When he's not spinning old-time R&B on Radio Patapoe, Bill Levy is adding to his art-porn oeuvre.
‘Where’s “start”?’ the radio presenter asks, searching the array of buttons in front of him. Eventually, he finds the right one and hits it. An innocuous-sounding 1950s bass line comes thumping out of the studio speakers, and is soon joined by a deep male voice singing rapid, rhythmic lyrics.
Re-mem-mem, re-member-member, re-mem-mem, re-member-member/ Re-mem-mem, re-member-member re-mem-mem, re-member whe-en. In the wistfully melodic first verse, a falsetto soars: Last night we fell in love, beneath the stars above/ That was a lovely summer night… It’s Tuesday at noon, and Dr Doo-Wop has opened the day’s broadcasting on 97.2 FM: Radio Patapoe, the last of Amsterdam’s squat-based pirates left on the air.
Dr Doo-Wop, 65, is a bit hesitant with the equipment. He’s still a relative newcomer to Patapoe’s cobbled-together studio—he left his long-time home at the pirate station Radio 100 after the authorities effectively forced it off the air and onto the Web last summer. He picks up the mike and murmurs over the music, speaking in the nasal, precise tones of the US Eastern seaboard.
‘Hey hey hey, mommy-os and daddy-os, rock-and-roll Romeos and Jitterbug Juliets. Doo-bee-doo-bee-doo, this is Radio Patapoe. Is you in or is you ain’t? Spend your lunch hour doing the bop with Dr Doo-Wop.’
Unobtrusively but nattily dressed in a black jacket over a tan v-neck jumper and yellow dress shirt, Dr Doo-Wop might be a teacher or a poet. His tidy appearance contrasts with the studio’s décor, which is pure Amsterdam squat scene: its metal door is plastered with radio benefit posters and countercultural stickers (‘Handen af van Irak’ and ‘LSD’ in big black crooked letters) and the beaten-up street sofa lacks cushions to protect sitters from its hard metal frame. Yet in his own way, Dr Doo-Wop is as much of an outlaw as any of the squatter types around Patapoe, even if most of his listeners would never guess it.
*
Sitting in his flat in a quiet street near the Vijzelgracht, Dr Doo-Wop—known to his friends as Bill Levy—is reminiscing on his long career in the arts underground. He recalls a scene 34 years ago. It was 1970, and he was in Frankfurt to publicize Suck, the infamous sexual-revolution newspaper of which he was then editor, at a sex industry fair. While there, he witnessed a ‘happening’ by the Actionist artist Otto Muehl. The aplomb with which he talks about it makes you wonder what else he’s seen. ‘There was a lot of fucking and sucking and pissing by two women. Then (Muehl) got a goose and slit the goose’s neck and fucked one of the women with the pulsating goose’s neck.’
Levy was impressed. He and others around Suck—a group which included the seminal second-wave feminist Germaine Greer, the English playwright Heathcote Williams and the Amsterdam artist Willem de Ridder—were planning the first Wet Dream Film Festival in Amsterdam at the time, and he thought a performance like Muehl’s would be an asset. ‘I said to Otto, ‘You must come!”’ he recalls. Muehl agreed to perform at the festival for the then-hefty fee of 400 guilders, on the condition that his host rustled up a live goose for the performance. Levy got hold of one, and the Austrian showed up in Amsterdam to perform the act again.
‘He was holding the goose over his head, about to kill it, when Germaine screamed, “No, no, stop!”’ Levy remembers. ‘And Heathcote jumped on Otto’s back and saved the goose. So Otto shit on the floor and walked away.’
Levy smiles at the memory. He opens a rare book full of black-and-white photographs of the event; there are many of them, and they must have been snapped rapid-fire. “See? Fucking. Sucking. Otto with the goose. And there’s Otto shitting on the floor.’
