Incidentally (Part Two)

 

“It is odd what you remember and what you forget.” – Graham Greene, Getting to Know the General

In the bedroom of Frank Pierson, the wealthy young American boy who followed Ripley, in the fourth novel in Patricia Highsmith’s series, “pop singer posters were tacked to a vast green pin-up board above the brown table, the Ramones slouching in blue jeans”. I have recently revisited the book, one I read 20-odd years ago, and was delighted to find that mention of Joey, Dee Dee, and co. was there, being the thing that stuck in my mind down the years. Oddly, though, I didn’t think they were named. Instead, I thought there was simply a reference to four brothers in leather jackets and ripped jeans. I got that bit wrong. Nevertheless, for a book published in April 1980, though set in the summer and early autumn of 1978, the Ramones mention is a lovely incidental musical detail, and a pretty cool one too. I can’t remember, can’t recall, as a lovely old June Brides song goes, any other contemporaneous nods to the band by a major author. I could be wrong.

Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley is a very strange creation, and I think the series gets better with age, especially the later books as the character and setting evolves. I don’t imagine for one moment Tom Ripley ever sat listening to the Ramones, though. His taste in music being rather more Scarlatti and Bach, the composers whose work he would try to play on his beloved harpsichord, on which he was taking lessons. For me, much of the appeal of the later books is Tom’s life as a gentleman of leisure, a rather ascetic one, with his routine of gardening, music, books, good food, buying nice clothes and things for around the home, Belle Ombre, his sanctuary in the village of Villeperce. I so envy this domestic enclave, Tome with his wife Heloise and the money from her wealthy parents, the loyal housekeeper Mme Annette, the wayward gardener Henri, a small circle of friends, the occasional drink in a local bar. If only life didn’t keep getting in the way.

In his highly flattering introduction to Patricia Highsmith’s short story collection Eleven, published in 1970, Graham Greene used the often-quoted phrase “poet of apprehension” to pin down Patricia’s artistry. It is always nice when people you admire show a fondness for one another. Incidentally, a few years earlier Graham Greene had published The Comedians, set in Haiti during the reign of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier and his terrifying Tontons Macoutes, certainly a time for the general populace to be apprehensive. It is another book I recently returned to.

In the novel the journalist Petit Pierre tells hotel owner Mr Brown about his excitement at having acquired a hi-fi system and adds: “I have ordered discs of Juliette Greco, Françoise Hardy, Johnny Halliday.” I hadn’t remembered that from when I first read it, many years ago. I am pretty sure The Comedians was the first Graham Greene book I fell for. It was passed to me by a lady my mum worked with in a charity shop, oddly one frequented by a June Bride. She thought I would like it. She was right.

I was gradually drawn in, more intrigued than thrilled, and then worked my way methodically through pretty much all Greene’s novels, which in those days were easy enough to get hold of via the local library and charity shops. I think I particularly admired his non-demonstrative deadpan style and matter-of-fact fatalism, rather like Patricia Highsmith I would suggest in that sense: very much “que sera sera” and “do what you have to do”. I still envy the economy of Greene’s writing. One could call it austere, but that word has bad connotations nowadays.

I never really explored his non-fiction work, so it was only recently that I discovered his Getting to Know the General, which was published in the mid-1980s and so is one of Greene’s very last books. It is such a lovely work: the story of how unlikely friendships and mutual respect developed after a surprise invitation, sent in 1976, to the author from Panama’s President General Omar Torrijos Herrara. Overcoming his initial bemusement at events (with echoes of Our Man in Havana), Greene became close friends with Torrijos and his security guard Chuchu. The charismatic President was certainly politically left-of-centre, by today’s standards, but hardly a Communist revolutionary, though he was enough of a Socialist to scare the United States, with his country so strategically placed. The enigmatic Chuchu, though, was a complex character: a Marxist, a poet, philosopher, lecturer, linguist, and incorrigible ladies’ man, who formed a wonderful bond with the writer, who by then was in his 70s. Greene gets about too, chatting with Castro in Cuba about Russian Roulette, discussing Thomas Mann with the Belize President George Price, for example.

