Apathy for the Devil (18 page)

We kept getting closer until we were practically stuck together like glue. As the room we shared was a bit of a dump, we mostly floated around the night-time streets of London - sometimes going to gigs or taking in a late-night film but otherwise always on the move. The heels on our boots were always looking worn-down because of this restless trait. We seemed to share the same wacky belief that the more you walk around a place, the more it becomes your own personal fiefdom. It was sublime because at that point in time we were totally in sync with each other. It was like having a twin, only better because of the deep romantic attachment growing between us.

Meanwhile, the summer of ’73 came and went without much pomp and circumstance. London was still the centre of the pop universe but there weren’t many interesting new bands turning up on the local grass-roots club circuit. In retaliation, several London pubs began booking live rock acts in order to drum up more customers for their liquor and a new phenomenon was duly sired: pub rock.

Mostly it was the province of ugly blokes who dressed like roadies and played old Chuck Berry songs badly. But there was
one band who stood out from the rest as a demented harbinger of things to come and they called themselves Kilburn and the High Roads. Throughout the autumn, Chrissie and I saw them on a succession of dilapidated pub stages, plying their trade to a tiny clique of admirers. The singer and drummer were both physically deformed, another member was a midget and the rest of the line-up looked as though they’d walked out of some fifties Ealing comedy about clueless East End spivs. Their music wasn’t rock so much as a vaguely menacing
mélange
of cockney music hall and roots reggae, and it was far too wilfully eccentric to ever find favour with mainstream tastes of the hour, but I still wrote a glowing critique of their unique attributes in an
NME
article that autumn garlanded with the catchy headline ‘Hardened Criminals Plan Big Break-Out’. Many years later and shortly before his death, Ian Dury - the Kilburns’ crippled singer and key focal point - publicly thanked me for being the first to write about him in a feature about his early career that he wrote for
Mojo
.

He wasn’t so courteous at the time, though. I remember him once approaching me drunkenly in a club in Camden Town and growling in my ears, ‘I’ve got a gun in my pocket and I want to stick it right up your bum.’ What do you say to something like that? I was glad when he found success with his Blockheads much later in the decade partly because he deserved it but mostly because if he’d stayed in the cultural margins much longer, he’d have become so twisted with rage he’d have probably ended up killing someone.

By early September, I was back in the big leagues. The Rolling Stones were touring Europe and the
NME
sent Pennie Smith and me out to cover their opening UK dates. I interviewed Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Mick Taylor together in a pancake
house adjoining their Manchester hotel one afternoon and got to ride with them to the show that evening in their bus. I couldn’t stop flashing back in my mind to the time when I’d first met them ten years earlier.

I’d still been a child then and they’d seemed like a new hooligan-youth superpower. Now they were maturing men of wealth and taste who shared little in common apart from the music they still made. When the five members were together in the same space, the conversational repartee between them was usually so strained and hesitant it could have been scripted by Harold Pinter. The source of their group discomfort wasn’t hard to locate: they were each at their personal wits’ end about how to coexist harmoniously with Keith Richards, whose ongoing drug addiction continued to daily imperil their potential to work and make more money.

I coined a new phrase for him and his spooky girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, who’d lurked side-stage behind a pair of giant ‘human bug’ op-art sunglasses - ‘wastedly elegant’ - in the piece I submitted to the
NME
, and other journalists soon followed suit. The group must have been tickled by what I’d written about them because someone from their office phoned a few days later and offered me the chance to travel around with the Stones on the final leg of the tour and then write a book about the experience. The band would pay my travel and hotel expenses and also pony up for the text I’d be penning. This was like being offered a chance to attain nirvana for me, my wildest teenage dream becoming reality.

As fate would have it, the book - though duly completed - would never get published. As I’ve said before, this was no tragedy as the text I concocted rarely dared to go below the
surface and confront what was really going on in the group’s universe. Twenty years later, though, I wrote up a more substantial and honest account of that tour in a piece entitled ‘Twilight in Babylon’ that became a chapter in my first book,
The Dark Stuff
. I don’t intend to repeat the basic information and character sketches contained within it here except to reiterate that the Stones were sinking more and more into the same dark vortex they’d unloosed at the dawning of the decade.

