Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  The big event as summer turned to autumn was a Wembley Stadium show headlined by the recently reformed hippie dreamers Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. They played for almost three hours, their voices audibly hollowed out by ongoing cocaine abuse. Half the band appeared to be struggling with recurrent nose-bleeding. It was a sorry spectacle all told - only Neil Young managed to fleetingly impress.

  At the party afterwards at a West End watering hole called Quaglino’s a wild-eyed, chemically impacted Young and an obnoxiously drunk-as-a-skunk Stills booed the ropey pick-up band hired to perform at their festivities off the makeshift stage and then climbed up and took over their instruments. Young immediately took control of the repertoire and started performing several sluggish-tempoed compositions from his just-released album On the Beach. Stills tried to play the drums but fell backwards off the stool after a couple of minutes. He then decided to approach the microphone and address the many illustrious English rock musicians who’d turned up to the event as invited guests. In a nutshell, he dared them to come up and match their playing skills with his. It was just a pissed-up brag but both Jimmy Page and John Bonham volunteered and played a memorable ten-minute jam with Young still firmly at the helm. Robbie Robertson of the Band also stepped up and he and Young got into a lively guitar duel that would have involuntarily curled the whiskers of any bearded man present in the room.

  Young was a force of nature that night. No one could intimidate him or outplay him. You could tell he was having an excessively good time. Even Stills’s bullish presence didn’t faze him. Why should it have? After all, Young was on a major creative roll that showed no signs of slowing to a halt in the immediate future. His 1975 masterpiece Tonight’s the Night was already done and dusted. After that came Zuma and a slew of brilliant records, culminating in 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps. By then, many were concluding that Neil Young had been the most consistently inspired male troubadour of the seventies. I wouldn’t argue the point. No one else - apart from Bowie - had the same insatiable need to push ahead and keep challenging an audience’s expectations and no one else had anywhere near the same mixture of self-discipline, creative gumption and sheer bloody-mindedness.

  As Young was holding forth from the Quaglino’s stage, his Canadian soulmate Joni Mitchell was sat in one of the more exclusive corners of the restaurant area surveying the human clutter around her with a fierce ‘do not approach’ look in her eyes and a haughty sneer creasing her lips. Bianca Jagger was seated beside her and together they made for a daunting double act in championship-level seventies snobbishness.

  At least Mitchell had something to back up her lofty demeanour. Like her fellow countryman Young, she was right at the top of her music-making game at that point in time. She’d started out as a folkie singer/songwriter in the late sixties and musically and lyrically she quickly proved herself to be head and shoulders above the rest of her introspective, acoustic-guitar-picking peers. But of late her voice had grown deeper and more worldly-sounding and she’d begun letting jazz musicians tamper with her songs on stage and in the studio. This bold stylistic detour would ultimately cost her a large section of her audience but it was also the best move she ever made. The next two albums, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira, were both masterpieces, a major artist entering maturity at the very peak of her powers and focused unblinkingly on two big issues of the era: the spiritual bankruptcy inherent in aimless hedonism and status-seeking and the inevitable trials and tribulations of searching for love in a vanity-driven universe. She’d always been a spectacular talent but the songs on those two records somehow cast a spell that seemed to penetrate deep inside the listener’s skin, clear through to his or her DNA. I continue to have boundless respect for Ms Mitchell but I’m also glad I never got to actually meet her.

  In late September I was back living the high life with my boys the Rolling Stones. They had a new album poised for imminent release entitled It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll that contained nothing particularly earth-shattering but which still managed to garner mostly enthusiastic reviews at the time. I did an interview with Mick Taylor which turned out to be his last as a Stones member. Unbeknownst to everyone else, he’d lately been encouraged by the engineer Andy Johns to start a group with the fiery-tempered Scottish bass player Jack Bruce. He was fed up with the Stones anyway. Jagger and Richards were way too intimidating for him to ever feel like he truly belonged in their midst. They criticised his playing and generally refused to give him a songwriter credit when he contributed to their tunes. He was starting to get strung out on heroin too. His brusque departure two months later was partly an attempt on Taylor’s part to seek out a healthier avenue for his professional music-making expertise. As it turned out, it became more a case of ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’. Too bad. He was a sweet guy and a massively gifted guitar player.

