Mindf#ckers

Mindfuckers, Edited by David Felton
No month stated, 1972  Straight Arrow Books

Yes, friends, the title of the book is really “Mindfuckers.” I just changed it in the post title given the overly-sensitive AI that now polices Blogger. Which is fitting, because this book is essentially about thought control. Subtitled “A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America” and comrpised of three very, very long articles that originally ran in Rolling Stone, Mindfuckers was published by the Rolling Stone imprint Straight Arrow, and likely it had a low print run, given how scarce the book is now. Luckily someone uploaded it to the Internet Archive. 

The book has been on my radar for quite some time, but I only now decided to read it because I’ve been on one of my infrequent Rolling Stone journalism kicks, and also because I’ve been on a Manson Family kick. Mindfuckers opens with the Manson piece, titled “Year Of The Fork, Night Of The Hunter,” credited to David Felton and David Dalton. Per Joe Hagan’s Sticky Fingers, Felton and Dalton argued over who should be the main writer for this piece, until editor Jann Wenner intervened and gave it to Felton – something Dalton was very upset over. Personally I find it confusing that the two authors have such similar names. 

Originally appearing in the June 25th, 1970 issue of Rolling Stone, “Year Of The Fork” took up the majority of the publication; I consulted my Rolling Stone: Cover To Cover CD-Rom and scanned through it to compare to this reprint in Mindfuckers. It appears the only thing missing is the photography that graced the original version, but for what it’s worth the copyright page of Mindfuckers states that “Portions of this book, in slightly different form, originally appeared in Rolling Stone.” I didn’t do a thorough A/B review, but I didn’t see any glaring changes, so the edits must have been very slight indeed. 

Running to a hundred pages, “Year Of The Fork, Night Of The Hunter” is certainly comprehensive, and as expected paints a very good picture of the era’s counterculture. In this regard it’s even more of a success than Ed Sanders’s contemporary The Family. But unlike Sanders, in which the author’s hatred for Manson and his “vampires” was palpable, Felton and Dalton convey an almost sympathetic tone. Indeed, again per Sticky Fingers Wenner’s original goal was to publish a story titled “Charles Manson Is Innocent,” but upon Felton and Dalton’s investigation that goal was scrapped. Likely Dalton had a lot to do with this, as per Hagan’s book he was living on Spahn Ranch when the story was written, and had first heard of Manson through Beach Boy Dennis Wilson (with whom Dalton also lived at one time, again per Hagan). 

Published before the trial began, the story caused enough waves that, per prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in Helter Skelter, it caused trouble for both the defense and the prosecution. Bugliosi also notes that the “copycat” scenario had its origin in this story; Felton and Dalton float the idea that the Tate-LaBianca murders were perpetrated so as to get Family member Bobby Beausoleil out of jail. But as Bugliosi notes, this half-assed defense wasn’t even brought up until after Manson and his three killers (Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten) were found guilty. (Charles “Tex” Watson, who carried out the brunt of the killing those nights, hadn’t gone to trial yet.) Bugliosi presents the inside scoop on how this article caused waves, noting in Helter Skelter that even the judge on the case was aware of it. 

Writing-wise, the Rolling Stone style, only a few years old in 1970, is already apparent. Predating the gonzo journalism of Hunter Thompson, Felton and Dalton don’t insert themselves as protagonists into the narrative, and for the most part the writing is on the level. It’s only in the counterculture vibe that the piece seems different than something published elsewhere – and this was one of Felton’s first assignments, coming in from the Los Angeles Times, where he’d won a Pulitzer. Perhaps the biggest coup of Felton and Dalton was an interview with Manson himself, which appears midway through the piece. 

The story encompasses most every aspect of the Manson story, starting off with a memorable open in which the authors take us on a virtual tour of Los Angeles, focusing on the areas of Manson’s impact as if we were hitting each one on a leisurely day’s drive. Then the authors meet with an anonymous attorney on the defense side who shows them gory photos of the murders and exposits on the particulars of the case – certainly stuff that would’ve construed a leak and could have gotten the entire trial thrown out as a mistrial. From there the story appropriates the vibe of one of those vintage Rolling Stone interviews in that the interview dialog goes on and on (and on)…with the caveat that it isn’t John Lennon or Jimi Hendrix or whoever doing the endless talking, but Charles Manson and his “super acid rap,” looking like a “cajun Christ” in his prison garb as Felton and Dalton interview him. 

This internminable interview once again outs Manson as a bullshit artist supreme. Like I wrote in my Helter Skelter review, it’s a wonder anyone took this guy seriously – certainly today no one would, given his constant self-comparisons to Christ, comparisons which would fall on deaf ears in this (mostly) post-Christian era. But Manson very much sees himself as a ‘60s Christ, about to be crucified (one almost gets the impression he regretted never going to the death chamber – then his martyrdom might have been ensured). In fact his attempts at being compared to Christ are ridiculous throughout his endless spiel, which is only occasionally broken up by befuddled responses from our two reporters. Charles Manson’s delight to finally be in the spotlight – to finally matter – is evident throughout this interminable sequence. 

After this we get lots of first-person recountings on Manson from followers new and old, which is how the piece closes; probably the highlight of “Year Of The Fork” is that it captures the Family immediately post-Manson, still living at Spahn Ranch and still eating food taken from garbage cans. We have Gypsy, for example, giving a metaphysical speech no doubt taken from Manson; the authors imply that Gypsy, slightly older than the other Family members, seems to secretly understand that Manson might never be coming back to them. I found this interesting from a modern perspective, as Gypsy (real name Catherine Share) has appeared in a few recent Manson documentaries, having cast off the cult shackles years and years ago. She was featured, for example, in the 2018 Manson: The Lost Tapes documentary on Fox, which featured a memorable moment of the former Gypsy putting on a pair of glasses to watch a recently-discovered film of Manson. Doubly ironic in that it was a visual display of how the Manson family was so long ago – the 70-something Catherine Share watching a film of the 20-something Gypsy – but also ironic given that Manson banned glasses in the Family. Something, by the way, he expounds upon in the interminable intervew in this Rolling Stone story. 

Overall this was certainly an interesting read, notable because it starts off seeming to be pro-Manson, but Felton and Dalton continue to pile up the evidence against him. The Helter Skelter motive isn’t mentioned, but we do get a lot of stuff from Manson and Gypsy on how the Beatles are sending out coded messages – even if The Beatles themselves don’t realize it! But in the capturing of the time and the place “Year Of The Fork, Night Of The Hunter” even bests Ed Sanders’s book. However, it’s no Helter Skelter. 

Next up we have another 90-page feature: Robin Green’s “The Great Banquet Table Of Life – We Deliver,” which first appeared as “Sgt. Bilko Meets The New Culture: The First Church Of Christ, Realtor,” in the December 9, 1971 Rolling Stone. Per Joe Hagan’s execrable Sticky Fingers, Robin Green was editor Jann Wenner’s “resident assassin,” the person he would send when he wanted a hit piece on someone. This particular story was briefly covered in that biography; Wenner’s mother, a rather self-obessed sort named Mimi, had fallen in with this pseudo-Tim Leary named Victor Baranco, and Jann Wenner was jealous of this (Hagan saddles Wenner with all sorts of hangups in the book, from latent homosexuality to Mommy Issues), so he sent Robin Green off to do a hit piece on Baranco. 

Regardless of the origin, the story really isn’t that compelling, and in fact has the vibe of a Kurt Vonnegut story or something. Well, maybe that’s stretching it…though Green does open the story with a quote from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. But essentially this one’s about this guy named Baranco who one day realized he was perfect as-is, despite any hangups or issues or whatnot, and so decided to teach others to accept their perfection. Or somesuch. But the gist of this Rolling Stone piece is that he charges his followers exorbitant amounts of money for basic things, and also puts them up in houses that they have to pay rent on and fix up, and etc. Green’s writing is fine and she carries the story along, adding a humorous note with the dimwitted cult members – many of them affluent types whose pockets are easily picked – she interracts with while researching the story. 

Rounding out Mindfuckers is the 178-page opus “The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege Of America,” by David Felton and from the December 23, 1971 and January 6, 1972 issues of Rolling Stone. This story, a book in itself, documents a Manson-esque cult founded by a banjo-playing mystic; a cult that boasts it hasn’t killed anyone…yet. The opening is especially memorable: we’re in Boston, where a cult member is disguised as a security guard in the Lyman Family compound. The “guard” runs away in the dead of night – and Felton reveals that in reality it’s none other than Paul Williams, former Crawdaddy writer, whose Outlaw Blues I reviewed here a few years ago. 

