The Tale Of Willy’s Rats

The Tale Of Willy’s Rats, by Mick Farren
No month stated, 1974  Mayflower Books

Unjustly obscure and unbelievably scarce, The Tale Of Willy’s Rats is a super-cool (and super-sleazy!) rock novel by a guy who was born to write rock novels: Mick Farren, onetime frontman of garage-psych outfit The Deviants, and later a solo artist and producer (he produced the great Think Pink) before turning his hand to novels and rock journalism. The guy was so devoted to the rock life that it’s believed he intentionally took the stage in July of 2013 for a Deviants gig knowing it might well prove fatal for his failing health – and his friends say his death onstage of a heart attack was likely the way he wanted to go out.

I’ve only known Mick Farren’s name in the past…I just knew he was a writer, one who appeared to have mostly dealt in sci-fi. I discovered this forgotten novel by a fluke, and I’m glad I did. It’s better than most other rock novels I’ve read, which makes me wonder why it’s so impossible to find. It only received this sole Mayflower edition, and good luck finding a copy. It must’ve sold poorly, as there doesn’t appear to have been a reprint edition. Why it was never brought over to the US is another mystery. Luckily a website – now defunct – offered the entire book for free download at one point, but more on that anon (after I’ve bored you with my review).

This is a fat paperback, 351 pages, and to be sure most of it’s composed of sex scenes with one-off female characters, with only the occasional tidbit about the world of rock music. It seems clear to me that Farren was tasked with writing a blockbuster in the Harold Robbins vein, and to be sure he hits his target better than fellow sci-fi writer Norman Spinrad did in the following year’s Passing Through The Flame. This is mostly because Farren sticks to the basics: this is truly a tale of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, with few pretentions toward being a “real novel.” That is not to say it is poorly written, though, or amateurish. I found it quite well written and certainly entertaining.

The cover promises a tale of “the most demoniac rock band ever,” and that’s sort of what Farren delivers, though honestly Willy’s Rats seem patterned after pre-Altamont Rolling Stones more than any one else, with a bit of early Alice Cooper tossed in for good measure. In fact the story, recounted by lead singer Lou Francis in his easy-going first-person narrative, seems to be taken from the Stones as well – the same origin story that most of those ‘60s rock groups of the UK had: growing up with a love of US rock and blues, learning instruments, dropping out of art school and getting a band together. And taking a lot of drugs and banging a lot of girls along the way. And perhaps maybe, in their drugged-out excursions into total excess, banging each other…!

Lou tells us his story from the beginning, with the framing device of a big concert he occasonally cuts back to. This part is told in present tense and appears to take place in late 1968. Farren rarely gives any specific dates, usually just relaying the era via topical details, ie the assassination of JFK, “the year of Bob Dylan’s motorcycle wreck” (1966), and the occasional mention of recently-released rock albums. It’s through the latter method that we learn the framing concert sequence must be in ’68, as Dr. John’s Gris-Gris gets a mention. However as will soon be noted, Willy’s Rats have a stage show more akin to the mid ‘70s, when Farren was writing the book, so I wonder if he was trying to cater to what readers of the day might expect in a “rock novel.”

At any rate our narrator, Lou, is, despite his tale of wanton sex and incredible drug usage, really just a regular (almost boringly so) guy. Which was perhaps one of the many in-jokes Farren littered the text with (some others might be that the sound of Willy’s Rats is “the Rolling Stones with a Bob Dylan influence”). Lou’s story will be familiar from any rock bio or VH1 Behind The Music special; growing up in England, falling in love with early rock and blues, learning to play the guitar. And learning about girls. I don’t exaggerate when I state that much, much of The Tale Of Willy’s Rats is given over to Lou’s recounting of this or that female conquest, and surprisingly it’s all a lot more explicit than I expected from British pulp. We’re talking the whole shebang.

Farren’s writing is assured throughout, with good dialog (even if he occasionally doles out scenes of inconsequential chattering), but he does make a few misses…like the fact that Lou’s first, pre-art school band is given more intro and buildup than Willy’s Rats is. We learn more about these guys and their in-fighting than we do about the later, more narratively-important Rats, and also get more glimpses of them actually performing. I must also note a creepy-in-hindsight bit where Lou collapses on stage at their first gig, much as Farren himself would many years later. When this first group finally breaks up – after an increasingly-disullusioned member quits and Lou gets his breasty girlfriend to screw the annoying and virginal guitarist – Farren introduces us to the members of Lou’s next band, aka the future Willy’s Rats, with much less fanfare. To the extent that only one of them, lead guitarist Jerry, doesn’t come off like a monosyllabic cipher.

