Apathy for the Devil (16 page)

Someone threw a party for the group after the show in a swanky Detroit house that everyone gatecrashed. In the living room, many guests were glued to a large colour TV showing the Oscar ceremonies beamed in live from Hollywood. On screen, a woman no one recognised was dressed up like an Apache squaw and was talking earnestly about the plight of the Native American Indian.
Marlon Brando - we later discovered - had sent her in his place to accept a best actor award for his role in
The Godfather
.

One of those captivated by the spectacle was Tony Defries, who’d commandeered the most throne-like seat in the room and had just lit up yet another jumbo cigar. A guy smoking a joint nearby turned to him at one point and asked, ‘So, Tony, do you think David Bowie will maybe be handing out an Oscar next year?’ ‘No,’ Defries replied with a feigned indifference, ‘David will be accepting an Oscar next year.’

But upstairs trouble was a-brewing. Iggy was stalking the premises with narcotics in his bloodstream and malice in his heart. At one point a drunken girl made the mistake of trying to hug him and he bitch-slapped her away so forcefully she came close to falling backwards down a long flight of stairs. The party wound down soon after that.

What on earth was going on in this guy’s mind to make him behave in such a fashion? It was the drugs pure and simple: Iggy liked them but those same drugs rarely seemed to like him. Heroin curdled his personality and cocaine stimulated instant mental disturbance. Downers left him comatose and uppers sent his mind reeling towards insanity. But still he persevered, believing in his heart of hearts that personal substance abuse and the cerebral disorientation they promoted within him were the key to attaining full Iggyness.

Bangs shared much the same philosophy too: he was an ardent apostle of the school of thought that believed the more you pollute yourself, the closer you get to true artistic illumination. Plus Iggy had bought into the whole Antonin Artaud shtick of the performer only being able to achieve greatness by staging his own madness in the public arena. That’s what he meant by the lines ‘I
am dying in a story / I’m only living to sing this song’ that he sang on ‘I Need Somebody’,
Raw Power
’s penultimate selection. It was a prophecy just waiting to be fulfilled. He and the Stooges were about to be slowly ground into dust for the second time in their short career.

Finally I wound down my American odyssey by spending a week in Manhattan in early April. Like other feckless boho wannabes of the era, I stayed at the Chelsea Hotel - renowned for having played host to Dylan, Leonard Cohen and the beat poets back in the mystic sixties. Unfortunately its vaunted reputation masked a shabby reality: the place was a literal fleapit with cockroaches visible in all the carpeting and grimy sheets, busted mattresses and malfunctioning black-and-white TV sets in every room.

Little wonder then that I spent most of my time outside. The New York Dolls were playing a week-long residency at a local joint known as Kenny’s Castaways. I’d lurk around there most nights. It was like a tiny pub with a stage and room for no more than a hundred bodies to congregate. The group - playing some of their first shows since the death of their original drummer Billy Murcia - really made sense in this kind of low-key close-to-home setting. Whenever I caught them live on bigger stages and outside of New York, they were always a big disappointment. The pressure, unfamiliar locale and lack of easy-to-contact drug dealers would invariably cause them to play like a hard-on-the-ear train wreck in full progress.

But in a nondescript Manhattan watering hole like Kenny’s, their limp-wristed hooligan magic could be summoned to full effect. The guitarists still posed far better than they actually played but their new drummer Jerry Nolan had brought a much-needed
dynamism to their formerly clunky grooves and their singer David Johansen was as smart as a whip. His between-songs repartee was always priceless and he sang in a deep lascivious croon like Big Joe Turner sporting nylon stockings and high-heeled slip-ons. He was the brightest, most professional and most ambitious of the bunch, the only one you could imagine going on to enjoy a long-term showbiz career, if not as an inspired Jagger clone then at least as a credible stand-up comic. The others, though, were too fenced in by their own musical limitations. One evening they invited me to be a fly on the wall at a local studio where they intended to demo a new song called ‘Jet Boy’, and it became increasingly apparent as the session progressed that certain players barely knew how to even tune their instruments correctly. This carefree indifference to basic musical convention coupled with a shared state of chemical befuddlement would ultimately prove their undoing in the months to come.

