#Suzi Ronson

[musicmags]

[bandaidpennylane]

[littlequeenies]

‘I’ve been called a witch, slut, murderer’: the ultra-creative women dismissed as rock star girlfriends

Despite their artistic skill, Anita Pallenberg, Suzi Ronson and Yoko Ono were cast as mere lovers or muses. They're now being allowed to tell their own stories – even if it's after death-Annie ZaleskiTue 21 May 2024 11.46 CEST

In a 2008 interview, Anita Pallenberg swore she would never write her autobiography. The artist, model and actor was weary of publishers who only wanted to read about her intimate dealings with the Rolling Stones – she dated both Brian Jones and Keith Richards, and had an affair with Mick Jagger. “They all wanted salacious,” she said then. “And everybody is writing autobiographies and that’s one reason why I’m not going to do it.”

Yet when Pallenberg died in 2017, she left behind pages of a neatly typed manuscript, titled Black Magic, that contained her life story. True to form, she characterised these memoirs as “memory images, a traveller’s tale through a landscape of dreams and shadows” rather than an autobiography. But she held little back while chronicling her spirited and frequently tumultuous life, quipping: “I don’t think the lawyers will like it very much.”Read in a narration by Scarlett Johansson, her unpublished words are the backbone of a compelling new documentary, Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg. Kate Moss celebrates her as “the original bohemian rock chick that people still aspire to today” but more valuable is Pallenberg reframing her legacy on her own terms from beyond the grave. “I’ve been called a witch, a slut, a murderer. I’ve been hounded by the police and slandered in the press,” she wrote, before adding, “But I don’t need to settle scores. I’m reclaiming my soul.”Given how much ink has been spilt on the Stones over the years, it’s refreshing to hear Pallenberg share her own perspective on her experiences. She’s not the only high-profile rock girlfriend now getting a chance to tell their own story, asserting their place in, and influence on, male-dominated music culture.

Suzi Ronson, who was married to the guitarist Mick Ronson, just released a candid memoir, Me and Mr Jones: My Life with David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars, that’s a clear-eyed look at rock star mythology. Pattie Boyd, married to both George Harrison and Eric Clapton, was interviewed in 2018 by Taylor Swift for Harper’s Bazaar (“George and Eric had an inability to communicate their feelings through normal conversation,” Boyd said, “I became a reflection for them”) and this year she eloquently reminisced as she auctioned her memorabilia, including love letters from Clapton and handwritten Harrison lyrics, for a staggering £2,818,184. “The letters from Eric – they’re so desperate and passionate, a passion that blooms once in a lifetime,” she said. “They’re too painful in their beauty.”

Tate Modern, in London, is meanwhile celebrating Yoko Ono with a career-spanning exhibition, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind – a pointed reminder that Ono’s artistic collaboration with John Lennon was only a relatively brief part of her career. It shows how her artistry spans theatre, writing and music, but also how it makes space for her story to change over time – for example, the various performances of Cut Piece across the decades – and for others’ perspectives. Take Ono’s 1964 artist’s book Grapefruit, which uses short, abstract action items (“Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put it in”) to generate a huge potential variety of creative responses.

Among those was Lennon’s Imagine. In a 1980 BBC interview, Lennon said Grapefruit provided “the lyric and the concept” of the song, but Ono didn’t receive a songwriting credit until 2017 even though Lennon was aware of the oversight in his lifetime. “But those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho,” he told the BBC, “and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution.”

Pallenberg, too, served as inspiration for Rolling Stones songs such as Gimme Shelter. But Catching Fire reinforces the idea that even if sexism meant she was underestimated by the public, she wasn’t a passive presence or muse. “Neither Anita nor I wanted to be with them because we wanted some of their power,” Marianne Faithfull says in voiceover – she was in the band’s orbit alongside Pallenberg owing to a relationship with Jagger. “We had our own power.”

Faithfull’s power was her own music career; Pallenberg, who spoke several languages and worked as a model, influenced the Stones’ look. (“I started to become a fashion icon for wearing my old lady’s clothes,” Richards quipped in his bookLife.) And she refused to rearrange her life for the Stones. “No girls were allowed in the studio when they were recording,” she said. “You weren’t allowed even to ring. I did other things; I didn’t sit at home.” She maintained an acting career, notably in 1968’s movie Barbarella and 1970’s Performance – though her voice was dubbed out in the former: you wonder whether her “muse” tag meant casting directors underestimated her.

