ATTACK OF THE RAGING POOFTERS

ATTACK OF THE RAGING POOFTERS

Many consider the "second" British Invasion to have begun with the Who's appearance at the historic Monterey Pop Festival. But then again, there's always John Mendelssohn. He just considers everything an insult. Below, Grandpa John revs up his brain—which was actually there at the time—and restates the way things were, one last time. Incidentally, have you heard about his new book?

JOHN MENDELSSOHN

No sooner had such diverse Americans as the Mamas & Papas, the minions of Motown, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, the Byrds and Beach Boys and Four Seasons, Sgt. Barry Sadler, Simon & Garfunkel, and a succession of young suburban Stones and Yardbirds-aping groups with Brian Jones hairdos recaptured the American airwaves by the dawn of the Summer of Love than a second wave of British hitmakers was upon us.

Just for the sake of maximum commerciality, let's say that they were led by the Who, who performed in America for the first time in the spring of 1967, and on the West Coast for the first time a couple of months later. The performance they gave at the original Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco two nights before their epochal appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival wasn't only the most thrilling one has ever witnessed.

It was also the most thrilling one's ever likely to witness.

Pete Townshend, who, with his laceratingly blue eyes and gigantic snout, and spindly physique, looked like a Dickens character come to life, played his guitar not like ringing a bell, but as though sending semaphore signals, pinwheeling his arm in that now-famous way of his, hurling himself into the air as though intent on becoming the first Briton in orbit. Keith Moon drummed as though he had eight arms and had gobbled an entire pharmacyful of amphetamines before he'd come on stage. John Entwistle played bass as no one had ever played it before—as though it were the lead instrument—and looked so impossibly bored that you imagined that he was apt to nod off at any second.

THE SECOND BRITISH INVASION 1967-1970

And Roger Daltrey was positively scandalous in bouffant hair the color of bright sunshine, an antique lace shawl, and ladies' slingback shoes. His eyes, as blue as Townshend's, and bluer, appeared the size of saucers. He was utterly expressionless. He alternately held his microphone as though it were an antique teacup of incalculable preciousness and hurled it whistling past the heads of the spellbound hippies in front of the stage, only to yank it back again at the last possible instant. He looked the most outrageous queen in the history of show business. Seeing him on that stage, you'd no more have believed him capable of pummeling his pals into submission in the group's early days—as it was later revealed that he indeed had—than that his hair was its natural color.

They even made ''Runaround Sue" sound amazing that night, and "Barbara Ann," with Moon singing. They sounded every bit as amazing as they looked. One was utterly transfixed, even without staying for the second show to watch Pete demolish his guitar.

They made the best records of their career in those days. As often as not, Daltrey sang in the voice of a bewildered, maybe even frightened kid, and Townshend and Entwistle accompanied him in creamy effeminate falsettos. The juxtaposition of the group's voices and their uniquely aggressive, nearly anarchic instrumental style had a strangely disorienting effect, created a weird—and quite wonderful—sort of tension.

After Tommy, when they ceased to be as much a harmony as an instrumental group, when Daltrey's vocal persona became that of the blues-howling bull stud, they had it no more, and were infinitely less fabulous as a result. In much the same way, something irretrievable seemed to disappear when they abandoned the hyperbolic glamor of their frilly shirts, shawls, and sequins days for T-shirts, boiler suits, beards, and those obnoxious chest-hair exposing buckskin numbers that Daltrey became so fond of.

Just for the record, we ought to note that it took them five years to become as big in America as Led Zeppelin became in one. As late as August, 1968, in fact, they could hardly fill a 3,000-seater. Booked to play two shows at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with the James Cotton Blues Band, they had to cancel the second due to lack of interest—and still played to enough unoccupied seats to accommodate three-quarters of the players in the National Football League.

When they returned to these shores a few months earlier, they'd brought with them as an opening act a Pete-produced group called The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. Arthur had pilfered his shtick from Screaming Jay Hawkins— and in turn inspired Alice Cooper, who inspired Kiss, who've inspired a whole generation of heavy metalmongers who try to come on as evil incarnate. Thus, if you were feeling particularly spiteful, you could make a fairly convincing case for Arthur Brown having made Motley Crue possible.

