Nico (7 page)

‘When yer purrit all tergether, what must she get, every time? Scag. That's all she wants.'

‘It's all you seem to want, too,' I said.

‘She gets the gear, we get the gig … an' if there's a bonus from the boss on the night, all well an' good.'

‘Boss?'

‘Boss.'

Bags

By some freak mischance on his part, Bags ballooned down on us, but he soon bounced back up again.

Bags was Demetrius's protégé. The Doctor was raising him in his own image and to his own methods… . Eat first, then think about paying the band. When Bags and Demetrius waddled into a restaurant chefs would raise their hats and cheer.

Bags had Demetrius's bulk but not his personal stature. Where Demetrius would occasionally take us for a pre-gig meal at some pastel-pink Deco Designer Diner with foliage in tubs, Bags was always sniffing out the whiff of a charcoal-grilled half-pounder snaking its way down the street. Of course, with Demetrius, the money was ours to begin with, but at least it sometimes found its way back to us in his munificence. Bags's life was a solitary feast.

Demetrius had crammed Bags into Nico's flat, along with a synthesiser duo from Sheffield, two young boys Demetrius had taken under his paternal care, Gary and Barry. One dark, one blond; one rough, one smooth. Something for everyone. The blue-eyed blond was Demetrius's ideal, whereas the Lad appealed more to Bags's fascination with the proletarian. It was important, if one intended to get on in the Pop business, to cultivate an interest, at least for a little while, in the habits and pastimes of one's social inferiors. To feel in touch with the simple rhythm of their lives … the beat, as it were.

Gary kept a “pen” in the back yard where a few scraggy chickens would peck out a wormless existence between cracks in the flagstones. In the corner Gary had erected a wire hutch in which he kept the chickens' mortal enemies – two ferrets.

Nico's universe was expanding into ever more perplexing dimensions. When Gary first brought a ferret back, she was fascinated yet bewildered.

‘What a cuoorieuse little creature. It's not a caaat … and it's not a raaat … what is it?' She got friendly with the chickens and would tap on the window. They'd come up to her, heads tilted in that one-eyed foolish way. ‘This is Esmeralda,' she'd say, ‘isn't she sweeet?' And she'd press her lips against the window and give the uncomprehending bird a kiss.

Demetrius spent nurture time with Bags, introducing him to the ways of command. Ordinarily Bags would have gone into insurance if his feet didn't stink so much. Pop music's the last refuge of the true stinker. All those toxins have to settle somewhere and Bags's trainers housed most of them.

Bags had complete contempt for arty popsters who dared to call themselves ‘musicians'. Like Demetrius, he shared the belief that Art Rock was a euphemism for ‘pretentious crap played by people who lacked the craftsmanship to write a good song, the skill to play an instrument properly, and the intellectual discipline required to create “serious music” '.

Demetrius and Bags had presided over a new line-up. Toby had some bona-fide paid work and wouldn't be coming. So Demetrius called up the number on a business card given to him by the drummer from the Gentlemen Jivers of Jazz. Suddenly we had some strange guy sitting in the middle of Echo's rehearsal room, with a pair of wire brushes, a tuxedo, and perfect teeth. Echo's crumbling yellow cavities spat venomous pus into his ring of confidence. Nico wanted to know who he was, what he was doing in her group, and why he kept smiling.

Dr Demetrius's musical awareness also convinced him that the American audiences loved English guitar heroes. So he hired Didsbury's very own Spider Mike. Spider did the Townshend Twirl, the Bolan Boogie, the Richards Raunch … you name it, he could do it. He made up for me, who couldn't do anything.

We gave it one last shot at a rehearsal. Smiler, the drummer, turned up in a dayglo Hawaiian shirt, pastel-blue slacks and a pair of deck sneakers.

‘Does he think he's going on holiday?' Nico asked.

He'd finished it all off with a crisp new haircut. He liked to look well-groomed, he said, and ‘I just live for that hour on the stage.' He'd always wanted to go to America. What a great opportunity this was. How much he appreciated Nico's choice of him as the drummer. How he'd do a good job for her. Also he'd heard, in case I was interested, that there were some hot spots in L.A. going for good session men. ‘Top rates … Best brass.'

Echo and Nico kept disappearing to take shot after shot in the hope that the ghastliness would recede. Spider turned up his amp and went into a History of Riffs. I stuck to playing just one note more or less all the time, shifting only when the harmonic changes absolutely demanded it. In this way I kept myself hidden, tucked in between Echo's bass and Spider Mike's guitar. Never, ever, getting in the way of the vocals.

