Apathy for the Devil (24 page)

At least he didn’t launch into one of his ‘I am still the greatest’ diatribes that had so vexed Keith Richards just two months earlier. I ended up talking to him for a couple of hours - two Limey fop dudes on coke babbling away - and found him pleasant enough. On the surface he was woozy and effete but at heart he was a canny little hustler who knew how to turn on the charm
whenever it might involve furthering his all-consuming fame-seeking agenda. But he also had a lively sense of humour and good taste in heroes. Syd Barrett was an obsession of his and he’d read my piece on the guy earlier in the year so he was particularly interested in learning anything about Barrett’s current whereabouts and state of health. I told him that Syd had lately gotten fat too. He winced tenderly at the news: clearly he could relate.

Then we went off into a long debate about Bob Dylan, and Bolan told me a funny, oddly self-deprecating story about Dylan being his ultimate idol and how he’d finally met him in Los Angeles that year at the house of a mutual friend, songwriter Harry Nilsson. After listening to Bolan’s effusive praise for several minutes without interrupting, Dylan had looked at him quizzically and asked, ‘Say, man - are you one of those guys from the Incredible String Band?’ The Bopping Elf was temporarily crushed - Bob didn’t know him from Adam - but thinking about it afterwards - he told me - it only made Dylan seem more untouchable in his estimation. I told him that I’d heard a pre-release copy of
Blood on the Tracks
and that it was the first record Dylan had released in eight years that you could justifiably call a masterpiece. Bolan - who’d yet to hear the record - looked delighted. Complete artistic rehabilitation - that must have been his dream too. It’s sad he didn’t live long enough to truly achieve it. During the taxi ride home afterwards, I thought of Bolan and a line from the final track of
Blood on the Tracks
began replaying itself in my head over and over again. ‘I’ve seen pretty people disappear like smoke.’ Me too, Bob. Me too.

A week later, the
NME
sent me off to follow Rod Stewart around for a couple of days. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier chapter, Bolan and Stewart were the two golden boys of the fledgling
seventies pop/rock mainstream, its two adored kingpins. But once they’d made it to the top of the charts in Britain, their career trajectories started to veer off in radically different directions. Stewart scored chart-topping records in America and quickly became a superstar attraction over there. Bolan didn’t: he was simply too ethereal and too aloof for their earthy tastes. Stewart wasn’t as pretty but he was a far better singer and projected a more fun-loving and altogether more approachable image out to the masses. Result: unwavering global megastardom was his to command throughout the entire decade. When we met, the critics still loved him and the fans still kept growing in numbers. He was the first to admit it: the guy was one lucky son of a bitch.

Stewart’s career was about to find itself at a major crossroads. His group the Faces still hadn’t gotten over losing their original bassist Ronnie Lane eighteen months earlier and were starting to stagnate as a musical unit. More problematic still, his faithful second lieutenant Ronnie Wood was spending more and more time in the Rolling Stones’ druggy world. A couple of weeks earlier, Mick Taylor had quit the group and now everyone was expecting to see Wood take over his post. It was a foregone conclusion really. Jagger and Richards both wanted him and he was simply too besotted with the band to even think of turning them down. Stewart spoke long and candidly to me about his own views on the unfurling situation. Woody wouldn’t leave him - he reckoned. He had too much of a good thing going with the Faces. Why would he willingly demote himself to hired-hand status for the Rolling Stones when he could stay an equal partner with his own lucrative outfit? It just didn’t make sense to Rod. It would have been fair to say that he wasn’t best pleased by the
predicament. But Rod wasn’t what you’d call a born worrier. Career issues would need to be addressed sooner or later but they weren’t ever going to interfere too much with his constant pursuit of fun.

No one I’ve ever hung out with ever eked a better time out of being rich and famous than old Rod the Mod. It was like he’d been born into the condition. He took to the celebrity playboy lifestyle like the proverbial duck to water. The Faces played a series of pre-Christmas shows in Kilburn and on the last night Stewart invited me to join him on a visit to a central London members-only nightclub known as Tramp. The place reeked of new money, predatory women and European gangsters soaked in overpriced aftershave.