It made them an irresistible force for others to want to fasten on to. Bored European monarchs and their spoilt-rotten in-laws, leading international fashion designers and their self-fixated ‘muses’, sun-baked movie stars with a yen for cocaine and pussy, big-time gangsters turned out in expensively tailored suits to play down their Neanderthal physiques - all these and more flocked to ingratiate themselves within the group’s touring entourage because they sensed the Stones were a musical mini-Mafia who possessed unique power, that they were in effect a law unto themselves.

Keith Richards kept getting busted every few months or so for possessing hard drugs and firearms but rarely even turned up to the law court where his misdemeanours were being judged, never mind facing any kind of jail time. Midway through the tour, the road convoy transporting the group’s equipment was forced to pull over at a customs checkpoint and various officials dismantled the amplifiers only to discover that they contained sizeable quantities of various illegal Class A and B drugs hidden inside. Mick Jagger and tour manager Peter Rudge then got a high-ranking lawyer to tell the authorities that the Stones knew nothing about the drugs and that they’d simply been the innocent victims of ‘international drug smugglers’ who’d somehow infiltrated their equipment without their direct knowledge. Result:
the Stones were instantly exonerated of any wrongdoing and the case was conveniently closed. That’s the kind of power they had at their disposal when the necessity arose.

But it evidently came at a steep karmic cost because the more their collective charisma and bargaining power increased on the world’s stage, the less potent they sounded as a working musical unit. The Stones’ best music is all about conjuring up just the right groove and then taking it somewhere interesting, but in 1973 they often found difficulty in locking together in live performance because their prodigal-son guitar player - whose job it was to set the actual pace for each song - was on a completely different planet, chemically speaking, to most of his fellow players.

At the same time, he was also the coolest-looking dude in the known hemisphere. Back in the early sixties he’d looked less cool: big-eared, slightly bashful and distinctly human, someone who was best summed up in Andrew Loog Oldham’s
Stoned
autobiography when the ex-Stones manager recalled his own mother stating that Keith was the only truly decent human being in the group because he was kind to animals and always phoned his mum at least twice a week. But then he started pitching woo with Anita Pallenberg and daily testing his personal stamina with drugs and a most dramatic physical and spiritual transformation was set into motion. Lately it had reached the point where he’d begun to resemble a cross between a human blackened spoon and Count Dracula. This in turn provided him with a singularly intimidating demeanour to shield himself behind. It was so effective that no one in the Stones organisation dared to initiate a frank exchange of views with him over the fact that his overstimulated lifestyle was so sorely taxing the group’s morale, music and money-making potential.

I broached this tender subject with Mick Jagger when we finally met for a lunch/interview in a gentleman’s club he frequented near Piccadilly Circus more than a month after the tour had wound down. Jagger had actually been the one who’d chosen me for the book assignment - he told me so during our meal - but he and I had never actually spoken during all the time I’d travelled with them. Sometimes I’d seen him from the corner of my eye backstage checking me out, mentally sizing up whether I truly merited being in his group’s exalted midst. He had his own way of intimidating people. But it was ultimately small beer compared to his soulmate Keith’s championship-level scowling expertise.

‘How do you deal with keeping the group afloat when your guitarist is so frequently in trouble?’ I asked him. He turned reflective for several seconds and then said, ‘Well, you’ve seen a bit of what he’s like. He’s not really someone who responds well to advice.’ His famous mouth exploded into a broad grin. I tried to continue the line of questioning but he soon cut me off. ‘Listen, I’m not going to judge Keith. I don’t judge Keith - period. That’s how our relationship works. That’s how I am.’

These days Jagger habitually gets worse press - principally in his native England - than a convicted child molester and it’s something that’s always baffled me, particularly when his equally money-hungry peer Paul McCartney is fêted by the same media organs as an all-purpose paragon of virtue. It’s obvious the guy isn’t the most loveable and approachable human being to have ever drawn breath but he never wanted to be loved by the general public in the first place. Patronised and applauded - yes. But not ‘loved’ in the gooey showbiz sense of the word. He’s always been smart enough to recognise that performers who actively look for
love from their audiences often end up needy and burned-out like Judy Garland.

