that Margaret Thatcher was the first world leader to acknowledge climate change, at the UN in 1989.

'Post -Modernism' came and went as did the New Age movement. 'Network' brings us to our globally connected world and the need to challenge individualism and corporate power. 'The millennial generation...understand that the most effective way to get on in such an environment is to co-operate.' Occupy and Anonymous are leaderless structure. 

Higgs believes that as the concept of an 'individual' has become more complicated to define (there are entire ecosystems inside the human biome); that our sense of 'self', of a single entity making rational decisions, is no more than a quirk of mind. 

He concludes: 'Perhaps the network will last as our defining model for as long as the imperial system did. If that is the case, then free-floating, consequence-ignoring individualism was a brief liminal moment in history a pause between breaths. The twentieth century will have been a rare time indeed...it was a glimpse of mankind at its worst, and at its best.'

Source: The Leary Project

'I Have America Surrounded' must be one of the great book titles ever. It is difficult to speak too highly of this amazing biography which has authority, insight and style. Actress Winona Ryder was his goddaughter and she gave a speech at his memorial service on 9th June 1996, reprinted in the book. She says Tim liked the idea of being the 'mad scientist' and that he lived a life of 'flat out epic grandeur'.

Like most others of my generation, Leary was a lighthouse figure whose beam touched us all when we too began conducting our own experiments with LSD in seaside bungalows but his legend became tarnished and muddied by allegations of him snitching to the authorities. The media turned him into a cartoon character which Leary played up to but this has overshadowed his genius, his humour, handsomeness and humanity. A genuine pioneer of the mind-altering world, he faced his own death with inquisitive enthusiasm and wonder.

The trajectory of his life: An only child, born (Oct 20th 1920) to an uptight mum and charming alcoholic rogue of a dad who disappeared when he was 14. Five years later. he enrolled at the prestigious West Point military academy where he got into trouble for illicit drinking. He refused to resign and was court martialled and 'sent to Coventry'. He endured nine months of this punishment before resigning. He then enrolled in the University of Alabama and, more by accident than design, started studying psychology. He was found spending the night in the girls' dormitory and expelled which meant he lost his draft deferment. 

He enlisted in the anti-aircraft artillery but had his hearing damaged as a result which prevented him being sent into combat. He completed his psychology degree before his discharge, moved to California (Sept 1946) and enrolled as a doctoral psychology student at Berkeley. He rose quickly and smoothly through the ranks and became director of the Kaiser Foundation Hospital (1954) and published nearly 50 papers in psychology journals. His meisterwork 'Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality'  - a method of categorising patients  based on their personality types - was highly praised and considered essential reading.

Leary married Marianne (12 April 1944) and they had two children (Susan and Jack). Cracks in their marriage, Leary took a mistress named Delsey and Marianne took her own life the day before Leary's 35th birthday (Oct 21st 1955). Leary married Delsey, honeymooned in Mexico, traveled to Spain and was divorced shortly afterwards. In Spain his whole life seemed to be falling apart and then he got so ill that he thought he was dying. Letting go of all his worries remarkably led to a full recovery, an experience Leary considered spiritual.
Shortly afterwards he was offered a job at the Harvard Center for Personality Research.

Here he met Richard Alpert and other like-minded souls and they discussed recent reports about 'magic mushrooms' with extraordinary properties. In August 1960, Leary and colleague traveled to Cuernavaca in Mexico where he ate psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. The slight change to the chemistry of his brain had altered his entire world. It was a pivotal moment in his life. He decided to dedicate his life to understanding the psychedelic experience.

On his return he set up the Harvard Psychedelic Research project. obtained a supply of psilocybin in the form of pink tablets from Sandoz Labs in Switzerland and wrote a proposal for 'A Study of Clinical Reactions to Psilocybin  Administered in supportive Environments'. A happy coincidence was that the 66-year old Aldous Huxley, author of 'Brave New World' was a visiting lecturer at nearby MIT and was happy to advise on the project. He considered Leary to be the ideal 'front man'' to explain the importance of psychedelics. He also introduced Leary to Dr Humphrey Osmond, the British psychologist who'd coined the word 'psychedelic' and used mescalin to treat alcoholics in Canada.       

Leary began by running psychedelic sessions with Beat writers, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg, who was an enthusiastic convert. Ginsberg first took it with Peter Orlovsky at Leary's house in 1960. This profound experience made him realise it was time to start a 'love and peace movement'.

