NME IS 60: THE HISTORY

This week the NME will be celebrating its 60th birthday, an occasion marked by the publication of this first full-length history of the paper by Pat Long, who served his time on the paper during the Noughties.
Both the anniversary and the book arrive at a time when questions are being asked about the relevance of the weekly paper in our digital world. [See: Michael Hahn’s piece in The Guardian].

According to this, NME’s weekly circulation has fallen to 27,650 whilst its website NME.com gets 7 million unique visitors a month. Krissi Murison, the current editor, remains bullish about the paper’s prospects, claiming that the print edition still brings in the major part of NME's revenues and denying that the paper will soon become a free-sheet.

Pat Long has a fascinating story to tell. It begins with the accordion boom of the 1930s when ‘Britain found itself in the grip of  an absolute mania for accordion music’. The movement had its own magazine – Accordion Times – first published in 1935. By the mid-1940s, the boom had bust and AW only narrowly avoided closure by merging with a brand-new 4pp black-and-white tabloid – the Musical Express, launched on the first Friday in October 1946. By the end of the decade it had become the biggest selling weekly music paper in the country on the back of the Big Band craze, outstripping its rival, the Melody Maker, which had been founded in 1926.

But by 1952, the Musical Express itself was in deep trouble. Circulation had fallen to 20,000 a week and the paper was haemorrhaging money. Enter a white knight in the rotund form of Jewish music impresario Maurice Kinn, who bought the title for £1000 (an estimated £20,000 in today’s money), found offices at 5 Denmark Street (Tin Pan Alley as it was known) and launched the New Musical Express on Friday 7th March 1952 with a cover featuring The Goons, Big Bill Broonzy and band leader Ted Heath.

The NME had a new hipper style and combined accessible and well-informed journalistic coverage of both showbusiness and popular music in an attractive pictorial format. Sales were modest until Kinn came up with the idea of publishing Britain’s first-ever UK singles chart. [The American trade paper Billboard published the first ever Hit Parade music chart in its 4th Jan 1936 issue. Long says this was a list of the most played songs on jukeboxes but I can’t find confirmation of this.]

The chart was based on sales from 20 London shops (later expanded to 53). Within a few weeks, circulation had leapt by 50%. ‘Crucially’, writes Long, ‘this new list reflected NME’s shift in emphasis from covering the writer of the song to its performer, simultaneously opening up a new market for the music press…record buyers and fans’.

Kinn managed to persuade Radio Luxembourg to use the NME charts via the auspices of Derek Johnson, then programme administrator for the station. He later worked for the NME as a freelance and then joined the staff as News Editor in 1957, a position he held until his retirement in 1986.

Kinn’s other innovation was The NME Awards ceremony, first staged at London’s Albert Hall in 1953; it became a annual highlight of the music calendar and survives to this day, albeit in a slightly different form. NME sales boomed during the rock ‘n’ roll era but peaked mid-decade. Sales and advertising headed in a downward spiral until, in late 1962, Kinn agreed to sell the title for £500,000 to the newly-formed International Publishing Co (IPC) – at that time the largest media conglomerate in the world, formed out of a rationalisation of the Mirror Group, which controlled a huge stable of magazines with interests also in printing, book publishing and tv. The NME was moved from its scruffy Denmark Street office to IPCs building in the Strand next to the Savoy where formality and suits & ties were required.

Kinn continued to be the paper’s Executive Editor and retained his gossip column (The Alley Cat) plus an expenses budget for showbiz parties. His close relationship with Brian Epstein (who had been to school with Kinn’s wife’s brother and was later to be the Kinn’s neighbour) ensured prime access to the Beatles and sales rose steadily despite increasing competition from not only its long-time rivals Melody Maker and Record Mirror (launched 17th June 1954) but also from new mags like Beat Instrumental (launched as Beat Monthly in 1963), Fabulous (launched 18th Feb 1964 with a Beatles cover and pull-out poster, which sold 1 million copies) and Rave (an A4-size monthly, also launched in 1964, which was selling a quarter of a million copies a month by 1966).

But from mid-decade on its circulation began to decline once more, mainly due to the conventional editorship of Andy Gray – a tubby pipe-smoking, golf-playing middle-aged man. The NME’s style, which had changed little since the 1950s was looking dangerously out-of-date and out-of-touch.

Further competition came from music mags and papers like Zigzag (16th April 1969) Sounds (10th Oct 1970),  and Bob Houston’s Cream but also from the Underground Press – the likes of OZ, IT and Friends. By the early 1970s, Melody Maker was still selling 200,000 copies a week while the NME’s sales were down to 130,000 and below. At the end of 1971, Alan Smith, an NME staffer since 1962, was summoned to IPC and told the paper was in the 'last-chance saloon' and that he had three months to reverse the NME’s decline.

They commissioned him initially to produce a new-look NME for distribution in London and the South-East only. With the help of Roy Carr and Nick Logan (later to be NME’s editor) they set out to change the paper’s direction. One new innovation was a Gig Guide and this really boosted sales. On the back of this, Smith was given charge of the national issue, which was re-launched on 5th Feb 1972. His editorial described the new publication as being ‘an intelligent weekly paper for music people who rate Beefheart but don’t necessarily slam Bolan’.

Smith and Logan then started hiring new blood from the underground press -  initially the two star writers Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent who between them established a new style of rock journalism, inspired by Lester Bangs and the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer, that placed the NME on a fast-growing upwards curve.
From 1972-1977, under the editorship of Smith and his successor Nick Logan the paper became a legendary force, with rocketing sales and huge influence. By 1973 it was selling over 200,000 copies a week. {Smith claims, in a comment to this post, that he achieved an ABC circulation of 272,000)

Kent and Murray aside, the NME attracted a stellar cast of great writers and editors,  including  the legendary Mick Farren (IT/White Panther/Deviant), Tony Tyler (lofty polymath), Ian McDonald (NME’s Eno), Chris Salewicz and Vivien Goldman (pioneering writers on reggae, punk and African music), Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill (the hip young gunslingers of Punk) plus brilliant photographers like Pennie Smith, Joe Stevens (Captain Snaps), Chalkie Davies and later Anton Corbin and artists like Tony Benyon, Ray Lowry, Edward and Alan Moore.

