#4 excerpted from “THE GET QUICK FILES: CHOOSE YOUR OWN CONJECTURE” as remembered by Mark Question
The Heavy Roller Revival
1972 - 1975
By the mid-1970s, The Get Quick had become a band both reborn and unraveling.
Following the dramatic 1972 reemergence of founding member Erik Evol — reborn (again) as Erjk Vanderwolf — the group stormed the world with a string of combustible live performances and era-defining recordings. DROP THE BOMB marked both a welcome return to form and thrilling up-the-ante — which they carried on through the next few years — building to their feverish, road-worn masterpiece HEAVY ROLLERS, which vibrantly captures the visceral electricity of a band with every moving part in constant motion. But the internal frictions and physical tolls of relentless touring led to Coco LeBree’s unexpected and bitter departure, splintering the classic lineup.
March 1972
EVOL LIVES!
Ivan Chtcheglov, The Eiffel Rifle
Erik Evol, the once-and-future front-man and songsmith of the famed pop group The Get Quick, has reemerged from seclusion and announced his plans to record new material with his band-mates as soon as possible. Now using his birth name, Erjk Vanderwolf, the singer even hinted at the possibility of some warm-up gigs to take place in Britain in the near future, but specifics were not forthcoming.
As for any details of his life during the past four years, five months, Vanderwolf had no comment other than “Your guess is as good as mine.”
* * * * * *
April 1972
TGQ At Wembley (And Ringo Too)
Baroukh Fulsara, In-Time Magazine
Erik Evol has returned to the stage! “It was a religio-sensual experience. He [Evol] pulled the strings. He had the power. He used it. He blues’d it. He brought it all back home.” So reports Globe reviewer Alfred Perkins of the two concerts at London’s Wembley Pool on April 17th. These were the first The Get Quick concerts to be held in Britain for six months — and the first featuring Evol (now Vanderwolf), the band’s original frontman, since his disappearance from public view over four years ago.
The event attracted over 20,000 fans — plus Ringo Starr, who headed a film crew intent on capturing the event as part of an Apple documentary on the mysterious Vanderwolf and the entire TGQ phenomenon.
For Erjk Vanderwolf, the shows proved an absolute triumph — and dashed rumors that, since the accident, he had become incapable of recreating past magic. In truth, he didn’t recreate past magic — he exceeded it. Even before the first encore, the shows were already being heralded far and wide as “the concerts that changed the face of British rock.”
For Ringo, the night must have held reminiscences of his own former triumphs — he stood (or rather, sat) on the same stage seven years ago for the Beatles’ glorious performance at the NME Pollwinners concert.
Meanwhile, the other documentary on which Ringo is working (simultaneously) — concerning the popular models of London’s Fleet Street scene — must have also been ringing in his mind, as several faces normally seen on pages two and three of the most popular UK dailies were likewise seen cavorting with the band backstage after the show!
As a footnote, a spokesman for the former Beatle also told us that he is set to appear in an upcoming film (to be produced by a major studio) called Count Down, with Ringo in the role of a 3,000 year-old vampire who moonlights as a hip West End hairdresser.
* * * * * *
June 1972
Russolo’s Posthumous Album
Ernest Gabor, Le Orléansville Graffito
Owing to the wishes of former band-mates Mitchell Joy, and Coco LeBree, Cromicon Records this month has released a solo album of sorts by Reed Russolo, comprised of demos and personal recordings the The Get Quick member recorded before his untimely electrocution one year ago.
Called Sympathetic Nervous System, the disc features 13 tracks — including an “all together alternate” alternate version of his hit “Vegas Angel” — along with recently unearthed medleys, instrumentals and spoken-word pieces with backing music.
* * * * * *
September 1972
Rodgers Edges Out Others As “The Greatest”
Cheik Ben Dhine, Stowaway Camp
Free’s Paul Rodgers has been voted The World’s Greatest Vocalist, beating out Erjk Vanderwolf of The Get Quick, in this year’s NME Musicians’ poll. The Nominations were diverse — everything from Forties crooner Vera Lynn to blues guitarist Albert King!
Elton John listed John Lennon, Aretha Franklin and Dusty Springfield as his choices, while Rod Stewart opted for Maggie Bell, Paul Rodgers and Labi Siffre, and Ozzy Ozbourne went for Erjk Vanderwolf, John Lennon and Al Green.
Among the many others who voted were Bryan Ferry, Ian Hunter, Rick Nelson, Marc Bolan, Lou Reed, Klaus Schulze, Rick Danko, Brian Wilson, Lulu, Iggy Pop and Coco LeBree.
* * * * * *
October 1972
Get Quick Hysteria Down Under
Constant Nieuwenhuys Gardner, The Perspectator
The Get Quick have suddenly and unexpectedly been swept to a new peak of acclaim in Australia on the strength of their re-promoted 1968 album The Commonplace Pleasure Cruise and the single “You Are The Sunshine.”
