Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  Meanwhile, the summer of ’73 came and went without much pomp and circumstance. London was still the centre of the pop universe but there weren’t many interesting new bands turning up on the local grass-roots club circuit. In retaliation, several London pubs began booking live rock acts in order to drum up more customers for their liquor and a new phenomenon was duly sired: pub rock.

  Mostly it was the province of ugly blokes who dressed like roadies and played old Chuck Berry songs badly. But there was one band who stood out from the rest as a demented harbinger of things to come and they called themselves Kilburn and the High Roads. Throughout the autumn, Chrissie and I saw them on a succession of dilapidated pub stages, plying their trade to a tiny clique of admirers. The singer and drummer were both physically deformed, another member was a midget and the rest of the line-up looked as though they’d walked out of some fifties Ealing comedy about clueless East End spivs. Their music wasn’t rock so much as a vaguely menacing mélange of cockney music hall and roots reggae, and it was far too wilfully eccentric to ever find favour with mainstream tastes of the hour, but I still wrote a glowing critique of their unique attributes in an NME article that autumn garlanded with the catchy headline ‘Hardened Criminals Plan Big Break-Out’. Many years later and shortly before his death, Ian Dury - the Kilburns’ crippled singer and key focal point - publicly thanked me for being the first to write about him in a feature about his early career that he wrote for Mojo.

  He wasn’t so courteous at the time, though. I remember him once approaching me drunkenly in a club in Camden Town and growling in my ears, ‘I’ve got a gun in my pocket and I want to stick it right up your bum.’ What do you say to something like that? I was glad when he found success with his Blockheads much later in the decade partly because he deserved it but mostly because if he’d stayed in the cultural margins much longer, he’d have become so twisted with rage he’d have probably ended up killing someone.

  By early September, I was back in the big leagues. The Rolling Stones were touring Europe and the NME sent Pennie Smith and me out to cover their opening UK dates. I interviewed Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Mick Taylor together in a pancake house adjoining their Manchester hotel one afternoon and got to ride with them to the show that evening in their bus. I couldn’t stop flashing back in my mind to the time when I’d first met them ten years earlier.

  I’d still been a child then and they’d seemed like a new hooligan-youth superpower. Now they were maturing men of wealth and taste who shared little in common apart from the music they still made. When the five members were together in the same space, the conversational repartee between them was usually so strained and hesitant it could have been scripted by Harold Pinter. The source of their group discomfort wasn’t hard to locate: they were each at their personal wits’ end about how to coexist harmoniously with Keith Richards, whose ongoing drug addiction continued to daily imperil their potential to work and make more money.

  I coined a new phrase for him and his spooky girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, who’d lurked side-stage behind a pair of giant ‘human bug’ op-art sunglasses - ‘wastedly elegant’ - in the piece I submitted to the NME, and other journalists soon followed suit. The group must have been tickled by what I’d written about them because someone from their office phoned a few days later and offered me the chance to travel around with the Stones on the final leg of the tour and then write a book about the experience. The band would pay my travel and hotel expenses and also pony up for the text I’d be penning. This was like being offered a chance to attain nirvana for me, my wildest teenage dream becoming reality.

  As fate would have it, the book - though duly completed - would never get published. As I’ve said before, this was no tragedy as the text I concocted rarely dared to go below the surface and confront what was really going on in the group’s universe. Twenty years later, though, I wrote up a more substantial and honest account of that tour in a piece entitled ‘Twilight in Babylon’ that became a chapter in my first book, The Dark Stuff. I don’t intend to repeat the basic information and character sketches contained within it here except to reiterate that the Stones were sinking more and more into the same dark vortex they’d unloosed at the dawning of the decade.

  It made them an irresistible force for others to want to fasten on to. Bored European monarchs and their spoilt-rotten in-laws, leading international fashion designers and their self-fixated ‘muses’, sun-baked movie stars with a yen for cocaine and pussy, big-time gangsters turned out in expensively tailored suits to play down their Neanderthal physiques - all these and more flocked to ingratiate themselves within the group’s touring entourage because they sensed the Stones were a musical mini-Mafia who possessed unique power, that they were in effect a law unto themselves.

