pin-ups 1972 Also by Peter Stanfield A Band with Built-In Hate: The Who from Pop Art to Punk Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film, 1927–63 The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966–1972 Horse Opera: The Strange History of the Singing Cowboy Maximum Movies – Pulp Fiction: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson pi n-ups 1 9 7 2 THIRD GENERATION ROCK ’N’ ROLL Peter Stanfield Reaktion Books For Graham Henderson and Eddie King Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2022 Copyright © Peter Stanfield 2022 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 565 6 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: FIRST IS FIRST, SECOND IS BEST AND THE THIRD GENERATION IS NOWHERE 7 1 ROCK ’N’ ROLL UNDERGROUND: MICK FARREN LOOKING TOUGH – KICKING DOGS 38 2 DIRTY-SWEET: MARC BOLAN – POP STAR 69 3 EX-PATRIA: IGGY POP AND LOU REED EXILED IN LONDON 110 4 KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS: DAVID BOWIE RUNNING WITH THE THRILL KIDS AND FUCK GIRLS 156 5 FOR YOUR PLEASURE . . . WE PRESENT OURSELVES: ROXY MUSIC – THE TEENAGE LIFESTYLE CHOICE 192 6 LOBBING MOLOTOV COCKTAILS INTO THE OPERA HOUSE: NEW YORK DOLLS, SIXTEEN FOREVER 233 CONCLUSION: OH, I WAS MOVED BY A TEEN DREAM 275 NOTE ON SOURCES 295 REFERENCES 297 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 331 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 335 PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 337 INDEX 339 INTRODUCTION: FIRST IS FIRST, SECOND IS BEST AND THE THIRD GENERATION IS NOWHERE That’s how fast pop is: the anarchists of one year are the boring old farts of the next. Nik Cohn, Pop from the Beginning (1969) This is a book about the rock acts that became the pin-ups of 1972, that year’s anarchists. To tell their stories, Pin- Ups 1972 pivots around a commonplace catchphrase in early 1970s pop criticism: ‘third-generation rock ’n’ roll’. The term was introduced to London’s rock cognoscenti by Alice Cooper on a promotional visit to England in 1971; he said his band and The Stooges were third-generation rock’s best representa- tives.1 It was likely he intended it to be no more than a pithy aphorism to differentiate his and Iggy’s band from the compe- tition, to signal that they were the next in line, but the idea behind the phrase found a receptive audience among those who wrote for Britain’s Underground press.2 They ran with the con- cept, putting it into wider circulation, and turned it into a refrain that became a summary definition for rock’s current predic- ament, namely: if The Beatles followed Elvis, and they were now sundered, who was their heir apparent? The need to find 7 pin-ups 1972 an answer was motivated by the fear that the scene was fast burning out, smothered by conformity to the demands of the marketplace. The heat once generated by rock’s seditious intent was turning to cold ash. Who then might fan the dying embers and put some fire back into rock ’n’ roll? For rock journalists, aesthetes and muckrakers alike, their role was to act as the accelerant for the conflagration they ardently hoped was to follow. The first-generation were the original rockers: Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. The second-generation were those who were directly and immediately inspired by these innovators: The Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who. But where it was easy to see the break between first and second iterations, the end of the second cycle and the start of the third was less obvious. It was widely accepted that things had fallen apart when Elvis joined the army, Little Richard got religion, Chuck went to jail and Buddy and Eddie were killed. Following the wake, the vanguard of the resurrection shuffle was never in doubt. The contention in 1970–72 was over whether or not the succeeding generation had now reached its end point. All who cared about such things could agree that something had changed with the break-up of The Beatles, with Altamont, the Tate–LaBianca murders and the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and Jim Morrison between 1969 and 1971. Whatever its end-of-days symbolism, the difficulty with this particular cut- off point was where it left those rockers, such as the Rolling Stones and The Who, who were still active and creatively valid, never mind figures such as Bowie and Bolan, who had roots 8 Introduction deep into the second-generation, even as they themselves were seen as defining actors in the third. As the 1960s rolled into the ’70s and Dylan, Lennon and Jagger edged into their thirties, the truism that rock was about the now, the new and the immediate, that it was fundamentally teenage in orientation, needed to be reassessed. How was the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality, between youth and maturity to be managed? Some ignored the question, their taste confirmed by displays of virtuosity and grandiose con- cepts measured against the fickle values of the teen pop consumer. Others, greaser revivalists, smothered the question under a shroud of nostalgia for the prelapsarian 1950s. A third camp dealt with it by redefining the canon to better classify just what rock was so that its latest iteration could be named and fêted. Pin-Ups 1972 is about this last group. Iconoclasm would play a key role in helping to define the gen- erational shift. Nik Cohn’s earlier and somewhat unique pursuit of the contrary in pop criticism was a model of sorts: few others at the time, or since, have proselytized with such passion and conviction for an outlier while showing an equal measure of disdain for the masters of the idiom, P. J. Proby and Bob Dylan respectively in his case. With the new cohort of rock writers – Ian MacDonald, Charles Shaar Murray, Duncan Fallowell, Roy Hollingworth and Nick Kent among them – the cultiva- tion of a discriminating sensitivity, in which an amplification of cultish preferences underlay critical evaluations, became the norm. Dylan, The Beatles, the Stones and The Who stopped being the markers against whom all might be judged. They 9