Can’t Control Himself: Deceased Artiste Reg Presley

I wanted to do a tribute to Reg Presley upon his death, but the single best paean to his band the Troggs, and to Reg’s own sexy growling vocals, was already written by Lester Bangs in 1971 — it can be found in the book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung from Vintage, which I urge you *go out and buy* right now.

Lester starts the piece by “calling out” his readers: “…You can talk about yer MC5 and yer Stooges and even yer Grand Funk Railroad and Led Zep, yep, all them badasses’ve carved out a hunka turf in this town, but I tell you there was once a gang that was so bitchin’ bad that they woulda cut them dudes down to snotnose crybabies and in less than three minutes too… They not only kicked ass with unparalleled style when the time came, they even had the class to pick one of the most righteous handles of all time: The Troggs.”

Lester’s article runs a mammoth twenty-seven fucking pages in the book (it originally appeared in a mag called Who Put the Bomp), and it is quite possibly one of the best-ever rambles by a rock critic about one of his fave underrated bands (oh, except for every other blissfully indulgent piece by Lester about yet another one of his favorite criminally underrated bands). The title of said piece? Why, “James Taylor marked for death” (with a short but effective plan to off “sweet baby” JT).

Lester left us three decades ago, but his writing is just as vibrant and enthusiastic now as it was then — and please don’t blame him for the thousands of pop-culture critics who’ve attempted his style without having consulted his sources (the Beats and innumerable poets) and without having a millionth of his talent. Reg Presley was equally unique, although he at least got 71 years to share his rare talents (and singular preoccupations) with us.

Presley died a week back in the same town he was born in, Andover, Hampshire. Lung cancer claimed him, after a series of strokes had only slowed him down (he was still on tour in Dec. 2011 when he got the cancer verdict). Here he is singing one of the Troggs’ best slow numbers “Love Is All Around” in 2009.

Reg (original last name Ball) came from a working class background and worked as a bricklayer until he was SURE that Troggs were actually taking off (i.e. had entered the charts). He had only one wife and remained married for half a century with two kids — a very normal life for one of the nastiest-sounding dudes to wield a mic in the mid-Sixties.

What Bangs taps into in his tribute to the band is the raw tone that the Troggs had. Their best songs have a provocative “garage” sound that set them apart from a lot of the other British invasion bands — the Stones probably were the only British group that bested them in terms of sounding over-modulated and legitimately nasty while selling lots of records (the Kinks and Who were far too well-produced acts with terrific lyrics front and center).

Reg developed other interests as the years went on. He patented an automatic fog-warning device (!), but it was only after his patent expired that it was used at Heathrow. He also became obsessed with UFOs, crop circles, lost civilizations, and alchemy. His 2002 book on these topics was called Wild Things They Don’t Tell Us. (I imagine Lester would’ve been pleased and amused by all this.)

“Wild Thing” was obviously the single biggest Troggs hit, but Presley didn’t write that one (Chip Taylor did). He did, however, write the very memorable “Love Is All Around” and “With a Girl Like You.” The line “your slacks are low/and your hips are showing” from “I Can’t Control Myself” got the song banned from BBC Radio.

Here the Troggs perform “With a Girl Like You” (a lipsynch) on French TV, standing in front of posters of James Brown, Elvis, Brando, and Dean:



The Troggs singles were very well-produced and grungy as fuck, but their vintage live performances were also pretty damned garage. Here they perform “I Can Only Give You Everything” for a live, screaming crowd:


In his epic Troggs tribute, Bangs goes off on these lyrical rambles about what the Troggs’ most carnal-sounding songs were really about. He imagines “I Just Sing” as a come-on sung by a depressed teenage boy on a date, “Give It to Me” as pre-feminism ode to giving pleasure to one’s partner, and “66-5-4-3-2-1” as being a nasty countdown to orgasm.

