Music History Monday: “Inappropriate”

There Must Be Something in the Air

Have any of you done – or anticipate doing – anything particularly foolish today, anything particularly inappropriate?

If you do, know that you will be in good company. Perhaps it’s the angle of the sun; perhaps it’s something in the air or water, because as dates go, May 27 is ripe with musical stories and actions that we shall deem as being “inappropriate.”

For example.

Coventry Evening Telegraph May 26, 1964: “In May of 1964, eleven 16-year-old boys were suspended from Woodlands Comprehensive School, Coventry, for having Mick Jagger haircuts. They were told by the Head of School, Donald Thompson, that they could return once they’d cut their hair.”

On May 27, 1964 – 60 years ago today – four of the eleven 16-year-old boys suspended from Woodlands Comprehensive School in Coventry, UK, for having Mick Jagger haircuts complied with their headmaster’s demand that they cut their hair, and returned to school. The other seven lads put their hair (or at least the allegiance to Mick Jagger!) before their schooling and remained suspended. According to an article in the Coventry Evening Telegraph:

“their headmaster Mr. Donald Thompson has said that he would not object if they returned to school with a ‘neat Beatle cut.’

Mr. Thompson told the Coventry Evening Telegraph today that he was not against boys having modern hair styles, but he did object to the ‘scruffy, long hair style of the Rolling Stones with hair curling into the nape of the neck and over their ears.’”

Thompson’s anti-Jagger, anti-Stones, pro-neatly-shorn hairdecree was handed down about a month after the President of the UK’s National Federation of Hairdressers declared that the Rolling Stones’ haircuts were “the worst” of all their rock ‘n’ roll colleagues. He then added:

“One of them [no doubt referring to Keith Richards] looks as if he has a feather duster on his head.”

Oh my goodness, how worried everyone was about hair in the 1960s! Was it inappropriate for the parents of those eleven suspended boys to send their kids to school in violation of what was a stated “hair code policy?” Yes, it was inappropriate of them. Was it inappropriate for the headmaster to indefinitely suspend those children at the end of the school year? Yes, doubly inappropriate.
At least those boys weren’t yet wearing their pants down around their knees, as they might do so today. Triply inappropriate.

Speaking of INAPPROPRIATE

The Sex Pistols in 1977: every parent’s worst nightmare

On May 27, 1977 – 47 years ago today – the Sex Pistols released their single, God Save the Queen,in the UK.

Now, if you thought I was going to label the Sex Pistols’ “song” God Save the Queen as being “inappropriate,” you are incorrect. Insipid? Yes. Artless? Surely. Ridiculous? Of course: it’s the freaking Sex Pistols, for heaven’s sake, the lowest, bottom-feeding punkers of the punks.

What was inappropriate was the reaction of the “establishment” to the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen and the degree to which that reaction made the song a cause célèbres. You see, after its release, the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was instantly banned from British TV and radio stations. Many of the workers in UK record pressing plants refused to even manufacture the record, and many UK record shops simply refused to stock and sell it.

We should all know what happens when this sort of spontaneous censorship occurs, and that’s exactly what did happen. The single sold 200,000 copies in one week, making it the No. 2 hit on the UK charts, just behind Rod Stewart’s I Don’t Want to Talk About It.

No. 2 on the charts, for what amounts to a total piece of musical merde. But certain rumors continue to circulate, rumors that have never been confirmed nor denied: that the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was actually No. 1 on the UK charts, but the British Phonographic Industry – the trade association that controls the UK charts – conspired to keep it out of the top slot. If true, that would have been most inappropriate!…

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