Apathy for the Devil (15 page)

Lester was equally unlucky in his choice of personal role models. One time I walked into the
Creem
house kitchen and found him in tears. He’d just finished reading a
Rolling Stone
feature in which Neal Cassady’s long-suffering widow Caroline had spoken
candidly for the first time about her life with her sociopathic spouse - the Dean Moriarty character in
On the Road
- and Jack Kerouac himself. The portrait she painted in words of the latter - Bangs’s most revered literary idol - was far from complimentary. She called attention to Kerouac’s inability to establish a healthy loving relationship with any woman, his terminal alcoholism and his hopeless mother fixation. She implied that he was basically born doomed. It was this revelation that caused Lester to weep so openly. He saw far too much of his own predicament in Kerouac’s death-driven depiction.

He didn’t do himself any favours in his choice of living heroes either. It’s no secret that he idolised Lou Reed to the point of obsession and saw the Velvet Underground songsmith as rock music’s most visionary iconic entity. A week after the aforementioned Bowie shows, Reed was booked to play a concert in Detroit and Lester managed to set up his first actual interview with the man and invited me to accompany him to the affair to act as his cornerman. It turned out to be an ugly spectacle: two drunks railing at each other over the glass-strewn Formica table of a tacky hotel bar. Reed was - relatively - civil to me but stared at Bangs throughout their long over-inebriated conversation as though he was face to face with some mentally challenged country bumpkin who’d just escaped from the local nuthouse.

Lester later wrote up the encounter in a piece for
Creem
he entitled ‘Deaf Mute in a Telephone Booth’ that’s since been reproduced in one of his two posthumous collections. It’s a vibrant, one-sided account of what happened that day but it neglects to mention at least one pertinent detail. Driving back to the
Creem
house directly after the interview had concluded, Lester was so distraught he veered into a garage by mistake, smashed into a
petrol pump and almost totalled his precious car. For three days afterwards he replayed what he could remember of their meeting of minds and fretted about the contemptuous way Reed had beheld him. I told him that trying to locate anything resembling human warmth, empathy and decency in Reed’s personality was as futile an exercise as trying to get blood from a stone. Then I bid him and the rest of the
Creem
corps a temporary adieu and boarded a flight direct to Los Angeles. I’d been entranced by visions of the Wild West ever since I’d seen my first Western at age six. Now the time had come to kick up some dust of my own within its untamed borders.

The first thing that left an indelible impression on my mental faculties once I’d debarked in the golden state and headed straight to Hollywood was seeing the profusion of palm trees poking out of the pavement on all the sidewalks. The second occurred when I actually walked around Hollywood on my first full day there and quickly discovered just how small it actually was. I was expecting a sprawling metropolis but the reality was more like being in a relatively opulent, sun-baked little village intersected by big highways.

Promenading down the Sunset Strip was all you needed to do back then if you wanted a one-on-one encounter with the city’s resident music- and movie-makers; within twenty-four hours of being there, I’d passed both Jackson Browne and David Crosby on the street. Two blocks away on Santa Monica Boulevard I found myself queuing one evening alongside four-fifths of the original Byrds outside the Troubadour folk club. Later on, whilst walking down the same street, I heard live music emanating from a shopfront. I peered in the window and saw Carl and Dennis Wilson with members of their current touring band rehearsing
songs for a local upcoming Beach Boys show. I must have stood there for an hour staring goggle-eyed as they worked up an arrangement for their latest single ‘Sail On, Sailor’, but that hour was my very own Californian dream come true. As a teenager the Beach Boys’ music had held me spellbound and now I was present in their idyllic stomping ground being treated to a private concert all of my own. Could it get any better than this?

Actually, yes. Four days later I attended the show they’d been preparing for and that ended up being my all-time quintessential golden-state souvenir. I think back to that night and instantly recall being surrounded on all sides by three thousand of the most perfect human specimens imaginable-a moveable Aryan super-race with surfboards instead of swastikas. I seemed to be the only audience member in the building without golden streaming hair and a golden walnut tan. It was like standing in a field of swaying human corn listening to the music of the spheres.

