by Nick Kent
Sartorially speaking, young Hollywood men still tended to stick to their end-of-the-sixties Neil Young copycat look: frayed blue denim work-shirt, dilapidated blue jeans, some native Indian jewellery around their necks or wrists if they felt like being flashy. But most of the teenaged creatures in the region were all over the freshly imported glam bandwagon like a rash on a wild dog. There was even a new club in town exclusively devoted to catering to their tastes: the English Discotheque fronted by Rodney Bingenheimer, a sad-eyed West Coast Zelig with no discernible personality of his own but an abundant love of all things English and celebrity-driven. Night after night he’d bludgeon the tiny mirror-walled dance hall with the shiny-sounding glam racket of Sweet, Slade and Suzi Quatro compelling hordes of scantily clad, barely pubescent girls to cavort suggestively whilst trying to stay aloft in their preposterous stack-heeled platform shoes. For jailbait connoisseurs and recruiting local chicken hawks, the place must have been a glimpse of heaven on earth, but it was really more like watching film director Russ Meyer’s hilariously sordid Hollywood pop spoof Beyond the Valley of the Dolls being re-enacted badly by a cast of pill-popping, conniving twelve-year-olds.
I got to know several of these girls during my stay - though not in the biblical sense, you understand. They’d start talking to you and never stop. By the time you got a word in edgeways, you’d been given their entire life history to date. It was always the same: rich divorced parents, no love at home, lecherous stepfather, trouble at school. And they were all blindly convinced they were bound for glory. ‘I’m thirteen now but when I’m sixteen I’ll be as famous as Marilyn Monroe’ was their personal mantra. All they needed was for Andy Warhol to walk into the English Discotheque one night and see them in action and - shazam - they’d be all set for their journey into the stratosphere. They’d fallen hook, line and sinker for that ‘everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes’ crap of Warhol’s to the point where it had become their ditzy, all-consuming religion. The sad reality: they were just lost, damaged little girls like the Jodie Foster character Iris in Taxi Driver - deluded broken blossoms who’d grown up too fast and had all the innocence and wholesomeness fucked out of them at too young an age.
I should point out here that though temptation often came a-knocking at my door whilst in Hollywood, I generally refrained from indulging in full sexual contact. It wasn’t a matter of personal prudishness so much as simple bad luck. Back in Michigan I’d managed to contract a urinary infection and a spectacular case of the crabs just prior to hitting the golden state and didn’t have the simple common sense to go to a nearby pharmacy and buy some lotion to make the two conditions disappear once I’d arrived. Finally I had my pubic hair shaved by a Japanese woman called Flower who’d taken several tranquillisers just prior to groping for the razor: not an incident I’d ever care to repeat. She and her girlfriend let me stay in their Sunset Strip apartment for a couple of nights. They were strippers - serious hard-core girls but kind-hearted nonetheless. Her room-mate was often teary-eyed. Her beloved drug-dealing boyfriend had been offed by the Mafia just two months earlier. Compared to the glam-rock Lolitas in the region, they were generally more level-headed and pragmatic in their dealings with the outside world, but even they had bought into the ludicrous notion that fame would one day be theirs for the taking. Everyone living in Hollywood back then seemed saddled with the same sorry delusion. The poor things.
In the midst of this weird little fame-hungry, sex-crazed town lurked Iggy and the Stooges, who’d moved into a communal house overlooking the Hollywood Hills just three months ago after bidding a not especially fond farewell to London’s more limited nightlife. The Doors had been LA’s most acclaimed musical ambassadors of darkness and dread but now, following Jim Morrison’s untimely death in 1971, they were gone and Iggy had duly decided that he and the Stooges should assume the same creepy mantle. Hollywood really brought out the beast in him: the restrained, thoughtful young man I’d encountered in London throughout 1972 had been replaced by a snake-eyed, cold-hearted, abrasively arrogant trouble magnet.