But how could anyone feel anything but the vastest reverence for a man who'd arrive on stage in a flaming headdress, dance as though the stage were electrified, and shriek so as to make your hair stand on end—that is, when he wasn't exploring the lower end of his 92-octave range, and making you worry that the accompanying subsonic vibrations might make your heart stop. He had a gigantic worldwide smash in "Fire," in which he proclaimed himself the god of hellfire, and then vanished, leaving the path clear for the infinitely less brilliant Cooper.

The Move came from Birmingham while Duran Duran were still toddling around that toddlin' town in diapers, and what a motley bunch they were. Their lead singer, Carl Wayne, fancied himself the Englebert Humperdinck of the very near future, and could be seen applying talcum powder to his underarms before gigs with a powder puff. Their guitarist and songwriter, Roy Wood, perpetually wore an expression of bug-eyed astonishment, had the most gapeinducingly freakish hair in all of rock, wrote terrific songs, inspired in equal parts by the Beatles and musical comedy, and bleated in the most distinctive way.

At first there were three more of them, and all five dressed as mobsters, and the four in front sang amazing harmony and did synchronized dancesteps like pale guitar-toting Temptations. At the insistence of their manager, they'd close their shows by attacking television sets and effigies of political leaders with axes, this before Wendy O. Williams was even 30 years old.

Slightly later, when psychedelia became all the rage, they swapped their pinstripes for kaftans and beads, and Wood took to writing songs about being able to walk on water and hear the grass grow. There was no getting a bandwagon past these guys.

Their sole American tour—if you can call performances in three cities and a cross-country drive in a rented station wagon a tour—was a complete disaster. Cowboys ridiculed Roy Wood in the great Southwest and then punched foolhardy roadie "Upsy" Downing's lights out when he tried to persuade them not to. Their record company pretended to be someone else when the group phoned, and someone slipped bass guitarist Rick Price a tab of LSD on the last night of the "tour," with the result that drummer Bev Bevan had to punch his lights out to get him on the plane home.

Judging from the album they proceeded to record, though, they arrived back in Brum none the worse for their harrowing experiences. Shazam, as the album was called, strikes a miraculous balance between heavy metal aggression and pop tunefulness, "progressive" pretension and hilarity, and represents the best performance by a drummer in recorded rock history. In a better world, it would have gone double platinum. Far from cracking the Top 200, though, it barely sold 200. A couple of members of the group went on to form the generally despicable ELO. They went multiple platinum.

Just as the Who were finishing up the American tour on which they opened for Herman's Hermits (Jimi Hendrix was opening for the Monkees at about the same time, and don't imagine for a second that they weren't both extremely grateful for the chance), Creamcomprising three journeymen who were considered the best in Britain on their respective instruments—were in the process of becoming America's favoritl new British group since the Stones. And very nearly ruining pop in the process.

In their wake, pop ceased to be about songs, which came to be looked on essentially as excuses for endless displays of how rapidly one could string together blues cliches. In their wake, every drummer in the world seemed to become Ginger Baker, Jr., to buy two bass drums and insist that he be allotted 30 minutes per performance to solo. In their wake was born the absolutely horrific notion of the "supergroup"—that is, the idea that a group of sufficiently well-known geezers could toss a group together and expect an audience without bothering to become genuinely cohesive, let alone to think of anything distinctive to express.

If pressed, one'll admit that he liked the perm Eric Clapton got to make himself look more like Bob Dylan, and loved the paint job the Fool (those artist/musician proteges of the Beatles) did on his guitar. And one was as spellbound as the next guy through the first 10 minutes of the first Ginger Baker drum solo he witnessed, and thought it was a wonderful thing that someone as physically repellent as he could become the idol of millions. But one positively detested listening to Jack Bruce howling the blues.