Those are Lester’s own discursive takes on these tunes (prob composed under the influence of Romilar, or an upper, or a particularly bright moon), but the Troggs’ best singles did seem particularly “possessed” of a kinky fervor:


The Troggs fit snugly into the category of “garage rock,” but they did also take excursions into psychedelia, despite the fact that Reg and his mates weren’t drug-oriented (they drank — and Reg once noted he smoked up to 80 cigs a day at his worst). Here is their trippiest hit, “Night of the Long Grass”:



The Troggs performed together on and off for four and a half decades, but their time in the limelight was waning by the end of the Sixties. At that point, they had an argument in a recording studio that became the infamous “Troggs tapes” (the plural is incorrect but it’s always used).

Presley later said that they were kidding when they were having that “fuck”-filled discussion, but the tape was heavily circulated in the Seventies, becoming a favorite among rockers and fans alike, to the extent that it is said to have “inspired” This Is Spinal Tap. I’ve never found the recording all that funny (it’s just an interesting chronicle of guys who liked to curse cursing), but there is one line that remains: drummer Ronnie Bond declaring that for a song to be good, you’ve got to “put a little fairy dust over the bastard.”



One of the hands-down best latter-day Troggs song was this nasty little item written by Reg — which does perfectly reflect Bangs’ views on the band being a bunch of sex-crazed muthas. It’s a killer and is very rarely heard:



Given my cinematic preoccupations in the Funhouse, the only way I could end this piece clip-wise is with a moment that makes me deliriously happy every time I see it. Two of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s three early shorts exist, and I am very glad he (or his mother?) preserved “Das kleine chaos” from 1966.

The film shows RWF’s debt to Godard and also to American gangster cinema. Its plot concerns three bored young people who decide to rob a rich woman. At the end when they discuss what they’ll do with the cash, Fassbinder devilishly smiles and says “I’m going to the movies” and then the Troggs absolute-killer “I Can’t Control Myself” plays as they run out to their car and ride away.

Music was always an integral part of Fassbinder’s cinema — I’d argue that the composer Peer Raben was perhaps his most seminal crew member, next to his cinematographers. He also used pop-rock from many countries, from Elvis and Janis to Kraftwerk. This sudden, unexpected use of the Troggs is the first example of his perfect use of music in his films, and I can’t recommend the short highly enough as a result — esp. if you like watching people who act like they’ve seen a lot of old movies, as with Godard or Mean Streets. The bit in question kicks in at 8:13:



I can only close out with Lester’s words about Reg’s voice (which he said was linked to “groin thunder” – Bangs was nothing if not a coiner of brilliantly picturesque terminology). Again, this comes from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, published by Vintage:

“Reg Presley didn’t have the Tasmanian-devil glottal scope of an Iggy, but he did have one of the most leering, sneering punk snarls of all time, an approach to singing that was comprised of equal parts thoroughly digested early Elvis, Gene Vincent and Jagger… the best way to describe it would be to say that he sounded raspy and cocky and loose and lewd.” Amen.

The Man Who Put his Art on Film: Deceased Artiste Nagisa Oshima

One of the modern masters of Japanese cinema, Nagisa Oshima left behind a legacy of great films. I will be spotlighting what has to be the strangest – and, yes, silliest – of his works in this blog entry, but I want to first sing the praises of this brilliant renegade filmmaker.

Oshima's passing didn't receive the attention it should have because, sadly, he hadn't made a film in the last 13 years and because his reputation these days tends to rest on one film, In the Realm of the Senses (1976), that wasn't reflective of most of his work. He was a political director first and foremost, but Realm was such a giant arthouse hit (and remains such a potent work) that his legacy became that of an “erotic” artist rather than a socially conscious one.

He died a few weeks back at the age of 80 from pneumonia. He had had several strokes that had debilitated him and kept him from working. He was born to a wealthy family (obits noted his father ran a “fisheries research unit” and died when Nagisa was very young). His political conscience was formed when he was at Kyoto University. There he became ardently leftwing and chose film as his vehicle of expression.

