Mother of Rock: Lillian Roxon

“Mother of Rock: Lillian Roxon”

ONE LINER

Mother of Rock: Lillian Roxon shines a light into the decadent world of Max’s Kansas City, a tiny underground club in New York, and Lillian Roxon’s place in documenting the emerging rock revolution as it rolled over the US in the 1960s and early 1970s.

SHORT SYNOPSIS

In New York City in 1968 a revolution was under way in a tiny club called Max’s Kansas City. When Andy Warhol’s Factory superstars collided with the underground music scene at Max’s, punk rock was born. It would be the new sound of the world, far more influential than The Beatles. It was defined by the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls and Iggy Pop, whose attitudes and sounds still influence us today. The reigning queen of Max’s was Australian journalist Lillian Roxon. She was a music visionary who understood before anyone else how important music would be

in shaping popular culture. Lillian became known as ‘the mother of rock’ and celebrated the world of popular music in her book, The Rock Encyclopedia, first published in 1969. Lillian was a funny, bitchy, passionate woman 30 years ahead of her time – appropriately the following year in 1970 Germaine Greer would dedicate The Female Eunuch to Lillian.

EXTENDED SYNOPSIS

On her way to New York in 1959, a young Australian journalist Lillian Roxon, who’d grown up as an impressionable teenager in the town of Brisbane awash with American servicemen, stopped in Hawaii to interview Colonel Tom Parker.

Symbolically this would mark the beginning of Lillian’s passion for Rock’n’Roll. Ten years later, she was the queen of New York’s coolest club, Max’s Kansas City, and would write the first ever Rock Encyclopedia. Roxon lived close to the Factory and was friends with Warhol and his superstars and the rock crowd who increasingly flocked to Max’s to be seen and to hear the new sounds of Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, and the New York Dolls. At Max’s, Pop Art collided with rock and roll and ultimately gave rise to the birth of Punk.

Mother of Rock: Lillian Roxon shines a light into the decadent world of Max’s, and Lillian’s place in documenting the emerging rock revolution as it rolled over the US in the 1960s and early 1970s. The film features an amazing cast including new interviews with Iggy Pop. Alice Cooper, Germaine Greer, Danny Fields, Lisa Robinson (Vanity Fair),

Lenny Kaye (the Patti Smith Group) , friend Richard Neville (of the Old Bailey Oz magazine trial notoriety), her former boss Derryn Hinch, rock photographers Leee Black Childers and Anton Perich, and many of Lillian’s closest personal friends including Booker Prize nominated author David Malouf and film producer Margaret Fink.

Lillian came from a Jewish family who had fled Mussolini’s Italy for the suburban safety of Brisbane, Australia. She arrived at Sydney University in 1949 and immediately aligned herself with the anti-authoritarian, anarchist Push movement. She subsequently embarked on a career as a journalist for the tabloid Weekend, writing fresh and inventive pieces that would distinguish her as a forerunner of the New Journalism. In 1959 she left provincial Australia for New York where she became increasingly fascinated with the burgeoning cultural phenomenon of popular music.

In the mid 1960s, together with close friend Linda Eastman, she covered the British invasion of the US with stories on The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Danny Fields befriended her after a press conference where he was impressed by the audacity and intelligence of the questions she threw at Brian Epstein.

Danny and Lillian became the “king and queen bee” of Max’s Kansas City where they had their own table in the backroom staked out by Andy Warhol and his Superstars. By 1970 Max’s Kansas City was the coolest place to be in New York – patrons included John and Yoko, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Janis Joplin and Hendrix, the young Patti Smith, and the new sounds of Alice Cooper, the New York Dolls and Iggy Pop and the Stooges. Lillian and Danny ielded real power there — Lillian as the unofficial publicist for the emerging scene, Danny as the “company freak” for Elektra Records. In this period Danny convinced Elektra to release The Doors first single Light My Fire, and signed

MC5 and Iggy Pop to the label. Lillian energetically supported the new, championing the bands and artists she saw as fresh and interesting, and mentoring the emergent generation of rock managers, journalists, and photographers. Lillian mixed freely with both the art crowd and the rock crowd in the backroom, striking friendships with Warhol, Bowie, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop.

