Apathy for the Devil (4 page)

When he finally arrived on stage flanked once again by the Band, he looked very different from the ghostly apparition who’d almost deafened me back in 1966. He was fuller in the face and wore a bulky white suit that made him look like a character from a vintage Humphrey Bogart gangster film set in Panama. He wasn’t stoned either - at least, not so that you would notice. He looked more apprehensive than anything else. He had a right to be because it soon became apparent that he was a changed man vocally as well as imagewise. He sang every song in a whimsical croon that was light years removed from the amphetamine shriek of yore. You almost expected him to break into a yodel at any moment. Like the Band themselves, it was an exercise in old-school musical Americana that couldn’t be faulted for its pioneering spirit and woodsy finesse. But it was about as sexy as kissing a tree.

I loved the Band’s first two albums like everyone else but had issues with their collective fashion sense and penchant for extravagant facial foliage. They were just too hairy for my taste. Of course, this probably had something to do with the fact that I still couldn’t grow facial hair to save my life. But the Band turned almost everyone in the rock milieu into budding Grizzly Adamses practically overnight. Look at photos of Paul McCartney during the
Let It Be
sessions. Or Jerry Garcia at the end of the sixties. You’re confronted with more hair than face. These people were just disappearing behind a forest of their own testosterone. That’s why the Stones were always the best-looking rock act of that era. Five members and yet no facial hair whatsoever. They always had their priorities well sorted.

Now it was 1970 and I was bored. Time weighed too heavily on me too often. I only felt grounded in the moments when I was listening to music or reading a worthwhile piece of literature. My mother had always made sure I was a reader. She made it her business to compel me to seek solace in books and enlarge my basic attention span in the process. I would have already started perusing the self-styled ‘new journalism’ tomes that had sprung up over the past ten years.

Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
was the first-a great book. Capote had a marked influence on me - particularly his celebrity profiles. He truly got Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe to open up in print and give voice to their personal vulnerabilities. In a way you could sense Capote was also betraying their confidence by revealing their intimate bar-talk to his readers in such a naked light, but it was a warranted invasion of privacy, made with a flawless insight into the human frailties that lurk behind the surreal world of celebritydom.

I was certainly intrigued by Tom Wolfe’s dandified upper-echelon hipspeak prose style and provocative choice of then-contemporary cultural fetishes to unleash it on. But the tome that really fired me up that year was James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, the greatest book ever written. It was a tough nut to crack, involving at least six months of daily reading sessions and the added necessity of having to constantly consult two separate reference books that broke down into minute detail all the labyrinthine complexities lurking in each and every sentence of the text.
Ulysses
focused on just twenty-four hours in the lives of three Dublin residents at the turn of the last century, revealing their every hidden thought and impulse as they whimsically grapple with their destinies. Whilst writing it, Joyce found a way to penetrate the complex innermost workings of the human imagination and evoke them sublimely in the printed word. He ripped open the floodgates whence the whole ‘stream of consciousness’ aesthetic was sired. In a sense, it was a pioneering artefact of the psychedelic impulse because - if you only took the time to log into its many-layered meaningful-ness - it was guaranteed to blow your mind and stimulate new insights into the world of artistic expression. To borrow a line that the
News of the World
- Britain’s leading tabloid of the day - used to run at the head of every issue, ‘All human life is there.’

My months spent doggedly digesting the full importance of
Ulysses
seemed to impress my English teacher, who then took it upon himself to persuade my parents that I should aim for a place at either Oxford or Cambridge University. This involved staying on at school for an extra term in order to sit a special entrance exam. It was probably just as well: my A-level results ended up being nothing to boast about.

In late October I took the test, flaunting my newly acquired
Joycean insights throughout one essay and attempting to pinpoint the cause of Virginia Woolf’s obsession with depression and boredom in her various novels in the second. Both were pretentious screeds unworthy of serious consideration. I sensed as much in early December when I was interviewed by a lecturer at Queen’s College, Oxford, who wasted little time in further acquainting me with my shortcomings as a literary analyst. Those dreaming spires wouldn’t be housing my sorry hide, I quickly concluded. I wouldn’t be darkening the towers of higher learning in this exclusive neck of the woods. A formal letter of rejection was in the post heading towards my address before the year was out.

