Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  After Altamont, the Stones returned to England and Keith Richards promptly began shooting heroin directly into his veins. Suddenly he wasn’t turning up to recording sessions any more or even answering the phone. The Stones had a lucrative new record deal with Atlantic to inaugurate, tiresome old contractual obligations with both Allen Klein and Decca to settle and a new decade to come to terms with. With no manager to guide them and a guitar player seemingly insensitive to their collective plight, Mick Jagger promptly become the Stones’ de facto leader and business brain. The Stones’ two closest rivals - the Who and Led Zeppelin - were both in the process of completing new albums for release later that year - Who’s Next and Led Zep 4 - so Jagger knew his band had to deliver or die on the vine. Sticky Fingers was what he came up with - the classiest, most self-assured collection of Stones songs about wild sex, hard drugs and doomed love ever concocted. Richards didn’t even play on three cuts - ‘Sway’, ‘Sister Morphine’ and ‘Moonlight Mile’ - but managed to make his maddeningly erratic presence felt on the other seven selections.

  The record’s young engineer Andy Johns would later recall a telling episode during a session at Jagger’s country home Stargroves in 1970. ‘We were doing “Bitch”, Keith was very late and Jagger and Mick Taylor had been playing the song without him. And it didn’t sound very good. I walked out of the kitchen and he was sitting on the floor with no shoes, eating a bowl of cereal. Suddenly he said “Oi, Andy! Give me that guitar.” He put it on, kicked the song up in tempo and just put the vibe right on it. Instantly, it went from being this laconic mess into a real groove. And I thought - Wow! That’s what he does.’

  When the Stones decamped to the South of France in spring 1971, they quickly became absorbed in recording the follow-up album to Sticky Fingers. By this point they’d become so frustrated by Richards’s infrequent appearances at virtually any studio they booked that they opted to record the thing in the one place they knew he was always guaranteed to be, the house where he actually lived. It was an opulent mansion called Nellcôte that had formerly been the local headquarters for the invading Gestapo. Nazi crosses carved into the heating system vents were still plainly visible. The dank basement the group used to record in had once been the interrogation room. This became Keith’s own dark realm in exile.

  For his first month or so on the Riviera he was heroin-free but quickly returned to its soothing embrace after injuring his back in a go-kart accident. What happened next has already been well documented. Local drug dealers descended on the property, eventually alerting the local constabulary. The rest of the Stones, producer Jimmy Miller and engineer Andy Johns meanwhile wasted hours of each evening waiting for the smacked-back guitarist to descend from his living quarters and grace them with his presence. But - according to Johns - ‘Everyone was too scared [to directly confront him]. Even Mick would never go up there. It was as if hell existed upstairs.’ Then Keith had all his guitars stolen, unadvisedly pulled a gun on the local harbour master and also managed to alienate certain of his household staff, who promptly went to the police and denounced Richards and girlfriend Pallenberg as major-league heroin distributors and all-purpose degenerates.

  The fallout was considerable: arrest warrants were immediately issued for the couple, they had to disappear from the country like thieves in the night in order to avoid incarceration and the rest of the Stones were also placed under investigation in the resulting messy legal brouhaha. One member’s ballooning drug problem had managed to turn the ongoing odyssey of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band into one potentially career-ending scenario after another.

  Many supporting players in the whole Nellcôte saga soon fell by the wayside but the Stones still managed to turn adversity into sonic gold dust. Exile on Main St. - the record that mostly resulted from those troubled sessions in Keith’s basement - took the whole sun-baked Riviera-on-hard-drugs languor of their day-to-day lifestyle and artfully moulded it to the hard-nosed horn-drenched American roadhouse rhythm ’n’ blues sensibility that has always best suited their particular musical chemistry. Released in mid-1972, it would prove to be their last truly Zeitgeist-defining collection of new songs.

  But we’re getting too far ahead of ourselves here. Let’s back-track a little. On March 10th 1971 the Stones played a concert in Brighton as part of a farewell-to-the-old-country tour of the UK just prior to Sticky Fingers’ release and their move to the South of France, and I was there to cheer them on. The performance was prefaced by its share of backstage dramas. Keith Richards - arriving early for a change - found his group’s dressing-room facilities still locked up and came close to pulling out a lethal weapon and braining the promoter in retaliation. Gram Parsons, Richards’s ex-Byrd drug buddy who was travelling with him on all the English dates, became so chemically deranged as the evening progressed that when he attempted to find the stage the Stones were playing on he ended up instead staggering into a nearby cinema. But I’d only learn about those incidents many years later after reading an article by Robert Greenfield, an American journalist then on assignment for Rolling Stone who’d actually been in the group’s designated touring party that night. On the evening in question, I was just another paying punter in a sea of faces and limbs come to pay homage to my dark-prince heroes and watch a truly stupendous live spectacle in an overcrowded provincial sweat-box of a venue named the Big Apple. It would be another two and a half years before I’d be granted direct access to their inner sanctum, and in retrospect I’m glad that fate didn’t summon me sooner. The dark vortex could wait awhile before it claimed my young bones. Like Elvis, I still had a lot of living to do.