Every so often Smiler would do a fancy little flurry on the snare, or a jazzy rim shot. Nico would slump a bit further on her stool, completely thrown.

Spider Mike dangled just above Smiler. Spinning his web around Nico, buying her drinks with money he'd borrowed from me. His meanness was the only legend that preceded him – but no one had told me. That lugubrious hound-dog face with the permanent drip of snot hanging at the end of his nose. He'd made it quite plain that he loathed me, as he did anyone who had brushed up against the soft-bellied South. I was an overeducated middle-class twat, except ‘Twat!' was all he could spare … he was a word miser as well. He openly flirted with Nico: ‘Aaright swee'heart?' Then he'd wink and put his arm around her. She'd look confused. ‘Do you think it's sexual?' she'd ask me later. On the sliding scale of contempt I'd suddenly moved up a couple of notches – above Spider Mike and Smiler, below Demetrius and Echo, at the exact halfway point between Hate and Need … Indifference.

July–August '82:

BREAKFAST AT PINKVILLE

Detour Ahead: the New York show had been postponed until the end of the tour. It was felt to be more ‘appropriate' – in other words there were no punters. It was July. Baking hot. The streets were stinking and melting and full of crazies. Who in their right mind would want to go out? Or punish their ears in some sweltering basement club? Easier to stay home, in the shower, except the waterbugs were waiting.

Detroit

It was straight into action without the usual soundcheck foreplay. We hadn't even seen the hired equipment yet. Bags set up the harmonium – that was the first useful thing we'd seen him do. The dormant instrument had a compact simplicity, like a deckchair – but one that would unfold into a logistical riddle in the hands of the uninitiated. With his backside mooning the already assembled audience of teeth-grinding speed-freaks and rock'n'roll loners, Bags would get the harmonium to stand freely for a few seconds; then, as he straightened up to leave, it would start to sway mournfully and slowly collapse in upon itself, playing dead. Bags's parka hood would flop over his head as he repeatedly fought the innate guile of his ancient adversary.

We dragged ourselves on stage, still giddy from the turbulence we'd met coming in to land. The organ that had been hired for the tour turned out to be an electric piano, with six keys missing. The game was up. Nico kept turning round and glaring at me during the set – every so often she'd hear the chimey, effete little ‘ching' coming from the piano. There was nowhere to hide any more. It meant I would have to listen to Spider Mike and learn his guitar parts, try and double up on the chords. When he went ‘chang' I'd go ‘ching'. Maybe no one would notice me then. The drummer was still pattering around with the fancy brushwork, like a French pastry chef. Echo had numbed himself out with a swig of methadone. He'd picked up an effects pedal before we left, called a Flanger. It made a weird swishing sound, like the sea rushing over pebbles. He'd play a string and it would resonate on and on over Brighton beach. It meant there was enough space for him to nod out between notes. Boom – woosh – woosh – zzzzz.

Spider Mike was cartwheeling away. I'd catch him on the downstroke (chang/ching). It worked. Nico stopped scowling.

We raced through the seven, then left it to her. Since there were only about thirty people in the audience she wouldn't be treating them to an extensive rendition of the Nico oeuvre. Just enough to make sure we were within the limits of the contract. Not a minute, not a bar, not a stretched melisma more.

After the show a kid strolled up and introduced himself. He was going to be our roadie for the tour. He couldn't have been more than about eighteen. He wore the regulation ripped Cramps T-shirt, combat trousers and army boots. He looked like he'd wasted ten villages single-handed back in 'Nam. His neck was the circumference of Echo's entire body. His skin was tanned by months of survival training out in the Mojave desert. His hair was a square-rigged, regulation military cut. His name was Axel. Echo and I watched him while he single-handedly dismembered the entire stage equipment.

‘Army brat … probably responds ter discipline,' said Echo menacingly. ‘Best not wind'im up with too much Oxford, Jim.'

Axel picked up the flight-cases and heaved them off the stage, wiping the sweat off his forehead with a red bandana. Real Oliver Stone material.

It turned out his father was a Brigadier-General in the U.S. Marines. Axel, it seemed, had rejected his father's vocation while still retaining the habits of a military upbringing. He approached everything as if it was a dawn raid on Charlie … breakfast at Pinkville. He was to be our travelling companion for the next six weeks.

Echo was measuring out a dose of the green syrupy methadone for Nico. ‘There yer go … the elixir of 'appiness, the nectar of narcosis.'

