Out in Homestead, in south Florida, a delicatessen sits by the marina. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, it sold bottles of ice-cold Dom Pérignon along with hot dogs and Reuben sandwiches. The bottles of premium bubbly walked off the shelves back when the marina was awash with cocaine money.
In the Sixties, drugs provided sensual pleasure and an avenue to rebellion. Smoking pot and dropping acid politicized a generation more than protest itself. ‘LSD and pot signifies the total end of the Protestant Ethic,’ proclaimed Jerry Rubin, with typical hyperbole. Getting stoned, he argued, offered a chance ‘to free one’s self from American society’s sick notions of work, success, reward and status’. For the ‘establishment’, this rebellion seemed more threatening than the drugs themselves, especially since no one had proved conclusively that marijuana was actually harmful. The issue, in other words, wasn’t dangerous drugs, but disobedient kids.1
Looking back on the Sixties and early Seventies, Peter Bourne, who would become Jimmy Carter’s ‘Drug Czar’, felt that the government conducted a culture war but disguised it as a drug war. ‘There was an effort to imply that marijuana was a public health problem, to justify the tough measures taken against those who experimented. But it was really . . . very phoney.’ Public health professionals, required to play along, felt uncomfortable giving scientific justification to what were in fact socio-cultural motives. According to Robert DuPont, director of the Narcotics Treatment Administration from 1970 to 1973, the ‘drug problem’ was contrived. ‘It was . . . media hype, a bunch of know-nothings who were overreacting to a trivial blip.’ Even notoriously thick-skinned politicians felt the twinge of hypocrisy. Bud Krogh, a Nixon aide, had a hard time justifying the administration’s policy toward marijuana. ‘I had just come out of school and a lot of my friends participated . . . and it was just not viewed by those of us on the staff as really the critical problem that we should be addressing.’ Government unease leached down to law enforcement agencies. George Jung, a pot dealer, was once accidentally caught up in a heroin bust. ‘We’re sorry,’ a contrite policeman explained, ‘we really don’t want to bust pot people but this is tied into a heroin operation and we have to arrest you.’2
Government hypocrisy encouraged distrust among the young. ‘It reinforced the notion that . . . you can’t believe what the government says,’ Bourne feels. ‘[Young people] were saying it’s some ulterior motive, because to say that smoking marijuana is dangerous is patently absurd . . . and therefore the government has to be lying.’ By the same logic, pot dealers were turned into heroes for defying an iniquitous law. Jung saw himself as a reefer Robin Hood. ‘I wasn’t looked upon as the guy in the black hat in the Sedan hanging outside the schoolyard. In fact, I was welcomed. There were movie stars and rock stars. I became a pot star. I glorified in that.’ As Rob Stoner, bass player for Bob Dylan, recalled, ‘You were suspicious of anyone who didn’t do drugs back then.’3
Nevertheless, in 1969 and 1970, more Americans died of drug overdoses than were killed in Vietnam. This statistic went unnoticed because the main culprit was heroin, the drug of the underclass. Policymakers took comfort in the assumption that neither heroin nor addiction were problems affecting white middle-class youths. That assumption ensured that a drug epidemic went unnoticed. From a base point in the 1960s, usage of all drugs – amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD, pot and heroin – rose steeply. ‘What had started with the mantra of “Feed Your Head”’, writes Bill Van Parys, ‘progressed into a mainstream mandate and recreational drug use became (gasp!) almost Establishment.’ Bill Alden, a former special agent for the Drugs Enforcement Agency, recalled how colleagues suddenly felt swamped. ‘If you would have told me or my fellow agents back in the 1960s that there would be tons of drugs, and there would be millions and millions of people using drugs, we never would have believed it. When we started in the 1960s, most of the drug use was in the lower socio-economic pockets of the major metropolitan cities.’ Jung remembers a dangerous atmosphere of unreality. ‘People were basically looking the other way or just accepting it as kids will be kids and nobody really stood up to try to stop it. Nobody really came across and said it’s evil. I don’t think anybody . . . really knew what the hell was going on. It was just like a snowball coming down a mountain and when it got too big, then they didn’t know what the hell to do with it.’4
Cocaine was a late arrival at the party, emerging in the early 1970s. ‘It’s a dynamite high,’ confessed a Boston dealer. ‘You feel like Adam, and God is blowing life into your nostrils.’ Due to its expense, it became a drug of the middle class, which in turn meant that it seemed harmless. Krogh admits that complacency extended right to the White House. ‘At that time, I don’t think that cocaine was even on anybody’s radar as something we needed to deal with.’ Bourne, a highly respected drug expert, published ‘The Great Cocaine Myth’ in 1974, arguing that scare stories were entirely unfounded. To him, the drug seemed benign – it was difficult to get addicted and virtually impossible to overdose.5
‘To snort cocaine is to make a statement,’ wrote Robert Sabbag in his hip tale of the cocaine trade. ‘It is like flying to Paris for breakfast.’ Cocaine’s popularity among wealthy, ‘responsible’ people seemed to confirm its harmlessness and also provided positive advertisement. For those addicted to glamour, cocaine was as indispensable as a Hermès bag or Bulgari watch. It was the first designer drug, its expense rendering it a symbol of success. One New York ad agency was rumoured to give free samples. In February 1979, five brokers were arrested for trading the drug on the floor of the Chicago Options Exchange. In Hollywood, producers added a hefty sum for cocaine to their budgets for blockbuster films, one editor explaining that ‘people won’t work without their wake-up calls’. Drug paraphernalia – nicely tooled mirrors and gold razor blades – reinforced the image of respectable rebellion. ‘It became an accepted product,’ Jung felt. ‘If you were well to do and you were a jet-setter, it was okay to snort cocaine . . . everybody was snorting cocaine, everybody was laughing and having a good time and snorting cocaine.’ At Studio 54, celebrities danced under a neon man in the moon snorting coke from a spoon. In the toilets, there were lines to do lines.6
By the end of the decade, it was estimated that 2 million Americans were spending $20 billion annually for 66,000 pounds of cocaine. The law provided little obstacle. ‘There’s a mindset in this country that it’s okay for upper-class white America to do drugs,’ Jung feels. ‘Nobody ever stood up. Nobody ever said no.’ Jung joined the gravy train, switching from pot to cocaine, which was easier to handle. ‘It was unbelievable. To sell 50 or 100 kilos in a matter of a day was nothing.’ The only problem was processing all that cash. ‘It took hours upon hours and hours to count it and recount it and go over it and over it again. It was tedious as hell.’7
The cocaine came mainly from Colombia, where a few cartels, centred on Cali and Medellín, grew more powerful than the government itself. The dominant drug baron was Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellín cartel, and arguably the most successful criminal in history. At its peak, his operation ran five flights loaded with cocaine into the US every day. Cocaine was an industry; the coca would come from producers in Peru or Bolivia and then get processed in huge factories hidden in the Colombian jungle. ‘We conducted business, cocaine business,’ Carlos Toro, essentially a PR agent for the Medellín cartel, reflects. ‘Just like General Motors or IBM, we get orders that we have to fulfill . . . Under the contract with the cartel, we . . . were to move the cocaine at a certain frequency out of the country . . . We were the clearinghouse of the cocaine.’ The business was impressively efficient, but not economically astute. Like the greedy monsters they were, cocaine barons mistakenly assumed that they could increase profits by increasing supply. The law of diminishing returns went unnoticed until it was too late. Eventually, the cartels found they had to sell an ever-greater amount simply to make the same income. ‘Escobar basically had a Neanderthal ideology,’ Jung concluded. ‘He didn’t understand supply and demand . . . if you flood the country with cocaine the price is going to go down and also it’s going to expose everyone and bring in more people at greater threat of being arrested or caught.’8
Legal or moral issues were smothered under a blanket of money. ‘I didn’t pay a lot of attention to [the legality],’ Juan Ochoa, an Escobar associate, admits. ‘At that time, no one said anything about anything. It was so easy.’ Drug barons could not believe their good fortune in tapping into wealthy Americans’ insatiable appetite for cocaine. ‘I’ve never understood what they liked in that substance,’ Ochoa admits, ‘because I don’t think it has any positive effects . . . I think it’s a really stupid thing.’ Dealers derived perverse pleasure from messing with the minds of the American people and destabilizing their economy. For Carlos Lehder, of the Medellín cartel, the drug became an expression of his hatred of Americans. ‘Carlos . . . wanted to flood the country with cocaine and destroy the political and moral structure of the United States,’ Jung felt. ‘As he stated, cocaine was the atomic bomb and he was going to drop it on America.’9
Drug barons were addicted to the life, if not the drug. Lehder bought an island called Norman’s Cay in the Bahamas, to serve as a distribution centre for shipping cocaine into the United States. It was a sybarite’s paradise. Toro recalls ‘being picked up in a Land Rover with the top down and naked women driving to come and welcome me from my airplane. It was a Sodom and Gomorrah . . . Everybody was naked. You would find people in one corner having sex, people sleeping on the floor, plenty of food. I mean, you’re talking about sin town . . . It’s wonderful. Drugs, sex, there’s no police. You own it, you made the rules, and it was just . . . fun.’ Danger was also addictive. ‘I have seen many people . . . go back to the drug business, not because of the money, but because of the excitement . . . knowing that somebody could . . . catch you – that you’re going to spend the rest of your life in prison or . . . be killed,’ Fernando Arenas confessed. ‘We are . . . absolutely nutcases.’10
Money inevitably inspired violence. ‘Any marijuana transaction I ever did with anyone, there were never any guns,’ Jung maintains. ‘It was simply . . . a handshake business and a trust factor.’ With cocaine, however, the stakes were far too high. ‘Suddenly everybody was carrying guns.’ Escobar’s hitmen would travel on motorbikes through the crowded streets of Medellín and Bogotá, seeking out enemies and gunning them down in broad daylight. ‘The bloodshed . . . was not created by the cocaine itself,’ Toro argued. ‘The bloodshed and the violence and the assassinations and the . . . dead bodies and all these things . . . were a product of our doing . . . It was the law enforcement of collecting monies.’ Oscar Toro, an industry minion who fell foul of his bosses, returned home to find his five-year-old son hanging from the rafters in his basement. His ten-year-old daughter and the family babysitter were later found brutally murdered in an abandoned building nearby.11
Escobar liked to eliminate an enemy’s entire family, so as to underline his absolute power and strike fear into those tempted to defy him. Victims were sometimes tortured, partly to extract valuable information, but often simply to prolong their suffering. Steven Murphy, a DEA special agent in Medellín, recalls listening to an intercepted conversation between Pablo Escobar and his wife. ‘In the background, while he was talking to his wife about family matters and things like that . . . screaming could be heard . . . Pablo put his hand over the receiver and turned around and asked whoever was committing this torture to please keep the guy quiet, that he was trying to talk to his family.’ On one occasion, while Jung was enjoying a drink with Escobar at his ranch, a Chevy Blazer pulled up, two burly men got out and an individual was dragged from the back. ‘[Pablo] simply said “Excuse me”. He walked over and executed the man and then he came back to the table. He simply looked at me and he said, “He betrayed me.” . . . then he asked me what I’d like for dinner.’12