For Long and many others these were the golden years when the lunatics took over the asylum, made merry and burned with a passion, Much of what happened at that time has passed into rock mythology – the fights, the busts, the battles with the corporation, the drugs, the excess. It was not to last and and for many it ended badly. But while it lasted, the NME became the closest thing this country has ever had to a genuine youth newspaper that for hundreds of thousands was absolutely required reading every week.

The story, 0f course, does not end there, Under Neil Spencer’s editorship, during the Thatcher Years, the paper became decidedly left-wing and politically active, through its support of initiatives like Rock Against Racism and Red Wedge. As the music shifted to post-punk and beyond, new writers like Paul Morley and Ian Penman emerged, applying the post-modern theories of French philosophers like Derrida and Baudrillard to bands like Devo and Talking Heads.

Between the 1980s and the 2000s, the NME continued to spark intermittently as new musical genres and scenes emerged, flared and died. The narrative reports a constant stream of battles, between members of staff, between staff and editor, between editor and corporation, between corporation and unions.
Little consensus remained. The soul boys embraced the emergence of hip-hop and rap; the rock lads went determinedly indie. The house/rave culture came and went. The Smiths and Morrissey dominated the paper for a while. Grunge lifted sales as did Britpop.

But music, which had once been the sole preserve of the music press had gone mainstream and all the papers suffered to a greater or lesser extent, Sounds and Record Mirror closed in 1991. In 2000, Melody Maker merged with the NME ending an 50-year era of rivalry. The digital age may well be the final blow to the paper’s long and glorious existence.

Pat Long’s account almost inevitably contains some flaws and errors. It was Mark Williams not Richard Williams who lost his editorship chance due to a coke bust. A big gap is the fact Nick Logan, one of the paper’s most creative editors, was not interviewed for the book. The chapter on the underground press needs a revise. The photo reproduction is poor. It seems strange that there are no NME front-cover images.

These small caveats aside, this is a really nice edition to have and to hold and Pat Long is to be congratulated. He’s a good story-teller with a clear, readable style. The book is well-researched and carefully constructed. It will appeal to several generations of readers and will shift a lot of copies. But it  will certainly not be the last word on the subject.

[The History of the NME by Pat Long is published by Portico Books.]

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

 

NME IS 60: CLIPS/COVERS/MEMORABILIA

A selection of material from the Generalist Archive

1974

From Top: James Johnson interview Bill Haley after a gig at the Stardust Club, Brighouse, West Yorkshire (March 30th ); Jet Harris of the Shadows visits NME office (April 6);

1976

Mick Farren’s famous article ‘The Titanic Sails at Dawn’ (June 19); Infamous incident when Shane McGowan had his earlobe bitten off by Jane Modette duiring a Clash gig at the ICA, reported by MIles (November 6); ‘Marley Gunned Down’ story (Dec 11); Report of the Sex Pistols on the Bill Grundy show  (Dec 11)

1977

 

 

NME 25th Anniversary Supplement  (Jan 1); Clash cover (April 2); Summer of Love cover (July 9); Wayne Kramer cover (Aug 20th); Sex Pistols back cover tour ad (Dec 17th)

 

             NME PARTY INVITES

 

Thanks to Nick Logan for this last-minute addition to the post – the original printing block for the old NME logo, which he rescued from the printers before it was dumped.

SIGNIFICANT OTHERS: PATTI SMITH & ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, ARTHUR RIMBAUD & PAUL VERLAINE.

THE GENERALIST is a lot to do with chance, coincidence and making connections which is why this post begins, on this bright crisp Sunday morning in February, with a book I suddenly remembered and fished out of my library.

‘Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership’ is a multi-author collection of 13 profiles, edited by Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron [Thames & Hudson. 1993] that examine artist and writer couples – partnerships in which both are active in the same field -who have shared both sexual and artistic bonds. The editors asked to the contributors to address the following question:

‘If the dominant belief about art and literature is that they are produced by solitary individuals, but the dominant social structures are concerned with familial, matrimonial, and heterosexual arrangements, how do two creative people escape or not the constraints of this framework and construct an alternative story.’

The book includes, amongst others: Rodin & Camille Claudel, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, Sonia and Robert Delauney, Robert Rauschenberg & Jasper Johns, Henry Miller & Anais Nin, Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera, Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst.

Which leads me to this well-thumbed copy of ‘Just Kids’ by Patti Smith, a loving memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, left in my care, by chance, by Baba on her way to Hindustan. Blessings.

This is a moving and poetic tale of how two street-ado0lescents found each other in New York, bonded and survived, and lived to become significant artists in their differing fields – photography and music/poetry. Both shared a love of drawing and dressing up. They lived in bedrock sleasehouses and abandoned basements, surviving on crackers and air, transforming their surroundings with juju objects found in their constant trawls through dime stores and skips. They moved to the Chelsea Hotel before fame and fortune found them. They hung-out in CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City with a long roll-call of famous faces. Patti travelled to Paris; Mapplethorpe explored the S&M underground scene. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS on March 9th, 1989; Patti Smith continues to perform and produce. Both continue to inspire.

