Apathy for the Devil (38 page)

But razor-boys and the violence groupies who enable them were generally less tolerated in the American music business of the late seventies. Bill Graham had Grant and co. (briefly) jailed and fingerprinted and then went on the radio to denounce Led Zeppelin and their management as the closest thing in rock ’n’ roll to Nazi Germany. This must have sounded like serious fighting talk to Grant’s ears - he was Jewish after all - but he was still too chemically looped to fully comprehend the consequences of what he’d set into motion in Oakland. As Richard Cole later recalled, ‘Once we got out of jail we rounded up the troops, jumped on a plane and got the hell out of town. We went to New Orleans where we were going to be given the keys to the city! Led Zeppelin was to be the first group to play at their new stadium.’ The group hadn’t even had time to book into their New Orleans hotel when a phone call came to the reception area requesting the presence of Robert Plant. Plant - who’d apparently been unhappy about John Bindon being on the tour and who’d also
been the only Zeppelin member to try and talk reasonably with Bill Graham on the day of the aggression - then learned that his six-year-old son Karac had suddenly died from a mysterious viral infection.

From that moment on, Led Zeppelin was never the same again. In his sorrow Plant turned away from the life he’d been living for the past ten years and even considered giving up music as a career and becoming a teacher instead. He was also apparently deeply hurt when Page, Jones and Grant failed to appear in person to pay their respects at his son’s funeral. But Grant had already exiled himself away deep inside his warped head-space. One of Bill Graham’s assistants, Nicholas Clainos, was in conference with his boss in their San Francisco office the night the news came through. The phone rang. ‘Bill’s secretary said, “There’s a guy on the line who says he’s Peter Grant,”’ Clainos later recalled. ‘Bill and I picked up the phone. Bill said “Hello.” The guy was speaking real low. He said, “I hope you’re happy.” Those were his exact words. Bill said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Thanks to you, Robert Plant’s kid died today.” And he hung up the phone. We found out later . . . [Led Zeppelin] had to go home. They cancelled New Orleans and they never played again in America as the original Led Zeppelin. In their eyes, it was all karma and all tied together. Whether Robert Plant ever thought that or only Peter Grant, I don’t know.’

The above testimony is just one eyewitness quote from a whole grizzly chapter dedicated to the Oakland incident and its repercussions that appears in
Bill Graham Presents
, the famed promoter’s posthumous autobiography. Published in the nineties, a copy of the book fell into the hands of Grant himself not long before his own death from heart failure in 1995. According to a
friend whom he contacted as soon as he’d finished reading its contents, the revelations in the chapter entitled ‘Led Zeppelin’ caused the big man to weep uncontrollably. ‘Is it all true though?’ asked the friend, who happened to be Ed Bicknell, Dire Straits’ manager. ‘Yes,’ replied Grant through gulping tears. The truth had clearly mortified him. ‘I don’t want to be remembered as a bad person,’ he kept saying. But it was too late. History was about to shunt his positive accomplishments into the margins and portray him for the ages as some fearsome ogre who hired known killers to help further his omnipotence.

Virtually everyone in the rock ’n’ roll hemisphere seemed to be adrift in troubled waters during 1977. It was that kind of year. You might look enviously across the Atlantic at groups like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac raking in the cash, hogging the top slots in the hit parade and racking up multi-platinum sales for their latest output, but when you actually listened to either
Hotel California
or
Rumours
it became numbingly apparent that it was just more high-grade cocaine music for the masses. Bruce Springsteen, the country’s big hope, was out of action for most of the year, tied down by legal proceedings that threatened to jinx his future recording career. And the US heartland was generally unresponsive to the first New York-based punk recordings being made available. The Ramones still weren’t getting played on the radio and the debut albums by Talking Heads, Television and Richard Hell and the Voidoids were all destined to attain only meagre chart placings in their homeland. A few disaffected kids in every major city would cherish these records but there was no discernibly ‘mainstream’ youth shift towards all things ‘punk’ like there was that year throughout Britain.