Unless they were otherwise engaged, the Dolls could always be found every midnight doing their usual human-peacock routines at Max’s Kansas City, Manhattan’s most exciting nightspot. On the ground floor was an excellent restaurant and bar, with a private room for the Warhol crowd and other self-styled celebrities. People came mostly to get loaded and socialise but the most enticing part of the establishment for me was the tiny upstairs room where they put on live concerts. In the days I was resident in Manhattan I saw Lowell George’s Little Feat, Tim Buckley and Gram Parsons perform unforgettable shows in a space you’d have been hard-pressed to swing a cat in.

Buckley in particular was a revelation. I’d been a fan of his back when he was attempting a sort of angel-voiced jazz-folk synthesis, but he’d recently jettisoned that approach and hooked up
with a straight rock band in order to sell more records. He had a brand-new album out called
Greetings from L.A.
which I didn’t particularly like and so I attended the show with certain misgivings. As I’d suspected, his back-up unit were nothing to write home about but Buckley was so on fire that night that he didn’t really need any support. I’ve never seen or heard another performer use his or her voice as bewitchingly as he managed to do before or since that performance. The guy was gifted with an extraordinary five-octave range and he could summon any sound from his larynx - from a blue yodel to a jazz trumpet to a police siren. Take it from one who saw both live: his son Jeff was great but Buckley senior was greater. Women were just wilting in front of the stage whenever he sang.

The same couldn’t be said when Gram Parsons followed Buckley’s brief residency some days later. He looked bad-a vision of toxic bloat in ill-fitting cowboy duds and a boozer’s moustache - and his voice was distinctly frail. But inspired by his new partner Emmylou Harris’s rich harmony counterpoint, he slowly rose to the occasion and the pair duetted emotively on a brace of shit-kicker country ballads that normally would have sounded distinctly out of place with the glitzy demi-monde frequenting Max’s. But I looked around and the little room was littered with people who looked like they’d just stumbled out of a bad Lou Reed song, wiping actual tears from their eyes. That was Parsons’s gift: he could still break anyone’s heart with his music, no matter how fucked up he was or they were.

Finally in mid-April my money ran out and I flew back from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Heathrow. Once through customs, I went looking for a newsagent in order to buy the latest
NME
, a paper I’d seen little of in the past two months as it
wasn’t sold anywhere in America. Leafing through the issue I’d just purchased I came to the centre and found that a long article I’d scribbled and then posted from Michigan about my aforementioned encounters there with David Bowie was taking pride of place.

The first night we met, a young girl present in the room had taken a photo of Bowie and me, and when I bumped into her in a club a few nights later, she gave me the little colour snap she’d had developed. As a joke, I’d sent it along with the article to the paper, never thinking they’d actually be able to print the thing. But there it was - me and the Dame grinning and holding each other like a couple of New Orleans transsexuals during Mardi Gras - taking up a large portion of one whole page. My first reaction on seeing it was one of stark horror: after all, it wasn’t exactly the most manly image to have projected out to the general public. But it certainly got me more noticed. Blokes at gigs would suddenly sidle up and offer me a joint with the inevitable damp cardboard filter. Women in London nightclubs would wink and flirt with a more promiscuous air. Old people would invite me to open their local garden fête and big dogs would nuzzle up and lick my hand whenever I promenaded down the streets. Actually, I’m lying on the last two counts - but still these were heady times and I was twenty-one, unattached and soaking up every second with unabashed glee.

One thing I learned though: ‘Everybody loves a winner’ is an often-quoted truism but it isn’t - strictly - true. When someone attains success rapidly, former acquaintances often tend to experience pangs of excruciating envy that inevitably destabilise the ongoing relationship. You get your face in the papers often enough and rank strangers begin harbouring grudges against you
for no clear reason. It’s not all champagne and blow jobs in other words. Things can start to get nasty. You can quickly find yourself the victim of ugly, unfounded rumours. You’ll be in some bar and some drunken oaf will get up in your face, nail you with his spittle and beery breath, call you a wanker and offer to beat you up in the car park. Fame is a double-edged sword in other words. It’s great to wave around but you don’t want to be falling on its blade.