Leary and Alpert set up a programme  to work with inmates in the Massachusetts prison system. The results appeared to show that recidivism rates amongst prisoners who had undergone psilocybin therapy had dropped from 70% to 10 percent. They also conducted similar experiments at Harvard Divinity School in order to compare the psychedelic experience with "true" religious ecstasy. 

In November 1961, Dr Leary was introduced to LSD. He wrote later that it was the most shattering experience of his life. The rest is history. LSD became illegal in 1966 and Leary  was described by Nixon as 'the most dangerous man in the world.

Leary's most famous soundbite came when he was one of the main star speakers at the legendary Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park (14th January 1967). he told the assembled crowd of 20,000: "The only way out is in, Tune in, turn on and drop out! Of high school, junior executive, senior executive. And follow me! The hard way!' 

Source: Timothy Leary Archives

[Interestingly, Wikipedia quotes a 1988 interview by Neil Strauss as the source for the fact that this quote was "given to him" when he had lunch with Marshall McLuhan at the Plaza Hotel in New York (Spring 1966). Higgs discusses their meeting but does not mention this. Rather he says McLuhan advised Leary to become a living advertisement for the positive benefits of the drug and that this could best be done by using one of Tim's greatest assets - 'his infectious smile.'
A third version about the friendship between the two men is found in an article by Leary's archivist Michael Horovitz that was published on Boing Boing in June 2014:

'Leary wrote: “The conversation with Marshall McLuhan got me thinking [that] the successful philosophers were also advertisers who could sell their new models to large numbers of others, thus converting thought to action, mind to matter.”'Inspired by McLuhan, Leary took LSD and devoted several days to creating a slogan. He claims he was in the shower when he came up with “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” ]

After declaring his candidacy for governor of California in 1970, Leary was arrested on marijuana possession and received a decade-long jail sentence. After several months inside, he managed to escape from prison with help from the Weather Underground, financed by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

He made it  first to Algeria, where he hung out with Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers, then Switzerland and then Afghanistan, where the DEA caught up with him in 1973 and brought him back to face American justice. He was eventual pardoned by Governor Jerry Brown in April 1976.

Amongst the many issues, campaigns and ideas that Leary embraced in later life was interstellar travel. Appropriate then that after he died (May 31st 1996), his ashes were sent into space in a Pegasus rocket (April 21st 1997) along with the ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry, space colony pioneer Gerard K. O'Neill and the rocket scientist Krafft Ehricke. It orbited the Earth once every 96 minutes for just over five years before re-entry on May 20th 2002.

The last word rests with Hunter S. Thompson, he said of Leary: "Tim was a Chieftain. He stomped on the terra, and he left his elegant hoof-prints on all our lives,"


See: http://jmrhiggs.blogspot.co.uk/

NME IS 60: DICK TRACY

[Left: Dick Tracy's first and only NME cover story, investigating record and tape piracy. July 22nd, 1978.

In this second post related to the publication of Pat Long’s ‘The History of the NME’ I would like extend my personal gratitude to him for taking the space to include mention of the freelance work I did for the NME between 1975 and 1983 as follows:

The very first story I had published in the NME

‘ Under the auspices of IPC, NME carried on the ethos, style and content of the underground press well past punk, up to the end of the decade and beyond.

In 1976, John May, an old friend of Kent's from Frendz began to contribute to the paper, both under his own name and a pseudonym, Dick Tracy. May's forte was serious investigative journalism and NME readers soon found lengthy and well-researched pieces on human cloning, the recently founded militant Animal Liberation Front, record piracy or the environment running alongside the usual interviews with Graham Parker, Thin Lizzy or Pink Floyd.

Elsewhere the magazine ran a regular drugs news and information column called, perhaps inevitably, 'The Inside Dope', and providing in-depth coverage of Operation Julie, in which undercover officers disguised as hippies provided surveillance evidence leading to the closure of industrial-scale LSD laboratories across Britain.

John May also worked with Ian MacDonald to produce a special four-page NME Guide to the Nuclear Age, a serious and chilling examination of the effects of a disaster at one of Britain's nuclear power stations which made the front of the magazine in June 1977. It was a bold and even foolhardy choice of cover, followed swiftly by a return to business as usual in the form of a Stranglers interview on the front of the following week's issue.

But May and MacDonald's investigation reflected the broad range of interests held by the people who produced this paper each week and the high regard with which they viewed their readers.

In 1980, Andrew Tyler left NME to set up the charity Animal Aid, while the paper played a large part in the formation and promotion of the renewed anti-Nazi and and-Racism movement in Britain.