  After seeing Taylor, I was invited to follow Keith Richards around London for what turned out to be something in the region of forty non-stop hours. He’d flown in from Switzerland without his family and was at something of a loose end. His new best pal Ronnie Wood was somewhere in Europe playing with the Faces and he was on his own looking for any like-minded druggie to share his time with. I’d always wanted to see up close what his life was really like - and then nail it in print. But his moment-to-moment existence back then was so mind-bogglingly X-rated and fraught with libellous content that I’d have to wait twenty years to do the story justice. The mid-section of ‘Twilight in Babylon’ from my first book The Dark Stuff is a detailed account of the first twenty hours of our encounter. It starts with us taking humongous amounts of drugs in central London, rises to a crescendo with the guitarist falling into a coma in Ronnie Wood’s Richmond guest house and ends with me vomiting all over his welcome mat. But I’ve never documented the second half - the twenty hours spent after my unfortunate Technicolor yawn incident. Until now.

  One thing about Keith during his junkie years - he was a remarkably non-judgemental host. Vomit on his premises and he wouldn’t throw you out. He was definitely a live-and-let-live kind of guy in that respect. Instead he offered me more drugs, or ‘the real breakfast of champions’ as he called them. He laid out a six-inch line of heroin and cocaine mixed together, snorted it, laid out another and handed me a rolled-up pound note with a conspiratorial nudge. It was still 7 a.m. and a bit early in the day for me but nonetheless I honked the whole thing back without further thought. Hey, when in Rome . . .

  The next few hours were understandably somewhat hazy but around midday Keith proposed we drive into London because he fancied something to eat. Whilst clambering into the passenger seat of his Dino Ferrari sports car, I offered up a silent prayer to the god of all London-bound motor-vehicle occupants that the man to my right would be more safety-code-conscious in daylight hours than I’d seen him be once night came a-falling. No such luck, of course. The open highway was just one big racetrack for him to burn rubber down. As far as he was concerned, heeding caution was strictly for sissies. Keith drove like a man transfixed. There was no conversation when he was in transit at the wheel. He just fixed the landscape in his windscreen with a withering glare and ramrodded into the bugger at full wheel-screeching velocity. He drove with the single-minded intensity of a tattooed man wading into a bar-room fight. It was a way of relieving some of his considerable inner aggression and frustrations.

  We were only two streets away from our destination-aswanky restaurant nestling on the borderline between Chelsea and Earls Court - when Keith noticed an old man in a shed on the adjacent pavement selling copies of the Evening Standard. The cover of the paper featured a photo of the leader of T.Rex and alongside it the headline read ‘Marc Bolan says “I am still the greatest”’. The headline had then been copied onto a makeshift poster that stood in a grille next to the man’s shed. Keith saw the thing and instantly brought his car to a juddering standstill. He leapt out onto the pavement and started kicking the sign with intimidating gusto. The old bloke peered out of his shed and star
ted remonstrating with Richards for damaging his property. Keith stood his ground and started jabbing a warning finger in his wizened direction. ‘Listen, old man - you should be ashamed of yourself selling bullshit like that. Marc Bolan never has been the fuckin’ greatest. He’s just a mouthy little poof whose fifteen minutes of fame are all used up. You’re misleading the public.’ Then he got back in the car and drove off in a silent fury.

  Keith - it has to be said - was not a fan of early-seventies rock. He couldn’t abide glam rock. Couldn’t stomach David Bowie’s music and was extremely sniffy about Bowie’s whole transsexual shtick. One time in a London club I saw Gary Glitter tentatively approach Keith. Before he could introduce himself, Richards had fixed him with such a disapproving scowl that poor old Gary practically wet himself on the spot. Like the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, Keith maintained a zero-tolerance policy when it came to ‘soft lads’ trying to make their bones in the medium of rock ’n’ roll. But Marc Bolan was by far and away the softest lad of them all from his exalted vantage point. Keith had a major bee in his bonnet and cursed him out at every opportunity.

