Apathy for the Devil (28 page)

Or maybe the King felt chastened and genuinely taken aback by the sheer power Led Zeppelin wielded throughout the country of his birth at the time of their meeting. By the mid-seventies America had become their own personal fiefdom. No other act was remotely as popular. And in LA particularly the mania surrounding them was so vast and volatile it seemed capable of setting off earthquake-like tremors throughout the community whenever they played there. Zeppelin and their music had a strange, unearthly effect on the region that had to be felt and seen to be believed. The natives went stark staring mad just knowing they were in the vicinity.

Zeppelin and their touring retinue arrived in Hollywood - just as the Faces were finishing up there - in order to play a series of concerts booked all over the West Coast that March. They even had their own private aeroplane waiting at the local airport to wing them to the venues. In the past, the town had played host to the group’s highest times whilst out on the road. But the high spirits of yore were much harder to locate this time around. Cocaine was largely responsible for this hardening of Led Zeppelin’s spiritual arteries. There was far too much of it freely available: dealers would literally line up to share their wares and curry favour with the group’s principals. And the groupie situation surrounding the band had lately gone into a state of red alert. Valley girls were prepared to tear each other limb from limb in order to beat the competition and bed a Zep member. Jimmy
Page told me about an incident where one deranged female had placed razor blades in a hamburger bun one of her rivals was about to eat as a way of eliminating her from the competition. The story had helped inspire the lyrics to one of their most recent songs - soon to be available on
Physical Graffiti
- ‘Sick Again’, Robert Plant’s disapproving ode to these self-styled she-creatures of the Hollywood Hills.

In fact, both Plant and Jones made a point in ’75 of steering well clear of all the groupie hysteria by renting accommodation in quiet mansions near the beach, far away from the Sunset Strip. The rest of the touring party though were happy to install themselves in Hollywood’s Continental Hyatt House hotel in the Strip’s centre, an establishment renowned for turning a blind eye to any outbursts of rock ’n’ roll excess.

Yet even Jimmy Page had grown tired of being fought over by scantily attired LA jailbait. In ’75 he initiated a new sexual pursuit: celebrity wife-swapping. He’d lately been seen enjoying the company of Bebe Buell, Todd Rundgren’s leggy consort, but had chosen Chrissie Wood as his ‘special friend’ throughout this West Coast stopover, a situation that didn’t best please her husband, Ronnie. Page spent practically all his down time sequestered in his suite on the hotel’s top floor. I visited him on several occasions there and found him holding court with a number of other acquaintances, all of us seriously wired on the voluminous quantities of cocaine that were readily available. Heroin was just starting to creep into the picture too. One night, he treated us all to an impromptu screening of Kenneth Anger’s
Lucifer Rising
, the film he intended to create a soundtrack for later in the year. It lasted for about half an hour and consisted of amateurish home-movie footage shot by Anger of an extremely stoned Marianne
Faithfull in black robes silently stumbling down a staircase embedded in the mountains of Egypt, holding a lighted candle.

Page may have been ever-increasingly drawn towards the dark side of life but he didn’t let these preoccupations interfere unduly with his professional responsibilities. He could still detach himself from the madness when he chose to. John Bonham, however, wasn’t so lucky in this respect. Los Angeles brought out all his most disturbing character traits and magnified them to a degree that made him a very frightening individual to be in close physical proximity to. He drank all the time partly as a way to counterbalance all the cocaine he was inhaling continuously. He’d even taken to placing an ounce bag of the stuff between his legs during their live shows and could sometimes be seen placing his hands inside the bag and throwing handfuls of the drug into his nostrils whilst still behind the drum kit. Mick Hinton, his personal roadie, told me once that the entire road crew would very carefully dismantle the kit after each concert’s conclusion and then tip his drum mat over a large sack in order to capture and share the large deposits of cocaine the drummer had spilled onto it during each show.

However, his escalating excesses were turning him into an increasingly tortured figure. One night that week, he ended up spending an evening in the company of Bryan Ferry, the suave Geordie crooner whose Roxy Music were also touring the LA area at that point in time. Ferry later recalled Bonham repeatedly bursting into tears and pleading to return to the relative calm of his home and family back in the Midlands, so terrified was the drummer becoming of his own insatiable appetites whilst on the road.