Among the barons, Escobar stood out because of the ferocity and breadth of his ambition. For him, cocaine was not simply a way to get rich. A freelance politician, he wanted to use the immense power of the business to bend the government to his will. This meant carefully cultivating a Robin Hood image. Schools, playgrounds and sports facilities were built, and a food distribution programme was established. Poor people loved him for his benificence, calling him El Patrón, and supporting him unquestioningly. Those immune to his largesse were brought round through intimidation. Politicians who refused bribes were offered a stark choice: ‘I’m going to kill you, so what do you prefer? You prefer money or you prefer to be killed?’ Those who summoned the courage to defy him did not live long. ‘You couldn’t confront Pablo Escobar, because you knew what would happen: you would die,’ Jorge Ochoa recalled. ‘[He] . . . did whatever he wanted. He didn’t consult with anyone . . . He intimidated everyone. It wasn’t just us, but the rest of Colombia and all of the United States . . . He thought that whatever he wanted is the way it should be done, and he didn’t ask anyone an opinion. He didn’t take anyone into account.’13
The flood of cocaine swamped American law enforcement agencies. ‘We are at almost a wartime status,’ Coast Guard Admiral John Hayes admitted in 1979, ‘but we are interdicting only about 10 per cent of the illegal drugs coming in.’ Just 1 in 100 drug planes were intercepted, yet each of the 99 that got through carried perhaps 400 kilos. ‘The business started growing like any business,’ Jorge Ochoa recalled. ‘It becomes like a ball of snow. It grows by itself, and demand makes it grow . . . It seemed like a game, and nobody paid any attention to it.’ The biggest problem was laundering the money – hundreds of personnel in the US were assigned the sole task of thinking up clever ways to get cash back to Colombia without alerting federal agents. At first the job was easy, since banks were only too eager to assist. ‘They used to help you set up accounts,’ ‘Mike’, a money launderer, confessed. ‘They would protect you, in a way.’ Some banks offered advice on setting up bogus offshore companies. Mike McDonald, a drug agent in Florida, recalls a familiar scene in bank lobbies: ‘[You’d] see people standing in line with boxes of money on dollies and a deposit slip in their teeth . . . We had 12 individuals in Miami who were depositing $250 million or more annually into non-interest bearing checking accounts.’ Bank officials knew they were breaking the law, but realized that if they refused the business, the launderers would simply find another willing bank.14
In 1979, a cash flow study by the Treasury revealed that billions of dollars were being drained out of the US economy through a sinkhole in south Florida. Treasury officials could not at first believe what their own statistics told them. But then came a moment of realization – as McDonald recalled: ‘not “Ah ha” but “Oh, my God.”’ Even if the drug issue did not seem serious, the money issue did. More aggressive regulations were instituted, but they simply forced the launderers to get more creative.15
The cocaine explosion occurred against the backdrop of some real progress in combating hard drugs like heroin. The Nixon administration found itself confronted with two incontrovertible problems: firstly, the direct connection between addiction and crime, and secondly, the alarming statistics of usage among servicemen in Vietnam. The latter problem demanded sensitivity. As Bourne relates, ‘when you had large numbers of GIs in Vietnam addicted to heroin, you couldn’t attack them as moral reprobates. You had to say, “These poor fighting men have unfortunately become victims of heroin, and we’ve got to treat them in a very humane way.”’16
What resulted was the most comprehensive drug strategy America had seen, one which concentrated not on enforcement but treatment. Struggling against his retributive instincts, Nixon reluctantly decided that no addict should be denied a place on a treatment programme. Federal spending on the drug problem rocketed from $80 million to over $600 million, with two-thirds going toward rehabilitation. ‘We have never had that proportion of federal resources devoted to intervention on the demand side,’ argues Jerome Jaffe, chief of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention under Nixon. That approach inspired a steady chorus of public disapproval. Most people did not want treatment centres; they wanted a beefed up police force, tougher laws, larger prisons and longer sentences.17
Public disapproval was not, however, responsible for destroying Nixon’s drug policy. Watergate was. After that scandal broke, every aspect of Nixon’s administration came under attack. Within a year, Krogh was in prison, Jaffe had resigned and the whole programme was in tatters. At precisely this moment of chaos, cocaine appeared on the scene. The Ford administration was too preoccupied with trying to rescue the Republican party to pay much attention to a drug that didn’t seem dangerous. A White Paper concluded that marijuana and cocaine were ‘not serious’ issues.
That logic continued after Carter became president. Malthea Falco, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters, admitted that ‘The thrust of our policy . . . was to try to . . . reduce the availability of heroin . . . Cocaine was basically used by a relatively small number of very wealthy – you know, the jet set, the rock stars.’ No wonder, then, that law enforcement agencies were not inclined to waste time on cocaine busts. Jim Kibble, a DEA agent, admitted that small-time dealers were essentially given free rein. ‘You’d have an informant . . . say, “Hey, I got two kilos of coke.” Unless the cocaine was sitting downstairs in a car with the bad guy outside the DEA office, you couldn’t work it. They wanted no time expended. And this went on for a while. Nobody’s going after the cocaine people. None of their people are getting arrested.’ Those in the business took delight in making a mockery of the law. During a Florida muscular dystrophy telethon in 1979, Tracy and Darrell Boyd called in a donation of $10,000, calling themselves ‘the blockade runners’.18
A monster grew, and no one noticed. ‘It all happened so quick,’ William Moran, a Miami lawyer who represented the drug traffickers, reflected. ‘Nobody even knew what it was. It just went from a situation where people were importing marijuana into this country, and they used to add 10 kilos of cocaine in the shipment. And before you know it, it totally swallowed the business.’ DuPont, author of the Ford White Paper, is now embarrassed by its naivety. His team easily convinced themselves that their ideas were progressive. ‘Looking back on it, it’s a terrible embarrassment, because [we] failed to understand the nature of addiction. [We] failed to understand not only the current status of the marijuana and cocaine problem, but the potential of those problems. And rather than being sophisticated, it just looks phenomenally dumb today.’19
The government’s emphasis upon heroin angered suburban parents, for whom the real problem was marijuana. By 1978, surveys suggested that one in ten eighteen-year-olds were smoking pot every day, and 40 per cent indulged at least once a month. Parental dismay grew organized after Marsha Keith Schuchard witnessed pot being smoked at her thirteen-year-old daughter’s birthday party. She complained directly to the White House and, before long, a parents’ movement coalesced. Bourne’s initial reaction was contempt: ‘Quite frankly, Carter and I had regarded these people as pretty inconsequential gadflies . . . and we essentially ignored them.’ That contempt proved costly, since those with political clout cared more about marijuana, not heroin. As the black comedian Richard Pryor said of the sudden shift of emphasis within the drug debate, ‘We call it an epidemic now. That means white folks are doing it.’ Ever the populist, Ronald Reagan understood precisely what middle-class parents wanted, and promised to get tough on drugs. Bourne, who had to watch his programme crumble under Reagan’s onslaught, found the development deeply disturbing. ‘It was a decision that people dying from drugs, or reducing the deaths, was not an important objective. The objective was, can you appeal to suburban voters who have this . . . irrational fear about their children smoking marijuana?’20
‘I think this is one of the gravest problems facing us internally in the United States,’ Reagan told the American people in 1981. He meant drugs in general, but drugs should never be approached ‘in general’. The problem encompassed everything from suburban kids smoking reefer to inner-city addicts killing for a five-dollar fix. Reagan’s tough talk was converted into tough policy, which in practice meant transforming drugs from a public health issue into a law enforcement matter. Cocaine consequently slipped through the net, since the government was not about to arrest Wall Street brokers, Hollywood producers and big time sports stars.21
While Reagan strutted, Americans snorted. The administration was powerless to stop the cocaine juggernaut. Eventually, the users, and those around them, began to feel uneasy. The wonderful drug proved a cruel tyrant. ‘Everybody was starting to realize what the coke was all about and they were all starting to get lost,’ Jung recalls. He experienced a personal epiphany. ‘I began to wonder . . . what the hell it was really all about . . . It was insanity. The money meant nothing . . . I didn’t have any friends, you know. I was just alone and I didn’t even like myself.’ Van Parys noticed a seismic shift in the culture of drug-taking, away from the camaraderie of pot. ‘[Cocaine] totally changed our behaviour toward one another. The dark suspicion that your drug partner might be a narc was replaced by the fear that he was holding and wasn’t going to share. It hit home with me the night Whitney came by my house to ask me to steal syringes from my mom, a diabetic, so that he could shoot some cocaine . . . He didn’t offer me any. Drugs were now a game of exclusivity, not democracy. I’ve got mine, you go get your own.’ Cocaine was its own pusher: it lured users with promises of cheap paradise and, before they knew it, they found themselves trapped in a sordid slum of dependence. ‘Everybody thought it was safe and easy fun,’ recalls Jann Wenner. ‘[But] people got diverted by a lot of drug use. And people became very unpleasant.’22
‘It got so that I couldn’t imagine life without it,’ a Boston real estate executive confessed in 1973. Those in the know say of cocaine: ‘The problem is, that by the time you realize it’s a problem, it’s a problem.’ That certainly applied to users, but even more fundamentally to the United States. For too long, the drug was ignored. By the time the government began to worry, cocaine was already an epidemic. In the meantime, the drug itself had morphed into crack – a more powerful, more addictive and much more dangerous substance than the stuff snorted up little silver straws. Because crack was cheaper than cocaine, it became a drug of the ghetto, tearing apart fragile families with an efficiency heroin never managed. ‘Crack [could] destabilize whole neighborhoods,’ Herbert Kleber recalled. ‘We had not seen a drug that had that same kind of devastating impact . . . Because crack was also sold so cheaply, it made everything worth stealing. And most people stole where they lived . . . I’ve been in this field for over 35 years, and crack is the most devastating drug that I’ve ever encountered.’ Bourne grew utterly demoralized. ‘There was no effort made to find any effective treatment for cocaine addicts . . . Instead, you had a sort of inane policy of “Just Say No”, which is like telling someone who’s depressed, “Have a Nice
Day.”’23
In the end, some of the wisest reflections on the cocaine epidemic were uttered by those made rich from it. ‘The responsibility belongs to all of us,’ Jorge Ochoa remarked. ‘This is not a problem that is only ours or of Colombia. It is also a problem of the Americans. And they have a great deal of responsibility . . . Of course you have to attack the problem and pursue it politically and all, but the people have to be educated as well. There is a need to try to stop the demand.’ Jung, who witnessed how easy it was to pollute the mind of a nation, agreed: ‘We have to come to the pool of self-reflection and . . . ask ourselves: was it the fact that Carlos [Lehder] and I had the courage to be bad or why did millions of Americans not have the courage to be good?’24
Nidge Miller first encountered skinheads as a young teenager during a family holiday on the English coast. A gang of sharply dressed ruffians terrorized the town for no apparent purpose. They seemed utterly oblivious to authority. Miller was instantly smitten. ‘A week later I had my head shaved, got my boots, my braces and a shirt.’25Youth culture is often defined by sartorial styles – in Britain, a succession of Spivs, Bohemians, Beatniks, Teds, Mods, Rockers, Punks, Casuals and Hoodies have made their mark by what they wore. In the early 1960s, Mods ruled, causing journalists and politicians to predict the decline of civilization. By the middle of the decade, however, Mods were in retreat, largely because their style had been hijacked by Carnaby Street boutiques. When those dressed like Mods no longer were Mods, the jig was up.