He’d transformed his look too, dyeing his hair surfer blond and using his considerable leisure time to cultivate a luxuriously bronzed suntan under the relentless California sun. At first glimpse he seemed positively aglow with rude health but the tan and hair dye were really there to mask a darker secret: he was back on the smack. And though it had yet to diminish his physical allure, his re-embrace of heroin had already tainted his personality, making him generally mean-spirited, self-centred and plain loopy. Iggy’s Hollywood persona was captured for posterity in a televised interview he gave in early ’73 to the venerable disc jockey and US TV host Dick Clark. Clark - clearly ill at ease with his subject - kept asking Iggy if he was truly ‘decadent’. The singer grumpily retorted, ‘Decadence is decomposition and I ain’t decomposing. I’m still here.’ But what about moral decadence?, Clark continued earnestly. ‘Are you morally degenerate?’ ‘Oh, I don’t have any morals,’ Iggy chimed back cheerfully. He wasn’t kidding either. Now that’s not something a sane human being would normally want to share with the rest of the world. But Iggy in 1973 wasn’t a sane person. In his mind he may have been voicing his private vision of himself as the American Zarathustra - beyond good and evil, free as a bird in mind, body and will. But the remark also bore the hollow ring of a junkie’s empty brag. Either way, his new amoral approach to life ended up making him few friends in the golden state and elsewhere.
In mid-March the Stooges returned to Michigan in readiness for their first concert on US soil in two years, with Detroit’s Cobo Hall booked for the 23rd of the month. It should have been a triumph - the hooligan Stooges, bloodied but unbowed, returning to the baying hordes who first supported them with a new album, a new label and new high-powered management. But it didn’t quite pan out that way. Iggy pretty much set the tone for what would transpire when he turned up to a live interview for a prominent Midwestern radio outlet a few days prior to the show. He proceeded to perform an impromptu striptease on the air whilst dancing around the room to tracks from Raw Power. The sound of his penis slapping against his lower torso was inadvertently captured on one of the studio microphones and beamed out to radio sets the length and breadth of its waveband.
I flew back to Michigan from LA purely to witness the Stooges’ homecoming show. I remember Bangs, Ben Edmonds and I visiting them at the downtown Detroit hotel they were holed up in the night before the gig for a pep-talk. Iggy’s room was dark - drawn curtains, no lights on - and his mood was darker. Real success was potentially within his grasp once more and yet the prospect seemed to spook him more than stimulate him.
The show itself drew a full house and the crowd was raucous and welcoming. The Stooges played well - most of Raw Power plus two new compositions worked up whilst resident in Hollywood - and Iggy was in pretty good form but the set lasted not much longer than forty minutes. The group left the stage to wild acclaim and were planning to return for an encore but manager Tony Defries - who’d flown in especially for the concert - expressly forbade it. He felt that true stars should always leave their audiences craving more and that encores were beneath his clientele. This kind of thinking may have worked for Bowie but for the Stooges it proved a tragic miscalculation. The hall duly erupted in a cacophony of boos and catcalls when the group refused to return. Bangs nailed the whole scenario best. Shaking his head sadly, he muttered, ‘Once again the Stooges have managed to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory.’
Someone threw a party for the group after the show in a swanky Detroit house that everyone gatecrashed. In the living room, many guests were glued to a large colour TV showing the Oscar ceremonies beamed in live from Hollywood. On screen, a woman no one recognised was dressed up like an Apache squaw and was talking earnestly about the plight of the Native American Indian. Marlon Brando - we later discovered - had sent her in his place to accept a best actor award for his role in The Godfather.
One of those captivated by the spectacle was
Tony Defries, who’d commandeered the most throne-like seat in the room and had just lit up yet another jumbo cigar. A guy smoking a joint nearby turned to him at one point and asked, ‘So, Tony, do you think David Bowie will maybe be handing out an Oscar next year?’ ‘No,’ Defries replied with a feigned indifference, ‘David will be accepting an Oscar next year.’
But upstairs trouble was a-brewing. Iggy was stalking the premises with narcotics in his bloodstream and malice in his heart. At one point a drunken girl made the mistake of trying to hug him and he bitch-slapped her away so forcefully she came close to falling backwards down a long flight of stairs. The party wound down soon after that.
What on earth was going on in this guy’s mind to make him behave in such a fashion? It was the drugs pure and simple: Iggy liked them but those same drugs rarely seemed to like him. Heroin curdled his personality and cocaine stimulated instant mental disturbance. Downers left him comatose and uppers sent his mind reeling towards insanity. But still he persevered, believing in his heart of hearts that personal substance abuse and the cerebral disorientation they promoted within him were the key to attaining full Iggyness.
