by Nick Kent
The abyss was yawning - and so was I. I could have slept for a thousand years. My drug-drenched dreams now seemed more real to me than the moment-to-moment reality I was drifting through. And that’s when the real darkness came seeping in. Real darkness and catastrophic bad luck. I’d entered the decade with a golden touch. Now - exactly halfway through its ten-year duration - it was about to be snatched from me and replaced by the mark of Cain.
1975
It was in early January of 1975 that I experienced my first significant bout of drug withdrawals. I shouldn’t have been that surprised. My daily use of heroin - and cocaine, it balanced things out - had become so pervasive of late I was now spending practically all my wages on the stuff. I was even writing to deadline under the influence of the two drugs. If you ever download any articles of mine from that specific era, you’ll notice how the sentences get longer and more convoluted as the text progresses. Now you know the reason why.
Then one day my Chelsea Embankment source ran dry for several days and my whole metabolism turned against me. The chills and rapid changes in body temperature weren’t unbearable but the ferocious depression I felt eating away at my very soul for some forty-eight uninterrupted hours wasn’t something I wished to visit upon myself again any time soon. This led to the last jolt of common sense I managed to rouse within myself for the rest of the decade. I decided I needed to distance myself from all the druggy tristesse of the past six months. It would mean abandoning London and all its temptations and relocating to some more exotic climate. But it also had to be a place where I could still find work. There was only one option, really: America, more specifically Los Angeles. I would get myself a golden suntan and prowl Hollywood anew in search of wild tales to tell the folks back home. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But I’d neglected to factor in an important detail: Hollywood in 1975 was fast becoming the West Coast’s very own re-enactment of Sodom and Gomorrah. Finding any kind of personal redemption there was a futile folly.
In the few weeks prior to my February departure, I became deeply embroiled in the music and short life of Nick Drake. Drake had died only a few months earlier - apparently it had been self-administered - but no obituary had appeared in any of the four music weeklies to mourn his loss. I’d been so taken up with my own sack of woe that at the time I doubt his passing even registered with me. But by year’s end I was becoming increasingly aware that his untimely death was something that needed to be addressed just like the three albums of music he made in his lifetime needed to be celebrated - albeit belatedly. I’d always been an admirer of his, ever since I first heard ‘River Man’ waft spine-tinglingly across the airwaves via a John Peel-helmed radio broadcast. In the autumn of ’71, just as I was installing myself into life at London University, I bought a second-hand copy of Bryter Layter and it quickly became the soundtrack for my brief middle-class student-drifter existence. I’d listen to the record and what Drake was singing about - the melancholy feeling of leaving England’s green and pleasant land to chance your arm in London’s gritty, isolating metropolis - spoke penetratingly to my inner condition. His was bedroom-hermit music taken to the level of high art, and the more I’d hear it, the more I became convinced that we had just lost one of the greatest English-born musical talents of the second half of the twentieth century. Ian MacDonald - who’d known Drake briefly when they were both students at Cambridge University - also subscribed to this viewpoint and was therefore enthusiastic when I told him I was planning a lengthy piece on the guy for the NME. It wasn’t an easy assignment. Drake had always been an intensely guarded and private individual. Certainly none of the friends and co-workers of his that I spoke to were able to decipher the inner workings of his mind or explain his enigmatic aloofness. But most of them openly questioned the verdict of suicide that had been handed down after the inquest into his death and I could see their point. Only three tablets of an antidepressant known as Tryptizol were found in his stomach - hardly an amount to guarantee eternal oblivion. I wrote that Drake didn’t wilfully take his own life and I’ve not read, seen or heard anything since to cause me to modify that opinion. The way I see it, both Drake and later Ian Curtis were the hapless victims of incompetent doctors who used them both as unwitting guinea pigs for pharmaceutical companies to test their most controversial new products on. The seventies was the decade of the nefarious pill-form antidepressant. Suddenly NHS quacks were doling them out to their patients like food to the famished. By decade’s end thousands and thousands of middle-aged English housewives had turned into panic-stricken zombies as a result of being force-fed Valium in this insidious fashion. Nick Drake’s tragic end can also be seen as a forewarning of their treacherous fate - the condition known as ‘prescription death’.
My own Drake investigation was completed at January’s end and printed in February. It’s not one of my best efforts but it gave its subject’s musical legacy much-needed acclaim and exposure and helped instigate a mystique around his name that has only grown with the passing of time. My next assignment was a sudden lurch from the sublime to the ridiculous. NME had found a patron to pay for my round-trip airfare to LA and a week’s worth of hotel bills - after which I was to be left to my own devices. There was one snag, however: the patron was Jethro Tull.
In Christopher Headington’s lofty tome A History of Western Music, Claude Debussy is quoted as having once claimed that he favoured featuring the flute in the foreground of many of his compositions because he felt the slender wind instrument possessed the mystical power ‘of a melancholy Puck (the mischievous sprite in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) questioning the hidden meaning of things’. But Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson showcased it in his own repertoire for less poetic reasons. He tootled away on it because it added a suitably mellifluous ‘age of Aquarius’ tonality to his group’s otherwise generic late-sixties blues-rock bleatings and because it was also a useful prop for his incessant human-scarecrow posturing whenever he found himself in front of a paying audience.
The Tull had started out as trailblazing ‘crusties’ but soon jettisoned their initial ‘playing the blues for greatcoat-sporting students who rarely wash themselves’ game plan to climb aboard the good ship ‘prog rock’ and seek their fortune through playing electrified madrigals in 7/4 time with lyrics about high-born lusty temptresses beating stable-boys’ naked buttocks with a riding crop. Against all conventional logic, their new direction paid off like a one-armed bandit choking up its entire contents of coinage to some dumb-lucky gambler. By 1975 they were one of the world’s biggest-selling musical attractions. In America they could sell out all the mega-barns any promoter could throw at them. In Los Angeles alone, they’d been booked for four consecutive nights at the prestigious 20,000-seater-capacity Felt Forum. That’s what I’d essentially been flown in to trumpet back to the home front. They seemed to think I’d happily adapt to the role of becoming their token media shill but as usual I had other more personal agendas to pursue.
Their US press officer-a shrill, hyperactive Bobbi Flekman lookalike with a voice like paint-stripper - met me at the airport and then drove me straight to the first of the Felt Forum shows previewed for that evening. I was already in a bad way from the jet lag - as well as probable drug withdrawal - and considered my imminent fate much like a prisoner about to face the gallows. Marshalling a half-hearted stiff upper lip, I staggered into the huge auditorium only to find myself in a scene to rank with Dante’s inferno: 20,000 double-ugly Americans going completely gaga over a musical spectacle so bizarre that it beggared description and which none of them could have even remotely comprehended. If they had, they wouldn’t have been there in the first place. Each song the Tull performed was as long and windy as a discourse on agrarian reform in the nineteenth century, and to top it all they’d incorporate old Monty Python sketches into their routines and pretend to their Yankee rube fan base - who’d yet to see Python on the telly in their country - that they were doing something audaciously original. I couldn’
t believe my eyes and ears. Where was the appeal? Why all the bums on seats? I asked Anderson these very questions later and even he was at a loss to explain his group’s popularity. But I already knew - it was bad taste, pure and simple. They say good taste is timeless. But bad taste has been around just as long and is invariably more lucrative.
Anyway, after half an hour of this musical torture, I was starting to sag and wilt like an untended bloom. The press officer - noting my haggard expression - passed me a Quaalude to aid my further discomfort. It was a decent thing to do, all things considered - but also deeply misguided. Five minutes later, I was out cold in my seat. Apparently I had to be carried out of the venue, placed in a car and then driven back to the hotel. I just remember waking up early the next morning fully-dressed in my hotel room with a dust bowl for a mouth and aches in all my joints.
Fortunately Iggy Pop arrived shortly afterwards. He lived virtually next door to my hotel on the Sunset Strip and had come over to renew old acquaintances and possibly scam a free breakfast on my room-service chit. I told him of my current dilemma: jet lag, drug withdrawals and, most of all, the prospect of having to witness yet another Jethro Tull show. ‘Man, I wouldn’t wish that combination on my worst enemy,’ he winced sympathetically before suggesting he contact a friend to help me self-medicate throughout the whole ordeal. An hour and one phone call later, there was a knock at my door. Iggy opened it and in walked a tall, thin, clearly gay young black man dressed like a member of Little Richard’s backing ensemble. His name was Johnny and he dealt heroin when not dipping his toes into other backwaters of small-time LA-based criminality with the aid of his equally overattired black boyfriend, who was known as Levi. He didn’t say much. Just dropped a small packet on the night-stand and then stared at me as if to say ‘So where’s the money, sucker?’ It was then that I had the sudden realisation that I possessed only English traveller’s cheques as a form of viable currency. I showed them to him but to no avail. ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ I recall him saying. ‘It’s just worthless paper to me.’ Fortunately, a compromise was reached. The hotel had a gift shop and Johnny needed a hairdryer so I basically paid for it on room service, as well as for a couple of chintzy items he also took a shine to whilst perusing the merchandise. This meant in effect that the Tull and/or their record company were footing the bills for our drugs. Looking back now, I can’t say I’m proud of the incident. You could dress it up and play it back as an early punk gesture of defiance - me and the Ig literally ripping off the stadium-rock behemoths - but in reality it was just seedy junkie behaviour. Still, it got the job done - so to speak. That night, I sat through two full hours of Jethro Tull in concert and felt no pain.
Once I’d dispensed with all Tull-related duties I began scoping out the Hollywood terrain in search of fun, adventure and good music, only to promptly discover that all three were in woefully limited supply. Ben Edmonds, my old Creem pal, had recently moved there and I remember us going to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco only to discover the gnome-like Bingenheimer cueing up old glam records on the house turntable to an audience of just three pilled-up punters dreamily occupying the dance floor like extras from Night of the Living Dead. We stuck around for half an hour - just to be polite - and then made our excuses and ran for the exit door. As we were stepping outside, we noticed a disturbance on the pavement before us. Two of the three patrons we’d just been rubbing shoulders with were splayed out on the cold concrete like wounded birds. Just a few feet away, a young long-haired man in an expensive-looking fur anorak was staring at the human wreckage with undisguised glee in his cocaine-rimmed eyes. Ben recognised the guy: it was Glenn Frey from the Eagles.
We both understood the subtext. Two years earlier, glam had been the big noise in town but now it was dead on its legs and the rugged and rigidly heterosexual Eagles had lately risen up victorious as the new messiahs of West Coast rock. It wasn’t hard to fathom out why. Their music was as comfortable and reassuring to mainstream America as slipping on a pair of old slippers. It didn’t challenge its audience on any level or promote alternative lifestyles. It just blended together contemporary hippie mysticism with fanciful cowboy folklore and then served the combo up like a musical box of chocolates wrapped up in a ribbon-bow of mock-prairie harmonising. Their records were like those washed-denim jeans that were so in vogue at the time: bland, inauthentic but impossible to escape. More than any other home-grown act, they had their collective finger on the pulse of what America really wanted to hear in the mid-seventies.
Frey and the rest of his cocaine cowboy musical fraternity had their own upmarket Hollywood watering hole to frequent when they weren’t cooking up new mellow tunes in the studio for further domination of the airwaves. It was called the Roxy and was situated on the Sunset Strip only a few doors away from the now-ailing Whisky a Go Go. There was a room to drink in, a room to eat in and a room to watch live entertainment in, as well as a dance floor, but most of the human interaction inevitably went on around the bar area. Every second-division rock musician in the region seemed to have a tab there and could be found draped over a bar stool on any given night trying to drown their professional and personal woes with copious shots of tequila. You rarely saw a smile on any of their faces. Hedonism had lately become a singularly joyless pursuit on the West Coast.
Meanwhile, out on the sidewalk the damaged and terminally drug-diminished were only growing in number. Wherever unsuspecting pedestrians went, they’d be approached by some intense young person attempting to indoctrinate them into one dubious cult or another. All these broken spirits had the same basic rap: the end is nigh, the devil has won, give up your ego and all worldly possessions and join us as we sink into blind submission to some crackpot deity.
Hollywood’s moneyed elite - the town’s real movers and shakers - had long since learned to avoid rubbing shoulders with its walking wounded. It was all too elementary. If you didn’t care to be hassled by scary ‘street’ people, then you simply didn’t go out in the streets. Employing this logic to its fullest degree, the area’s superstars tended to lock themselves away at home in Malibu or Bel Air, only venturing out to record or visit their dealers. Every now and then there’d be some ugly public brouhaha: some liquor-looped English drummer and his troglodyte roadies smashing up a local bistro, or Sly Stone and his hoodlum cronies pulling guns on a receptionist at the Record Plant in a seriously misguided attempt to retrieve several master tapes Sly had recorded there without ever paying for the sessions. But most of the real madness of the time was played out behind the locked doors and gated driveways of remotely located luxury mansions once owned by movie stars from the silent-picture age that no one seemed to remember the names of.
Such an arrangement was ideal for at least one foreign body who’d lately beamed himself down into the community. David Bowie had moved to the City of Angels around the same time I had - sometime in February - but was clearly in no mood to celebrate his arrival with the locals. He was conspicuously absent from all the clubs and social functions during that month and the ones that followed. He’d first found fame as a flamboyant ‘look at me’ kind of fellow but now he seemed to be invaded by a Howard Hughes-sized craving for self-seclusion. It made sense. He’d been going through many ch-ch-changes of late and, like a snake, had been shedding a lot of dead skin. Musically speaking, he’d daringly jettisoned glam only to plausibly reinvent himself as a white soul boy fronting an upmarket disco revue. His physical appearance had undergone a startling transformation too. Where once he’d resembled an alien transsexual from the planet Outrageous, he now affected the dress code of an emaciated hop-head straight out of a Damon Runyon novel set in the McCarthyite fifties. Every time Bowie appeared in public that year, he looked like he’d just stepped out of an audition for Guys and Dolls.
Bowie was in LA partly to further distance himself from Tony Defries’s ruinously extravagant New York-based management empire Mainman, which the singer had lately forged a legal separation from. On discoverin
g that their meal ticket had left them in the lurch and flown westward, the fame-seekers who made up the organisation began a frenzied smear campaign of public gossiping that was heard loud and clear throughout the industry. Bowie - his jilted employees maintained - had lately become mentally unhinged, had a raging cocaine problem and needed to be institutionalised before he drove himself terminally crazy or - worse - killed himself. In the weeks and months that followed his exodus to LA, phone lines across America were throbbing with rumours of Bowie cavorting with white witches, pentagrams, exorcisms and Nazi theology. Hearing this stuff, it became obvious why he no longer felt the urge to embrace the madness of the Hollywood streets. From the sound of things, it was already all going on in his overstimulated mind.
Bowie also had a new album set for imminent release, his first full-tilt foray into contemporary soul music, which he’d recorded both in Philadelphia and Manhattan throughout the previous year. He’d briefly toyed with the idea of calling it Shilling the Rubes - Jewish slang for ‘ripping off the peasants’ - but had later relented, titling it instead Young Americans. A song of the same name was the opening track and RCA, Bowie’s record label, had earmarked it as the project’s first single as well. One sultry day in mid-February, I was in a Sunset Strip coffee shop with Iggy Pop when the radio playing over the loudspeaker system suddenly announced they were about to unveil an exclusive preview of David Bowie’s latest musical caper. The song came and went, leaving me underwhelmed. True, Bowie once again had hit upon a brand-new musical hybrid - Johnnie Ray meets gospel - but the blend sounded as forced as a shotgun wedding. Iggy liked it, though. He genuinely admired Bowie’s sense of creative ambition and thought he was a ‘damned fine singer to boot. It’s a good piece of work.’ He kept repeating, ‘He’s still a white-hot talent. ’ Neither of us knew it then but in less than a month Bowie would start focusing that white-hot talent of his on heating up Iggy’s own career. It wouldn’t come a moment too soon.