With only half of the album tracks complete at the time of Vanderwolf’s 1967 disappearance the remainder were culled from Vanderwolf’s demos or re-created by Mitchell and Coco.
The ’Pleasure Cruise’s release unfortunately fell in-between volume one and two of the Amerikan Wranglers television series soundtrack albums which, by virtue of the diabolically savvy Vogue Mogul Productions marketing department, were heavily promoted and timed to take full advantage of the winter holiday and summer seasons. The result being that the ‘Pleasure Cruise, despite rising above its fractured beginnings to be one of the band’s most cohesive and engaging albums, has essentially spent the last five years as a semi-obscure collector’s item.
“I believe all our albums are classic,” Mitchell Joy reportedly stated to the Standard last Sunday. “They’re like sharks, or torpedoes. They never stop and they never go extinct. Even if one seems to miss its target, and you think it dropped to the ocean’s floor and is covered with algae... it’s not. It’s still swimming, still ticking. And eventually it will hit something, someone, sometime — and detonate with every ounce of the original energy and power we put into it. And believe me, that’s TONS.”
Strange analogy, but it appears he’s right. Now The Commonplace Pleasure Cruise — and its first single — have both entered in the Top 10 of the respective Aussie charts and are challenging for No 1 positions.
The band’s Down Under tour opener, at Sydney’s Baxterdrome coliseum, was a double sell-out — the 19,000 tickets went in just 90 minutes.
* * * * * *
June 1973
Silk, Smoke & Soundwaves: An Evening with Coco LeBree
Miss Patsy Drake, Verve Ozzazine
Darling, there are dressing rooms and there are boudoirs of the divine, and then there is Coco LeBree’s backstage sanctum, which is less a room and more a sub-reality stitched together from fragments of broken chandeliers, Moroccan opium dens, and the private train carriage of a Romanov princess who took too many psychedelics and survived.
There were at least six mirrors, none showing quite the same reflection, two parrots trained to say “bravo” and “don’t touch that” at alarming regularity, a Persian rug soaked in patchouli and nail polish remover, and—this is not an exaggeration—a velvet chaise lounge occupied by an Afghan hound in sunglasses.
And there, reclining amidst the incense mist and silk, was Coco.
Or rather, the Coco of that moment—long limbs like unwrapped gifts, a pink feather robe that might once have belonged to Ziegfeld’s most dangerous girl, and a mouth lacquered like a forbidden fruit in a fever dream.
“I thought you’d be taller,” Coco said by way of greeting, before offering me a flute of something far too cold and far too expensive to be Prosecco.
“Darling,” I replied, settling beside them, “I am taller. But I bend for beauty.”
And thus began our two-hour confection of an interview, a candy floss opera of philosophy, fashion, and gender metaphysics, all set to the tuning of distant guitar strings and the gentle sigh of an espresso machine someone had clearly repurposed into a theremin.
Coco, of course, was incandescent. They spoke of the tour (“Mammothgon is less a tour, more an astral procession”), of the band (“Mitchell’s in a spy phase. I don’t ask.”), and of sound itself (“It’s a ghost in reverse. A memory that hasn’t happened yet.”).
I asked about the dressing room. Coco shrugged. “I manifest according to mood. If I’m feeling Barbarella, the walls go chrome. If I’m on a Dietrich bender, more absinthe, fewer lights. Space is fashion, darling. Use it.”
And then — mid-sentence — it happened.
Coco, sipping from a crystal tumbler that looked like it had been stolen from a cursed Venetian speakeasy, began a story about a séance in Kyoto (“The medium got possessed by feedback... no one’s heard treble the same since”) and in the blink between punchlines, Coco changed.
The posture shifted. The silhouette sharpened. A jawline emerged that could slice through byzantine bureaucracy. The voice dropped half an octave and acquired resonance, the kind that vibrates in the bones of your misdeeds. Same person. Different expression.
I blinked.
“What?” Coco said—now a he, exquisitely. “Didn’t anyone tell you I modulate? It’s ’73, Pats. Get tuned.”
I laughed so hard I nearly spilled my Chanel clutch.
It wasn’t drag. It wasn’t costume. It was Coco’s entire ontological thesis in sequins and cologne. Gender was, in their presence, a question so irrelevant it became impolite to even ask it.
By the time the interview ended, Coco was somewhere between. A living hymn to ambiguity, in green leather trousers and a boa made of cassette tape.
As I left the sanctum, the Afghan hound growled appreciatively. I took it as a compliment.
One thing is certain, kittens: Coco LeBree is not only the future of pop, Coco is the proof that time bends for charisma, that beauty is a weapon, and that somewhere beneath the glitter and distortion, truth is dancing by itself.
