Sixties pop revolution now an addiction to the past

ONE of the WhatsApp groups I am part of recently started a discussion about Jameson’s, a pub on Commissioner Street in downtown Johannesburg. Jameson’s was a household name in the alternative 1980s.

That was about 10 years before I landed in this country, so I’ll quote blogger Deborah Pelser to give you an idea: “Jameson’s was an anomaly because it had been issued a liquor licence by Paul Kruger who had been the President of the Transvaal in the late 1800s. As a result, Jameson’s drew a clientele that consisted of both black and white people and thus, in the midst of apartheid, with a state of emergency in place and the townships effectively ungovernable, there existed a pub where South Africans of all colours could drink and listen to music together."

Her blog post comes with pictures of a narrow staircase that leads down to a small space where bands such as the Cherry Faced Lurchers performed and recorded the seminal album Live at Jamesons, released on the equally seminal Shifty Records.

It was an interesting discussion on the WhatsApp group, with members sharing memories and mentioning some of the colourful characters who had been around, with nicknames like Lofty and Pops. It was fun and sometimes quite touching, and hopefully it will result in a book. Those must have been exciting if uncertain times, pretty wild from what I could gather. Carsten Rasch captured the madness of the era very well in his book Between Rock and a Hard Place (MFBooks, 2019).

The conversation was loaded with nostalgia. That’s not surprising in this day and age when nostalgia seems to be the fuel that keeps our culture alive. I watched two series recently, and both drew heavily on nostalgia. One was Loudermilk, about a recovering alcoholic rock writer who is still stuck in Seattle’s grunge days of the early 1990s. The other was Love, which is set in LA and has twenty- and thirtysomethings cheerfully covering Jet by Paul McCartney and Wings. At the time, 1974, those of us listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd thought it was a lame song. But these days corny is cool.

Then there are the movies celebrating the lives of Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Elvis Presley and soon Bob Dylan (A Complete Unknown, due for release on Christmas Day). There are hundreds of documentaries about bands and artists, all looking back on the colourful, often uninhibited lives they led before social media forced you to consider every move, drink, word and kiss.

Meanwhile, if you open the few remaining music magazines you’ll notice the amount of space dedicated to reviews of reissues, in particular massively expensive box sets, snapped up by boomers to shuttle them back to their youth. If you check out the gig ads, you’ll see they often involve nostalgia acts (Squeeze, The Damned, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band) and tribute bands with names like The Smiths Presumably and The Australian Pink Floyd Show.

And, who would have thought, apart from Arno Carstens and Theo Crous reviving Springbok Nude Girls songs, we now also have Chris Chameleon’s Boo! returning to the circuit.

Even at the dinner table, talk tends to turn overly nostalgic. Like the other day when I was sitting opposite someone, well into his 60s, who insisted that the singer/songwriter scene in Los Angeles in the early Seventies (Jackson Browne, Eagles, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor etc) was the last time truly exciting music was made. I tried to argue but it was pointless. Punk, disco, hip-hop and rave had obviously passed him by.

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Nostalgia as a word and concept, writes Simon Reynolds in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (Faber & Faber, 2011), “was invented in the 17th century by the physician Johannes Hofer to describe a condition afflicting Swiss mercenaries on long tours of military duty". Nostalgia is a form of homesickness, a debilitating craving for times gone by. Naturally, many of us suffer from nostalgia one way or another.

We love to look back and reminisce. But if we are to believe Reynolds, nostalgia has become an affliction, an addiction, the driving force to keep culture afloat and keep us happy (and consuming).

I don’t mind indulging in nostalgia. When I visited Los Angeles last May, I traversed Hollywood Boulevard, stepping on tiles with names and hand and foot prints of famous people. I took pictures of the tributes to Humphrey Bogart, Quentin Tarantino, Frank Sinatra, Marcello Mastroianni, Kobe Bryant, Priscilla Presley and Winona Ryder, while humming the chorus of an old song by The Kinks: “You can see all the stars as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard/ Some that you recognise, some that you've hardly even heard of/ People who worked, and suffered and struggled for fame/ Some who succeeded and some who suffered in vain."

This was a double shot of nostalgia: a lovely Kinks song from 1972 referring to the lives of old movie stars like Rudolph Valentino and Bela Lugosi. LA is full of this kind of memorabilia. On Sunset Boulevard you can see “Hell House", the place Guns N’ Roses started their career in music and depravity. A huge graffiti portrait of the five band members commemorates this bygone era of extreme hedonism.

Not too far away is the Viper Room, launched by Johnny Depp in 1993. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played on the opening night. The club got quite a reputation when film star River Phoenix died there from cardiac arrest after a serious drug binge. With its black walls and black awning, it still hosts bands for those of us who want to relive the heady 1990s.

If you drive a few miles west, you’ll get to Holmby Hills, where Michael Jackson lived and died. Nothing to see except a huge mansion. But it is quite eerie to pass the garage where the body of what was then the world’s biggest pop star was picked up by paramedics at 12.24pm on 25 October 2009, only to be declared dead two hours later. Los Angeles functions as one gigantic museum of pop culture, from the house where Charles Manson’s gang murdered Sharon Tate to the mean streets of NWA’s South Central to the downtown punk clubs and the green hills of Laurel Canyon’s 1970s folk rock scene.

You can spin a similar tale about San Francisco, 650km north. Gone are the days when this city was futuristic and forward-looking, when technological innovations and innovators heralded a new revolution, when punk bands such as Dead Kennedys, The Avengers and Crime were keen to obliterate the past.

As Reynolds writes in Retromania: “The very people who you would once have expected to produce (as artists) or champion (as consumers) the non-traditional and the groundbreaking – that’s the group who are most addicted to the past. In demographic terms, it’s the exact same cutting-edge class, but instead of being pioneers and innovators, they’ve switched roles to become curators and archivists. The avant-garde is now the arrière-garde."

San Francisco reminded me of Cape Town, beautifully situated and inhabited by somewhat complacent people who lack the directness of New Yorkers and the brashness of Los Angeleans. But a very nice place, I hasten to add. I had read horror stories about San Francisco being in the grip of an army of homeless, criminals and drug addicts. Sure, they were there, especially in and around the notorious Tenderloin District, but for us, used to cities like Cape Town and Joburg, it’s not that shocking.

In fact, it was a real pleasure to venture into the North Beach neighbourhood, which in the 1950s was the area where the beatniks used to hang out, including writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady.

dOn Columbus Avenue, on the edge of Chinatown, you’ll find the famous City Lights bookstore, which was the meeting place for the Fifties' underground literati. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D Martin.

Although Ferlinghetti died three years ago (at the age of 101), the shop still operates like clockwork. As the website says: “City Lights is one of the few truly great independent bookstores in the United States, a place where booklovers from across the country and around the world come to browse, read, and just soak in the ambience of alternative culture’s only ‘literary landmark'.

“Although it has been more than 60 years since tour buses with passengers eager to sight ‘beatniks' began pulling up in front of City Lights, the Beats’ legacy of anti-authoritarian politics and unconstrained intellectual curiosity continues to be a strong influence in the store, most evident in the selection of titles."

It’s a lovely store, cosy, with many well-stocked nooks and crannies. I walked out with several books bearing the City Lights Publishers logo on the spine. A bit further down, in Caffe Trieste, I opened them while sipping a strong espresso, imagining myself one of those aspiring writers who frequented the place in the 1950s. Later I read not only that Kerouac and his buddies used to have their strong Italian coffees here, but that Francis Ford Coppola wrote much of the screenplay for The Godfather at these same tables.

I was too young for the Beats but I do have vague memories of the Sixties. I was 11 when Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died. And later I would dive into the music of Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, all from San Francisco. As a teen, I read all I could about Flower Power, the hippy scene, about the Summer of Love of 1967, when hippies walked around with placards that said “Make Love Not Money". The area called Haight-Ashbury had a magical sound to my teenage ears. So I indulged in a nostalgia trip to satisfy my longing for an era that was there right at the edge of my fingertips.

Did it disappoint? Yes and no. The area has become completely gentrified. If you see the well-kept Fulton Street mansion fronted by faux-Greek columns where Jefferson Airplane practised their dreams of free love, drugs and psychedelic music, and the stately houses on Ashbury Street where Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin lived, it’s hard to feel those Sixties vibes of love and optimism.

After a sharp decline in the Seventies and Eighties (drugs, crime), the area has gentrified in a place where you pay $6 (about R108) for an oat milk latte. Sure, you’ll still stumble upon the strung-out victims of the timewarp, but overall it’s all clean, safe fun. You can buy “genuine" tie-dye shirts.  You can stay fit in yoga and Pilates clubs. And in the vintage stores you can assemble an outfit to give yourself that genuine, but oh so ironic, Sixties look.

But there’s also the fantastic Amoeba Music, which calls itself “the world’s largest independent record store". It may well be. It is in a 2,200m² former bowling alley and stocks more than 100,000 CDs, LPs, singles, music cassettes, books, videos, anything to do with music. As you can imagine, I lost myself there for hours, filling a shopping basket on wheels with vinyl, books and cheap CDs (which the friendly woman at the counter didn’t charge me for).

Outside the shop, on the other side of the road, an artist dressed in filthy, ragged clothes was trying to sell portraits to passing tourists. He was delighted that I recognised the image of jazz bassist Charles Mingus. “You see," he shouted at no one in particular, “a foreigner knows our heritage better than we do."

And I closed my eyes, happy to have indulged in some reflective nostalgia.

♦ VWB ♦

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