Similar to Felton’s piece on Manson, we then flash back to the origins of this cult, which started in Boston in the early ‘60s with the apperance of a Mel Lyman on college campus, toting a banjo. The drug of choice was Morning Glory seeds, which per recent discovery could be soaked in water and ground up for an LSD-type experience. He was into the folk scene and could play Bach on his banjo and whatnot, and in the style of the time he began accumulating followers. I had a hard time understanding why, though. After 178 pages I still found nothing special nor memorable about Mel Lyman, at least in the way he was presented by David Felton – why so many followers would willingly boast that they “served” him was just a mystery. 

Regardless, Felton serves up this story as if it were a counterculture epic, painstakingly interviewing several of Lyman’s early followers – some of whom refused to have their real names shown in the story. Throughout there is the insinuation of Lyman’s evolving mean temperament, particularly given how his followers were so afraid of him. But boy it does go on, Felton doggedly pursuing leads to figure out the mystery of the “Lyman Family.” And speaking of which, despite getting started earlier, Lyman gradually became inspired by the Manson Family – particularly by the Rolling Stone story Felton himself wrote, which brings a full-circle vibe to the anthology. 

Felton takes us through the earliest days of the family, with lots of material from fellow musician Jim Kweskin, who also became a follower of Lyman – as did Paul Williams. I’m not familiar with Kweskin but I was surprised (and a little disappointed) to hear that Paul “Crawdaddy” Williams, who displayed such an independent strain of thought in the pieces collected in Outlaw Blues, could have fallen in with a cult – particularly one in which he gave up his own individual thought. I guess if nothing else this is a demonstration of the cult of personality, something Lyman apparently shared with Manson – though the drug regimen he put his followers through didn’t hurt matters. 

There’s quite a bit of stuff about some flap at a radio station where Lyman’s music was about to be played, but the levels were wrong, and the family accused the station of intentionally doing this, leading to a scuffle – as I say, Felton quite develops the theme of an undercurrent of violence in the Lyman Family. Also mystery, with the investigation leading Felton to realize that Lyman had at least one secret identity, which he apparently used in a brief capacity as a music director at that radio station. Meanwhile Felton hangs with the cult members at family HQ in Boston, where they eat communal meals and throw people in an isolation room for running afoul of groupthink. You kind of what to go back in time and shake the shit out of these people – I mean it’s the height of the goddamn counterculture era and they’re giving up their most basic rights for a dude who plays the banjo. Oh and on that note – family members are also occasionally denied having sex by Lyman, despite the fact that he himself has plenty of gals for his personal enjoyment. 

Felton does a good job of building the mystery around Mel Lyman, though; the vast majority of the story is just Felton talking to people about Lyman. One of the more interesting parts concerns Mark Frechette, an actor who at the time was momentarily famous for starring in Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonini’s flop counterculture movie of 1970 – which also was spotlighted in Rolling Stone at the time. Many years ago, when Zabriskie Point was almost impossible to find, I went on a hunt for it and then learned about Frechette; all I knew was that he’d been an unknown, discovered on the spot by Antonini and cast as the lead in his picture. And also that he died in prison a few years after the movie was released – having been sent there for robbing a bank. What I didn’t know was that Frechette was involved with the Lyman Family, and Felton spends a bit of time with him here in the story…mostly relating how Frechette kept trying to sway Antonini to the Lyman path. Interesting here that Frechette is presented as someone who will be going on to a Hollywood career, which was not to be. 

When Lyman does appear in the finale, he’s almost humble and soft-spoken, quite anticlimactic after the preceding 170-some pages of buildup. He’s a far cry from Manson, I mean to say; Felton even drops incidental details like how Lyman is missing teeth. He comes off more like an underdog than a cult leader, but then again this might have been his intention – this meeting with Lyman stems from the family’s concern that Felton was going to write a negative story about them. Speaking of which, prior to the Lyman meeting there’s an unintentionally humorous bit where some of Lyman’s thugs confront Felton in his home and make vague threats to him, and Felton finally kicks them out – and they leave! I mean they’re totally in a different league than Manson’s family. 

Anyway, as a document of the era’s “acid gurus,” Mindfuckers is pretty interesting. The writing is good throughout, but the book certainly isn’t worth the exorbitant prices booksellers charge for it; if you’re after the Manson piece, you can also find it in the much-more-affordable paperback anthology The Age Of Paranoia, credited to The Editors of Rolling Stone and published by Pocket Books in 1972.

Sticky Fingers

Sticky Fingers, by Joe Hagan

No month stated, 2017  Knopf

I remember when this book came out a few years ago; the most notable thing about it was that writer Joe Hagan, who had personally been asked by Rolling Stone honcho Jann Wenner to write the definitive history of the magazine, had turned in a book so displeasing to Wenner that Wenner cut off all ties with Hagan, disavowing the book (and going on to write his own autobiography). Reading the 547-page doorstop that is Sticky Fingers, one can understand Wenner’s displeasure. While the book starts off on relatively sound footing, it soon becomes apparent that Joe Hagan’s goal is to write a modern-day The Lives Of John Lennon (a book that he even references in the text): a malicious attempt at cutting down his subject. But, as with Albert Goldman’s much-detested biography of John Lennon, the subject of Sticky Fingers ultimately comes off as okay – it’s the biographer who comes off like the bad guy. 

Sticky Fingers is at least shorter than Goldman’s epic of a character assassination, but it’s no less vindictive. What’s interesting is that the first half of the book seems relatively even-toned, until the knives come out in the second half. But, at least for this reader, the cumulative effect was that I became sympathetic to Jann Wenner. For, like Goldman in his Lennon bio, it soon becomes clear that, while Joe Hagan has interviewed many people for his book, he has only used their negative comments about Wenner. Just as The Lives Of John Lennon gave the impression that John Lennon was a marginally-talented narcissist who only stumbled into success through luck, so too does Sticky Fingers convey that Jann Wenner is a “star-fucker” and “groupie” who managed to run the definining magazine of his generation only by luck. 

The frustrating thing is that I was looking forward to the book. I’ve long been interested in the very early Rolling Stone, and over the years have picked up several original issues, the majority of the mass market paperback anthologies, and also in 2007 I got the Rolling Stone: Cover To Cover CD-Rom, which features every page of every issue from the first one up through 2007. I also picked up two earlier “unauthorized histories” of Rolling Stone: Robert Sam Anson’s 1981 book Gone Crazy And Back Again, and Robert Draper’s 1990 book Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History, neither of which I’ve read. I’ve also picked up – and reviewed here – a few roman a clef novels about Rolling Stone: Rising Higher and Angel Dust. 

All of which is to say I’m very interested in Rolling Stone, at least the first several years of it, though I admit I lose interest once the ‘70s become the ‘80s and beyond. Reading Sticky Fingers, though, never once did I get the impression that Joe Hagan has ever liked Rolling Stone, and nowhere in the book does he capture the magic of flipping through those early issues of the magazine, the newspaper so brittle from the years as to split in half as you turn the page, to find nigh-endless interviews with rock personalities of the day, epic album reviews, psychedelic art, various feature stories, “dope world” communiques, and occasionally even poetry. There is a definite magic to the first ten or so years of Rolling Stone, and it’s clear why readers of the day “grokked” it, but Hagan can’t be bothered to tell us that. Indeed, when he does comment on the magazine, it’s in a derogatory or mocking tone. 

However, it’s to Hagan’s credit that about 85% of the book focuses on the ‘60s and ‘70s. Indeed, the ‘90s and ‘00s only take up a few pages at the very end of the book. This is because the ‘60s and ‘70s were the prime years of the magazine, something everyone acknowledges. And too, Hagan does provide the occasional interesting backstory about some of the more famous stories from the magazine’s golden years, some of which had me accessing my CD-Rom to check them out. But one wonders if this same behind-the-scenes info is also in Anson’s and Draper’s books. 

For the most part, though, Sticky Fingers is a biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner…but, just as Albert Goldman’s Lennon bio was also about Yoko Ono, so too is Sticky Fingers also about co-founder Jane Wenner, aka Jann’s wife. (And a quite attractive wife at that, if you don’t mind a little toxic masculinity with your review.) As I say, it’s pretty incredible how similar Sticky Fingers and The Lives Of John Lennon are. We even start at Wenner’s childhood, with the same focus on Wenner’s mother as there was on Lennon’s mother in that other book – with the caveat that Hagan is much more enamored with Wenner’s mom than I was, as she comes off as the epitome of the self-involved “upper crust” narcissist. I did appreciate Hagan’s subtext (possibly unintentional, though) that Wenner’s mother decided late in life that she was a lesbian, just as Jann Wenner himself came out as gay later in his own life. 