It was still some kind of freak-show cult out there in the land
of shopping malls and sagebrush. Some elemental galvanising force needed to arrive in the country much like the Beatles had in 1964 and then take the nation completely by storm. Iggy Pop was too old and the Ramones didn’t really have the right personalities for the job. The only logical candidates were the Sex Pistols. In late autumn of 1977, Bill Graham, Peter Grant’s new worst nightmare, contacted Malcolm McLaren and offered the band their very own San Francisco showcase at an old hippie venue he still ran known as the Winterland. McLaren eventually took him up on his offer and scheduled a small tour of other US states to precede the show. And that - as history now clearly indicates - was the end of the Sex Pistols. America has a habit of decimating English groups on their first tour of the colonies and such was the case with Shepherd’s Bush’s finest. In the end they had the bollocks but lacked the stamina. If the New York Dolls were too much too soon, the Pistols were too little too fast.

I saw Sid maybe two weeks before he was due to ‘invade’ the United States. I was walking out of a dope house on Powis Square as he stumbled into the courtyard. He was wearing a black patch over his right eye like a pirate. ‘Is that for theatrical effect then?’ I asked him. It wasn’t, he cheerily insisted. He’d lately lost the vision in his right eye. It was all to do with him shooting up something he shouldn’t have and going temporarily blind as a consequence. Then he mentioned - apropos of nothing - that he’d overdosed thirteen times in the previous twelve weeks. He was grinning as he said it, like he was waving around some kind of junkie badge of courage. ‘Way to go, son. Way to go,’ I mumbled back. And then we went our separate ways. I knew I’d never see him again. The smell of death coming off him had become way too pungent.

It’s funny though - when Sid got booked for murdering Nancy over in Manhattan a few months into 1978, his mother, whom I’d never met before, sought me out at the
NME
’s new office in Carnaby Street. She was a well-spoken, small, birdlike woman - pencil-thin, quiet-natured, noticeably intelligent, younger-looking than I’d expected - and she asked me to help her in drumming up support for her son in his darkest hour. By chance, the Clash were having a record-company-sponsored knees-up for their latest recording only a few streets away and so I shepherded her over to the festivities and introduced her to Mick Jones and Paul Simonon. I think they actually ended up playing a special benefit show for Sid not long afterwards. In the brief time we were together, I pondered asking Ann Beverley how she felt now about having used heroin whilst her son was still in her womb. And what had actually transpired in their home environment to create such a monster - but left the questions unspoken. I didn’t want to cultivate any kind of relationship with the woman. I just wanted to be rid of the whole sordid Sid scenario and the hateful, barbaric time frame that had seen its rise and fall.

Did anything good happen for me in 1977? Well, I managed to obtain a pre-release tape of Television’s
Marquee Moon
album sometime in spring and played it incessantly on the crummy little cassette player I took with me on my travels around London’s smack shacks. I quickly concluded that I hadn’t heard new music this compelling in years and wrote a long review to the effect that ended up netting the New York quartet their first
NME
cover. This exposure actually gave Television a handy springboard for instant recognition in a country where no one had yet heard them play a note. Upon its release,
Marquee Moon
penetrated the lower echelons of the UK album top 30 and even the notoriously
prickly Tom Verlaine thanked me later for having aided its commercial momentum. At least it indicated to me that whilst my own writing might have become stilted and flawed of late, my instincts for recognising other people’s talent were still safe and sound.

The only other worthwhile assignment I pulled off for the
NME
that year was to instigate the first interview the paper ever ran with Elvis Costello. I’d known his manager Andrew Jakeman, aka Jake Riviera, for more than three years and had watched him formulate and then boldly put into practice an independent record label he’d called Stiff, which began releasing singles in ’77. I’d also steered the Damned onto his management roster a year earlier. Jake started out pinning his main hopes on developing Nick Lowe from the underrated pub-rock stalwarts Brinsley Schwarz as a hit-making singer/songwriter and record producer but secretly lusted to find his very own Bob Dylan to play Albert Grossman alongside. When a former roadie of Lowe’s old group sent in a demo tape to Stiff, he sensed he’d struck gold dust. There was a compelling urgency in Declan MacManus’s beseeching voice and an eloquence and trickiness to the lyrics of all his self-penned compositions that were astonishing to hear from one so young. The twenty-year-old MacManus had lately been gaining experience as a struggling UK Bruce Springsteen clone with a group named Flip City but was now ready to assume a musical identity of his own. Riviera renamed him Elvis Costello but MacManus was otherwise firmly in control of his own destiny.

