Apathy for the Devil (23 page)

I didn’t get into hard drugs - specifically heroin - so that I could be more like Keith Richards. I took the narcotic partly as a misguided way of temporarily gluing back together a broken heart but mostly because I liked the world it plunged me into, that instant all-embracing comfort zone. I would have become a user and addict whether or not I’d ever encountered Chrissie Hynde or heard a note of the Rolling Stones’ music.

Neither was I ever - technically speaking-a Stones hanger-on. In practically all the time I spent with them, our roles were always pre-fixed. I was a writer on assignment and they were the subject matter. I never wanted to become a regular fixture in their entourage because I recognised early on that the only way to do that was to become a resident court jester for them, and I didn’t need the condescension or fancy wearing the cap and bells.

As for being one of the group’s many ‘casualties’ - well, once again I beg to differ. If you want to read a book about a real Stones casualty, then dig out a tome on Gram Parsons. Or read the last chapters of
Wired
, Bob Woodward’s account of doomed comedian John Belushi’s life and ugly death. Or check out the part in legendary US promoter Bill Graham’s autobiography
where he describes undergoing a complete mental breakdown as a result of being passed over by the Stones when they toured the States in 1989.

Probably all big rock acts have a personal trail of destruction stacking up behind them but the one shadowing the Rolling Stones is the biggest of them all, with corpses and broken spirits strewn far and wide across the universe mostly because the victims let their imaginations get too enflamed by what they heard and saw whilst in the group’s orbit. But I was never one of them. On the contrary, I was one of the lucky few who stared into their dark vortex at close quarters and lived to tell the tale(s) with all my powers of recall still intact. I’ve always looked at our association as a boon not a curse.

When I wasn’t busy consorting with the stars of the mid-seventies rock galaxy, the final months of 1974 would often find me lurking forlornly in my crummy bedsit cultivating a world-weary melancholy mood. I remember spending drugged-up hours alone listening intensely to Frank Sinatra’s great Capitol albums -
Only the Lonely
,
No One Cares
and
Wee Small Hours
, the ones he made after being jilted by Ava Gardner. The pain in his voice spoke to me across the ages; Frank knew exactly how I was feeling.

But let’s not get too down and dreary here. After all, I’d lately acquired new friends to help draw me out of the clutches of gloomy introspection. I even had a new girlfriend - of sorts. Her name was Hermine Demoriane and she was a performance artist. Her ‘performance’ speciality involved walking a tightrope stretched across a lake, thus giving the impression that she was actually walking on water. Imagine a younger Juliette Gréco with Yoko Ono’s mind - that’s how I saw her anyway. She was a lot
older than I was, French, a real looker and eccentric as all hell. But that was OK with me. Consorting with the nuttiest broads in town was fast becoming my destiny as a young adult: like attracting like and all that. As a teenager I’d sat enraptured in front of TV sets and film screens taking in the French
nouvelle vague
films of François Truffaut and Louis Malle and I always carried a torch in my heart for the young actresses these great directors would employ - women like Jeanne Moreau, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier and Bernadette Lafont. The characters they portrayed were invariably free spirits who couldn’t be tamed by any one man and as such they heralded the first true wave of post-war feminism in Europe. Hermine was just like these women.

She was actually married to a poet with whom she still lived. They had a child as well-a daughter about to enter her teens. Theirs was an open marriage, though, with both parties free to explore other relationships. She approached me at a London club one night and told me she’d fallen in love with my writing and wanted to get to know me better. I was flattered but initially leery of her ‘married mother’ status-I didn’t need to add the role of ‘home-wrecker’ to my list of dubious accomplishments in 1974. But when my relationship with Chrissie Hynde went into free fall, Hermine was there to console me. She just kept coming around and I kept letting her in. There was a peaceful aura about her that I appreciated. Most women I’ve been close to could talk the hind legs off a donkey but Hermine was the opposite - given to long, enigmatic silences. At first I didn’t have particularly deep feelings for her as my heart still belonged to another, but as time passed we sought out each other’s company more and more. Hermine actually cared for me a lot more than Chrissie ever did. As the decade progressed, she would become my personal
guardian angel. Without her watching over me, I would surely have died. If there is a heroine to be found in the story I’m telling you throughout this book, then she is it.