While I have not read those earlier Rolling Stone exposes, one thing I know they both agree on is that Jann Wenner was not the best of bosses, sort of enjoying the high life with rock royalty and leaving his employees to do the brunt of the work. To which I say, “Who gives a shit?” Honestly, this sort of ignorace about the working world baffles me…it’s like these biographers have never had a real job outside of the journalism industry and don’t understand that this is essentially how it works in the corporate world. So yes, there’s a fair bit of bitching from Rolling Stone employees new and old, but again the humorous thing is, no one would know who any of these people are if they hadn’t worked for Rolling Stone in the first place. But then the same sentiment can be extended to Joe Hagan himself – I’d never heard of the guy previous to this book. 

Writing-wise, Hagan does for the most part keep his narrative moving, but the passive-aggressive tone soon becomes wearying. He also writes in that pretentious style favored by modern journalists; back in the ‘90s I remember getting a subscription to Esquire due to a bunch of frequent flyer miles, and I was immediately turned off by the highfalutin, desperately-trying-to-sound important writing style throughout. Unsurprisingly, Joe Hagan writes in that exact style, doling out sentences like, “When Simon and Garfunkel came to San Francisco to play the Community Theater in Berkeley in May 1966, they made a special trip to Berkeley to meet Ralph Gleason, whose collection of Lenny Bruce recordings, bequeathed to him by Bruce himself, was highly prized samizdat.” To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy: If you use words like “samizdat,” you might be a pretentious twat. Especially if it’s in a sentence that also has “Simon and Garfunkel” in it! 

As in Goldman’s Lennon-bashery, from the beginning of this epic tale we are to understand that Jann Wenner had no real part in anything that made Rolling Stone great, and any success he enjoyed was either due to someone else’s idea or due to a fluke. So then the origin of Rolling Stone itself is framed as Wenner perhaps ripping off some other underground magazines of the day, then straight-up using the printing plates designed for a defunct paper. Only occasionally will Hagan admit that Wenner might have come up with a good idea on his own, but just as soon as we’re told something positive, Hagan will undercut it with a biting comment – he does this throughout the book, increasingly so as we get a few hundred pages in. Again and again, any time we are told of a good deed Wenner has done, or any time someone else makes a positive comment about him, there will be a single-line sentence that undercuts Wenner. For example: 

Travolta was pleased [with Wenner’s screen test for a featured part in Travolta’s 1985 movie Perfect]. He characterized Wenner’s second screen test “one of the best I’ve ever seen…I’ve never seen a beast like this one on celluloid before.” 

At least that’s what he said in his “actor’s notebook” that Wenner published in Rolling Stone. 

Just like that, throughout the damn book. Speaking of Lennon, Sticky Fingers is even framed around him, opening in 1970 – well after Rolling Stone had become a success – with Jann and Jane Wenner enjoying a brief friendship with John and Yoko. We get the insider scoop that Wenner, despite Lennon’s specific demand, published Lennon’s long interview with the magazine as a book, Lennon Remembers, and Lennon never forgave him for it. Obviously a jerky move, but then again one could see Wenner’s point – the interview would have been the property of the magazine, for Wenner to do with as he pleased. Speaking of which, we get a lot of legal wrangling between Wenner and Mick Jagger over the use of “Rolling Stone,” with Jagger incensed in the early days that it infringed on his band’s name; wranglings which humorously took decades to be worked out between the two men. One wonders how Jagger feels now that this book, too, “rips of” the Stones for its title – but even then, “Sticky Fingers” is a lame title, as it has no real bearing on anything…other than being yet another dig at Jann Wenner, implying that his career has been the result of “sticky finger” thievery and backstabbing. 

Despite being 500+ pages, Sticky Fingers is very shallow in the research department. Again, it’s all written about on the surface level of an Esquire article. We’ll get cursory overviews of some of the more famous pieces that ran in Rolling Stone, maybe a little behind the scenes stuff…but that’s it. There’s no mention whatsoever of more minor figures from the magazine’s early days: no J.R. Young, no Smokestack El Ropo. Not a single mention of either of them – nor any confirmation of my pet theory that early contributor “Elmo Rooney” might have been Steve Martin, who literally portrayed Elmo Rooney in the ultra-weird Rolling Stone 10th Anniversary TV Special. (“Elmo Rooney” was probably really Charles Perry, who was also “Smokestack El Ropo,” but still – it’s a fun idea.) 

One of the things that drew Wenner’s ire upon the publication of this book is Hagan’s strange obsession with Wenner’s sexuality. In a way I can appreciate it, though…I mean Hagan has at least tried to cater to a “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” ethic. But the obsession with Wenner’s latent homosexuality and how it shaped Rolling Stone in its early days – even subconsciously! – gets to be as wearying as the constant single-sentence barbs. Indeed, coupled with Hagan’s other obsession (namely, the insinuation in Keith Richard’s autobiography that Mick Jagger has a small penis – something Hagan refers to several times in this book!), the reader begins to wonder if there’s a little “latency” in Hagan himself. Actually this might explain the increasingly vicious tone the book appropriates toward Wenner. 

On that same note, Hagan is really, really bothered that Rolling Stone was essentially “by white men for white men.” Of course, the white population of the United States was around 90% in 1970, but who cares about such trivialities – I mean Jann Wenner should’ve catered at least a little to the nascent albino trans population, for crying out loud! How dare he go for the majority of the population? I mean what was he, a businessman or something?? But boy, we do get a lot of today’s mandatory white male-bashing; Hagan most seems to be bothered by Joe Eszterhas, who wrote for Rolling Stone in the early ‘70s before heading to Hollywood. Hagan has it that Eszterhas was not only a chauvinist but that he also plain made up most of his stories. To which I say big woop; this is no different than what writers were doing over at the Men’s Adventure Magazines of the day. Kudos to Eszterhas for pulling it off in a more “respectable” periodical. Hagan also mentions that Eszterhas liked to carry around a buck knife, which he’d lay down on the table when in heated discussions in the editorial room – a WTF? note that made me laugh out loud. I think I’m gonna start doing that at the office. 

Hagan is so focused on his white male-bashing that he misses the forest for the trees. For, despite being “by white men for white men,” there were indeed women and “people of color” (in the modern parlance) at Rolling Stone, even in the earliest days. Chief among them would be Robin Green, the first female reporter, and Ben Fong-Torres, a Chinese journalist who was one of the main contributors for years and years. So hey, right there – opportunities for Hagan to expound upon “muh diversity.” 

But in another laugh-out-loud miss on Hagan’s part, we’re told that Robin Green was Jann Wenner’s “resident assassin,” the reporter Wenner would send when he wanted a hit piece on someone, and not really good for much else. And Fong-Torres was even worse, notorious for snooping through the personal belongings of his subjects and also publishing personal material in his stories – like stuff taken directly from a private notebook he spied in someone’s house. And it’s humorous – no doubt unintentionally so – that Hagan does essentially the very same thing in this book! According to Rolling Stone veteran Greil Marcus, Hagan took a particular story Marcus had given him about Jann Wenner and distorted it to make Wenner look bad; Marcus further declared Sticky Fingers to be a “vile” book. 

Anyway, while there was some precious “muh diversity” at Rolling Stone, even in the beginning, apparently Green and Fong-Torres weren’t the best representatives…or something. It just made me laugh, particularly given how incensed Hagan was at Jann Wenner’s race-and-gender faux pas in 2023, more on which anon. 

Despite all attempts to make him appear spineless and craven, Wenner still comes off in a positive light…in particular in a flap in the Rolling Stone offices after the publication of the Altamont special, in 1970. This was, in Hagan’s dramatic telling, a watershed moment in the paper’s origin, as the radical leftists in Wenner’s employ demanded that their boss trounce Mick Jagger for his part in the debacle and death at that festival…pushing Wenner to defy his “groupie” image and go after Mick Jagger himself. Wenner did so…after which, in typical fashion, the radical leftists wanted more: they wanted Rolling Stone to become overtly political, and essentially staged a coup. In a move modern-day executives at Disney and Boeing and etc should learn from, Wenner stood his ground and kicked the radical fuckers out. And Rolling Stone went on to its greatest success in the ‘70s, while those fired radicals faded into the woodwork. Certainly there is a lesson there, but Joe Hagan misses it…perhaps intentionally so. 