Into the breach strode skinheads. They borrowed heavily from the Mod milieu, particularly the tight jeans and polo shirts. But the simmering menace of their look – underlined by shaved heads and Doc Marten boots – acted as a barrier to imitators. In other words, only those who genuinely aspired to be a skinhead, with the violence implied, actually dressed like one. More than just a look, skinhead was a defiant assertion of class pride. Emotions were worn like shirts, and the continued validitiy of those emotions has ensured the cult’s survival. ‘Skinheads . . . are too true,’ one of the faithful insists. ‘It wasn’t a fashion . . . it’s a way of life.’26
Skinhead started as an attempt to reclaim lost territory, a reassertion of culture. Those annoyed by the commercialization of Mod intentionally toughened the style, calling themselves ‘hard’ or ‘gang’ Mods, in contrast to the dandified ‘peacock’ Mods more interested in clothes than ethos. By 1968, hard Mods became known as skinheads in reference to their distinctive hairstyle, itself a macho riposte to the effeminate long hair of middle-class hippies. Hairstyle expressed class identity, since short hair was essential for anyone who had to hold down a job, and was mandatory for the machine-worker. The style’s implied aggression indicated how marginalized working-class boys felt. ‘It’s . . . a mental state of being,’ Rob Hingley believes. ‘It’s a proud badge of working class courage, that’s how I see it.’ The working class, excluded from the 1960s ethos, was fighting back. ‘The dreamy, idealistic, liberal 1960s drew to an end,’ recalls the former skinhead Chris Brown, and ‘dear old Britannia, who had hitched up her skirt, kicked off her sandals and danced barefoot in the park with Timothy Leary’s peace-loving hippies, suddenly received an abrupt dose of reality and a reminder that she was not quite ready to lose her head and her customs to a bunch of junkies from across the pond.’27
The clothes oozed machismo, but were never scruffy. Jeans were lovingly laundered; creases ironed with machine precision. Shirts, either Fred Perry or Ben Sherman polos, or American-style button-down Oxfords, were carefully pressed and worn tucked in. Braces, a Harrington coat and Crombie hat enhanced the image of a proud outlaw. ‘For a finishing touch I rubbed some Brut into my neck and chest and behind my ears,’ Martin King recalled. The defining feature was the boots, usually Doc Martens, with sixteen or twenty eyelets, polished to perfection. ‘Putting those boots on was a big part of being a skinhead,’ King reminisced. ‘When you had them on you felt better equipped to deal with life on the streets. They made you feel ten times harder and meaner.’28
‘Skinhead is basically a teenage thing,’ argues McGinn. ‘It gave you a sense of identity.’ The implied power of the costume was particularly attractive to young boys in the turmoil of puberty who need a quick fix to problems of inferiority. McGinn, who grew up in Glasgow, underwent a rite of passage at the age of twelve, when he first put on the clothes. ‘Big boots, cropped hair, a working class look. Young, aggressive . . . The first time I had a crop, I felt tremendous. A bovver boy. I thought, fucking great, look at the state of me!’ Boys who grew up in rough neighbourhoods had to prove themselves early or face years of torment. ‘With boots and a shaved head it’s hard to look nice and quiet,’ Big Iain feels. ‘You look nasty whether you are or not. It’s a predominantly violent look.’29
While clothes varied according to time and taste, the walk remained a constant. ‘We walked in that distinctive way,’ recalls Brown, ‘the arrogant, bow-legged swagger, the arms thrust deep into pockets of short zip-up jackets or sheepskin coats, poking out at right angles, ready to annoy, aggravate, bovver anyone who dared to cross our paths . . . once I had mastered the all-important “fuck-off-outta-my-way” walk, I knew I had arrived.’ Skinheads grew intoxicated by the terror they spread. ‘We were absolutely vilified,’ one former skinhead fondly recalled. Another remembered the visceral thrill that came from jumping on a train and watching a wave of fear pass through the carriage. ‘That gave you a feeling of power.’ A potent sense of freedom arose from being part of a mob beyond control. ‘We didn’t give a monkey’s about anyone else,’ one of the faithful boasted. ‘We enjoyed ourselves, we did what we wanted. And bollocks to everyone else.’30
‘What made us special was we stuck together,’ Mick explained. Boys emerging from a culture of low self-esteem derived worth from belonging to a group so fearsome. ‘You . . . really are your own little army,’ Symond of Wycombe reflected. ‘We knew that when violent situations did arise you would be together. There’d be at least five or six of you that would fight to the death, . . . because you were hated so much by everybody – by your parents, your school teachers, by the police, by everybody – it drew you so close together that you became as one.’ For Ghane Chane, membership was a form of self-defence. ‘Everybody was in a gang. Everybody . . . you were either in a gang or you were the victim.’ Larry Jenkins was likewise comforted by mob mentality. ‘It seemed like every shopping centre had a gang. So to protect yourself against other numbers, you had to congregate in numbers. It was pretty violent.’31
‘You don’t even think of yourself as a skinhead,’ says Big Iain; ‘it’s just the way you live.’ Gavin Watson, who joined a gang at the age of fourteen, feels that ‘Ultimately, it’s difficult to explain the attraction, as it is for anyone deeply passionate about music, style and fashion . . . It’s like asking “Why do you love your wife?” There was a lot of love involved and a lot of passion involved . . . There was a spiritual and mystical part of being a skinhead that is unfathomable.’ For ‘Pan’ the ethos was so strong that he never abandoned it. ‘Skinhead’s a way of life, a culture I live by,’ he explains. ‘It’s about having pride in the way I look, it’s about working for my living, earning everything I get. It’s about the second family I have with my mates on the street, about being true to the values that I learned, the honour code that I learned . . . it’s the truest culture because you’re talking about the real people, the working people, the poor people.’32
The backing track to skinhead culture was initially Motown. Later, however, reggae’s raw melodies took precedence – the sound seemed particularly suited to skinhead’s rambunctiousness. ‘Skinheads put reggae into the British charts,’ a Ramsgate afficionado claims. ‘If it wasn’t for skinheads . . . I don’t think reggae would have made it . . . Bob Marley wouldn’t have got to where he got to if it wasn’t for the white working class youth.’ Chris Prete felt reggae the perfect expression of skinhead nation: ‘You can’t separate them. It’s a basic music, simple and not complicated. It’s got a hook with the bass beat, and once you start getting into the music, it’s hard to walk away from it.’33
The love of black music seems strange, given the stereotyped racism of the skinhead. That stereotype, however, developed later. Skinhead’s emergence coincided with an influx of Jamaican immigrants into London, causing a synthesis to develop. Skinheads adopted Jamaican rude boy culture, listened to reggae and ska, encorporated rasta slang and mannerisms, and frequented West Indian nightclubs. Membership was not defined by race, but rather by culture – it was perfectly possible, at first, to be a black or Asian skinhead. ‘Our club . . . always used to stick together,’ recalled Rikki, a Pakistani in the Glasgow Globetrotters gang. ‘We had three Asians, the rest were white . . . but we were like a family.’34
Former skinheads who retain pride in their past blame the media for exaggerating the stereotype of social pariah. ‘White working class males are an easy target,’ Watson argues. ‘The media just repeats that . . . stereotype of a muggy bonehead, glue sniffing, granny mugging thug,’ another contends. ‘It’s a complete myth. A decent skinhead is someone who believes in himself, knows what he’s looking for, knows what he wants, knows how to dress. Just someone who’s well sussed, well clued up . . . No mugs.’ The predilection for mindless mayhem nevertheless seems to justify the stereotype. Lee Thompson recalled doing ‘stupid things like smashing windows and that. There was a bowling green next to us where old people used to enjoy their Sunday afternoons and one day we went over there with our steel combs and carved our names in the bowling pitch.’ ‘I don’t say any of us are nice guys,’ a skinhead proudly boasted to Time in 1970. ‘We want to be “tasty” – y’know, big guys.’35
Nor was mayhem confined to petty vandalism; skinheads got the greatest thrill from grievous bodily harm. Jack Weeds, a train engineer, recalled being set upon by a skinhead pack baying for blood. ‘I got boots in the back, in the guts, on the head, everywhere . . . These kids were actually skipping around with excitement.’ A perfect night out usually included some aggro. ‘Gigs were nearly always full of students who . . . are almost always commies, socialists, lefties or whatever,’ recalls Mick White. ‘Nearly every single week we used to smash the fuckers as they really got on our nerves.’ Gangs would intentionally invade venues outside their turf, in search of confrontation. ‘You were different, coming into their club, dancing to strange records, chatting their girls up, so it would always kick off,’ Brian Kelson recollects. ‘It was just a laugh, great fun. You’d always end up having a punch up. Everything would go flying, chairs and tables and whatever, you against them.’ King recalls:
Old Big Gob . . . started to call anyone who fancied a fight towards him. ‘Come on . . .’ he tried to say, but only the word ‘come’ made it out of his mouth as Jeff leapt on his back and someone else chucked a hot cup of tea in his face. At this we jumped and climbed all over him until he sank to his knees . . . He stopped struggling and fell forward as we gleefully kicked and stamped all over his body and head . . . I almost felt sorry for him but I quickly came to my senses.