But golden visions aside, there was something deeply rotten putrefying up the state of California in 1973 and nowhere more so than in Hollywood itself: most of the time for me it was like getting to hang out in some biblical place of damnation with people getting stoned on drugs instead of getting stoned to death. The first week, I stayed at the Continental Hyatt House hotel with my Brit pals Silverhead, who were playing a residency at the famed Whisky a Go Go. Both buildings are situated less than half a mile away from each other on the Sunset Strip and most evenings I’d take the fifteen-minute stroll to the venue. Virtually every step of the way I’d be approached by extremely intense young people trying to sell me their home-made jewellery or trying to indoctrinate me into some wacky religious cult.

I’d already been around my share of ‘damaged hippie’ types back in Ladbroke Grove but their American cousins on the West Coast were a far more harrowing bunch. They’d rant on and on about the looming apocalypse until they were literally foaming at the mouth. And their eyes wouldn’t leave you alone, always staring as though they could simply hypnotise you into following their will. Charles Manson was safe behind bars but his many acid-crazed messianic wannabes were still pimping up the streets of Hollywood every evening. People living up in the Hollywood Hills all had fierce guard dogs posted at the front of their properties. They weren’t going to let what happened to Sharon Tate four years earlier happen to them.

Sartorially speaking, young Hollywood men still tended to stick to their end-of-the-sixties Neil Young copycat look: frayed blue denim work-shirt, dilapidated blue jeans, some native Indian jewellery around their necks or wrists if they felt like being flashy. But most of the teenaged creatures in the region were all over the freshly imported glam bandwagon like a rash on a wild dog. There was even a new club in town exclusively devoted to catering to their tastes: the English Discotheque fronted by Rodney Bingenheimer, a sad-eyed West Coast Zelig with no discernible personality of his own but an abundant love of all things English and celebrity-driven. Night after night he’d bludgeon the tiny mirror-walled dance hall with the shiny-sounding glam racket of Sweet, Slade and Suzi Quatro compelling hordes of scantily clad, barely pubescent girls to cavort suggestively whilst trying to stay aloft in their preposterous stack-heeled platform shoes. For jailbait connoisseurs and recruiting local chicken hawks, the place must have been a glimpse of heaven on earth, but it was really more like watching film director Russ Meyer’s
hilariously sordid Hollywood pop spoof
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
being re-enacted badly by a cast of pill-popping, conniving twelve-year-olds.

I got to know several of these girls during my stay - though not in the biblical sense, you understand. They’d start talking to you and never stop. By the time you got a word in edgeways, you’d been given their entire life history to date. It was always the same: rich divorced parents, no love at home, lecherous stepfather, trouble at school. And they were all blindly convinced they were bound for glory. ‘I’m thirteen now but when I’m sixteen I’ll be as famous as Marilyn Monroe’ was their personal mantra. All they needed was for Andy Warhol to walk into the English Discotheque one night and see them in action and - shazam - they’d be all set for their journey into the stratosphere. They’d fallen hook, line and sinker for that ‘everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes’ crap of Warhol’s to the point where it had become their ditzy, all-consuming religion. The sad reality: they were just lost, damaged little girls like the Jodie Foster character Iris in
Taxi Driver
- deluded broken blossoms who’d grown up too fast and had all the innocence and wholesomeness fucked out of them at too young an age.

I should point out here that though temptation often came a-knocking at my door whilst in Hollywood, I generally refrained from indulging in full sexual contact. It wasn’t a matter of personal prudishness so much as simple bad luck. Back in Michigan I’d managed to contract a urinary infection and a spectacular case of the crabs just prior to hitting the golden state and didn’t have the simple common sense to go to a nearby pharmacy and buy some lotion to make the two conditions disappear once I’d arrived. Finally I had my pubic hair shaved by a Japanese woman
called Flower who’d taken several tranquillisers just prior to groping for the razor: not an incident I’d ever care to repeat. She and her girlfriend let me stay in their Sunset Strip apartment for a couple of nights. They were strippers - serious hard-core girls but kind-hearted nonetheless. Her room-mate was often teary-eyed. Her beloved drug-dealing boyfriend had been offed by the Mafia just two months earlier. Compared to the glam-rock Lolitas in the region, they were generally more level-headed and pragmatic in their dealings with the outside world, but even they had bought into the ludicrous notion that fame would one day be theirs for the taking. Everyone living in Hollywood back then seemed saddled with the same sorry delusion. The poor things.

