UFO

Part 4 of The Death of Rock and Roll
Incoming : Part 5 - Way Down to Mexico Way
by Stephen Deng


The seminal US TV Science Fiction adventure series Star Trek came to light on September 8, 1966. Set two hundred years in the future, the show envisioned worldwide peace and scientific cooperation. True, its universe was English-speaking and owed rather more to the culture of the US than to that of the UN--but this was understandable, given the audience market. And anyway the US--like the PRC--is a gigantic state and home to many ethnic nationalities, and likewise espouses the dream of equal dignity for all of them.

[Our interstellar spaceship in orbit above the peaceful Earth of 2266]

So famous did the Star Trek series eventually become that in many countries throughout the West and beyond, its space-faring characters are as familiar as household gods. One of these, a spaceship's Communications officer, is a handsome citizen of the future united Africa and is named for Uhuru (the '60s socialist movement, co-ordinated in Tanzania). Another character, the ship's helmsman, is a gorgeous Asian; and one of the spaceship's many sisters is named for the Kongo (a 1940s warship sunk in the strait off of Xiamen). And in a further extreme of brotherliness, one character is even partly non-human : his mixed blood is green-blue because it is copper-based, like the blood of a horsehoe crab.

[Taking care of Communications one hundred and sixty years from now]

The first pearl of Star Trek to be broadcast before the huge US TV audience was the episode entitled “The Man Trap” wherein our spaceship is freighting NorthAmerican chili peppers to a “starbase”(associated planet) when we discover the ruins of an ancient and long-dead civilisation of salivores (= salt-eaters). Their sole surviving representative manages to come aboard through supernatural delusion. Seeming to be a former girlfriend, it so hoodwinks the ship's doctor he doesnt even find it dodgy that her appearance could be that of a 25-year-old when she should be 37! While the danger to him gives the episode its title, the lurking salivore also disguises itself as human males. Speaking Swahili [斯瓦希里语], the international language of East Africa, the vampire-like sole survivor is romantic and predatory toward the Communications officer too.

[The sole survivor of an ancient and long-dead civilisation.*1*]

Audiences forty years ago had never seen such a racy combination of horror, humour and hopeful humanism. In the four decades since, the Star Trek universe has never been off the airwaves and the once underground Science Fiction [hereafter SF] genre is now mainstream. The original series has directly spawned four other TV shows (a dozen others indirectly). There have also been ten feature-length films--the eleventh is due to be on cinema screens around the time of the Beijing Olympics.

Four days after Star Trek, Davy Jones & The Monkees premiered in their own TV show. While promoted as an American Beatles and having several well-written and well-produced hit songs in ’66, the group’s four pretty faces were in fact pretty much non-musicians—a music-industrial concoction known to insiders as “The Pre-fab (= industrial) Four.” Even the name The Monkees was an inside joke, being the jargon of US Air force Test pilots for any comrade who joined the space program and rode the orbit vehicle in the manner of such a “monkey” (actually a chimpanzee 黑猩猩) as it had been used to carry.


[The first USAmerican voyaged up beyond the atmosphere (=air) in 1961. Just
five years old, "Ham" was actually an unwilling African emigrant. (died 1983)]

[The Pre-fab Four]

While not as high as on The Monkees' records, production values were at least par for the time. Robert “Bob” Rafelson, later the successful film director of Stay Hungry, Brubaker, Mountains of the Moon and the final Philip Marlowe mystery Poodle Springs, owes his leg up in the losAngeline entertainment industry to this very popular TV series. One technical problem no one ever bothered with was that of synchronizing the video and audio halves of the show, so that for example Jones’ lips might be seen to move just as we hear his north-of-England subregional accent. TV “performances” of the Monkees’ songs were glaringly “out of synch”[/sink/], and should have drawn attention to the dubiousness of their skill. To appear on TV forty years ago, however, even competent musicians agreed to “synch” their mouth and hand movements with recordings. The once exciting new medium had gone down the capitalist road, and the Corporations now cast a dim view on “live”[/laiv/] performance. Until recently Hong Kong show business, with its multi-lingual market, would never bother recording audio and video parts at the same time—even for simple melodramatic performances. And in China even unbroadcasted, ticket-selling “live” music concerts use recordings and “lip-synch” – a practice that embarrasses real musicians and yet went unchallenged until 2002, when Cui Jian [崔健] launched his Live Vocals movement.*2*