When Stewart walked through the door, the whole room stood up and applauded him like he was Father Christmas. One by one, wealthy dudes would stop by our table and kneel down as though they were about to kiss his ring. Women would suddenly materialise in pairs and offer to give him a blow job under the table - offers he cheerfully declined. At one point, he suggested I follow him to the toilets. Once through the door we were besieged by at least three adoring drug dealers determined to offer us free lines of cocaine. Back in the dining room he ate and drank like a Viking lord after being told by the maître d’ that everything his table consumed was strictly on the house.

Stewart just took all the generosity being extended towards him in cheerful stride and drank it all in. He didn’t have the kind of addictive personality that most musicians seem to struggle with so he could booze and snort without things getting seriously out of hand. He was suave, laconic and drop-dead funny as well - the closest thing to Dean Martin that England has ever produced.
You couldn’t have dreamed of better company. By the end of the night he’d lined up several of the most attractive women in the club and was instructing his chauffeur to ferry them all back to his country pile for further hanky-panky. He even invited me along to share in the festivities. I would have gone too like a shot from a gun but Hermine had turned up to the club in the interim and I didn’t want to just abandon her there. Still, maximum respect and gratitude to Mr Stewart for extending the invitation in the first place. Shortly after our encounter, all his best musical instincts started to desert him and he began releasing bland codswallop like ‘Sailing’ and ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ but I always kept a soft spot in my heart for the singer. To me, he’ll always remain a prince amongst men.

I thought a lot about Rod in the final week of 1974. I mean, here was a guy who instinctively knew how to live the high life without getting needlessly bogged down in self-absorbed neurosis. I wasn’t that lucky. Why couldn’t I be that flippant?

Because I couldn’t reconcile myself to what I’d lately become - a bad person. I didn’t like myself any more. And I didn’t like the smoky nightclub world and tawdry Tin Pan Alley sideshow that I’d abandoned myself to either. My dad had been right all along: the entertainment industry is a tainted, corrupting universe. And as the seventies hit their midway stretch I realised that I’d become corrupted too. Like the New York Dolls, I’d experienced too much too soon and part of me now felt like I’d been ground through a lemon squeezer. That’s where the heroin came in: at first it glued me back together and gave me the get-up-and-go to continue to play out my role as the
NME
’s resident hit man.

What other options were there? The idea of stepping back into
anonymity was unthinkable. I’d set out on this journey and couldn’t back out now that the landscape had suddenly turned all bleak. Rock stars in the seventies were facing much the same dilemma. Neil Young wilfully ostracised his mainstream fan base by ‘heading for the ditch. It was a rougher ride but I met more interesting people there.’ And Sly Stone once stated that ‘sometimes a man has to lose everything he’s built up just in order to check himself out’. In other words, practically all the people worth a damn in music were headed for the low side of the road too.

The abyss was yawning - and so was I. I could have slept for a thousand years. My drug-drenched dreams now seemed more real to me than the moment-to-moment reality I was drifting through. And that’s when the real darkness came seeping in. Real darkness and catastrophic bad luck. I’d entered the decade with a golden touch. Now - exactly halfway through its ten-year duration - it was about to be snatched from me and replaced by the mark of Cain.

It was in early January of 1975 that I experienced my first significant bout of drug withdrawals. I shouldn’t have been that surprised. My daily use of heroin - and cocaine, it balanced things out - had become so pervasive of late I was now spending practically all my wages on the stuff. I was even writing to deadline under the influence of the two drugs. If you ever download any articles of mine from that specific era, you’ll notice how the sentences get longer and more convoluted as the text progresses. Now you know the reason why.