Bangs shared much the same philosophy too: he was an ardent apostle of the school of thought that believed the more you pollute yourself, the closer you get to true artistic illumination. Plus Iggy had bought into the whole Antonin Artaud shtick of the performer only being able to achieve greatness by staging his own madness in the public arena. That’s what he meant by the lines ‘I am dying in a story / I’m only living to sing this song’ that he sang on ‘I Need Somebody’, Raw Power’s penultimate selection. It was a prophecy just waiting to be fulfilled. He and the Stooges were about to be slowly ground into dust for the second time in their short career.
Finally I wound down my American odyssey by spending a week in Manhattan in early April. Like other feckless boho wannabes of the era, I stayed at the Chelsea Hotel - renowned for having played host to Dylan, Leonard Cohen and the beat poets back in the mystic sixties. Unfortunately its vaunted reputation masked a shabby reality: the place was a literal fleapit with cockroaches visible in all the carpeting and grimy sheets, busted mattresses and malfunctioning black-and-white TV sets in every room.
Little wonder then that I spent most of my time outside. The New York Dolls were playing a week-long residency at a local joint known as Kenny’s Castaways. I’d lurk around there most nights. It was like a tiny pub with a stage and room for no more than a hundred bodies to congregate. The group - playing some of their first shows since the death of their original drummer Billy Murcia - really made sense in this kind of low-key close-to-home setting. Whenever I caught them live on bigger stages and outside of New York, they were always a big disappointment. The pressure, unfamiliar locale and lack of easy-to-contact drug dealers would invariably cause them to play like a hard-on-the-ear train wreck in full progress.
But in a nondescript Manhattan watering hole like Kenny’s, their limp-wristed hooligan magic could be summoned to full effect. The guitarists still posed far better than they actually played but their new drummer Jerry Nolan had brought a much-needed dynamism to their formerly clunky grooves and their singer David Johansen was as smart as a whip. His between-songs repartee was always priceless and he sang in a deep lascivious croon like Big Joe Turner sporting nylon stockings and high-heeled slip-ons. He was the brightest, most professional and most ambitious of the bunch, the only one you could imagine going on to enjoy a long-term showbiz career, if not as an inspired Jagger clone then at least as a credible stand-up comic. The others, though, were too fenced in by their own musical limitations. One evening they invited me to be a fly on the wall at a local studio where they intended to demo a new song called ‘Jet Boy’, and it became increasingly apparent as the session progressed that certain players barely knew how to even tune their instruments correctly. This carefree indifference to basic musical convention coupled with a shared state of chemical befuddlement would ultimately prove their undoing in the months to come.
Unless they were otherwise engaged, the Dolls could always be found every midnight doing their usual human-peacock routines at Max’s Kansas City, Manhattan’s most exciting nightspot. On the ground floor was an excellent restaurant and bar, with a private room for the Warhol crowd and other self-styled celebrities. People came mostly to get loaded and socialise but the most enticing part of the establishment for me was the tiny upstairs room where they put on live concerts. In the days I was resident in Manhattan I saw Lowell George’s Little Feat, Tim Buckley and Gram Parsons perform unforgettable shows in a space you’d have been hard-pressed to swing a cat in.
Buckley in particular was a revelation. I’d been a fan of his back when he was attempting a sort of angel-voiced jazz-folk synthesis, but he’d recently jettisoned that approach and hooked up with a straight rock band in order to sell more records. He had a brand-new album out called Greetings from L.A. which I didn’t particularly like and so I attended the show with certain misgivings. As I’d suspected, his back-up unit were nothing to write home about but Buckley was so on fire that night that he didn’t really need any support. I’ve never seen or heard another performer use his or her voice as bewitchingly as he managed to do before or since that performance. The guy was gifted with an extraordinary five-octave range and he could summon any sound from his larynx - from a blue yodel to a jazz trumpet to a police siren. Take it from one who saw both live: his son Jeff was great but Buckley senior was greater. Women were just wilting in front of the stage whenever he sang.
