MALCOLM McLAREN EATS EGG SALAD

MALCOLM McLAREN EATS EGG SALAD

Other Pagan Rituals To Follow ?

John Mendelssohn

Throughout his career as proprietor of one of London’s most controversial boutiques, and later as the man who radicalized the New York Dolls and essentially thought up the Sex Pistols, Adam Ant, and Bow Wow Wow, Malcolm McLaren has demonstrated a remarkable proclivity for scandalizing the pop world. But if you imagine Malcolm McLaren to be some cynical manipulator who, to paraphrase the Sex Pistols, does it all for fame, or at least infamy, you might have lots more imagining to do.

Consider that when McLaren speaks about rock ’n’ roll, he does so with such wide-eyed earnestness and passion that he seems to lose sight of all else around him. Indeed, while chatting with an old chap from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such—the second or third in a long succession of people whom his record company had invited to interrogate him very late one" afternoon in the third winter of the 1980s—he was brought what appeared to\be an egg salad-on-white sandwich. But he’d become so wrapped up in trying to elucidate his feelings about rock V roll that he gesticulated with the poor sandwich for perhaps 10 minutes before he realized that he had it in hand and shut up'long enough to chomp into the sucker!

And if he gets keyed up talking about rock ’n’ roll, he becomes positively apopletic about the world’s downtrodden and disenfranchised, a lot of whose dance music he presents or performs in his latest role, that of ethnomusicoligist/Solo Artist.

Rock Wrollis the music of the d Ispossessed.

“I believe,” he expounds, “that the whole rock ’n’ roll era came about when people accidentally borrowed from a very pagan musical source. Elvis Presley moving like a black man from the darkest part of Africa excited people because it made them aware that music could involve thinking with your hips instead of your head.

“Seeing or reading about them now, we laugh at all those outraged ’50s fathers who attacked rock ’n’ roll as jungle fever that would send their kids into trances and destroy the American ethic. But is was absolutely true! Rock ’n’ roll was magical and pagan. Rock ’n’ roll was about the jungle!

“By now, the original idea’s got pretty milky! I don’t think it’s meaningful any longer to be a member of the fifth generation applauding a Chuck Berry riff. Rock ’n’ roll is bigger than that, or fucking well ought to be. Rock ’n’ roll doesn’t necessarily mean what Alan Freed meant. It’s grown much larger than that, more enveloping. It can mean Peruvian Indian music, or Zulu music. When I was in Zululand, I heard what sounded like Keith Richards riffs, as stolen from Chuck Berry!

“Rock ’n’ roll is the music of the dispossessed. The ’80s are all about understanding that.”

Perhaps you’ve wondered how McLaren came to juxtapose square dance music, of all things, with street rapping in the best-known track on his solo album, Buffalo Girls. Well, wonder no more. “Dance had once been a sacred love ritual. But by the ’50s there was no trace of that left in America, except in things like the square dance, which can be seen as game of pursuit and rejection, and harks back to ancient rituals.”

If you want to make a hormone, don’t pay her. If you want to make McLaren moan, ask him what he thinks of pop music. “Pop music,” he’ll assert biliously, “is an invention of something that we know as The Industry. It has to do with a lot of technical apparatus, inventions like producers, and packaging. The Industry has never had anything to do with the essence of rock ’n’ rofl. I think the only place you can find the essence is in places where music remains a sacred means of communication.

“The rock ’n’ roll artists I’m interested in are the Peruvian baker or Dominican auto mechanic in New York City who play at their friends’ weddings, or the Cuban priest who digs up songs of pagan gods that his forefathers handed down to him.”

Suspecting that both are created essentially to provide pleasure, the old chap from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such really presses McLaren to explain how the Peruvian baker’s and Domincan grease monkey’s musics are inherently nobler than the AOR that white teenagers with long hair listen to in the suburbs, but to no avail.

McLaren essentially invented both the prototypical punk and pirate looks after years as London’s premiere Teddy Boy haberdasher. So the old chap from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such was a little surprised to have noted that, aside from his rather peculiar black felt boots, the clothing Mai wore to be interrogated in was a sort that might be glimpsed anywhere that nice folks go about their business. He explained his sartorial demureness this way: “Havinga physical image of my own has never been essential to what I do. An artist who paints pictures often doesn’t have an image of his own, and I’ve always preferred to use other people as my canvas.”

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The fact that he disdains to dress for success, though, should by no means be construed as tantamount to his lacking a self-conception that both whimsical and wonderful. “I think of myself,” he reveals, peepers all a-twinkle, “as Mr. Mischief, as a sort of Harpo Marx grossed with the god Pan, someone who pops up in odd places creating confusion.”