Source: http://babayaganyc.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/patti-smith-and-robert-mapplethorpe/

Here’s my one Mapplethorpe story. I was in the foyer of a show of his photos at the ICA in London in the 1980s, standing in the foyer staring at a very large black and white self-portrait of the photographer. God he looks cool I thought. Things were not going so well for me at that time. I was jealous I guess, frustrated in the face of this hip icon. The rest of the photos were arranged in a series of three short narrow corridors leading of a main aisle, each one with framed photos on either side. The first were the more innocent shots leading gradually to Corridor 3 where the elegant hard-core portraits challenged both the sensibilities and the stomach. Returning from this journey back to the foyer, there was now a figure standing in front of the self-portrait. It was Robert Mapplethorpe – looking white and tiny and weary in front of his iconic self. That shocked me and its an incident I often think about. Draw your own conclusions.

Patti Smith’s book is suffused with the spirit of Rimbaud so it was somehow no surprise to me when, whilst reading the above, I made the chance discovery of ‘Disaster was My God: The Scandalous Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud’ by Bruce Duffy on one of those little tables you find outside second-hand bookshops.

First published last year by Clerkenwell Press in London, this is an imaginative novelisation of Rimbaud’s life, studded with his poetry. It’s a triumph.

WOW! This book grabbed me by the neck and took me on a helter-skelter ride. Duffy seems to have mesmerically internalised Rimbaud’s spirit (if that makes sense), bringing him to life in extreme vividness. His prose has both raw energy and microscopic preciseness.  We’re both inside the poet’s mind and feelings and outside him, observing the shattering affect he has on those around him – including of course Paul Verlaine, his significant Other. –  with whom Rimbaud has an intense, bizarre, extreme relationship. Duffy calls that section of his book ‘Monsters Together’.

Source: www.chueca.com/fotos/poetas-prohibidos/rimbaud-y-verlaine.html

Through this book I now understand why Rimbaud is so powerful, so original, so important, so influential:

‘The boy…was that rarity of rarities and oddest of oddities – a prodigy of letters.

‘And by sixteen – and then writing his own poems – Arthur Rimbaud was not merely dazzling or surprising…Arthur Rimbaud had anticipated and exceeded Dada and Surrealism, had checkmated and rewritten sixty years of future poetry, had barged headlong into the twentieth century….with recklessness and bravado.’

The last words belong to Rimbaud, from a letter he wrote in 1870 when he was 16:

‘When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man – heretofore abominable – having given her her release, she too will be a poet! Woman will find some of the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? – She will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things; we will take them, we will understand them.’

Here’s to significant others!

 

 

CULT MUSIC: GUY STEVENS

Following on from my Previous Post: CHECK OUT CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY I have promoted three gigs with the man himself (two with his band Crosstown Lightnin’). His great biography of John Lee Hooker has just been republished by Canongate.

His collected journalism in Shots From The Hip (currently out of print but copies are available on the net) I particularly enjoyed because the pieces conjure up for me that period of the NME when I was working for the paper.

One of the stories I enjoyed most was about the legendary producer/dj Guy Stevens and Charlie was good enough to grant me permission to reprint it here. So for your reading pleasure:

Guy Stevens: 'There are only two Phil Spectors in the world and I am one of them’

NME, 22 December 1979

‘THEY rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes 'Awwwwwww. . .’

Jack Kerouac - On The Road

‘He's in love with rock and roll, WOOAAHHHRLD! He's in love with getting stoned, WOOOAAAHHHRLD!’

The Clash - 'Janie Jones'

‘With Guy Stevens it was very, very special, because if it hadn't been for him seeing that glimmer of whatever that I certainly wasn't aware of, I'd still be workin' in the factory right now.’

Ian Hunter

‘Guy Stevens? Forget him. He's had it.’

A Music Industry Figure

Guy Stevens back with Nigel Waymouth and Michael English, the two designers behind Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. Stevens produced their eponymous album, a cult classic

Source: The Look

Take a deep breath and you could recount the Guy Stevens story in one sentence.

Kingpin mod deejay at the Scene Club in '64, Our Man In London for Sue Records, the legendary soul label, first house producer for Island Records where he signed and produced Free and Spooky Tooth as well as inventing Mott The Hoople, discov­erer of The Clash after a long time in hibernation and now finally producer of their new album 'London Calling', the man who got Chuck Berry out of jail in 1964, the man who supplied The Who with the compilation tape that gave them most of their early pre-original material repertoire, the man who introduced Keith Reid to Procol Harum and generated 'Whiter Shade Of Pale' only to fail to get them signed up and then had to stand by and watch them sell 90,000,000 copies for someone else, the man who smashed up every piece of furniture in a recording studio to get the performance he wanted out of the group he was recording, the man who Mick Jones of The Clash still thinks is responsible for getting him fired from his first real band, the man who heard Phil Spector rant about how it was him, Phil Spector, who first discovered The Beatles, the man who . . .

Guy Stevens, with the rolling, popping, bulging eyes of a veteran form speedfreak, the boozer's lurch and slur, smashing through or falling over every obstacle between him and the perfect rock and roll record, the ultimate rock and roll record, the final rock and roll record, the next rock and roll record ... be that obstacle human or inanimate, himself or something else. Staggering, screaming, crying, flailing, laughing, Guy Stevens arouses pity, terror, admiration, revulsion, contempt.

In 1971 they wrote him off as a hopeless loser, a man too far gone into the depths of alcoholics' perdition to be of any use to himself or anyone else again.

And now, in the closing weeks of 1979, Guy Stevens is back in the charts. It is — as they say — a mighty long way down rock and roll. The inevitable corollary is that it's an even longer way back up again. Guy Stevens has been to hell and back.

*

Source: http://manchestersoul.co.uk/msoul/Guy_Stevens.html

'What happened was I was living in a one-room no-water flat in Leicester Square and playing records for Ronan O'Rahilly — later of Radio Caroline — down at the Scene Club. I had an R&B night every Monday, and a lot of people like The Stones and Animals used to come down ...'