Otherwise the mistakes are for the most part minor, like when Hagan tells us that “the first Steve Miller Band album” was Sailor, when in reality it was Children Of The Future. Since stuff like this is admitedly outside the scope of the book, it’s forgiveable. But the goofs about Rolling Stone are a bit harder to swallow, given that this is supposed to be the “definitive story” – I mean, like on page 414 we get a scant few paragraphs on Tom Wolfe’s serialized Bonfire Of The Vanities, which ran for 27 installments in the mid-1980s in Rolling Stone. Not even broaching the plot or telling us much at all about the story or its reception, Hagan informs us that the protagonist is “a Wall Street trader,” Hagan unsurprisingly using the character as an opportunity to take yet another swipe at Wenner, lending the impression that Wolfe was serving up a veiled parody of his editor. There’s only one problem. In the original Rolling Stone serialization, protagonist Sherman McCoy was a writer. It was in the heavily-revised hardcover edition of the novel, published in 1987, that Tom Wolfe changed the protagonist to a Wall Street trader. Hagan has gotten this detail wrong. Which makes one wonder how much else in Sticky Fingers he’s gotten wrong. 

The appearance of Hunter Thompson at Rolling Stone after the Altamont issue was another factor that took the paper to its success, and Hagan writes of the increasingly fractious relationship between Thompson and Wenner. But otherwise there isn’t much here about Hunter Thompson that’s revelatory; I mean he comes on strong, burns out quick, and is soon a shell of his former self. At least this is how he’s presented here; Hagan has it that none of Thompson’s work after the mid-‘70s is worth the paper it was printed on. We do at least get another dig at Joe Eszterhas here, this time from Eszterhas himself (who likely regretted talking to Hagan, given how Hagan made Eszterhas come off in the book), who claims he tried to emulate Hunter Thompson. This is clear just from reading Eszterhas’s pieces, in particular one of his last stories, the infamous “King Of The Goons” hit-piece on Evel Kneivel. 

There’s no denying Rolling Stone lost much of what made it special as the ‘70s wore on, and by the point in Haggan’s narrative where the magazine becane a slick and moved to New York my interest had waned – as had Joe Hagan’s. The ‘80s-‘00s are for the most part rushed through in a few hundred pages, or should I say I skimmed through a lot of it. I’ve never had time for Bruce Springsteen or Bono, and Jann Wenner was a big fan of both, hence there’s a lot of stuff about the two of them which I skipped. That said, the cover of “Blinded By The Light” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band is one of my favorite songs ever. I couldn’t care less what the Springsteen original sounds like.  Otherwise we just get a litany against Wenner for all the things Hagan accuses him of missing as the century neared its end...like his reluctance to feature rap in the magazine, or how he missed out on the importance of MTV.  Yawn. 

As mentioned as the book goes on the knives increasingly come out, and we get a lot of stuff about Jann Wenner lying to people, or enjoying the high life while his poor employees must scrimp and save, or how he’d take credit for articles others worked on. Again, yawn. (Which rhymes with “Jann!”) We also get too much on Wenner’s sex life, with the curious tidbit that it’s his affairs with men that Joe Hagan most focuses on. (Hmmmm….) On the female front it sounds like the guy did pretty good for himself – I was especially impressed by his involvement with none other than Mary Microgram of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, a book I read 30 years ago and keep meaning to read again. Aka Denise Kaufman, she was also in the all-female group Ace Of Cups, which was a favorite of Jimi Hendrix. 

But the absolute nadir of Sticky Fingers is the Afterword, in which Joe Hagan essentially pats himself on the back for not turning in the hagiography Jann Wenner apparently expected. And how does Hagan know Wenner expected such a thing? Why – because Wenner would take Hagan to concerts! And Wenner gave him Rolling Stone merchandise…a-and he even gave him the complete mono vinyl set of the Beatles discography as gifts! And Wenner showed Hagan photos of rockstars from Wenner’s personal collection! I mean, the craven bastard!! No wonder Joe Hagan felt justified in sharpening his knives and cutting that fucker up good! Seriously though, this last part is just unbelievable in its lack of self-perception; totally unaware of the ill-will he is engendering in his reader, Hagan basically congratulates himself on the great job he’s done with this book – and he’s also eager to tell us how Jann Wenner stopped talking to him after Wenner read the manuscript, shortly before it went to press. For Hagan stipulated that Wenner would not be able to make any edits to the book – cue another round of self-congratulations for this incredibly wise decision. 

Ah, but if you thought the knives were out in Sticky Fingers, just check out this hit piece from the September 2023 Vanity Fair. So in September of 2023 Jann Wenner published a new book titled The Masters, focused on seven rockers who in Wenner’s estimation were “masters” of the art – and Wenner had the absolute fucking gall to only write about white men. The horror!! In an interview with the pathetic New York Times Wenner further stated that “performers of color” were outside his area of focus, and further – gasp! – he said that female performers weren’t articulte enough in the rock field, or somesuch. 

There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth in the virtue-signalling world of modern journalism. Joe Hagan’s glee at finally getting to really dig into Jann Wenner is almost palpable in this Vanity Fair piece. 

The thing is…well, first of all, Jann Wenner has every right to say what he wants, and if I wore a hat I’d take it off for him, just for how he demonstrated the courage of his convictions. A rare sight indeed in today’s emasculated era. But Jann Wenner has the right to say what he wants because of the little fact that we live in the United States, and we have freedom of speech here. The PC Thugs of Hagan’s industry think they are arbiters of what is “permissible” speech. FUCK THEM. Jann Wenner is free to say whatever he wants, even if it ruffles feathers. If he is guilty of anything it is apologizing for his comments. Curiously, for a bunch of so-called “liberal” types who “just want to breathe,” these modern-day progressives are like sharks with blood in the water when they detect any weakness in their enemies. The woke battlefield is littered with the corpses of famous personalities who have said something “wrong,” apologized for it – and then been cancelled. Jann Wenner is just the latest example. If there is one lesson from any of this, it is never to apologize to the foaming-mouth radicals, and only to fight back. Sadly, only a very few understand this. Jann Wenner himself once understood this…like when he fired those in-house radicals in 1970. 

But the other thing is, Wenner really isn’t in bad company. I’m not sure if he’s been cancelled yet (which could be easy because he’s dead and not around to defend himself), but in 1948 the poet Robert Graves in his book The White Goddess put forward the notion that women could not be poets, that only men could truly write poetry; women, in Graves’s philosopy, were instead the muses who inspired poets. Thus in Graves’s estimation the only poets with a “voice” were men. This, essentially, is the same proposition Jann Wenner has put forward about rock music. And I can’t say I disagree with him. Obviously there are exceptions – glaring exceptions at that – but for the most part rock music is the product of white males. Sure, rock originated from rhythm and blues played by black musicians in the early 20th Century…just as much as it originated from the country music played by white musicians in that same era. But what it came to be – what most people think of when they think of “rock” – was mainly the work of white males in the 1960s and 1970s. Sort of like how Buddhism began in India…I mean, do you think of a person from India when you think of a Buddhist? 

And besides, all this race and gender identity politics bullshit is a modern obsession. Back in the glory days of rock, the musicians didn’t make a big deal out of being white, or being male, and nor did the listeners. Hell, if you listen to the Freeform Progressive Rock Radio of the era, you’ll notice that there was just as much soul and blues played as there was rock. But we live in an era of race obsession, no matter how absurd, thus Jann Wenner’s comments struck such a nerve. 

But then I could have just linked to Greil Marcus’s superbly-argued defense of Wenner.

Personally I think Wenner shouldn’t have backed down…and in fact his “faux pas” was another indication of how he has an innate sense of knowing the direction things are going. Fortunately, we are currently seeing pushback against race and identity-focused ideologies, particularly against companies that espouse these ideologies. As it turns out, most Americans don’t like being told how to think; Hagan’s industry is crumbling as a result of people cancelling their subscriptions to these woke propaganda outlets. In my mind, Jann Wenner’s only mistake was that he didn’t retain control of Rolling Stone and take the tone of the magazine into more of a populist direction. After all, the underground of today is the right. The left has become the establishment. In the ‘60s the FBI targeted hippies; today the FBI targets grandmothers who took selfies at the Capitol. And curiously a lot of those former hippies are now Trump supporters. Even I know a few people my age whose parents were hippies back in the ‘60s but who are now MAGA Republicans…and I hardly know anyone, so you have to wonder how many of them there really are out there. Rolling Stone, just as it had once before, could have become the voice of this new underground. 

If you think that sounds crazy, just remember that Donald Trump was himself once a Democrat. 

I bring up the dreaded topic of Trump because Joe Hagan himself does, in the closing pages of Sticky Fingers. We are told that Wenner was “interested” in Trump’s 2016 candidacy – cue more hue and cry from Hagan, who again displays his coastal ignorance by telling us that those dim-witted Trump supporters only vote for Trump because he’s famous. (FYI, they aren’t voting for him because he’s “famous.”) In Hagan’s mind, Donald Trump is the epitome of the fame-obsessed narcissism Jann Wenner has long been enamored with; there follows the most superficial appraisement of Trump that…well, it gives one an indication of why most Americans are so ill-informed, if they’re getting their “news” from people like this writer. 