One gangmember who belonged to ‘the most violent firm of skinheads there was’ recalled a never-ending sequence of fights. ‘One day . . . a group of skinheads told us to stop getting us all barred from everywhere for fighting, and my brother . . . snapped back, “That’s what being a skinhead’s all about you dickheads and if you don’t like fighting then you shouldn’t fucking be one.” That shut them up.’ Brown agreed with that logic. ‘To me, my hooliganism was a natural extension of the great strength of the British people, heroism in the face of adversity. It was lads just like me and my mates who had fought at Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme and my allegiance and my pride was in myself, my football club and my country.’36
Skinhead began to decline around 1975 but then underwent a surge, perhaps because the ethos harmonized so well with the bleak second half of the decade, a time of economic blight and social tension. Skinhead’s nihilism harmonized perfectly with the culture of hate that typified the late 1970s. While the merger of skinhead with neo-Nazi politics and football hooliganism was not automatic, it was entirely logical, since the three groups share a common constituency and certain core rituals. It’s no wonder, then, that ultra-nationalist groups enjoyed conspicuous success recruiting discontented youths whose first port of call had been skinhead nation.
The original skinheads were perturbed when fascist thugs hijacked their culture, and made racism a defining feature. ‘The multicultural thing was a big deal for us,’ Chas Smash of Madness reflected. ‘We felt we were part of a wave . . . its ideals were honourable and progressive.’37 Equally disturbing was the emergence of punk, since surface similarities caused both groups to be deluged by the same torrent of outrage. Skinhead purists thought punks too dissolute. ‘The clothes were just so scruffy and ill-fitting,’ Kelson complained.
The jeans would be skin tight and too short with great big boots, and the hair was shaven right off. They’d be taking drugs and sniffing glue, and you wouldn’t have caught an original skinhead doing that – it was degrading. You were a working class bloke, proud of this great nation, and you wouldn’t be seen dossing like a hippy. The public saw them as dirty, scruffy, bald-headed drug takers . . . To be brought up with such strong ideals about the movement and to see it taken over like that was worse than anything.38
In truth, the public’s confusion was entirely understandable. By the late 1970s, British youth culture was a pit of writhing snakes, with similar strands of thought, music and behaviour intertwining but never completely amalgamating. As Brown writes, ‘The word “diverse” was inadequate to describe the motley crew of teds, mods, skins, suedes, smoothies, punks, skunks, rude boys, soul boys and headbangers that filled Britain’s streets, terraces and concert halls and who listened to a cacophony of music ranging from rockabilly to jazz funk by way of punk and ska.’39 Separate cultures competed over the same raw material, namely alienated kids from tower blocks and council estates. Both punk and skinhead were attempts to assert identity amidst disintegrating working-class culture. If the picture of who belonged where seems confused, that is because the boys themselves were.
That confusion was reflected in the emergence of Oi!, a music that defied classification. For its practitioners and fans, it was a reaction to punk’s poseurs, those whose badness was merely cosmetic. Oi! was the Doc Marten of sound, hard, often political lyrics backed by discordant angry noise. ‘Oi! really was about the kids coming in off the streets, out of the tower blocks and the building sites and it was just for real,’ Lol Pryor thought. Jon Richards, who still plays in the band Argy Bargy, sees the music as ‘an attitude . . . It was that stand up for yourself, believe in yourself, fight for yourself attitude.’ For Chas Smash, however, Oi! seemed like hatred and violence put to music. ‘We weren’t an Oi! band, we were happy, it was up, we were kids enjoying ourselves.’ That distinction, however, was lost on the new skinheads, young kids who readily assigned their politics to the music they liked, regardless of what the original artist intended. ‘It was depressing,’ Chas Smash reflected,
we were naive and just thought ‘wow, loads of people!’ Not thinking, ‘ow, there’s loads of right-wing skinheads’ . . . that’s the thing with right-wing organizations, they latch on. If there had been a couple of black people in our band, then maybe they wouldn’t have . . . We used to have kids coming up to us in the early days . . . [of] the National Front, [with] a right-wing magazine, to autograph . . . There were all these rumours that we were funded by right-wing organizations. And it created a load of friggin trouble.
Kelson shared that disappointment with the way his ethos had been usurped. ‘A lot of skinheads are from inner city areas and are unemployed. So I can see their point of view, but I still wish they’d get their own cult to voice it rather than taking our cult and using it!’40
In truth, racism had always been present within the movement, though it wasn’t necessarily a defining feature. Ethnic hatred was focused in particular on Asian immigrants, who had not, it was argued, made enough effort to assimilate. Brown admits to beating up Asians in 1970, simply for the fun of it. ‘They smell, don’t they?’ a skinhead told Time in June of that year. ‘It’s all that garlic. I mean, they’ve no right to be here.’ He proudly described his ‘Paki-bashing’ technique: ‘You go up to them and bump into them, and then you nut them right, and then you hit them, and as they go down you give them a kicking, bash them with an iron bar, and take their watches and rings and things like that.’ In the month the Time article was published, more than 2,000 Pakistanis marched on Downing Street to protest against the rising tide of skinhead attacks.41
After 1976, ‘Paki bashing’ became as fashionable as boots and braces. ‘It was the in thing to do,’ one skinhead confessed. ‘Have your hair cropped, get a pair of boots and go bash pakis.’ Mick White, a member of the Tilbury gang responsible for racist riots in the Brick Lane area of London in 1977, explained the attraction for him was not the dress, or the music, but the opportunity to fight immigrants. ‘Everyone knew skinheads didn’t like pakis and I thought that’s the one for me.’ Meanwhile, ideologues hovered overhead, always ready to assign political meaning to racist violence. ‘It’s easy for an extreme party to grab hold of passionate kids,’ one former member reckoned. ‘Skinheads were very angry, and so for the extremists they were easy targets.’ Membership in the British Movement or the National Front provided a sense of belonging to young boys desperate to inject meaning into their lives.42
Before long, social commentators carelessly lumped all skinheads into one far-right racist mob. In truth, it is difficult to discern what individual skinheads believed, and indeed whether beliefs, as opposed to emotions, were important. Chris Brown feels that violence was more important than racism. ‘A lot of skinheads were just plain “bad lads” and the attacks and insults on lone Asians, like the assaults on lone greasers or homosexuals, were more about following the herd and proving one’s so-called “hardness” than they were about making any kind of political statement.’ Tilbury skinheads insisted that their group was apolitical – hatred was dispensed equally to Asians, glue sniffers, socialists, hippies and anyone who liked disco. One member of that gang recalled his disgust when a contingent of Nazis appeared at a concert. ‘Although we hated pakis and sikhs and that, we also didn’t like Nazis as our parents fought them in the war. We couldn’t understand why skins should be connected to them as our idea of skinhead is to be British and proud of it, and all other cunts are the enemy, including Germans.’ In a world packed with hatred, a skinhead did not have to look far to find an enemy. ‘It wasn’t just white kids bashing Asians,’ Chris Prete insists. ‘It was everybody bashing everybody to be top dog in the street.’ ‘There weren’t too many Pakistanis in Henbury so we had to make do with queers,’ recalls Brown.43
That same desire perhaps explains the appeal of football hooliganism, which reached epidemic proportions in the late 1970s. Hooligans boasted that the government ruled the country from Sunday to Friday, but they ruled on Saturdays. Kelson recalls attending a West Ham–Chelsea match, his first as a fully fledged skinhead. ‘Everybody seemed to have crombies on . . . it was just electrifying . . . I remember sitting down at half time and there were four or five lads in front of us, pulling things out of their crombies, and they all had tools, knives and that.’ Rob Hingley, a Plymouth Argyle fan, fondly recalled a holy ritual: ‘On a Saturday you’d get dressed up, get the bus down to Plymouth to watch Argyle get mauled, try to get into the pubs, get thrown out, get beat up by the opposing teams’ skinheads.’ Meanwhile the rest of the nation shook its head in bewilderment. ‘Those who wonder why people fight at football and then add, “It’s only a game” are . . . totally missing the point,’ argues George Marshall in Skinhead Nation. ‘Football just happens to be the perfect arena for violence. The passion is certainly there and the football club acts as a focus for local pride and as a magnet for youths willing to defend its honour. Most importantly though, it offers the opportunity to travel all over the country to fight like-minded mobs.’ For skinheads, hooliganism existed in a parallel universe with the game itself. ‘Violence has home and away and even Cup fixtures,’ Marshall explains. ‘Getting a result is all important, losing face means anything from dropping a few points on a good day to being relegated or even put out of business on a bad one. There’s even some movement between mobs, a sort of free transfer market.’44
After a Blackpool vs. Bristol Rovers match was repeatedly interrupted by crowd violence, the frustrated referee remarked: ‘We are reaching the situation where it would be ideal to play matches in front of empty terraces.’ Politicians, sociologists, psychiatrists and journalists struggled to understand, while populist firebrands demanded the return of national service. Chris Lightbrown offered his own explanation to the Sun:
They will never stamp out football hooliganism. It is going to get more, rather than less. What’s so marvellous is that these kids who are doing bum jobs and are said to be idiots, can get themselves organised like this and set up a fantastic military strategy that goes into battle. It is not as simple as it looks. Decoys are planted and flanks formed. It’s great to see it. We have been brought up on war psychology so long that is has become part of our culture, and teenagers expect to be fighting. When there are no wars, there will be things like punch-ups at soccer matches.
‘Violence is part and parcel of being young,’ the former skinhead Paul Jameson explains, in a weak attempt at self-justification. Watford Jon agrees: ‘You can’t escape it, it’s part of life.’ That assumption is undoubtedly flawed, but it does perhaps explain the mindless nature of the violence. The leader of the Tilbury gang boasted: ‘Pakis, blacks, Nazis, whoever got in our way, we’d bash. In them days we used to go out and have a fight or whatever, but now a few of us have got educated and now we work as nightclub bouncers . . . We still love violence.’ Or, as Brown wrote of a former comrade: ‘Benny joined the army. Carrying on being a hooligan and now getting paid for it. His predilection for queer bashing found greater rewards serving in Her Majesty’s forces than it ever could on Civvy Street.’45
‘I know that Pastor Jim Jones is God Almighty himself!’ came a shout from the huge crowd gathered in a San Francisco gym on Sunday, 17 September 1972. ‘You say I am God Almighty?’ asked Jones. ‘Yes, you are!’ shouted another voice, and the crowd erupted.46
By the age of sixteen, Jones could already mesmerize a crowd. But while his passion was formidable, his belief frequently wavered – he struggled to understand how a loving God could allow widespread suffering. In the early 1950s, he drifted toward the Methodists, whose social conscience harmonized with his core beliefs. Established religion could not, however, contain an ego so large. Jones eventually set out on his own, taking his devoted followers into his ‘People’s Temple’.
At first, the Temple seemed a shining example of social awakening in 1960s Indiana. Jones preached racial brotherhood and communalism to a congregation consisting of middle-class whites angered by injustice and downtrodden blacks who suffered it. He campaigned not just for racial harmony, but also encouraged Christian charity toward the jobless, the ex-con, the single mother and the addict.