Guy Stevens is ensconced in a taxi heading for a friend's flat, where our interview is scheduled to take place. He had arrived at the NME offices half an hour late and roaring drunk, his hand lacerated and bleeding following some sort of incident with a glass door. Apparently, the prospect of being interviewed — at once exhilarating and terrifying — had sent him down to the pub as soon as it opened. He is fifteen years away in time, back when Mod really was mod, back when Guy Stevens had a direct line to R&B central.

'I got all my records mail-order. You sent 'em the money and got the records back within seven days from Stan's Record Store in Shreveport, Louisiana, USA, and it's right down deep in Tennessee . . .'

Wait a second, Guy. How can it be in Tennessee if it's in Louisiana?

'Well, it's somewhere around there. It all started for me when I was eleven years old and the first record I ever heard was "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" by Jerry Lee Lewis and that was the end of my school career. What I did was to start this thing at school where every boy in the school had to pay me a shilling a week — that's 5p — to be a member of my rock and roll club, and I chose the records. We had "Peggy Sue", "That'll Be The Day", Larry Williams' "Bony Maronie", all the hits of the time, Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls Of Fire" . . . and I got expelled for it eventually.

'So I was expelled at fourteen, and I went to work for Lloyd's, the insurance brokers. They thought I was kinda funny. By '63 I had all these records that I'd imported from Stan's Record Store in Shreveport, Louisiana, right? . . . And Peter Meaden came round one night. He was the bloke who formed The Who, and he arranged to bring them round one day with their manager, Kit Lambert.

'And they were really weird. They just stood there. My wife, who I was then living with - we're seperated now - made a cup of tea for each one of them and they still stood still. I played 'em "Rumble" by Link Wray and put it on a tape for them - because by then I'd built up this enormous collection and Steve Marriott and everybody used to come round to get material.

'So The Who were there with Kit Lambert, and he offered me a fiver to make a two-and-a-half-hour tape for them, because Townshend hadn't started writing and they had no material to play on stage. So I played 'em all James Brown stuff, "Pleeeeeeeeeease Pleeeaaase Pleeease" . . .' Hair flying, right there in the cab, Stevens becomes James Brown. 'And I played 'em "Rumble" by Link Wray, which was the classic Pete Townshend record, which he'd never heard before.'

Stevens' mouth begins to emit gigantic, grinding guitar chords and odd flecks of spittle. Demonic possession by a guitar.

'So Townshend, Daltrey, Entwistle and Moon sat there for three hours drinking tea looking like little schoolboys and my poor wife was going, "Would you like another cup of tea" and they're saying, "Uh . . . well ... um ... ah ... dunno," and I'm playing the records going, "Jesus Christl WAKE UP!" I was going through my cabinet where I had all my singles, I had every Motown single, every Stax ... I went to Stax in Memphis in 1963 and they said, "It's just a record shop." I said no, no, you've got a studio and they say, "We're just a record shop." So I went behind the shop and there was the studio where Booker T made "Green Onions". The whole lot, Rufus Thomas . . . and it was the size of this taxi we're sitting in now.'

One visualizes a younger Stevens, mod suit, hair cropped short, ranting and screaming at the bemused counter assistant at Stax, or a young, shy Who clutching cooling teacups while this maniac jumps up and down, hitting them with soul music and scream­ing ...

'And at Stax I said to them in 1963, "Don't you understand the importance of what you're doing?" I can't tell you enough . . . they were nuts! They thought the record shop was more important than the studio!'

The whole industry thinks shops are more important than studios, though.

'Well, if they think filing cabinets are gonna sell records, then they'd better start selling them now. Records sell because they are made by dedicated people who love to sing and love to play, and that's what it's about. The record companies are full of people who are either secretaries, hangers-on or people who don't know anything about music all thinking, "Well, it's better than working in a bank."'

*

The cover of a 2004 CD release by Ace Records

From deejaying, scene-making and propagandizing blues, soul and rock and roll, Stevens moved to operating Sue Records as part of the then fledgling Island label. From living off what he made from selling Scene Club tickets at Piccadilly Circus tube station, he graduated to a £15 a week salary from Island. From label administration to production was only one band away.

'What happened was that these guys came down from Carlisle in a van in '65. They were called the VIPs, later to be known as Spooky Tooth, and they were all nutters, all complete maniacs, and they ambushed Island Records at the same time as I did. I was always at total war with Chris Blackwell [then — as now — Island's headman] and ... I can't put him down in a nice way, really. He was always a millionaire dilettante: he had a million anyway so he didn't need to bother, but I never knew this. I had just started the Sue label, and I got Charlie & Inez Foxx, I got James Brown, I got a hell of a lot.

'Sue was formed by a guy called Juggy Murray in New York, and he started the label with Charlie & Inez Foxx's "Mocking­bird"; that was Sue 301. I went over to get a record called "The Love Of My Man", which nobody has covered, and I hope Elkie Brooks isn't listening. "The Love Of My Man" by Viola Kilgore. Unbelievable. Un-be-liev-able. Blitzkrieg, out the window, number one, easy. He owned the copyright. Chris went over and offered him $500. Juggy wanted half a million. It got to three in the

American charts; if you check back you'll find it. One of the greatest records I've ever heard in my life.

'I wanted it to be on Sue. The main thing was that I wanted everything good to be on Sue. I wanted Bob Dylan to be on Sue. That was why I started importing records for Island with David Betteridge [now a CBS high-up] and Chris. And it nearly bankrupted Island.'

*

By now we're established in a luxurious flat belonging to a friend of Guy's. We're drinking coffee and brandy, except that Kosmo Vinyl - acting as Guy's part-time minder on behalf of The Clash — is surreptitiously filching Guy's brandy glass every time it's refilled and drinking it himself. Guy doesn't appear to notice, since every so often he is allowed to take a sip.