In point of fact, fame and celebritydom have long been the proverbial kiss of death for creative writers. Truman Capote was destroyed by the success of
In Cold Blood
and his heedless embrace of the American talk-show circuit. Hunter S. Thompson never wrote anything great after
Fear and Loathing
made him an American stoner icon. More recently, both Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis have seen their talent decrease at the same alarming rate as their global notoriety has increased. It’s elementary, really; writers by the very nature of their work need to stay lurking in the shadows in order to do the job properly. That’s where you can stand back and get the big picture. The more invisible a writer is, the better placed he or she will be to fully penetrate the subject matter. If, however, you get enticed into stepping into the celebrity spotlight yourself, you’re only going to make yourself feel self-conscious, and that self-consciousness will end up paralysing your creative perspective and leaving you bereft of insight.

My employers at the
NME
shared a different view, however, and missed no opportunity to push their writers further into the pop spotlight. I couldn’t knock it as a form of instant ego-gratification but it always had its share of bad repercussions. Charles Shaar Murray and I started getting unhealthily competitive
around this juncture. Back in ’72, he, Ian MacDonald and I had briefly bonded in a Three Musketeers ‘all for one and one for all’ kind of way. I’d crashed at Charlie’s Islington flat from time to time and we’d often shared each other’s hopes and dreams like young men on the cusp of achieving full-blown adulthood are sometimes prone to do. But that open channel we shared soon got dismantled and I’m still not exactly sure why the breakdown and ensuing animosity occurred.

My memory tells me that once I’d returned from the USA our friendship speedily soured. Partly it was to do with his meddlesome girlfriend - who’d gone to the same university as me. I knew her to be trouble and had warned Charlie early in the relationship that she wasn’t ideal ‘wife’ material. But he was too love-stung to see her shortcomings and my remarks may have been misinterpreted as unwarranted interference. That was the start, anyway. All I know is that from then on there was a chilly edge between us and our basic temperaments clashed so much that I sometimes found it hard to physically be in the same room as him. Looking back, I can see it now as a couple of juvenile hot-heads having a never-ending ego stand-off, but at the time I was still too immature, and none of the older, supposedly leveller heads at the paper chose to step in and talk real sense to us.

Maybe they liked the unfolding drama and thought that pitting Charlie against me would be a further sales boost. That was the problem, see: few amongst them - apart from Nick Logan - seemed to behave like real adults. There was an axis at the
NME
that was like still being stuck back in primary school. I’d sit and listen to them sometimes and close my eyes and it would feel like I was back in the playground again, watching someone get their sweeties stolen. These people were closing in on thirty and yet
they were still talking like they were thirteen in the head. I couldn’t fathom this at all because I’d not been long out of school myself and couldn’t wait to catapult myself into the furthest recesses of hard-core X-rated young adulthood. The fucking playground was the last place on earth I wanted to return to.

One striking example of this infantilism that really got my goat was the way certain staff members took such unholy glee in deriding Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry. Tony Tyler - the ringleader - had previously worked at Roxy’s EG management company as Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s press officer and he remembered Ferry often haunting the premises prior to RM’s actual formation. He even once auditioned unsuccessfully to become King Crimson’s resident vocalist. According to Tyler, he’d been a humble, self-effacing Geordie lad back then but recent success had spun his head into another stratosphere and made him haughty and feverishly self-fixated. He may have been right too but his decision to needle Ferry ceaselessly by calling him a series of ever-increasingly silly names in print was a spectacularly wrong-headed way of venting his concern.

This was doubly short-sighted because Roxy were really taking off in the spring of ’73. Their just-released second album
For Your Pleasure
was all the rage throughout most of Europe and - with Bowie spending most of his time breaking the States - they’d lately become Britain’s best-loved thinking person’s glam ambassadors. The
NME
needed them to keep expanding their weekly sales base, but Roxy needed the
NME
too in order to stay in the big media spotlight. That’s where I came in: the group heartily detested my colleagues but were nonetheless amenable to inviting me on tours with them. I’d once dubbed them ‘lounge lizards’ in a review - it was a term my grandfather used to employ
to describe the louche gigolo types he’d encountered in his youth - and they’d taken a shine to me from that point on.