I do not want to be nick-picky but its important to try and get the historical record straight as follows:

1. For some time back, before I arrived, the NME had carried some non-musical features on films, books and the like. Further such material also formed part of Thrills – a lively ever-changing section with a mix of news, weird and wonderful stories, cartoons etc. During my time this was first edited by Mick Farren, who got me onto the paper and was one of my great supporters. When Mick left, the section was taken over by Phil McNeill. Phil really took a leap of faith to support some of the stories and investigative pieces I did.

2. I was the first journalist on the paper who wrote about anything that wasn’t music, although I did stray into that area from time to time. [I did review a Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers gig/w. Siouxie and the Banshees at the Music Machine in 1977]

There was no tradition of investigative journalism in the paper’s history before. I was the first to investigate the music business, based on close reading of the music trades and my own research. For a time, I did a column called ‘The Biz’ by Shares Bono with others.

3. I invented and wrote the column ‘Inside Dope’ which appeared sporadically for many years. At that time, the police were busting individuals for even minute amounts of dope and many young people were being imprisoned for minor drug offences. I regularly took phone calls from anxious mums all over the country whose sons had been busted. This was the first and last time there was ever a regular drugs column in a national publication.

I also wrote the feature piece on Operation Julie [See below] which was a serious piece of work that matched and challenged the coverage of the trial carried in the mainstream press.

4. Re the ‘NME Guide to the Nuclear Age’: Ian McD was certainly sympathetic to what we were doing but it was Angus McKinnon who was the lead editor and ( I believe) did some writing on the project. The main part of text was written by myself and my colleagues from the Index of Possibilities – John Trux, Michael Marten and John Chesterman. The supplement was half and half about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy and covered the work of CND and Friends of the Earth. It was published just days before the notorious Windscale Inquiry over the proposed expansion of the reprocessing plant. It may not have helped sales but it was a major publicity blast for the anti-nuclear movement. Hats off to Nick Logan for going with it. It’s an iconic moment in the paper’ history.

5. Under Neil’s editorship, Andrew Tyler picked up the baton and wrote a steady stream of lengthy pieces on a wide range of important social and political issues. I had already written a string of pieces on the Animal Liberation Front and the Save the Whale movement in particular. On the back of the NME coverage, I was able to develop and launch an independent magazine ‘The Beast’ – one of the world’s first animal liberation mags. [SEE PREVIOUS POST]. Andrew did not found Animal Aid (it was started in 1977) but he did run it subsequently for many years.

6. One of the other main contributions I made to the paper was the film coverage, which I was initially in charge of.

A new section called ‘Sideswipe’ was created which was used for not only for films but also books and other cultural stuff. My first review – of the Arthur Penn western ‘The Missouri Breaks’ with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson – was published on June 19th, 1976.

Its hard to think of it now but, at the time, just before the launch of Star Wars, cinema audience attendance figures were in serious decline. The whole British film industry was concerned. As part of this new role, I was taken up to the IPC Board room for a lunch with IPC executives and representative of the leading film distributors in Britain. I was given a promise of access to all areas and first-run exclusive interviews and news. That’s how I got  a major interview with Spielberg on the release of Close Encounters of A Third Kind. [See below]

Many of the paper’s writers did film reviews, features and interviews as well. Mick interviewed Kenneth Anger and I think Tony Parsons met Sylvester Stallone, for instance. I also did a regular Teasers-type film column initially called ‘Screen Dreem’ and later ‘Silver Screen’, mainly about upcoming films, with material I gleaned from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

7. There is another book to be compiled of all the non-musical material in the paper, written by many writers. Bear in mind, many of the musicians were also politically involved.

8. As well as the better-known names, what made the NME such a great place to work at that time, was the number and variety of great writers

PREVIOUS POSTS:

NME: Adventures in the Music Press A previous memory dump about my time at the NME

NME: Tony Benyon and Th’ Lone Groover

TONY TYLER   First of a 4-part post

NICK KENT

CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY

DICK TRACY NME REPRINTS:

NME/The Stone With the Golden Arm              Keith Richard’s heroin trial

NME/ The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Chaos Exclusive first-run piece on the Sex Pistols film

NME/Alien Visions  Interview with Steven Spielberg

NME/Interview with Gilbert “Furry Freaks” Shelton

NME/Andrew Loog Oldham

NME/Plastic People of the Universe

NME/Richard Neville on Charles Sobhraj          First of 2-part post

NME/ Pink Floyd Pig

NME/Operation Julie

 