This book upset me so much that I actually looked online for a way to contact Jann Wenner somehow, to let him know Sticky Fingers was just a stupid hatchet job and “nothing to get hung up about.” It’s just a vicious screed that ultimately makes the writer look like the bad guy, without showing any true understanding of its subject – again, the similarities to Goldman’s Lennon bio are many and profound. And no doubt the fates of both books will be similar. Hagan seems to have a premonition of how his own book will be treated by history: toward the end of Sticky Fingers he mentions how upset Jann Wenner was with Goldman’s The Lives Of John Lennon when it was published in 1988, commissioning a rebuttal in the pages of Rolling Stone…yet Hagan notes it was all for naught, as Goldman’s book was “destined to be forgotten.”  Surely the same fate has already befallen Sticky Fingers. 

My only regret in reviewing Sticky Fingers is that I’m giving the book any visibility. So I guess I read it so you don’t have to. But if you do get the urge to read it, try getting it from your library – or maybe order a cheap remaindered copy on abebooks.com. Checking there now, it seems there are a ton of such copies available for a pittance. Which is about all this “vile” book is worth.

Angel Dust

Angel Dust, by Lindsay Maracotta

January, 1979  Jove Books

Well friends, somehow I’ve managed to discover yet another obscure paperback original rock novel from the ‘70s. This one promised much, too, following the trash template of the era: a roman a clef about the famous personages of the era, opening in 1974 and then flashing back to 1964, detailing the torid year-by-year events of the age of rock. I mean I was in trash heaven when I saw that the back cover was like so many of the trashy bestseller paperbacks of the era, listing off the characters and noting their kinky proclivities.

But man, first of all, let’s take a look at this uncredited photo cover…and try to figure out what the hell is going on. So I get the guy with the guitar and microphone is supposed to be a rock star up on the stage, but what are the women doing below him? Are they in rock rapture, or are they bending their heads back in cultlike supplication? I guess both things are the same, but still. Then if you look at the back cover, you’ll note the cover is a wraparound, with more “bent back in supplication” heads below the rocker – but the perspective just seems off. Are these “bent heads” people standing or lying on the ground? 

This however isn’t even the big question. TAKE A LOOK AT THE ROCK STAR’S FACE. Here’s a closeup – don’t look if you don’t want nightmares! 

I think I speak for us all when I ask, “What the fuck??” I’ve spent altogether too much time trying to puzzle out what exactly this guy’s expression represents…this insane leering sneer. What is this, “Tim Curry as Mick Jagger?” I mean has the cover photographer ever seen a rock star? Or perhaps the goal here was to mimic (or mock) a shock rocker of the day, like Alice Cooper or something. The only problem is, there’s no shock rocker in Angel Dust, so perhaps this bizarre and lame (but for those very same reasons, friggin’ great) cover is why the book is so obscure. 

And speaking of which, the title of the book, “Angel Dust,” has nothing whatsoever to do with the contents of the novel. Perhaps it is a play on the underworld name for PCP, but if so that is not made clear in the narrative itself. While several characters do get hooked on drugs, it’s the same heroin and speed that is common in rock novels. Also, there’s a bit of a morality tale at play, as the drugs are part and parcel of the various downward spirals the large cast of characters go through as the sixties become the seventies. But then, another theme here is that essentially everyone involved in the rock biz is a self-involved narcissist hell-bent on destroying themselves. Well…so what if they are? I mean the last thing I want is a self-respecting and well-behaved rock star… 

No, the main issue with Angel Dust is that Lindsay Maracotta, to borrow a phrase Kirkus used in their review of contemporary rock novel Rising Higher, “hasn’t even bothered to be inventive” with her story. Basically Angel Dust takes all the topical points of ‘60s rock and filters them through a bland prism of characters who are analogs of real rockers. Bob Dylan going electric, Altamont, the Rolling Stones becoming increasingly “evil” and decadent, Yoko Ono and John Lennon breaking up The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix dying young…hell, even the Redlands bust: all of these and more are here in Angel Dust, only the, uh, names have been changed to protect the (not so) innocent. 

Not only that, but like so many of these contemporary rock novels – ie Triple Platinum, Rock & Roll Retreat Blues, or the aforementioned Rising Higher – actual rock stuff is scant at best. Indeed, the entire “rock” theme could be replaced by any other theme, and the essence of the novel would be the same. By which I mean, this could just as easily have been a novel about movie stars, or hell even opera singers or something. Angel Dust is more of a tepid soap opera than a “rock novel,” having even less to do with the business than those previously-mentioned books. Maracotta spends hardly any time at all on the creative process of the music, or the recording of the albums; other than a handful of too-brief scenes, we rarely see these famous rockers creating or performing. Rather, the focus is on their mundane soap operatic lives, with the caveat that the novel rarely attains the trashy level one might hope for. 

Not surprisingly, given that the author is a woman, the main characters are women, all of them analogs of real women in the rock scene. The male characters – ie the famous rock stars – mostly exist on the periphery, and come off as callous pricks. There’s even a Paul McCartney analog who is a self-involved cad who demands his women to be subservient. The Hendrix analog is a heroin junkie who constantly needs to be told how great he is and walks over women with scorn; a far cry from what the real Jimi Hendrix appeared to be like. To make things easier, I’ll just follow that back cover format and tell you who the characters of Angel Dust are clearly intended to be: 

Jim Destry: The “smouldering eyes” line on the back cover had me hoping Destry was going to be a Jim Morrison analog, as in the 1970 rock novel Cold Iron. But unfortunately, Destry is in fact…Bob Dylan. (Dylan, by the way, was the inspiration for a surprisingly sleazy paperback original in 1970, The Golden Groove.) 

Meredith Fairchild: This is the closest we get to a main character in Angel Dust. A beautiful American gal from a wealthy family who becomes a rock photographer and ultimately marries a member of the most famous rock group of the day, The Shades. Meredith Fairchild is, of course, Linda Eastman. 

Bryan Revere: The guy Meredith marries, the best-looking member of The Shades who all the girls go crazy for – Paul McCartney. 

Morgan Meeker: Lead singer of “the second best band in England,” the Marked Cards, Morgan is the stand-in for Mick Jagger. 

Christina de la Inglesia: This is the Bianca Perez-Mora Macias to Morgan Meeker’s Mick Jagger. 

Averill Sloane: This is the only original character in the novel, a manipulative mastermind in the mold of Jango Beck, from the contemporary rock novel Passing Through The Flame. 

Humorously, the back cover doesn’t even mention some of the more important characters in the novel. Here they are, as well as less-important characters who are based on famous rockers: 

Tom Sampling: This is the John Lennon analog, the lead singer of The Shades, who becomes increasingly gaunt and politically aware as the sixties progress. 

Monica Choy: The Yoko Ono to Tom Sampling’s John Lennon…only she’s Chinese! Otherwise this is Yoko in all but name, or at least the Yoko of the tabloids of the day – a self-involved social-climber with delusions of her own importance, who latches onto famous men. 

Lazarus “Laz” Allen: The Hendrix analog, but a far cry from the real thing; he barely appears in the novel. 

Bill McHale: Aka Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone; upstart publisher of rock magazine Tumbling Dice, though accused by his subordinates of being domineering and not possessing any writing talent of his own; he started the mag to be around rock royalty. 

Sabina: Foul-mouthed and fat-bottomed lead singer of The Psychedelic Invention, “the high priests of acid rock.” Aka Janis Joplin, who was the basis for a much superior rock novel also published in 1979, The Rose. 

Josie James: One of the more curious misses on the back cover, as Josie is a fairly important character, a Joni Mitchell-style folk singer who must sell her soul to become famous – and, this being a trash novel, can only find true happiness in the sack with other women. Her parts reminded me very much of another contemporary rock novel, The Scene. 

Sonny Lanahan: A hot-tempered businessman who fights Averill Sloane for control of various groups – no doubt supposed to be Allan Klein. 

So there are a lot of characters afoot, but Maracotta does a fairly good job juggling them. The only problem is Angel Dust is constructed a little strangely. It runs to 395 pages of small print, but Tom Sampling and Bryan Revere – ie the John and Paul analogs – aren’t introduced until page 295…and practically the rest of the novel revolves around them! What makes it worse is that the majority of this is just John-Paul rivalry stuff (the two aren’t introduced until 1969, long after their group, The Shades, has been a tight unit), with slightly more soapy recreations of the real-life fights between the two. Also, Angel Dust opens in 1974, giving the impression that all the “rock world” stuff was long in the past…but as the novel progresses, Maracotta takes us from 1964 to 1970, before finally returning to that opening 1974 sequence…meaning that the opening is really just four years later! 

