Memories of a Duck Rocker

Nick Egan: Front cover of Malcolm McLaren's Duck Rock (1983) [1]

and Duck Rock (2023), a mixed media collage on canvas, 48 × 36 in [2]

 

 

I. 

 

I was very pleased to discover that the artist, designer, and film director Nick Egan is alive and well and living in the Hollywood Hills with his wife and family. 

 

I was even happier to discover that he has recently been reimagining some of the record covers he designed back in the 1980s; including Malcolm McLaren's Duck Rock (1983), which has been transformed from a 12" square image into a large mixed media collage on canvas, using digital artwork, airbrush, oil pastels, acrylic and metallic paints.    

 

Still referencing the art of Keith Haring and Dondi White [3], which formed such a vital part of the original work, it also includes the magically customised boom box (or ghetto blaster, as we used to say) designed by Ron West, that became known as the Duck Rocker - one of the most iconic objects in the cultural history of hip-hop.   

 

Due to the size and shape of Egan's 2023 work, it reminds one of poster art; and in fact Egan has admitted that this was his intention:  

 

'I saw it as a poster that had been put up on the walls of a New York subway station, with the Duck Rocker retained as the base image, but, as time went on, people would come by and graffiti over it. Some would try to peel it off the wall, and others would stick another flyer over it until it became almost unrecognisable from the original, exactly how it would look if it did appear on a subway wall.'

 

I suppose it's fair to say that Duck Rock is Egan's greatest achievement as a designer of record covers [4]; although his recreation of Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) for the cover of the Bow Wow Wow album See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! (1981), will always just top it for some of us [5].

 

 

II. 

 

I first met Nick Egan back in the spring of 1983, at Malcolm's first floor office on Denmark Street, after he'd kindly offered to help find me a six-week work attachment of some description. He was very tall and thin with lots of blonde hair and wore a large punk-style jumper, a pair of striped pirate trousers, and a Buffalo coat from Nostalgia of Mud, so looked good.     

 

He gave me several names and numbers to try, including that of the press officer at Charisma Records, and told me not to worry as he was sure something could definitely be arranged (although unfortunately not at Moulin Rouge, as he and McLaren were both going to be in New York for a lot of the time in April and May). 

Thus it was I ended up at 90 Wardour Street; in the Charisma offices above the Marquee Club, working as Lee Ellen Newman's assistant (and general dog's body). Amongst my more amusing assignments was taking the Duck Rocker to the HMV, where it was to feature in a window display dressed by Nick to promote Malcolm's album [6].

 

Whether this was the original customised boom box - or one of several that were made - I'm not sure; but it looked fantastic and was surprisingly heavier to carry than one might imagine. Judging by the stares of astonishment it received - and the number of people who stopped me as I walked along Oxford Street requesting a photo - it wasn't only the Zulus in South Africa, the Hip-hoppers in New York, or the Hilltoppers in the Appalachian Mountains, who were enchanted by it.       

Unfortunately, I didn't think to have a photo taken with the Duck Rocker. However, here's a picture taken in the Charisma press office, standing in front of a smaller replica (which, I think, was eventually given away as a prize in a Smash Hits competition), accompanied by a photo of Malcolm in NYC with the mighty original [7].

Notes

 

[1] Malcolm McLaren's groundbreaking studio album Duck Rock, produced by Trevor Horn, was originally released on Charisma Records in 1983. Arguably, it has proved to be as influential - if not more so - than Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977). 

      A 40th anniversary double vinyl edition was issued on the independent label State51 Conspiracy in 2023. This featured six additional tracks and was produced in collaboration with Young Kim of the Malcolm McLaren Estate: click here for details.

 

[2] Duck Rock (2023), by Nick Egan, is available to buy from the Wilma Gallery: click here for more details. For those who can't afford the asking price of the original canvas (£22,800), there are some very nice limited edition prints available, starting from just £150: click here. 

      Other works by Egan can also be viewed on (and purchased from) the Wilma Gallery website: click here.     

[3] Keith Haring (1958-1990), was an American Pop artist who emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. At Nick Egan's invitation, he provided the illustration that formed the pink background image of the Duck Rock sleeve (for which he was paid $1000).

      Dondi White (1961-1998), was also an American street artist; he provided the Duck Rock lettering, again having been asked to do so by Nick Egan (unfortunately, I don't know how much he was paid).

 

[4] The album cover artwork for Duck Rock is now included in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art: click here.

 

[5] Amusingly, Egan transformed Andy Earl's 1981 photograph, inspired by Manet's canvas, back into a painting entitled We're Only in it For the Manet (2023): click here for details. 

      By his own admission, Egan always felt a little awkward being credited for the original record sleeve, as it contained none of his graphics; yes, he directed the photo shoot, but the artist responsible for the actual image was Andy Earl. With this new canvas, however, he has made it very much his own.       