Another daunting European female I found myself socialising with in the autumn-to-winter months of ’74 was Nico, the German-born former chanteuse for the Velvet Underground who’d lately signed a solo recording deal with Island records’ UK A&R branch. Whilst recording her fourth album
The End
in London, with John Cale once again producing, she’d met up with my pal Gene Krell from Granny Takes a Trip and they’d become romantically entwined for a brief period. The Chelsea apartment Gene shared with Marty Breslau became a home away from home for both Nico and me during those months because heroin was so freely available there.

I liked her a lot - and we developed a friendship. She was a fascinating individual and a quintessential bohemian free spirit. Part of her was like a child - naive and incredulous - but the other part - the part that kept her surviving - was ruthless and self-possessed. She saw herself quite rightly as a genuine artist. No man was ever going to make her his dutiful spouse. Poor old Gene tried and got his heart broken into a million pieces just like I did with Chrissie Hynde. He asked for her hand in marriage and she turned him down and ended their affair. ‘You just don’t amuse me any more,’ she told him. I felt sorry for the guy but I still told him he was emotionally way out of his depth. You don’t fall in love with women like Nico: it’s like trying to bottle a lightning bolt.

Meanwhile, a much younger generation was vying for my attention in 1974. A few of them I cemented budding relationships with, others I let escape through my net. The most significant
example of the latter breed was a precocious Mancunian youth called Steven Morrissey who wrote letters to me practically every week during that year. I wish I could tell you that these missives contained glimpses of the poetic audacity that he brought to his lyric-writing when he became the lead singer of the Smiths a decade later - but suffice to say this was not the case. How could it have been otherwise? He was only fourteen years old at the time. Instead he wrote ardently and single-mindedly about his fierce devotion for the New York Dolls. His teenage dream was to escape dreary Manchester and reinvent himself as one of the Dolls’ glitzy entourage in downtown Manhattan. That’s why I never wrote him back. I didn’t want to inadvertently encourage an underage youth into embarking on a life of wilful self-destruction. I told him as much ten years later when I actually got to meet him. But I don’t think he ever fully forgave me for ignoring him during his adolescent wallflower years.

Two teenagers I did become reasonably close to during that time were a pair of eighteen-year-old likely-lad law-breakers called Steve Jones and Paul Cook who hailed from the White City precinct of London. They approached me early in the year at McLaren’s emporium. They had a group called the Swankers that they’d started with one of the shop’s assistants, an art student called Glen Matlock. Matlock was a middle-class youth with better opportunities and a more responsible head on his shoulders whilst Jones and Cook were so working-class they could have been Arthur Mullard’s two illegitimate sons.

Those two were always up to some kind of mischief. McLaren had initially caught them stealing from his shop but still let them frequent the place because he quickly became fascinated by their criminal-minded lifestyles. He saw Jones in particular as a
seventies update of the Artful Dodger from Charles Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
and in time would start fantasising that he could invent a role for himself as their very own Fagin. But that was all in the immediate future. In ’74, Jones and Cook were out and about, ducking and diving, thieving and looting pretty much wherever they went.

Jones was the motivating force in all of this. He had major skills as a cat burglar - most specifically, the power to make himself virtually invisible whenever he entered an establishment intent on pulling off a heist. He’d recently succeeded in half-inching no less than thirteen expensive electric guitars one by one from various instrument shops situated on central London’s Denmark Street. He even sold me one of his pilfered acquisitions - a beautiful black Fender Telecaster Deluxe. They were always up to no good. I remember their impromptu arrival that summer at a concert in a Kilburn cinema that Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards were putting on in order to promote Wood’s first solo album. Jones, Cook and Matlock got in by literally dismantling and then climbing through a trapdoor on the building’s extremely high roof.

Like McLaren, I could tell instantly that these oiks were going to go on to big things in the future - unless Jones and Cook got sent to jail first. At that point they could barely play at all but that didn’t prevent them from projecting an aura of championship-level cockiness at all times. As I reported earlier, Dr. Feelgood were the hot up-and-coming band on the London club and pub scene that year, the one act everyone had high praise for. And yet Jones and co. were unimpressed. ‘We could do better than those Southend cunts,’ they blurted out more than once within my earshot. They even went so far as to refer to the
Feelgoods’ large-domed guitarist Wilko Johnson as ‘Fuckin’ brick-head’ one night to his face. They weren’t what you’d call diplomatic or deep thinkers but I liked being in their company because they never took anything seriously and I found their continual tomfoolery an entertaining tonic to counterbalance my usual bedsit blues.