*
Pah-doooo/ Pah-doooo/ Pah-doo-pah-doo-pah-doo… For most people born after the ’50s, nonsense syllables and harmonies of doo-wop music are forever wedded to movies like Grease and American Graffiti, and Stateside baby boomers’ nostalgia for their own lost innocence. 1950s R&B gets little attention these days, except from anoraks at record fairs. But Dr Doo-Wop is no nostalgia nerd. He’s about twice the age of many Patapoe broadcasters, but he’s paunchless, and his hair is still, somehow or other, black. When he’s not spinning early rock ’n’ roll, he’s often writing about sex, usually of the transgressive variety.
From 1969 to 1974, he and the rest of the Suck cabal worked to free the minds and asses of the protest generation with articles on subjects like giving head and loads of naked pictures (including a very revealing one of Greer). Suck started in swinging London, to which Levy had sailed in 1966 on the Queen Mary after his then-wife landed a teaching job there. ‘We put out one issue and immediately the police started coming after Suck,’ Levy recalls. ‘They raided the building (where it was edited) on Drury Lane and started tapping the walls, thinking there was a secret printing press in there.’ But the paper was actually being inked across the water in the Netherlands. That’s where the British decided to deport him to, for being an undesirable alien.
Living in Amsterdam on and off since then, Levy has written scores of articles and stories, as well as a couple of dozen small-press and self-published books on such subjects as pornographic political cartoons and perversions from coprophilia to paedophilia. In the 1980s, he wrote about coffeeshops and radical Spanish politics for the cannabis-culture magazine High Times<$>, and also briefly penned sex stories for Penthouse. These days, he frequently writes poetry and expatriate memoirs for the Romanian-American writer Andrei Codrescu’s online literary magazine Exquisite Corpse. His most recent book is Impossible: The Otto Muehl Story (2001); the two have been friends since the goose episode.
Only one of his books has been commercially published in Dutch—De Vliegende Jood—in contrast to five in Germany. ‘In Holland, people say, “Don’t get heavy, man”,’ he says. ‘And in Germany, people say, “And then it got heavy and ve vere all very glad!”’ In the context of his work, ‘heavy’ might be best understood as ‘politically incorrect’. Has he published in the prudish US or UK? Don’t even ask.
But the British, who kicked him out so long ago, love him now. Near the door of Levy’s flat, a golden-winged phallus statuette is on display. It’s the ‘erotic Oscar’ he won in 1998 as Erotic Writer of the Year at the Sex Maniacs’ Ball, London’s biggest annual bash for fetishists and other pervs. That is saying something. He went to the ball, though he wasn’t expecting to win. ‘I looked out and there were thousands of people in leather and rubber strapped to crucifixes being whipped,’ he says, ‘and I thought, “Wow”. I lost my voice. I was overcome when they called my name.’
*
Back in the studio, Dr Doo-Wop picks up the mike and exclaims over an Isley Brothers tune: ‘Twist and Shout! Ooh, knock it on out!’ A filter cigarette hangs from his mouth; his knee shakes to the beat every once in a while, like Fonzie’s at the jukebox. He occasionally lifts the reading glasses from his chest to check a label. The brevity of the songs keeps him busy popping cassettes in and out; he’s a dynamic mixer, stirring in the odd snippet, like the drum-thrash and DJ announcement that kick off the Ramones’ ‘Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio?’
‘The show gives me a chance to create a character,’ he says. ‘The Dr Doo-Wop character. I mean, it’s no more me than any other character somebody plays.’
But what is the appeal of this particular character? What place did doo-wop and rock radio have in Levy’s youth? He would have been 18 in 1957. Given his literary oeuvre, one could be forgiven for thinking it might have something to do with sex. After all, Levy has written a lascivious short story involving middle-aged backseat hijinks that take place to doo-wop on a car radio (it’s easily found online).
Re-mem-mem, remember when… Once upon a time, William Levy was an all-American teenager in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, on the US east coast. And yes, doo-wop—‘We called it rhythm and blues then’—was the music on the car radio when he went on dates. He acknowledges that the songs tend to be about sex, even if the references are veiled by today’s standards. But if in his youth there was much back-seat rollin’ and rockin’ to the dooin’ and woppin’, he’s curiously silent about it for a man who waxes lyrical about his liaisons in writing. When Levy remembers doo-wop music’s place in his life, he talks not of sex but of radio, transgression, and the human voice.
