White Bicycles (2 page)
In June that year, a
News of the World
reporter tipped off Scotland Yard about a ‘drugs-and-sex orgy’ at Keith Richards’ place and was rewarded with a ringside seat at the raid. It has become the stuff of legend: Mars bars, threesomes, Marianne Faithfull naked under a fur rug, etc., a symbol of out-of-control decadence. The media stopped winking and grinning about ‘Swinging London’ and started wallowing in horror stories about teenagers being led astray.
Sgt Pepper
was the world’s soundtrack that month and powerful Establishment figures were horrified by the implications of influential pop stars’ open fondness for drugs.
For the UFO audience, the Stones’ bust represented the sinister collusion of circulation-seeking editors, treacherous grasses and killjoy drug squads. Jagger and Richards may have been wealthy superstars, but they were counterculture heroes, too. Hoppy had also been busted that spring (after a plainclothes man reached, conjuror-like, behind his sofa and pulled out an evidentiary plum) and had just been sentenced to eight months in Wormwood Scrubs. Ads and editorials in the
International Times
, posters around UFO and graffiti in Notting Hill Gate reminded everyone of the injustice. A bucket was circulated at the club, the money going to a legal defence fund for drug busts.
One Friday, just before Tomorrow took the stage, I found myself in conversation with Twink and a few others. Hoppy’s jailing outraged us and the behaviour of the
News
of the World
seemed like the last straw. We decided to close the club after the first set and parade through the West End, finishing off with a protest in front of the
News of the World
building in Fleet Street. The West End at 1 a.m. on a Friday night was nothing like as busy as it is today, but there were quite a few ‘normals’ about, and they gaped as we rounded Piccadilly and headed for Leicester Square, then down through Covent Garden towards Fleet Street. Our destination was a letdown: the
News of the World
building was dark and silent. Firebrands among us started planning a blockade of the Sunday paper and an assault on their vans the next night.
The long walk in the night air, the hostile stares from the ‘straights’ and the threats from the police had energized everyone, so the club was packed and buzzing when Tomorrow hit the stage about 4 a.m. The unity of spirit between audience and musicians was tremendous: Twink had been at the head of our two-hundred-strong column. Tearing into ‘White Bicycle’, they had never sounded tighter. At some point Skip from The Pretty Things took over on drums as Twink grabbed the microphone and plunged into the audience. Howe’s playing moved to another level of intensity, sending the dancers leaping into the cones of light as Twink crawled along the floor, hugging people and chanting ‘Revolution, revolution’. Everyone was high – on chemicals or adrenalin or both. You really did believe in that moment that ‘when the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake’. The tide of history was with us and music was the key.
The bill for this glorious moment was presented a month later. The
News of the World
may not have known who we were before that weekend, but they certainly did afterwards. The fruits of their plotting burst forth on the last Sunday in July: beneath a grainy, out-of-focus shot of a bare-breasted girl, the front page screamed that she was fifteen years old and that the photograph had been taken at the ‘hippy vice den’ known as UFO. Our normally stoic landlord buckled under police pressure and evicted us.
A recording may preserve elements of a great musical moment, but bottling the energy of social and cultural forces is impossible. Without realizing it, we had started on a downhill slope that was mirrored in New York and San Francisco. The
agape
spirit of ’67 evaporated in the heat of ugly drugs, violence, commercialism and police pressure. In Amsterdam, people began stealing and repainting the white bicycles.
There was music still to be made on the way down, of course; and on the way up, I had heard wonders.
WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, we became the last family on our street in Princeton, New Jersey, to get a TV set: now we could watch Sid Caesar in
Your Show of Shows
,
The Ed
Sullivan Show
and baseball games. A year later, in the autumn of 1954, my brother Warwick and I discovered the real reason we needed it:
Bob Horn’s WFIL-TV Bandstand
, beamed out of Philadelphia every afternoon after school.
Horn was a large man with the false bonhomie of a used-car salesman. He wore amply cut suits with wide ties and swept his hair back from a high forehead. Like Alan Freed and other middle-aged hustlers in the early 1950s, he provided a link between rhythm and blues and the growing teenage audiences for rock’n’roll.