  Keith Richards kept getting busted every few months or so for possessing hard drugs and firearms but rarely even turned up to the law court where his misdemeanours were being judged, never mind facing any kind of jail time. Midway through the tour, the road convoy transporting the group’s equipment was forced to pull over at a customs checkpoint and various officials dismantled the amplifiers only to discover that they contained sizeable quantities of various illegal Class A and B drugs hidden inside. Mick Jagger and tour manager Peter Rudge then got a high-ranking lawyer to tell the authorities that the Stones knew nothing about the drugs and that they’d simply been the innocent victims of ‘international drug smugglers’ who’d somehow infiltrated their equipment without their direct knowledge. Result: the Stones were instantly exonerated of any wrongdoing and the case was conveniently closed. That’s the kind of power they had at their disposal when the necessity arose.

  But it evidently came at a steep karmic cost because the more their collective charisma and bargaining power increased on the world’s stage, the less potent they sounded as a working musical unit. The Stones’ best music is all about conjuring up just the right groove and then taking it somewhere interesting, but in 1973 they often found difficulty in locking together in live performance because their prodigal-son guitar player - whose job it was to set the actual pace for each song - was on a completely different planet, chemically speaking, to most of his fellow players.

  At the same time, he was also the coolest-looking dude in the known hemisphere. Back in the early sixties he’d looked less cool: big-eared, slightly bashful and distinctly human, someone who was best summed up in Andrew Loog Oldham’s Stoned autobiography when the ex-Stones manager recalled his own mother stating that Keith was the only truly decent human being in the group because he was kind to animals and always phoned his mum at least twice a week. But then he started pitching woo with Anita Pallenberg and daily testing his personal stamina with drugs and a most dramatic physical and spiritual transformation was set into motion. Lately it had reached the point where he’d begun to resemble a cross between a human blackened spoon and Count Dracula. This in turn provided him with a singularly intimidating demeanour to shield himself behind. It was so effective that no one in the Stones organisation dared to initiate a frank exchange of views with him over the fact that his overstimulated lifestyle was so sorely taxing the group’s morale, music and money-making potential.

  I broached this tender subject with Mick Jagger when we finally met for a lunch/interview in a gentleman’s club he frequented near Piccadilly Circus more than a month after the tour had wound down. Jagger had actually been the one who’d chosen me for the book assignment - he told me so during our meal - but he and I had never actually spoken during all the time I’d travelled with them. Sometimes I’d seen him from the corner of my eye backstage checking me out, mentally sizing up whether I truly merited being in his group’s exalted midst. He had his own way of intimidating people. But it was ultimately small beer compared to his soulmate Keith’s championship-level scowling expertise.

  ‘How do you deal with keeping the group afloat when your guitarist is so frequently in trouble?’ I asked him. He turned reflective for several seconds an
d then said, ‘Well, you’ve seen a bit of what he’s like. He’s not really someone who responds well to advice.’ His famous mouth exploded into a broad grin. I tried to continue the line of questioning but he soon cut me off. ‘Listen, I’m not going to judge Keith. I don’t judge Keith - period. That’s how our relationship works. That’s how I am.’

  These days Jagger habitually gets worse press - principally in his native England - than a convicted child molester and it’s something that’s always baffled me, particularly when his equally money-hungry peer Paul McCartney is fêted by the same media organs as an all-purpose paragon of virtue. It’s obvious the guy isn’t the most loveable and approachable human being to have ever drawn breath but he never wanted to be loved by the general public in the first place. Patronised and applauded - yes. But not ‘loved’ in the gooey showbiz sense of the word. He’s always been smart enough to recognise that performers who actively look for love from their audiences often end up needy and burned-out like Judy Garland.