      For those who are interested, I explain why I love Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe in a post on TTA dated 27 April 2017: click here. 

[6] According to my diary, this was Monday 23 May, 1983. 

      Amusingly, Malcolm had agreed to dance with a buffalo gal in the store window on the following Saturday, but he pulled out at the very last minute, insisting he must have been drunk to have ever agreed to such; much to Lee Ellen's irritation, as she had already informed several journalists who went along to witness the event.  

 

[7] The photo was taken by Bob Gruen in April 1983. Many more wonderful photos of McLaren taken by Gruen can be found on the latter's website: click here.

 

 

Bonus 1: click here for a fascinating interview with Nick Egan conducted by Mike Goldstein in August 2013, in which he discusses his work with Malcolm on the cover of Duck Rock. As Egan makes clear, he was involved with McLaren as a conceptual partner rather than simply an art director; in other words, he worked on Duck Rock from its inception all the way through its recording and mixing, contributing ideas at every stage. 

      Egan is currently working on a book project which explores the cultural influence of Malcolm McLaren and features his artwork from the Duck Rock period. 

 

Bonus 2: To watch the feature documentary Creative Vandal (dir. Peter Pahor, 2024), chronicling the career of Nick Egan, click here. 

 

Bonus 3: The essential track on Duck Rock is, of course, 'Buffalo Gals', which was released as a single in November 1982 on Charisma Records. The video pretty much captures what was happening in NYC at the time (filtered through the imagination of Malcolm McLaren who directed it): click here.

      For those who might be interested, my post on 'Buffalo Gals' (dated 19 Feb 2019) can be accessed by clicking here.     

 

All That Jazz

Theodor Adorno, D. H. Lawrence, 

and Sebastian Horsley: they fucking hate jazz

 

'Jazz is the false liquidation of art [...] the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment ...' [1]  

 

 

I.

 

Sebastian Horsley famously didn't like jazz and refused to believe that other people liked it either; "once they're in Ronnie Scott's, they're asleep like everybody else" [2]. 

 

Of course, Horsley is not alone in hating jazz and certainly not the first person to express his contempt for the genre. One recalls that Adorno, for example, wrote a number of essays that expressed his negative evaluation of jazz as an art form and dismissed the claims made on its behalf by exponents and admirers. 

 

In brief, for Adorno, jazz was not only formulaic and banal, but it also lacked moral-aesthetic truth value and was essentially alienating and dehumanising (and not in a good way). Mostly, however, he despised it for being popular; a commodity born of modern mass society and the music industry. 

 

Although Adorno lived until 1969 - and despite the fact that jazz became increasingly complex and avant-garde, deviating significantly from its own origins as an upbeat genre to which the Bright Young Things of the so-called Jazz Age could dance the night away - he never revised his opinion of it.   

 

 

II. 

Another famous critic of jazz and popular modern culture in general - including the cinema and the radio - was the English writer D. H. Lawrence, who, in many ways, anticipated what Adorno would say, albeit using less openly Marxist terminology [3].

For although Lawrence was from a working-class background and frequently expressed concern with how he might appeal to as wide a readership as possible, he often used the word popular negatively to denote cultural forms that, in his view, lacked the spiritual and intellectual value that he believed genuine art possessed. 

 

As he grew older, Lawrence became increasingly critical of popular culture and the "bulk of our popular amusements" [4], including gramophone records; famously breaking one on Frieda's head in a notorious incident of domestic violence after she played it over and over, driving him into a rage with its dreary jazz trombone and crude sexual innuendo [5].

 

Does this make Lawrence and Adorno reactionary cultural elitists? Maybe. At the very least, we can agree that their views are out of tune with more informed opinion on the subject of jazz and popular culture - although Horsley would certainly have been sympathetic.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Adorno wrote that "Jazz is the false liquidation of art" in his 1967 essay 'Perennial Fashion - Jazz'. It can be found in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (Routlege, 1990).

      He described jazz as the "mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment" in his much earlier text, 'On the Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening' (1938), which can be found in his book The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Routledge, 1991).     

 

[2] For Sebastian's highly amusing take on punk, jazz, and Notting Hill contra Soho, click here.   

[3] See Gemma Moss, ‘Popular Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed Catherine Brown and Susan Reid (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 145-159. 

      As Moss rightly notes, Lawrence and Adorno were both living in a period when European culture was becoming increasingly Americanised and transforming into commercial mass culture with its standardised models of entertainment generating mechanical responses in the audience. In other words, both Lawrence and Adorno believed that popular art forms - such as jazz - create a public who become used to a limited range of emotions and ideas.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 244. 