I made my own escape from LA in early April, just in the nick
of time. I returned to London with an unsightly sunburnt face - I’d fallen asleep at an outdoors Beach Boys concert I’d attended two days prior to taking the plane homeward - and no appreciable healthy glow to my features. I’d made few friends during the two months I’d been resident there and was now pretty much
persona non grata
in the region. Someone had even alerted the local police to have me placed under arrest if I ever returned there (it must have been rescinded; I flew back five years later without incident). The folks over there just didn’t understand kamikaze journalism. The place gave me the fucking willies anyway and I’d rubbed up against enough of its weird scenes and fame-worshipping grotesqueries to last me a lifetime. The way I saw it, California was doing me a favour banning me from its borders. I’d almost died out there but had still managed to tunnel my way out. Plus I had a couple of hot stories to peddle to the
NME
and its readers. All was not lost - at least not yet.

London hadn’t changed in the time I’d been away from it - it was just as grey and glum-spirited as ever. Glam rock had brought some fleeting colour to its streets and music venues two or three years earlier but now that trend had petered out, all the blokes at gigs and in clubs had gone back to dressing like roadies and the women didn’t look much better. I was still flouncing around in my Beau Brummell phase and was generally mortified by the lack of sartorial flair being exhibited by my pop-picking compatriots that year. But then 1975 was another watershed year in rock and youth culture, and watersheds are generally gloomy places to be stuck in.

It was the last year that old-school rock ’n’ roll values still held the reins over young music-lovers around the world. Throughout the sixties the music itself had grown in structure and complexity
in a genuinely forward-thinking fashion, but by the mid-seventies it had become stagnant and far too besotted with its own perceived past. A case in point? John Lennon’s musical output over the two decades. Simply play ‘I Am the Walrus’ from 1967 and then follow it up with ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’ (a US no. 1 hit for him in ’75). The first track is a glorious, mind-boggling sonic lurch into the unknown whilst the second is an unimaginative regurgitation of late-fifties Brill Building popcraft complete with a double-corny sub-King Curtis sax solo. Rock was still hopelessly Yank-fixated, which meant that the vast majority of English acts were still singing with pronounced American accents and name-checking American towns and cities in their songs instead of being true to their real roots and writing about their own experiences and regions. Punk would change that, of course. But punk as we now know it was still a full year away from unleashing its fury.

In its absence, UK-based rock was being hijacked once more by the testosterone brigade - lusty-voiced blues-cliché-spewing lead singers in gonad-constricting loon pants who were always using the medium of music to bray on about their two-fisted manliness and rambunctious hard-loving ways. Ex-Free singer Paul Rodgers - lately a rising star again with Bad Company - was the kingpin of this hirsute studly mob. Legend had it that Rodgers was so manly he could start a show clean-shaven and by the end of the set he’d have grown a full beard before the audience’s very eyes. But a capacity for sudden facial-hair growth is ultimately scant compensation for the lack of musical adventurousness he and his ilk instilled in the mid-seventies rock landscape. I could see it in the rapture-free stares of their London audiences. Everyone looked just as jaded as I still felt.
A lot of good music had come out of the early seventies and I’d been there to hear it all. But by mid-decade, inspiration was scarce on the ground. A few gifted mavericks like David Bowie, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young still released new music of real consequence and artistry but the rest had mostly gotten bogged down in aimlessly parroting whatever they wrong-headedly perceived to be ‘the new contemporary trend’. This was when the musical abomination known as ‘white reggae’ started to materialise. And if rock bands weren’t making complete fools of themselves trying to appropriate rhythms best left to the likes of Toots and the Maytals, they’d be loitering in studios under the influence of too much cocaine attempting to play funk with equally desultory results. What a sorry state contemporary music was in. Two years earlier, I’d returned from the States with my suitcase laden with new records I’d heard whilst there and fallen in love with. When I’d flown back this second time, I hadn’t bothered to take any vinyl whatsoever from my LA sojourn with me. The only piece of music in my luggage had been a master tape James Williamson had made for me of a Stooges gig in Michigan just prior to their final break-up. On it you could hear Iggy being heckled and then physically attacked by a biker gang in the audience. I told James and Iggy I could sell it for them and get them some (much-needed) advance cash in the process, and they’d happily complied. I then flew to Paris and gave it to my pal Marc Zermati, who was the only punk-related person to have his own independent record label - Skydog - at that time. Marc paid them and then received another live Stooges tape by mail from Williamson. The two low-fidelity tapes were sequenced together and released the following year under the title of
Metallic KO
. The record went on to
sell surprisingly well and became a seminal soundtrack for UK punks, who gleefully aped the unruly aggression of the audience response captured within.

