"Rolling Stone felt comparatively stuffy, preoccupied with movies and politics and reluctant to cover loud and snotty subcultural movements like punk and metal..."

"... whereas Creem’s pages first coined those genre’s names: 'punk rock' by Marsh, about ? and the Mysterians, and 'heavy metal' by Mike Saunders, about Sir Lord Baltimore, both in the May 1971 issue.... Subversive humor was the Creem lingua franca. Snarky photo captions and regular features like the Creem Dreems (tongue-in-cheek pinups of artists like Debbie Harry and Bebe Buell) were clearly intended for — and driven by — adolescent hormones.... [S]een through today’s eyes, some of the old Creem content can seem puerile, even offensive. The casual sexism and homophobia is sadly typical of its time, and racial sensitivity was nonexistent. Yet its anarchic attitude and early embrace of new wave and punk inspired future musicians like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament and Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, who all appear in the film. In one scene, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe recalls the first time he ever saw a copy of Creem, during detention in high school, and being mesmerized by a photo of Patti Smith. 'From that moment forward my entire life shifted and changed dramatically,' Stipe says. 'I was like, what world is this? Most people want to fit in somewhere. Because of my otherness, because of my queerness, I was trying to find that gang. I wasn’t going to find it in my high school. I found it in Creem magazine.'"

From "The Wild Story of Creem, Once ‘America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine’/A new documentary traces the rise and fall of the irreverent, boundary-smashing music publication where Lester Bangs did some of his most famous work" (NYT).

Here's the trailer:

Patti Smith “dressed more masculine … my approach was different. . . . I was playing up the idea of being a very feminine woman...”

“... while fronting a male rock band in a highly macho game. I was saying things in the songs that female singers didn’t really say back then. I wasn’t submissive or begging him to come back. I was kicking his a--, kicking him out, kicking my own a — too. My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up but I was very serious.”

Writes Debbie Harry, quoted in “In her memoir, Debbie Harry gives an unvarnished look at her life in the punk scene” by Sibbie O’Sullivan (WaPo).

Also:

She also loved drag’s performative qualities, especially its attention to fashion and gesture, two practices Harry perfected while shaping her own image. Drag queens saw Harry’s display of femininity as drag, “a woman playing a man’s idea of a woman.” Harry’s words are more revealing: “I’m not blind and I’m not stupid: I take advantage of my looks and I use them.”

The idea of a woman in drag as a woman is useful, but you see that the book reviewer is not getting that idea from Harry’s memoir. Harry seems to want to critique the man’s idea of a woman: She got herself up like that but then she resisted — she kicked his ass. Maybe some drag queens are on the side of women, helping fight male domination, but the book reviewer doesn’t even notice the issue, let alone give any depth.

And let me just say that I’m amused by Harry’s offhanded reference to her own great beauty: “I’m not blind.”

"In this vast and troubled world, we sometimes lose our way, but I am never lost/I feel this way because...."

"It was Mr. Margo’s idea for the Happenings to do an up-tempo version of the Gershwin brothers’ 'I Got Rhythm,' his nephew Noah Margo said. The record reached No. 3 on the Billboard singles chart in 1967."

That's from the NYT obituary: "Mitch Margo, an Original Member of the Tokens, Dies at 70." You think of The Tokens — if you think of them — as the group that did the much-loved early-60s song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." But I see that The Tokens went on to produce records for The Chiffons, Randy and the Rainbows, and Tony Orlando and Dawn. Mitch Margo was one of the producers on the sublime Chiffons hit "He's So Fine." *

And I know the most famous Randy and the Rainbows song without looking it up: "Denise." That also seems to have been produced by The Tokens (under the production company name Bright Tunes). "Denise" was redone in 1978 by Blondie as "Denis," which — apart from the masculinization of the love interest  — aurally copies the Randy and the Rainbows version, though the visual effect is quite different:



Denis Denis, oh with your eyes so blue/Denis Denis, I've got a crush on you...

And Mitch Margo wrote "Laugh," the Monkees song, and "Slow Dance," which, we're told, The Carpenters released in 1989.