  In order to understand Mick Jagger better, it’s always instructive to recall the state he found himself in at the end of the sixties. On the one hand, he was the rebel prince of New Bohemia - someone millions of young people the world over idolised and aspired to be. On the other, he’d had to witness Brian Jones’s pitiful meltdown and strange, sudden death as well as the descent into heroin addiction by the two people he was then closest to - Marianne Faithfull and Keith Richards.

  Even more dramatically, he’d lately discovered that most of the money the Stones had made in the sixties had been pocketed by manager Allen Klein, along with all the rights to their recorded back catalogue. He had two basic choices: either join his soulmates in narcotic never-never land or assert himself and as a canny businessman steer the Rolling Stones’ leaky ship towards more advantageous waters. The guy chose to survive and thrive. Without his relentless input, the group would have petered out after the recording of Let It Bleed. And yet somehow he always ends up the villain whenever the Stones saga gets recounted - the control freak, the cold fish, the cunning, heartless greed-head. It’s become one big fairy story - the Rolling Stones as perceived by the world’s media - with Jagger as the resident evil goblin.

  So what’s he really like then? Hard to say these days-I haven’t been in direct contact with the man for over twenty years. But back in the seventies he was someone who always made it his business to be one step ahead of everyone else and who cultivated relationships mostly to achieve this aim. He was extremely shrewd too. He was amused by the clonish likes of the New York Dolls but recognised instantly that they were far too unprofessional and scatterbrained to ever cause his outfit any worried side glances. David Bowie on the other hand fascinated him. For Jagger, Bowie was the only white guy from the seventies who ever caused him to look anxiously over his shoulder. Mention the likes of Lou Reed and Marc Bolan to him though and he’d dissolve in laughter. He knew a thing or two about performers, did Mick Jagger. They had to be fearless, vain and deeply ambitious in order to cast their spell meaningfully night after night. Back in 1964 he’d gone toe to toe with James Brown on the T.A.M.I. show and he’d learned more about stagecraft from that one encounter than any of the new glam boys - apart from Bowie - could ever comprehend. ‘It’s hard work being me,’ he once said in an unguarded moment, and that’s what I most recall him being: a hard worker. Back then his life wasn’t just about getting paid and getting laid.

  And he could be really good company too when he was relaxed. But he was rarely relaxed in public situations. His problem was, whenever he’d walk into a room of strangers, people would invariably go stark staring mad. Women would suddenly lose all sense of decorum and men would start following him around like hypnotised puppy dogs. Jagger had to muster every atom of his considerable sense of self-possession in order to deal with the star-struck behaviour his very presence automatically tended to incite. That’s why being Mick Jagger was ultimately such a hard gig. His ongoing retreat into the world of aristocracy and high society has been one way of distancing himself from such situations, I would imagine.

  Perhaps this would be the ideal moment to end this chapter and draw a veil over 1973. I’d realised my most ardent teenage fantasy: acceptance and patronage within the Rolling Stones’ inner sanctum. Plus I was crazy in love. It couldn’t get any better than this. And it didn’t, either.

  I’m not complaining but too much had happened to me in too short a time and as exhilarating as they had been to live through, the previous two years had left me dizzy and disoriented. I needed an anchor in my life and that’s what my relationship with Chrissie Hynde gave me - initially. For the first six months, it was bliss. But then 1974 dawned and our honeymoon period was over.

  Something else deeply significant to my future standing in society happened right at the tail-end of 1973. I went over to Cologne in Germany to visit Can in their rehearsal studio there on assignment from the NME. Had a great time too. So great in fact that when someone in their entourage offered me a tiny line of heroin to snort, I did so without much forethought on the matter. I’d been offered the drug before on occasion but had always had the presence of mind to turn it down. This time, though, was different: my first time. I didn’t know it then but in that one heedless moment I’d just opened the door to a world of hurt.