We're in '67 now, discussing the first Traffic album 'Dear Mr Fantasy', the getting-it-together-in-a-cottage-in-the-country one with the ghost on the cover. 'I did that cover! I went down to the cottage in Berkshire with them, I did the cover, I did everything!. It sounds terrible to say all this . . . maybe I should say nothing. What do you want me to say?'

'Tell 'im the facts, Guy,' interjects Kosmo from across the room.

'Steve Winwood asked me to come down, said, "I want you to produce Traffic and live with us." So I went down there and it was a bit fairytale, a bit weird. There were some very weird things going on. They were smoking a hell of a lot, and each one of them would come out and say to me,' "Oh God, I can't go on with life" and all this. That was Jim Capaldi. Then Steve Winwood would come out with, "I can't cope! It's all gone too far! It's all too much! We've had a hit single! Oh God!" And then Chris Wood started going, "Oh God! I've had enough!"

'I said, "Hang on, I've just heard this from three people! What is this? Have you all learned it off parrot fashion or what?" I was down there with all my belongings, all my records and everything thinking "Jesus Christ, they're all going mad!” And what they were all going mad over was Steve's girlfriend, but that's definitely another story ...

'But the worst thing that happened between me and Blackwell was the "Whiter Shade Of Pale" incident. He had it on his desk for a week! What happened was this boy I knew called Keith Reid came into the office with these words he'd written. He worked in a solicitors' office for £4.50 a week, and he brought in these words which were vaguely Dylanish, and I told him the words were great and suggested that he got himself to a good songwriter.'

Reid ended up with Gary Brooker and Procol Harum. Chris Blackwell turned the result down, and when it was finally issued elsewhere, it made number one in two weeks flat, became one of the biggest records of '67 and still sells astronomical quantities whenever it's reissued. Guy Stevens had a nervous breakdown.

At the same time, Guy's massive record collection was stolen from his mother's house in 1967, and - to add insult to injury -the thief sold them all off for ninepence each (that's old money. In contemporary currency that would be 3.75p each. Weep!).

'The guy didn't know what he was selling. I had every Miracles record. Every Muddy Waters record. I had every Chess record from 001. Listen! I was at a session with Phil Chess in 1964 with Chuck Berry when he was doing "Promised Land" and "Nadine". I was at the session! I was taking photographs! I got Chuck Berry out of prison! I put tremendous pressure on Pye Records, who had Chess and Checker over here, and the head of the company at the time was Ian Ralfini.

'I put pressure on him to get "Memphis Tennessee" released as a single. It was out as a B-side, with "Let It Rock". They taped all the Chuck Berry tracks off my records! Not from master tapes but from my records! I mean, I may have spat on them or something. You never know what happens, do you? Now you'll know that if your old Chuck Berry records jump or something, it's probably me spitting on them.

'The first thing I actually produced was with Spooky Tooth. It was called "In A Dream" and it built up. All my records build up. Have you noticed that? Now, what I've done with the new Clash album is I've made 'em actually play a bit. I hope that's no offence to anyone . . . they haven't turned into Andy Williams or anything. Actually, I could do a really good Andy Williams. You wanna hear an Andy Williams impression?'

Guy lurches to his feet, something like a slow-motion film of somebody falling over projected in reverse. He approaches the white piano in the corner of the room, punches out a horribly discordant introduction to 'Moon River', saunters to the centre of the room and collapses into a paroxysm of mock sobbing. He chokes out an anguished monologue about Claudine Longet and the death of the ski instructor and then returns cautiously to the sofa.

'That's it. Ask me another question. Now the thing is that these blokes - Spooky Tooth — came down from Carlisle in a van, and they were incredibly heavy, both physically and because they were all taking about 500 blues a week. I loved them. I thought they were incredible and I took Blackwell along to see them. "Spooky Two" was the album. The mixing on that was incredible: that was my engineer Andy Johns. I don't know what happened to him. He's still alive, but he's in America.

'Andy — if you're listening — please come home.' Stevens lurches closer to the cassette microphone and raises his voice. 'You can work with anyone here at any time, but' - confidentially now - 'don't get messed up like you did before.'

*

 

And then came Mott The Hoople, and that story starts 'in Wormwood Scrubs. I was doing eight months for possession of drugs and I read this book called Mott The Hoople by Willard Manus.

I wrote to my wife and said, "Keep the title secret." She was my ex-wife, or separated wife, I don't know what they call them, and she wrote back, "Are you joking? Mott The Hoople? That's ridiculous!" Anyway, when I came out of prison Island re-employed me at £20 a week — I went up a fiver — and I've got to admit that Mr Betteridge came and picked me up from the gates of Wormwood Scrubs.

'And then I wanted to have a pee, and he said, "Fuck that, have a pee if you want one, but I'll be two miles down the road." I said, "Wait a minute, I just got out of prisonl Show some sensitivity, for fuck's sake! I don't even know what roads look like any more." So I went for a pee and he drove off, and then finally he said, "Oh, I didn't know you were following us." I only found them because my wife was waving her arms out of the window and yelling…’

Memories cascade out of Stevens, virtually unchecked. He is obviously pissed and ranting, but there is something eerie about his conversation: he appears more medium than raconteur. His voice undergoes startling changes; one moment almost precise, the next moment so alien that it seems as if he is maintaining his grip on the art of speech only by a conscious effort.

He recalls Janis Joplin telling him at the Albert Hall that she was going to overdose within a year. 'She was the kind of girl who would walk into a bar and just take over the whole bar. She'd walk up and . . . "Awwwwwl raht! A-whoooooo's gonna bah me a drank? A-whooooooo's gonna bah me 'nother drank? Whooo's gonna bah me 'nother double drank?"