Back to the Stones – Jerry seems to me a clear stand-in for Brian Jones. He has that same egalitarian bitchiness about him, cruel and petty but apparently irrresistable to the ladies. He also has a sado streak that Jones himself probably would’ve envied: Jerry is quite fond of whipping his girls or putting them through other tortures. A humorously undeveloped subplot has it that Jerry was a child actor and thus gets a large monthly allowance; Lou runs into him shortly after dropping out of art school in London and discovers that Jerry is an infinitely better guitarist than he could ever be; soon enough Lou drops the guitar and sticks to lead vocals. They put together a group, eventually going by the name Uncle, and play blues and folk numbers.

Along comes Jimmy Di Angelo, a gangster slash band manager; the boys have become too big for their ineffectual, smalltime manager, and Jimmy gives him the boot and also brings in a new rhythm guitarist and bassist. Now he wants a new band name. After reading Naked Lunch Jerry suggests “Willy’s Rats,” after one of the Heavy Metal Kid’s nicknames, and everyone goes for it. Personally I don’t like the name, but whatever. Jimmy sees potential in the boys, particularly that they could be “the most evil” rock group going, even more evil than the infamous Rolling Stones. So maybe Farren was using the Pretty Things as inspiration for Willy’s Rats…

Another miss, at least for me, is that Farren rarely describes what their music sounds like. He gives inordinate rundowns of Lou’s lyrics (natch), but when it comes to the music itself, we just get bare details. We know they do a storming cover of Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love,” and at one point they do a woefully-undescribed “psychedelic album,” but otherwise it’s up to our own imaginations what Willy’s Rats sound like. Eventually I decided that all their songs sounded like the Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out version of “Midnight Rambler.”

With Di Angelo’s connections the group plays gigs to bigger and bigger crowds (garnering more and more one-off female conquests, of course), eventually cutting their first single. Here’s the only real time Farren gives a peek into the recording studio, with Lou having some trouble getting a good take on his vocals. When the single finally takes off they move up into the limelight, and here Farren takes us out into Swinging London, the year now sometime in ’66. So far as the drugs go, the novel follows the same path as familiar from all those documentaries about real ‘60s groups: the naïve, almost innocent early years of dope, followed by amphetimines, followed by LSD, and finally coke – heroin not getting much of a mention, but doubtless it would have had there been a sequel, which would’ve picked up after ’68 and presumably gone into the heroin-happy ‘70s.

Lou is the trensdsetter so far as psychedelics go; he hooks up with a young London beauty named Ruth who makes more of an impression than any of the other female characters; indeed Lou tells her he loves her, though admittedly he’s flying on LSD at the time. Ruth though ultimately becomes just another one-off conquest – the Lou-Ruth relationship coming to a sudden end when Lou catches her in bed with Jerry – but she actually stays in the novel, becoming a peripherarl character who serves the band meals and sleeps with them when necessary. Humorously Farren fails to inform us of this, so that when a “Ruth” is abruptly mentioned a hundred or so pages after this ’66 sequence, I at first thought he’d made a mistake or that it was another Ruth. Only gradually do we learn it is the same Ruth, just vastly reduced in narrative importance.

But anyway she’s the person who introduces Lou to LSD (and also tells him about the famous psych club UFO, more of which anon); there follows a memorable “trip” sequence where Lou ponders love and reality and later grooves to “Tomorrow Never Knows.” This song makes an impression on him, even though he’s never cared much for the Beatles, and presumably it has an impact on the Rats’s ensuing psychedelic album. More focus is instead placed on the drug itself than the new avenues of creativity it leads the characters to. So rather than rushing to the studio, Lou concerns himself with introducing the other four members of the group to the drug. First though they visit UFO, where Lou gets a gander at the famous new group The Pink Floyd. There’s no mention of Syd Barrett, but Lou informs us that he is suitably impressed with the Floyd’s mix of Bo Diddley and psychedelic fuzz.

