Apathy for the Devil (37 page)

Vowing never to live again in Los Angeles, he remained in Europe, staying briefly in Switzerland (where his faithful assistant Corinne Schwab put him in touch with a therapist) before heading for Berlin with Iggy Pop. Moving into a seven-room flat at 155 Hauptstrasse in the city’s downmarket Schöneberg district, he mingled anonymously with the area’s mostly immigrant population and found inspiration for several instrumental pieces he planned to record with the recently recruited Brian Eno. ‘The first side of
Low
was all about me,’ Bowie later explained. ‘Always crashing in the same car and all that self-pitying crap. Isn’t it great to be on your own; let’s just pull down the blinds and fuck ’em all . . .’

The record shocked listeners at first. Bowie sounded withdrawn and down in the mouth throughout his five vocal performances, as though his personality was deflating before our very ears. ‘Deep in your room / So deep in your room,’ he intoned, like some crooner peddling Valium via a television advert. Today, Bowie likes to claim that
Low
and its two follow-ups
Heroes
and
Lodger
were conceived and recorded in a largely cocaine-free state of being, but other sources insist this wasn’t exactly the case. Certainly he was taking far less of the drug in Berlin than he’d managed in LA, but there was also a lot of alcohol being consumed. Iggy would later recount that in a typical
seven-day week he and Bowie would spend two days in some form of intoxication, two days recovering from the hangovers, and three days straight, ‘which is a pretty good balance for musicians’. Of his months as Bowie’s Berlin house guest, Iggy still remembers the basic routine. ‘Get up in the morning on the fourth floor of a cold-water building and take a sponge bath. Cut a little brown bread and cheese, and eat. Then walk over the city, which hasn’t changed since 1910: organ grinders who still had monkeys, quality transvestite shows. A different world. By evening, I’d go have dinner with Bowie, see a film or watch
Starsky and Hutch
- that was our big thing. If there wasn’t enough to do, I knew some bad people and I’d get stoned and drunk. Sometimes I’d do the bad stuff with Bowie and the good stuff with the bad people.’

In March 1977 Iggy played his first-ever ‘solo’ concert in a venue called ‘Friars’ out in the English town of Aylesbury as the official unveiling of a world tour booked for that spring. Only it wasn’t really a solo deal because David Bowie was part of his backing band, supplying the keyboard accompaniment and backing vocals. The Duke remained out of the stage spotlight and had certainly dressed down for the occasion. In an anorak and flat cap he looked more like a registered taxi driver than a rock star. Still, his everyman attire and dimly lit profile hunched over a keyboard couldn’t detract from the soon-drawn realisation that he was the one who was really in charge of Iggy’s new direction.

As a result, the singer’s own performance felt oddly constrained in its desire to exhibit a higher grasp of professionalism. He still moved and danced like a whirling dervish but he wasn’t interacting with the audience, wasn’t stirring up the communal frenzy any more. Bowie was midwifing him into a new career
phase - that of the performer in control of himself and his surroundings - with a pre-arranged set and precious little room for any kind of spontaneity or ‘sonic jazz’. The London punk cognoscenti came out in force to savour the moment and Johnny Thunders stood next to me through much of the show. But before the end he was turning on his heels. ‘I can’t watch this shit any more,’ he’d murmured. ‘Jim’s just Bowie’s bitch now. I can’t believe he sold out his rock ’n’ roll side to go cabaret.’ I thought his reaction was small-minded and told him so. I actually liked some of the music they were playing. Not the brace of ill-advised Stooges covers but the new material that no one in the audience had ever heard before: songs from
The Idiot
and
Lust for Life
. I saw what Bowie was essentially trying to pull off - rehabilitating his ‘wild American friend’ whilst enlarging his own musical frontiers and gaining some handy punk cred in the process - but my heart still went out to the guy because his patronage was an act of genuine kindness that had probably saved Iggy’s life and such acts were desperately hard to come by in the seventies, particularly in the music-making marketplace.