'Janis Joplin I loved. I loved her music and since her death I've felt funny and tortured about it. If I'd tried . . . when I get really sad I cry at home and play that second track off "I Got Dem 01' Kozmic Blues Again Mama".'

He also remembers a pre-Yardbirds Eric Clapton, dragged up to Guy's den and finding Freddie King albums blaring out at him while Guy banged a hammer on the floor and screamed 'Play, Eric! Play!' while the young fellow tried to hide in a corner.

He moves on to chaotic Mott The Hoople sessions where studios were reduced to rubble.

'I never hit a microphone. Everything else I destroyed. Why? ANGER! I'm just a very angry person. When a group's been sitting there for two weeks without getting anything done, you've got to ... lemme tell you about Hunter. The first time ... I love the fact that he came from a wife and three kids in Archway — changing buses twice — to get to what he thought was some dodgy demo session. He didn't know what it was going to be. The guy at Regent Sound just told him that there was some bloke rambling on about Jerry Lee Lewis and Bob Dylan.

'Ian had a cold and a headache, but he came down and he played "Like A Rolling Stone" and I stopped him and said, "That's it. You're hired. Come by the office tomorrow and pick up your fifteen quid with the rest of the band." He asked what the band was called and I told him Mott The Hoople. He went, "Whaaaaat? Mott The What?"

'He came in the next morning and got his fifteen quid, and then he finally believed. I'd organized everything, set it all up. There was no embarrassment. The only thing I'd like to say on my behalf is that I think David Bowie scored most of the credit rather than me. I'd chosen the name, found the band - because they had to be right, I'd auditioned over seventy bands in a year.

'I knew they had to be right, have the right attitude. Then I saw these blokes lugging an organ up the stairs, and they were really lugging this fucking great organ up the stairs. It was enormous, a Hammond C3 the size of a piano, and I thought, "I don't care what they sound like. They've done it. They got the organ up the stairs."

'What happened was that I made five great albums for Island with Mott and luckily David Bowie picked up on them. That was great. I was really pleased. He saved their lives.

'The actual incident that happened . . . you know "Ballad Of Mott The Hoople"? Well, they disbanded in Zurich, they just said, "Well, see ya when we get off the train." Bowie had heard about this, and he'd based most of his rock thing on Mott, all his rock artistry and all his rock vision. I think if he'd been Ian Hunter, he'd have loved it.

'The real trouble with Ian, though, is that he takes himself so seriously. He takes himself much too seriously.'

Today, Guy Stevens says, 'I never really recovered from Mott The Hoople.' Ask him about the period between  'Brain Capers' (his last Mott album) and 'London Calling' and his reply is simply, 'You're asking about a very mixed-up period of my life.'

He refocuses. 'I never really got over working with Ian Hunter. You've got to realize that ... I think Chrysalis Records are doing a great job, signing him up and . . . the trouble with Ian is really . . .

'HE-E-ELLLLP!' A comic wail of distress masks the real one effectively enough for the conversation not to be derailed.

'Listen, The Clash are really great to work with. I found 'em in '76. I produced demos of the first album, "White Riot" an' all that. This character called Bernie Rhodes who owned a garage in Camden Town and happened to live opposite where they rehearsed ... I was living near there at the time and I wandered in. They were doing "White Riot".'

He launches into his own impromptu performance of the song, spittle flying, hair bouncing, eyes bulging. '"WHITE RIOT!! WANNA RIOT! WHITE RIOT! A RIOT OF MY 0WWWW-WWN!" And I just thought "Right! RIOT! RIGHT! RIOT! Let's goooooooh!"

And then Bernard got very tricky.⁷

The conversation then saunters into the minefield of The Clash's financial history, a topic over which a discreet veil should be drawn. Suffice it to say that anyone thinking that The Clash's popularity and influence has created a proportionate bulge in their bank accounts is suffering from severe delusions. If anyone's 'turning rebellion into money', it certainly ain't The Clash.

*

Paul Simonon smashing his bass on the stage of The Palladium in New York City on September 21, 1979 during "The Clash Take the Fifth" US tour. Photo by the legendary Pennie Smith

Which is why we find The Clash in a room in a West London office building winding down after a business meeting. The previ­ous day the 'London Calling' video had been shot in the Battersea drizzle, and an evening's rehearsals have just had to be cancelled because their equipment is still waterlogged and as such unfit for immediate use.

Their single is out and warmly received. Everyone who's heard the album thus far thinks it's marvellous, so everyone's telling their Guy Stevens stories.

Joe Strummer looks like a Ted on his way from a building site to an oldies shop hot on the trail of Jerry Lee Lewis out-takes. Paul Simonon looks like The King Of All The Rudies. Topper Headon looks like a punk rockaaaahhh. Mick Jones looks like Al Pacino in The Godfather.

'I well remember searching through all the pubs in Oxford Street looking for him,' Strummer recalls. 'I found a row of blokes sitting slumped over the bar staring in their beer. I looked down this row and I spotted him because of his woolly hat. I went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder, he looked round and it was like son-finding-father in one of those corny films. He looked up at me and said, "Have a drink."'

'He had a few rucks during the sessions,' Mick Jones chips in. 'He had one with Mister Oberstein [Maurice Oberstein, big boss man at CBS] where he lay in front of Mister Oberstein's Rolls Royce. He had fights with Bill [Price, engineer of That Ilk] . . . why'd he have a fight with you?' he calls over to roadie Baker Glare.

'He threw something of mine across the room,' elucidates Baker.

'We highly recommend him to anybody who wants to make a record,' announces Strummer.