Bandstand
had a simple formula: students from local high schools dancing to records; a ritual reading of the charts; ‘roll-call’; groups lip-synching their latest record; and the occasional interview with a singer plugging a local appearance. The production was cheap: two static cameras, maybe three. The playlist was full of doo-wop by groups like the Cleftones, the Five Keys, the Flamingos, Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, the Five Satins, etc., and up-tempo R&B by Fats Domino, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Chuck Willis and ‘The Stroll’ became a favourite: the kids would line up across the studio – boys on one side, girls on the other – and take turns sashaying and spinning down the aisle.
Revelations exploded out of the TV set daily: no New Jersey radio station played music like this, at least not before we had to start our homework in the evening. The years 1954 to 1956 were the great cusp, when black music was discovered by white teenagers and sold millions of records. The horrified guardians of the nation’s morals feared the underclass world it represented and the miscegenation implied in its rhythms; major record labels hated it because they didn’t understand it, putting them at a disadvantage with buccaneering independents like Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic, the Chess brothers, Lew Chudd of Imperial, Morris Levy of Roulette and George Goldner of Gone.
The world revealed every afternoon fascinated us. I had a crush on a duck-tail-hairdo’d girl from South Philadelphia named Arlene, who wore sleeveless blouses and tight black skirts. During one roll-call, Horn asked a boy named Vinny to explain the diagonal bandage across his cheek. In the deepest of Delaware Valley accents (the home city is ‘Phiwy’ and you dance on the ‘flaw’) he said: ‘
Wew
, uh,
Bawb
, I ran into a
daw
.’ The next morning in my seventh-grade classroom we felt very worldly speculating about the length and type of blade responsible for Vinny’s wound.
We were respectable middle-class kids. There were a few DA haircuts and raised collars in our class, but they weren’t really serious, at least not Philly-serious. Princeton kids would never perfect the dance steps and clothing styles paraded on
Bandstand
. The bourgeoisie can only borrow its culture from below and above – and America never did have much of an ‘above’. The sullen insouciance of the Italian kids was intimidating enough, but we had no hope of matching the swagger of the vocal quintets as they walked onstage, or the shake of the head that freed their processed hair to tumble over their foreheads, or the snap of the fingers as they crossed their feet preparatory to an elegant spin as they ooohed and waahed behind the lead singer.
Horn delegated the chart countdown and the interviews to a rota of regular girls, always blonde and built. They were calm and professional while making announcements from the tacky podium (no waving to friends or giggling) and completely at home interviewing dangerous-looking pompadoured black men in sharkskin suits. It was not lost on us that these were probably the only occasions on American TV in 1955 when white girls and black men could be seen in such close physical proximity (
Bandstand
dancers being almost entirely white, of course).
At the close of every programme the charisma-free Horn would thank the guests, the technicians and his producer, Ernie Mamarella. We loved the name Mamarella. I would like to think we caught its curvaceous resonance, but it probably just sounded funny.
One afternoon early in the summer of 1956, we were stunned to see a small unremarkable man in Horn’s place. He followed all the show’s rituals without once mentioning the host’s name. At 4.30 he simply said, ‘This is Ernie Mamarella saying so long until tomorrow.’ Speculation began on the school bus the next morning and continued between classes. After lunch, a group of us were talking in the hallway when Pat Fischer, a clever black girl with reddish pigtails, overheard our conversation. ‘If you want to know what happened to Bob Horn, you better get yourselves a copy of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
,’ she said, and disappeared into science class.
After school, one of us went to the news-stand while the rest grabbed a booth at the local luncheonette. We examined each page until we came to the headline reading ‘Disc Jockey on Morals Charge’. The position atop the podium could be earned, it seemed, by visits to a motel with Bob. Horn was accused of statutory rape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Sixteen years later I was living in Los Angeles and running the music department of Warner Brothers Films. Ted Ashley, the company president, asked me to ‘take a lunch meeting’ with some famous TV producers who were pitching a series of music films. When I heard their names, I could barely contain my eagerness. In an Italian restaurant in Hollywood, I asked Ernie Mamarella about that day.
