Naked Hippies in Teepees

33 years on, I still can’t get my head around August 21st, 1976. On the day, it seemed quite simple. Wake up in a tent in a Hertfordshire field, your first night away from home with mates, aged 17. Following a magical evening of camp fires, acoustic guitars, joss sticks, awe and wonder. (One of the Plonker People - as we called the naked hippies in the teepee - sold Corf what turned out to be a soggy cigar butt for 10 pence.) Hoards of hairy, kaftan-wearing youths, all here for one purpose. To see the one and only Rolling Stones headline the Knebworth Festival. Some of us had even paid the extraordinary sum of £4.50 for our ticket – nine houses on my Saturday window-cleaning round. For this was also to be one of the last live performances from 10CC at the time of their biggest hit single, I’m Not In Love. And, little did we know, but this was also one of the last gigs by the complete line-up of Lynyrd Skynyrd, before the crash that killed half the band. Then there was Todd Rundgren and Hot Tuna. And instead of the few tens of thousands expected, over 200,000 more gatecrashed the event. Like ants and locusts, they climbed the fences and overwhelmed the turnstiles. So large was the crowd that those at the back heard reggae, off-beat versions of the bands, as the speaker banks at each corner of the massive event struggled to synchronise. We loved it – Buffalo Johnson, Corf, Pubic and me. We didn’t know it was the end of an era. Or that what was about to change that era was actually happening that very same day at another festival in France, at Mont De Marsan, where Nick Lowe, Pink Fairies, Eddie And The Hot Rods, Tyla Gang, Little Bob Story, Count Bishops, The Boys and The Damned, were featuring at a famous Punk Festival. It was the day where Ray Burns actually got his Captain Sensible moniker. But we were oblivious. We read about these upstarts in the paper the following week. We even saw Eddie And The Hot Rods as the Reading Festival the next weekend. But this was yet another festival from the old school, featuring the likes of Rory Gallagher, Camel, Black Oak Arkansas and Ted Nugent. The change was under way. Some people may well have seen The Sex Pistols perform at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall in June and July 76 and had their world changed overnight. But this never happened to the majority of the people in the sticks where we came from. So, for us, August 21st, 1976 was a seminal day. And we didn’t even know it. We just enjoyed it for what it was. By the way, I’ve still got the packet of joss sticks I bought the previous evening. I wonder what happened to the Iron Cross I put round my neck. And that red and green, harlequin-patterned Knebworth ticket hanging up on our toilet wall today is fading somewhat now…