ROLLING STONES: PAST AND PRESENT

The happy coincidence of receiving and reading the newly- released paperback edition of 'Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones' by Robert Greenfield [Da Capo Press. £9.99] shortly before seeing the Scorsese documentary 'Shine A Light', at a 4:00 Saturday screening at the Duke of York's in Brighton with friend Manek and son Louis, has filled my heart and mind with things to say.
Greenfield, a class act, old-school music journalist, takes us back in time to the Villa Nelcotte in the South of France where, during the long hot summer of 1971, Keef (with Anita Pallenberg) sets up base to begin recording what proves to be the crucial Stones album -their dark masterpiece if you will - a portion of which was forged in the Villa's basement, which may well have been used for torture during the period when it was a regional Nazi HQ.

Night after night, band members troop over there from a string of surrounding villas, to wait to see whether Keef will emerge from the darkness and junk to come downstairs and make some magic happen. Most nights end in frustration. Mick Taylor is close to a nervous breakdown. Mick gets married and has a pregnant Bianca on his hands. The house is full of visiting junkies (a sad portrait of Gram Parsons here), petty criminals, bagmen constantly ferrying more junk. There are knives, guns, thieves and police. Our of this dark stew, a few flashes of silver are mined.

By now the Stones have become royalty. They can have anything the desire and are already able to marshall powerful political, financial and legal resources to keep their Renaissance court
intact and on the road - despite Keef's best efforts to bring the whole enterprise to its knees. Once more, he faces serious criminal charges, once more he and Anita escape the country by the skin of their teeth and once more, money changes hands, charges are dropped or changed to ones that carry lesser penalties. The entire band follow Keef to LA where the album is finally finished but they cannot tour until Keef (and Anita, now pregnant and using) undergo drug rehab in Switzerland. Not a pretty picture.

Greenfield concludes the saga with an examination of how this album became considered to be a masterpiece and brings the story right up date with a portrait of the Stones of today -mega rich, out-grossing every other music act in the world, earning further fortunes for five-minute photo-opportunities with corporate clients.

Which brings us neatly to Scorsese's movie 'Shine A Light', which eschews the darkness and concentrates on adding majesty and lustre. Marty, of course, loves the Stones from way back and had already made one of the great music concert films ever - 'The Last Waltz'. The documentary of the making of that film reveals in fascinating detail how Scorsese planned his shoot.

In this film, all that material is in the main movie, as his people and their people struggle to find agreement on the staging and the all-important set list. Scorsese plans to shoot two concerts, back to back, in the beautiful old Art Deco Beacon Theatre in New York rather than in a giant stadium, in front of an invited audience which includes Bill Clinton. This long black and white opening sequence builds the tension perfectly. Marty gets his set list but only scant minutes before the band is on stage.

What follows is a classic performance, beautifully and dramatically shot and edited. (According to Philip French's review in The Observer: Scorsese brought in eight major cinematographers using 18 cameras) The lighting is exquisite, the choreography sublime. Apart from brief archive cut-aways, we're there up-close and personal with the Stones and their extended band - backing singers, keyboards and horn section led by long-time Stones stalwart saxophone player Bobbie Keys.

The first thing to be said is the strangeness of the set. Given the size of the songbook, one would have to call the track selection eccentric.

There are three guest appearances: we could have done without Christine Aguilera and possibly also Jim White but Buddy Guy is a real star - what a voice, what magnetism. Keef is so impressed he gives Guy his beautiful back Gibson on stage, a gunslinger's tribute from one great to another.

The film has its genuinely thrilling moments when the blood stirs and small tears began trickling down my cheeks (yes I can admit that). For my generation, the Stones provided the soundtrack of our lives. Most fascinating of all are the bands' extraordinary faces on which their entire history is marked like a road map. Mick struts pouts and prances non-stop, Keef's killer chords set the pace while he gives out secret smiles, Charlie's drumming is crisp, powerful and immaculate and Ronnie looks as cool and taut as ever. At the end of the day - magnificent!

At the post-screening debrief at The Open House, we agreed that Scorsese should just spend the next 10 years filming every important band in this manner - the Zep would be a good start.

See Previous Postings:

The Stone With The Golden Arm, my story on Keef's heroin bust in Toronto, originally published in the NME.

Hear the interview with Nick Kent on the Audio Generalist, which includes some Stones material. Nick has written one of best ever essays on the Stones in his book 'The Dark Stuff.'

Footnotes and digressions:

1. Greenfield has also written 'STP: A Journey Through America with the Rolling Stones' plus biographies of rock promoter Bill Graham, Dead mainman Jerry Garcia and LSD prophet Timoth Leary.

