Apathy for the Devil (25 page)

The Tull had started out as trailblazing ‘crusties’ but soon jettisoned their initial ‘playing the blues for greatcoat-sporting students who rarely wash themselves’ game plan to climb aboard the good ship ‘prog rock’ and seek their fortune through playing electrified madrigals in 7/4 time with lyrics about high-born lusty temptresses beating stable-boys’ naked buttocks with a riding crop. Against all conventional logic, their new direction paid off like a one-armed bandit choking up its entire contents of coinage to some dumb-lucky gambler. By 1975 they were one of the world’s biggest-selling musical attractions. In America they could sell out all the mega-barns any promoter could throw at them. In Los Angeles alone, they’d been booked for four consecutive nights at the prestigious 20,000-seater-capacity Felt Forum. That’s
what I’d essentially been flown in to trumpet back to the home front. They seemed to think I’d happily adapt to the role of becoming their token media shill but as usual I had other more personal agendas to pursue.

Their US press officer-a shrill, hyperactive Bobbi Flekman lookalike with a voice like paint-stripper - met me at the airport and then drove me straight to the first of the Felt Forum shows previewed for that evening. I was already in a bad way from the jet lag - as well as probable drug withdrawal - and considered my imminent fate much like a prisoner about to face the gallows. Marshalling a half-hearted stiff upper lip, I staggered into the huge auditorium only to find myself in a scene to rank with Dante’s inferno: 20,000 double-ugly Americans going completely gaga over a musical spectacle so bizarre that it beggared description and which none of them could have even remotely comprehended. If they had, they wouldn’t have been there in the first place. Each song the Tull performed was as long and windy as a discourse on agrarian reform in the nineteenth century, and to top it all they’d incorporate old Monty Python sketches into their routines and pretend to their Yankee rube fan base - who’d yet to see Python on the telly in their country - that they were doing something audaciously original. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. Where was the appeal? Why all the bums on seats? I asked Anderson these very questions later and even he was at a loss to explain his group’s popularity. But I already knew - it was bad taste, pure and simple. They say good taste is timeless. But bad taste has been around just as long and is invariably more lucrative.

Anyway, after half an hour of this musical torture, I was starting to sag and wilt like an untended bloom. The press officer -
noting my haggard expression - passed me a Quaalude to aid my further discomfort. It was a decent thing to do, all things considered - but also deeply misguided. Five minutes later, I was out cold in my seat. Apparently I had to be carried out of the venue, placed in a car and then driven back to the hotel. I just remember waking up early the next morning fully-dressed in my hotel room with a dust bowl for a mouth and aches in all my joints.

Fortunately Iggy Pop arrived shortly afterwards. He lived virtually next door to my hotel on the Sunset Strip and had come over to renew old acquaintances and possibly scam a free breakfast on my room-service chit. I told him of my current dilemma: jet lag, drug withdrawals and, most of all, the prospect of having to witness yet another Jethro Tull show. ‘Man, I wouldn’t wish that combination on my worst enemy,’ he winced sympathetically before suggesting he contact a friend to help me self-medicate throughout the whole ordeal. An hour and one phone call later, there was a knock at my door. Iggy opened it and in walked a tall, thin, clearly gay young black man dressed like a member of Little Richard’s backing ensemble. His name was Johnny and he dealt heroin when not dipping his toes into other backwaters of small-time LA-based criminality with the aid of his equally overattired black boyfriend, who was known as Levi. He didn’t say much. Just dropped a small packet on the night-stand and then stared at me as if to say ‘So where’s the money, sucker?’ It was then that I had the sudden realisation that I possessed only English traveller’s cheques as a form of viable currency. I showed them to him but to no avail. ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ I recall him saying. ‘It’s just worthless paper to me.’ Fortunately, a compromise was reached. The hotel had a gift shop and Johnny needed a hairdryer so I basically paid for it on room service, as well as for
a couple of chintzy items he also took a shine to whilst perusing the merchandise. This meant in effect that the Tull and/or their record company were footing the bills for our drugs. Looking back now, I can’t say I’m proud of the incident. You could dress it up and play it back as an early punk gesture of defiance - me and the Ig literally ripping off the stadium-rock behemoths - but in reality it was just seedy junkie behaviour. Still, it got the job done - so to speak. That night, I sat through two full hours of Jethro Tull in concert and felt no pain.