Suzi Ronson, a colour-loving hair wizard who brought David Bowie’s tomato-red Ziggy Stardust coif to life, also took a different path from other women of her time. She left a steady job and went on the road, steering the Ziggy Stardust tour aesthetic by handling hair, makeup, and other tasks.

Me and Mr Jones illuminates her part in helping Bowie crystallise his vision – and shows how fame and rock stardom corrupt. On a Mott the Hoople tour, she seethes while Mick, cozying up to a baroness, orders Suzi to find his hairbrush, treating her like an assistant rather than a girlfriend. It wasn’t the only time she was underestimated. “I’m now the pathetic girlfriend, clinging on to my man, a position I never thought I’d find myself in,” she writes after joining Mick on tour with Bob Dylan for a few days, after not being invited. “I try to be understanding, but truthfully I’m infuriated at being left out.”

These new works also highlight how each woman, at a time when women struggled to “have it all”, cultivated agency through one of the only paths open to them: motherhood. Rather than being something limiting, becoming mothers allowed them to reinvent their lives. Suzi Ronson, long out of Bowie’s orbit and living in England with her parents after giving birth, reflects that “the life I created for myself has disappeared, and my career with it,” she writes, but her daughter brings joy and solace – and encourages her to stay optimistic and keep striving for a unique path. “As I push her around the same streets my mother used to push me, I swear to her: this isn’t going to be it, and I pray I’m right.” Ronson closes the loop by noting that she and Mick return to the US, living in the singer Maria Muldaur’s house and finding equilibrium.

Ono confronted motherhood’s messiness. Her installation My Mommy Was Beautiful used photos of breasts and vaginas to demystify birth and celebrate the strength of the body, and the 1969 song Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for a Hand in the Snow) – which Yoko wrote for her young daughter Kyoko – conveys primal agony and frustration. “Society’s myth is that all women are supposed to love having children,” Ono said in 1981. “But that was a myth. So there was Kyoko, and I did become attached to her and had great love for her, but at the same time, I was still struggling to get my own space in the world. I felt that if l didn’t have room for myself, how could I give room to another human being?”

Pallenberg also navigates this conundrum. Jake Weber, the actor son of notorious Stones associate Tommy Weber, becomes visibly emotional when talking about how “generous and funny” Pallenberg was to him after his mother died in 1971, during the Stones’ debauched French summer. “She filled a vacuum of a surrogate parent,” he said. “She was lovely like that. Her thing was trying to give us joy.” Catching Fire also visits the agonising fallout of the sudden June 1976 death of Pallenberg’s 10-week-old son Tara.

Pallenberg has the last word in Catching Fire, and her conclusion illustrates the importance of women directing their own narratives. “Writing this has helped me emerge in my own eyes,” she noted. “Reading over what I’ve written, I get a lump in my throat. But it doesn’t need to be a doom and gloom kind of story.” The film makes it clear that Pallenberg’s chief power was, ultimately, resilience, which she needed during an often-challenging life (she lived with various addictions, including to heroin and alcohol) and several tragic events, such as when a 17-year-old shot and killed himself in Richards’ bed.

“I felt like some nasty person who caused death and destruction around her,” Pallenberg said after the 1979 incident, but Catching Fire refuses to let Pallenberg become a tragic figure or cautionary tale. The film ends noting that she got sober, graduated from college, and aged with iconoclastic gusto. The lessons are clear – redemption is possible and we are not our worst moments – while also reinforcing what we miss when women’s voices are silenced or ignored. Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, directed by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill is in UK and Irish cinemas now

[demolition-lesbians]

Rolling Stone #1119 December 9, 2010 - The Playlist Issue

(click for better quality) Here's the playlist if you want to take a listen! Transcript:

Gerard Way: Glam Rock

My Chemical Romance's frontman grew up a metalhead, but when he heard Iron Maiden's lead singer, Bruce Dickinson, cover Mott the Hoople's "All the Young Dudes," he discovered a whole other world, "I knew I had to find out more," Way says, "To some people, glam is just about makeup. To me, it's a very magical thing almost like witchcraft."