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Roadrunner once

Everybody has performed Pablo Picasso, but it’s Roadrunner that really made the difference. As you can tell, I need to say something about Jonathan Richman today. Trouble is, I haven’t got another lifetime in which to say it. But I have to try. Jonathan Richman had one great thought and it was worth hanging on to…Late at night. Out on the open road. Alone in the modern world. Driving with the radio on. Aged 18. Free. This is how it’s always going to be. It’s a moment in your life you know you’ll remember forever. And, clearly, I do. I can appreciate it as much today, aged 50, as I could when actually experiencing it along the byways of Staffordshire in the summer nights of 1977. A rare coincidence of being and feeling alive. And the soundtrack to this would be something like Spanish Stroll by Mink Deville, Whole Wide World by Wreckless Eric, Less Than Zero by Elvis Costello and First Time by The Boys. Plus, of course, that song by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers that described it all. Roadrunner. Going faster miles an hour. Released, or rather re-released on the wonderfully named Beserkley Records at this time, the end of June, 1977. In the middle of the Punk explosion. That Jonathan Richman was considered to be part of the Punk scene is as difficult to understand now as it was then. For starters, he was 26 and far too old. To even begin to understand, you have to know the story of Punk. It didn’t just come from nowhere in 1976/7, though it felt much like that to most of us at the time. Punk had a heritage that was both American and British. Even The Sex Pistols played songs from 60s bands like The Monkees and Dave Berry. The 60s were not the problem – that was the hippies and nestheads, everything they represented and the control they exerted. And we all know Joe Strummer wanted to go even further back to the 50s and become Eddie Cochrane. I’ll leave the British story for another time. The American part of this heritage is what concerns us here. Understanding Jonathan Richman depends on knowing that the American story splits into three strands. The first, as represented by Iggy and the Stooges and MC5, was the garage band scene – essentially, bad-ass hippies on acid progressing the darker side of the beat group explosion. It’s exemplified by the bands on the 1972 LP collection, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68, compiled by Lenny Kaye, soon to be part of Patti Smith’s band. The cover notes in the gatefold sleeve were among the first to describe ‘punk rock’ bands like The Electric Prunes and The Seeds. The MC5 took this music to the extreme with Kick Out The Jams. Then Iggy and the Stooges took it further with Funhouse and Raw Power. At the very same time, the second strand was the sole province of Andy Warhol’s house band, The Velvet Underground – the ultimate, inside-out, negative image of Californian peace-and-love psychedelia (on the surface). A very strange mixture of Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico, The Velvets combined progressive rock with art-house antics, avant-garde noise and folksy doo-wop harmonising. The influences of Punk are curious indeed. Utterly unsuccessful at the time, The Velvets produced a spate of seminal LPs which were to gain them a retrospective credibility for being so single-mindedly ‘unhippy’. Although some of their songs were more complex than anyone thought (as musicologist and ex-Passage frontman, Dick Witts says in his biography of the band, The Velvet Underground), many were simple constructions that newly formed Punk bands could copy and include as covers to add credibility to their 1977 sets. Buffalo Johnson’s Punk band, Trash, performed a very passable version of White Light, White Heat. Now, aged 18 in 1969, an impressionable Jonathan Richman became infatuated with The Velvet Underground, leaving his home town of Boston for New York, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to break into their scene as a musician. He returned to Massachussets. Not long after, Lou Reed and the Velvets followed him, having themselves failed in New York. They actually found their audience among students in Boston. The sound that Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground then adopted was to be the sound that Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers would take forward when they formed in 1970. In retrospect, this sound has been described as proto-punk garage rock. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Listen to What Goes On and New Age from The Velvet Underground Live With Lou Reed, Vol 1, then to She Cracked and Hospital from the first Modern Lovers album, produced by ex-Velvet John Cale, and you’ll find it hard to disagree with me that there isn’t a great deal of difference between Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman. They’ve been trying to sound like each other on and off for the last 40 years. It was just that Jonathan Richman took time to emerge. As for Roadrunner, it first emerged as a single in the States in September, 1975. Then again in October, 1976, when that first album, The Modern Lovers, was eventually released after four years. Ironically, this was around the time that the third and final strand of US Punk heritage was kicking in. Although Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers had nothing whatsoever to do with Patti Smith, The Ramones, Blondie, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Talking Heads (although one founder member, Jerry Harrison, left to form the latter), it was this awakening, with its early vinyl releases, that led to the lumping in of JR with Punk. There was hardly any new vinyl around, so having an early release meant you got your record played in all the right places, wherever Punk was mentioned. So, Jonathan Richman got to ride the wave and make it first in the UK, just as The Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads did. And, so finally, Beserkley released Roadrunner for the first time in the UK, because we’d been listening to the import for the previous six months. It wasn’t till even later in the summer that they released the first Modern Lovers LP in the UK. They obviously knew something we didn’t. It would soon become clear. For Richman was ready to release his next album on an unsuspecting public - Rock’n’Roll With The Modern Lovers. Here were whimsical songs about leprechauns, insects and abominable snowmen. Was it Steve Hillage and Gong all over again? Then came his biggest UK hit, Egyptian Reggae. After this, JR never again left his own version of Narnia. Though he did leave a bemused Punk and New Wave audience in his wake. I never saw Jonathan Richman live, though I did hear him. He came to Bradford University in 1978. I was refused entry by a bouncer with whom I’d had a recent disagreement. While I stayed outside, Bingo, Sparky and Max Jingoff went in, saw him and even talked to him afterwards, sitting on the edge of the stage. I sat outside and listened. It was late at night. The stars were shining. I was alone in the modern world. Aged 18. And free. And that’s the way it’s always been.


Roadrunner, roadrunnerGoing faster miles an hourGonna drive past the Stop 'n' ShopWith the radio onI'm in love with MassachusettsAnd the neon when it's cold outsideAnd the highway when it's late at nightGot the radio onI'm like the roadrunnerAlrightI'm in love with modern moonlight128 when it's dark outsideI'm in love with MassachusettsI'm in love with the radio onIt helps me from being alone late at nightIt helps me from being lonely late at nightI don't feel so bad now in the carDon't feel so alone, got the radio onLike the roadrunnerThat's rightSaid welcome to the spirit of 1956Patient in the bushes next to '57The highway is your girlfriend as you go by quickSuburban trees, suburban speedAnd it smells like heaven(thunder)And I say roadrunner onceRoadrunner twiceI'm in love with rock & roll and I'll be out all nightRoadrunnerThat's rightWell nowRoadrunner, roadrunnerGoing faster miles an hourGonna drive to the Stop 'n' ShopWith the radio on at nightAnd me in love with modern moonlightMe in love with modern rock & rollModern girls and modern rock & rollDon't feel so alone, got the radio onLike the roadrunnerO.K., now you sing Modern Lovers(Radio On!)I got the AM(Radio On!)Got the car, got the AM(Radio On!)Got the AM sound, got the(Radio On!)Got the rockin' modern neon sound(Radio On!)I got the car from Massachusetts, got the(Radio On!)I got the power of Massachusetts when it's late at night(Radio On!)I got the modern sounds of modern MassachusettsI've got the world, got the turnpike, got theI've got the, got the power of the AMGot the, late at night, (?), rock & roll late at nightThe factories and the auto signs got the power of modern soundsAlrightRight, bye bye!