The “1974” opening has Jim Destry about to make his long-awaited return concert in Madison Square Garden, and Meredith Fairchild has come here to relive “the old times” or whatever. We learn here she’s married to a “Bryan,” a guy who has a rivalry with a “Tom,” but it won’t be for like 290 pages until we even find out who these guys are. Meredith also runs into old friend Josie James, there to open for Destry and now an angry, hard-edged bitchy type, a far cry from the willowy and idealistic girl Meredith once knew… 

From there we flash back to 1964, and Maracotta actually spends most of the narrative here in the early days of the age of rock. But despite her Cliff’s Notes take on rock, Maracotta still pulls some anachronistic blunders…most particularly with Tumbling Dice magazine. A newspaper-style underground rag devoted to rock and the youth movement and what not, running out of San Francisco…four years before Rolling Stone. And hell, eight years before the Rolling Stones would even release the song “Tumbling Dice!” I mean this Bill McHale guy might’ve been a hack, but he sure did have a knack for seeing the future. 

One unique thing Maracotta brings to the tale is that this group of characters is essentially the main movers of rock; hardly any other musicians are mentioned, though in true roman a clef style we will have super-brief references to real groups, like the Beatles or the Stones or Dylan…or at one point even Rolling Stone is mentioned as a competitor magazine. But clearly this is an alternate reality where those groups are not nearly as famous as The Shades, Jim Destry, or the Marked Cards. Otherwise what Maracotta adds is they all have shared history, beginning in 1964: Jim Destry is in love with Josie James, two folkies in New York, and Chinese-American artist Monica Choy makes her way through basically all of the guys here, until finally scoring her biggest coup in Tom Sampling. But man, if you’ve ever wanted to read some Yoko Ono-Bob Dylan slash fiction, you’ll find it here in Angel Dust. 

Well, sort of. It’s my sad duty to report that the novel is incredibly timid in the sleaze and trash fronts. Most all of the sex occurs off-page and what we do get is tepid stuff along the lines of, “His strokes were quick and hard.” I mean, is this dude screwing or swimming? Also, what with Lindsay Maracotta being a woman and all, there’s zero in the way of the customary female exploitation one might demand from their trashy paperback cash-in fiction. But that’s another curious thing. A not-so-subtle theme at play here is that none of these studly rock gods can satisfy their women in bed! Not only that, but they’re all closet homosexuals; multiple times Bryan is accused of being in love with Tom, and vice versa. On the female front, all the women are latent lesbians; Meredith’s first time is with Morgan Meeker, the Jagger analog, and she finds herself unsatisfied afterward. Despite which, we get the unforgettable line, “Meredith felt a sharp pain as [Morgan] thrust deeper in her body, which increased as the full length of his cock penetrated her.” The Marked Cards, baby! Meredith with also be unsatisfied with Bryan Revere…her only true orgasm in the novel occurs in a lesbian fling in 1969 with Josie James. Hell, even Laz Allen can’t keep her happy – though as mentioned the Laz here is a cad. Jimi clearly made his way through a ton of women, but per the bios of him I’ve read he didn’t go out of his way to brag and boast about it, or flaunt it in the faces of other women. 

The unwieldy construction runs through the book; Meredith is mostly the main character, using her father’s connections to get a gig as a photographer for Tumbling Dice. She’s there for when Jim Destry is still unknown, getting some of his first pictures, and also some of the Marked Cards’s first show in the US. From there we hopscotch through the sixties, with Morgan and the Marked Cards becoming increasingly brutish and decadent, the drugs becoming increasingly commonplace, and an eventual spreading of malaise and boredom through the rock elite. Curiously, Woodstock is the one real-life incident Maracotta doesn’t rip off, though we do have a pseudo-Altamont in 1969…complete with Jim Destry appearing on stage with the Marked Cards. This, confusingly, will be the first of Destry’s two “return concerts,” this one being after a motorcycle crash he got into a few years before (humorously, right after being heckled onstage for coming out with an electric guitar, Maracotta getting double-bang for her real-life-ripoff buck); Destry’s second “return concert” is the opening one in 1974. 

I’m also sad to report that Lindsay Maracotta is another of those rock novelists who makes the curious decision to hardly ever describe the music. This is such a recurring failing of these novels that it almost makes me wonder if there was an unspoken agreement among all rock novelists in the ‘70s. Indeed, the characters here are rarely if ever shown on stage or in the studio; if they are, Maracotta will hurry through the proceedings and then get back to lots of soap opera-esque dialog. One gets the impression from Angel Dust that being “a famous rock star” entails nothing more than looking the part and doing the right drug; there’s no feeling that any of these characters are musicians capable of selling albums – other, that is, than the occasional bit of expositional dialog where characters will tell Meredith about recording or performing. 

Also, like Passing Through The Flame, midway through the novel becomes focused on the mercenary practices of the businessmen who plundered the rock world, “soiling” the art and whatnot…but again, none of these characters seem very artistic, not even Monica Choy, who is an artist. Otherwise the focus is on the increasing torpor and decadence of the rock world, with Morgan Meeker treating Meredith like shit and Meredith gradually becoming a “groupie” who sleeps her way through sundry rockers (all off page), before ending up with Bryan Revere in 1969. Her fling with Laz Allen is barely mentioned, other than a random bit where Laz screws Meredith in a New York City porno theater – one of the few scenes in the novel that does get fairly explicit. As for Morgan, his descent into sexual sadism is hard to understand, given that he starts the novel as a relatively cheery and thoughtful individual, but my assumption is Maracotta’s intent is that the mysterious death of a friend of his, midway through the novel, pushes him into the path – him and Christina, who also gets off on being beaten around during sex, thus becomes a perfect match for Morgan. Also special mention must be made of the arbitrary bit where Morgan breaks the neck of a pigeon before that Altamont analog concert. 

It's funny though how when the John and Paul stand-ins Tom and Bryan make their belated appearance, it’s like Angel Dust has been about nothing but them since the beginning. What I mean to say is, Destry, Morgan, Josie – all of these characters who were important for the past 290 pages are mostly brushed aside, and the stars of the show are now Bryan and Tom as they bicker and banter. It’s almost embarrassing how Maracotta just lifts real-life incidents without bothering to change them up at all, complete even with Monica bringing a mattress into the studio during the recording of a Shades album so she can be with Tom all the time – and also pushing him into more of a radical political direction. 

Monica is also of course duplicitous and vindictive; above I said that Bill McHale could see the future with Tumbling Dice. The same could be said of Lindsay Maracotta herself. In the 1969 section, Monica is getting her hooks in Tom, and has made herself a rival of Meredith, just as Tom is a rival of Bryan. To get revenge on Bryan and Meredith for the latest bantering session, Monica calls in an anonymous tip to the cops that they’ll find a lot of marijuana at a certain residence – the same residence Bryan and Meredith happen to be renting here in England. In the ensuing bust Bryan is arrested and spends time in jail. Angel Dust was published in January 1979…and exactly one year later Yoko Ono, according to Albert Goldman and Frederic Seaman, called in a tip to some friends in Japan to bust Paul and Linda as they arrived in Tokyo, all because the two threatened to ruin John and Yoko’s “hotel karma” by staying at their favorite Tokyo hotel. Now, who knows if this is what really happened; what’s incredible is that Lindsay Maracotta has here predicted something that mirrors what would become a real-life incident. I mean, imagine if John and Yoko got the “let’s get Paul busted” idea from this very novel! 

The narrative gets more interesting, and more sordid, as the sixties progress. The Redlands bust analog is one of the first instances of this sordid nature, with Maracotta again mixing and matching her Rock Babylon material; whereas it was just the Stones in the Redlands caper, here it’s the Stones analogs the Marked Cards, along with Josie James (the Joni Mitchell analog) and Sabina (the Janis Joplin analog). But we even get the infamous “candy bar” bit, but here it’s an acid-soaring Josie who has a candy bar inserted into her nether regions and the Marked Cards take turns taking bites from it – humorous stuff here with one of the Cards being a closeted gay and disgusted by the whole thing, but going along with it. Curiously, a character Maracotta doesn’t even return to in the novel; only her penchant for perspective-hopping even lets us know who this guy is. 

The Altamont analog isn’t a match for its real-world counterpart, though Maracotta tries to amp it up by having one of the characters shot while on stage…sort of a prefigure of The Armageddon Rag. From there we are thrust back into the opening 1974 section, where we learn that Morgan is truly into his decadent trip, having a three-way with wife Christina and a “glitter rock” star clearly modelled on David Bowie. But curiously even this framework section doesn’t work, because Angel Dust opens and closes on a section titled “1974,” yet a few pages toward the end we’re told it’s 1975! Oh and also, this novel features an insane finale that’s reminiscent of Once Is Not Enough in how it seems to come from a different novel. Since Angel Dust is so obscure and scarce, I’ll describe it, but skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know. Basically, Meredith accuses Bryan of wanting to fuck Tom and Bryan storms off in a rage. Meredith, losing her mind, takes a ton of drugs and gives her toddler daughter a sleeping pill (Maracotta intentionally leaves the child’s fate vague). Then Meredith, totally insane now, gets in her car and roars off into the night on what is clearly a death trip – truly a WTF? type of bitch-slap finale. 

But man, if only the entire novel matched the sheer bitch-slappery of that finale. Instead, Angel Dust is strangely dull and lifeless, despite being a sort of “greatest hits” of various ‘60s rock-world hijinks. The characters don’t seem real and are pale reflections of their real-world inspirations. And there is zero feeling for the time and the place; essentially Angel Dust is a “rock novel” for people who are only vaguely aware of rock music. As I said above, the characters here could just as easily have been actors or models or whatever, and the story wouldn’t have been much changed – the focus is on soap opera dynamics between the various characters, nothing more. Still, I was super happy to discover the book – I’m always excited when I discover a new rock novel paperback original – so I can’t complain too much.

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 14

More Space Race Documentaries: 

For All Mankind (1989): This documentary still has a lot to offer, despite being a few decades old now. It’s sort of the prototype of Apollo 11; indeed, Todd Douglas Miller’s 2019 film ends with the credit “For Al and Theo.” Theo is Theo Kamecke, director of Moonwalk One, and Al is Al Reinert, who directed this theatrically-released 1989 documentary. Like Apollo 11, For All Mankind presents a concise trip to the moon and back, but with a few differences from that later film: it too features vintage audio from the era, but also includes modern voiceovers from many of the astronauts, and also it presents a sort of composite of every lunar mission (plus a clip from a Gemini-era spacewalk). In that regard it isn’t nearly the historical document that Apollo 11 is, and actually if you are familiar with the Apollo missions and the various astronauts you could get confused by the whirlwind of assembled footage. For example, Charlie Duke appears in this film as both an astronaut on the moon and a Capcom at Mission Control! Now that’s multitasking! 

Another big difference here, and one of the things that still elevates For All Mankind, is that the majority of the footage is from post-Apollo 11 missions. Whereas most other documentaries just rush through Apollos 12-17 and put the most focus on Apollo 11, here the more famous mission actually gets less screen time. But again, it’s all assembled into a composite of “one” trip, so for example you’ll see Buzz “Apollo 11” Aldrin coming down the ladder for his first steps on the moon, after Neil Armstrong has been out there for several minutes, but the voiceover is courtesy Pete “Apollo 12” Conrad, who’s talking about what it was like to be “second” on the moon. But what Conrad really means is that his was the second trip to the moon, Apollo 12, and he was the third man to walk on the moon. Regardless another thing For All Mankind has going for it is humor; here Conrad reveals that he took a bet with someone that he could say whatever he wanted when he first stepped on the moon, and thus he proclaimed with his first step: “Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me!” 

One thing For All Mankind proves is that the Apollo 11 crew (Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins) was indeed a laconic bunch…even when compared to other astronauts. For the others presented here are downright giddy; these guys hoot and holler, joke constantly, occasionally sing and dance, and as seen above even lampoon famous quotes. In fact one wonders how different space history might’ve gone down if the Apollo 12 crew of Pete Conrad and Alan Bean were the first two men to walk on the moon, not Amrstrong and Aldrin; Conrad and Bean are almost a lunar comedy duo. Whereas the Apollo 11 crew approached their mission with a sort of gravitas, Apollo 12 and the rest mostly just seemed to have a good time. I wondered as I watched how it would’ve been if these later guys were really the first ones to get there, the ones that billions would’ve watched on TV…I figured it could’ve gone either way, with the public either getting more invested in the program, what with how approachable and goofy these astronauts were, or they could’ve thought the entire thing was a waste of money, being taken as a joke by the astronauts. 

The footage itself is incredible, and one of the big selling points of For All Mankind when it was released was that it was the first time many viewers got to see actual moon footage outside of the blurry black and white images that had been originally broadcast on TV. It isn’t a feast for the senses like Apollo 11 is, but it’s still in the same ballpark at least, and the Criterion Blu Ray presents it all in remastered high definition. There’s a lot of great material with the lunar rover just barrelling over the moonscape. The majority of the Mission Control footage comes from the Apollo 17 mission (as seen in The Last Steps, below), but as mentioned footage from various missions is cobbled together. This personally bugged me about the film, but honestly the less you know about the Apollo program the more you’ll enjoy For All Mankind. Another thing that added to my personal confusion was that none of the modern voiceovers are credited; you’ll hear an astronaut talking – and most of them have Southern accents, adding to the confusion – but you’re not given any info on who he is. However having seen a few of these space documentaries now, many of the voices were recognizable to me, in particular Mike Collins, Charlie Duke, Alan Bean, and Gene Cernan. 

Speaking of astronaut voices, one you won’t hear is Neil Armstrong’s. It doesn’t look like he appeared in many of these documentaries; the only one I’ve yet seen is the 2008 Discovery Channel doc When We Left Earth, which features Armstrong as one of the onscreen talking heads. Otherwise director Reinert, who apparently gathered all his audio interviews in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, has assembled at least one crew member from each of the lunar missions, ie Apollo 8 through Apollo 17. Speaking of which two more surprising no-shows are Frank “Apollo 8” Borman and Buzz Aldrin. And neither of the Apollo 14 lunar walkers – Ed Mitchell and Alan Shephard – show up. Mitchell I believe was sort of the black sheep of the space program, given his New Age/UFO interests (see below), which might explain his absence, but I’m surprised that Alan Shepard rarely features in any of these documentaries. I find his story compelling, given that he was the only Mercury Program era astronaut who actually made it onto the moon during Apollo. But the Apollo 14 mission, in all the documentaries I’ve yet seen, is usually relegated to a few super-quick clips. Mitchell did show up in In The Shadow Of The Moon (2007), at least, but given that Shepard died in 1998 I’m not sure if he appears in any of these space documentaries. 

Oh and I’ve gone this far and forgotten to mention the one thing most people talk about when it comes to For All Mankind: Brian Eno’s score. This is the most overtly “sci-fi” of all the space documentaries I’ve yet watched, and really it comes down to Eno’s work. Its ambient, synthy vibe gives everything a science fiction spin, yet at at the same time it sort of reminds me of the music I’d hear in Twin Peaks at the time. That said, there’s also a lot of country music in the film, given that so many of these astronauts were fans of it– Southern boys, remember – and they would take along tapes of country music into space. Personally if I was going into space I’d take along Electric Ladyland. Oh and one of the astronauts also plays “Thus Spake Zarathustra” in the command craft, talking about how ironic it is to be playing the theme from 2001 in space. 

But overall this gives a great view into what the lunar astronauts experienced, and the film pairs well with the later In The Shadow Of The Moon (which I meant to review this time, but given how I’ve gone on and on per usual I’ll save it for the next Random Review). Reinert only uses a little footage from Moonwalk One; even the launch prep material, of the astronauts getting suited up and waiting to leave, is from later missions. After the launch we have the aforementioned spacewalk, aka “EVA,” which actually predates any of the Apollo material – it’s Ed White performing the first American EVA in 1965. Reinert even incorporates the Apollo 13 disaster into the storyline, with an alarm flashing abruptly on the soundtrack courtesy some post-production audio. Unlike reality though, the error is quickly fixed and the composite lunar mission continues on. And speaking of multitasking, Jim “Apollo 13” Lovell also appears as both an astronaut and in Mission Control. The lunar material gets a lot of screentime, but Reinert skips over the return material, basically ending the film with a quick clip of the descent parachutes and the mandatory flashback to President Kennedy’s speech at Rice University in 1962. Throughout there is unexpected stuff, likely not seen anywhere else, like the fires of Bedouin desert tribes in the Sahara, glimpsed through the cockpit window as the ship orbits the Earth, or a part on the moon where one of the astronauts loses his footing as he walks and totally wipes out into the lunar dust. 

The “modern” audio from the various astronauts adds an extra layer to the film, giving us their thoughts. Cernan as usual stands out; his gift for gab and making “profound statements” must’ve been a godsend for these documentary directors. Reinert features long clips of Cernan’s voiceover, particularly his “The stars are my home” monologue which closes the film. Cernan’s comments also graced the closing credits of In The Shadow Of The Moon, by the way – and in fact even the title of that film was derived from one of his comments. But not always knowing who is talking does rob For All Mankind of a little emotional connection. That said, Reinert does a great job of showing how lonely the command capsule pilots could become when their two fellow crewman would descend to the moon, leaving the pilots to circle the moon alone for the next few days; Neil Armstrong’s “See ya later” to Mike Collins as Eagle breaks off from Columbia particularly comes off as touching in this regard – and also this is the only documentary where I’ve heard this audio footage. A cool thing about watching all these space docs is that you see and hear different stuff in each. 