She slugged it in one. ‘That drummer … what's his name? He looks at me, like a monkey.'

‘Simian,' I said.

‘Simon?' she said. ‘I thought it was Mick, or Dick.'

‘But what about this Axel?' I hoped she could be persuaded to divest us of his already overbearing presence.

‘He's very handsome,' she said, suddenly coquettish.

‘It's the methadone, Nico,' Echo explained. ‘Once yer back on scag yer won't feel so much of the urge within.'

‘He has big aaarms, and a tattoooo … should I say something to him?' she giggled.

‘Like what?' asked Echo.

‘Like … you know … that I find him attraaaactiff.'

‘I think yer should tell 'im we need some scag, terribly urgent-like.'

‘I had a period this morning … I haven't had one of those for years.'

I'd never heard her like this before, discussing biological functions and bodily desires. The black nun was having wicked thoughts and unexpected reminders of that other kind of hunger, need and frustration beyond the end of the needle.

Axel drove us to Chicago to the permanent accompaniment of Metal FM. Muscle was in charge of the brain department – instead of a decent and sensible tour bus he'd turned up in a Chevy four-seater estate, with a trailer hitched on the back. Seven people were about to cross the continent with little else in common except an unfounded faith in the U Haul Trailer company.

Axel had taken it upon himself to be a gung-ho Corporal Peppercorn: ‘Yeeah … we can do it, guys! Tugether!' and he'd punch the air. He was another idiot in search of adventure, but for him it had to resemble a theatre of war. He'd smirk cockily at other drivers and give them the finger. Charging across lanes, swaying the trailer, so you'd feel the vehicle on the edge of skid all the time, he'd turn the radio up full volume in case any tender shoots of conversation should dare to reveal themselves above the Heavy Metal bombardment. For Axel there was an enemy even greater and more sinister than Communism itself – silence.

Bags the Bulge took the front seat. Four of us squeezed in the back (the temperature was 100 degrees and our bodies were
touching
). Echo found himself a padded crib amongst the luggage. He could string it out to the next dose of methadone so long as he had a place to stretch his aching muscles. His prescription was for two weeks and for himself; Nico seemed to think it was on the tour contract.

Bags dared to twiddle the radio knob. Axel's hand blocked him reflexively: ‘Heyyyyy there, buddy – that's my transmission in transition and your omission.'

‘Five minutes? Please?' I ventured on everyone's behalf. He ignored me.

‘What about a more
pop
station?' suggested Bags, ever the man of the people.

‘Hallelujah from the sky – rock'n'roll will never die.' Axel punched the air again.

‘This is ludicrous,' I said, ‘there are six other people in this vehicle.'

‘Yeeeah, but I'm the driver, Lord Jim – don't you know, where you bin?'

We drove on, with rhyme, without reason.

Chicago

They like the Blues in Chicago … Nico's music was so white it was almost translucent. She was indifferent to such
unter- mensch
basics as rhythm and expression. What we played was like a slap across the face from a Gauleiter's gauntlet. We did a kind of upstairs bar/poolroom. There was no stage. You could hear the balls clacking through her solo spot:

Janitor of Lunacy

Paralyse my infancy

Petrify the empty cradle

Bring hope to them and me.

Clack a tat tat
! ‘Yo … Hey, a couple of beers and some pretzels!'

Two dudes just stood and watched us, leaning on their pool cues, faces impassive, in a kind of sleeping hatred.

Nico still hadn't found a heroin connection and Echo's methadone just wasn't enough. She couldn't get that lift on to the stage without it. So now she was forced to see the boredom and hostility upon the faces of the miserably few punters. Normally the heroin enveloped her, gave her a totality of purpose that propelled her from the dressing-room on to the stage and projected her out towards the audience. It was a substitute for Will.

She had a name in Chicago that she'd been tracking down every spare minute. Finally, just before we left the hotel, she got the address. Axel took some persuading as we had to be in Minneapolis by early evening. She promised him a hit.

We were parked near a vacant lot on the edge of the South Side in our stupid hire car and trailer, like we'd lost the rest of the circus. Nico had picked up the exact whereabouts of her ‘friend'. She worked a couple of blocks away.

Axel slowly inched the vehicle along as if it was about to come under sniper fire.

‘There she is!' shouted Nico.

There were two women standing on the corner of a tenement block. One had on a pair of ass-splitting hot pants and red thigh boots, the other an off-white minidress and teetering stilettos. There could be no misconception as to their chosen profession.

