Mick Farren 3

MICK FARREN – His Passing

I was scanning the song list on It’s My Way! and spotted another song that came up in a different context: “You’re Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond”. As with every song on It’s My Way! but one, the songwriter was listed as Buffy Sainte-Marie on the Allmusic listing for the album. I actually said out loud when I saw that: “Really?!” – where I remembered it was on the most recent album by the psychedelic hard rock band the Deviants, Dr. Crow.

I don’t remember thinking consciously that “You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond” – the way the song was shown on the Deviants album – didn’t sound like a song that Buffy Sainte-Marie would have written, but it really didn’t. For that matter, it didn’t sound like a song that the Deviants would have written either. “You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond” sounded like an old-time blues number, with a strong-throated black background singer doing a duet with Deviants frontman Mick Farren.

But it turns out I was wrong about that: The singer in the duet (who is quite white) is actually the lead vocalist for the alternative rock band Concrete Blonde, Johnette Napolitano. Napolitano and another member of Concrete Blonde, Jim Mankey actually contributed quite a bit to the Dr. Crow album: Johnette Napolitano is one of the background singers on the album called the Deviettes – along with Blare N. Bitch of Betty Blowtorch – and Jim Mankey played bass on their version of the Beatles’ classic “Strawberry Fields Forever”.

On one of my Atlanta shopping trips to the Criminal Records store, I found one of the most delightful albums I have purchased in the past five years: a collection of early 1980’s punk rock simply called The D.I.Y. Album. (The album is described as using the “Han-O-Disc” recording process, whatever that means). On it is the first known song by the band that later became Concrete Blonde: “Heart Attack” by Dreamers. This song was made even before they took the name Dream 6 in 1982. Johnette Napolitano’s reedy but compelling vocal on “Heart Attack” could hardly sound more different from the way it is on the Deviants’ version of “You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond”. As a result of these two recordings, I have gained a whole new respect for Concrete Blonde and Johnette Napolitano.

Mainly on the strength of this Dreamers recording (though there are other terrific songs as well, including an early song by Black Flag), The D.I.Y. Album brought $50 at auction on eBay in 2006 (I paid maybe half that much myself!), according to popsike.com – a great resource if you are interested in what original vinyl recordings have been bringing at auction and in private sales.

Anyway, the liner notes on Dr. Crow gave an unusual level of detail about “You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond”: “New words and music by Mick Farren and Andy Colquhoun to the original by Blind Willie Johnson”. Andy Colquhoun is a past UARA and long-time member of the Deviants.

I will have more to say about songwriting in a post sometime in the future, but generally speaking, the music industry has become much more fastidious about songwriting credits now than was the case through the 1960’s. Regarding “You’re Going to Need Somebody on Your Bond”, which is a song that is evidently in the public domain, it was fairly common for musicians to list themselves as the songwriters. The more proper credit would be: “Traditional – arranged by Buffy Sainte-Marie”.

In any case, there is so much to like about Dr. Crow: Can it really be as long ago as 2002 when this album came out? What is basically the title song is called “When Dr. Crow Turns on the Radio” – according to the lyrics, “you won’t hear nothing” when this happens – and it is a good old-fashioned stomping rock number. There is a cover of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, a Burt Bacharach/Hal David song that is based on the Western film of the same name, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that came out in 1962 (but it was not used in the soundtrack). Gene Pitney had a Top 10 hit with “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”, though he was asked not to record it before the movie came out. In their version, the Deviants include a clip of some dialogue from the movie – apparently Lee Marvin as the title character – and between the verses, Mick Farren talks about how rare it is for the villain’s name to appear in the title of a movie. One of their original songs on Dr. Crow, “The Murdering Officer” sounds ancient enough that pirates might have known about it; the lyrics talk about (among other things): “But snarling like dogs, we all went so willing / When the murdering officer paid us a shilling”.

I laughed out loud when I first read the review of Dr. Crow by Dave Thompson for Allmusic, because it is all so true for us Deviants fans: “The thing with the Deviants is, either you love everything they do – in which case Dr. Crow is their most thrilling new release in the six years since their last one – or you just don’t get it. Sadly for the band’s dreams of world domination, most people tend to fall into the latter category; but anybody who has pursued mainman Mick Farren across the last 35 years of sonic and literary guerilla-ism will have Dr. Crow cranked up as loud as is humanly tolerable, not caring a toss for what the neighbors think. Because in the Deviants’ world, the neighbors don’t think – their brains aren’t big enough.”

Or as Mick Farren himself put it in one verse of an earlier song, “Hard Times”: “Started me this rock and roll band / Thought that I would get real rich / Warner Bros. thought we sucked / Ain’t this modern life a bitch.”

* * *

I wrote the above tribute to Dr. Crow on July 30, 2013, not learning until later that morning that Deviants frontman Mick Farren had passed away three days earlier. Besides his amazing music that is not like anyone else’s – that goes double for his singing voice – Mick Farren regularly wrote articles that I would see in the Village Voice and other places, published numerous science fiction novels, and was a respected rock critic and music historian.

When Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records determined to write an appreciation of the ground-breaking career and life of her former husband and long-time business partner Greg Shaw (shortly after his untimely death in 2004), Mick Farren was brought in as the co-author of the resulting hardbound book Bomp! / Saving the World One Record at a Time.

After living in New York and then Los Angeles for many years, Mick Farren recently returned to London. Farren collapsed on stage during a rare live performance by the Deviants in London and died in the hospital. Mick Farren never got rich – though with his outsized talent, he most definitely deserved it – but he lived and he died doing what he loved. On his albums, he often chats between verses or in introductions; and there is always such joy and mischief in his voice – that often comes through in his singing as well. On one 1984 live Deviants album in my collection, almost the first words out of his mouth before starting the concert were: “We even rehearsed this time!”

Learning of the death of one of my all-time favorite rockers put a damper on the celebration that I had planned for the day: My first day on the job as a real estate appraiser was 40 years earlier, on July 30, 1973 (my younger sister Julie W. Kovasckitz’s birthday is also on that date).

(August 2013)