But when Germaine Greer came to stay the sparks flew. Perhaps they had too much in common. Both were brilliant young émigrés whose intellectual foundation had been shaped by the Push; both were popularising feminism in the media; and both were enamoured with rock and roll culture. The visit ended in tears. Nonetheless, a year later Greer dedicated The Female Eunuch to Roxon. Lillian was not impressed.

Roxon’s star had also risen with the release of the

Rolling Stone magazine declared, “It took Lillian … to recognize that rock & roll was not a passing fancy but the seedbed for a revolution in lifestyles as well as art… as such, it deserved to be properly chronicled.”

She was the unchallenged queen of the New York rock scene, and was soon hosting her own radio spot, Lillian Roxon’s Discotheque, syndicated across 250 stations in the US, and writing columns for the New York Sunday News and a plethora of mainstream and independent magazines. 

The long hours took their toll on Lillian’s health. Life in her dusty, stuffy flat could be lonely, and periodically she regretted not having settled into a marriage with children. The legacy of her all-consuming commitment to rock and roll was deteriorating health, mismanaged with heavy doses of cortisone which caused her weight to balloon. In August 1973, Lillian saw Iggy Pop and the Stooges play at Max’s. “Rock and roll is not dead,” she declared, “it’s moving in a new direction, and Iggy Pop, David Bowie and the New York Dolls are the harbingers of it”. Within days of writing these prophetic words she was dead. The soupy smog enveloping the city she loved had brought on an asthma attack

that killed her. She was 41.

Lillian’s story is told weaving together her letters and published writings with the testimony of rock celebrities and rock journalists, her friends and colleagues and with the complete support of and access to the family archive. The film draws on some of the best rock photography and archival sources from the 60s and early 1970s.

BEHIND THE STORY

Lillian Roxon’s story intersects an extraordinary range of cultural and social movements of the 1950s, 60, and early 1970s, domestically in Australia and internationally in Britain and the US. As David Malouf and close friend Aviva Layton recall, Lillian was a central figure in the bohemian movement known as the Sydney Push. It was hardly surprising that Lillian would find herself writing for Australia’s first racy tabloid, Weekend, where she wrote gossipy pieces on visiting Hollywood stars and celebrities and advice to troubled readers. According to Germaine Greer, both Lillian and she were dissatisfied with the constraints of conservative 1950s Australia and Lillian quickly settled on New York as her destination of choice.

Once in New York, Lillian fielded continual enquiries from her Yiddish mama about her marriage prospects, and found herself drawn to the emerging folk scene in Greenwich Village. She fell briefly in love with one of Clancy Brothers, met the young Bob Dylan, and like him, apparently visited the dying folk hero Woody Guthrie in hospital. After a period of freelance work Lillian commenced work fulltime as a journalist and would later cover the Nixon campaign in 1968.

But Lillian was continually drawn back into the burgeoning world of rock and roll. As Derryn Hinch, her boss at the Sydney Morning Herald bureau in New York, recalls, Lillian was almost messianic and prophetic in her belief in the power of popular music in shaping late twentieth century culture. She saw that rock music represented the growing spirit of rebellion and social change that was sweeping America. Working closely with her friend from Elektra Records,

Danny Fields and photographer Linda Eastman (soon to be Linda McCartney), Lillian started to document her ideas on music and who was important. This work culminated with the publication of her Rock Encyclopaedia in 1969 which,

appropriately was launched at Max’s Kansas City, the underground club which transformed from being a hangout for Andy Warhol and his Factory crowd to the groundbreaking rock venue where the hard rock sounds of the Velvet

Underground, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper and the New York Dolls rang out every night. According to Alice Cooper it was like a club, and he was there every single night.