To many, he seemed a saint. Intelligent, charismatic and handsome, he attracted admirers even among those who rejected his religion. At the same time, however, his programme sparked fear among conservative Indianans, for whom socialism was taboo. Rumours circulated about his tyrannical powers and the sacrifices he demanded. Those who wanted to believe in Jones countered that prophets are frequently persecuted, as are socialists.
Jones, who confused criticism with harassment, sought a more welcoming home for his mission. He settled upon Ukiah, in northern California, in part because caves in the area offered the perfect place for his Chosen to shelter from a nuclear apocalypse predicted to take place on 16 July 1967. In addition, his evangelical communalism seemed more likely to find acceptance in a state tolerant of eccentricity. In 1965, accompanied by 165 followers, Jones headed west.
The move was not immediately successful. Rumours (most of them true) circulated that he was a violent paranoiac, sexual predator and drug addict. By 1968, his congregation had dwindled to a few dozen. Jones responded by affiliating himself with the Disciples of Christ, a move which brought credibility, not to mention tax-exempt status. A monthly newsletter and regular radio broadcasts spread the word. By 1971, the Temple boasted 4,711 members, a number which, if slightly exaggerated, nevertheless demonstrated that a phoenix had risen. In addition to churches in Ukiah, San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Temple owned a forty-acre children’s home, three convalescent centres, three dormitories and a heroin rehabilitation centre. The tireless Jones was also a part-time public schoolteacher and foreman of the Mendocino County Grand Jury.47
The People’s Temple was not really a church, but a way of life to which one surrendered. New members were baptized ‘in the holy name of socialism’. At services, which lasted up to six hours, the faithful sang hymns with lines like ‘There’s a highway to Utopia walking in a revolutionary way’. While the programme was undoubtedly attractive, even more so was the hypnotic power of Jones. In time, worship of God gave way to veneration of Pastor Jim. ‘If you believe I am a son of God in that I am filled with love, I can accept that,’ he told parishioners. ‘I won’t knock what works for you.’ The faithful were occasionally told that he was the dual reincarnation of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx.48
‘With over 4,000 members . . . we haven’t had a death yet!’ Jones boasted in October 1971. ‘I am a prophet of God and I can cure both the illness of your body, as well as the illness of your mind.’ His services provided miracles on demand, melting scepticism like butter. ‘The reason I know it ain’t fake,’ Ann Moore explained to her worried sister, ‘is how could it be if the leader can bring life to dead people, make the blind see, the lame walk, know the thoughts of your mind and the intents of your heart. I can tell a fake if I see one.’ Among those convinced was Timothy Stoen, assistant prosecuting attorney of Mendocino County. In 1972, he told Lester Kinsolving, religious affairs reporter at the Examiner, that ‘more than 40 persons have literally been brought back from the dead this year . . . I have seen Jim revive people stiff as a board, tongues hanging out, eyes set, skin graying, and all vital signs absent. Don’t ask me how it happens. It just does . . . Jim will go up to such a person and say something like, “I love you” or “I need you” and immediately the vital signs reappear.’49
Jones could also apparently read minds; he recited information about a member’s private life that only that individual could know. One new recruit was flabbergasted when Jones proceeded to identify ‘all the names of her relatives, the brands in her refrigerator, the cost of her insurance policy, and the exact price – “TO THE PENNY” – of all the books she had purchased years ago!’ This power enhanced his influence and made resistance futile. In truth, Jones had a bevy of loyal lieutenants who collected information through tapping phones, break-ins and sifting through the garbage of parishioners.50
The Temple was a trap that gently lured the innocent. It was, claimed Moore, ‘a place where you’ll never be lonely’. She found her own Utopia:
the Temple is great . . . not just because Jim Jones can make people cough up cancers but because there is the largest group of people I have ever seen who are concerned about the world and are fighting for truth and justice . . . And all the people have come from such different backgrounds, every color, every age, every income group, and they have turned into constructive people from being dopers and thieves and being greedy . . . it’s the only place I have seen real true Christianity being practiced.
For new members, financial contributions were entirely voluntary. In time, however, donations became a measure of faith. Once ensnared, the member might sign over 25 per cent of his income to the Church. Full commitment came when they renounced their former life by moving into Temple facilities and transfering all income, property and social security benefits to Jones. The deeper the commitment, the greater was the isolation from wider society, which validated the sense of being chosen.51
Control was tightened through complex behavioural manipulation. Members signed letters admitting to illegal and immoral acts that in fact had never happened. Others signed blank affidavits (which were filled in later) as evidence of their trust. At regular ‘catharsis sessions’, the faithful confessed misdeeds and dark thoughts. ‘I don’t respect Dad [Jones] the way I should,’ one member admitted. ‘Dad’, another wrote, ‘All I can say is that I am two people right now: one of them is a very humble and innocent person and the other is a cruel and insensitive person that goes around with bad thoughts on his mind.’ Members dutifully reported those whose faith seemed to waver, thus contributing to an atmosphere of mistrust. Transgressions were brutally punished, with spouses forced to beat one another, and children encouraged to chastise wayward parents. ‘The first forms of punishment were mental, where they would get up and totally disgrace and humiliate the person in front of the whole congregation,’ Elmer Mertle recalled. ‘Jim would then come over and put his arms around the person and say, “I realize that you went through a lot, but it was for the cause. Father loves you and you’re a stronger person now. I can trust you more now that you’ve gone through and accepted this discipline.”’ By this means, confidence was continually undermined, isolation deepened and dependence reinforced.52
Sex was used to emasculate followers. A believer in marriage, Jones nevertheless argued that monogamy was reactionary and insisted that members should experiment. Catharsis sessions were often given over to sexual tittle-tattle designed to humiliate. Spouses complained openly about a partner’s inadequacy. Those reluctant to experiment were brutally reprimanded and condemned as counterrevolutionary. Punishment took the form of forced congress, often of a homosexual nature.
Devotion was an investment and sacrifice its own reward. The faithful gave themselves to the People’s Temple – spiritually, socially, sexually and financially. Since membership implied separation from normal society, belonging intertwined with isolation. Commitment was self-reinforcing, since to break with the church demanded an acknowledgement that all those sacrifices were meaningless. Thus, indoctrination had a ratchet effect – as time passed demands increased and breaking from the church grew more difficult. Those who lived in the compound effectively signed their lives over to the Temple, rendering it virtually impossible to start a new life outside. They were addicted to Jones and ‘owned’ by him.
California liberals supported Jones because of his considerable influence among the poor and his seemingly genuine desire to help the downtrodden. Jones cemented this affinity by contributing generously to sympathetic politicians. Those beholden to him were naturally inclined to believe the best of him, dismissing persistent rumours as McCarthyite persecution. The prominent state assemblyman Willie Brown described Jones as ‘a combination of Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao’. He was ‘a rare human being . . . [who] cares about people . . . who can be helpful when all appears to be lost and hope is just about gone’. In June 1977, Brown explained why Jones had enemies: ‘When somebody . . . constantly stresses the need for freedom of speech and equal justice . . . that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody.’ He promised Jones that ‘I will be here when you are under attack, because what you are about is what the whole system ought to be about!’53
‘Can you win office in San Francisco without Jones?’ a journalist asked Brown. He replied: ‘In a tight race . . . forget it.’ Proof came when George Moscone ran for mayor in 1974. Jones mobilized his disciples to canvass in the rougher precincts. After the election, which Moscone won by just 4,000 votes, allegations surfaced concerning thousands of People’s Temple members voting where they were not registered. The reliability of the allegations was never adequately tested since the investigation was assigned to Stoen. Michael Prokes, a Jones adviser, privately boasted that ‘Moscone acknowledges . . . that we won him the election’.54
Sympathetic insiders in the courts, politics and the civil service provided Jones with a shield against public scrutiny. ‘We have won over the sheriff’s office and the police department,’ he openly boasted. Disciples working in the county welfare department streamlined the Temple’s adoption of hundreds of young orphans. Those officials who could not be won over were incessantly bullied. Critics were threatened with legal action, popular disapproval or, in some cases, physical violence. In September 1971, the Baptist minister Richard Taylor of Ukiah warned the state attorney general, Evelle Younger, of ‘the atmosphere of terror created in the community by so large and aggressive a group’. He demanded an investigation, but Younger refused. Around the same time, Kinsolving launched a series of exposés in the Examiner. After his third article, published on 19 September, Temple members picketed Examiner offices and ransacked Kinsolving’s home. The series was cancelled, and Kinsolving officially reprimanded for failing to show ‘charity, compassion or consideration’. His editor chastised him for being a ‘bully and bigot’. Meanwhile, the Chronicle, the Examiner’s rival paper, courted favour with fulsome tributes written by the highly respected columnist Herb Caen. ‘[Jones] is in good company and obviously has many fine friends,’ Caen wrote. ‘The picture I get is of an intelligent and warm human, of which we have regrettably few these days.’55
As it turned out, a handful of critics had more effect upon Jones than a legion of docile admirers. ‘He would not sleep for days at a time and [would] talk compulsively about . . . conspiracies against him,’ Deborah Blakey recalled. ‘As time went on, he appeared to become completely irrational.’ An increasing amount of Temple income went toward a private army of heavily armed toughs. Driven by a deep paranoia that the CIA was out to destroy him, he made plans to quit America. In 1974, he obtained permission from the government of Guyana to build a settlement deep in the jungle. It would be called Jonestown.56
The breaking point came in 1977, when rumours surfaced of an exposé to be published in New West magazine. The publishers were bombarded with a fusillade of writs, pickets, threatening phone calls and angry letters. The article nevertheless went ahead, describing an atmosphere ‘of Spartan regimentation, fear and self-imposed humiliation’. ‘Please, please, please’, a worried parishioner wrote to her father, ‘do not get disturbed by the bad publicity . . . I am more convinced than ever of conspiratorial & political set-ups.’ Jones escaped to Guyana, where 1,200 followers were already building Utopia.57
On the surface, Jonestown seemed impressive – an oasis of order in the middle of the jungle. ‘The isolation of it was . . . beautiful,’ a visiting journalist wrote. ‘It was free of urban ill . . . When you saw the compound, you had to really be impressed by the labor and dedication that went into clearing this 2,700 acres – it was huge – and establishing crops and building structures . . . It looked really good on the surface.’ Visitors from the Embassy saw efficiency, cleanliness and contentment, not to mention happiness. It seemed perfect. ‘Dad,’ wrote one newcomer, ‘I would rather die than go back to the States as there is plenty of hell over there. I would give my body to be burned for the cause [rather] than be over there.’58
‘Everything with me is going just fine,’ Bruce Oliver assured his parents. ‘I’m here in Jonestown and all I got to say is that you have to see it to believe it. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen . . . This is the place I would want to spend the rest of my life.’ For Jones, success was measured by glowing testimonials from those who called him Dad:
‘I want to please you and one way I know is to please the family.’
