A Band With Built-In Hate: The Who From Pop Art to Punk by Peter Stanfield

Author:Peter Stanfield [Stanfield, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: music, General, Genres & Styles, Rock, art, popular culture
ISBN: 9781789142785
Google: qE0gEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2021-03-22T23:27:50.014358+00:00

Nik Cohn’s Pop from the Beginning (1969) – here sitting on top of the Track Records compilation The House That Track Built (1969) – used the graphic designer David King, who was partly responsible for half a dozen album covers for Lambert and Stamp’s label.

The Beatles absorbed and exploited that summation. Where they led, others followed. And for a while they were truly marvellous. For Cohn, the group went down a dead end when they started to believe in their own hype, when they concurred with ‘the posh Sundays’ that they made Art. In making that turn, pop lost out. Cohn rated Sgt Pepper highly, but he had real issues with what it represented. ‘In itself,’ he wrote, ‘it was cool and clever and controlled. Only, it wasn’t much like pop. It wasn’t fast, flash, sexual, loud, vulgar, monstrous or violent. It made no myths.’15

When The Beatles lived out their lives in a mythical ‘Liverpool USA’, they spoke to their teenage audience in the language of pop; ‘these boys were coke drinkers from way back,’ wrote Cohn. But with Dylan joining them in their Rolls-Royce, The Beatles lost that audience; and they lost a truth that can be found in trash: ‘originally, in the 1950s, the whole point about rock was its honesty, the way it talked so straight after all those years of showbiz blag, and now it’s just become as fake as Tin Pan Alley ever was.’16 Cohn could barely listen to Dylan, he disliked his voice as much as he hated ‘the changeless wail of his mouth-harp’. He thought he was a monotonous ‘mouthpiece of teen discontent . . . peddling politics and philosophies and social profundities by the pound . . . just the same, [he] moved pop forward into its second phase,’ namely, shutting down rock and roll as ‘the golden age of pulp’.17

The Rolling Stones, on the other hand, ‘were like creatures from another planet, impossible to reach or understand but most exotic, most beautiful in their ugliness’.18 The band was made in the likeness of their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who ‘without doubt, was the most flash personality that British pop has ever had, the most anarchic and obsessive and imaginative hustler of all. Whenever he was good, he was quite magnificent.’19 The long description he provides of the Stones is Cohn at his best: Watts, ‘moronic beyond belief ’; Wyman, ‘impossibly bored’; Keith Richards ‘kept winding and unwinding his legs, moving uglily like a crab, and was shut-in, shuffling, the classic fourth-form drop-out. Simply, he spelled Borstal.’ Jones was ‘flouting and flitting like a gym-slip schoolgirl’ and Jagger, ‘he was all sex.’20

After a Liverpool gig by the Stones, pegged by Cohn as the best show he has ever seen, he wanders around the empty auditorium. A dank smell of urine hangs heavy in the air, ‘the small girls had screamed too hard and wet themselves.’21 The Stones did things to their audience, they were evil, independent and utterly uncompromising. Every group before

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