Those not so Pretty Things

Rave-Up at Roderick’s (1965; Todd-Ao; Cinemascope; 96 min.; Helen Shapiro, Ian Whitcomb, The Pretty Things, Unit 4 + 2, The Small Faces; music by Ennio Morricone; written by Larry Winchester and Tommy “Legs” Larkin; directed by Larry Winchester).

If you ask your average film geek what was the first psychedelic movie, chances are good they’re going to say, “The Trip of course, 1967, Roger Corman. Written by Jack Nicholson. With Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper.” Well, not to put too fine a point on it: “Wrong.”

The first psychedelic film was Larry Winchester’s Rave-Up at Roderick’s, and here’s Larry in his memoir I’ll Take the Low Road, telling us how it all went down:

“I’m doing post sync on The Boxing Milkmaid at the Abbey Road studios with our sound engineer Geoff Emerick, and who walks in one day but my old pal Legs Larkin.

“Hey, Larry, I got a present for ya.”

“All right, give it to me.”

“Nah, later, man. How much longer you gonna be?”

“Give us another hour, Legs.”

“Cool, I’ll meet ya down the pub.”

So an hour later I leave it to Geoff and go down to the Crown & Anchor and Legs has got this big grin on his face, sittin’ there over a pint of Guinness.

“So what’s up, Legs?” I motioned to the barman to set me and Legs up with two more of the same.

“This, daddy-o.” He holds out the open palm of his hand and he’s got this sugar cube in it.

“Hey, great, thanks, Legs, a fucking sugar cube. You’re too good to me.”

“It’s LSD, man, take it.”

Well, all I knew was that Cary Grant had supposedly taken this shit. I figured if Cary had tried it, it couldn’t be too bad. So what the hell, I popped it in my gob and washed it down with a mouthful of Guinness. Imagine my surprise when a half hour later Legs’s head has started to give off a golden radiation, and when he speaks I can feel the words in my fingertips. Also, I was no longer sitting on the barstool but floating three inches above it.

“Legs,” I say, “you’re a motherfucker.” But it was more like:

“Legggggggggs....yerrrrr....uhhhhhh.....motherfugggggggerrh.”

“Cool,” he says. “So, you got a project for me?”

“Well,” I say, “Hammer wants me to do another teen rock ‘n’roll movie with Helen Shapiro. Something with music and a love story. They’ve showed me a couple of scripts but they stink. You got any ideas?”

“Sure. Helen’s this nice young girl, right? Wants to be a singer, right?”

“Yeah, good so far.”

“She meets this cat, he’s in the music biz, promoter, singer, whatever.”

“I dig.”

“Thing is, the cat’s an acid head.”

“What’s that?’

“It’s somebody who likes to take LSD, like we are now.”

“Cool, go on.”

“So he gets her to take acid. And it like opens up her mind to the fuckin' multifarious mysteries of the universe and shit.”

“Right; that’s really fucking dramatic, Legs. They're gonna be lining up around the block for this motherfucker.”

“Hey, we’ll work out the details. All you gotta think about is building it all up to this wild scene where everybody’s tripping on the acid. Like look around you, man.”

I looked around. All the patrons of the pub were giants. And then I’d blink and they’d all become elves. Or barnyard animals.

“All right, Legs, let me think about it. I gotta pee.”

It took me about a year to make it to the john, and then when I did and finally took my johnson out it was five yards long. Maybe this LSD wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Anyway I peed out about ten gallons of technicolor-rainbow pee, and by the time I was finished I pretty much had the three acts of the movie worked out in the enormous swirling funhouse that my brain had become.

Helen Shapiro told Larry flat out that she didn’t think she should play a girl who took drugs, so Larry and Legs simply rewrote the third act in an afternoon to take that part out, and shooting for what was now entitled Rave-Up at Roderick's started not very long after, in September of 1965.

We wanted to get the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Who for the movie. None of them panned out so we settled for Ian Whitcomb, the Pretty Things, Unit 4+2 and the Small Faces. Loved those Pretty Things boys. Rags and I thought we knew how to party, but these guys were dangerous. Good band, too. And lucky for us they actually had a song called “LSD”.

Unfortunately for Larry the Queen’s Councillor shut this film down two days after it opened. It has not played anywhere ever again since. But Larry screened it for me one night at his place on Ivar Avenue and I want to tell you, Rave-Up at Roderick's totally rocks. The "freak-out" scene at the Marquee club (with the Pretty Things jamming with unbilled guest artists Itzhak Perlman and Ravi Shankar) is worth the price of admission all by itself. It’s up to you, all you Winchester fans out there: if you want to see this film re-released start bombarding the movie studios with letters and e-mails today.

You have nothing to lose but your sanity.

(Check out the right hand side of this page for a listing of more of the "Films of Larry Winchester". You might also enjoy our serialization of the "director's cut" of Larry's long-lost novel A Town Called Disdain, available exclusively on this site.)

The Pretty Things:

"Railroad Train to Heaven", Part One

I have some very exciting news. After many months of the most debased begging, wheedling and cajoling on my part the splendid people at the Arnold Schnabel Society have handed over to me the army footlocker containing the hundreds of small copybooks which comprise the poet Arnold Schnabel’s unpublished but legendary memoir, Railroad Train to Heaven, and have said, in essence, “Do with this what you will.”