 

[5] The record - 'Empty Bed Blues (Columbia, 1928) - was by the African-American singer Bessie Smith, with Charlie Green on trombone and Porter Grainger on piano. Smith was extremely popular during the Jazz Age and is now regarded not only as one of the greatest singers of her era, but a major influence on many other blues singers and jazz vocalists. 

      For an interesting essay on Lawrence and Bessie Smith, see Fiona Becket, 'A Brand New Grind: D. H. Lawrence, Manliness and the Blues', in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies - click here to access as an online pdf. 

      Readers who wish to listen to the track can do so by clicking here.  

 

Tales from Storyville 1: Shame Upon Those Who Think Badly of It (With a Note on Tony Jackson)

Photo of a Storyville prostitute 

by E. J. Bellocq (c. 1912)

For those who don't know, Storyville is not simply the title of an excellent series of BBC TV documentaries made by various international filmmakers. It was also the red-light district of New Orleans, established by municipal ordinance to officially regulate (and profit from) prostitution between 1897 and 1917.

The ordinance originally designated a thirty-eight block area to be known as The District, but it was soon universally referred to as Storyville, after Sidney Story, a city alderman, who wrote the guidelines to control activities within this zone of tolerance. Story, whose big idea was to replicate the port cities of Europe that legalised prostitution, was not amused by this. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, Storyville soon became the most popular - and swingin' - part of town [1], both with locals and tourists who were able to purchase Blue Books to familiarise themselves with the district and give an indication of what girls and services were being offered at which houses (prices, however, were not included). These guides, priced 25c, and available from saloons, barbershops, and street corner vendors, were inscribed with the French motto (more usually associated with the British Order of the Garter): Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Although the brothels employed black, white, and mixed race prostitutes, African-American visitors were barred from legally purchasing services within them, demonstrating how, at this point in time, racial concerns (and racism) trumped even commerce [2]. Despite this restriction on a potential source of income, by 1900 Storyville was fast-becoming New Orleans's largest centre of revenue; the world's oldest profession proving itself to still be the most lucrative.        

So why did it all come crashing down in 1917?

The answer, of course, has to do with the puritanism of wartime leaders, who suddenly rediscover their moral backbones: the US Navy had sailors located in New Orleans and the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, did not want them to have any distractions before being sent to fight. And so he pressed to have the whorehouses of Storyville closed and for prostitution to be recriminalised throughout the entire city. This included even the famous Mahogany Hall, an establishment employing forty women run by Lulu White, which drew its clientele from amongst the wealthiest and most influential men in Louisiana.

Baker - with the support of the American Social Hygiene Organization - is on record saying of the young men he was about to send overseas in order that they might have the (dubious) honour of killing and dying for their country: 'I want these boys armed and clothed by ther government; but I also want them to have an invisible armour ... a moral and intellectual armour for their protection overseas.' 

Whilst the New Orleans Mayor, Martin Behrman, and others strongly protested the closure - You can make prostitution illegal, but you can't make it unpopular - Storyville officially shut up knocking shop at midnight on November 12, 1917.

It continued, however, in a much subdued (and, thanks to Prohibition, sober) manner to be a centre of entertainment throughout the following decade. But essentially the wild times were finished and almost all the buildings in the district were demolished during the 1930s to make way for public housing. Today, there are just three saloons still standing from the Storyville period.  

Notes

[1] Many of the more more upmarket brothels would hire a piano player and sometimes a small ragtime band. Thus, although jazz did not originate in Storyville, it flourished there as in the rest of the city and it was where many visitors first encountered this new style of music, associating it thereafter with vice. Musicians who emerged from Storyville include Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, and Tony Jackson, the latter of whom would become the most popular (and flamboyant) entertainer in New Orleans. As Louis Balfour reminds us, even fellow musicians conceded that Jackson was the hottest performer in town - which is nice. He was also the best-dressed and many attempted to copy his style; the argument being that whilst you couldn't hope to play the piano as well as him, at least you could try to look as good. 
       
Many remember Jackson today as the writer of the song 'Pretty Baby' (1916), the original lyrics of which were said to refer to his male lover of the time. This much-covered song later inspired the 1978 film of the same title, directed by Lois Malle, and starring Brooke Shields as a 12-year-old prostitute (Violet), working in a Storyville brothel: click here for a recent post on this.   

[2] Even the Blue Books, which alphabetically listed the names and addresses of all the prostitutes of Storyville, separated them on the basis of race; going so far as to categorise girls with one great-grandparent of colour (i.e., who were only one-eighth black by descent) as octoroon.   

To read part two of this post - on the photos of Storyville taken by E. J. Bellocq - click here. 

To read part three - on the poetry of Natasha Trethewey - click here. 