Was I sad? Not that I can recall. I was finished with kowtowing to the high-minded dictates of academia anyway. My brain couldn’t take in another avalanche of useless information. The old ways meant nothing to me now. My mind was set on rambling, on striking out for parts unknown. My thoughts were all on how I could best project myself into the new wild frontier of London’s brimming youth counter-culture.

What was I really like at this precise ‘crossroads’ moment in my life? A weird kid, certainly - moody, introspective, unsure of myself, girlish-looking, long-limbed, fresh-faced, a victim of bad posture. Puberty had been a hell of a long time arriving and I was still shyly adjusting to the new regime that had only recently invaded my body and hormones.

I was becoming something of a bedroom hermit, plotting out my future and fantasising the hours away behind drawn curtains. I had a lot in common with Tom Courtenay’s escape-obsessed character in the landmark sixties film
Billy Liar
; my dreams had lately gotten so out of control that I needed to live them before they devoured me.

But what would happen if my dreams were suddenly revealed as a kind of living nightmare? Wouldn’t it be somehow more sensible to opt for a life of quiet rural underachievement instead? That way at least my ‘innocence’ would still be protected. I wouldn’t be soiled by worldly experience. But innocence has always been an overrated virtue in my scheme of things. It’s a kissing cousin to naivety and being naive is only one small step from out-and-out stupidity. People who endlessly talk up its purity of sentiment usually turn out to be either morons or chicken hawks.

William Blake was right. You have to soldier on down that dank tunnel of adulthood until you arrive at the bigger picture. Otherwise you’re just abandoning yourself to a world of small-mindedness, bitterness and regrets.

Just as the sixties were tapering off into history, a dark vortex opened up in the era’s rock culture. Hard drugs began knocking over musicians like ninepins. By 1971 many were hooked on heroin or burning out their nasal membranes and nervous systems with too much cocaine. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison all expired within a few short months of each other, Joplin and Morrison from heroin overdoses, Hendrix from pills and booze. The West Coast rock scene was in utter turmoil. Once upon a time they’d been comrades-in-arms gently cushioned by the sweet scent of pot-smoke; now they were frantically pulling knives and guns on each other over cocaine deals gone awry.

Bad drug craziness was afflicting every nook and cranny of the youth music hemisphere that year. Young hard-rock hopefuls like Michigan’s MC
₅
and the Stooges were being seriously sidetracked by their addictions. Down in Georgia, the Allman Bros. Band had to be forced into a rehab clinic by their record company just prior to a tour. The intervention didn’t prevent their guitarist Duane Allman from dying in a motorbike crash just a few months later whilst stoned out of his gourd. Even the introspective US folkie brigade of the hour were tainted: James Taylor, the dulcet-voiced shy and retiring troubadour who’d lately
become a bashful million-selling superstar the world over, was regularly on the nod throughout the period.

Over in England, it was just as bad. John and Yoko were both strung out. Eric Clapton had lately succumbed too. The fabled guitarist stopped playing in public in 1971 and self-medicated himself into temporary oblivion instead. He only left his country home once that year - to fly to the South of France in midsummer in order to attend Mick Jagger’s wedding. As soon as he arrived at his destination he started experiencing acute heroin withdrawal. In great physical discomfort he phoned Keith Richards - who lived nearby - for something to tide him over. ‘Tell him to go and find his own,’ responded Richards curtly to the person who answered the phone and then transmitted the message. The caring, sharing sixties were dead and gone. Now it was every man for himself.

In such a cold and divisive climate, the Rolling Stones could only further flourish. They’d never made convincing propagandists for utopianism anyway. They were more inclined to view life through a dark prism of worldly cynicism. The inky black vortex was their natural habitat and so 1971 became their greatest-ever year, their sustained moment of true creative majesty. It saw the release of two mind-boggling Stones-related films -
Performance
and
Gimme Shelter
- as well as
Sticky Fingers
, the best album of their entire career. That same year, they toured the UK and then tax-dodged their way over to the South of France, where they lived whilst recording their last real masterpiece,
Exile on Main St.
, in Keith Richards’s basement.