But the individual I became closest to during the second half of ’74 was another rock journalist who’d climbed aboard the
NME
masthead that summer as the paper’s newest staff writer. His name was Pete Erskine and he and I had already become fast friends when we were on an assignment together in New York at the beginning of the year. Pete was thin, pale and feminine-featured like me and we shared the same dark sense of humour so we just naturally gravitated towards each other. He was two or three years older than me, married with a young son and I think he was drawn to my company partly because my lifestyle at the time was less restrictive and fenced-in than his was.

That turned out to be our eventual undoing, however. Through being around me he first came into contact with heroin and succumbed to his temptation with little or no pre-thought. By the end of the year, we were both hooked on the stuff. Our brief honeymoon period with the drug was tapering off and trouble was getting ready to engulf us both. In Pete’s case, he was never able to fully extricate himself from the jaws of addiction. He died nine years later. The official cause was a fatal asthma attack but that attack wouldn’t have occurred if he’d been clean and healthy. It’s always been my greatest regret in life that I couldn’t help him redeem his circumstances and that I in effect contributed to his long decline by introducing him to the drug in the first place. But I also believe that he would have eventually
fallen under its grip whether he’d ever known me or not.

Bad times were a-coming but in the dying weeks of 1974 I still maintained an upright ‘cock of the walk’ status within the music industry. The media bedazzled still lined up around the block to kiss my ass. And promiscuous women in London nightspots still dangled themselves before my gaze like overdressed car keys. But I’d long grown weary of their attentions. And I was becoming wary of the whole idea of thoughtless, passionless sex. With all the diseases I’d managed to pick up over the past two years, sleeping around had become indistinguishable in my mind from playing Russian roulette with my genitalia.

Meanwhile, music wasn’t exciting me as much as it once had - at least not the new music I was hearing. There were suddenly far too many white guys trying to play funk and failing miserably. The glam thing was now dead on its legs. And the one new trend on the horizon - disco - sounded shallow and inconsequential when I’d hear it played alongside the great black rhythm ’n’ blues music of the sixties. I knew what I was becoming - jaded - and I found the condition unsettling. I was still only twenty-two for God’s sake.

Every now and then though something would transpire to temporarily rekindle my wavering interest in the whole pop process and the personalities contained within. Two close encounters during the final two weeks of the year still play vividly in my mind to this day. The first took place a week before Christmas. I went to visit a cocaine dealer friend of mine who lived off Edgware Road. Once inside his dimly lit apartment, I realised we were not alone. Two inebriated people were reclining on some cushions laid out across the living-room floor. One was a vivacious young black woman who spoke with a pronounced
American drawl - her name was Gloria Jones. The other figure - her boyfriend - was a short baby-faced man swathed in a floor-length Edwardian popinjay coat. It took me a full minute to actually identify him. It was Marc Bolan.

He looked a lot bulkier than the elfin figure he’d cut back in his glam messiah days. His once flawless features were now effectively rubberised by a bad case of toxic bloat and his body under that ludicrous coat of his seemed flabby and shapeless. What a turn-up for the books: the prettiest boy in the seventies pop stratosphere had prematurely gone to fat. At first I couldn’t understand why. After all, he was snorting cocaine all the time and that usually acts as an appetite suppressant. But then I noticed how much alcohol he was putting away and realised that his added girth was all booze-related. He’d been doing the tax-exile boogie over in some bland Euro-trash hidey-hole like Monaco and had gotten so bored he’d just let himself go until he’d developed a nasty case of full-blown alcoholism. His physical deterioration also coincided with a marked dip in his personal popularity here in the UK. His records weren’t setting the charts on fire any more. Most of his old fans had shifted their allegiance over to his arch-enemy David Bowie. In short, he was free-falling from grace at the speed of light and was unsure of how to rectify the situation. The musical formulae he’d still felt compelled to feed the media with were sounding more and more hollow and self-deluded.