Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  Meanwhile, the toilets were literally crammed with people either having sex or necking pills. The whole building was like some epic porno film brought to twitching life. Back in London’s West End, the best-loved theatrical presentation of the hour was an asinine farce called No Sex Please: We’re British, a title that pretty much summed up the United Kingdom’s awkward embrace of its libidinous potential even during the so-called permissive age. Put that reticence down to a mixture of instilled Catholic guilt, cold showers, single-sex schooling and ‘steady on, old boy’ stoicism. Our young American cousins, however, had no such inhibitions to curb their lust. And with no life-threatening diseases then in evidence to cause further pause for thought, they were up for any kind of carnal and pharmaceutical hanky-panky you could throw at them.

  This was not lost on David Bowie, whose new Aladdin Sane songs were clearly part-inspired by their composer coming into direct contact with the Babylonian sexual frenzy of young America in the early seventies. Two hours after he’d left the stage in triumph and had been driven back to his hotel, we gingerly approached his suite in the hope that he was still up for a bit of socialising. His man-mountain bodyguard duly beckoned us into a large room where - seated on an elegant settee - the man himself was. He immediately stood up and daintily shook our hands, welcoming us to his temporary abode. He had pointy carrot-coloured hair, shaved eyebrows, a ton of make-up slapped across his extremely pretty face and a slender androgynous physique - swathed in a red chequered blouse and electric-blue Oxford bags - that moved with the studied poise of a movie starlet from some bygone era just prior to the advent of Technicolor.

  At first it felt like he had no fixed sexual identity. His mannerisms were as outrageously camp as those of any self-respecting drag queen but there was a bold streak of jack-the-laddishness immediately apparent in his general demeanour. He’d also chosen to invite several teenage girls who’d been lurking in the hotel corridor into his lair and was eyeing them up and working his charm. By the time we left, he’d already seduced one of them-a black girl. This wouldn’t have been especially noteworthy save for the fact that his wife Angie was also present in the room. But she didn’t appear to mind: she had her own boyfriend-a Detroit-based singer named Scott Richardson - with her anyway. I hadn’t realised it at the time but I’d met her once before at the Stooges’ Barons Court house sometime in the early autumn of 1972. Whilst her husband was busy touring the world as Ziggy Stardust, she’d been occupying her time consorting with Ron Asheton. Clearly she had a serious yen for rough-hewn Midwestern dudes. And even more self-evidently, the Bowies were committed swingers who enjoyed the most open of open marriages.

  I can still recall the first words he directed at me. ‘So you’re Nick Kent. Aren’t you pretty! And here I was thinking that all English rock critics looked like Richard Williams.’ (Williams - one of Melody Maker’s most prominent writers during the sixties - was a straight-arrow Welsh clergyman’s son who had been fiercely dismissive of Bowie’s glitzy allure.) He stared at me coquettishly but with a wary glint in his two differently coloured eyes. It was like he had X-ray vision when it came to sizing up strangers. He looked at you and through you at the same instant. On the surface he was all lightness and breezy charm - the host with the most - but that lightning-fast brain of his hiding under the signature dyed-red hair was always in full effect, never giving too much away. He was drinking tentatively from a glass of wine but he and his wife were both very anti-drugs at the time: a girl in the room who started rolling a joint was ejected by a bodyguard at their behest.

  Still, he seemed to be having a good time chatting away with other music-industry Brit expats caught in the culture shock of discovering America. I remember he kept playing ‘Virginia Plain’ by Roxy Music on a portable record player he had set up at one end of his suite over and over again. He thought the group was absolutely wonderful, the only other glam-rock act to truly merit his respect. That’s when I realised how smart he really was. Almost anyone else in his position would have felt threatened by the advent of Roxy Music - they were UK chart rivals after all - but Bowie was intelligent enough to embrace and study what they were doing and in time appropriate some of their elements into his own evolving œuvre. That’s why his career has lasted so long. He wasn’t closed-minded like so many of his peers. He was a big thinker and a true professional.