Performance
had actually been filmed in the autumn of 1968 but an early edit had so mortified the higher-ups at Warner Bros., the project’s backers, that it was initially deemed unviewable. After
approximately two years of haggling and re-editing it was given a limited opening in the States, followed by a brief showcase at a plushly seated cinema in London’s West End that began in early January ’71. The delayed exposure would prove propitious to its acceptance. Late-sixties audiences would have found it generally too violent and disturbing to readily accept. It spoke far more eloquently to the uncentred, ‘something wrong something not quite right’ mood of the emerging seventies. The plot line starts out straightforwardly enough: a psychotically violent London gang-land enforcer named Chas - unforgettably played by James Fox - gets too caught up in his bloodlust and incurs the wrath of his deeply scary employers. His life in jeopardy, he hides out in the basement of a Ladbroke Grove town house only to discover that his landlord is a reclusive rock star named Turner (Jagger) who shares his living quarters with two wacky female paramours and a prodigious supply of hallucinogenic drugs. The second half of the film revolves around an extended druggy mind-fuck confrontation between the gangster, the rock star and his witchy girlfriend Pherber (Anita Pallenberg). Turner wants to fasten onto Chas’s ruthless self-confidence as a way to rekindle his own fractured career ambitions but only ends up reaping the whirlwind when Fox’s character calmly shoots him during the film’s final climax.

Essentially, it’s a cautionary tale about corrupted souls toying with forbidden forces and then having to face the consequences, but that didn’t prevent its mastermind, writer/director Donald Cammell, from also depicting the lives of his dissolute protagonists in a hypnotically alluring fashion. Seeing the naked Turner/Jagger smoking reefer in a bathtub surrounded by two exotic-looking naked European women certainly had a forceful impact on my easily stimulated late-teenage imagination. When I
was only twelve years old, my dad had let me stay up to see
La Dolce Vita
on the telly and I’d experienced a similar tingling reaction. Fellini’s film - like
Performance
- is a surreal meditation on the spiritual bankruptcy that lurks within the souls of those who ardently pursue the glamorous life. But that only became apparent to me when I saw the film again years later as a fully fledged adult. As a child, all I connected with was the endless cavalcade of beautiful available women, the dizzy flashing lights and wild all-night parties. It looked like heaven on earth. And the vision
Performance
conjured up of life in Turner’s dimly lit Ladbroke Grove lair was equally bewitching.

The film still conveys an almost supernatural power whenever it’s shown, but its lasting brilliance was clearly obtained at a steep cost to its key players. James Fox became mentally unhinged as a result of immersing himself in the film’s disorientating script, suffered a personality meltdown and had to retire from acting for several years. Anita Pallenberg didn’t act in a film again for some time. Cammell never managed to build a prolific career for himself in cinema after
Performance
; he committed suicide in the nineties. And Mick Jagger deeply estranged his soulmate Keith Richards during the actual filming when he and Anita Pallenberg, Richards’s girlfriend, supposedly began an affair of their own. This would have perilous consequences as Richards chose to react to the perceived infidelity by introducing his bloodstream to the pain-relieving panacea known as heroin, thus setting in motion the Stones’ true dark age and an antipathy between the two head Stones that exists to this day.

Both
Performance
and
Gimme Shelter
- which opened in London just a few short months later - focused down hard on the calamitous predicaments that tend to prevail whenever narcissistic
would-be ‘outlaws’ come into direct contact with the infinitely more barbaric genuine article. But whereas the former was a many-layered work of fiction,
Shelter
was a flashback-driven documentary that chillingly captured the mayhem and carnage let loose at the Altamont Speedway on December 6th 1969, when the Stones headlined a free concert there only to be upstaged by the Oakland Hells Angels - unwisely chosen to provide security around the stage - who savagely beat up anyone in the audience they happened to take a personal dislike to. ‘Altamont’ was already being touted in the print media as the byword for the spiritual death of the sixties - that and the much publicised arrest in November ’69 of hippie mass murderer Charles Manson - but prior to the film’s premiere few had actually seen what transpired that fateful day and those that had all had different takes on whose fault it really was.
Gimme Shelter
didn’t moralise or apportion blame; it simply replayed the nightmarish events as they occurred, leaving the stunned viewer to draw his or her own conclusions.