His first professional job was at the Shochiku studio, where he was an assistant director; around the same time he also wrote film criticism, like his French counterparts in the nouvelle vague. His first films showed the influence of Godard and company, as well as Nicholas Ray – my fondest memories of his Cruel Story of Youth (1960) are the ways in which it resembled Rebel Without a Cause. Here is a fascinating relic from that era, a 1959 short called "Tomorrow's Sun," which functions as a trailer for an imaginary film. The short has no subtitles, but seems to betray Oshima's fascination with, and need to mock, the accepted "codes" of storytelling in mainstream moviemaking.

As the Sixties moved on, his films became more and more political and militantly stylized (a la Godard and his colleagues in the Japanese cinema). The political message of his Night and Fog in Japan (1960) got him fired from Shochiku; he composed the film in only 43 shots, constructing a new kind of tour de force.

I need to catch up with a lot of the Oshima films from this period, but I really enjoyed one of his more radical works, a seeming step past Uncle Jean's La Chinoise, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1969). The fact that a couple have sex during a political riot would seem to have impressed Bertolucci (who has a similar scene in his Dreamers). It is a brilliantly disjunctive film that is available in its entirety on YouTube:

Other very important works from Oshima in the Sixties included Violence at Noon (1966) (which counterpointed the 43 shots of Night and Fog... with 2,000 shots), Death by Hanging (1968), The Man Who Put His Will on Film (right, 1970), and The Ceremony (1971), which is available in its entirety with English subs here.

Oshima's career changed decisively when, the story goes, the great French producer Anatole Dauman said to him, “Let’s make a porn flick!” The result was In the Realm of the Senses, which still is a remarkable, strong, erotic, and disturbing film, close to 40 years after it was made.

The film, about a geisha and a married man becoming involved in an obsessively sexual relationship, could not be developed in Japan because of its graphic content, and thus was sent to France to be developed. Most of Oshima's obits rightly quoted the statement he made at a trial over whether the film was obscene or not: “Nothing that is expressed is obscene. What is obscene is what is hidden.”

He won the Best Director award at Cannes for his next feature Empire of Passion (aka, “In the Realm of Passion,” 1978), a very good film but one that paled in comparison to In the Realm... (a notion that was true of most of his later works).

It was often speculated as to why he made so few movies after Empire – only six films in twenty years, two of them telefilms. After 1996, it was health issues, but between '78 and '96, it was clear that not only had he “said the unsayable” in terms of In the Realm, but he publicly went on the record decrying Japanese cinema (his most famous quote being “My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it” – although he had a very polite interview with Kurosawa in 1993, the hero of his youth whose films he later rebelled against).

He maintained his films were made “to force the Japanese to look in the mirror,” and with the uneven but still underrated Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) he made both Japan and England look in the mirror. As noted, his health declined when he had his first stroke in 1996, and he had several more after that.

While in retirement from film he reportedly became a talk show host on Japanese TV (no clips from this exist on YouTube, though). It was also noted that he translated books, including John Gray's pop psychology tome Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus! His final triumph was indeed Taboo, his last fiction feature made in 1999, about gay desire in a samurai school.

If you want to experience the best of Oshima, please check out the many great films cited above. However, if you have, like me, an incurable fascination with camp, kitsch, and general weirdness, watch the embed below and see Oshima's weirdest project ever, his next-to-last fiction feature Max, Mon Amour (1986).

The film primarily carries the stamp of its screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carriere, the sublime scripter who worked with Bunuel and Polanski and wrote The Tin Drum and The Return of Martin Guerre. Max is not one of his strongest works, since it is an absurdist satire about a diplomat's wife (the always elegant and sexy Charlotte Rampling) falling in lust with a monkey (a guy in a gorilla costume, who was “advised” by makeup expert Rick Baker).

The film is intended to be amusing and starts out to be blithely odd, but gradually descends into being plain silly (with a car chase that's straight out of a Seventies live-action Disney flick). I think the film slowly falls apart as it continues, but no less than Charlotte Rampling – in the documentary Charlotte Rampling: the Look – considers it one of the best scripts she ever read.

I have uploaded my short review of the film from the Funhouse TV show before the clips below. Please drink in the weirdness and enjoy. But remember – Oshima was a master-filmmaker who was not evidently trying to get something made when he made Max, Mon Amour....