Danny Fields, the gadfly-entrepreneur of US pop and proto-punk, is attracted to “crazy people”, he says, and the dark side of showbiz. As a music manager and all-round trend-setter he helped to launch Jim Morrison and his California combo the Doors, Andy Warhol’s hip inhouse band the Velvet Underground and such rackety Detroit acts as Iggy and the Stooges and MC5.
Admittedly much of this music now looks silly. Perhaps it always did. By the time Morrison hit Los Angeles in 1967, like a psychedelic Frank Sinatra, the hippie heyday had peaked and the acid trip was no longer so fruitful or freak-out free.
Fields, born Daniel Henry Feinberg to Jewish parents in Brooklyn in 1939, is nevertheless no dreary advert for drug-induced excess. He is a recognised authority on Motown, for one thing, and has written a reliably good biography of the vegan celebrity photographer and Eastman Kodak heiress Linda McCartney.
With his antic appearance (wild dark hair, dark starey eyes), Danny as a young man seems to have fallen into the erratic genius category. He was not interested in making money but, following his instincts, signed up bands he liked. Drugs played their part. By his own account, Fields undertook some dangerous chemical expeditions to the mind’s antipodes in the company of, among others, a naked Jim Morrison.
Brendan Toller’s irreverent, feature-length documentary of Fields, Danny Says, fathoms the rock’n’roll underworld with all guns blazing. Having dropped out of Harvard Law School in 1960, Fields decamped to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, where he explored the downtown music scene. “I wanted to make some trouble,” he says. As editor of the teen-fan Datebook magazine he made much of John Lennon’s shock-horror “more popular than Jesus” remark, which almost destroyed the Beatles after American Bible Belt zealots took to the streets in protest.
Openly homosexual, Fields is a gossipy, amusing presence on screen. In 1960s New York he drifted into the social circle of Warhol’s Factory, with its models, musicians and androgynes of one stripe or another. There he met the German ice-maiden chanteuse and former fashion model Christa Päffgen, better known as Nico. A protégé of Federico Fellini, Nico sang alongside (the boringly opinionated) Lou Reed and, in 1968, was persuaded by Fields to record her Marble Index album, distinguished by its shimmering, doom-laden Gothic atmospherics and dirge-like harmonium playing.
Seven years later, in 1975, Fields discovered the Ramones at New York’s famed CBGB music venue, and signed them to Sire Records. Danny Says, by the Ramones, is dedicated to Fields, without whom (as they say) punk rock might not have happened.
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