'There was this big pile of chairs,' reminisces Jones, 'all stacked up on top of each other like at school and he rushed out during a take and grabbed for the top chair and they all started to come over, so he pushed them back, then went for the top one, pulled it down and smaaaassssshhl Then he says, "I'm Guy Stevens and this is what I do ... especially when I'm thinking about my mother" and then he starts behaving . . . eccentrically.'

During the sessions, Guy would periodically phone Ian Hunter in the States for pep talks. Guy was telling Hunter that he couldn't go on, and Hunter would tell him to stop pissing about and get on with it. He would hang off the hallway phone for hours while The Clash worked in the studio.

'We paid for the calls. We paid for his minicabs as well. He brought in about a year's worth of minicab slips - every minicab he'd taken since the fifties. We'd told him he could have minicabs in and out, so he brought all these other ones in. One day he hired a bodyguard . . .'

The bodyguard eventually turned out to be a cab-driver who'd come in to get paid when Guy didn't have the cash. He ended up staying at the session for eighteen hours.

The Clash received considerable opposition from CBS when they proposed to use Guy Stevens. 'They hate his guts! They said they wouldn't use him again until he was bankable. We plan to use him again, and we're going to get all of CBS's acts to use him. We're gonna make him their house producer.

'It gives me heart when Guy tells us about his business history,' continues Strummer. 'At least there's someone around who's as bad as us if not worse. All the dreadful, life-wrecking things that've happened to him . . .'

Jones: 'His presence in a studio definitely makes all the differ­ence. It's like all the mess goes to him like Dorian Gray's portrait or whatever. All the messy sound goes and it becomes him, and what's left on the tape is ... clarity.'

Strummer: 'People tend to be afraid of him because he's off the wall, to put it mildly. And they should be. There's a little bit of an act in there, but it's not entirely an act. It puts a lot of people off. They just think, "Christ, get this man home."'

Jones: 'But even when he's unconscious he can still recite his address.'

Apart from applying time-honoured Guy Stevens production techniques such as the Mott furniture-smashing standby . . .

Strummer: 'He invented some new ones for us. Like pouring beer into the piano to make it sound better . . .'

Jones: 'Like blowing the desk up. Like hitting the guitarist with a ladder. All these I could take, but not pouring beer into the piano. I nearly killed him.

Strummer: 'When he poured beer into the TV / nearly killed 'im an' all. Lucky there were no Space Invaders about or he'd 'a done them and then Paul would've killed 'im.'

Jones: 'He's obsessed with Liam Brady and Arsenal. He always wears his scarf and on the way to every session he goes and stands in the middle of Arsenal football ground and pays the cab to wait for him. And nobody in the group supports Arsenal.'

The Clash unhesitatingly recommend Guy Stevens. Strummer pronounces him 'the ultimate cure for musical constipation'. How would they react to the dictum — oft-voiced by such worthies as PiL and The Stranglers — to the effect that all record producers are parasites.

Strummer grins broadly. 'They should try him. They've never met a parasite like this one before!' And the room explodes into laughter.

*

It has been ten days since the first interview session with Guy Stevens. Then he had arrived at NME blind drunk and bleeding. Now, he turns up punctual and sober. The shilling-sized flakes of dandruff in his hair have been washed away. He is wearing new sneakers. Suddenly, he's a hero. Suddenly, everyone loves him. He is in ecstasy.

'I'm buying some new jeans as well! I was tremendously unpopu­lar at CBS until this record went in the charts. Now it's "Hel-lo, Guy!" They've all cooled out!

'It's been tremendously refreshing working with The Clash. They've changed a lot since I first knew them in '76. Joe is great, because he always puts you straight if you're out of order. The whole thing happened very naturally. It just worked.'

Throughout his entire involvement with rock and roll, right from that first Jerry Lee Lewis flash more than twenty years ago, Guy Stevens has been lurching and screaming after one thing, one great blinding, deafening rock and roll epiphany.

'Well, the best way of explaining that would be ... there's a quote from Jack Kerouac's On the Road, quite early on — about~ page seven or so — something like "All my life I've been chasing after people who are mad, mad to talk, mad to play .. ." People who want to. And I suppose that applies to rock and roll. I was eleven when I heard"Whole Lotta Shakin'” and I was never the same again. That intensity of feeling. I've seen performances by Jerry Lee Lewis that were just unbelievable. It was when he was at his most unpopular, 200 people in a 2,000-seater, and he played his heart out, and that's always stayed with me.

'That electricity, that manic intensity. It's a kind of madness, not a "mad" madness . . . but like Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise. Chasing, chasing. I've always felt that way about making records. Making a record is an event. Big letters: AN EVENT. It's not just "another session": I hate people with that attitude. It's electricity. It's got to be.

'It may be hard for a company like CBS to accept a concept like this, but I could quite well die while making a record. It's that important. That's why — if it came to it — I could produce anybody.'

Right now, Guy Stevens is out of the dumper with a vengeance. The plan now is to get rid of the booze problem and take advantage of his redeemed credibility to make a lot more records.

'I can't very well afford to take out a small ad in the classifieds, so ... you couldn't print my phone number so that people can get hold of me, could you? It's 699-4999. Ask for Guy.

'Record production a speciality.'

CHINA: THE FAT YEARS by CHAN KOONCHUNG

The novel touches on nearly every sensitive political and social topic confronting China today.

This is my intention — to put as many issues into one relatively short novel so that people can have a more holistic meaning of what China is now. I need to do that within the context of a novel.

Extract from a phone interview with Chan Koochung by Dean Napolitano of the Wall Street Journal

*

A photo released on Dec. 31, 2011 shows Chinese President Hu Jintao delivering a New Year address, titled "Jointly Improve World Peace and Development", to domestic and overseas audiences via state TV and radio broadcasters. (Xinhua/Lan Hongguang)

We are living in strange times in which the increasing dominance of China on the world stage is causing concern and unease. The papers are full of stories of crackdowns and imprisonments of dissidents, attempts to limit the freedom of the internet, industrial sweat shops, ecological disasters. China’s new regime, we are told, is a blend of socialism and capitalism in which the population accepts state dictatorship, censorship and infringements of human rights in exchange for a false paradise of consumer benefits. What does the future hold for this giant country whose star is rising as the West declines.