2. Wikipedia says most of the film is taken from the second of the two performances. Includes complete track listing as follows. Performance begns with Jumpin' Jack Flash and ends with Satisfaction.

3. Short New Yorker piece about the recruitment of the audience for the film.

NME: Adventures in the Music Press

Dick Tracy's first and only cover story, investigating record
and tape piracy. July 22nd, 1978.


It was a recent weekend Guardian magazine profile of Tony Parsons that initially triggered all this off – a flood of memories. Tony, now a best-selling novelist and a regular columnist for The Mirror, was interviewed in connection with his just-published novel ‘Stories We Could Tell’ based on his time at the New Musical Express (NME). The least said about that the better. Paul Morley's review 'Those Weren't The Days' is right on the button I think.

My story begins back in the days of what was then called the ‘underground press’. I was part of Frendz magazine, one of a number of nationally-distributed haphazardly-produced mags and papers that documented the counter-culture of the period. It was here that I met Nick Kent who turned up and asked me if he could write some rock reviews for the papers. Good writers of any kind were hard to come by, particularly ones that didn’t want paying, and within a few weeks Nick was pumping out live and record reviews that immediately convinced that here was man with real talent. We became best mates

Within a few weeks it seemed, Nick was suddenly everywhere, hanging out with the Grateful Dead and Keith Richards. (He took me once to Richards house in Chelsea but he wasn’t in). I remember travelling down to Brighton with him on a coach with Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, hanging out in Wembley with the legendary San Fran rock band The Flaming Groovies (later seeing them live with Nick at their appearance at the legendary Iggy Pop gig at the Kings Cross cinema)

Frendz, in its last incarnation, was being designed in Osterley by Pennie Smith (later to acquire legendary status as a rock photographer par excellence for the NME) in her funky converted railway station pad, helped by our dear departed friend Kevin Sparrow. I remember Roxy Music being the big thing at the time.

Inevitably Frendz came to a close – there was no money left and only a few survivors on the staff – and our last issue, designed by George Snow, featured news of an exclusive Lou Reed piece by Nick Kent which never materialised, we had to print a big apology in the paper. By now Nick and Pennie had migrated to the NME.

The New Musical Express (NME), founded in 1962, had begun recruiting from the underground press and Nick and Charles Shaar Murray, one of the schoolkids featured in the infamous OZ issue that became the subject of the longest obscenity case in British legal history, between them ushered in a whole new era of rock writing – inspired by Lester Bangs and Creem magazine – that made the paper a must-read for so many at that time. This was New Journalism of an irreverent drug-fuelled kind that captured the spirit of the times.

It must be remembered that, at that time, there was no coverage of music in the national press at all – except for headlines when one of the Beatles got married or such like. Hence the strength of the music press and feelings that attached to them. This was vital reading for music fans and the NME along with its rivals Melody Maker and Sounds saw their circulations rise rapidly during the 1970s with the NME way out on top in a dominant position before the decade was out.

Clustered here were the some of the best writers and editors around – the late great Ian McDonald, Tony Tyler and the editor Nick Logan, who would go on to found Smash Hits and subsequently his own magazine The Face, the style bible for the decade to come.

I was determined to get into the paper if I could and it was thanks to Mick Farren, former editor of International Times, who had also joined up, that I managed to get a gig around 1976. I believe my first piece was a three-line story about a guitar-plucking contest which carried my by-line. I remember leaping up-and-down with excitement. I had made it into the NME – the nearest thing we’ve ever had in this country to a national youth newspaper.

Amongst the great writers on NME were Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, perhaps the best known now to a mass audience, but music journalist afficianados will recognise not only Kent, Murray and Farren but also the truly excellent Chris Salewicz, Vivien Goldman, Brian Case, Danny Baker, Paul Morley et al

The best source of information to date on NME and the other papers of the period is ‘In Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press’ by Paul Gorman [Sanctuary Publishing 2001], consisting entirely of interleaved interviews with the above mentioned and others.

What is missing from this account, and from other assessments I have read about the NME is the fact that although the paper carried principally music journalism, there was also a great deal of material on books, films and the general youth culture.

From my earliest days at the NME it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to be able to compete with the music writers but I found my niche as the person who wrote everything that wasn’t music. In the process, I became Dick Tracy, investigative journalist and, under that nom de plume, wrote a considerable amount of stories between 1976-82. A few pieces appeared under my own name but Dick Tracy acquired a bigger profile and cachet than my real identity.