  Did I tell you I’d finally located a girlfriend? She was a looker too with cascading blonde hair and a supple dancer’s physique, a sweet sixteen-year-old suburban little princess for me to bottle all my overstimulated post-adolescent romantic fantasies up in. Her name was Joanne Good and we’d first linked up in December 1970 when I was press-ganged into being the side-stage prompt for a school play that she was acting in. Joanne’s thespian skills would later bring her mainstream recognition throughout the British Isles: in the late seventies she’d become a regular fixture in the cast of Crossroads, the decade’s best-loved UK TV soap opera (these days, she’s a popular morning disc jockey on Radio London). But in 1971 we were both still soldiering down the treacherous path intersecting post-puberty with young adulthood. We both declared undying love for each other - our favourite courting song was the Temptations’ heart-fluttering ‘Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)’, a big hit that spring - but the love we really shared was closer to the toothachingly sugar-rush rapture expressed in a less sumptuous-sounding chart smash du jour - Donnie Osmond’s ‘Puppy Love’. We stared into each other’s misty eyes a lot and held hands whenever in public. But physically speaking, we were an odd fit. I was 6 foot 1 whilst she measured 5 foot in her stocking feet. And temperamentally too we bordered on the incompatible. Joanne was vivacious, outgoing and gregarious whilst I was generally intense and prone to introspection.

  Her family was Good in both name and nature, apart from her older brother Nigel, who was what they used to call ‘a bit of a tearaway’. He was also Horsham’s most notorious druggy, having lately been busted for pot-smoking in the town centre, an incident that saw his name subsequently splashed over the front page of the local paper. He and another youth named Rob Daneski, who looked like anyone in Black Sabbath, were the drowsy little commuter town’s two resident heads. I met them through Joanne and we quickly became fast friends forever stalking the neighbourhood together in search of cannabis resin. Nigel and Rob liked to drop acid whenever possible, but I always refused to join them, as I sensed - quite rightly, I now realise - that I was still too emotionally and spiritually immature to react well to its lysergic lift-off.

  Though I would later come to be perceived as one of the championship-level London-based substance-abusers of the late twentieth century, I started my journey into the world of chemical refreshment with
tentative steps. I first smoked pot at the Bath Festival in summer 1970 when a fellow audience member passed me a droopy, hand-rolled cigarette and bade me suck on its soggy cardboard filter. Inhaling its fumes must have had some effect on me because the next thing I remember was descending from my instant reverie to be confronted by a hippie girl who was staring at me with an extremely alarmed look on her face. I felt like a door had been suddenly ripped open in my brain. Time no longer hung heavy on my stooped shoulders. Pot put me right in the moment, enriching my consciousness with the sensation of feeling simultaneously giddy and alive. From then on it became an integral part of my religion to consume as much of it as I could get my hands on.

  But daily consumption only began in earnest once I’d moved to London later in ’71. Drugs in general were hard to come by in the early seventies if you didn’t live in England’s capital or near one of its major cities that also doubled as a port. Forget heroin, cocaine and ecstasy. Crack had yet to be invented. All you could hope for was to befriend some long-haired ne’er-do-well in your region who sometimes purchased reefer from a connection in the big bad metropolis and pester him to sell you a small chunk. Doping up was still in its infancy as a British national pastime, particularly out in the suburbs, and those few who dared partake invariably became extremely paranoid due to the build-up of cerebral befuddlement and fear of getting busted.

  In the early part of 1971, when I wasn’t illegally stimulating my endorphins or belatedly experiencing first-hand the tumultuous joys and sorrows of teenage romance, I was sending my CV around to various universities in the hope that one of them would accept me onto their campus and postpone the day when I’d actually have to go out and find a job for a further three years. I was flat-out rejected by all of them, except for Bedford College, which was then part of London University. They called me down for an interview so I tied my hair back and hid the ponytail under my shirt collar, wore a suit that even an undertaker might call ‘subdued’ and somehow charmed them into taking me on board. I had good reason to feel elated by their decision. Not only would it mean that henceforth I’d be living in London but Bedford College was one of the only places of further education in Britain where the female student population sharply outnumbered the male. Like Jan and Dean’s mythical ‘Surf City’, it functioned on a ratio of two girls for every boy.

  In order to bolster my finances that summer in readiness for student life I went looking for any kind of legitimate work. Soon enough I got employed by a Sussex-based chemical plant and spent long days digging drainage ditches for a pittance. Later I manned the pumps at a local garage. Each job lasted roughly two weeks in duration, after which I got promptly fired for rank incompetence. I learned a lot from these experiences, the key lesson being that I was simply not cut out for the rigours of manual labour and should never consider it as a temporary career option ever again. Leave all that heavy lifting and sod-busting to the brawny lads with the muscles on their muscles. I was better off developing my brain and making a living from that.