  Five minutes later, he’d parked his car and we located the restaurant. There’s a great scene in John Ford’s classic Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance when the hellion gunslinger Valance - played to perfection by Lee Marvin - abruptly enters a saloon bar with his faithful giggling accomplice at his side and all the action in the room suddenly grinds to an ominous halt. The roulette wheel stops spinning. The piano goes silent. All conversation ceases. Everyone stares at the intruders in stark terror. That’s what it was like when Keith sauntered into the dining room. The place was packed with lunching yuppies - only they weren’t called that then - who looked like they’d just dropped a gallstone when they saw him arriving. Suddenly the noisy environment was stilled to an eerie silence. The only sound to be heard was that of cutlery dropping to the floor in shock. Every eye there was warily fixed on him as though Vlad the Impaler had just stepped into the big room.

  Not that the reaction he was eliciting fazed the guitarist in the slightest. I doubt if he even noticed. He just nonchalantly strode to a corner table, sat down and proceeded to disappear behind a fog of billowing cigarette smoke. I suppose he’d long grown accustomed to the supernatural effect he automatically set into motion whenever he chose to step out in public. Both he and Jagger shared a lucid grasp of the charisma they could radiate. That’s why they’d lately started calling themselves the ‘Glimmer Twins’: ‘glimmer’ was the word they used to define their personal auras. ‘A glimmer is more addictive than heroin,’ Keith once told a journalist. He vividly understood the power he possessed.

  After lunch, we moved on to the Rolling Stones’ central London office, where Keith immediately espied yet another newspaper trumpeting a Marc Bolan interview inside its pages. This prompted a further avalanche of unprintable invective against the Boppin’ Elf and his faltering career that lasted clear through the afternoon. Then - just as daylight was dimming out in the streets - Keith bumped into a drug buddy acquaintance called Rick Grech who’d been the bass player in Family and Blind Faith and who’d also co-produced Gram Parsons’s first solo album. Grech returned to Ronnie Wood’s guest house with us and then at midnight Keith took us both with him to a recording studio, where he was set to preside over a remix of the Stones’ version of the Temptations’ classic ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’ for future single release.

  Sometime the next morning Ronnie Wood - fresh off the plane from Europe - joined Keith’s little clan, followed by Jimmy Page later in the day. That night they returned to Wood’s and wrote and recorded a song together in the same studio called ‘Scarlet’ - ‘a folk ballad with reggae guitars’ (according to Page) that remains unissued to date. I wish I’d been there to tell you more about it but I flaked out during the earlier mixing session and had crawled back to my dingy Archway shack for some much-needed rest and recuperation. Richards and I had been more or less awake for the same length of time - about forty hours - and I was dead on my legs whilst he was still wide awake and readying himself for three more days and nights of full-on wakefulness. Truly the man was a walking miracle of wayward stamina. Don’t ever find yourself in a drug stand-off with him. No one throughout history has taken more drugs with more pleasurable consequences than Keith Richards. It’s like going into combat with something out of Greek mythology. The grave-yards of the world are littered with the corpses of those who tried and failed. I’m profoundly lucky that I came out of it with some good stories and just an upset stomach.

  Whilst on the subject of upset stomachs, I need to put the proverbial kibosh on a scurrilous piece of gossip that has been printed and reprinted about me and Keith Richards in magazines and books and which persists to this day. This story claims that one night the guitarist accidentally threw up on me and that I was so besotted with the guy that I continued to wear his vomit stains on my jacket for days afterwards as a badge of pride. Utter slanderous poppycock! It’s just pure fantasy and misinformation. First, it’s insulting to the guitarist who’s rarely - if ever - thrown up in his entire life. The man was born with a stomach - as well as a will - of purest iron. And it’s deeply belittling to me also. Indeed, this bald-faced lie was the beginning of a cruel perception that dogged me more and more as the decade progressed: that I was nothing more than just another Stones hanger-on/ casualty. The NME have played up this bullshit angle too. In 2004 the BBC ran a documentary on the paper and one of the editors interviewed was droning on about me ‘living the Keith Richards dream’. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

  I didn’t get into hard drugs - specifically heroin - so that I could be more like Keith Richards. I took the narcotic partly as a misguided way of temporarily gluing back together a broken heart but mostly because I liked the world it plunged me into, that instant all-embracing comfort zone. I would have become a user and addict whether or not I’d ever encountered Chrissie Hynde or heard a note of the Rolling Stones’ music.