So much so that the following small notice was run in the paper on May 20th 1978 in connection with a piece I wrote called ‘Cloning Papers’:

‘Contrary to popular belief, Dick Tracy is not the pseudonym used for NME team efforts. Tracy is one man who works alone, albeit with occasional help from both inside and outside NME central. The only journalist to unearth the covert activities of the Animal Liberation Front, the only journalist to present an alternative view of Operation Julie acid purge, Dick Tracy now offers the most convincing theory to date about The Man Who Was Cloned.’ [An interview with David Rorvik, author of ‘In His Image’ which claimed to be the true story of the first human cloning]

I don’t have a complete record of everything I wrote during this period so what follows is a fraction of the total but includes some of the most important stuff:

FILMS: During the mid-1970s cinema attendances had collapsed, to be subsequently revived by the new generation of sfx films led by Star Wars. The film industry was desperate to get coverage in the NME and I was, in the beginning, one of the paper’s principal film writers, with access to major film studios, artists and writers.

- Exclusive first- run interview with Julian Temple about the first Sex Pistols film
- The first piece, some six months before the film was released, on ‘Quadrophenia’ followed by interviews with Franc Roddam and Phil Daniels.
- Interview with Milos Forman about ‘Hair’.
- Interview with Steven Spielberg about ‘Close Encounters’
- Interview with Billie Hayes and Brad Davis, the actor who played him in ‘Midnight Express’
- Feature on the films of Clint Eastwood.
- UNPUBLISHED: Interview with David Mingay on the Clash film ‘Rude Boy.’

PLUS: Numerous reviews of movies beginning with ‘The Missouri Breaks’ (Jack Nicholson/Marlon Brando)

DRUGS: Wrote a regular drug column called Inside Dope. Major pieces on Keith Richard’s heroin trial, on British drug prisoners on foreign jails, on Operation Julie.

POLITICS:
- Worked as part of a team, with Angus Mckinnon, Ian McDonald and others, to produce the four-page NME Guide to the Nuclear Age. There was a nuclear explosion on the cover of that week’s issue. (June 11th 1977)
- Numerous pieces on the Animal Liberation Front and the birth of what has become a worldwide radical movement.
- Number of pieces on the Save The Whale movement and campaigns – the biggest environmental issue of that time. Also the seal culls in Newfoundland

Much of this sort of coverage was taken up in a more expansive form by Andrew Tyler, who now runs the excellent Animal Aid. Hats off to a great writer. See details of his latest campaign here.

MUSIC BUSINESS: I was one of the first journalists to write investigative pieces about the music industry itself, profiling major corporations and pillaging the trade papers of the times for juicy leads. This led to MY ONLY COVER STORY, on Record Piracy. Also did major piece on The Elvis Industry following the death of the King plus similar piece on the mass cross-marketing of Saturday Night Fever.

The NME years were genuinely exciting. The power and reputation of the paper was such that doors opened wherever you went. Johnny Rotten, Paula Yates, The Stranglers and the like would drop round the office, always full of the pressure cooker atmosphere of a weekly paper.

Yes, I spent a lot of time in the legendary ‘kinderbunker’ with Tony and Julie, who liked what I was doing and were real mates to me, inviting me to a number of punk events – like the memorable Johnny Thunders deportation party – encouraging me to go and interview Blondie but also supporting the animal liberation coverage I was writing for the paper.

I was not a major figure on the paper but I made a contribution. Thanks to Chris Salewicz for saying in ‘In Their Own Write’: ‘John May was very good as Dick Tracy. He started the film coverage with what was called Silver Screen and he was quite instrumental in changing the paper.’

Thanks also to Phil McNeill, who took a real interest in the investigative journalism I was writing and supported some very ambitious and difficult stories.

So much more to be said. Consider this a 1st Draft memory exercise.


Footnote:

1. Mick Farren’s account of those times can be found in his biography ‘Give The Anarchist A Cigarette’. I am covered by a sentence that reads: ‘Old underground press contacts came up with stories on bizarre media events, weird performance art, animal rights, the environment, recreational drugs and drug enforcement.’

2. For Neil Spencer’s recent account as his period as editor (1978-85), see here.

3 Am currently chasing up the ‘Inky Fingers’ documentary on the NME, shown on July 4th, 2005, on BBC4. Some of you lucky people who can get digital tv will have seen it already. Further comments to come.

4. A huge amount of journalism from the NME and other music papers can be found at
www.rocksbackpages.com. Highly recommended.