In the midst of this weird little fame-hungry, sex-crazed town lurked Iggy and the Stooges, who’d moved into a communal house overlooking the Hollywood Hills just three months ago after bidding a not especially fond farewell to London’s more limited nightlife. The Doors had been LA’s most acclaimed musical ambassadors of darkness and dread but now, following Jim Morrison’s untimely death in 1971, they were gone and Iggy had duly decided that he and the Stooges should assume the same creepy mantle. Hollywood really brought out the beast in him: the restrained, thoughtful young man I’d encountered in London throughout 1972 had been replaced by a snake-eyed, cold-hearted, abrasively arrogant trouble magnet.

He’d transformed his look too, dyeing his hair surfer blond and using his considerable leisure time to cultivate a luxuriously bronzed suntan under the relentless California sun. At first glimpse he seemed positively aglow with rude health but the tan and hair dye were really there to mask a darker secret: he was back on the smack. And though it had yet to diminish his physical
allure, his re-embrace of heroin had already tainted his personality, making him generally mean-spirited, self-centred and plain loopy. Iggy’s Hollywood persona was captured for posterity in a televised interview he gave in early ’73 to the venerable disc jockey and US TV host Dick Clark. Clark - clearly ill at ease with his subject - kept asking Iggy if he was truly ‘decadent’. The singer grumpily retorted, ‘Decadence is decomposition and I ain’t decomposing. I’m still here.’ But what about moral decadence?, Clark continued earnestly. ‘Are you morally degenerate?’ ‘Oh, I don’t have any morals,’ Iggy chimed back cheerfully. He wasn’t kidding either. Now that’s not something a sane human being would normally want to share with the rest of the world. But Iggy in 1973 wasn’t a sane person. In his mind he may have been voicing his private vision of himself as the American Zarathustra - beyond good and evil, free as a bird in mind, body and will. But the remark also bore the hollow ring of a junkie’s empty brag. Either way, his new amoral approach to life ended up making him few friends in the golden state and elsewhere.

In mid-March the Stooges returned to Michigan in readiness for their first concert on US soil in two years, with Detroit’s Cobo Hall booked for the 23rd of the month. It should have been a triumph - the hooligan Stooges, bloodied but unbowed, returning to the baying hordes who first supported them with a new album, a new label and new high-powered management. But it didn’t quite pan out that way. Iggy pretty much set the tone for what would transpire when he turned up to a live interview for a prominent Midwestern radio outlet a few days prior to the show. He proceeded to perform an impromptu striptease on the air whilst dancing around the room to tracks from
Raw Power
. The sound of his penis slapping against his lower torso was
inadvertently captured on one of the studio microphones and beamed out to radio sets the length and breadth of its waveband.

I flew back to Michigan from LA purely to witness the Stooges’ homecoming show. I remember Bangs, Ben Edmonds and I visiting them at the downtown Detroit hotel they were holed up in the night before the gig for a pep-talk. Iggy’s room was dark - drawn curtains, no lights on - and his mood was darker. Real success was potentially within his grasp once more and yet the prospect seemed to spook him more than stimulate him.

The show itself drew a full house and the crowd was raucous and welcoming. The Stooges played well - most of
Raw Power
plus two new compositions worked up whilst resident in Hollywood - and Iggy was in pretty good form but the set lasted not much longer than forty minutes. The group left the stage to wild acclaim and were planning to return for an encore but manager Tony Defries - who’d flown in especially for the concert - expressly forbade it. He felt that true stars should always leave their audiences craving more and that encores were beneath his clientele. This kind of thinking may have worked for Bowie but for the Stooges it proved a tragic miscalculation. The hall duly erupted in a cacophony of boos and catcalls when the group refused to return. Bangs nailed the whole scenario best. Shaking his head sadly, he muttered, ‘Once again the Stooges have managed to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory.’