To be honest, one detested listening to very nearly all white Englishmen howling the blues, but that didn't keep small armies of them—including Fleetwood Mac (who'd believe it?), John Mayall, the Jeff Beck Group, Savoy Brown, and others far too numerous and terrible to recall, from doing so. Much as one might have been wowed by Peter Green's guitar playing, say, or Beck's, there really wasn't any way one could endure their singers without the use of controlled substances. They were such poseurs, and they sounded so feeble. Hearing a 55-year-old black man's song about the misery of the black urban existence coming out of a 22-year-old white Briton dressed in a frilly black see-through blouse and teased and sprayed hair was a singularly disorienting experience.

While we're on the subject of the blues and showing off, we'd better get Led Zeppelin out of the way. Millions adored them, but they made me wish I were deaf. They weren't about anything, it seemed to me, but showing off their chest hair and how superhumanly high they could screech and rapidly they could play blues scales in that area of a guitar's fretboard where the frets get tiny and the air thin. As though it weren't bad enough that they seemed to have nothing to express but what insatiable studs they were, they often seemed to be mocking the very idea of expression. When Plant sang, "I know what it's like to be alone," at the end of "Good Times, Bad Times," for instance, his voice oozed and you didn't believe him

And those obnoxious fruit metaphors, all the insufferable lemon-squeezing business! Is it any wonder that your brave correspondent, laughing (very nervously) in the face of threats to his ongoing personal wellbeing by the group's mountain-sized ex-professional-wrestler manager, tried to stir up an anti-Zeppelin fervor in the hallowed pages of a rival magazine?

Just for the record, one has to admit that in the context of groups like Triumph and Iron Maiden and just about everybody else who played the second day of the 1983 US Festival, Zeppelin seem in retrospect to have been the very picture of expressiveness, taste, and restraint. There's no denying that Jimmy Page could be extremely inventive when he wanted to be, and adventurous too,

which is the last thing in the world you could say about Zeppelin's trillions of stud-bracleted legatees. And one'll be cornholed by the offensive line of the New Jersey Generals if he doesn't find Plant's "Big Log" strangely beautiful.

But back to the subject at hand. Free, whom America first glimpsed when they opened for Blind Faith on their lone American tour in the summer of '69, were a great deal easier to take than their fellow British bluesboys—a great deal easier. Paul Rodgers sang with real power (if many more Sam & Dave and Otis Redding mannerisms than one might have preferred), Paul Kossoff did wonderful imitations of Clapton at his most lyrical, the drummer seemed to lack any desire at all to play a solo, and the bass player was one of the drollest and most reminiscent of Motown's brilliant James Jamerson in rock to that point.

They were so streamlined and young and diminutive that you actually laughed with delight when they went into something like Albert King's "The FHunter."

Speaking of singers and Blind Faith, there wasn't a better one in the United Kingdom than Stev(i)e Winwood, who didn't wear see-through blouses, didn't pose or preen, and sang like a black banshee on an electrified grid. Anyone who'd exclude "Gimme Some Lovin'," which he recorded while still a member of the Spencer Davis Group in 1966, from his list of the greatest British rock singles of all eternity deserves nothing but your scorn—or your pity in the case of a certifiable disability. A couple of things Winwood cut with Blind Faith were fairly astonishing too, as too were the first couple of albums he made with Traffic, the psychedelic-cum-soul group he formed between Davis and Faith and then later went back to.

Brilliant a singer as he was, Winwood was a strangely inaccessible and uncharismatic little sod on stage (and, lest we forget, a positively frightful guitarist on record—but did that stop him from jamming for what seemed weeks at a time?), a real washout in the presence department. Joe Cocker, who for a while there sounded more like Ray Charles than Ray Charles did, had no such problem. Indeed, the misshapen former plumber cut an absolutely riveting figure on stage as he staggered and twitched like a spastic, snatched frantically at his own hair, played guitars and pianos that weren't really there, and generally appeared to be plummeting into psychosis right before your eyes.