Lillian’s story also intersects with the growing women’s movement and in keeping with her early experiences in the Push, Lillian was drawn to the work and powerful persona of her friend Germaine Greer, also on the brink of world stardom. Lillian Roxon, like Greer, was living and working as a single and single-minded independent woman.

THE PRODUCTION, by Robert de Young

Like most documentaries, Mother of Rock, has taken some time to come to fruition, and some of my earliest emails to Lillian’s biographer Robert Milliken date back to December 2004. Through my interest in rock music and my avid watching of both GTK and later Countdown, I already knew a reasonable amount about rock journalism and who Lillian

Roxon was, but I was very impressed with Robert Milliken’s research for his biography of Lillian which I’d picked up on sale. Once we’d made contact, Robert was both generous with his information, and clearly excited at the thought that her life could be realised as a documentary film. I was completing production on my Errol Flynn documentary, and as the months went by and I did further research, I was convinced that Lillian’s story was made for film. I was in the cafeteria at ABC TV when I ran into Paul Clarke who I’d known from my days at ABC Television, and I’d admired the work he did on the history of Australian rock series Long Way to the Top. We started a conversation that day about

working on the film together and eventually with the support of the director involved in the development stage of the project, Kathy Drayton, the project received development funding from the then New South Wales Film & Television Office (now Screen NSW). The development funds were used to record some interviews and to do some research in New York, where we found one of our most important patrons for the film — Danny Fields, one of Lillian’s closest friends

in New York and a man with an extraordinarily impressive CV in the rock industry. Danny was an early publicist for the Doors, discovered and signed both the MC5 and the Stooges, and later the Ramones. We also made contact on this trip with the rock photographers Anton Perich — who shot the wonderful super 8 material in Max’s that’s used in the film

— and Leee Black Childers.
Closer to home Lillian’s friend film producer Margaret Fink had demonstrated great foresight in donating Lillian’s papers to the Mitchell Library after her death, and this formed the foundation both for Robert Milliken’s work and for our own.

The support of the Roxon family and the Estate was enormously important and they trusted our judgements from the outset. I decided that writing and producing a radio documentary on Roxon’s Rock Encyclopaedia might further our

chances in getting the film commissioned. The project was pitched at the AIDC, but it was the continual support of the then Commissioning Editor at SBS TV, Anna Miralis, that began to assist us greatly with the financing of the film.

Doors began to open and it wasn’t long before we realised what an extraordinary cast of characters we had. During the editing of the film we were very fortunate to secure — after some time of negotiation — interviews with both Iggy Pop and

Alice Cooper. Their contribution to the film is enormous. More than anyone, it was Iggy who saw that Lillian was championing the tougher sounds coming out of NY where, as he says in the film, they were “raising the bar of thought” in venues like Max’s.

STORIES AND INCIDENTS, by Robert de Young

The second shoot in LA and NY ultimately yielded some of the best ambient material for the film. Helen and Paul shot super 8 footage, and for all of us, the time spent at the Chelsea Hotel where we shot many of the interviews gave us a sense of walking in Lillian’s shoes. Like Max’s Kansas City — bizarrely now the site for a health food deli – The Chelsea Hotel was the playground in the 1960s for many of the characters in our film, and it was a great pleasure to be able to spend time there and to share that space with many of the people who had lived life to the full on the premises.

We heard fabulous stories of Leonard Cohen meeting Edie Sedgwick, and being surprised to find her friend Brigit Berlin had glued herself to the floor of the hotel room. Each booth in the Spanish restaurant next door El Quixote – a favourite spot for William Burroughs and Patti Smith — has a story to tell of Nico and the Velvet Underground’s wild,

sometimes violent scenes, or Warhol’s “leather and plastic freaks” as Lillian calls them.

As the film progressed we also felt as if we were documenting the birth of punk music and culture — at least in NY — and people such as photographer Leee Black Childers talked to us about his drag queen friends Jackie Curtis and Jayne County who painted their faces with silver and glitter and dyed their hair with lime green or purple shoe dye and dressed in ripped clothes with safety pins. By night they would be in Max’s listening to the tough sounds of the New York Dolls, or Iggy and the Stooges.