  Things went so swimmingly that Bowie - after chatting for a couple of hours - invited us back the next night for an impromptu party following his second show at the Cobo Hall. He told us that he didn’t normally do this kind of thing - that his manager liked to keep him sealed away from all human contact as often as possible - but that his manager wasn’t present on this phase of the tour and he suddenly felt the urge to mingle with the natives. Detroit’s wildest young things then caught wind of this invitation and turned up in hordes to the hotel, determined to party down with their new rock deity.

  The previous night we’d only been seven or eight in his suite - an easily containable collective. But now the same space was throbbing with bodies and most of them were conspicuously on some chemical or other. Bowie looked distinctly ill at ease in the centre of it all. Detroit had a well-deserved reputation as the most hard-partying city in the whole USA and even he was clearly more than a little taken aback by his gatecrashing guests’ zeal for self-annihilation.

  Meanwhile, outside his quarters and unbeknownst to him, his Mainman-employed touring minions were trying to initiate a series of orgies in their respective rooms with the numerous kids lined up in the hotel corridors waiting to touch their hero. Bowie’s American management enablers during his Ziggy era were some of the sleaziest, most repugnant people I’ve ever had the misfortune to shake hands with. They were all oversexed gossip-crazed fame-seekers who’d spent time in the lower rungs of Andy Warhol’s Manhattan social circle and who carried themselves with a sense of lofty self-entitlement that made the conduct of the royal family seem humble by comparison. They were so caught up in their own lust for personal celebrity that they couldn’t help but resent their employer for being such a rising star himself. Still, it didn’t take long for Bowie to draw much the same conclusion. Twelve months hence, he’d sack them all and initiate legal proceedings to extricate himself from Mainman’s parasitical clutches.

  The party wound down somewhere in the early hours of the morning. The hotel’s hallways as I left the establishment looked like a modern-day rendering of a scene from Caligula. Suddenly I was alone and walking the streets of downtown Detroit in a drugged daze just as dawn was breaking. This was pure insanity on my part as the zone was known to be rife with muggers, rapists, killers and other predatory forms of human debris.

  After stumbling down two or three streets, I decided to take refuge in the only bar that was open in the area at this ungodly hour. Now take a picture of this: me decked out like Little Lord Fauntleroy entering a run-down juke joint populated exclusively by seriously pissed-off black blue-collar dudes nursing their drinks and thinking criminal-minded thoughts. Nervously I asked the barman if there was a payphone on the premises as I was lost and needed to phone a taxi. He jerked his thumb towards the rear-end of the establishment, wouldn’t even look me in the eyes.

  As I was searching my pockets for change to make the call, I suddenly found myself encircled by three Negroes with brick-shithouse physiques and eyes like sleepy snakes. I sensed that I was not long for this world - but then after a nerve-wracking minute of sullen, silent scrutiny, one of them spoke up. ‘Hey, man, you’re English, right? Are you by any chance the guitar player for Elton John?’ ‘The very same,’ I blurted back in a high-pitched nervous lying wail. And they actually believed me, too. Their expressions immediately softened as they told me they were big fans of ‘Elton’s grooves’. They were full of praise for ‘my’ fretboard contribution to ‘Crocodile Rock’ too and one of them even got me to autograph a beer mat for his wife before my taxi arrived and whisked me back to Creem’s headquarters.

  This pre
posterous, potentially life-threatening incident was just one of many that occurred to me during my two-month stay in America. But somehow I always managed to come through unscathed. I honestly believed at the time that I was leading a charmed life and that nothing really bad could befall me. Laughable as it may sound now, being English was the only good-luck charm you needed back then to be instantly accepted in America. Yanks - particularly the womenfolk - had fallen head-over-heels in love with little old Limey-land when the Beatles ‘invaded’ their shores in 1964, and the infatuation was still going strong almost a decade later. They couldn’t get enough of our quaint, wacky accents, bad teeth and bizarre eating habits. You could even talk in the incomprehensible cadences of a Geordie docker and still travel the continent getting laid from coast to coast.