‘Father is wonderful, clean, straightforward and supernatural.’
‘I know I still follow you because you have the gift to protect me.
I like to look strong but I know I am weak.’
Ann Moore grew convinced that ‘Jonestown was paradise . . . we could live together with our differences . . . we are all the same human beings.’ Later, she reflected: ‘The children loved the jungle, learned about animals and plants. There were no cars to run over them; no child-molesters to molest them; nobody to hurt them. They were the freest, most intelligent children I had ever known.’59
For others, paradise was prison. ‘Rev. Jones’ thoughts were made known to the population of Jonestown by means of broadcasts over the loudspeaker system,’ wrote Blakey. ‘When the Reverend was particularly agitated, he would broadcast for hours on end. He would talk on and on while we worked in the fields or tried to sleep.’ Tracy Parks, a ten-year-old Jonestown survivor, recalled how, ‘Children who said they were not happy and wanted to go away were severely beaten.’ Others were dangled head first into a well. Defying Jones was unthinkable, escape virtually impossible. Even minor offences were punished by confinement underground in a small plywood box. ‘Any disagreement with his dictates came to be regarded as “treason”,’ Blakey recalled. ‘The Rev. Jones labelled any person who left the organization a “traitor” and “fair game”. He steadfastly . . . maintained that the punishment for defection was death. The fact that severe corporal punishment was frequently administered . . . gave the threats a frightening air of reality.’60
For Jones, Utopia did not bring relief from his demons. Feverish paranoia encouraged contemplation of ultimate escape – mass suicide. ‘Because our lives were so wretched anyway and because we were so afraid to contradict Rev. Jones, the concept was not challenged,’ Blakey later testified. In frequent ‘white night’ exercises, the population ‘would be awakened by blaring sirens. Designated persons, approximately fifty in number, would arm themselves with rifles, move from cabin to cabin, and make certain that all members were responding . . . we would be told that the jungle was swarming with mercenaries and that death could be expected at any minute.’ On one occasion:
we were informed that our situation had become hopeless and that the only course of action open to us was a mass suicide for the glory of socialism. We were told that we would be tortured by mercenaries if we were taken alive. Everyone, including the children, was told to line up. As we passed through the line, we were given a small glass of red liquid to drink. We were told that the liquid contained poison and that we would die within 45 minutes. We all did as we were told.
When death did not come, Jones calmly explained that the group had passed his test of loyalty. ‘He warned us that the time was not far off when it would become necessary for us to die by our own hands.’61
On 13 November 1977 congressman Leo Ryan was alerted to the story of Bob Houston, who had died mysteriously the day after he left the People’s Temple. Police judged the death an accident (he fell under the wheels of a train), but Houston’s father suspected otherwise. Ryan began to investigate, and before long was inundated with letters from parents worried about children at Jonestown. Evidence surfaced of social security fraud, illegal adoptions and extreme cruelty. After Blakey, who had escaped, told of the ‘white night’ exercises, Ryan decided to travel to Guyana. Two assistants, nine journalists and eighteen concerned parents accompanied him.
By the time Ryan arrived, Jonestown was boiling with paranoia. ‘It is hard to find a rational explanation for the continual press harassment,’ Carolyn Moore Layton wrote to her parents. ‘Maybe they just want to prove that you just can’t be too successful a socialist group without being totally desecrated . . . [It] makes me wonder if we have tampered with someone’s “master plan.”’ She had in mind the CIA, though she stressed that, if the agency intervened, ‘we would never stand for it’. Despite the paranoia, residents managed to give the Ryan party a carefully rehearsed show about the joys of Jonestown. The performance was so convincing that Ryan began to wonder if he had been misled. Doubts began to surface, however, when two individuals secretly slipped him notes indicating their desire to leave. By the following morning, a dozen more had appealed for safe passage out.62
Jones went into meltdown. According to Charles Garry, the Reverend’s lawyer who had accompanied Ryan, ‘When 14 of his people decided to go out . . . Jim Jones went mad. He thought it was a repudiation of his work. I tried to tell him that 14 out of 1,200 was damn good. But Jones was desolate.’ With the situation spiralling out of control, Ryan cut short his visit. He left in the afternoon, arriving at the nearby Kaituma airstrip along with fifteen defectors at 16.30. They then waited an agonizing forty-five minutes for a second plane to carry the additional passengers. As the group began to board, one of the ‘defectors’, Larry Layton, drew a gun and opened fire. At around the same time, a People’s Temple vehicle approached Ryan’s plane at speed. Three men inside raked the plane with rifle fire. When the shooting stopped, Ryan, three journalists and one defector were dead, while six others were seriously wounded.63
Back at Jonestown, calamity unfolded with the predictability of a carefully written script. Jones called together his flock. ‘We’ve been so betrayed, we have been so terribly betrayed,’ he cried, while confessing to a premonition that an attack would be made on Ryan. ‘What’s going to happen is that one of those people on the plane is going to shoot the pilot. I know that. I didn’t plan it, but I know it’s going to happen. And we better not have any of our children left when it’s over.’ He explained that enemies would shortly invade. Rather than await annihilation, he preferred ‘revolutionary suicide’. ‘Death is not a fearful thing,’ he insisted. ‘It’s living that’s treacherous.’ With impressive efficiency, helpers brought large vats of Kool-Aid, laced with cyanide. ‘So you be kind to the children and be kind to seniors,’ he calmly told the faithful. ‘Take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece, and step over quietly, because we are not committing suicide – it’s a revolutionary act . . . Lay down your life with dignity. Don’t lay down with tears and agony . . . I don’t care how many screams you hear; death is a million times preferable to spending more days in this life . . . Have trust. You have to step across. This world was not our home.’64
One single-minded woman, Christine Miller, openly questioned why fifteen defectors should be seen as a catastrophe. ‘I think we all have the right to our own destiny as individuals!’ she shouted at Jones. ‘I look at all the babies and I think they deserve to live.’ ‘Guards with guns and bows and arrows pressed in on her,’ one survivor recalled, ‘and Jones tried to make her understand that she had to do it.’ The crowd was warned that survivors would be castrated and tortured by the Guyanese army. If Jones had not managed to silence Miller, those desperate to die would have torn her apart.
Chaos reigned as frightened parishioners raced toward death. ‘It’s simple, it’s simple!’ Jones shouted as the poison was distributed. ‘There’s no convulsions with it, it’s just simple, just please get it before it’s too late.’ Adults were given syringes to squirt poison into the mouths of young children, before they drank their own dose. ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ one of the women distributing the syringes shouted. ‘Everybody keep calm and try and keep your children calm. And the oldest children can help love the little children and reassure them. They’re not crying from pain. It’s just a little bitter tasting but, they’re not crying out of any pain.’65
Most parishioners willingly embraced death. ‘We have pledged our lives to this great cause,’ Richard Tropp wrote before he took his poison.
We are proud to have something to die for. We do not fear death. We hope that the world will someday realize . . . the ideals of brotherhood, justice and equality that Jim Jones has lived and died for. We have all chosen to die for this cause. We know there is no way that we can avoid misinterpretation. But . . . Jim Jones and this movement were born too soon. The world was not ready to let us live . . . We did not want this kind of ending – we wanted to live, to shine, to bring light to a world that is dying for a little bit of love.
Some, however, found this one loyalty test too far. ‘Babies were screaming, children were screaming,’ a survivor recalled. With rebellion gathering, Jones made one final appeal:
So be patient, be patient . . . I tell you I don’t care how many screams you hear, I don’t care how many anguished cries . . . death is a million times preferable to ten more days of this life. If you knew what was ahead of you, . . . you’d be glad to be stepping over tonight . . . Let’s, let’s be dignified. If you’ll quit telling them they’re dying, if you adults will stop some of this nonsense . . . Adults, adults, adults, I call on you to stop this nonsense. I call on you to quit exciting your children when all they’re doing is going to a quiet rest.
Within a short time, 913 residents lay like shingles around the podium where Jones told them to die. Among the dead were at least 150 foster children who should never have been allowed to leave California. Jones himself was shot in the head, an apparent suicide. In his last recorded words, he told a dying crowd: ‘We didn’t commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.’ Ann Moore, one of the last victims, wrote: ‘We died because you would not let us live in peace.’66
A few days later, a Time reporter saw an eerie scene as his plane circled overhead. ‘The large central building was ringed by bright colors. It looked like a parking lot filled with cars. When the plane dipped lower, the cars turned out to be bodies. Scores and scores of bodies – hundreds of bodies – wearing red dresses, blue T shirts, green blouses, pink slacks, children’s polka-dotted jumpers. Couples with their arms around each other, children holding parents. Nothing moved.’ Tim Chapman located the dead Jones. Something struck him, something about the way the bodies were arranged. Jones was on his back, while most of the others were on their stomachs, face down, their heads pointing toward their leader, in concentric arcs of death. ‘I could tell that it wasn’t their final statement,’ Chapman remarked. ‘It was Jones’s.’67
‘Gray skies dripped sadness and sorrow over San Francisco yesterday,’ wrote Caen. ‘Headlines told of tragedy and madness in steaming jungles . . . how to judge the insanity surrounding the end of Rev. Jim Jones . . . Who would have expected THIS?’ In truth, some people had expected it, but they had been ignored, vilified or bullied. After the massacre, however, came a frenzy to explain. Pop psychologists readily provided theories explaining why so many people could have been so gullible. For others, incredulity fed suspicion. ‘Until all the facts are in,’ Jesse Jackson insisted, Jones would remain a man who ‘worked for the people . . . I would hope that all of the good he did will not be discounted because of this tremendous tragedy.’ Conspiracy theorists claimed that the CIA had been using Jonestown for mind control experiments, and that Jones was a victim as innocent as those who fell around him. Suspicion, which remains rife to this day, has been encouraged because Congress has refused to release in full the official investigation. In truth, however, government meddling in Jonestown was conspicuous by its absence. Jones got away with what he did because most government officials desperately wanted to be his friend.68
One-time allies frantically sought distance. In response to difficult questions, Moscone denied involvement, while Brown communicated in shrugs. In contrast to other politicians, he steadfastly refused to express regret. ‘They all like to say, “Forgive me, I was wrong”, but that’s bullshit. It doesn’t mean a thing now, it just isn’t relevant.’ That, however, was a hypocrite’s lament. The behaviour of the press, of City Hall and of every prominent person who eagerly sought benediction from Jones was indeed relevant. Outside the offices of the San Francisco Sun-Reporter, as an angry crowd demanded explanation, one picket sign said it all: ‘We had a madman in our midst and you told people he was a saint.’69
For the last thirty years, people have struggled to find explanation for why so many people followed Jones to doom. Refuge has been found in labelling those people kooks, weirdos, zombies. It is much harder to see them as products of American society, people who sought a peculiar escape from the common misery of their lives. Jonestown, wrote Tropp, ‘was a monument to life, to the renewal of the human spirit, broken by capitalism, by a system of exploitation and injustice’. ‘No matter what view one takes of the Temple,’ Prokes argued, ‘perhaps the most relevant truth is that it was filled with outcasts and the poor who were looking for something they could not find in our society. You just can’t separate Jonestown from America, because the Peoples Temple was not born in a vacuum, and despite the attempt to isolate it, neither did it end in one.’ That argument was reiterated in an official statement read to a group of reporters in a hotel room in Modesto, California in March 1978:
Beyond the satisfaction of their material needs, people found dignity and pride in the Temple that racism had previously denied them . . . And that’s why so many chose to die in the end . . . [They] died . . . because they weren’t allowed to live in peace. They died because they didn’t want to be left with no choice but to come back to live in the rat-infested ghettoes of America. They died for all those who suffer oppression.