So what I will do is dole out this treasure-trove of modern literature in its unexpurgated entirety, but occasionally, on the installment plan, for litterateurs throughout the universe to read and savor and to cut and paste and send to all their friends.

I should mention that, unlike the poems, which typically went through numerous densely-amended drafts, these notepads appear to be only sparsely revised. All the entries were written with ball-point pen, usually a Bic. Very occasionally a word will be crossed out and replaced, or a phrase or a sentence will be interpolated in the space between the lines. Sometimes a line will be drawn through a sentence or a great X engraved on a paragraph or page, often accompanied by a comment in the margin such as "rubbish" or "nonsense". Schnabel only rarely indicates the date of composition (and usually then only through a reference to a holiday or some historical event, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy) but, working through internal evidence, I shall do my best to present these memoirs in chronological order.

And so we begin this serialization of Railroad Train to Heaven, which I would rank alongside the great confessionals of world literature, second only perhaps to the immortal Pepys.

The time would be June, 1963. Observe the complete lack of any sort of preamble. As with his poems he simply gets right to it.

(Note: I have silently corrected the occasional misspelling. Everything else is directly transcribed from the Schnabel holograph. As with the poems, these excerpts are presented thanks to and only with the imprimatur of the generous people of the Arnold Schnabel Society.)

I hate the beach, and truth be told I’m not all that crazy about sunshine. 

But I have come here, to my aunts’ guest house in Cape May, because my mother thinks it would be good for me, and because she likes to see her sisters now and then.

My mother also has no interest in the beach. She spends her days mostly working in the garden, or trimming the hedges.
    

I have my own room, a very small room, in the attic. 

I read, walk around, try to stay sane. 

I go to mass every morning without fail, and I think that helps. (Or so I pray. I pray that the daily mass helps. I pray that my prayers help.) 

Occasionally I stop in a bar and nurse a beer. I look at baseball games on the television.

Sometimes I get into conversations with people. My fellow Americans seem to be a friendly sort by and large. People like to talk, and with little or no prodding they will and do tell you everything about themselves.      

I listen, or sort of listen, I like to think I have always been very much a nice guy, but I do not reciprocate their autobiographical effusiveness.      

What can I tell them?      

That I am a Catholic bachelor, forty-two years old, that I live with my mother and except for the few years of my decidedly unheroic military career have always lived with my mother, that, again excepting for my time in the modest service of Uncle Sam, I have worked my entire life as a brakeman for the Reading Railroad, that last winter I went completely out of my mind and spent twelve weeks in the Byberry mental hospital?      

That after a while I returned to work but, following a few embarrassing episodes (some of which I was aware of at the time, others to which I was oblivious), it was strongly suggested that I take an extended leave of absence on half-pay?      

That I was on prescribed pills but stopped taking them?      

That after ceasing to take these pills I would occasionally suffer the most frightening hallucinations, hallucinations which while they were happening were as real as anything I have experienced in my life?      

And that — knock on wood — it has now been a few weeks since my last “episode”?     

No, I choose not to share all this with my new temporary friends.      

I won’t say no one wants to hear this sort of thing because actually people love to hear horror stories, as of course do I.      

No, I simply don’t want to be the one telling them, with me as the subject; except for here, in this copybook, where it’s all between me, myself and that other lunatic: I.

(Continued here.)

(Up-to-date listings of links to other episodes are posted on the right hand side of this page, as well as links to many of Arnold Schnabel's classic poems. Nihil Obstat, Bishop J.J. "Smilin' Jack" Graham, S.J.)

Seashore reading for Arnold Schnabel

This sonnet first pleased Arnold Schnabel’s public in the June 15, 1963 issue of the “Olney Times”. Through internal evidence we can assume that Arnold is still vacationing with his mother at his aunts’ house on Perry Street, in Cape May, New Jersey.

Note that the accepted old-school Philadelphian pronunciation (or as Philadelphians would say, “pronounciation”) of the word Tuesday is “Toosdy”.

“Newman” doubtless refers to John Henry Cardinal Newman, whose Apologia Pro Vita Sua was found among Arnold’s books after his death, although it showed little sign of actually having been read. It should be noted that Arnold also had a complete collection of all the extant “Parker” novels of Richard Stark on his bookshelf, and indeed his untimely death apparently interrupted him midway through his reading of the most recent one at that time, The Sour Lemon Score.

(Rebroadcast by the courtesy of the Arnold Schnabel Society.)

“The Man With the Getaway Face”

I was browsing through the mysteries this Tuesday
(To not always read Newman is no disgrace),
When I espied a book that seemed to say, “Choose me.”
It was titled The Man With the Getaway Face;
I scurried home; well, to my aunts’ home, not mine,
And in a rocker on the porch I was soon hooked,
As, sipping my TaB, I read this first line:
“When the bandages came off Parker looked
In the mirror at a stranger.” How odd.
I read that sentence again, and thought: If I
Could change my face, would that please me, or God?
No; because behind the face would be the same sad guy.
What I need is someone to cut what’s inside my head away;
Then perhaps I too at last could make my getaway.

(For links to other even more disturbing poems from the prolific Bic pen of Arnold Schnabel, and to selections from his vast and previously unpublished memoir Railroad Train to Heaven, check the right hand column of this page.)

Lino Ventura in "L'Armée des ombres"

Read all about it here.