‘It was my youth music, and no one else liked it,’ he says. ‘It was black music. It had to do with the car radio. You couldn’t listen in your house.’ He’d drive his parents’ car through the suburbs of 1950s America, picking up girls across town and taking them on dates. ‘At the end of the dial were these strange stations where you could hear these people going’—he lowers his voice to a bass growl—‘Hey man, this is Big Daddy!’
He can still name his favourite radio DJs: Big Daddy in Baltimore and Lord Fauntleroy in Annapolis (‘I guess he was gay, and he spoke only in rhyme’), and his all-time favourite, Jerry Blavat in Philadelphia. Heard on an old LP, Blavat’s high-pitched, frenetic delivery calls to mind a coked-up cartoon character (‘It was dexies (speed) back then,’ Levy says). Listening to Blavat, one feels like telling him to take a Milltown (a 1950s tranquillizer)—or maybe elocution lessons from Dr Doo-Wop.
Indeed, Levy’s love of the human voice is another reason he digs doo-wop. He indicates the goofy syncopated syllables booming from Patapoe’s monitor speakers. ‘I like this nonsense. It’s like (the work of Dadaist collagist) Kurt Schwitters; it’s like sound poetry. But I came across this before I came across Kurt Schwitters. When I was a teenager I thought they must have something to do with each other. They don’t.
‘There was a time in the 80s,’ he says, ‘when people would ask me, “What do you miss about America?” The only things I could say were doo-wop and bagels. There are bagels enough now.’ In 1987, he started spinning his doo-wop records on Radio 100. Born out of the squatters’ movement of the 1980s and known for techno, punk, noise mixes, and leftist political chat, the station was an unlikely home for such an eccentrically nerdy project--or perhaps it was the obvious place. The show was a home for doo-wop, but also a way for Levy to be involved with radio, which has always stayed close to his heart.
Dr Doo-Wop stayed on Radio 100 for 16 years, until the city gave its frequency to local community broadcaster SALTO. Some of Radio 100’s producers applied to get an official frequency, but they were refused and threatened with penalties if they continued. So they fled to the Web. But to Levy, listening to streaming music wasn’t the same: ‘You can’t read a book; you can’t make love; you can’t cook a meal.’ So he moved to Radio Patapoe, an altogether more esoteric and anarchic enterprise than Radio 100.
Patapoe’s usual fare, insofar as it can be described as having any, is soundscapes and mayhem, from punk and cut-ups to children’s songs, all presented in the best DIY, experimentalist style. As Amsterdam’s last anarchist radio outlet (Web streams notwithstanding), it’s a local treasure. In February, though, Patapoe came under threat: the telecom authorities showed up at a certain Amsterdam building intending to shut the station down. They failed to find the exact location of the studio or transmitter and left. But the alarm had been raised. The broadcasters collected messages of support and held a demo on the Westermarkt on 27 February. For the moment, things seem to have gone quiet, as the government considers giving stations like Patapoe official frequencies, and Dr Doo-Wop and the rest of the motley crew continue to broadcast.
It’s a fairly loose-knit group, and one young Patapoe associate is astonished to hear of Dr Doo-Wop’s past in the sexual underground. ‘But the music is so…’ he searches for the right word: ‘sweet!’
*
On the decks in the studio, Dr Doo-Wop snaps his fingers and whispers along to an infectiously rhythmic a capella ditty.
We-e-ell, I said: Come on cocksucking Sammy, get your money from your mammy/ We’re going downtown to the cocksuckers’ ball/ Fuck, suck and fight/ Till the beginning of the broad daylight…
It’s the hard-to-find ‘Rotten Cocksuckers’ Ball’ by the Clovers. Today, the Internet means oddball stuff like this is easier than ever to get.
‘Now,’ says Dr Doo-Wop, ‘I could go on forever.’
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