The same couldn’t be said when Gram Parsons followed Buckley’s brief residency some days later. He looked bad-a vision of toxic bloat in ill-fitting cowboy duds and a boozer’s moustache - and his voice was distinctly frail. But inspired by his new partner Emmylou Harris’s rich harmony counterpoint, he slowly rose to the occasion and the pair duetted emotively on a brace of shit-kicker country ballads that normally would have sounded distinctly out of place with the glitzy demi-monde frequenting Max’s. But I looked around and the little room was littered with people who looked like they’d just stumbled out of a bad Lou Reed song, wiping actual tears from their eyes. That was Parsons’s gift: he could still break anyone’s heart with his music, no matter how fucked up he was or they were.
Finally in mid-April my money ran out and I flew back from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Heathrow. Once through customs, I went looking for a newsagent in order to buy the latest NME, a paper I’d seen little of in the past two months as it wasn’t sold anywhere in America. Leafing through the issue I’d just purchased I came to the centre and found that a long article I’d scribbled and then posted from Michigan about my aforementioned encounters there with David Bowie was taking pride of place.
The first night we met, a young girl present in the room had taken a photo of Bowie and me, and when I bumped into her in a club a few nights later, she gave me the little colour snap she’d had developed. As a joke, I’d sent it along with the article to the paper, never thinking they’d actually be able to print the thing. But there it was - me and the Dame grinning and holding each other like a couple of New Orleans transsexuals during Mardi Gras - taking up a large portion of one whole page. My first reaction on seeing it was one of stark horror: after all, it wasn’t exactly the most manly image to have projected out to the general public. But it certainly got me more noticed. Blokes at gigs would suddenly sidle up and offer me a joint with the inevitable damp cardboard filter. Women in London nightclubs would wink and flirt with a more promiscuous air. Old people would invite me to open their local garden fête and big dogs would nuzzle up and lick my hand whenever I promenaded down the streets. Actually, I’m lying on the last two counts - but still these were heady times and I was twenty-one, unattached and soaking up every second with unabashed glee.
One thing I learned though: ‘Everybody loves a winner’ is an often-quoted truism but it isn’t - strictly - true. When someone attains success rapidly, former acquaintances often t
end to experience pangs of excruciating envy that inevitably destabilise the ongoing relationship. You get your face in the papers often enough and rank strangers begin harbouring grudges against you for no clear reason. It’s not all champagne and blow jobs in other words. Things can start to get nasty. You can quickly find yourself the victim of ugly, unfounded rumours. You’ll be in some bar and some drunken oaf will get up in your face, nail you with his spittle and beery breath, call you a wanker and offer to beat you up in the car park. Fame is a double-edged sword in other words. It’s great to wave around but you don’t want to be falling on its blade.
In point of fact, fame and celebritydom have long been the proverbial kiss of death for creative writers. Truman Capote was destroyed by the success of In Cold Blood and his heedless embrace of the American talk-show circuit. Hunter S. Thompson never wrote anything great after Fear and Loathing made him an American stoner icon. More recently, both Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis have seen their talent decrease at the same alarming rate as their global notoriety has increased. It’s elementary, really; writers by the very nature of their work need to stay lurking in the shadows in order to do the job properly. That’s where you can stand back and get the big picture. The more invisible a writer is, the better placed he or she will be to fully penetrate the subject matter. If, however, you get enticed into stepping into the celebrity spotlight yourself, you’re only going to make yourself feel self-conscious, and that self-consciousness will end up paralysing your creative perspective and leaving you bereft of insight.
My employers at the NME shared a different view, however, and missed no opportunity to push their writers further into the pop spotlight. I couldn’t knock it as a form of instant ego-gratification but it always had its share of bad repercussions. Charles Shaar Murray and I started getting unhealthily competitive around this juncture. Back in ’72, he, Ian MacDonald and I had briefly bonded in a Three Musketeers ‘all for one and one for all’ kind of way. I’d crashed at Charlie’s Islington flat from time to time and we’d often shared each other’s hopes and dreams like young men on the cusp of achieving full-blown adulthood are sometimes prone to do. But that open channel we shared soon got dismantled and I’m still not exactly sure why the breakdown and ensuing animosity occurred.