While that statement did not perhaps take sufficient account of the manipulative powers of Jones, it contained nevertheless a painful kernel of truth. For Prokes, at least, it seemed sufficient explanation. No more need be said. After delivering that statement, he got up, went to the bathroom, closed the door, turned on a faucet and shot himself in the head.70
On 7 May 1977, the Clash were playing London’s Rainbow Theatre. In the middle of ‘White Riot’, a white riot erupted. ‘The audience . . . were the scariest I’d ever been in,’ recalled Billy Bragg. ‘They were punks and I’d never seen punks up close before – never been in an audience that was like being in a riot. They trashed the seats down at the front, threw them at the stage . . . Up in the balcony there were people just going mad!’71
Damage was estimated at £1,000. ‘It was not malicious . . . just natural exuberance,’ Allan Schaverian, the Rainbow’s manager, told the Sun. ‘The audience obviously got excited at the group’s music. We expected some damage and arrangements were made to cover the cost.’ In other words, CBS, producers of the Clash, wrote a cheque and everyone went home happy. ‘We shall have more punk concerts soon,’ promised an ecstatic Schaverian. Maurice Oberstein, managing director of CBS in Britain, shared his delight. ‘Punk rock’, he said, ‘is perfectly harmless.’72
Punk was not supposed to be harmless. It was supposed to be revolutionary, violent, destructive of the status quo and certainly contemptuous of businessmen like Oberstein and Schaverian. Their approval is proof of punk’s failure. At the back of the Rainbow two rows of seats remained untouched by the mayhem. They had been occupied by agents and managers – rock’s moguls. As a metaphor, that perfectly illustrated the futility of punk’s rebellion. The citadel would not crumble.
Punk has often been judged a limited genre – shallow, talentless rebels desperately striving to be despicable. In truth, however, the congregation is hugely diverse. Patti Smith is an immensely talented poet, while Sid Vicious was a violent lunatic with zero talent. Dee Dee Ramone conformed to the punk stereotype of average music and above average drug consumption, while Jonathan Richman – highly talented and strikingly sober – did not. The fact that all four are seen as archetypes of the genre reveals just how large the punk basket actually is.
The stereotype (personified by the Sex Pistols) is reductive to the point of triviality. Dress style was not uniform: Sid Vicious dressed like a caricature of a drug-addled hooligan, David Byrne like a schoolteacher, Richard Hell like a schoolteacher savaged by wolves. Nor is there a typical punk sound: Television sound nothing like the Buzzcocks, who in turn sound nothing like the Heartbreakers. ‘The bands were held together by philosophy alone,’ argues Lenny Kaye, guitarist for Patti Smith. ‘They were hardly alike in style . . . The only time-share they cultivated was another way of looking at the world: good old Us versus Them.’ Punk artists sought something raw; their music was an intentional counterpoint to the highly refined work of Seventies superbands like Led Zeppelin. Their songs were rebellion – a yearning to challenge, even destroy, the status quo, be it musical or political. ‘We sing about the world that affects us,’ claimed Joe Strummer of the Clash. ‘We’re not just another wank rock group like Boston or Aerosmith.’ This also explains punk’s demise, because when it ceased to challenge it withered and died.73
Punk was a musical coup, an attempt to reclaim rock from the polyester bands of the Seventies. ‘I think that’s what really created the anger,’ Malcolm McLaren, producer of the Sex Pistols, reflected. ‘The anger was simply about money, that the culture had become corporate, that we no longer owned it and everybody was desperate to fucking get it back.’ Kaye felt a passionate sense of betrayal:
The immediate gratification of rock & roll had been replaced by a workmanlike professionalism and studio sheen, a world away – or so it seemed – from the raw exuberance and spontaneous combustion of early rock. Slumbering singer/songwriters. Pyrite metal. Dinosaur bands lumbering under concept albums and pseudo-symphonies. The Sixties rock underground, now welcomed into the corridors of power, had made a collective bargain that, like most pacts with the Devil, gave it three wishes and took its soul. Confronted with a music that was smoothed and sated, we looked for the angularity, the jagged edges that could draw blood, the atonal skid-mark screech of our own rite of passage.
Guns were aimed at Prog rockers like Yes and Jethro Tull – the ‘dinosaurs’. ‘Our music is an answer to the early Seventies when artsy people with big egos would do vocal harmonies and play long guitar solos and get called geniuses,’ Tommy Ramone explained. ‘That was bullshit.’ Punk sought to reinvigorate rock by injecting it with energy, excitement, grit and danger. ‘That was the master plan,’ claimed Scott Asheton of the Stooges: ‘knock down the walls and blow people’s shit away. All we wanted to do was make it different.’ Iggy Pop ‘wanted the music to come out of the speakers and just grab you by the throat and just knock your head against the wall and just basically kill you’. Richard Hell thought punk was ‘an outlet for passions and ideas too radical for any other form’.74
‘Music had become so bloated,’ Hell thought. ‘It was all these leftover sixties guys playing stadiums . . . it was all about the lights and the poses.’ Punk pretended that the ever-widening gap between artist and audience could be closed, that performer and listener could become one. The audience was part of the carnival, as that night at the Rainbow demonstrates. Aficionados claim that the best punk has been lost because it was played live at small venues and never recorded. Concerts were not, however, lovefests – central to any performance was the contempt directed at audiences, sometimes expressed by spitting on those in the front row. As Strummer once shouted: ‘We don’t give a toss what you think, you pricks, this is what we like to play and this is how we’re gonna play it.’75
The rebellious image was, however, somewhat contrived. ‘We were almost Stalinist in the way that you had to shed all your friends, or everything that you’d known, or every way that you’d played before,’ Strummer felt. ‘We were guitar-playing drug addicts,’ he admitted in a moment of honesty. ‘I’d like to think the Clash were revolutionaries, but we loved a bit of posing as well. Where’s the hair gel? We can’t start the revolution ’til someone finds the hair gel!’ The desire to smash rock’s icons was nine-tenths artifice. ‘I was into the Upstarts and everything in between, from Neil Young or Traffic to Stevie Wonder,’ admitted Colin Newman of Wire. ‘I was a total hippie,’ Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex confessed. ‘I went to see Alan Ginsberg in Bath, I did that whole hippie thing for some time, and I did it for real: bathing in streams, living on ferns.’76
Nevertheless, while the rejection of other subcultures may have been contrived, the anger was not. ‘I would like to know . . . the source of the deep rage that runs through this story like a razor-edged wire,’ writes Charlotte Pressler in her memoir of the underground music scene in Cleveland. ‘It wasn’t, precisely, class-hatred; it certainly wasn’t political; it went too deep to be accepting of the possibility of change . . . It was a desperate, stubborn refusal of the world, a total rejection; the kind of thing that once drove men into the desert . . . It should be remembered that we had all grown up with Civil Defense drills and air-raid shelters and dreams of the Bomb at night; we had been promised the end of the world as children, and we weren’t getting it.’ Punks assigned themselves the status of an underclass. ‘We wanted to write songs about cars and girls,’ Johnny Ramone remarked, ‘but none of us had a car and no girls wanted to go out with us. So we wrote about freaks and mental illness instead.’77
Anger and alienation were particularly pronounced in Britain, where artists performed against a backdrop of a nation in decline. ‘Britain’s Not Working’ roared the most famous Conservative poster of the 1979 election. Those three words perfectly summarized the mid-Seventies shambles that provided punk inspiration. Alienation was a safe harbour, a situation of complete separation from society that punksters achieved by being utterly offensive. Mainstream approval was the worst sort of failure. No greater praise could have been received than the explanation double-barrelled Bernard Brooke-Partridge, chairman of the GLC Arts Committee, gave for banning the Sex Pistols from London. ‘I loathe and detest everything they stand for and look like. They are obnoxious, obscene and disgusting.’78
Long before the Sex Pistols were even an idea, punk bands were carving a niche for themselves in the United States, though primarily in the hothouse of New York, where weird was wonderful. New York clubs like CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City provided artists like Television and Patti Smith an opportunity to play before live audiences. ‘Word spread’, writes Kaye, ‘that a home for the disaffected had been founded on an avenue where many had traditionally come to lie in the gutter.’ The genre was nevertheless quarantined within New York – the rest of America didn’t really see the point.79
The phenomenon was noticed by McLaren, the business partner of Vivienne Westwood, who ran a boutique called SEX on the King’s Road. Her shelves juxtaposed outrageous clothes with sex toys, the combined purpose being to shock. While in New York to promote Westwood’s clothes, McLaren developed a taste for the New York Dolls and other groups playing at CBGB. ‘The fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force,’ he later wrote. ‘There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.’ On his return to London, he decided to start up a punk band to use as live advertisement for the boutique. The raw material stood in front of him – the yobs who lurked at SEX. Forming them into a band was a good way to keep them from nicking clothes. Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock had already dabbled in music, though not successfully. In need of a singer, McLaren chose John Lydon, who had the right looks and interesting dress sense, in particular a Pink Floyd T-shirt on which he had scrawled ‘I HATE’. ‘Can you sing?’ McLaren asked. ‘Like an outta tune violin,’ Lydon snarled. His terrible voice suggested the perfect stage name – Johnny Rotten – while his deprived background provided suitable inspiration for songs. ‘I learnt hate and resentment [at school],’ he later explained. Lydon’s friend John Ritchie, a psychopathic street urchin destined for prison or an early death, skulked nearby. Westwood, taken with his ugliness, brought him into the band. He became Sid Vicious, named after Lydon’s pet hamster that had a tendency to bite. Like a mad scientist creating a monster, McLaren had concocted the Sex Pistols – ‘Sex’ as advertisement for the shop and ‘Pistols’ because it was both nasty and violent. McLaren later tried to provide method to the madness: ‘I was taking the nuances of Richard Hell, the faggy, pop side of the New York Dolls, the politics of boredom, and mashing it all to make a statement, maybe the final statement, and piss off this rock and roll scene.’80