We also heard many tales of Lillian’s family from David Malouf who’d been asked by Lillian’s father at one point whether he’d consider marrying his daughter. Friend Aviva Layton, then living in Montreal was Lillian was close by in NY, also told us about coming to the Chelsea Hotel and complaining to the management about the noise level from a band downstairs who were rehearsing – it turned out to be the Rolling Stones!

But some of our best insights into Lillian Roxon came from her own writings, and because we had access to private letters, diaries and journals, this material greatly assisted us in building a profile of this highly intelligent, rebellious character. As the age of 12 she was already complaining that nothing was happening in the conservative environment of her private girls’ school in 1940s Queensland. It’s hardly surprising that, inspired the style and ideas of the GI Joes stationed in Brisbane, Lillian started to look to America as her natural cultural home.

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Paul Clarke

PRODUCED BY Robert de Young

EDITOR Mark Middis

PRODUCTION MANAGER Lavinia Riachi

PRODUCTION CO-ORDINATOR Carolina Martinez Walkington

ADDITIONAL RESEARCH Danielle Brigham

NARRATOR Judy Davis

LILLIAN VOICE Sacha Horler

ADDITIONAL VOICES Keith Scott

CONSULTANTS Danny Fields, Robert Milliken

LICENCED MUSIC

“I’ll Make You Happy”
Composed by G Young/S Wright
Performed by The Easybeats

“Piece of My Heart”
Composed by Jerry Ragovoy & Bert Berns
(© 1967 Unichappell Music Inc
Warner/Chappell Music Australia Pty Ltd.
& Web IV/Sony/ATV Music Publishing)

“Good Times”
Composed by H Vanda/G Young
(© 1967 J Albert & Son Pty Limited)
Performed by The Easybeats
(P) 1967 Albert Productions

“Stone Free”
Written by J. Hendrix
(Pall Mall Music Ltd, Administered by Universal Music
Publishing Pty Ltd)

“Max’s Kansas City”
Written by Vernon Wayne Rogers
(Published by Sweet-n-Sour-Songs
Administered by Hebbes Music Group Pty. Ltd.)
Recorded by Jayne (Wayne) County & the Electric
Chairs
(P) 1970 Belcraig Ltd. trading as Safari Records

“I Am Woman”
Written by Burton/Reddy
(Rondor Music Publishing (Irving Music, Inc./Buggerlugs
Music Co.)
Administered by Universal Music Publishing Pty Ltd)
Performed by Helen Reddy
Courtesy of Capitol Records, Inc.
Under licence from EMI Music Australia Pty Limited

“I’m Waiting For the Man”
Written by Lou Reed

“1969”, “Little Doll” & “I Wanna Be Your Dog”
Composed by Osterberg/Asheton/Asheton/Alexander
(c) 1965 Oakfield Avenue Music Ltd.
Licensed & admin. by EMI Music Publishing Australia Pty
Ltd
Performed by The Velvet Underground
Under license from Universal Records, a Division of
UMG Recordings, Inc
Licensed courtesy of Universal Music Australia Pty
Limited
(© 1969 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. & Stooge
Staffel Music
Warner/Chappell Music Australia Pty Ltd/
Bug Windswept Music obo James Osterberg Music (US
Territory))
Performed by The Stooges
(P) 1969 WEA International Inc
Licensed courtesy of Mana Music Australia Pty Ltd
On behalf of Warner Music Australia Pty Ltd

“TV Eye”
Composed by Osterberg/Asheton/Asheton/Alexander
(© 1969 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. & Stooge
Staffel Music Warner/Chappell Music Australia Pty Ltd/ Bug Windswept Music obo James Osterberg Music (US Territory))

TRAILER: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHhMOMph1fs

by Ilaria Rebecchi

Related Images: