Apathy for the Devil

by Nick Kent

  Another daunting European female I found myself socialising with in the autumn-to-winter months of ’74 was Nico, the German-born former chanteuse for the Velvet Underground who’d lately signed a solo recording deal with Island records’ UK A&R branch. Whilst recording her fourth album The End in London, with John Cale once again producing, she’d met up with my pal Gene Krell from Granny Takes a Trip and they’d become romantically entwined for a brief period. The Chelsea apartment Gene shared with Marty Breslau became a home away from home for both Nico and me during those months because heroin was so freely available there.

  I liked her a lot - and we developed a friendship. She was a fascinating individual and a quintessential bohemian free spirit. Part of her was like a child - naive and incredulous - but the other part - the part that kept her surviving - was ruthless and self-possessed. She saw herself quite rightly as a genuine artist. No man was ever going to make her his dutiful spouse. Poor old Gene tried and got his heart broken into a million pieces just like I did with Chrissie Hynde. He asked for her hand in marriage and she turned him down and ended their affair. ‘You just don’t amuse me any more,’ she told him. I felt sorry for the guy but I still told him he was emotionally way out of his depth. You don’t fall in love with women like Nico: it’s like trying to bottle a lightning bolt.

  Meanwhile, a much younger generation was vying for my attention in 1974. A few of them I cemented budding relationships with, others I let escape through my net. The most significant example of the latter breed was a precocious Mancunian youth called Steven Morrissey who wrote letters to me practically every week during that year. I wish I could tell you that these missives contained glimpses of the poetic audacity that he brought to his lyric-writing when he became the lead singer of the Smiths a decade later - but suffice to say this was not the case. How could it have been otherwise? He was only fourteen years old at the time. Instead he wrote ardently and single-mindedly about his fierce devotion for the New York Dolls. His teenage dream was to escape dreary Manchester and reinvent himself as one of the Dolls’ glitzy entourage in downtown Manhattan. That’s why I never wrote him back. I didn’t want to inadvertently encourage an underage youth into embarking on a life of wilful self-destruction. I told him as much ten years later when I actually got to meet him. But I don’t think he ever fully forgave me for ignoring him during his adolescent wallflower years.

  Two teenagers I did become reasonably close to during that time were a pair of eighteen-year-old likely-lad law-breakers called Steve Jones and Paul Cook who hailed from the White City precinct of London. They approached me early in the year at McLaren’s emporium. They had a group called the Swankers that they’d started with one of the shop’s assistants, an art student called Glen Matlock. Matlock was a middle-class youth with better opportunities and a more responsible head on his shoulders whilst Jones and Cook were so working-class they could have been Arthur Mullard’s two illegitimate sons.

  Those two were always up to some kind of mischief. McLaren had initially caught them stealing from his shop but still let them frequent the place because he quickly became fascinated by their criminal-minded lifestyles. He saw Jones in particular as a seventies update of the Artful Dodger from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and in time would start fantasising that he could invent a role for himself as their very own Fagin. But that was all in the immediate future. In ’74, Jones and Cook were out and about, ducking and diving, thieving and looting pretty much wherever they went.

  Jones was the motivating force in all of this. He had major skills as a cat burglar - most specifically, the power to make himself virtually invisible whenever he entered an establishment intent on pulling off a heist. He’d recently succeeded in half-inching no less than thirteen expensive electric guitars one by one from various instrument shops situated on central London’s Denmark Street. He even sold me one of his pilfered acquisitions - a beautiful black Fender Telecaster Deluxe. They were always up to no good. I remember their impromptu arrival that summer at a concert in a Kilburn cinema that Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards were putting on in order to promote Wood’s first solo album. Jones, Cook and Matlock got in by literally dismantling and then climbing through a trapdoor on the building’s extremely high roof.

  Like McLaren, I could tell instantly that these oiks were going to go on to big things in the future - unless Jones and Cook got sent to jail first. At that point they could barely play at all but that didn’t prevent them from projecting an aura of championship-level cockiness at all times. As I reported earlier, Dr. Feelgood were the hot up-and-coming band on the London club and pub scene that year, the one act everyone had high praise for. And yet Jones and co. were unimpressed. ‘We could do better than those Southend cunts,’ they blurted out more than once within my earshot. They even went so far as to refer to the Feelgoods’ large-domed guitarist Wilko Johnson as ‘Fuckin’ brick-head’ one night to his face. They weren’t what you’d call diplomatic or deep thinkers but I liked being in their company because they never took anything seriously and I found their continual tomfoolery an entertaining tonic to counterbalance my usual bedsit blues.

  But the individual I became closest to during the second half of ’74 was another rock journalist who’d climbed aboard the NME masthead that summer as the paper’s newest staff writer. His name was Pete Erskine and he and I had already become fast friends when we were on an assignment together in New York at the beginning of the year. Pete was thin, pale and feminine-featured like me and we shared the same dark sense of humour so we just naturally gravitated towards each other. He was two or three years older than me, married with a young son and I think he was drawn to my company partly because my lifestyle at the time was less restrictive and fenced-in than his was.

  That turned out to be our eventual undoing, however. Through being around me he first came into contact with heroin and succumbed to his temptation with little or no pre-thought. By the end of the year, we were both hooked on the stuff. Our brief honeymoon period with the drug was tapering off and trouble was getting ready to engulf us both. In Pete’s case, he was never able to fully extricate himself from the jaws of addiction. He died nine years later. The official cause was a fatal asthma attack but that attack wouldn’t have occurred if he’d been clean and healthy. It’s always been my greatest regret in life that I couldn’t help him redeem his circumstances and that I in effect contributed to his long decline by introducing him to the drug in the first place. But I also believe that he would have eventually fallen under its grip whether he’d ever known me or not.

  Bad times were a-coming but in the dying weeks of 1974 I still maintained an upright ‘cock of the walk’ status within the music industry. The media bedazzled still lined up around the block to kiss my ass. And promiscuous women in London nightspots still dangled themselves before my gaze like overdressed car keys. But I’d long grown weary of their attentions. And I was becoming wary of the whole idea of thoughtless, passionless sex. With all the diseases I’d managed to pick up over the past two years, sleeping around had become indistinguishable in my mind from playing Russian roulette with my genitalia.

  Meanwhile, music wasn’t exciting me as much as it once had - at least not the new music I was hearing. There were suddenly far too many white guys trying to play funk and failing miserably. The glam thing was now dead on its legs. And the one new trend on the horizon - disco - sounded shallow and inconsequential when I’d hear it played alongside the great black rhythm ’n’ blues music of the sixties. I knew what I was becoming - jaded - and I found the condition unsettling. I was still only twenty-two for God’s sake.

  Every now and then though something would transpire to temporarily rekindle my wavering interest in the whole pop process and the personalities contained within. Two close encounters during the final two weeks of the year still play vividly in my mind to this day. The first took place a week before Christmas. I went to visit a cocaine dealer friend of mine who lived off Edgware Road. Once inside his dim
ly lit apartment, I realised we were not alone. Two inebriated people were reclining on some cushions laid out across the living-room floor. One was a vivacious young black woman who spoke with a pronounced American drawl - her name was Gloria Jones. The other figure - her boyfriend - was a short baby-faced man swathed in a floor-length Edwardian popinjay coat. It took me a full minute to actually identify him. It was Marc Bolan.

  He looked a lot bulkier than the elfin figure he’d cut back in his glam messiah days. His once flawless features were now effectively rubberised by a bad case of toxic bloat and his body under that ludicrous coat of his seemed flabby and shapeless. What a turn-up for the books: the prettiest boy in the seventies pop stratosphere had prematurely gone to fat. At first I couldn’t understand why. After all, he was snorting cocaine all the time and that usually acts as an appetite suppressant. But then I noticed how much alcohol he was putting away and realised that his added girth was all booze-related. He’d been doing the tax-exile boogie over in some bland Euro-trash hidey-hole like Monaco and had gotten so bored he’d just let himself go until he’d developed a nasty case of full-blown alcoholism. His physical deterioration also coincided with a marked dip in his personal popularity here in the UK. His records weren’t setting the charts on fire any more. Most of his old fans had shifted their allegiance over to his arch-enemy David Bowie. In short, he was free-falling from grace at the speed of light and was unsure of how to rectify the situation. The musical formulae he’d still felt compelled to feed the media with were sounding more and more hollow and self-deluded.

  At least he didn’t launch into one of his ‘I am still the greatest’ diatribes that had so vexed Keith Richards just two months earlier. I ended up talking to him for a couple of hours - two Limey fop dudes on coke babbling away - and found him pleasant enough. On the surface he was woozy and effete but at heart he was a canny little hustler who knew how to turn on the charm whenever it might involve furthering his all-consuming fame-seeking agenda. But he also had a lively sense of humour and good taste in heroes. Syd Barrett was an obsession of his and he’d read my piece on the guy earlier in the year so he was particularly interested in learning anything about Barrett’s current whereabouts and state of health. I told him that Syd had lately gotten fat too. He winced tenderly at the news: clearly he could relate.

  Then we went off into a long debate about Bob Dylan, and Bolan told me a funny, oddly self-deprecating story about Dylan being his ultimate idol and how he’d finally met him in Los Angeles that year at the house of a mutual friend, songwriter Harry Nilsson. After listening to Bolan’s effusive praise for several minutes without interrupting, Dylan had looked at him quizzically and asked, ‘Say, man - are you one of those guys from the Incredible String Band?’ The Bopping Elf was temporarily crushed - Bob didn’t know him from Adam - but thinking about it afterwards - he told me - it only made Dylan seem more untouchable in his estimation. I told him that I’d heard a pre-release copy of Blood on the Tracks and that it was the first record Dylan had released in eight years that you could justifiably call a masterpiece. Bolan - who’d yet to hear the record - looked delighted. Complete artistic rehabilitation - that must have been his dream too. It’s sad he didn’t live long enough to truly achieve it. During the taxi ride home afterwards, I thought of Bolan and a line from the final track of Blood on the Tracks began replaying itself in my head over and over again. ‘I’ve seen pretty people disappear like smoke.’ Me too, Bob. Me too.

  A week later, the NME sent me off to follow Rod Stewart around for a couple of days. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier chapter, Bolan and Stewart were the two golden boys of the fledgling seventies pop/rock mainstream, its two adored kingpins. But once they’d made it to the top of the charts in Britain, their career trajectories started to veer off in radically different directions. Stewart scored chart-topping records in America and quickly became a superstar attraction over there. Bolan didn’t: he was simply too ethereal and too aloof for their earthy tastes. Stewart wasn’t as pretty but he was a far better singer and projected a more fun-loving and altogether more approachable image out to the masses. Result: unwavering global megastardom was his to command throughout the entire decade. When we met, the critics still loved him and the fans still kept growing in numbers. He was the first to admit it: the guy was one lucky son of a bitch.

  Stewart’s career was about to find itself at a major crossroads. His group the Faces still hadn’t gotten over losing their original bassist Ronnie Lane eighteen months earlier and were starting to stagnate as a musical unit. More problematic still, his faithful second lieutenant Ronnie Wood was spending more and more time in the Rolling Stones’ druggy world. A couple of weeks earlier, Mick Taylor had quit the group and now everyone was expecting to see Wood take over his post. It was a foregone conclusion really. Jagger and Richards both wanted him and he was simply too besotted with the band to even think of turning them down. Stewart spoke long and candidly to me about his own views on the unfurling situation. Woody wouldn’t leave him - he reckoned. He had too much of a good thing going with the Faces. Why would he willingly demote himself to hired-hand status for the Rolling Stones when he could stay an equal partner with his own lucrative outfit? It just didn’t make sense to Rod. It would have been fair to say that he wasn’t best pleased by the predicament. But Rod wasn’t what you’d call a born worrier. Career issues would need to be addressed sooner or later but they weren’t ever going to interfere too much with his constant pursuit of fun.

  No one I’ve ever hung out with ever eked a better time out of being rich and famous than old Rod the Mod. It was like he’d been born into the condition. He took to the celebrity playboy lifestyle like the proverbial duck to water. The Faces played a series of pre-Christmas shows in Kilburn and on the last night Stewart invited me to join him on a visit to a central London members-only nightclub known as Tramp. The place reeked of new money, predatory women and European gangsters soaked in overpriced aftershave.

  When Stewart walked through the door, the whole room stood up and applauded him like he was Father Christmas. One by one, wealthy dudes would stop by our table and kneel down as though they were about to kiss his ring. Women would suddenly materialise in pairs and offer to give him a blow job under the table - offers he cheerfully declined. At one point, he suggested I follow him to the toilets. Once through the door we were besieged by at least three adoring drug dealers determined to offer us free lines of cocaine. Back in the dining room he ate and drank like a Viking lord after being told by the maître d’ that everything his table consumed was strictly on the house.

  Stewart just took all the generosity being extended towards him in cheerful stride and drank it all in. He didn’t have the kind of addictive personality that most musicians seem to struggle with so he could booze and snort without things getting seriously out of hand. He was suave, laconic and drop-dead funny as well - the closest thing to Dean Martin that England has ever produced. You couldn’t have dreamed of better company. By the end of the night he’d lined up several of the most attractive women in the club and was instructing his chauffeur to ferry them all back to his country pile for further hanky-panky. He even invited me along to share in the festivities. I would have gone too like a shot from a gun but Hermine had turned up to the club in the interim and I didn’t want to just abandon her there. Still, maximum respect and gratitude to Mr Stewart for extending the invitation in the first place. Shortly after our encounter, all his best musical instincts started to desert him and he began releasing bland codswallop like ‘Sailing’ and ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ but I always kept a soft spot in my heart for the singer. To me, he’ll always remain a prince amongst men.

  I thought a lot about Rod in the final week of 1974. I mean, here was a guy who instinctively knew how to live the high life without getting needlessly bogged down in self-absorbed neurosis. I wasn’t that lucky. Why couldn’t I be that flippant?

  Because I couldn’t reconcile myself to what I’d lately become
- a bad person. I didn’t like myself any more. And I didn’t like the smoky nightclub world and tawdry Tin Pan Alley sideshow that I’d abandoned myself to either. My dad had been right all along: the entertainment industry is a tainted, corrupting universe. And as the seventies hit their midway stretch I realised that I’d become corrupted too. Like the New York Dolls, I’d experienced too much too soon and part of me now felt like I’d been ground through a lemon squeezer. That’s where the heroin came in: at first it glued me back together and gave me the get-up-and-go to continue to play out my role as the NME’s resident hit man.

  What other options were there? The idea of stepping back into anonymity was unthinkable. I’d set out on this journey and couldn’t back out now that the landscape had suddenly turned all bleak. Rock stars in the seventies were facing much the same dilemma. Neil Young wilfully ostracised his mainstream fan base by ‘heading for the ditch. It was a rougher ride but I met more interesting people there.’ And Sly Stone once stated that ‘sometimes a man has to lose everything he’s built up just in order to check himself out’. In other words, practically all the people worth a damn in music were headed for the low side of the road too.