In these scenes Farren brings to live Swinging London, and I wish there was more of it. This was the one area where Spinrad exceled more than any of the other genre authors gone mainstream; his Passing Through The Flame is filled with such groovy early ‘70s detailing that it gradually becomes overbearing for the reader, despite its grooviness. And for that matter, it would’ve been nice to see more of the Rats in action. Instead much more focus is placed on them scoring with a variety of girls, some of whom they put through bizarre paces in their increasing drive toward sadism.

Lou tells us toward the end that he’s shocked people find the Rats so vile and evil, as to him everything they’ve done has been normal. This is also conveyed in the personal, chatty way Lou tells us his story. But the guy is just as bland as his name, and I feel that Jerry should’ve been the star of the book. This is a guy who doesn’t give a shit about anything or anyone and is just looking for the next high or the next babe. He’s the one who comes up with the group name, with “press personalities” for each member, and who also introduces the novel concept of a bull whip to their act. Further proto-Alice Cooperisms include makeup and garish costumes. As I say, all this is more “early ‘70s” than the mid-late ’60s in which the action occurs, but whatever; we can just assume Willy’s Rats were trendsetters.

The novel takes on an episodic structure as it proceeds. The Rats tour around England and pick up countless chicks, including a long sequence where Jerry picks up one who is into being subjugated, so he puts her through a variety of tortures, including an orgy. There’s also an overlong bit where they take a vacation in the country and Lou, against the wishes of his bandmates, brings along an old, pre-fame girlfriend who turns out to be much too prudish. She doesn’t even smoke dope! Even a trip to the US is rendered more in flashes of sex and drugging, with Lou relaying it all in scattershot bursts of prose, trying to make the reader as exhausted and disoriented as he is himself.

This does lead to one of the more interesting episodic sequences; the Rats get a letter from a Satanic cult promising to make them better musicians and etc, and for the hell of it Lou and Jerry go off to their desert commune outside LA. It’s all very Mansonesque and Farren does some good dark humor here with the glazed, dazed, and hypnotized girls on the commune. So out of it that even Jerry turns down an offer of sex from the robot-like girls! Unfortunately this part fizzles out quickly, with our two heroes watching a sacrificial rite and freaking out, escaping from the cult. I was hoping Farren was about to introduce a Kenneth Anger type who would become the Rats’s Satanic guru, a la the pre-Altamont Rolling Stones.

The framing concert sequence becomes more involved with each cutover; gradually we learn that it’s the last show of the US tour, and the Rats have been receiving death threats, each postmarked from New York. And guess where the last show’s being held? However their management – and by the way they’ve replaced Jimmy Di Angelo with a sort of Alan Klein businessman – is humorously unconcerned. And just before going on stage, Lou gets an impromptu zodiac reading from a girl who freaks out that his sign is Scorpio– normally the sign of violent death or whatnot. Farren ends the tale on a growing vibe of tension, with neither the reader nor Lou himself sure if he’s about to get his head blown off by some madman in the massive audience.

In 2002 the website Funtopia, dedicated to the work of Farren, offered The Tale Of Willy’s Rats for free PDF download. Farren himself blessed the e-publication, even writing a new introduction for it, where he admitted he remembered very little about the book. Unfortunately, Funtopia went offline in 2011 or so, but thanks to the Wayback Machine it can still be accessed. Funny story – I found all this a few months ago after some deep diving on the Wayback Machine, but when it came time to write this review I was unable to find the links again. In other words, sometimes I go so deep down these rabbit holes that even I can’t find my way back in! Then a had a rare lightning bulb moment and realized I could just search my Chrome history.

Anyway, enough patting of my own back – follow the below nine links to the Wayback Machine, where you will be able to download each installment of The Tale Of Willy’s Rats. For whatever reason the Funtopia folks didn’t make the book a single PDF document. Also be aware that the thing is littered with typos, some of them downright bizarre, so clearly there was no real editing going on. But at least Funtopia made the book available to read again; The Tale Of Willy’s Rats is much too scarce and obscure, and that’s a shame, because it’s a helluva rock novel.

Mick Farren intro

Pgs 1-37

Pgs 38-55

Pgs 56-77

Pgs 78-104

Pgs 105-135

Pgs 136-164

Pgs 165-199

Pgs 200-222

And one more link – here’s a great review of the novel from The Pop Music Library blog.