This was a time of political upheaval in Central and Latin America, and the armed liberation struggles in El Salvador and Nicaragua are very much a part of the book. Importantly, Greene presents very human and moving portraits of the leaders of these Guerrilla struggles, men he got to know, much to his surprise. Open the book at any page, and you will find an illuminating passage, such as this: “In the evening I went to a bad Nicaraguan meal with my Sandinista friends and I met for the first time the poet, Father Ernesto Cardenal, who is now the Minister of Culture in Nicaragua. I thought him perhaps a trifle consciously charismatic with his white beard and his flowing white hair and the blue beret on top, and he seemed a little conscious of his own romantic character as a priest, a Communist and a refugee from Somoza, who had destroyed his monastery on an island in the Great Lake.” That’s lovely, isn’t it?

Here we have a book in which a venerable author improbably hangs out with a number of Guerilla war leaders, at a time when most of us were really only aware of the Sandinistas via The Clash and tracks like the magnificent ‘Washington Bullets’, which provided an education of sorts for kids like me. I don’t suppose for one moment Graham Greene would have known who The Clash were, and I have no idea if Joe Strummer was a fan of his books (one likes to think so!), but I bet GG could drink the group under the table, if Getting to Know the General is anything to go by. I would also suggest that in their own ways Graham Greene and Joe Strummer were incurable romantics who would have got on.

Anyway, from that same era, and another book I have recently reread, is John le Carré’s Smiley’s People. It is, I think, my favourite of the Smiley books, and for me the most moving. Partly I wanted to check whether I had recalled or remembered correctly Smiley’s comment about punk. I was right, and it is still so gloriously incongruous coming from a man more at home with Mahler. Even so, in a disused pavilion on Hampstead Heath, Smiley notes the graffiti: “Earnest moral statements enlivened the flaking green paint. ‘Punk is destructive. Society does not need it.’ The assertion caused him a moment’s indecision. ‘Oh, but society does,’ he wanted to reply; ‘society is an association of minorities’.” That passage suggests the Television line about understanding all destructive urges, but that’s just me.

What I hadn’t remembered was, a little further on: “Proceed to the rendezvous, it said, no danger sighted. Moscow Rules, thought Smiley yet again. Moscow, where it could take a fieldman three days to post a letter to a safe address. Moscow, where all minorities are punk.” Seeing that unexpectedly made me think of Nik Cohn and his Broadway odyssey Heart of the World (incidentally, Nik’s another big Patricia Highsmith fan) which I then had to dig out to test my memory.

I was right: Cohn’s guide and minder, Sasha Zim, a young Russian émigré, did indeed speak about how (and this would have been in the same sort of era Smiley was talking about) “in Moscow, the youth gangs that counted had all been named after English pop groups of the sixties, the more obscure the cooler. Wimp suburbanites chose the Beatles and Rolling Stones; inner-city stylists preferred the Yardbirds or Them. On Novokuz, which must always be hippest of all, prime icons included John’s Children, the Action, the Troggs.”

This passage has bittersweet associations for me. The hardback book came out in 1992, and it would have been a short while later it turned up in the local library. By then it was too late. I had written something, and to make that explicit connection between The Action and Nik Cohn would have been perfect, but copies were all printed, so there you go. It was odd. Like a lot of people, I had fallen for Nik Cohn in a big way in the 1980s, and had great fun tracking down his old books, while kind of loving the idea that he seemed to have stopped writing. Now, suddenly, he was back, with a book about Broadway and its denizens. I sort of felt disorientated. I wanted more on a Johnny Angelo pop theme, but here was a new book that didn’t seem to be about music at all. I liked it, but privately felt a little cheated.

Reading it again, I realise how stupid that was. With the benefit of hindsight, you can see it as the first part of a remarkable trilogy, with ‘Yes We Have No’ and ‘Triksta’. And there are, actually, dozens of incidental music references, from Puccini and Palestrina to Public Enemy and the Real Roxanne, from Johnny Ray and John Coltrane to Bud Powell and Big Daddy Kane, from Billie Holiday and Mary Lou Williams to Allen Toussaint and Jackie Wilson, from Fauré and Bernstein to Sun Ra and Vladimir Vysotsky.

