Pin-Ups 1972: Third Generation Rock ’n’ Roll

344 Pages·2022·15.64 MB·English

by  Peter Stanfield

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
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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
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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
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