  Not surprisingly, my all-American male cronies at Creem were often resentful of all this anglophile ardour running riot throughout their proud nation. ‘You goddam Limey fops!’ Lester Bangs would rail at me. ‘What’s so great about your fucked-up culture anyway? We produce great art like the Velvet Underground, the MC5 and the Stooges, and you retaliate with David fucking Bowie and his Spiders from Mars. Whoopee! You’re just reselling us Herman’s Hermits for homos.’ I’d retaliate by tartly informing him that unlike him I’d been born in the cradle of civilisation and that we Brits were making timeless art when Americans were still learning how to ride a horse, steal cattle and shoot each other in whore-ridden bar-rooms. That would generally shut him up.

  The rest of the time we got on famously. Lester drove everywhere in a garbage-strewn jalopy that was one of his few personal possessions, and I would be there next to him in the passenger seat taking in the landscape and making sure he didn’t suddenly nod out at the wheel. This sometimes occurred late at night after he’d mixed the liquor and pills and was a matter of some consternation amongst his Creem cohorts, who’d all experienced the phenomenon and were genuinely concerned that he’d drive into a wall one night and spend the rest of his life in traction.

  These fears had recently intensified because Lester had started dating a young girl named Dori who lived in the Canadian frontier town of Windsor, Ontario, over one hundred miles away from Birmingham. He loved the place: the beer they served was extra-potent and you could buy codeine tablets over the counter at the local pharmacists. As a result, he would make almost-nightly treks there and back throughout my stay, and I would usually accompany him. Those long journeys driving across the muddy Detroit river with him at dead of night were heady experiences for me. Just five years earlier my schoolboy imagination had been seriously enflamed by reading On the Road and now I was actually living the full-tilt Kerouac dream, careening through the nation’s ripped backsides in the company of America’s latest championship-level wild man and literary blowhard.

  The conversations we had ranged as far and wide as the country spread outside our speeding vehicle. Being in motion - and under the influence of amphetamines - always opened Lester up and he’d talk for hours, often littering his diatribes with intimate recollections from his mostly troubled past. He spoke emotively about his drunkard father who perished in a fire when Lester - who’d actually been christened ‘Leslie Bangs’ - was only nine and about his infuriating, still-living Jehovah’s Witness mother whom he harboured deeply conflicted feelings for. His mother’s suffocatingly possessive presence throughout his young life had scarred him with regard to developing healthy loving relationships with the opposite sex as an adult. He kept falling madly in love but the female objects of his worshipful desire - after a brief period of courtship - would almost always be put off by his kamikaze drunken mood swings and his intense emotional neediness. This was heartbreaking to behold because under his rowdy exterior lurked the beating heart of an incurable misty-eyed romantic who so desperately craved to share his life with a soulmate that his ongoing loneliness - and the demons it ignited - ended up growing like a malignant cancer within him.

  Lester was equally unlucky in his choice of personal role models. One time I walked into the Creem house kitchen and found him in tears. He’d just finished reading a Rolling Stone feature in which Neal Cassady’s long-suffering widow Caroline had spoken candidly for the first time about her life with her sociopathic spouse - the Dean Moriarty character in On the Road - and Jack Kerouac himself. The portrait she painted in words of the latter - Bangs’s most revered literary idol - was far from complimentary. She called attention to Kerouac’s inability to establish a healthy loving relationship with any woman, his terminal alcoholism and his hopeless mother fixation. She implied that he was basically born doomed. It was this revelation that caused Lester to weep so openly. He saw far too much of his own predicament in Kerouac’s death-driven depiction.

  He didn’t do himself any favours in his choice of living heroes either. It’s no secret that he idolised Lou Reed to the point of obsession and saw the Velvet Underground songsmith as rock music’s most visionary iconic entity. A week after the aforementioned Bowie shows, Reed was booked to play a concert in Detroit and Lester managed to set up his first actual interview with the man and invited me to accompany him to the affair to act as his cornerman. It turned out to be an ugly spectacle: two drunks railing at each other over the glass-strewn Formica table of a tacky hotel bar. Reed was - relatively - civil to me but stared at Bangs throughout their long over-inebriated conversation as though he was face to face with some mentally challenged country bumpkin who’d just escaped from the local nuthouse.