In order to understand Mick Jagger better, it’s always instructive to recall the state he found himself in at the end of the sixties. On the one hand, he was the rebel prince of New Bohemia - someone millions of young people the world over idolised and aspired to be. On the other, he’d had to witness Brian Jones’s pitiful meltdown and strange, sudden death as well as the descent into heroin addiction by the two people he was then closest to - Marianne Faithfull and Keith Richards.

Even more dramatically, he’d lately discovered that most of the money the Stones had made in the sixties had been pocketed by manager Allen Klein, along with all the rights to their recorded back catalogue. He had two basic choices: either join his soulmates in narcotic never-never land or assert himself and as a canny businessman steer the Rolling Stones’ leaky ship towards more advantageous waters. The guy chose to survive and thrive. Without his relentless input, the group would have petered out after the recording of
Let It Bleed
. And yet somehow he always ends up the villain whenever the Stones saga gets recounted - the control freak, the cold fish, the cunning, heartless greed-head. It’s become one big fairy story - the Rolling Stones as perceived by the world’s media - with Jagger as the resident evil goblin.

So what’s he really like then? Hard to say these days-I haven’t been in direct contact with the man for over twenty years. But back in the seventies he was someone who always made it his business to be one step ahead of everyone else and who cultivated relationships mostly to achieve this aim. He was extremely shrewd too. He was amused by the clonish likes of the New York Dolls but recognised instantly that they were far too
unprofessional and scatterbrained to ever cause his outfit any worried side glances. David Bowie on the other hand fascinated him. For Jagger, Bowie was the only white guy from the seventies who ever caused him to look anxiously over his shoulder. Mention the likes of Lou Reed and Marc Bolan to him though and he’d dissolve in laughter. He knew a thing or two about performers, did Mick Jagger. They had to be fearless, vain and deeply ambitious in order to cast their spell meaningfully night after night. Back in 1964 he’d gone toe to toe with James Brown on the T.A.M.I. show and he’d learned more about stagecraft from that one encounter than any of the new glam boys - apart from Bowie - could ever comprehend. ‘It’s hard work being me,’ he once said in an unguarded moment, and that’s what I most recall him being: a hard worker. Back then his life wasn’t just about getting paid and getting laid.

And he could be really good company too when he was relaxed. But he was rarely relaxed in public situations. His problem was, whenever he’d walk into a room of strangers, people would invariably go stark staring mad. Women would suddenly lose all sense of decorum and men would start following him around like hypnotised puppy dogs. Jagger had to muster every atom of his considerable sense of self-possession in order to deal with the star-struck behaviour his very presence automatically tended to incite. That’s why being Mick Jagger was ultimately such a hard gig. His ongoing retreat into the world of aristocracy and high society has been one way of distancing himself from such situations, I would imagine.

Perhaps this would be the ideal moment to end this chapter and draw a veil over 1973. I’d realised my most ardent teenage fantasy: acceptance and patronage within the Rolling Stones’ inner
sanctum. Plus I was crazy in love. It couldn’t get any better than this. And it didn’t, either.

I’m not complaining but too much had happened to me in too short a time and as exhilarating as they had been to live through, the previous two years had left me dizzy and disoriented. I needed an anchor in my life and that’s what my relationship with Chrissie Hynde gave me - initially. For the first six months, it was bliss. But then 1974 dawned and our honeymoon period was over.

Something else deeply significant to my future standing in society happened right at the tail-end of 1973. I went over to Cologne in Germany to visit Can in their rehearsal studio there on assignment from the
NME
. Had a great time too. So great in fact that when someone in their entourage offered me a tiny line of heroin to snort, I did so without much forethought on the matter. I’d been offered the drug before on occasion but had always had the presence of mind to turn it down. This time, though, was different: my first time. I didn’t know it then but in that one heedless moment I’d just opened the door to a world of hurt.