Speaking of dying, did Karen Carpenter survive to the year 1989? No, she died in 1983. But you can listen to the song while looking at video of Karen slow dancing with her brother Richard, here.

If that's too sad, here's "Laugh," replete with way-too-frenetic Monkees antics.
___________________

* "He's So Fine" was written by Ronnie Mack. You know that song "Jimmy Mack" — "Jimmy Mack, when are you coming back?" — which seems to be about a boyfriend who's staying away too long, was inspired by Ronnie Mack, who had died of Hodgkin's lymphoma when he was only 23.

Jay Siegel of the Tokens later said of Mack's songs: "They had the most incredible lyrics; not intellectual lyrics, but just the things that people speak of in everyday language. Most people don't have the talent to write them down as music, but he did.... [Had he lived] he...would have been one of the most successful songwriters of the '60s."

"She’s 71 years old, still punk af and hanging out with Grandmaster Flash in her pedal-pushers and pink patent Candie stilettos."

"No biggie. Style? She makes her own, bitches."

The time Debbie Harry was not murdered by Ted Bundy.

From the UK Telegraph article titled "Debbie Harry on punk, refusing to retire and sex at 69":

Harry has always identified herself as a feminist, and there is a quiet strength in the way she presents herself, a sense that here is a woman very much in control. Before she was famous, she was on her way home from a club one rainy night in New York.

“It was two or three in the morning and I couldn’t find a cab. A car kept coming round and offering me a ride, so I accepted. Once in the car I noticed there were no door handles on the inside, which made me wary. I don’t know how, but I managed to put my hand through the window and open the door from the outside.”

The driver swerved to try to stop her escaping, but that gave her the momentum to throw herself out of the moving car. She thought no more of it until years later, when she saw the driver on the news. It was Ted Bundy, the serial killer who eventually confessed to murdering at least 30 women. “I always say my instincts saved me.”

1. Did that really happen?

2. What does being a feminist have to do with it? If only those 30 women who died had been more feminist, maybe they'd have figured out how to interpret and deal with the absence of interior door handles?

3. Why does the headline refer to punk, not retiring, and old people still having sex but not the time she escaped from Ted Bundy?

Do you notice what's extraordinary...

... about this, from 1968?



I was just poking around in the Christmas Eve 1976 edition of The New York Times, looking for something else, and I ran across:



And this pair of ads on the facing page caught my eye:



Two competing images of sexiness from late 1976. Who knew then that the Rocky image would be the much more enduring one. The man, alone with his armpits. Not the man and the woman, with hands thoroughly entangled in curly hair. Rocky even has the more enduring font. And they tried so hard with all those futuristic serifs stabbing their way through the adjoining letters in "A Star Is Born."

Anyway, after finding what I'd actually been looking for — news of the concerts Lou Reed played in NYC in the 70s — I went in search of The Wind in the Willows. I hope you enjoyed that hippie, trippy sojourn into the land of the gentle people, that canyon of if-not-your-then-my mind that was the 1960s, before the mean old 70s came along and made everything so harsh and cruel.

"Women Are Just Slaves."

Late 70s newspaper headline, prominently displayed in one of a set of vintage photos of Debbie Harry.

"But as I look ahead and think about what may still be relevant in fashion years from now, I think back to eras in style that were defined by freedom."

"I am so happy I was young in the ‘70s and participated in the women’s movement and all it meant. My generation behaved as if it had invented freedom. That was a moment in time, between the discovery of the pill and the arrival of AIDS, when sex was carefree and fun. For design inspiration then, we looked 40 years back, to the 1930s. We loved its furniture and architecture, all minimalist, and the light style of the clothing."

Writes Diane von Furstenberg.

ADDED: Her penultimate paragraph is "Who saw this coming? An icon of the ‘70s: Andy Warhol," which was especially funny to me because as I was reading, I was planning to search for "Diane von Furstenberg" in my copy of "The Andy Warhol Diaries." She's all over the place in there. Sample:

"Photographers mistake 66-year-old Debbie Harry for Lindsay Lohan."

Great moments in pop-culture freakish aging.

"Are you ready to paint me?" — Debbie Harry.

"Yeah. It's great. It's such a great thing." — Andy Warhol.

(Via Drawn!)