Extraordinary Rendition

Meanwhile the sales of Revolver were going through the roof. Music industry strategists had seen before that controversy and notoriety, far from diminishing interest in the product, were actually a stimulus to it. "The Corporate appetite was whetted for street cred [=credibility among common folk]," says Skip Lunch, legendary New York punk guitarist. "There no percentage in the outright anti-war stuff but the psychedelic movement seemed like something the Corp might profitably work with." How far would Corporate penetration of the youth culture wildfire go? RNR was cornered in the studio by the experts of production. It was tamed on TV. Could its social engagement too be commodified? Was even consciousness to be set rolling down the capitalist road? On September 15th, the word came down to all agents in the underground : the days of aimless wildness were done. The Corp was moving in and taking over.
For the strategy to work, both poles of the NewYork--London Axis would have to be set humming. In England, home province of The Beatles—and Davy Jones--RNR was also gaining a tenuous foothold in visual media. The MGM-British film Blow-up, directed by the Italian Marxist Michelangelo Antonioni, cameoed Jeff Beck & The Yardbirds performing one of the covers on their last album but one, Having a Rave-up.*3* Typically however the sound and vision are “out of synch.” Had Antonioni let Beck do a song from the band’s latest album it would have awash in psychedelic distortion.
In the same film studio, American exile genius director Stanley Kubrick was in the middle of his long production of the SF film 2001 : a Space Odyssey, and having to elaborate delays to the publication of AC “Telstar” Clarke’s novel of the same name. Under way over at Pinewood Studios was the much shorter production You Only Live Twice. In this fifth movie in the James “007” Bond series, the dashing MI6 agent partners with his EastAsian counterpart Tiger Tanaka to recover hijacked Gemini and Soviet orbit vehicles. The last of the books of Bond stories, Octopussy & The Living Daylights, had been published in June.

[AC "Telstar" Clarke, SF novelist]

On October 1st lucky Londoners witnessed a native American electric guitarist take the stage to perform alongside the famous former guitarist with the Yardbirds. Discovered just that summer in New York’s Manhattan district, the intractable JM “Jimi” Hendrix had been let go for “stepping out” from several bands*4*—Curtis Knight & The Squires, Little Richard & The Upsetters, The Isley Brothers--even his fellow Columbia River regionals Little Daddy & The Bachelors had fired him. “By ’66 Hendrix wasnt exactly a starving artist,” says Lunch.*5* “He had bandied together a rhythm section [bassist + drummer]—The Blue Flames--and trained them to take his grandstanding well. They had got a regular gig and everybody was eating every day—you know, not filet mignon, but eating. All the same, though, the minute this big ol’ Corporate agent lurches over to him and utters the magic words ‘Lose the band’—he does.” The agent, Hendrix’ appointed handler, was the 2-meter tall Bryan “Chas” Chandler. Himself a former bassist with the Invasion band The Animals, he jet-planed the willing Hendrix out along the Axis to London. “A rhythm section can be bought in any market, alas, even in the Olde World,” says Lunch. “The Flames were history.”
Encouraging the American genius to compose his own “original” songs, Chandler fed his houseguest a steady diet of SF and encouraged him to “think spacey.” Hendrix read the sanFrancisco Bay writer PK Dick, renownful for “The Man in the High Castle,” an alternate history wherein the Japanese have annexed the Pacific coast away from the USA and no decisions are made there without consulting the Yi-Jing [易经]. Dick’s latest novel showed the people of a future, hotter Earth being drafted by the Buddhist secretary-general of the UN for colonization of other planets; its metaphysical, psychedelic elements interested The Beatles. But Hendrix’s favorite Bay SF novel was “Earth Abides”(1949), about a man named Ish who seems to be the sole survivor of a planet-wide biological apocalypse.



Space Monsters

Also that October 1st, two former members of Germany’s “Nazi” [= National Socialist] Party, Albert Speer and Baldur vonSchirach, were released from prison – precisely twenty years after the conclusion of their long war crimes trials at Nuremberg. NATO moved its headquarters into Bruxelles and out of Paris, France having left the Organisation claiming it privileged the US-UK axis. In London the NewYork artiste Daye Yangzi [大野洋子] met the singer-guitarist with the Beatles and the two embarked on a 14-year love affair. On the 7th Johnny Kidd died [cf. Part 1]. Putting together a new Blue Flames for his charge, Corp agent Chandler recruited ska drummer John “Mitch” Mitchell. In the US, the much anticipated Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme was released, an electric folk answer to that year’s other production-heavy giants Pet Sounds and Revolver. #201 of the 500 greatest of all time, the album contained songs against Johnson’s “Vietnam war” and has made world-famous the Elizabethan folk song “Scarborough Fair.”