Stepping back into
NME
’s Long Acre office that spring felt strange. Business was booming - the paper was selling more than ever - but morale was low within its ranks. It felt like most of the staff and contributors had suddenly grown detached and cynical about what we were supposed to be doing. Few of us now felt the continued urge to push the envelope and take rock journalism into ever more provocative areas. I was unhappy about this state of affairs and duly vented my spleen on the subject to the guilty parties. And then - just three weeks after waving my unfond farewell to California-I got the sack.

In strict point of fact, I was fired for someone else’s fuck-up. My bosom buddy Pete Erskine was supposed to deliver a cover story one week but missed the deadline because he chose to down a full bottle of cough medicine instead of applying himself to the task at hand. He was so comatose he also neglected to hand in a singles review I’d completed and was counting on him to deliver to one of the editors due down at the printers. This review’s non-appearance was the reason for my sacking. Erskine got off with just a few stern words.

This not unnaturally threw our friendship into a state of some turmoil. I loved Pete dearly - he was my closest friend at the time - but lately he’d become something of a liability. Ever since heroin had come into the picture our relationship had tended to mirror the one later shared by the two protagonists in the film
Withnail and I
. Pete had left his wife and child and moved into my squalor-ridden Archway retreat (he’d lived there whilst I was off on the West Coast). Suddenly he had no family to keep him
in check and got swept up in hard drug use instead. It scared me to see how quickly and how intensely he fell under the lure of heroin. It was like standing next to someone you care about whilst that person is being sucked into quicksand. It hadn’t escaped my attention that I was a bad influence on him: our relationship just ended up bringing out the worst in each other. At first I felt responsible for his worsening state. But then he started screwing up in the workplace and I found myself having to cover for his mistakes. Now I’d been given the boot from the
NME
over something that was essentially his fault. That’s when I stopped feeling responsible for Pete.

The sacking not only seriously compromised one friendship but also annihilated whatever feelings of camaraderie still lingered within me vis-à-vis the rest of the
NME
staff. That cherished sense of a shared goal - that ‘all for one and one for all’ high-spiritedness - had left the building back in 1973 or early 1974 at the latest. In its place a mood of divisive complacency had taken over the premises; it increasingly felt like I was one of the only writers who’d stayed committed to upping its level of impact, subject range and journalistic standards. To that end, I was still prepared to risk death, ridicule, deportation and even the wrath of the entire music industry. My colleagues weren’t nearly as gung-ho though. They generally preferred the age-old ‘anything for an easy life’ approach, clocking on and off between 9 and 5 and then stealing away to the comfort zone of their private leisure-worlds outside of pop culture.

Tony Tyler, the paper’s features editor, had basically given up on popular music the day the Beatles broke up and had come to loathe the seventies and its rock musicians with a fierce passion (in the eighties he actually gave vent to this hatred in a slim tome
entitled
I Hate Rock & Roll
). After making it his personal crusade to belittle Bryan Ferry whenever possible in print, he’d turned his disapproving gaze on me. He then persuaded Ian MacDonald that I needed to be put in my place and that the best way to achieve this was to kick me out of the
NME
. These two then went to Nick Logan and told him I’d become too arrogant and loose-cannon-like and needed to be given my marching orders. This he did - in a short letter he handed me one day in the office. I read it before exiting the premises in high dudgeon.