The two men’s thoughts turn to the New York Dolls, whom McLaren managed briefly before their breakup, and whom he persuaded to write and sing songs “about truck driving in Peking, about all things

Red,” with a hammer and sickle flag behind them and Mao’s Little Red Book in lead singer David Johansen’s grimy dutches.^

“After one of their best shows,” Mrs. McLaren’s baby boy Malcolm reminisces sourly, “this woman who used to write for your magazine that bills itself as such, was going on and on to the promoter about how she didn’t approve at all, as I was a Communist. She knew this for a fact, you see, because someonein London had told her so. David collared me in the loo and said, “For Christ’s sake, don’t irritate this woman—she’s very important!” I tried to tell him that he was the important one, that he was the one who’d just done a great show. But it didn’t work. “ ‘Look,’ he went up and told her, ‘it’s only fun,’ It was that night that I realized that my work with the New York Dolls was finished.”

What in the world, the old chap from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such wonders, does the self-styled Mr. Mischief have against fun? “Fun,” McLaren explains tartly, “is a very debilitating word. I don’t thirikNthat anyone who’s really mattered would have said that it was just fun—not Jim Morrison, not Jimi Hendrix, not Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley or Elvis, none of them.

“And I thought what the Dolls d d was a very strong, very valid way of livening up people’s attitudes, of getting' them to define who they were, of creating debate. So I thought it was fatally cynical for David Johansen to say it was just fun. That ignored Alan Freed dying under the circumstances that he died under! That ignores nearly every major black artist of the ’50s winding up penniless or a heroin addict!”

Perhaps, the old chap from America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine that bills itself as such speculates, Johansen fretted that the trappings of Maoism might strike his audience as sensational for sensationalism’s sake, facile and meaningless in much the same way that the vile and repugnant Plasmatics would be years later. “No*2 the pixieish provocateur wails woundedly, “it wasn’t facile! Nothing I’ve ever done has been facile!

“It was like ET. ET worked in the Ameriqan market because he’s the Red under the bed, this terrible monster America’s been propaganderizing (sic!) for years. ET is the black man—Everything That Couldn’t Be in White Anglo-Saxon society. Now when I say to you that David Johansen was doing what ET did—giving the dispossessed of America something to rally around, you might reply that ET is jusjt a lot of fun. But I think he’s much, much more than that.”

No interview with Malcolm would be complete without a few paragraphs on The Sex Pistols, and this one is no exception. Hence, let’s pause for a moment to encourageThe self-styled maestro of mischief to reminisce about Johnny, Sid, WhatWas-His-Name, and What-Was-His Name.

I “They were England’s greatest contribution to rock ’n’ roll because they were the most English group ever,” he responds with palpable enthusiasm. “Rotten was straight out of David Copperfield, Vicious straight out of one of those drains in Battersea; They were a bunch of ragamuffins who had a fucking huge story to tell everybody. They were closer to Dickens than to Muddy Waters, which was why they were afforded such tremendous journalism. The gave rock ’n’ roll a wider definition. They put anarchy into the children’s dictionary!”

“Maybe they speak unkindly of me,” M mused when asked why such of his former proteges as John Lydon and Bow Wow Wow speak so lowly of him, “because they’re jealous, or because they don’t understand who I am. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been interested in success. What is important to me is to provoke change. The people I’ve worked with have often expected me to do so solely for their own ends.”

Many people believe that the Sex Pistols saved rock ’n’ roll. The Sex Pistols were essentially M’s idea. Therefore, you might very Well reason that M saved rock ’n’ roll. So why don’t countless millions of teenagers carry photographs of him around in their wallets? Mai himself can scarcely be bothered even to consider the issue; although he’s only too delighted to note the irony of his charges being hailed as saviors. “At the time,” he points out, “people didn’t think that the Sex Pistols were saving anything at all. In fact, people were terrified that they’d destroy everything. And it’s true that in the end they left a lot of debris. When they broke up there was a sigh of relief in The Industry that could be heard from Warner Bros, in Burbank clear across the Atlantic to Greek Street in Soho. The Industry,” he finishes, sneering expansively, “was very pleased that they could get back to the normal selling of product.”

“No,” he muses, treating himself to a quick bite of his egg salad sandwich, “The Sex Pistols didn’t want to save anything. They wanted to show that rock ’n’ roll was about provocation and change.”

“I don’t know if I get my due,” he reflects at last, munching happily now, “but I’m hot so sure that I care. I’m far more concerned with what’s next.” ^