News of Horn’s arrest had arrived late in the morning, he said, leaving him no option but to fill in. Afterwards, the station bosses announced they were pulling the show. He pleaded and cajoled, pointing to its minuscule budget and remarkable ratings. They agreed to give him until noon the following day to find the most clean-cut, above-suspicion, white-bread, all-American disc jockey in God’s creation. Mamarella told me he drove all over Greater Philadelphia that night interviewing one leering, seedy, unshaven DJ after another. He was on the point of giving up when someone suggested a late-night jock in Reading, an hour north-west of the city. He arrived about two in the morning as Dick Clark – the other half of my 1972 lunch date – was spinning records for local insomniacs.
For Americans, the denouement of this story lies at the heart of our popular culture. Clark, his white shirt collar outside his blazer, his smile as bright as a toothpaste commercial, started work the next day. Within six months, the network was pumping the show into every market in America. Arlene, Vinny and their friends became teen icons. For the next three decades,
American Bandstand
beamed an ever blander version of popular music into millions of homes, making hits, creating stars and homogenizing the dance steps and fashions of American youth.
The WFIL-TV studios were in North Philadelphia, a few blocks from the now derelict station where express trains used to stop before turning west towards Chicago and St Louis. Alighting passengers descended an iron staircase to the then-noisy immigrant streets below. Clark and Mamarella told how they rented an office above a barber shop opposite that stairway. Brill Building men in snap-brimmed hats and dark suits would catch the 11 o’clock from New York and join them for lunch at the coffee shop next door, bringing briefcases stuffed with cash or contracts giving Dick Clark Productions a share in the publishing rights to the B-side of a new single. That afternoon, their records would be played to millions of teenagers across America. In those days, ‘payola’ was considered just good business. (It still is, but the methodology is more subtle.) The smart money – the big money – was on white stars and safe music.
In a used bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico, many years after my encounter with Clark and Mamarella, I came across a fevered but well-sourced history of the events of the summer of 1956 written by Stanley Blitz, a fan of Horn’s. Clark, he claims, had been waiting in the wings at WFIL radio, not out in Reading, and the rape and drunk-driving charges that cost Horn his job were a set-up. WFIL-TV was part of the media empire of Walter Annenberg, later Nixon’s ambassador to London, and Mrs Annenberg evidently hated the kind of music Horn played. The deeply religious station manager was also revolted by Horn and his hipster ways. By the time he was found not guilty of molesting the girl, Horn was a forgotten man in Philadelphia, although not by the many
Bandstand
‘regulars’ who wrote to Blitz of how much they loved him and how the show had lost its soul with Clark.
My brother and I were appalled by Dick Clark from his first day on air. Before long, prefab rockers like Fabian and Frankie Avalon started edging out the doo-wop groups. In a year or two, the rock’n’roll era was over, replaced by chirpy corporate pop. Like most non-conforming kids, we began to look further afield for our musical adventures.
THERE IS A
NAÏF
SKETCH from the 1820s of apprentices at a New York market watching black kids ‘dancing for eels’ on overturned stall tables. The white boys lean forward, fascinated by the exuberance of the dancers. Warwick and I and a few of our friends were like the boys in that old drawing, leaning towards a culture we sensed held clues for us about escaping the confines of our middle-class upbringing and becoming male sexual beings. For Christmas one year, my maternal grandmother – a woman who didn’t know Louis Armstrong from Louis Napoleon – accidentally gave me one of the great compilation LPs of all time, RCA Victor’s
Encyclopedia of Jazz
, with tracks by King Oliver, Duke Ellington and Sleepy John Estes. From its first spin, we were completely hypnotized by it.
When Warwick and I began listening to old blues and jazz records, the fraternal fighting that had marked our childhood ceased. Fellow obsessive Geoff Muldaur moved to Princeton soon after and the three of us would spend long afternoons exploring singers, soloists or genres by playing every relevant track in our collections. The artists appeared in our imaginations like disembodied spirits in front of the hi-fi speakers as we listened.