You get the picture? In other words, the Nik Cohn of Heart of the World was incredibly clued-up: considerably more so than I was at the time. Plus, there are some nice mentions of the Paradise Garage, the Knitting Factory, and Keith Haring along the way, which gives the text an oddly contemporary feel. And there’s a great scene, from the heyday of doo wop and the Brill Building, set one Monday lunchtime in a Broadway coffee shop called the Turf, where Nik momentarily slips back into Rock Dreams mode.

Now, I think it may well be the best thing he’s done. The writing is divine, but you would expect that. What really strikes home is the sheer obsessive dedication Cohn invested in this project: literally walking up and down Broadway for years, observing and listening to a cavalcade of cracked characters (and very few ‘known’ figures: the art critic Robert Hughes being an exception, and the boxer Emile Griffith another), taking it all down in his notebooks, and from these notes crafting a beautiful book.

We have been inundated with works by writers inspired by Sebald and Sinclair who have gone off for a wander and a ponder. You would not immediately put him as part of that tradition, but I think Nik has done it best here, and part of what makes it such a remarkable book is the way he pretty much keeps himself out of things, letting his subjects speak and the events flow, with just a few necessary and usually self-deprecating appearances. And, unlike so many of those other books, there are no photographs, no Polaroids or snapshots to back up the text, leaving more to the imagination, which fits with a quote or gripe in the book: “No secrets were left unexposed, no mysteries whatever.” Nik leaves us to picture the faces and places he writes about, which works for me.

It is an incredibly romantic work, partly I guess in the spirit of Damon Runyon and The Drifters on Broadway. There is one particularly beautiful passage where he lists businesses and says: “The names alone made a psalmody.” It is also a kind of elegy: “Once upon a time on Broadway, there had been a magical world. And now it was lost, gone to dust.” I, however, suspect Nik liked that sense of faded glamour, and it is no coincidence that his chosen characters are by and large awkward misfits and doomed souls: wheelers and dealers on the slide, exotic dancers and drag queens struggling to get by, street philosophers, embattled bar owners, promoters on the ropes, and so on. Anyone who reads the book will have their favourites: mine is Bert Randolph Sugar, a guru of sports and a devotee of hats, about whom it is said “sentimental journeys were his stock in trade.”

Sasha, Nik’s guardian angel, is also a star: a taxi driver who wants to be a drummer (he is portrayed playing jazz at the Knitting Factory, looking like a young Sal Mineo). Back home, in the world of Moscow’s street gangs, he had been a Fruit Eating Bear: “They were fragile goods and shattered at the first contact with the Pretty Things, who were the neighbourhood kingpins. The Things had the deadliest weapons, the sharpest clothes; they looked the most Western. Only the Hi-Numbers dared challenge them.”

When I first read the book that mention of the Fruit Eating Bears threw me completely. I genuinely thought my knowledge of 1960s groups could match that of any Russian gang member, and the only Fruit Eating Bears I knew of was the dead-end punk band who, despite being completely uncool, wonderfully really went for it in the A Song for Europe competition in 1978. Alarmingly, I can still vividly recall their performance and indeed their song ‘Door in My Face’, which over the years in my mind has blended with The Motors’ ‘You Beat the Hell Outta Me’. Don’t ask!

Today we have the Internet to turn to, and I now realise there was an earlier Fruit Eating Bears, named by Kit Lambert I believe, who were the backing group for The Merseys. I hadn’t realised The Merseys shared a management team with The Who (and I guess there lies a Cohn-nection), but it explains why they got first bite at ‘So Sad About Us’. There really is a link between the two sets of Fruit Eating Bears via the drummer Kenny Mundye, so there you go. Somewhere in between there was Slowload, who apparently for a while backed Glo Macari (of ‘He Knows I Love Him Too Much’ fame, a 1960s British femme pop gem recorded, when she was about 14, with the magic touch of Ivor Raymonde) at the start of the 1970s, notably on ‘Lookin’ for Love’, an incredible slice of early glam stomp singalong nonsense.