The Idiot
got released at the end of March and promptly polarised its audience. Lester Bangs wrote one of his last truly worthwhile pieces of criticism on the subject in a
Village Voice
article entitled ‘Blowtorch in Bondage’. He lambasted the album’s contents with a vengeance; ‘the person singing on
The Idiot
sounds like a dead man’, he wrote disparagingly. But he and other Stooges hardliners were missing the point. Iggy and Bowie were just taking the whole dank vampiric vibe of the seventies to a further sonic and conceptual extremity. Too remorselessly bleak and experimental-sounding to snare any kind of mainstream hit momentum, the record nonetheless held a rising new demographic
- most notably creative young Mancunians such as Ian Curtis and Howard Devoto - spellbound with awe and the accompanying tour turned out to be a stirring standing-room-only success everywhere it played.

At its conclusion, Iggy and Bowie promptly deployed their working unit - Hunt and Tony Sales as the rhythm section plus a Scottish guitarist named Ricky Gardiner - back to West Berlin, where they all entered a recording studio known as Hansa together and commenced work on a second album project. It was at this juncture that Iggy started to rebel against his European patron’s grip on his own creative destiny. ‘Bowie’s a hell of a fast guy,’ he’d later reflect. ‘Very quick thinker, very quick action, very active person, very sharp. I realised I had to be quicker than him or whose album was it going to be?’ By the end of the summer sessions, he’d managed to wrest back control of his core musical identity -
Lust for Life
, the resulting record, was brim-full of inspired autobiographical lyrics that dovetailed neatly into Bowie’s generally more uplifting-sounding backing tracks. Indeed it was such a tour de force that many were predicting that it would provide Iggy with the elusive cross-over hit that would finally transform him into a bona fide superstar.

But then just as the record was being shipped into stores that September, news broke that Iggy’s more prestigious RCA Victor label-mate Elvis Presley had died and the company promptly suspended the further pressing and distribution of
Lust for Life
in order to cope with worldwide demand for the King’s back catalogue. The curse of Osterberg was still in full effect. His career had been sidelined yet again, this time by a fat bloke dying on the toilet. He tried keeping a stiff upper lip but became seriously unglued just prior to going out on his second world tour that
year, booked - without Bowie’s presence this time - to promote a new record that was barely available in the shops.

One afternoon in September I wandered into the
NME
’s drab Waterloo headquarters only to hear a familiar sound coming from out of Nick Logan’s office-a deep-voiced American baritone that suddenly see-sawed into a high-pitched cackle whenever its owner came to the punchline of the tale he was telling. From a distance, I could just about make out the form of a strange little man in thick, frameless glasses and sporting disastrously short hair and a nondescript trench coat, slacks and golfing shoes who looked disconcertingly like the kind of character Jerry Lewis might have played in one of his early movie romps. Only the voice gave him away: it was Iggy.

I went over to greet him but couldn’t get past the fact that his appearance and general demeanour were those of a completely crazy man. I took him to one side and asked what on earth he was doing on the premises. ‘I’m trying to get hold of some crank,’ he replied - ‘crank’ being US slang for speed. ‘And I heard there might be some here. Can you help me out?’ Oh boy - Iggy Pop on uppers: the most hyperactive man on the planet under the sway of the most hyperactive drug on the planet. It was a recipe for utter bedlam. He then invited me to join him for a ride around London in his limo parked outside. I told him I couldn’t help him obtain any amphetamine but followed along anyway simply to further our sudden reacquaintance. I ended up spending the rest of the evening in his company and wishing I hadn’t. He wasn’t unfriendly but he was so bizarrely different from the guy I’d known back in the Stooges that it felt like he’d assumed a whole new personality in the interim-a personality moreover that was bewilderingly hard to actually like. He’d strut around
like a little banty rooster marshalling his troops - his tour organisers and general personnel - like the drug-deluded ghost of General Patton. Then I joined him on an impromptu midnight trek to the Roxy, London’s most notorious punk niterie, only to watch him behave there with such a haughty sense of self-entitlement he almost got punched out by the barely pubescent drummer of X-Ray Spex.

Still, Iggy managed to get two great albums out in 1977 and build a lucrative solo career for himself as a live act hither and yon, and these positive accomplishments ultimately far outweighed any negative energy and tricky karma still dogging his tracks. By any reckoning he’d be able to look back on the year as a providential one-a time of growth and dreams fulfilled. Other rock stars I’d known back in the early seventies wouldn’t be so lucky.

1977 came down like a jackhammer even on big boys like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Keith Richards got busted in Toronto that February by some Mounties who discovered enough heroin and cocaine in his hotel room to put him behind bars for several years. Many strings had to be pulled - many favours called in - but the Stones organisation somehow managed to keep him out of jail and out of Canada until an actual trial date was set. A rehab stint was set into motion but it evidently failed to have lasting results. In Ian McLagan’s autobiography
All the Rage
the former Faces keyboard player recalls doing sessions with the group in a Paris recording studio later the same year and witnessing the guitarist ‘jab a needle straight through his jeans into his bum and leave it there, the syringe sticking out as he walked around the room laughing loudly’.

With no fresh product to promote apart from a ropey in-concert
album entitled
Love You Live
and a key member in big trouble, the group wisely opted not to tour that year. Led Zeppelin also had no new recordings to release during the same time frame, a singer still recovering from an auto accident in Greece eighteen months earlier that had come close to crippling him for life and two other band members in the early stages of heroin addiction. Even more alarmingly, their manager Peter Grant had just been put through a painful divorce by his once-devoted wife Gloria and was numbing the extensive emotional wounds brought on by no longer having a family to counterbalance the craziness of being at the helm of the world’s biggest rock attraction by consuming far too much cocaine for a man of his gargantuan girth. His mood quickly darkened and he began making bad business decisions, the most far-reachingly ill-conceived being his green-lighting of a huge Zeppelin tour booked into all the major cities in America throughout the spring and summer months of ’77.

To the group’s credit, they managed to perform well through most of the forty-nine shows despite ill health, frayed nerves and escalating levels of chemical refreshment. But the tour would end up going down in the history books not on its musical merits but for a single grotesque incident that will haunt the group for an eternity. In Oakland Coliseum just prior to the first of two Zeppelin concerts being presented by Bill Graham, the most powerful promoter in America, Peter Grant, bookended by John Bonham and Richard Cole, had savagely beaten up one of Graham’s security team, a young man named Jim Matzorkis. ‘Grant said “Hold him,”’ Matzorkis later testified, ‘and just started punching me in the face with his fists and kicking me in the balls.’ The victim then recalled a fourth accomplice of
Grant’s ‘trying to rip my eyeballs out of their sockets. I think my lawyers found later that there was some incident where he did rip somebody’s eyes out. That scared the hell out of me.’

The identity of this fourth accomplice was made available under the banner headlines that prevailed in the world’s press when he, Grant, Bonham and Cole were formally arrested at Graham’s instigation in their San Francisco hotel two days after the attack and all charged with grievous assault. It was John Bindon, a well-known London-based career criminal who’d dabbled in acting - he played the slow-witted enforcer Moody in
Performance
- and improved his circumstances by becoming one of those colourful East End villain types that sections of the seventies aristocracy liked to adopt and invite to their soirées. Bindon wasn’t short on colour: he was supposed to be equipped with the largest penis in the whole South of England and was known to be a close personal friend of Princess Margaret, the Queen’s wayward little sister. But those bored rich folk who fell under his earthy charm generally preferred to remain blissfully ignorant of his shadow self and its gleeful ongoing involvement in murders and acts of bodily harm too gruesome to itemise here. In the same way that human excrement like Charles Manson could only make their homicidal mark in the LSDDRENCHED late sixties, someone as brutish and bloodthirsty as Bindon could only rise up and get himself integrated into the worlds of glamour and prestige that fell under the dark voyeuristic penchants of the seventies. When Grant and Richard Cole elected to have him be part of Led Zeppelin’s security staff that year, they unwittingly unloosed real demons within their organisation that were far more deadly and disruptive than anything Jimmy Page could have possibly conjured up in Aleister
Crowley’s old lair with his occultist books and spells.

Why on earth did they embark on such a foolhardy collaboration? It was the drugs again. Everyone was so coked up they’d convinced themselves that the lives of the members of Led Zeppelin were under threat and that the only way to combat a possible assassination attempt whilst touring the States was to hand-pick the most vicious brutes known throughout the whole Western world to be on their team. When you think about it, it was a distinctly ‘punk’ way of reacting, particularly for a bunch who’d lately been branded ‘tired old farts’ by the same demographic. After all, back in London, Malcolm McLaren was behaving in an identical fashion and making out like a bandit on the publicity. His thugs just hadn’t killed anybody yet.