The newly rechristened Costello was as young as any of the other punk upstarts making merry that year and could instinctively relate to their rage and youthful audacity. But his music drew from a deeper well than the one containing just the Stooges
and a bit of reggae. He’d already digested the works of the real masters of pop songcraft - Burt Bacharach, Brian Wilson, Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan and Randy Newman - and was determined to create songs of his own that stood up to their exacting standards. He was a big talent and big thinker blessed with a canny knack for self-packaging. ‘The only motivating points for me writing songs are revenge and guilt,’ he’d seethed at me during our first encounter. It was a great line that was destined to appear many times hence in banner headlines over other articles on the guy. He knew it and I knew it too. He was using me to construct his very own media profile for future exploitation.

But he was still very young and not a little drunk and so when he slipped out of his Mr Angry routines and started to reveal a sweeter, more playful nature, I warmed to him. He ended up paying me two of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received. The first was something he told me in an alcoholic semi-stupor. Just before making music his full-time profession, Costello had been working in the office of a company engaged in the creation and upkeep of early computers. On his last day there, he went to clean out his desk and found my old Brian Wilson articles from 1975 lurking at the bottom.

And he wrote part of his song ‘Waiting for the End of the World’ about seeing me almost get attacked by fellow passengers on a tube ride out towards Middlesex. I’m the guy in the first verse - or at least that’s what its composer told me. I don’t mean to brag but I’ve been the subject matter of several tunes penned by the great, the good and the indifferent. Chrissie Hynde lyrically re-enacted our ugly break-up in a dirgey ballad the Pretenders released in 1994 called ‘977’. Adam and his wretched
Ants wrote and recorded a sneer-driven early B-side called ‘Press Darlings’ that featured the refrain ‘Nick Kent - he’s the best-dressed man in the town’. And Morrissey’s supposed to have penned a particularly vituperative attack on my person that I’ve never bothered to listen to-a song called ‘Reader Meet Author’ that appeared on 1996’s
Southpaw Grammar
. Being a ‘rock muse’ may be the secret dream of many but believe me, hearing your name and likeness sullied in song isn’t all it’s supposedly cracked up to be. I could’ve certainly done without the exposure. But I always liked the Elvis song and hearing him play it live that year with his Attractions was always a moment to cherish. It told me that even in my current shabby state, I was somehow still having an impact on the way rock culture was developing.

But the best thing that happened to me in 1977 occurred in late autumn, when I finally succeeded in becoming a registered drug addict at an NHS-sponsored facility in Westbourne Grove. It was actually just a small wooden hut that had been recently constructed on the grounds of the local hospital to deal with the growing heroin epidemic in the region. A young doctor and a nurse were in charge. Their job was to determine whether anyone who came through the door seeking their aid was a real addict or some joker trying to feign dependency in order to ponce off the system. If - after countless urine samples - you’d proven to them that you were one of the former breed, then they’d prescribe you daily dosages of a drug called methadone - almost exclusively taken orally in liquid form - which you could then pick up legally and free of charge from an obliging chemist’s.

I liked methadone. A lot. It gave me the same warm inner glow and skewed sense of dreamy invulnerability that heroin had provided at the beginning. In fact, there didn’t seem to be much
difference between the two drugs - they were equally addictive on a purely physical level and interacted pleasingly with the same parts of the brain once they’d invaded the bloodstream. Ultimately I was just substituting one bad form of chemical dependency with another.

But there were still immediate upsides aplenty for me to gloat over. First and foremost, it broke the spell smack had me under for the past four years. This was a miraculous occurrence in itself: another few months of struggling through the life I’d been living of late and I’d have ended up a corpse decomposing inside a condemned building. Everyone I’d started out using heroin with was now dead, near death or facing jail time. We all should have known better. We’d all read the stories. Heroin is bad karma in powder form and it killed loads of jazz musicians so what chance did the flakier rock generation stand under its influence? We were all like sheep being led to the slaughterhouse. But then just as I reached the killing floor, salvation - in the form of a methadone script - plucked me away from death’s merciless blade. I had a lot to be thankful for. I was now getting high daily on a drug that was both legal and free. That was my definition back then of heaven on earth.