Then one day my Chelsea Embankment source ran dry for several days and my whole metabolism turned against me. The chills and rapid changes in body temperature weren’t unbearable but the ferocious depression I felt eating away at my very soul for some forty-eight uninterrupted hours wasn’t something I wished to visit upon myself again any time soon. This led to the last jolt of common sense I managed to rouse within myself for the rest of the decade. I decided I needed to distance myself from all the druggy tristesse of the past six months. It would mean abandoning London and all its temptations and relocating to some more exotic climate. But it also had to be a place where I could still find work. There was only one option, really: America, more specifically Los Angeles. I would get myself a golden suntan and
prowl Hollywood anew in search of wild tales to tell the folks back home. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But I’d neglected to factor in an important detail: Hollywood in 1975 was fast becoming the West Coast’s very own re-enactment of Sodom and Gomorrah. Finding any kind of personal redemption there was a futile folly.

In the few weeks prior to my February departure, I became deeply embroiled in the music and short life of Nick Drake. Drake had died only a few months earlier - apparently it had been self-administered - but no obituary had appeared in any of the four music weeklies to mourn his loss. I’d been so taken up with my own sack of woe that at the time I doubt his passing even registered with me. But by year’s end I was becoming increasingly aware that his untimely death was something that needed to be addressed just like the three albums of music he made in his lifetime needed to be celebrated - albeit belatedly. I’d always been an admirer of his, ever since I first heard ‘River Man’ waft spine-tinglingly across the airwaves via a John Peel-helmed radio broadcast. In the autumn of ’71, just as I was installing myself into life at London University, I bought a second-hand copy of
Bryter Layter
and it quickly became the soundtrack for my brief middle-class student-drifter existence. I’d listen to the record and what Drake was singing about - the melancholy feeling of leaving England’s green and pleasant land to chance your arm in London’s gritty, isolating metropolis - spoke penetratingly to my inner condition. His was bedroom-hermit music taken to the level of high art, and the more I’d hear it, the more I became convinced that we had just lost one of the greatest English-born musical talents of the second half of the twentieth century. Ian MacDonald - who’d known Drake briefly
when they were both students at Cambridge University - also subscribed to this viewpoint and was therefore enthusiastic when I told him I was planning a lengthy piece on the guy for the
NME
. It wasn’t an easy assignment. Drake had always been an intensely guarded and private individual. Certainly none of the friends and co-workers of his that I spoke to were able to decipher the inner workings of his mind or explain his enigmatic aloofness. But most of them openly questioned the verdict of suicide that had been handed down after the inquest into his death and I could see their point. Only three tablets of an antidepressant known as Tryptizol were found in his stomach - hardly an amount to guarantee eternal oblivion. I wrote that Drake didn’t wilfully take his own life and I’ve not read, seen or heard anything since to cause me to modify that opinion. The way I see it, both Drake and later Ian Curtis were the hapless victims of incompetent doctors who used them both as unwitting guinea pigs for pharmaceutical companies to test their most controversial new products on. The seventies was the decade of the nefarious pill-form antidepressant. Suddenly NHS quacks were doling them out to their patients like food to the famished. By decade’s end thousands and thousands of middle-aged English housewives had turned into panic-stricken zombies as a result of being force-fed Valium in this insidious fashion. Nick Drake’s tragic end can also be seen as a forewarning of their treacherous fate - the condition known as ‘prescription death’.

My own Drake investigation was completed at January’s end and printed in February. It’s not one of my best efforts but it gave its subject’s musical legacy much-needed acclaim and exposure and helped instigate a mystique around his name that has only grown with the passing of time. My next assignment was a sudden
lurch from the sublime to the ridiculous.
NME
had found a patron to pay for my round-trip airfare to LA and a week’s worth of hotel bills - after which I was to be left to my own devices. There was one snag, however: the patron was Jethro Tull.

In Christopher Headington’s lofty tome
A History of Western Music
, Claude Debussy is quoted as having once claimed that he favoured featuring the flute in the foreground of many of his compositions because he felt the slender wind instrument possessed the mystical power ‘of a melancholy Puck (the mischievous sprite in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
) questioning the hidden meaning of things’. But Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson showcased it in his own repertoire for less poetic reasons. He tootled away on it because it added a suitably mellifluous ‘age of Aquarius’ tonality to his group’s otherwise generic late-sixties blues-rock bleatings and because it was also a useful prop for his incessant human-scarecrow posturing whenever he found himself in front of a paying audience.