Once I’d dispensed with all Tull-related duties I began scoping out the Hollywood terrain in search of fun, adventure and good music, only to promptly discover that all three were in woefully limited supply. Ben Edmonds, my old
Creem
pal, had recently moved there and I remember us going to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco only to discover the gnome-like Bingenheimer cueing up old glam records on the house turntable to an audience of just three pilled-up punters dreamily occupying the dance floor like extras from
Night of the Living Dead
. We stuck around for half an hour - just to be polite - and then made our excuses and ran for the exit door. As we were stepping outside, we noticed a disturbance on the pavement before us. Two of the three patrons we’d just been rubbing shoulders with were splayed out on the cold concrete like wounded birds. Just a few feet away, a young long-haired man in an expensive-looking fur anorak was staring at the human wreckage with undisguised glee in his cocaine-rimmed eyes. Ben recognised the guy: it was Glenn Frey from the Eagles.

We both understood the subtext. Two years earlier, glam had been the big noise in town but now it was dead on its legs and the rugged and rigidly heterosexual Eagles had lately risen up
victorious as the new messiahs of West Coast rock. It wasn’t hard to fathom out why. Their music was as comfortable and reassuring to mainstream America as slipping on a pair of old slippers. It didn’t challenge its audience on any level or promote alternative lifestyles. It just blended together contemporary hippie mysticism with fanciful cowboy folklore and then served the combo up like a musical box of chocolates wrapped up in a ribbon-bow of mock-prairie harmonising. Their records were like those washed-denim jeans that were so in vogue at the time: bland, inauthentic but impossible to escape. More than any other home-grown act, they had their collective finger on the pulse of what America really wanted to hear in the mid-seventies.

Frey and the rest of his cocaine cowboy musical fraternity had their own upmarket Hollywood watering hole to frequent when they weren’t cooking up new mellow tunes in the studio for further domination of the airwaves. It was called the Roxy and was situated on the Sunset Strip only a few doors away from the now-ailing Whisky a Go Go. There was a room to drink in, a room to eat in and a room to watch live entertainment in, as well as a dance floor, but most of the human interaction inevitably went on around the bar area. Every second-division rock musician in the region seemed to have a tab there and could be found draped over a bar stool on any given night trying to drown their professional and personal woes with copious shots of tequila. You rarely saw a smile on any of their faces. Hedonism had lately become a singularly joyless pursuit on the West Coast.

Meanwhile, out on the sidewalk the damaged and terminally drug-diminished were only growing in number. Wherever unsuspecting pedestrians went, they’d be approached by some intense young person attempting to indoctrinate them into one
dubious cult or another. All these broken spirits had the same basic rap: the end is nigh, the devil has won, give up your ego and all worldly possessions and join us as we sink into blind submission to some crackpot deity.

Hollywood’s moneyed elite - the town’s real movers and shakers - had long since learned to avoid rubbing shoulders with its walking wounded. It was all too elementary. If you didn’t care to be hassled by scary ‘street’ people, then you simply didn’t go out in the streets. Employing this logic to its fullest degree, the area’s superstars tended to lock themselves away at home in Malibu or Bel Air, only venturing out to record or visit their dealers. Every now and then there’d be some ugly public brouhaha: some liquor-looped English drummer and his troglodyte roadies smashing up a local bistro, or Sly Stone and his hoodlum cronies pulling guns on a receptionist at the Record Plant in a seriously misguided attempt to retrieve several master tapes Sly had recorded there without ever paying for the sessions. But most of the real madness of the time was played out behind the locked doors and gated driveways of remotely located luxury mansions once owned by movie stars from the silent-picture age that no one seemed to remember the names of.

Such an arrangement was ideal for at least one foreign body who’d lately beamed himself down into the community. David Bowie had moved to the City of Angels around the same time I had - sometime in February - but was clearly in no mood to celebrate his arrival with the locals. He was conspicuously absent from all the clubs and social functions during that month and the ones that followed. He’d first found fame as a flamboyant ‘look at me’ kind of fellow but now he seemed to be invaded by a Howard Hughes-sized craving for self-seclusion. It made sense.
He’d been going through many ch-ch-changes of late and, like a snake, had been shedding a lot of dead skin. Musically speaking, he’d daringly jettisoned glam only to plausibly reinvent himself as a white soul boy fronting an upmarket disco revue. His physical appearance had undergone a startling transformation too. Where once he’d resembled an alien transsexual from the planet Outrageous, he now affected the dress code of an emaciated hop-head straight out of a Damon Runyon novel set in the McCarthyite fifties. Every time Bowie appeared in public that year, he looked like he’d just stepped out of an audition for
Guys and Dolls
.