— Miss Patsy Drake, writing from the softest corner of a very loud evening.
* * * * * *
December 1973
OZ OK’s TGQ
C. Lutwidge Dodgson, Outback Underground
Despite the recent rumor-mill, The Get Quick, who open their Far East tour with concerts in Honolulu this month, will be admitted to Australia after all. The band’s visit was in jeopardy because of outstanding warrants the New Zealand police had issued against Coco LeBree (the charges have not been disclosed).
The Australian Government, however, have announced that they have no objection to the tour, though China has banned the ’Quick’ums. It had originally been planned for the band to be in China for seven days, but they’ll now bypass that country and resume the tour in Tokyo on the 5th.
Prior to leaving for their Far East dates, the Quicksters managed to arrange a last-minute charity concert to aid victims of the recent Nicaraguan earthquake disaster. (Could this have anything to do with Mitchell Joy’s allegedly impending engagement to native beauty Maria Morena Bianca de Perez?) The show was held at Los Angeles Forum on November 5th and raised a reported $200,000.
* * * * * *
January 1974
TGQ To Roll It Out In ’74
Duncan Mills, Locust Bohemian
The Get Quick will definitely be playing spring gigs in the UK, claims Mitch Joy. These will follow the band’s extensive US tour to support their upcoming album, which opens in Washington DC January 18 and continues into March.
The Get Quick have been out of the public eye for the greater part of the year, spending the past few months mixing singles, editing their new film, and selecting tracks from over 60 hours of tape for an upcoming live album. It was because of these commitments that they were forced to withdraw from the UK Knebworth open-air concert during the summer.
The live album, tentatively titled Heavy Rollers, will be Cromicon’s first release in April. Planned as a double album with tracks culled from various dates on the band’s last American tour. Insider Georgie Purchase claims: “It’s 72 minutes of inimitable hallucinatory riffology ready for mass consumption. Whatever you do make sure you set the volume dial to 10 (on second thought, make that 11) because The Get Quick is, without a doubt, the most staggeringly powerful and dynamic band in the megaverse.”
The film they’ve been editing is said to be a semi-documentary that includes in-concert sequences shot on the same tour (notably at New York’s Madison Square garden) plus several sequences described as animated flights of fancy. Whether or not “animated” should be in quotes or not is unknown.
* * * * * *
February 1974
TGQ Seek Out The Good Life
Lucien Ginzburg, Cosmonaut
Spending the night at the Henry V is one of life’s great experiences, that is to say, if one is lucky enough to afford to do so. The operative word being “spending.” In each bathroom you’ll find monogrammed bathrobes made from the fur of the blanc de bouscat (known to find their way into guests’ luggage — which, upon departure, are rumored to be discreetly searched, with the hotel employees tactfully removing any contraband without a word to offend the offender). The halls are hung with Louis XIV tapestries, and the awestruck onlooker is forced to wonder if the Picasso in the foyer, is in fact, absolutely genuine. Bottles of Calvados distilled during the Napoleonic Wars more than a century and a half ago shore the labyrinthine walls of hotel’s cellar. It is, in a word, EXPENSIVE. Not, you would think, the place for a middling American rock group, still crouching like a weary lion on the threshold of unbridled fame and fortune.
The logistical ideas and economic acumen of S. True Smith are unconventional at best. The Get Quick will not make a speck of profit from this tour, nor did they from the highly successful American jaunt that preceded it.
“They have insisted on nothing less than the highest standard of living,” gloats a well-lubricated roadie. Word is, on tour, the Quick’sters and their entourage are connoisseurs devoted to the highest levels of pleasure. There are no ludicrous banalities like an antique pewter bowl of M&M’s (with the green ones removed) for the bass-player’s feet, no, their indulgences are bit more refined. And refinement doesn’t come cheap, bucko.
“It’s got to the point, you see,” explains S True, “where tours in and of themselves don’t make a tic o’ taffy. After all the band is constantly in a state of debt. A manager, or financial advisor, or a record company, has already sunk in about £35,000 from the get-go in equipment costs and subsidizing tours and recording. If everything falls into place and the band are able to keep it together, the investment could be recouped two to three years — with monstrous profits on the back-end.” Adding that “The big sums come from record sales, and tours are strictly seen as promotional runs to boost these sales.”
In Paris, as TGQ entertain a modest coterie of fans, they are shadowed by hawk-eyed record men (from Cromicon in Britain and Vogue Mogul in France) — all attempting to guard their investment and keep the merry band bereft of their characteristic mischief.
But the band has other ideas...