1: "Ziggy Stardust" David Bowie, 1972

This song defines glam. It was also the first thing in rock that really challenged people's notions of sexual orientation. Bowie actually sings about a man's ass! 2: "Children of the Revolution" T. Rex, 1972

You always knew Bowie would make it out alive and turn into another character; with Marc Bolan you didn't know that. He came across as very vulnerable. 3: "All the Young Dudes" Mott the Hoople, 1972

This is kind of a cheat because David Bowie wrote it for them, but I always preferred the Mott the Hoople version. By this point, Bowie was talking about the actual glam movement, which is why it's about kids stealing makeup and breaking into unlocked cars. Glam became about the kid in the room, the poster on the wall, putting on a women's short fur coat and eyeliner, with no shirt on, just listening to this music. 4: "Ballroom Blitz" Sweet, 1973

They completely break the fourth wall when the song opens up and they're calling each other by name. We emulated that on our song "Vampire Money." It literally starts out just like "Ballroom Blitz" does. 5: "Cum On Feel the Noize" Slade, 1973

Obviously, everybody knows this for the Quiet Riot version, but when you hear the original you realize just how bold it is. The soundscape they created is probably one of the best out of all the glam-rock bands. 6: "Love Is the Drug" Roxy Music, 1975

Roxy Music took the glam thing and then modified it. Bryan Ferry looks nothing like a glam artist, and that's what I love about him. He's wearing this great suit and he's got short hair and he's so romantic. Maybe some people wouldn't consider Roxy Music a glam band, but I do, for a lot of reasons. A major one is that they used to have Brian Eno behind the keyboard wearing feathers on his shoulders and eye shadow.

7: "Needles in the Camel's Eye" Brian Eno, 1974

Speaking of Eno, this is the first track on his first solo album. It's the glammiest track on the record. As soon as he finishes that song, he's almost over it, and he's moved on to something else. Besides Bowie, Eno is still the most important artist to me of the glam scene. When you heard his first album, you knew it was gonna be his last glam record. He just needed to do it once and he was done. 8: "Clones (We're All)" Alice Cooper, 1980

With "Clones," Alice Cooper was moving into the glam of the future, like this kind of Blade Runner replicant version of glam. Alice Cooper doesn't get enough credit for being a glam artist. A lot of people just say, "Oh, he's shock rock," but I think he's way more Rocky Horror than he is shock rock. 9: "48 Crash" Suzi Quatro, 1973

She's the most unsung glam rocker. She's also the prototype for the Runaways. "48 Crash" is one of her more aggressive songs. She looks amazing on the cover, wearing this black cat suit. Everything about the song is magic. 10: "Personality Crisis" New York Dolls, 1973

They were a lot more punk, but I will always consider the New York Dolls glam by the nature of how they looked and their attitude. They took glam to America and really challenged the sexuality of it. They also had Johnny Thunders, who's basically like the American Mick Ronson.

[msamba]

BBC World Service - Outlook, From suburbia to stardom: I created Ziggy Stardust's hair

The chance encounter that led Suzi Ronson to style David Bowie’s iconic look Suzi Ronson always dreamt of adventure growing up in the suburbs of 1960s London. That dream came true when a chance encounter with David Bowie’s wife Angie led Suzi to the job of a lifetime. The haircut she gave David Bowie would form part of the iconic look of his alter ego Ziggy Stardust, catapulting Bowie to…

[jo163]

Bowie & Suzi Ronson 🖤

[phoenixnull11]

TW: Me and Mr. Jones by Suzi Ronson

David Bowie sounds like a serial sexual creep and I'm so disappointed Suzi Ronson thought introducing young starstruck boys and girls to him was anything other than exploitative. I briefly felt sorry for her after watching the Mick Ronson documentary. Certainly don't anymore.

[mondoradiowmse]

01/17/24 Mondo Radio Playlist

Here's the playlist for this week's edition of Mondo Radio, which you can download or stream here. This episode: "Have a Ball", featuring classic glam rock and more. If you enjoy it, don't forget to also follow the show on Facebook and Twitter!