  1974

  1974 was the year when - glory be-I finally found my own voice as a writer. Before that, I’d been a wannabe, simply channelling whatever literary influences - Bangs, Capote, Wilde, Wolfe-I happened to be in temporary thrall to. But the apprenticeship I’d undertaken over the past two years had led me to adopt a very different perspective from my rock-lit peers on how to most effectively capture the sounds and sensations of pop life in prose form. Everyone else seemed to me to be writing about the ‘idea’ of rock as though it was some abstract concept. They liked to bracket the music’s practitioners off into separate competing movements and spent far too much space and energy dissecting their lyrics as though they were all W. B. Yeats with an electric guitar. Their stilted prose and sheltered thoughts were typical of a particular mindset: that of the bookish bedroom hermit with a sociology degree who doesn’t quite know what to do with the rest of his life. In other words, the kind of young adult I might have become had luck and the NME not sealed my fate.

  My perspective was the polar opposite of theirs. I wasn’t writing about rock as an idea: I was writing about it as a full-blown flesh-and-blood reality - surreal people living surreal, action-packed lives. From what I’d learned coming up, rock writing was fundamentally an action medium that best came to life when the writer was right in the thick of that action and yet removed enough to comprehend its possible consequences. The range of characters the medium offered was phenomenally rich. There was the lead singer with his monumental narcissistic personality disorders. The guitarists with their witchy girlfriends and ever-mounting drug-dependency issues. The managers feverishly working the money angle whilst secretly envying their wards’ success and pulling power. The roadies building their own thuggish power base. The audience - like the children of Hamelin - hypnotised and bug-eyed with communal ecstasy. It’s the convergence of human elements like these that made the form start to come alive for me. Some degree of windy theorising is always necessary - true - but only in small doses. Nothing longer than three or four incisive, well-worded sentences to establish a wider context and also pass judgement on the music actually being made. Then - back to the action.

  The key trick, though, is to somehow create prose that flows with a distinct musicality all of its own. That’s what I finally hit on in ’74: the right tone and the right groove. Before that, there’d been something contrived about my writing as well as the literary persona I’d hastily adopted. But I’d toiled long and hard to find a style and approach that I was happy with. I took my evolving writerly skills very, very seriously during that whole period. I made a point of never taking any drugs just prior to and during the actual act of scribbling my texts out. I
’d tried once or twice whilst on speed and it had screwed up my ability to focus and fuse together incidents to the best of my ability. And pot only befuddled my thinking whenever a deadline loomed. No, I really needed to be straight to do full justice to the talent growing within me.

  That was one of the better aspects of my relationship with Chrissie Hynde: it wasn’t a drug-driven liaison. We’d take drugs in social situations when they were being offered freely to us but didn’t have any where we lived and rarely felt the urge to actually buy them. Chrissie was like me - she’d snort cocaine if she was given it but it invariably left her nervous and ill at ease. The best times we shared together were the ones when it was just the two of us, clear-headed and drunk simply on each other’s company. You don’t need drugs when you’re truly in love and on the same wavelength as your intended.

  But romantic love - as the poets have often pointed out - is a multifaceted condition of the heart that can end up deeply wounding those who fall under its spell. Some can ride its giddy momentum whilst others become destabilised and start to come apart from within. That’s what was about to happen to me. The image I was trying to project out to the world was that of a self-assured, waspishly witty young sophisticate, but behind it I was emotionally still sixteen years old in the head: insecure and possessive - two qualities almost all self-respecting species of womankind have a built-in contempt of.

  Meanwhile, weird scenes had been happening within the NME. Sales continued to increase throughout ’73, but then in the year’s final weeks the paper had been forced to cease production and go on strike. It was out of circulation for almost two months as I recall-a nerve-wracking time for its staff and contributors wondering if it would ever resurface. The strike coincided with our IPC paymasters taking umbrage at the NME’s new laissez-faire editorial policy regarding bad language. The word ‘cunt’ had lately cropped up in one feature and the higher-ups were mortified by this turn of events, threatening to shut the paper down if further obscenities were committed to print. A compromise was duly arrived at. We could use ‘fuck’ in moderation, as well as ‘asshole’ and ‘bugger’. But any slang word for genitalia - male or female - was strictly out of bounds.