Speaking of The Merseys, there is some great 1966 ciné verité footage of the duo with the Fruit Eating Bears on YouTube (with two drummers no less, years before The Glitter Band’s heyday), featuring ‘So Sad About Us’ and ‘Sorrow’. I bet most of us here heard ‘Sorrow’ first via the David Bowie cover which may still be my favourite Bowie moment. I’m not sure when I became aware it was based on The Merseys’ recording. I am not sure, either, when I realised one of the composers was Richard Gottehrer and that the McCoys had recorded it first. Anyway, Gottehrer is one of those music biz characters whose name crops up in so many special places, and I suspect for many of us it is a name we know almost without realising why.

Gottehrer wrote ‘Sorrow’ with his partners Bob Feldman and Jerry Goldstein. They made a great team, continuing the Brill Building tradition, and in many ways their sound and approach would predict the glam racket of Mike Leander and the Chinn & Chapman team. There is an Ace (in all senses) CD which puts the spotlight on their productions and compositions, which often were joyously opportunistic. The songs they are known for include The Angels’ ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ and the McCoys’ ‘Hang on Sloopy’. Chubby Checker’s Twisted Wheel favourite ‘(At the) Discotheque’ is another one of theirs. As is the Strangeloves’ ‘I Want Candy’.

For my taste, Gottehrer & co. were at their best straddling soul and garage sounds (like Ed Cobb on the West Coast). One way or another, their fingerprints are all over some of the best things ever, like ‘Determination’ by Dean Parrish, ‘The Drifter’ by Ray Pollard and the punky sneer of the Strangeloves’ Nuggets highlight, ‘Night Time’ with its immortal lines: “A hundred million people with nothing to say / Running round in circles / They’re just living for today”. A little later, Gottehrer paired up with Seymour Stein and, again, was involved with some of the best things ever, like Eddie and Ernie’s ‘Falling Tears (Indian Drums)’ and ‘In These Very Tender Moments’ (which was written by Ernie Johnson of E&E) by Dee Clark, a highlight on volume three of Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures.

Gottehrer and Stein’s Sire production company in time became a record label, which would later become a home for the New York New Wave, a tag which tips its hat to Peter Meaden and Norman Jopling’s own New Wave production company (which had Sire connections). As punk came in, Gottehrer was on the way out of Sire, busy looking after Blondie, and also Robert Gordon whose cover of ‘Red Hot’ was very much part of the sound of the summer of 1977, late afternoons with Roger Scott on Capital Radio, along with ‘Spanish Stroll’, ‘Oh Lori’, ‘Roadrunner’, and ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’. This was when Robert was recording with Link Wray (whom I wouldn’t have known way back then), and before he became a Postcard pin-up after starring in Katheryn Bigelow’s The Loveless. It is preposterous looking back that Gottehrer could only get his Blondie and Robert Gordon recordings released on Private Stock, the home of Frankie Valli, David Soul, and the post-ChinniChap Mud.

Gottehrer did maintain a 1977 Sire connection via Richard Hell & the Voidoids’ immortal and still inspiring Blank Generation. Anyway, I read a great quote from Richard Gottehrer recently where he speaks about feeling at home working with Blondie and Richard Hell as their music was “soul based”, and I guess he heard something of his younger self in their songs. Ironically the Voidoids’ Marc Bell in 1978 got a transfer to the Ramones, which brings us back to The Boy Who Followed Ripley: would Richard Hell or Debbie Harry be among the other posters on Frank’s wall? What was on my wall in 1978? Not the Ramones, that’s for sure. But I do vividly remember the Ramones with Marky “slouching in blue jeans” on the cover of the October 1978 edition of Zigzag, which was the first copy I ever bought (from the WHSmith store in Lewisham). It came with a wonderful Radar flexidisc of the 13^th Floor Elevators’ ‘Reverberation’ and the Red Crayola’s ‘Hurricane Fighter Plane’, which sadly is, like so many things, long gone. Ah life. It is, indeed, very strange what you remember and what you forget.