This remarkable novel ‘The Fat Years’ by Chan Koonchung sets out to paint a picture of this near future. The story centres on the quest to discover why a whole month, between the collapse of the Western economies and the rise of China’s Golden Years of Ascendancy, during which the government instituted a widespread crackdown, has been effectively wiped from people’s memories and official records. A small group of outsiders who do remember, find each other and join forces to discover the disturbing truths that lie behind the impenetrable facade of the Chinese state.

Koonchung’s storytelling skills make this a real page-turner and his novel reminds me of both Murakami and Bolano. The world he depicts has a 3-D believable reality to it; his characters are lifelike and fully realised.  He cleverly  manages to incorporate many geographical locations and different  levels and aspects of Chinese life. The smart premise of the story provides intrigue and mystery and the book comes to a remarkable conclusion in which all is revealed in a satisfying manner.

Reality is rapidly verifying many of the insights and predictions in this haunting and thought-provoking book. This is brought home -  in the Preface by Julia Lovell and the Translators’ Notes by Michael S. Duke – which bookend the novel.

Chan Koonchung is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. Born in Shanghai and raised and educated in Hong Kong, he studied at the University of Hong Kong and Boston University. He has published more than a dozen Chinese-language books and in 1976 founded the monthly magazine City in Hong Kong, of which he was the chief editor and then publisher for twenty-three years. He has been a producer on more than thirteen films. Chan Koonchung now lives in Beijing.

Interesting piece on Koonchung here: mychinesebooks.com

Good recent review of the book by David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times

SEE PREVIOUS POST: CHINESE PUNK

LEE TORREY: IN MEMORIAM

Photo: Roger Perry

The e-mail from Bill

‘I am a childhood friend of Lee Torrey's from Cape Cod. Lee died several days ago in Las Vegas, Nevada. I spoke briefly with his brother Bruce who told me that Lee had recently taken up residence at the Golden Nugget hotel in Las Vegas. He died of poor health. At the time of Lee's death, all of his earthly possessions fitted into a small suitcase.’

ARGUING WITH THE ANGELS

Its a cold Saturday morning

Snow still on the ground

Bright sun and blue skies

Listening to the Incredible String Band

Thinking of Lee

And all those days and nights, nights and days

When we sat at  two desks in a small room

Behind our IBM golfball typewriters

Constructing the Index

word by word, line by line

until we, exhausted, crashed out on  the floor

we were young then

*

Lee

intense and passionate soul

inventor of the Torrey-Roget classification system

which brought unusual order to our magic library

each book individually labelled

in scrupulous fashion

I can hear your bark of a laugh

see your excited electric gestures

words spilling out

a challenging arguer

brisk one moment, garrulous the next

a great and valuable companion

on a journey into the infinite unknown

*

Lee

It was a long  journey, coast to coast

From Thoreau’s Cape Cod

To Hunter S. Thompson’s Las Vegas

Only you know what demons you had to face down

But now you’re arguing with the angels

Lee’s profile picture from his short-lived blog ‘The Curious Blogger’

Longer message from Bill Latimer

‘Lee's full name was Stanley Albert Torrey, Jr. Father of the same name lives now in East Sandwich, Mass., with Lee's stepmother. Two brothers, Bruce and Scott.

‘I moved to Sandwich, Mass., when I was seven years old and started the third grade in our tiny school in Lee's class. We were friends over the years until he left Sandwich for private school in Maine, perhaps at the beginning of high school. I lost touch with him until the 1970s when he returned to the States with his bride from Liverpool. I lived with them for a short time. Lee also snared some of us into a venture called Scorton Press (named after a nearby saltwater creek and an ancient band of Wampanoag Indians). After reading your blog about the Index years, it's clear Lee based Scorton Press on your band of merry writers, right down to the round table. We amassed a large library with the aim of compiling a book encompassing everything known about the body-mind connection. Alas, the endeavour shattered after several months due to, well, let's say interpersonal craziness.

‘I drifted throughout North America and next came upon Lee in West Palm Beach, Florida, in the early 1980s. Lee was an editor at the National Enquirer tabloid, and I ended up living with him for several months and writing for the NE and another nearby tab (Lee taught me the ropes of this zany world). This was the period he refers to in the Hunter Thompson piece you put on your blog several years ago (I've sent the link to that and to your piece on the Index to several of Lee's old childhood friends). After Lee and I both moved on in different directions, we lost touch again for the most part.

‘Then, in the early 1990s, Lee tracked me down and I went to work with him at a small service company in Boston. It was called Air Systems Service Company, AssCo for short (our T-shirts emblazoned with AssCo were very popular for some reason). Lee was general manager and I was business manager. Lee ran the business, which mostly consisted of testing biological safety cabinets in hospitals and labs, from the third floor of a building on Charles Street where he also lived. Our collaboration lasted several months until AssCo's owner pulled the plug on the Boston office (for many understandable reasons).

‘I then lost touch with Lee completely. I did run into Bruce several years ago on Cape Cod. He told me Lee had been managing an apartment building in Brookline, Mass., for several years. I found some "entertaining" posts online about the "insane" building manager.

‘I had figured I'd go looking for him one of these years, but I missed my chance.

‘Lee was intelligent, creative, and mad. Alcohol was his poison of choice, among others to a lesser degree. News of his death was a hard kick to my gut.’

SEE PREVIOUS POSTS: 

Lee’s piece on Hunter S. Thompson

History of the Index of Possibilities