  Lester later wrote up the encounter in a piece for Creem he entitled ‘Deaf Mute in a Telephone Booth’ that’s since been reproduced in one of his two posthumous collections. It’s a vibrant, one-sided account of what happened that day but it neglects to mention at least one pertinent detail. Driving back to the Creem house directly after the interview had concluded, Lester was so distraught he veered into a garage by mistake, smashed into a petrol pump and almost totalled his precious car. For three days afterwards he replayed what he could remember of their meeting of minds and fretted about the contemptuous way Reed had beheld him. I told him that trying to locate anything resembling human warmth, empathy and decency in Reed’s personality was as futile an exercise as trying to get blood from a stone. Then I bid him and the rest of the Creem corps a temporary adieu and boarded a flight direct to Los Angeles. I’d been entranced by visions of the Wild West ever since I’d seen my first Western at age six. Now the time had come to kick up some dust of my own within its untamed borders.

  The first thing that left an indelible impression on my mental faculties once I’d debarked in the golden state and headed straight to Hollywood was seeing the profusion of palm trees poking out of the pavement on all the sidewalks. The second occurred when I actually walked around Hollywood on my first full day there and quickly discovered just how small it actually was. I was expecting a sprawling metropolis but the reality was more like being in a relatively opulent, sun-baked little village intersected by big highways.

  Promenading down the Sunset Strip was all you needed to do back then if you wanted a one-on-one encounter with the city’s resident music- and movie-makers; within twenty-four hours of being there, I’d passed both Jackson Browne and David Crosby on the street. Two blocks away on Santa Monica Boulevard I found myself queuing one evening alongside four-fifths of the original Byrds outside the Troubadour folk club. Later on, whilst walking down the same street, I heard live music emanating from a shopfront. I peered in the window and saw Carl and Dennis Wilson with members of their current touring band rehearsing songs for a local upcoming Beach Boys show. I must have stood there for an hour staring goggle-eyed as they worked up an arrangement for their latest single ‘Sail On, Sailor’, but that hour was my very own Californian dream come true. As a teenager the Beach Boys’ music had held me spellbound and now I was present in their idyllic stomping ground being treated to a private concert all of my own. Could it get any better than this?

  Actually, yes. Four days later I attended the show they
’d been preparing for and that ended up being my all-time quintessential golden-state souvenir. I think back to that night and instantly recall being surrounded on all sides by three thousand of the most perfect human specimens imaginable-a moveable Aryan super-race with surfboards instead of swastikas. I seemed to be the only audience member in the building without golden streaming hair and a golden walnut tan. It was like standing in a field of swaying human corn listening to the music of the spheres.

  But golden visions aside, there was something deeply rotten putrefying up the state of California in 1973 and nowhere more so than in Hollywood itself: most of the time for me it was like getting to hang out in some biblical place of damnation with people getting stoned on drugs instead of getting stoned to death. The first week, I stayed at the Continental Hyatt House hotel with my Brit pals Silverhead, who were playing a residency at the famed Whisky a Go Go. Both buildings are situated less than half a mile away from each other on the Sunset Strip and most evenings I’d take the fifteen-minute stroll to the venue. Virtually every step of the way I’d be approached by extremely intense young people trying to sell me their home-made jewellery or trying to indoctrinate me into some wacky religious cult.

  I’d already been around my share of ‘damaged hippie’ types back in Ladbroke Grove but their American cousins on the West Coast were a far more harrowing bunch. They’d rant on and on about the looming apocalypse until they were literally foaming at the mouth. And their eyes wouldn’t leave you alone, always staring as though they could simply hypnotise you into following their will. Charles Manson was safe behind bars but his many acid-crazed messianic wannabes were still pimping up the streets of Hollywood every evening. People living up in the Hollywood Hills all had fierce guard dogs posted at the front of their properties. They weren’t going to let what happened to Sharon Tate four years earlier happen to them.