[Albert Speer, after release and as German War Production Minister.]


Halfway through the month, the first East Atlantic Acid test show was held. For a venue or “space” the Corp had settled on the cold and grimy Roundhouse, a structure in disuse belonging to British Rail. The occasion was the launch of the “International Times” an underground (=nonCorporate) newspaper. Psychedelic light effects accompanied the performance of another genius, Roger “Syd” Barrett. Though named for black US singer-guitarist Pink Anderson, Barrett’s group performed psychedelic music while he sang jaunty, witty songs of the traditional English music hall variety. To hear a distinctly middle-class Cambridge accent instead of the unconvincing emulation of Mississippi English one expected in an RNR setting was a liberating experience for the music-lovers in the audience. After a decade of provincial aping, England had finally spawned .. Anglo-RNR!

[Pink Anderson and Son, South Carolina, 1960s]

One of The Beatles was on hand for the revelation—the bassist. “That guy was an avid keeper-up with cultural twists and turns,” says Chubby Jiang, “not so much a butterfly as a hummingbird.” The other Beatles did not catch the Times launch : the singer-guitarist was squiring Daye Yangzi, the drummer was having a nice hot bath, and the lead guitarist was off studying the sitar in South Asia. “He may not have felt he would miss much,” says Hans Fenger. “Harrison often said that as a band The Beatles had peaked in their Hamburg days [1960--62]. Ever since, all the bouncing up and down for screaming girls had only eroded their cohesion. The Revolver songs, while brilliant compositions, are bundles of solo recordings bound together. What was an Acid test / psychedelic RNR show going to be but Revolver with screaming girls?”
Harrison’s uninterest was not universal. “The launch of IT was one of the two most revolutionary events in the history of English alternative music and thinking,” said Chandler, who, having dispatched Hendrix with his new Marshall 7026 amplifier and rhythm section to Paris, put another of his creature groups on stage to match The Pink Floyd. “That event marked the recognition of a rapidly spreading socio-cultural revolution that had its parallel in the [United] States.”
Consciousness of either country’s history of brutal imperialism? Awareness of social class and the military-industrial complex? Rejection of wage-slave, consumerist society? Transcendence of the materialist outlook? Possibly. Or maybe Chandler’s “socio-cultural revolution” was simple psychedelia – the new fashion in clothing, vocabulary and media. And fashion’s flagship was Acid test style RNR, or “Acid Rock” as the Corp would sooner have it. On the 23rd Hendrix and his rhythm section, back from the mainland, recorded his extraordinary rendition of the California folk song “Hey Joe,” bringing its outlaw tale into the Acid age. “My mum was humming that song way before she heard Hendrix,” says Ismail Lopes, former singer with a Xiamen pub band, now Bangkok correspondent with a major Axis newspaper. “Her nanny bought the album Hey Joe by The Leaves because it had a cover of “Tobacco Road” on it, which was a hit [by The Nashville Teens] when she’d met her boyfriend and it was like ‘their song.’ But The Leaves played proper RNR. The closest they ever got to “psychedelic” distortion was their fuzz guitar--hardly an uncommon instrument in those days.”*6*