‘Saandra,' Nico leant out of the window.

The girl in the hot pants warily came over. She looked at the car, she looked at the trailer. She wasn't sure. Then she looked at Axel and Bags – she definitely wasn't sure.

Nico called her again from the back. The girl recognised her and Nico got out. They chatted for a couple of minutes, then walked off. Axel followed up behind.

The girl in the minidress came over. The doors were open for ventilation. She sat herself down in the driver's seat. Her skirt hem ‘accidentally' sneaked up to reveal the absence of underwear.

‘Twenny bucks a shot, guys, whaddya say? Anyway ya like.'

We tried to pretend we hadn't seen or heard anything, resuming interest in dead conversations and exhausted magazine articles. Though Smiler was giving it some serious consideration, his mouth half-open in that strange Planet of the Apes perma-smile.

The girl fanned herself with her clutch-bag, filling the car with the smell of cheap perfume and stale sex. We all declined:

Out of Moral Prudery – Echo.

Out of Fear of Disease – Me.

Out of Misanthropic Indifference – Spider.

Out of Sudden Loss of Appetite – Bags.

Out of Peer-group Pressure – Smiler.

Cash was tighter than ever after Nico's score, so we had to be prudent with fuel. Axel had a theory that the car burnt significantly less gas if the air-conditioning was switched off. This meant having the windows wide open, though the breeze was baking hot and laden with dust. Later I learnt that this was in fact false economy, the open windows creating a drag effect.

We arrived too late for the Minneapolis show. Now there was even less in the kitty. We had two days to get to Denver, Colorado, on the edge of the Rockies. About eight hundred miles. The only way we could make it was if Nico didn't have to score again, which meant Echo would have to give her the remainder of his methadone. Various ploys were thought up by Axel in order to achieve this, the chief being that we could listen to the radio station of our choice for one hour each day. Echo surrendered his insurance. He'd planned to wean himself off the stuff, but not with quite such an abrupt wrench to the nervous system.

Seven misfits literally stuck together in submission to Axel's military might. ‘I want to drive,' Nico shouted. ‘Why can't I?'

No one responded. Axel kept his eyes unflinching on the road: rock'n'roll will never die – you'll never know until you try!' he yelled.

I muttered peevishly from the back, ‘rock'n'roll is dead and done – bring back Lonnie Donegan.'

‘Whassamadda wid Lord Jim? English proper, Oxford prim!'

Nico was catatonic on the methadone: ‘That Leonard Cohen … he broke my wrist.'

No one had been talking about Leonard Cohen, or wrists. In fact no one was talking at all. Spider Mike had won the toss for a free hour on the radio station of our choice – he chose Zero FM, Radio O.F.F. Perhaps Nico was
making conversation
– but nobody wanted to talk except for drummer-boy Smiler and he was terrified. Every time he opened his mouth, Nico would bite his head off. It wouldn't be anything witty or obtuse, more like ‘Shut your fucking monkey face.' But now she was trying to be conciliatory, to sweeten the atmosphere with some idle chitchat. It was the same script she'd been using for years – the events she could recall before she became a junkie and time stood still. Like everyone, Nico had certain landmark experiences in her past, but she never bothered to integrate them into the present. She would only ever quote from her own diary – and that had stopped a decade before.

It seemed unbelievable, but she insisted that she'd never used heroin until after her spell at the Factory. Looming up to her, out of the psychedelic fizz, she'd never noticed anything unusual in anyone's behaviour. She accepted everything. Apart from withdrawal tantrums she hadn't changed. Everything is the way it is. It just happens. The complex skein of historical process was not, one suspects, uppermost in her thoughts.

‘… he twisted it and twisted it until he broke it.' She was starting to get upset as the memory got closer. The methadone didn't block that stuff out.

Echo came in all conciliatory. ‘See what charmin' companions y' ave now, Nico, see 'ow much things've improved.'

She looked about her and yawned. Methadone makes you sleepy.

It was hard to work out how we came to be pulled for speeding in the middle of Nebraska … nothing but prairie-weed and silence. It meant an on-the-spot cash fine. Everyone emptied their pockets, except for Nico. That would have been a bad idea. There was something incriminating in every crease and crevice of her. Dead needles. Blood-stained cottons. Bent spoons. The kind of stuff you find in public toilets.

Another thing I could never work out was why Bags continued to wear his parka jacket as if he was still in Manchester. Whenever we pulled up for gas and the air was no longer blasting through, a sweet, all-too-human stink would waft up from him. It reminded you of school.