Artist - Song - Album

David Bowie - Moonage Daydream - The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars

David Bowie - Suffragette City - The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars

Sweet - Ballroom Blitz - The Best Of Sweet

Sweet - Action (U.S. Single Version) - The Best Of Sweet

Slade - Get Down And Get With It - Get Yer Boots On: The Best Of Slade

Slade - Cum On Feel The Noize - Get Yer Boots On: The Best Of Slade

Wizzard - You Can Dance The Rock 'N' Roll - Wizzard Brew

Wizzard - Wear A Fast Gun - Wizzard Brew

Cockney Rebel - Hideaway - The Human Menagerie

Cockney Rebel - What Ruthy Said - The Human Menagerie

T. Rex - Mambo Sun - Electric Warrior

T. Rex - Life's A Gas - Electric Warrior

Phil Barry - Hello I Love You (Inst.) - Hello I Love You (Single)

Mick Ronson - Growing Up And I'm Fine - Slaughter On 10th Avenue

Mott The Hoople - All The Young Dudes - All The Young Dudes

Mott - Broadside Outcasts - Shouting & Pointing

Mud - Rocket - Mud Rock

Bay City Rollers - Saturday Night - The Definitive Collection

The Glitter Band - Let's Get Together Again - Rock 'N Roll Dudes

Elton John - Open-End Interview With Elton John: Soundtrack - 'Friends' (III) - An Open-End Interview With Elton John: "Friends" Soundtrack

Suzi Quatro - Shine My Machine - Suzi Quatro

The Runaways - Rock And Roll - The Runaways

New York Dolls - Looking For A Kiss - New York Dolls

New York Dolls - Trash - New York Dolls

Jobriath - Good Time - Creatures Of The Street

Jobriath - Ooh La La - Creatures Of The Street

Lou Reed - Vicious - Transformer

Lou Reed - Hangin' 'Round - Transformer

Roxy Music - Virginia Plain - Roxy Music

Roxy Music - If There Is Something - Roxy Music

Eno - Baby's On Fire - Here Come The Warm Jets

Eno - Cindy Tells Me - Here Come The Warm Jets

Queen - Killer Queen - Sheer Heart Attack

Richard O'Brien - Science Fiction/Double Feature: Reprise - The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Original Soundtrack)

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Delilah (Live, The Old Grey Whistle Test 30/05/1975) - Live At The BBC

Sparks - Bon Voyage - Propaganda

[thehorne73]

I’m searching for information on behalf of Suzi Ronson - Mick Ronson’s wife. She would like to use the photo that is here, sitting and smiling. Are you or your father the owner of this photo? Any information would be appreciated that could lead to making contact with the owner of this photo. many thanks. alanhorne73@yahoo.co.uk

“I found this photo in the ‘80’s when I was clearing out packets of photos that hadn’t been collected for years from my dad’s camera shop. There’s a few others but this is the clearest one of David Bowie from his tour bus. He lived in the same town, not that I ever saw him wandering around”

[twixnmix]

David Bowie being dressed by Angie Bowie and Suzi Ronson. Bowie performed for the last time as Ziggy Stardust at the Marquee club during a three night filming session of ‘The 1980 Floor Show’ in London on October 19, 1973.

Photos by Terry O’Neill

[bandaidpennylane]

[clivearrowsmith]

Mick Ronson - The Nicest Man Who Fell To Earth

Mick Ronson – The Nicest Man Who Fell To Earth

I first met Mick Ronson’s when I was photographing Mott The Hoopleat a Chelsea studio in London in 1972. Although I was photographing the whole band I was struck by Mick’s classical Byronesque looks so I asked him if he would mind if I took some solo portraits after we finished the band shoot. He just said “fine” in his very reserved way and the result was the above portrait. Looking back at the…

[jaynedolluk]

Last few weekends of the Times included interviews w/Bruce Dickinson, The Liverbirds, Bananarama, Cyndi Lauper, Maisie Williams, Michael Sheen and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. Plus an extract from Suzi Ronson's new book about her time working with David Bowie.

There were also features on the rise in fantasy romances (particularly those being written/read by women), politics of girl band styling and Biba (as a new exhibition is opening soon - I've always loved the Biba style + I wish I could have shopped there back in the early 70s).

Also had reviews of The New Look, Alice + Jack, Expats, Masters of the Air, Sexy Beast, One Day, The Jury: Murder Trial, Shogun and The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin.

[coolhandlook]

2018:38 — Beside Bowie: The Mick Ronson Story

(2017 - Jon Brewer) ***