* * * * * *
June 1974
Doing the Spiral with Mitchell Joy
Penny d'Arc, Nexus Pop Review
“I don’t quite know what the Spiral is,” said Mitchell Joy, pilfering another one of my Rothmans with a grin that could start a fire. “It’s sort of…” He twisted one lean leg, mimed the pulling of a lever, and threw back his head in mock ecstasy. “You can do anything to it really. We were gonna get Coco to choreograph something cosmic for it. But the Spiral is everything.”
It is. And so is The Get Quick’s latest album, FEEL THE BUZZ, which Mitchell insisted on playing loud enough to rattle the windows of the record office we’d taken refuge in.
We met up at the Markham Arms on King’s Road. I had foolishly braced myself for a pouting art-brat buried in his own intellect, oozing obscure references and cold detachment. But Mitchell Joy isn’t that. He’s nervy, luminous, riddled with charm, and open in the way that only people who’ve seen too much too fast ever really are. Tall, dressed in a crumpled velvet frock coat over a tattered snake-print tee, he looks like a glam-clad starman left behind after a botched landing.
“He looks human enough, Captain,” I said aloud, just for the fun of it.
“But I detect multiple consciousness clusters,” Mitchell replied, deadpan. “I’m told I’ve got backup personalities stored behind my eyeballs.”
Or perhaps your dimples, I think to myself.
We shared a drink, then shared another, before getting giddy over E.L.O.’s “Showdown” howling out of the pub’s jukebox. “Jeff Lynne’s a crooner trapped in a UFO,” said Mitchell, “but I still think Roy Wood’s got more Sasquatch mischief.” Apparently, when Joy had DJ’d in Berlin under the name DJ Kinesthesia, he’d spin “Fire Brigade” every single night.
Once across the road—fur, flash, and flares flying—we got ourselves into the management office. Inside, massive speakers were already pumping the throb of FEEL THE BUZZ. “”Tight, right?” Mitchell said casually. “I even enjoyed it more than DROP THE BOMB. That one took months. This? Two weeks and a dose of Dr Watson’s Special Frequency Tonic.” He tapped his temple. “We play sharper now. Tighter. We’re psychically linked, basically.”
I asked for a track-by-track rundown, but as soon as Side One kicked in, neither of us wanted to speak. We just listened. Mitchell looked out onto the King’s Road, and I stared into the swirling abyss between the two speakers.
Whatever happened after that, must wait for next week’s issue.
* * * * * *
September 1974
The Get Quick Vs. Bad Hoodoo
Dom Michel Mourre, Notre-Dame Journal
They rioted just to get tickets for the earliest dates of The Get Quick’s US onslaught. In New York 60,000 tickets at Madison Square Gardens were snapped up in four hours after the crowd forced the box office to open a day early. In Boston they trashed the foyer and the mayor was so angry he cancelled the show.
It’s been a year since their triumphant FEEL THE BUZZ, and their new release, the rumored double-album STUNT OF THE CENTURY, won’t be out in time for the start of their tour. But there is no doubt that The Get Quick is the band everyone wants to see this time around.
Despite widely circulated rumors that malevolent effects from a recently activated voodoo hex are plaguing the group, nothing seems to be daunting their spirits.
“It’s not only that we think we’re the best group in the word — it’s just that in our minds we’re so much better than whoever is number two,” boasted Coco LeBree as he prepared for the first of three shows in Chicago. Not even the tattered throat that traditionally haunts him at the start of the tour can dampen his humor. But it’s not just Coco’s voice. Mitch sustained a broken finger when he trapped it in a door during rehearsals.
“It’s the most important finger for a drummer,” he pointed out, “the one that does all the leverage and most of the work. I’m still not really playing with it but I’m starting to master a half-hand technique!”
* * * * * *
December 1974
TGQ In Jeopardy: LeBree Quits!
Ernst Maxus, Voulut Entrer
Coco LeBree has announced his decision to quit The Get Quick. The bassist, who has just returned with the band from their 13th South American tour, commented: “I’m tired. I don’t know, I feel the need for a change — it’s time for me to move on.”
The group, currently auditioning new musicians, expects to announce a replacement for LeBree within the next two weeks. In an official statement, drummer Mitchell Joy said: “Coco obviously wants to do something on his own, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have that opportunity.”
As for the future of TGQ, he says: “We will continue, of course. But not before we find the right fit.”
Christian Hait, who has subbed in for the erratic LeBree on countless occasions in the past, would be the obvious choice. Currently on holiday in Switzerland, Christian suffered an unfortunate skiing accident three days ago. He’s reported to have suffered two broken ribs and fractured his left wrist.
Meanwhile Cromicon Records are lining up a Mitchell Joy solo album for the summer. Tentatively titled Pictures Of Mitch, it’s reportedly a compilation of “semi-polished” songs taken from numerous never-released sessions and live recordings featuring the drummer on lead vocals.