The Last Steps (2016) Three years before the incredible Apollo 11, director Todd Douglas Miller released this mini-documentary, again for CNN films. Whereas Apollo 11 documents the first moon landing, this one documents the last, in December of 1972. The Last Steps follows the same format as the later film, using archival film (remastered in high definition) and audio footage to tell the story with no modern intrusions. And once again Matt Morton provides the score, making this come off like a proto-Apollo 11. It isn’t nearly as epic, but then it’s only 25 minutes long. This was the last Apollo launch; budget cuts cancelled any more moon landings, and Apollo 17 would be the last lunar landing: Commander Gene Cernan (who had also commanded Apollo 10), Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, and Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans. Cernan was the only one I was familiar with, given that he’s appeared in almost every space documentary I’ve yet watched. He’s quickly become one of my favorite astronauts…he has this super-serious sort of vibe, always making these “profound” statements, but at heart comes off like a fun-loving goofball. He’s like the kind of character Patrick Swayze would play, if that makes any sense. 

Anyway, it’s late ’72 now, and first thing one notices is that things have gotten a bit grungier: the hair is longer, the sideburns are thicker, the collars are more severe. Whereas Mission Control in Apollo 11 still had that natty ‘60s look, it’s replaced here with dudes sporting massive ‘staches, smoking pipes, and just in general looking like hairy freaks. Oh and speaking of Mission Control, there’s a brief clip of Jim “Apollo 8 and Apollo 13” Lovell sitting in there; again, much of this footage, as well as the ensuing lunar footage, is also seen in For All Mankind. Miller opens the documentary with some rare pre-flight PR material from Cernan, talking directly to the camera and explaining that Apollo 17 is not the “end” of space travel, just of the Apollo Program. How little did he know… From there we go to the midnight launch of the Saturn V rocket, which turned night to day – this was the launch Tom Wolfe was hired by Rolling Stone to write about, the ensuing story which became the kernel for The Right Stuff (see below). 

The launch material is thrilling, Morton’s music again providing a great soundtrack. Miller uses still photography at times, and when the ship gets to the moon we also have video – by this time NASA was able to shoot color video on the moon, though I don’t believe any of it was broadcast on television at the time. The public had pretty much grown bored with the whole space race thing, which makes you feel sort of sorry for Cernan and crew. I mean, they were still risking their lives, same as the Apollo 11 crew did, but none of their names would be cemented in history like Neil Armstrong’s was. Oh and speaking of which, it’s funny to see how blasé these moon landings had become; when Cernan and Schmitt land “Challenger” on the moon, Cernan yells, “We is here! Man, is we here!,” and the Capcom says, “Roger, Challenger, that’s super!” So much for momentous occasions. But then, Cernan and Schmitt reveal themselves to be fun-loving goofs of the highest order, gamboling across the lunar landscape like little kids on the playground, cracking jokes, and even breaking into song. 

But there is also a sense of sadness about it, as everyone involved – both the astronauts then and Miller and his crew now – knew that this was to be it for the moon landings. Cernan almost seems desperately insistent that this is not the end in his opening and closing PR interview, that the exploration of space will continue. But it was not to be – and manned space exploration still hasn’t reached the extent of the Apollo Program. As for Morton’s score, you can hear some precursors to his work on Apollo 11, though The Last Steps has a bit more of a tribal feel at times, which is nice. Morton too seems to tap into the elegiac vibe of this final Apollo mission; in the staging sequence where the rockets drop off in the blackness of space, the music is almost mournful: this will be the last time a Saturn rocket heads for the moon. 

Overall The Last Steps is a concise, entertaining mini-doc that really paves the way for what Miller would accomplish on a grander scale in Apollo 11. A lot of the footage here – especially the Mission Conrol sequences – was seen previously in For All Mankind, but here it’s shown in its proper context. Currently The Last Steps can be viewed for free on Vimeo; personally I think it should be released on a special Blu Ray with Apollo 11 and Apollo 11: Quarantine. Actually what I really think is that Smith should do a documentary for every one of the Apollo lunar missions! 

SPECIAL BONUS MAGAZINE REVIEW SECTION! 

Tom Wolfe, “Post-Orbital Remorse” (1973): Here’s an admission: I’ve never read or seen The Right Stuff. (I’ve never even seen Apollo 13…or Jaws!) Several years ago I was on this crazy New Journalism kick and even then I never read Wolfe’s famous book, even though I read many other books by him. The reason was, I knew The Right Stuff focused on the earliest days of the space race, and indeed spent the majority of its opening sequences even before that, with Chuck Yeager in the ‘40s. I wanted to read about stuff from later on, at least the Gemini Program but especially Apollo. I also knew that Wolfe had originally planned to write about all three of these programs, but after spending so long on just Mercury his wife told him that he was finished with the project(!). So The Right Stuff turned out to be Wolfe’s only book on the subject, ostensibly about the Mercury Program but as mentioned taking a long time to even get there, with a lot of ‘40s test pilot stuff. 

Anyway, you often read that The Right Stuff started life as an article Wolfe wrote for Rolling Stone. I was under the impression that The Right Stuff was just a fleshed-out version of that original article, which ran in four issues of the magazine in early 1973. However this was not the case: “Post-Orbital Remorse,” the title of the series of articles, actually encompasses the entire space program up to 1972. Wolfe was hired by Jann Werner to cover Apollo 17 (see above), and while gathering material from the various astronauts at the launch he cottoned to the idea of telling the entire story. Here we can see where a lot of The Right Stuff probably came from; the article is written in this omniscient “collective voice of the astronauts,” telling “Tom” about their test pilot origins and their quest to be at the pinnacle of “the Right Stuff.” 

Even though this long article covers the entire program, you can tell Wolfe’s heart is already with the earliest days; so much of “Post-Orbital Remorse” concerns the test pilot beginnings and the Mercury Program – with of course the usual detours expected of Wolfe’s new journalism. He doesn’t touch on Gemini much, and surprisingly doesn’t even talk much about Apollo 11, but he does get into some of the other lunar flights, among them Apollo 8 (where he details Frank Borman’s bout of stomach flu). As for Apollo 17, all Wolfe really talks about is the launch, then in a later part he lampoons commander Gene Cernan’s moment of “the higher bullshit” when Cernan starts thanking countless people for the success of Apollo at a press conference. Here Wolfe goes into a humorous fantasy sequence in which a janitor pushes Cernan off stage and starts taking credit for the mission’s success. We also get some detail on the “postal flap” that plagued the Apollo 15 mission, and also a focus on Edgar Mitchell, who was forever after maligned for his New Age ESP experiments on Apollo 14; Wolfe, in that “voice of the astronauts,” ponders over Mitchell, as he has “the Rightest Stuff” of them all, what with his incredible fighter pilot and test pilot background, yet he too was humbled by his trip to the moon. 

You can also see why Wolfe titled his later book The Right Stuff, as that’s the phrase most often repeated here. The titular “Post-Orbital Remorse” only factors sporadically, and has to do with the comedown the astronauts experience after achieving the “pinnacle of the Right Stuff,” ie going to the moon or into space and then coming back to…what? As Wolfe details, there’s nowhere left to go, other than into religion (as some of the astronauts did, which Wolfe also details) or mysticism (like Mitchell) or politics (like John Glenn) or “an old-fashioned breakdown” (like Buzz Aldrin). Speaking of which, Wolfe also mentions a Volkswagen TV ad Buzz did at the time, which I’d never heard of before: you can see it on Youtube. Also Wolfe discusses things that were about to happen, like how Deke Slayton, a Mercury astronaut who was grounded due to a minor heart issue: Wolfe tells us that Deke got surgery, the issue fixed, and will soon “go up” in Skylab, which Slayton in fact did. Also Wolfe of course was unaware of stuff further in the future; he tells us that John Glenn’s first voyage into space was so magnificent to the public that New York cops broke into tears at Glenn’s parade, and Glenn was so famous NASA couldn’t let him “go up” anymore…meanwhile, Glenn did return to space, at the age of 77 in 1998. 

I don’t believe “Post-Orbital Remorse” has ever been reprinted. But someone by the name Tom Rednour on the collectSPACE forum scanned the entire series of articles onto a 24-page PDF and uploaded it here, so check it out if you’re interested.