Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell: The Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed Book

"What about the annihilation of self?" asked the New Musical Express.
"I have tried that in the past --with some success, I might add."
"But you gave it up?"
"I do it on weekends." -Jimmy Osterburg
A crash-course for the ravers. Doesn't diverge from the generally accepted version of things but adds a plethora of interconnections.

When the Velvet Underground played the Cafe Bizarre in Greenwich Village, six sets a night for three nights before Christmas 1965, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol were there.

The Cafe Bizarre engagement was a disaster. Occasionally the band would slip into a song that the audience-- on occasions that there was an audience, might recognize... but they concentrated on their own compositions, and swiftly discovered that the club's owner was not a big fan of theirs, or of their dissonance.
"The Black Angel's Death Song"-- in which viola keened over percolating guitar while Reed's vocals clashed staccato poetics with nightmarish vision-- was especially objectionable, and finally the owner laid out an ultimatum. If they played that song once more, they would be fired on the spot. "So we started the next set with it," Sterling Morrison laughed, "the all-time version" --and sure enough, they were fired. And hired almost immediately.

The audience was listening.

Author Thompson proceeds in this vein to shake out all the webs of influence and connection, starting in the early mid-sixties and proceeding thru the late seventies. Everybody's here who was anybody: Mott The Hoople, Marc Bolan & T-Rex, Maryanne Faithfull, Romy Haag, Wayne County, Cherry Vanilla, Mick Ronson, Nico, John Cale, Ingrid Superstar, Kraftwerk, Anita Pallenberg, Johnny Thunders, Stiv Bators, Brian Eno, Roxy Music, Patti Smith, and the New York Dolls. Sinatra and Bing Crosby make cameo appearances too.

Here's Iggy Pop on the old Max's Kansas City hang : "I was a kid from the midwest who had some exposure, mainly through books and records, to both the outrageous and the arts. I was aware of John Cage, I was aware there was a concert that had been given consisting of a woman playing nude cello while someone else beat the strings of a piano with hammers, I was aware of these things... But coming into that room [Max's:] was kind of like entering a University Of Dementia ... "

Heady times, sights and sounds of the never-before and never-again. Thompson sticks to the standard hagiography of Pop/Glam here: In the beginning there was Warhol, it was almost good, and even better with the Velvets as the soundtrack. The general idea became The Idea as one David Jones lifted a million outré cues from pop culture and created alienist & clairvoyant, doppelganger 'David Bowie'; even more unexpectedly, the Idea persisted to become flesh with circumstances conspiring to give birth to Iggy Pop, idiot-savant and world's-forgotten-boy ... Warhol is the grey (or shock-platinum) Eminence who founds the cult, Lou & the Velvets the greek-choir; wizardly Bowie triangulates the signs & symbols, and emerges as a different Other every outing; Iggy subsumes, encapsulates and proceeds to yank down the swish velvet curtains in the sanctuary.

As on this occasion :

Pop gasped, "I don't think I had ever seen so many rock critics in one room in my life, nor will I ever. If they weren't rock critics, they looked like rock critics. It was just wall-to-wall."
Pop's reputation for self-destruction had of course preceded him and he was in no mood to disappoint. Wayne County recalled watching Pop leave the stage mid-set, and pick his way through the audience via their chairbacks and tables, until he finally tumbled from his perch and landed chest-down on a table stacked with glasses. As he rose from the shattered mass, his chest was slashed to ribbons, with one cut so deep that, every time Pop moved his left arm back, a jet of blood shot out.
So he kept on doing it.
"It was horrible, like a Roman arena," County shuddered, but the show went on, Pop still singing even as roadie Bob Czaykowski attempted to patch him up with duct tape. But Pop was bleeding so heavily that the tape couldn't adhere to the flesh ..."

Enchanting times, lilting tunes, and a good day's work turned in by all contestants.