  Neither was I ever - technically speaking-a Stones hanger-on. In practically all the time I spent with them, our roles were always pre-fixed. I was a writer on assignment and they were the subject matter. I never wanted to become a regular fixture in their entourage because I recognised early on that the only way to do that was to become a resident court jester for them, and I didn’t need the condescension or fancy wearing the cap and bells.

  As for being one of the group’s many ‘casualties’ - well, once again I beg to differ. If you want to read a book about a real Stones casualty, then dig out a tome on Gram Parsons. Or read the last chapters of Wired, Bob Woodward’s account of doomed comedian John Belushi’s life and ugly death. Or check out the part in legendary US promoter Bill Graham’s autobiography where he describes undergoing a complete mental breakdown as a result of being passed over by the Stones when they toured the States in 1989.

  Probably all big rock acts have a personal trail of destruction stacking up behind them but the one shadowing the Rolling Stones is the biggest of them all, with corpses and broken spirits strewn far and wide across the universe mostly because the victims let their imaginations get too enflamed by what they heard and saw whilst in the group’s orbit. But I was never one of them. On the contrary, I was one of the lucky few who stared into their dark vortex at close quarters and lived to tell the tale(s) with all my powers of recall still intact. I’ve always looked at our association as a boon not a curse.

  When I wasn’t busy consorting with the stars of the mid-seventies rock galaxy, the final months of 1974 would often find me lurking forlornly in my crummy bedsit cultivating a world-weary melancholy mood. I remember spending drugged-up hours alone listening intensely to Frank Sinatra’s great Capitol albums - Only the Lonely, No One Cares and Wee Small Hours, the ones he made after being jilted by Ava Gardner. The pain in his voice spoke to me across the ages; Frank knew exactly how I was feeling.

  But let’s not get too down and dreary here. After all, I’d lately
acquired new friends to help draw me out of the clutches of gloomy introspection. I even had a new girlfriend - of sorts. Her name was Hermine Demoriane and she was a performance artist. Her ‘performance’ speciality involved walking a tightrope stretched across a lake, thus giving the impression that she was actually walking on water. Imagine a younger Juliette Gréco with Yoko Ono’s mind - that’s how I saw her anyway. She was a lot older than I was, French, a real looker and eccentric as all hell. But that was OK with me. Consorting with the nuttiest broads in town was fast becoming my destiny as a young adult: like attracting like and all that. As a teenager I’d sat enraptured in front of TV sets and film screens taking in the French nouvelle vague films of François Truffaut and Louis Malle and I always carried a torch in my heart for the young actresses these great directors would employ - women like Jeanne Moreau, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier and Bernadette Lafont. The characters they portrayed were invariably free spirits who couldn’t be tamed by any one man and as such they heralded the first true wave of post-war feminism in Europe. Hermine was just like these women.

  She was actually married to a poet with whom she still lived. They had a child as well-a daughter about to enter her teens. Theirs was an open marriage, though, with both parties free to explore other relationships. She approached me at a London club one night and told me she’d fallen in love with my writing and wanted to get to know me better. I was flattered but initially leery of her ‘married mother’ status-I didn’t need to add the role of ‘home-wrecker’ to my list of dubious accomplishments in 1974. But when my relationship with Chrissie Hynde went into free fall, Hermine was there to console me. She just kept coming around and I kept letting her in. There was a peaceful aura about her that I appreciated. Most women I’ve been close to could talk the hind legs off a donkey but Hermine was the opposite - given to long, enigmatic silences. At first I didn’t have particularly deep feelings for her as my heart still belonged to another, but as time passed we sought out each other’s company more and more. Hermine actually cared for me a lot more than Chrissie ever did. As the decade progressed, she would become my personal guardian angel. Without her watching over me, I would surely have died. If there is a heroine to be found in the story I’m telling you throughout this book, then she is it.