Speaking of psychosis, Pink Floyd, who were a largely unnoticed part of the second wave of the British Invasion, originally boasted one of the great pop madmen in Syd Barrett, whose behavior eventually became so...erratic that Dave Gilmour had to be called in to replace him before the group reached these shores. He'd turn up at a gig one night in drag, then the next with his head shaved. He'd strum the same chord for hours on end. Or he'd stand motionless and silent in the spotlight, transfixed by sights that he alone could see. And yet most of the songs on the Floyd's terrific first album are the work of this later inspiration for Roger Waters's "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond." Who can say if the group would have turned into the pompous old bores they'd turned into by the turn of the decade (if there's one thing worse than letting drummers play half-hour solos in concert, it's giving them half-album sides on which to masturbate) if poor Syd had kept his wits about him.

Speaking of wits (and madmen), mention should be made of the altogether wonderful Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah) Band, who had no hits here (and only one in their native land), but should have had many carloads. Besides hysterically funny send-ups of Elvis-era rock 'n' roll ("Death Cab For Cutie," for instance) and ancient vaudeville numbers, they also did exquisite, touching ballads reminiscent, believe it or not, of some of Paul McCartney's more wistful Beatles stuff. One's own favorites include "Readymades" and "Quiet Talks And Summer Walks." The night in June,

1969, that they opened for the Who and Poco (not yet laid back and soporific then, still breathing fire) was one of the three or four most memorable in one's rock 'n' roll life. The most musical of them, Neil Innes, went on to star as Nasty in The Rutles and to provide the music for lots of other Monty Pythonrelated projects.

Speaking of fire, we ought to mention Jimi Hendrix here too. He wasn't a real Briton, granted, but if he hadn't gone to London to get a foothold and his two accomplices, he almost undoubtedly wouldn't have been wearing a frilly blouse when he took the stage for his historic performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, and might not even have set his guitar on fire.

The reason that so many of the stars of the second phase of the British Invasion dressed like raging poofters, it was later explicated, was that all the most influential managers of the era were raging poofters who molded their boys to turn themselves on. Exand future Animal Chas Chandler (later to produce the way-way-ahead-of-its-time original version of "Cum On Feel The Noize") was far too tall to be homosexual, of course, but that didn't stop him encouraging Jimi to dress in the height of the raging-poofter-dictated fashion.

I personally never enjoyed Hendrix much at all, always felt cruelly patronized by his oversexed ultraspade persona. The more his audiences lapped it up, the more he seemed to disdain them. The last c time I saw him, at the Forum about six s months before his death, he didn't stop g sneering once, and almost succeeded in § inspiring a stampede in which I'd have 1 been crushed to death. But countless i hundreds of thousands did enjoy him a '

4 treat, and still do, and to them I say, "More power to you."

Speaking-of vestal virgins, one has no intention of neglecting to mention Procol Harum, who, in their original incarnation, were equal parts Percy Sledge and rockas-art pretensions (if hardly less fab for it), but who later went on to make some of the most powerful music of the era. Robin Trower later became rich and famous emulating Hendrix, but for one's own money he never played more expressively than while he was a member of the Purple Horrors, as the zany lads called themselves when no one was around. Treat yourself to an earful of "Repent Walpurgis" on their first album soon and often and hear for yourself!

Speaking of singers, one's own personal favorite was Steve Marriott of Small Faces, who had only one American hit ("Itchycoo Park"), but would have had a jillion if there were any justice in this world. One listen to their nearly unrelenting astonishing The Autumn Stone album, which was never even released in this country, will make a fan of even the most cynical old jade.

Don't think for a minute that Steve was always the insufferable little would-be cock of the walk he became in the ghastly Humble Pie. In the Faces days, he and Ronnie Lane wrote wonderful tuneful songs ("Afterglow," "Tin Soldiers,"

"Here Comes The Nice") and he sang them with enough soul to fill an airplane hangar.

Last, and least, you had your Moody Blues, who, with a slightly different lineup, had been part of the tail end of the first phase of the Invasion, but who didn't become superstars until "Nights In White Satin" in '68. Theirs was the most mushily over-produced rock-derived music of the era, theirs the most hideous album covers, theirs the greatest pretentiousness. My own favorite of their hits was the one in which they admitted to being puzzled about why they never got satisfactory answers to their "thousand million questions about hate and death and war." Well, let's see here, in answer to No. 14,223,982...