The Roundhouse provided the space for a second “all night rave” Acid test on the Eve of All Saints [Oct/31] and again on Guy Fawkes Day. The former show went swimmingly but at the latter one some astute music fans noticed that Barrett was playing guitar without enthusiasm. “It was just the same note, over and over,” says longtime music-Nazi *7* Paul “Guru” deMontfort, former hirer with a Xiamen language school, now under-provost with a UK-PRC JV school up the coast. “The Pink Floyd had just got in from doing a show up in Watford. It had been meant as a demonstration of psychedelia, but turned out to be a bit of a disaster. The group didnt get a very nice reception and Syd was really rattled.”
‘Not very nice’ is putting it mildly : this reporter has heard that beer bottles were tossed at the group--not all of them empty. The high-hat was bashed off beat, and the bassist was struck on the kneecap.Watford is quite far north, I say to provoke deMontfort. Why would the Corp despatch their flagship so far beyond its nest? How brash, how overweening, to run roughshod over subregional sensibilities!
“Sensibilities!?” says deMontfort. “You’re talking about Johnny [Kidd, dead a month before], I take it. Yes, we were sensitive. We felt Rock and Roll had taken a body blow. And that awful paraplegic Bolton nightclub boss who disappointed him and sent [Kidd’s band] The Pirates down the Bury Road is deservedly reviled. But the beer bottles weren’t for Johnny. It goes deeper than music. Nor were the tossers Guy Fawkes wastrels. And they weren’t from Watford. No. My old man was there and I can tell you. They were from Glossop--a big telly town.*8* On the evening in question everyone and his dog in that town had sat with baited breath to watch Doctor Who confront the Daleks on the planet Vulcan. Only it wasn’t the good doctor--it was Patrick Troughton! The Beeb [=BBC] had switched actors on us!” Fleeing their homes to seek solace [找乐] in another, less tearful town, these north-English youth were in no mood to be cheated by the British Establishment, not twice in one evening. The Pink Floyd had borne the brunt of that righteous RNR wrath. On the way back south, the group's Corp handler mocked the Watford audience for its ignorance--how could they deny that psychedelia is "where it s at"?--shook his fists in the VW van and swore that before long the tables would turn, and the music the northern punks had wanted would become unprofitable and wither on the vine. But gentle Barrett was inconsolable.

The autumn of the Year of the Death proceeded. Ernesto “Che” Guevara began his Bolivian Revolution diary. Harrison practiced his new instrument. “Good Vibrations,” released under the recognisable rubric of the onetime US surf band The Beach Boys, was a number one hit in the UK. The most technically advanced and expensive studio production ever, the song featured a theremin, a spooky-sounding instrument familiar to listeners from thriller movies such as The Red House and SF / space monster ones such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another World, Forbidden Planet and Mars Attacks.


[with a theremin on the soundtrack]

Deploying Hendrix upriver to the natty club we see in Blow-up, Chandler fobbed the native American off on the trusting Olde World clientele as “black” and “RNR.” One good thing came of the evening however : Hendrix got along like a house on fire with Beck, and the fellow Acid rock guitarists embarked on a 4-year friendship. Hendrix laughed when he learned The Yardbirds called Beck’s lengthy distorted guitar parts “rave-ups” and Beck for his part followed Hendrix’ example by quitting his band in order to “go solo.” With the release of the “Hey Joe” cover a done deal, the Corp agent exerted himself for his other creatures. A new Acid test club, to be called UFO, was subletting a dancehall under the Berkely Cinema once a week - Chandler got them onto the opening bill. His group meshed well with Barrett & The Pink Floyd, who were to fill the dank basement with generous helpings of sound and vision. The club’s first session was on Friday, Dec.23. “The idea was you could stay down there all night and not worry about resting up for the job in the morning,” says Lopes, who grew up within sight of the Berkeley on Tottenham Court Road. “They did a repeat rave the Friday after, so you would have had psychedelic people crawling out of the UFO yawning on the very Eve of 1967. It was a pretty groovy [=fashionable] space, my mum says, for a smelly dancehall. Everyone squeezed in, sooner or later. Hendrix was excited to bump into “Cat” Steven Georgiou there sort of dancing. He was only 19 but he’d had a hit record [“I Love my Dog”] and was quite the star. Hey Joe wasn’t yet the worldwide monster it would become, so Hendrix felt the bump to be auspicious [吉兆].”

["Cat" Georgiou with "Twiggy" Hornby, the supermodel face of 1960s "Swinging" London.]



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Notes and Links :

*1* http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/M-113_creature
*2* www.cuijian.com
*3* www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEIYWolRoqM
*4* native = aboriginal, also indigenous or autochthonous. Hendrix was a
Cherokee, one of over 500 nations that inhabited NorthAmerica for
millennia before modern European and Asian immigration.
intractable = headstrong, uncompromising, not useful to others.
stepping out = to do a long solo on one's instrument, common in jazz
but in RNR upstaging the singer who should normally be the star.
Also "grandstanding" and "being a prima donna"
*5* starving artist = poor or punk musician, writer, painter etc. producing art
but not making a living at it.
*6* for The Leaves' cover, cf www.youtube.com/watch?v=470d1MTXYoE
for the song's rich history www.heyjoe.org
*7* music-Nazi = one who finds the musical choices of other people unbear-
able. Also "stereo bull"
*8* telly town = a town where television is watched religiously.