  Looking back through the misty veil of nostalgia, that summer of ’71 now feels like a sun-drenched and special season of rampant carefree splendour. England’s green and pleasant land never looked greener or seemed more pleasant to be a part of. Maybe it’s just the pot I smoked back then playing tricks with my retroactive memory but I think not. It was indeed a golden age for middle-class floaters like me. Students still received grants. The world’s biggest rock bands still performed to audiences no larger than two thousand at a time at venues that didn’t cost an arm and a leg to enter. Records - my main expenditure - were reasonably priced. It cost nothing to hitch-hike whenever the urge for travel struck. Sex wasn’t fatal. Only skinheads were to be avoided at all cost.

  And the music being released that year was often outstandingly good. It was Tamla Motown’s last golden year for example - starting with the Jackson 5’s irresistible ‘The Love You Save’ and building to Marvin Gaye’s transcendent ‘What’s Going On’ - and you’d hear these singles constantly blaring out of transistor radios in public places, boldly lifting the spirits of the nation. On the white side of the tracks Rod Stewart - the rooster-haired, dandy-dressing Sam Cooke soundalike who’d left Jeff Beck’s employment at the turn of the last decade to join the remnants of the Small Faces as their resident singer - was on constant rotation in pub jukeboxes throughout the country with his first-ever hit recording, ‘Maggie May’, a bitter-sweet smoky-sounding rumination on the perils of falling in love with an elderly prostitute. Everybody had mad love for the man sometimes referred to as Rod the Mod that year: rock critics swooned at the sound of his gritty self-deprecating voice, student drinkers were in seventh heaven over his habitual public displays of boozy camaraderie with the Faces whilst teenage girls were particularly smitten by his big-nosed cock-of-the-walk charm and tight satin trousers.

  Another former sixties London ‘face’ making bold inroads into the mainstream pop landscape of the early seventies was a brash little hustler who called himself Marc Bolan. Three years earlier, Bolan could have been found sitting cross-legged on the wooden stage of any self-respecting UK hippie venue, strumming a cheap acoustic guitar and warbling arcane pseudo-Tolkien gobbledegook whilst an extremely stoned individual played bongos haphazardly alongside him. This quaint spectacle were known as Tyrannosaurus Rex and they quickly came to enjoy the patronage of several key underground taste-makers, most notably John Peel, who played their records ceaselessly on his Radio One broadcast and even contributed some dubious spoken-word snippets to one of their early albums.

  But John Peel couldn’t help Bolan achieve what he really wanted, which were big hit records and a shot at Elvis-like mega-rock superstardom. So ‘the bopping elf’ - as he was sometimes known - rudely brushed aside his DJ champion, sacked the stoned bongo player (who called himself Steve Peregrine Took), bought an electric guitar and started shaping his gauche, nonsensical lyrics around rudimentary riffs archly filched from old fifties vintage rock chestnuts like Chuck Berry’s ‘Little Queenie’ and Eddie Cochran’s ‘C’mon Everybody’. His ‘Queenie’ rewrite - entitled ‘Get It On’ - became one of ’71’s national pop anthems and he and his new electric ensemble now known as T.Rex were suddenly on a serious roll that year with a succession of chart-topping singles and a hit album called Electric Warrior. At first Bolan seemed like a breath of fresh air: a new breed of rock star - haughty, androgynous and glamour-fixated - who was unapologetic about his thirst for fame and utter self-fixation. He was the first to cut loose from the late-sixties notion that rock was one big sharing, caring community where musicians and audience members stood together on equal footing. Bolan was more interested in creating an in-concert ambience that separated the two entities into ‘the superstar’ and his ‘slaves’. T.Rex concerts in 1971 were actually the first public manifestation of the seventies ‘me decade’ consciousness in action. Bolan would primp and pose around the stage like a narcissistic guitar-strumming girl in front of a giant full-length mirror whilst his mostly teenage female fans would scream ‘Me! Me! Me!’ back at him hysterically from the stalls. Certainly it was a shallow and sometimes unhealthy spectacle but infinitely more entertaining than having to sit through yet another twenty-minute-long drum solo. Prog rock’s halcyon days were suddenly numbered. The kids wanted vanity instead of virtuosity and Bolan was ideally suited to spearhead the new sea change - at least until his nemesis David Bowie swept in and stole his audience the following year.

  Stewart, Bolan and Bowie were all flashily attired young fops who’d already tried to become superstars in the sixties only to languish in the musical margins of the decade. Their early failures had simply strengthened their resolve to make their mark on a new era. A similar case was Cat Stevens; in 1967 Stevens had enjoyed two UK pop hit singles - ‘I Love My Dog’ and ‘Matthew and Son’ which he’d written and recorded whilst still in his late teens. Ill health then dogged him for the rest of the decade and he fell off the pop radar for a while. But at the very
outset of the seventies he bounced back as a bedroom mystic troubadour hippie Rod McKuen and by 1971 - when he had two new albums out, Tea for the Tillerman and Teaser and the Firecat - he’d become the new Messiah of the sensitivity set.