One of the biggest bands in the Boston live music scene in the late 70s was Mission of Burma. I can’t remember how many times I saw them. In 1979 the MIT college radio station played their song “Peking Spring” more than any other. They were a favorite of Boston Rock the way cool local magazine, a kind of combination of the Village Voice and Rolling Stone and far more important in Boston than either. If The Rat was our church, then Boston Rock was our bible. It was a wonderful crazy scene. You can also go back to my February 26th post for a video of Human Sexual Response.
Located at 528 Commonwealth Avenue in Kenmore Square, Boston near BU and open from 1974 to 1997, The Rathskeller or The Rat was the cradle of the legendary Boston Rock scene and THE venue for punk and new wave in New England. After my Stevie Nicks gypsy phase, I cut off all my hair, wore leather and t-shirts and made the scene at The Rat. I was there the night the disco club across the street emptied out and the punks and disco dancers rumbled on Commonwealth. Standing in the median, waiting for a chance to bolt through traffic, guys in cars yelled, “Sheena!” at me after the Ramone’s song. I saw a lot of bands there including the Cars and Mission of Burma. But the one that changed my life was Human Sexual Response.
Andrew Szava-Kovats has made a documentary “Let’s go to The Rat”.
Mother would never in a millions years have let us ride the subway in New York. She never did. Even with our nannies we would take the bus or Mother would give them cab fare. But after only a year in London, Robbie and I were riding the Tube or the Underground everywhere — by ourselves or with a pack of other kids from school. Busses were fun but the Underground was fast and filled with cool people and round and much cheaper than taking a taxi. And when you’re saving all your money for platform shoes and trips to Biba, that’s an important difference!
Of all the glam bands in all the world, in platform shoes or high heels, Roxy Music was and is my all-time favorite. This album, “For Your Pleasure”, released by Island Records in 1973, was the band’s second and the last featuring Brian Eno. The woman on the cover was lead singer and songwriter Brian Ferry’s girlfriend at the time, transsexual singer and model Amanda Lear. Judi Dench’s voice can be heard at the end of the title track saying, “You don’t ask. You don’t ask why.” I bought the album with my own money at the WH Smith in Sloane Square and played it until the grooves wore out. That copy is lost now–a casualty of a peripatetic childhood and young adulthood. I may very well have left it in a taxi stuffed into one of the Bloomingdales bags I used to move apartments at a moment’s notice in New York in the early 80s. More of that in the sequel to Chanel which will be coming your way sometime next year from Gallery Books.
The one, the only (at the time), the original Hard Rock Cafe.
Before the empire — the chain, the hotels, the casinos, even before the huge collection of rock memorabilia and the now ubiquitous t-shirts, there was this: a joint in London serving up Schlitz beer and real American hamburgers and fries and milk shakes and rock-n-roll. Opened on June 14, 1971 by Americans Peter Morton and Isaac Tigrett at 150 Old Park Lane in London (in an old Rolls Royce dealership) it quickly became the place to go even for real rock-n-rollers. Paul McCartney and Wings were the first band to play live there (1973). Carole King loved the burgers so much she wrote an ode to the place which became a huge hit. And Eric Clapton started the memorabilia collection in 1979 by giving Peter and Isaac one of his guitars. Not to be outdone, Pete Townsend quickly left one of his with the note: “Mine’s as good as his! Love, Pete”.
For us Young Americans abroad the Hard Rock represented and America we didn’t know first hand and only really learned about when George Lucas’s American Grafitti hit town. After that, we HAD to go to the Hard Rock and, thanks to our giant platform shoes, we were even able to score some Schlitz.
BTW, the concert Wings was warming up for with their impromptu gig at the Hard Rock was the one we saw with Mother’s boyfriend of the moment, comedy writer, Herb Sargent. Herb used to drive mother crazy by tossing her cigarettes out of the taxi which made Robbie and I laugh a lot. He’d flown all the way to London to see her and we would have been happy if it had worked out; he was a good guy.
What was a girl to do in 70s London if she wanted to see a AA rated film and she was only 12 or…
…an X rated film and she was only 14? Buy the tallest pair of platform shoes she could stand in, of course!
The platform shoe has been around at least as long as the Greeks who used cothurni to raise up important characters on stage. They were big in Chinese opera and rose again in Europe in the late 16th century. I first experienced them as a girl when my dad was in the “House of Atreus” at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis (more on my and Robbie’s House of Atreus dolls from the Guthrie’s set designer in another post). But it was in the 1970s when the platform shoe made it’s biggest mark.
For me, Elton John and glam rockers made platform shoes a much desired style accessory. But trying to score Babycham at the pub and bypass the British film raiting system (U – universal, A – five and older, AA- fourteen and older, and X- eighteen and older) made them a necessity.
In 1972, Robbie and I and our friends absolutely had to see “Endless Night” the new Hayley Mills horror film. But it was rated AA and we were only twelve and eleven. SO with a lot of make-up, stylish clothes and some new pairs of giant platforms, we bluffed our way in. I seem to recall at least one of us tripping down the aisle. A couple of years later when American Graffiti hit London it was rated X and once again our platforms were called into service.
That movie ushered in a craze for all things American in London which for us included trying to get into the Hard Rock Cafe. More on that tomorrow!
When the IRA was bombing London and a couple of threats were called in to our school (The American School in London) we had to evacuate and so went to the pub nearby and tried, with the biggest platform shoes and the greatest amount of lipstick, to look old enough to order Babycham, Sparkling Perry.
Originally called “Champagne Perry”, Babycham was invented by brewer Francis Edwin Showering in Shepton Mallet, Sommerset, England.After the French complained about the use of the appelation Champagne, the name was changed to “Sparkling”. Perry is an ancient alcoholic beverage made from fermented pears traditionally popular in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and parts of south Wales as well as in Normandy and Anjou, France. Despite its juvenile fawn mascot and name, Babycham made us feel like grown-ups even as the real grown-ups in our world were acting like children.
A thirteen year old’s reading list. At the time (the early 1970s) I didn’t see anything unusual in my choice of reading. With my mother out partying every night with a wild cast of American expats and European jetsetters, the insane drug addicted narcissists of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of Dolls, the rapacious unhappy housewife of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and the incestuous courtesans of Jean Plaidy’s Light on Lucrezia didn’t strike me as abnormal or different from the real world. In fact, they confirmed to me that life with my mother may not have been all that unusual in the great scheme of things.
It may be an odd worldview for a thirteen year old but it was all I had.
Signed copies of CHANEL BONFIRE are off to our two lucky Goodreads Giveaway winners in Aurora, Colorado, and St. Louis, Missouri! Isn’t it fun to win stuff?!
And whether you live in Missouri or Colorado, Texas or Bermuda, London or Paris, Berlin or Singapore, Indonesia or Indiana, Tokyo or Toledo, you and your Book Group can schedule a Skype or FaceTime Q & A with me. They’re really fun and a great way to get all your questions about Chanel answered and to share your own experiences with “difficult” mothers and and surviving childhood. Just email me at chanelbonfire@gmail.com.
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