Bowie was in LA partly to further distance himself from Tony Defries’s ruinously extravagant New York-based management empire Mainman, which the singer had lately forged a legal separation from. On discovering that their meal ticket had left them in the lurch and flown westward, the fame-seekers who made up the organisation began a frenzied smear campaign of public gossiping that was heard loud and clear throughout the industry. Bowie - his jilted employees maintained - had lately become mentally unhinged, had a raging cocaine problem and needed to be institutionalised before he drove himself terminally crazy or - worse - killed himself. In the weeks and months that followed his exodus to LA, phone lines across America were throbbing with rumours of Bowie cavorting with white witches, pentagrams, exorcisms and Nazi theology. Hearing this stuff, it became obvious why he no longer felt the urge to embrace the madness of the Hollywood streets. From the sound of things, it was already all going on in his overstimulated mind.

Bowie also had a new album set for imminent release, his first full-tilt foray into contemporary soul music, which he’d recorded
both in Philadelphia and Manhattan throughout the previous year. He’d briefly toyed with the idea of calling it
Shilling the Rubes
- Jewish slang for ‘ripping off the peasants’ - but had later relented, titling it instead
Young Americans
. A song of the same name was the opening track and RCA, Bowie’s record label, had earmarked it as the project’s first single as well. One sultry day in mid-February, I was in a Sunset Strip coffee shop with Iggy Pop when the radio playing over the loudspeaker system suddenly announced they were about to unveil an exclusive preview of David Bowie’s latest musical caper. The song came and went, leaving me underwhelmed. True, Bowie once again had hit upon a brand-new musical hybrid - Johnnie Ray meets gospel - but the blend sounded as forced as a shotgun wedding. Iggy liked it, though. He genuinely admired Bowie’s sense of creative ambition and thought he was a ‘damned fine singer to boot. It’s a good piece of work.’ He kept repeating, ‘He’s still a white-hot talent. ’ Neither of us knew it then but in less than a month Bowie would start focusing that white-hot talent of his on heating up Iggy’s own career. It wouldn’t come a moment too soon.

Bowie and Iggy’s personal circumstances at that point in time couldn’t have been more different. The former had supposedly been stripped of a large chunk of his financial net worth in his recent legal battles with Mainman but was still a wealthy young dude with power, prestige and a doting entourage to cater to his every nutty whim. He could make a bizarre public spectacle of himself - as he did that same month when he’d turned up on US television screens to give Aretha Franklin a special Grammy Award, only to deliver a drug-addled eulogy to Lady Soul sounding like Peter O’Toole on PCP - and no one thought any the worse of him. He might have lately become a raving coke fiend
like the gossips were claiming but it hadn’t yet robbed him of his golden touch in the industry, and that was all that really mattered.

Iggy - by contrast - was poverty-stricken and semi-homeless, crashing in the spare room of his former Stooges guitarist James Williamson’s modest Sunset Strip apartment and living an existence that can be best described as ‘hand to mouth’. He was no longer - technically speaking-a drug addict, mainly because he simply didn’t have the financial resources to sustain such a lifestyle. In February you could even see him early in the morning jogging the length and breadth of the Sunset Strip. But he was also bored and deeply gloomy about the state of inactivity his musical career had stalled into during the past twelve months, and these factors often compelled him to still get fucked up. He and Williamson were trying to put something together-a new band - with two local brothers, Hunt and Tony Sales, tentatively pencilled in as the rhythm section and a guy called Scott Thurston - whom Iggy always referred to as ‘Doll-face’ - who’d already worked with the Stooges on keyboards. But there was little local interest and no record-label patronage forthcoming. The Stooges had splintered apart with no record royalties or performance income to tide their members over and only bad memories and bad karma as a continued reminder of their very existence. Iggy was doing the only thing he knew how to do - just soldiering on - but he often felt he was beating his head against a brick wall. Worse still, the rest of Hollywood had seen him in some truly pitiful conditions out in public over the past two years and had reached the conclusion that he was just another lost cause.