In truth, McLaren’s creation was just slick marketing. ‘The sort of people that get involved in band management, or clubs and promotions’, explains the club owner Andy Czezowski, ‘are able to see and exploit something coming along. People like Malcolm, who people may now revere as being The Man Who Invented Punk . . . was nothing of the sort: the man was nothing more than a t-shirt salesman. People coming through the shop, ideas bounced off and he was sufficiently aware and astute to realise that there might be an angle there somewhere.’81
‘We were all extremely ugly people,’ Lydon remarked. ‘We were the outcasts, the unwanted.’ ‘They were terrible,’ Bernard Sumner of Joy Division remarked. ‘I thought they were great. I wanted to get up and be terrible too.’ The rock establishment meanwhile struggled to comprehend the ugliness. Most traditionalists felt that punk ennobled incompetence. ‘Punk hates talent’ became a favourite expression of dismissal. ‘Music is a wonderful, big world,’ wrote George Martin, the Beatles’ producer. ‘[But] what killed it, momentarily and inevitably, was the rise of punk rock – suddenly music became little boys dropping their trousers.’ The rock critic Charles Young, writing in praise of the Ramones, remarked: ‘their music derives much of its charm from . . . [their] instinctive understanding that great artistry can result from turning your liabilities into assets’. Confirming that appraisal, Debbie Harry confessed: ‘We attracted the most fucked up and interesting people and had the cruddiest equipment.’ Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, on the other hand, found no joy in hideous mediocrity: ‘The breakneck pace of the Ramones was indicative of nothing more than their utmost contempt for their music, their audience and, justifiably, themselves.’82
Sideburns, fanzine of the Stranglers, once carried three photos of finger positions for guitar chords. Under the photos ran the caption: ‘This is a chord, this is another, this is a third, now form a band.’ Punk musicians boasted that by lowering the talent standard they made music more democratic. ‘To be a musician went against the whole idea,’ Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders argues. ‘The minute anyone got serious about their musicality, they lost what was interesting about the punk scene. Not having a fucking clue and getting on stage and just doing it was what made it so exciting.’ ‘There was a lot of struggling with our instruments at the start,’ Mick Jones of the Clash recalled. ‘It was that struggling, learning to play, it made it alive, it made it real, it made it something that wasn’t like anything else.’83
‘Ideas were far more important than how well or badly you could play,’ argued Marco Pirroni of Adam and the Ants. ‘You could be as shitty as you wanted to. No one would like you if you were brilliant anyway.’ Burchill and Parsons, however, found that pride in incompetence a bunch of pretentious nonsense. ‘The mass of raw repressed energy’, they argued, ‘was never a genuine movement – it was just a collection of non-starter rat-racers who didn’t lack the greed for fame and fortune so patently obvious in the idols they professed to despise, just the Old Guard’s technical proficiency.’ Unfortunately, the tendency to dismiss punk as a talent vacuum has meant that some genuinely gifted artists have been ignored or conveniently slotted into a different genre. The impressive talent of Elvis Costello, Blondie and Talking Heads has often disqualified them from punk identification. Nevertheless, while not all punk artists were devoid of ability, an impressive number were. ‘Democratic’ music lowered the talent bar sufficiently to allow a crowd of yobs to satisfy their dreams of becoming rock stars. As Burchill and Parsons wrote: ‘punk required not virtuosity of music, but of attitude – the new wave’s only revolutionary reform was that now anyone could become a tax-exile’.84
‘Rock & roll is not just music,’ said McLaren. ‘You’re selling an attitude too.’ When attitudes become products, however, sincerity corrodes. Highbrow critics liked to portray the Pistols as Situationists with guitars, but in truth their politics was paper-thin and their emotion cleverly contrived. The socialist views of the Clash seem more genuine, but that did not prevent them from selling their political songs to CBS for a big advance. The Clash, write Burchill and Parsons, ‘were the first band to use social disorder as a marketing technique to shift product – “I have gobbed in the eye of the whirlwind – please buy my record.”’ In any case, even blatantly political messages were susceptible to misinterpretation, amidst all that noise. One of the most memorable political Punk songs was ‘Eton Rifles’ by the Jam, which concerns a socialist Right to Work march heckled by pupils at Eton. The Tory leader David Cameron, a twelve-year-old Etonian when the song was released, recently claimed it as his favourite record. ‘Which part of it didn’t he get?’ the Jam’s Paul Weller asked. ‘It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps.’85
While it would be impossible to gather all punk artists into one political basket, they did share a common sense of doom. As the punk journalist Legs McNeil explained:
Things had collapsed. We had lost the war in Vietnam, to a bunch of guys with sticks in black pyjamas. Vice President Spiro Agnew had to resign because he was caught taking bribes . . . And Richard Nixon had the Watergate burglars break into the Democratic national headquarters because he was so paranoid . . . So punk wasn’t about decay, punk was about the apocalypse. Punk was about annihilation. Nothing worked, so let’s get right to Armageddon. You know, if you found out the missiles were on their way, you’d probably start saying what you always wanted to, you’d probably turn to your wife and say, ‘You know, I always thought you were a fat cow.’ And that’s how we behaved.
That reckless desire to offend perhaps explains the fondness for Nazi imagery. Swastikas were printed on T-shirts, worn on armbands, or drawn on faces. The Sex Pistols released a song called ‘Belsen Was a Gas’, which was supposed to be a joke, but turned out to be one irony too far. ‘It was always very much an anti-mums and anti-dads thing,’ Siouxsie Sioux explained of the swastikas. ‘We hated older people – not across the board but particularly in suburbia – always harping on about Hitler . . . and that smug pride. It was a way of saying, “Well I think Hitler was very good actually”: a way of watching someone like that go completely red-faced.’ Her fellow band member Steve Severin confirmed that the swastikas ‘weren’t badges of intolerance, but symbols of provocation’. That was perhaps true, but symbols get misinterpreted by an audience immune to nuance. Siouxsie Sioux never quite realized that when she sang about ‘too many Jews’ (which she lamely explained as ‘too many fat businessmen’), her words did not seem all that different from what the National Front was shouting about Zionist control of the economy. ‘The swastika thing was past wrong,’ the record dealer Don Hughes felt. ‘And it got taken wrong by various football yobs and boneheads – they weren’t going to understand talk about irony. To them it was a thumbs-up to racist thought.’86
The punk revolt was short-lived and ultimately ineffectual. It may have destabilized, but it never came close to destroying. Like all countercultures, it was eventually absorbed into the mainstream, defanged, and turned into commodity. ‘It’s good to know you’ve all been reading your News of the Worlds and you’re all spitting like punks are supposed to,’ sneered Jean-Jacques Burnel of the Stranglers during one of his live sets. The demise was clear to Lydon in early 1978. ‘Punk was clichéd at that point. It was a joke on itself. Endless arseholes reading the Sun and the Daily Mirror and running out thinking that’s what you needed to do: put some egg in your hair, wear a leather jacket, brothel creeps . . . A straitjacket mentality.’ Billy Altman saw Lydon at CBGB in January 1978: ‘Here he was, the most famous celebrity in punk, going completely unrecognized. I looked around . . . and realized precisely why that was. You see, there were at least two dozen people in the place who looked exactly like him.’87
Punk as commodity turned out to be much more successful than punk as rebellion – a few people got very rich indeed. ‘No one’s really very scared of punk, especially [not] the record companies,’ the producer Sandy Pearlman told Rolling Stone in 1979. ‘I’d seen Elvis and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan,’ said Oberstein. ‘It seemed perfectly natural; suddenly there was another bunch of screamers. The record companies are in business to make money, and I saw the potential that these artists had to be on our label rather than some other label . . . I wasn’t interested in looking at the Clash as a social phenomenon; we were just making records.’88
Punk’s main problem was that it was a giant contradiction. It was supposed to be all about hopelessness and despair, but there clearly was hope if a band like the Sex Pistols could make millions from being ugly and discordant. As one fan remarked: ‘Everyone was going, “There’s no future, there’s no future”, but at the same time by indulging in punk rock and everything surrounding it, they were creating a future for themselves.’ ‘Punk’, wrote Burchill and Parsons, ‘started off as a movement born out of No Fun and ended as a product whose existence was No Threat.’ It was all over so quickly, dying young, rather like its iconic performer, Sid Vicious. In Britain, punk burst onto the scene in 1976 and was gone by 1979, disintegrating into hyphenated genres. The demise was predictable, since a movement built on chaos and incompetence and which celebrated failure could not really handle success. Punk was supposed to be played before live audiences in grotty theatres, not pressed onto discs marketed by CBS.89
Those discs nevertheless have achieved an acclaim disproportionate to the impact they had at the time. The inescapable fact of punk was that it was never very popular – concerts seldom sold out and most albums languished at the bottom of the charts. Now, however, punk albums pepper the ‘all time greatest’ lists. Rolling Stone’s ‘500 Greatest Albums of All Time’, published in November 2003, included twenty-six punk albums. That acclaim, however, arises more from notoriety than excellence. Punk’s capacity to inspire fear is fondly remembered. Sid Vicious, a pathetic creep and musical midget, somehow captured the zeitgeist because he became the perfect symbol of the sorry end to Western civilization. In that sense, the Sex Pistols provide a case study in marketing. McLaren presented them as a threat to society and the public obediently panicked.
Panic is not, however, enough to explain why the music seems ‘great’. The best explanation lies in the genre’s short life, the fact that it died young and remained, as a result, for ever new. Its status was enhanced by its unique nature – it remains easy to identify and chronicle. No song that came after sounds quite like ‘Anarchy in the UK’, or ‘White Riot’, or ‘Search and Destroy’. Punk took music into a cul-de-sac; bands that came later, instead of continuing the challenge, turned back into safer thoroughfares. As a result, three decades on, punk remains undiluted, sounding neither stale nor jaded. ‘Today, so many years later,’ writes Griel Marcus, ‘the shock of punk is that every good punk record can still sound like the greatest thing you’ve ever heard.’ Those unable to appreciate its virtues, on the other hand, find that its repulsiveness does not mellow. ‘It was all deliriously exciting’, wrote Allan Jones after that fateful night at the Rainbow Theatre, ‘but it has nothing to do with music, I fancy.’90