An Interview with Malcolm McLaren (August 1984)

After recently going through a box of treasures from the past, I came across the above photo of myself with Malcolm McLaren and a copy of a taped interview recorded in the offices of Charisma Records, above the Marquee Club at 90 Wardour Street, back in the summer of '84. 

Malcolm was signed to Charisma at this time and I acting as an assistant to his very lovely Press Officer, Lee Ellen Newman, whilst (unsuccessfully) chasing a job as a presenter on a new cable and satellite TV channel. McLaren's new album, Fans, which fused opera with contemporary urban sounds was due for release in the autumn. 

As a means of marking the fifth anniversary of his death which passed earlier this month (April 8), I thought it might be nice to post an edited transcript of this short conversation with my mentor from over thirty years ago:

J: It's been a while since we've heard from you on record, but I'm pleased to know you have a new single out at the end of the month called Madame Butterfly. Would you like to say something about this song and the ideas behind it?

M: [Laughs] Oh dear! So what d'you wanna know then?

J: Just tell me anything about the single; or tell me a bit about opera ...

M: It's marvellous, opera. Because opera is about the most irrational art form ever in the sense that it gets to your emotions better than anything else. It combines drama with music - and it's live. It's one of the most difficult things to actually record. But it wasn't that which intrigued me, so much as the actual drama created with the music in someone's voice and I chose certain stories that were obvious classics, like Madame Butterfly, because they seemed to lend a certain emotion to people now that you could construct as something very sincere and without any cynicism.

J: I'm sure Madame Butterfly is a moving story, but it all sounds a long way away from the Sex Pistols. Do you think that you've changed personally over the years - mellowed ...?

M: I don't think it's mellow. I think that what is great about opera and the story of Butterfly in particular is that it's so poignant; it's the absolute opposite to anything that's bland. Most emotions are packaged today in pop music and they don't have that kind of irrational element. That's what's so great about opera; you don't know why you're feeling what you're feeling, but it makes you cry and it makes your heart thump!
      That, combined with something black and tough and real rootsy - something I suppose that you could say is still happening in New York - is why the record is so great. It's the combination of those two forces; something tough and rootsy with something that's melodic and very majestic and full of emotion.
      When you listen in the discotheques today all you hear are lyrics that have very little meaning other than to get up and dance, or make love and have sex without any particular slant, or any real purpose. This record demonstrates that all that is, I suppose, very happy and schlocky. What's good about this record is that it doesn't have anything that schlocky in it.

J: In the past you've made some memorable videos, such as the ones for Buffalo Gals and Soweto, which are very fast and breathless. Is that how you think a good pop video should be and is that how the video for Madame Butterfly is going to be?

M: No, the video for Madame Butterfly is actually gonna be very cinematic and has no mimed playback whatsoever. I wanted to create a moment and an expression that would enhance the record and allow you to listen, rather than be bamboozled by a variety of images. I think the content is in the record and the content's in the vocals mainly. The vocals are what you want to listen to and you don't want to be completely disillusioned by seeing my face on screen and burst out laughing, so I've just opened it up to a lot of girls sitting about in a Turkish bath, waiting, and crying their eyes out.

J: Do you welcome the emergence of music TV which obviously relies on videos as much as records?

M: I don't know, I suppose it's a good thing in a way - but only if it actually has a different policy from Top of the Pops and some of the other more format programmes that exist on ordinary television. Cable is great only because perhaps it can be less censorial and allow a bit more experimentation. Also, it provides an opportunity to people who don't necessarily warrant being categorised as musicians or filmmakers. The great thing about video is that it's a technology that most people - who may be brilliant sellers of raspberries or great horse riders - can go off and use and I think cable TV may accept that more readily than the record industry or the national TV stations.
      I think what's happening today is that we're creating a very new way that people receive music and culture generally. The future really lies in technology being given to people that normally would not be able to make a record, play an instrument, or shoot a movie and that's the most exciting thing.

J: You mention the future: what else have you got lined up?

M: I'm just finishing off my commitments [laughs]. I made this record only because I was tired of making another straight ahead rock 'n' roll record. I don't think I've done too much of that, but I decided to venture into something that was, for me, badly needed; something more dramatic and emotional, more personal. The sort of record I've never made. I've either made very politically-orientated, sloganistic records - such as when I managed the Sex Pistols - or, thereafter, I started to get involved as a mercenary manager managing various pop groups and creating good antics and good visual ideas, but, at the end of the day, the delivery wasn't as profound as it should have been.
      When I finally made a record on my own, Duck Rock, that was really very much to do with ethnic music and the discovery of dance and looking at the world with the eye of rhythm. This time, I haven't thought about rhythm at all and have gone for what I would just declare emotion - it's purely emotional music.    

J: Finally Malcolm, why do you think I would make a perfect presenter on the Music Box?

M: [Laughs] Maybe because you're more daft than I think you are [laughs].