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Lost friend

I ought to say something. Buffalo Johnson is 50 today. We were friends from the age of 10. At the age of 29, he married my little sister, his second wife. Today, estranged from me as well as her, but not their three, fantastic teenage sons, Buffalo Johnson is half-way through his fourth divorce. They say he looks like Henry VIII. He’s certainly acting like him. Two wives to go. Fortunately, nobody has been beheaded. Except, perhaps, Buffalo Johnson himself – who has suffered from severe depression throughout his adulthood, but these last ten years in particular. It cost him his career. It’s lost him three wives. And our friendship. But, then, I was never a very good friend. Any more than he has been a very good husband. It all makes me wonder…how we come into each other’s lives and what purpose we serve there. According to his father, I was a kind of beacon of achievement for Buffalo Johnson at a time when he was going off the rails. Buffalo Johnson was certainly a kind of leader for me during my teens. He seemed to know his own mind when I never did. He had the well-paid Saturday afternoon job at Tesco while I went to see Wolves. He could afford all the David Bowie, Lou Reed and Velvet Underground albums. I had to record off the radio. We attended our first music concerts together…Status Quo, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Genesis, Rolling Stones, Reading Rock Festival, Knebworth. Dated our first girlfriends together. Ironically, I ‘lost’ him when he chose the risky membership of a local Punk band rather than University. He chose a new clique. I had to find new friends. Including the best-looking girl in the sixth form, who also shares Buffalo Johnson’s 50th birthday today (happy birthday, Lesley, wherever you are - I know that you, too, like Buffalo Johnson, were suffering mentally, even in your early 20s). By the time I had made my way into Punk at 17, he was too deep. I went to University. He got married in December, 1979. It all went quiet. Then, in early August 1979, I met him and his wife at an Adam and the Ants gig at Newport, Shropshire. The next time I saw him was in the summer of 1981, when I had given up life as a trainee chartered accountant and was about to spend a month travelling around Europe on Interrail with Sparky and Blind Ray. His first marriage was over. Buffalo Johnson had plaster casts on both forearms and I never twigged. When I went to live in London with Sparky and Ray, I’d pick things up with Buffalo Johnson during Christmas breaks back home in Stafford. It was all heavy drinking and slot machines. By 1984, Buffalo Johnson would occasionally come down to London for the weekend, kipping on the sofa, much to Blind Ray’s objection. Things were not right. Buffalo Johnson was describing himself as an emotional cripple, then drowning the thought with twenty pints a night. Being his size, he could take it. At the bar, he’d order one to drink, while waiting for his change, then bring back the round. I couldn’t keep up with him. I rarely tried. When I did, it ended in vomit and stitches. I still have the scars to prove it. Then everything started to go right for him. I was stuck in Brixton, on the dole, writing hopeless novels, working in a Nigerian grocery, six nights a week till midnight and not getting paid. He had been snapped up by an up and coming IT company. He was a hot computer programmer, someone who could take new systems into companies and bed them in. It was 1987, big bang. And, for Buffalo Johnson, big bucks. The next thing I knew he was marrying my sister. For our friendship, it all went downhill from there. Big houses in Twickenham and Manchester. Buffalo Johnson never there. My sister bringing up young boys by herself. I have this particular memory of Buffalo Johnson going berserk at my little sister because she had folded over a pair of his socks at the top, so that the elastic was going. He had lost his sense of priority. When my sister divorced him early this century, we all wondered if he would survive. He has hospitalised himself in a sanatorium more than once. I don’t know how he has managed to persuade two other women to marry him since. His close relationships have been a disaster. But his sons, my nephews, are fantastic lads. The eldest, Sam, now studying sound engineering at Bolton University, looks like a perfect cross between Buffalo Johnson and me. It’s uncanny. Like I said, I don’t understand what we bring to each other’s lives. And then I see Sam…I feel like I also ought to say that Ray Davies of The Kinks becomes a pensioner today. Many more lazy Sunday afternoons to you, Ray. But my thoughts today are with Buffalo Johnson, in California with his brother, though we may never speak again for years.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk