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The real ‘Quadrophenia’: Mods vs. Rockers fight on the beaches
01.28.2015
06:10 pm
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In 1964 gangs of Mods and Rockers fought battles on the very British beaches Winston Churchill had once sworn to defend.

It all kicked-off over the Easter weekend of 30th March in the holiday town of Clacton-on-Sea, south-east England. Famed for its cockles and winkles, “Kiss Me Quick” hats, amusement arcades, its eleven-hundred foot pier and golden sands on West Beach, Clacton provided the backdrop for the first major battle between the twenty-something Rockers and their teenage rivals the Mods. Clacton was reportedly “beat-up” by “scooter gangs” and 97 youth were arrested.
 
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This was but a small rehearsal for what was to come later that year. Over the May and August bank holidays “skirmishes” involving over “thousands” of youngsters “erupted” at the seaside resorts of Margate, Broadstairs and Brighton.

In Margate there were “running battles between up to 400 teens and police on the beach as bottles were thrown amid general chaos.” But it was the fighting in Brighton that scooped the headlines, with tales of two days of “violence” and some “battles” moving further along the coast to Hastings.
 
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The press latched onto the story of youth out of control like a terrier and squeezed every damning adjective out of it, hyping the events into a small war. Yet, these so-called “running battles” between the two rival factions were no worse than the fights between soccer fans or street gangs on a Saturday night. Still,  the press and parts of the “establishment” (the police, the judges, the bishops, the local councillors and politicians…etc.) saw an opportunity to slap down the youth, and the press created a “moral panic” outraged over the falling standards of “this scepter’d isle.”
 
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The Rockers were proto-biker gangs—they kept themselves separate from society, were bound by their own rules and rituals, and usually only fought with rival Rockers. Though considered dangerous—often referred to by the press as the “Wild Ones” after the American B-movie starring Marlon Brando—there was a sneaking admiration for the Rockers as they epitomised a macho fantasy of freedom and recklessness that most nine-to-five workers could only dream about. The Rockers also had the added appeal of being working class and fans of rock ‘n’ roll—which was more acceptable to middle England in the mid-sixties once the God-fearing Elvis had set youngsters a good example of being dutiful to one’s country by joining the US Army.
 
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Mods on the other hand were an unknown quantity—ambitious, aspirant working class kids, politically astute, unwilling to take “no” for an answer. They were feared for their drug taking—speed was their tipple of choice—and their interest in looking good and wearing the right clothes. Dressing sharp was considered “suspect” and if not exactly effeminate, being fashion-conscious was not an attribute traditionally thought of as a masculine one. For an older generation, the Mods were the face of the future looming—the red brick universities, the council estate, the supermarkets, the motorways and self-service restaurants—these entitled brats were the very children for whom they had fought a war.
 
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The events of that heady summer inspired The Who’s Pete Townshend to write his rock opera Quadrophenia. Anthony Burgess, who was never shy about making a headline, said his book A Clockwork Orange had been inspired by these “loutish” and “hoodlum” youth—even though his book had been published in 1962. Fifty years after the infamous “fighting on the beaches,” the BBC made a documentary revisiting the Mods, Rockers and Bank Holiday Mayhem that interviewed some of the youngsters who were there.
 

 
The intention of the filmmakers in this short extract from the “exploitation” documentary Primitive London is to take a pop at tribal youth culture and its fashions. The four youth cultures briefly examined are Mods, Rockers, Beatniks and those who fall outside of society.

The Mods are dismissed as “peacocks;” the Rockers are seen as lumpen and shall we say knuckle-dragging; the Beatniks don’t really know what they believe in as they are against everything, man; and finally there are the ones who are not part of any group as they consider themselves to be outside of society—apparently these guys “dissipate their identity in complete passivity”—now that sounds like a group I’d join.

Mostly it’s all about the Beatniks, who are filmed hanging out in their local bar getting drunk, answering questions on fashion, work, marriage and all the other concerns middle-aged producers thought were important in 1965. As a footnote, the bar seen in this clip is the one where Rod Stewart (aka Rod the Mod) hung out. The featured musicians are Ray Sone, harp (later of The Downliners Sect) and Emmett Hennessy, vocals, guitar.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.28.2015
06:10 pm
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Mods, Rockers Fight Over New Thing Called ‘Dylan’

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The Village Voice is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York City by digging up some articles from their archives. This one by Jack Newfield published on September 2, 1965 is so off-the-wall I had to share the whole thing with you. The notion of a mods and rockers confrontation in Flushing, Queens is more hysterical than historical. I don’t recall a single point in American pop culture where hip youth were separated by the mod/rocker divide. Newfield, in trying to equate American Dylan fans to the mods and rockers of Britain, is just plain full of shit. And the reference to Stalinists and Social Democrats is even more amusing in its absurdity. Did anyone buy this back in 1965?

Newfield had a reputation for being a bit of a sensationalist and he lives up to that rep with tabloidy lines like “It was during the third rock number that the first wave of Rockers erupted from the stands and sprinted for the stage. This ritual was repeated by co-ed guerilla bands after each succeeding song. The Mods, meanwhile, responded to the ultimate desecration of their idol by throwing fruit.” What was probably a relatively civilized event is depicted as some kind of rock and roll riot. Accurate? I don’t know. Funny? Yes. Newfield was a smart cat, but rock and roll was definitely not his beat.
 

At Forest Hills: Mods, Rockers Fight Over New Thing Called ‘Dylan’

Twenty-four year old Bob Dylan may have been the oldest person in the crowd of 15,000 that jammed Forest Hills Stadium Saturday night.

The teenage throng was bitterly divided between New York equivalents of Mods and Rockers. The Mods—folk purists, new leftists, and sensitive collegians—came to hear Dylan’s macabre surrealist poems like “Gates of Eden” and “A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall.” But the Rockers—and East Village pothead—came to stomp their feet to Dylan’s more recent explorations of electronic “rock folk.”

The confrontation was riotous. The Mods booed their former culture hero savagely after each of his amplified rock melodies. They chanted We want Dylan and shouted insults at him. Meanwhile, the Rockers, in frenzied kamikaze squadrons of six and eight, leaped out of the stands after each rock song and raced for the stage. Some just wanted to touch their newfound, sunken-eyed idol, while others seemed to prefer playing Keystone cops with pudgy stadium police, running zig-zag on the grass until captured in scenes reminiscent of the first Beatle movie.

The factionalism within the teenage sub-culture seemed as fierce as that between Social Democrats and Stalinists, and it began even before Dylan set foot on the wind-swept stage. Folk disc jockey Jerry White introduced from the wings, “The Fifth Beatle, Murray the K.”

The leading symbol of commercialization and frenetic “Top 40” disc jockeying was greeted with a cascade of boos. “There’s a new swinging mood in the country,” Murray the K began, “and Bobby baby is definitely what’s happenin’, baby.”

The teenage argot drove the Mods to even greater fury. But when the K added, “It’s not rock, it’s not folk, it’s a new thing called Dylan,” a united front of cheers filled the night.

After three introductions, Dylan finally emerged from the wings like a timid bird with a lion’s mane. The first half of his concert was devoted exclusively to the image-filled, heavily symbolic absurdist songs he was identified with before he unveiled his “electricity” at Newport last month. The Mods listened enraptured as he sang the familiar images: “She is a hypnotist collector/You are a walking antique” and “She can take the dark out of the night and paint the daytime black.”

A few moments later, hunched over, his long hair rippling in the breeze, Dylan mesmerized the Mods, half singing, half chanting, “The Gates of Eden”:

“I try to harmonize with songs the lonesome sparrow sings . . . at dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dream/With no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.”

Then Dylan sang a long, new dream called “Desolation Row” that contained these two verses:

“All except Cain and Abel and the Hunchback of Notre Dame/Everybody is either making love or waiting for rain/Ophelia, she’s beneath the window, for her I feel so afraid/On her 22nd birthday, she’s still an old maid.”

“The Titanic sails at dawn/Everyone is shouting ‘Which side are you on’/Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are fighting in the captain’s tower/While calypso singers laugh at them below them . . . “

But Dylan is like Norman Mailer: He never repeats himself or exploits his past. Just as Mailer has moved inevitably from Trotskyism to hipsterism to mysticism, so has Dylan grown from political protest to rock folk.

A four-piece amplified band (electronic organ, electronic bass, electronic guitar, and drums) backed Dylan up the second half of the concert. After the first rock song, the Mods booed Dylan. After the second someone called him a “scum bag,” and he replied cooly, “Aw, come on now.” After the third the Mods chanted sardonically, “We Want Dylan.”

It was during the third rock number that the first wave of Rockers erupted from the stands and sprinted for the stage. This ritual was repeated by co-ed guerilla bands after each succeeding song. The Mods, meanwhile, responded to the ultimate desecration of their idol by throwing fruit. But they should have been listening to the lyrics—they were as poetic as ever.

Perhaps in an attempt to show the Mods he wasn’t “going commercial” or “selling out,” Dylan performed a few of his earlier hits like “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” with a muted rocking beat. The message seemed to get through, and much of the Mods’ wrath subsided. And the Mods joined the Rockers in wildly applauding Dylan’s second new song of the evening (no title announced), which he sang while playing the piano standing up.

America’s most influential poet since Allen Ginsberg then sang his top-selling “Like a Rolling Stone,” and the factions divided again. The Mods booed, and during the last chorus a dozen teenagers charged the stage, exhausted police in slow-footed pursuit. Keeping his cool, Dylan finished the song, mumbled, “Thank you, very much,” and walked off without doing an encore, while kids and cops cavorted on the grass.”

Keeping in the tabloid spirit of Newfield’s article, I’m sharing the notorious Dylan/Lennon limousine footage from May 27, 1966 in which both musicians were reputedly drunk and/or tripping. Dylan certainly seems out of it. Lennon seems bemused. While we’ve previously shared a portion of this on DM, this is the long version. There’s an additional four minutes of footage that wasn’t included in this clip because it’s silent and consists mostly of Dylan looking nauseous and Lennon looking bored.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.26.2011
03:55 am
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