by Nick Kent
As a result, the singer’s own performance felt oddly constrained in its desire to exhibit a higher grasp of professionalism. He still moved and danced like a whirling dervish but he wasn’t interacting with the audience, wasn’t stirring up the communal frenzy any more. Bowie was midwifing him into a new career phase - that of the performer in control of himself and his surroundings - with a pre-arranged set and precious little room for any kind of spontaneity or ‘sonic jazz’. The London punk cognoscenti came out in force to savour the moment and Johnny Thunders stood next to me through much of the show. But before the end he was turning on his heels. ‘I can’t watch this shit any more,’ he’d murmured. ‘Jim’s just Bowie’s bitch now. I can’t believe he sold out his rock ’n’ roll side to go cabaret.’ I thought his reaction was small-minded and told him so. I actually liked some of the music they were playing. Not the brace of ill-advised Stooges covers but the new material that no one in the audience had ever heard before: songs from The Idiot and Lust for Life. I saw what Bowie was essentially trying to pull off - rehabilitating his ‘wild American friend’ whilst enlarging his own musical frontiers and gaining some handy punk cred in the process - but my heart still went out to the guy because his patronage was an act of genuine kindness that had probably saved Iggy’s life and such acts were desperately hard to come by in the seventies, particularly in the music-making marketplace.
The Idiot got released at the end of March and promptly polarised its audience. Lester Bangs wrote one of his last truly worthwhile pieces of criticism on the subject in a Village Voice article entitled ‘Blowtorch in Bondage’. He lambasted the album’s contents with a vengeance; ‘the person singing on The Idiot sounds like a dead man’, he wrote disparagingly. But he and other Stooges hardliners were missing the point. Iggy and Bowie were just taking the whole dank vampiric vibe of the seventies to a further sonic and conceptual extremity. Too remorselessly bleak and experimental-sounding to snare any kind of mainstream hit momentum, the record nonetheless held a rising new demographic - most notably creative young Mancunians such as Ian Curtis and Howard Devoto - spellbound with awe and the accompanying tour turned out to be a stirring standing-room-only success everywhere it played.
At its conclusion, Iggy and Bowie promptly deployed their working unit - Hunt and Tony Sales as the rhythm section plus a Scottish guitarist named Ricky Gardiner - back to West Berlin, where they all entered a recording studio known as Hansa together and commenced work on a second album project. It was at this juncture that Iggy started to rebel against his European patron’s grip on his own creative destiny. ‘Bowie’s a hell of a fast guy,’ he’d later reflect. ‘Very quick thinker, very quick action, very active person, very sharp. I realised I had to be quicker than him or whose album was it going to be?’ By the end of the summer sessions, he’d managed to wrest back control of his core musical identity - Lust for Life, the resulting record, was brim-full of inspired autobiographical lyrics that dovetailed neatly into Bowie’s generally more uplifting-sounding backing tracks. Indeed it was such a tour de force that many were predicting that it would provide Iggy with the elusive cross-over hit that would finally transform him into a bona fide superstar.
But then just as the record was being shipped into stores that September, news broke that Iggy’s more prestigious RCA Victor label-mate Elvis Presley had died and the company promptly suspended the further pressing and distribution of Lust for Life in order to cope with worldwide demand for the King’s back catalogue. The curse of Osterberg was still in full effect. His career had been sidelined yet again, this time by a fat bloke dying on the toilet. He tried keeping a stiff upper lip but became seriously unglued just prior to going out on his second world tour that year, booked - without Bowie’s presence this time - to promote a new record that was barely available in the shops.
One afternoon in September I wandered into the NME’s drab Waterloo headquarters only to hear a familiar sound coming from out of Nick Logan’s office-a deep-voiced American baritone that suddenly see-sawed into a high-pitched cackle whenever its owner came to the punchline of the tale he was telling. From a distance, I could just about make out the form of a strange little man in thick, frameless glasses and sporting disastrously short hair and a nondescript trench coat, slacks and golfing shoes who looked disconcertingly like the kind of character Jerry Lewis might have played in one of his early movie romps. Only the voice gave him away: it was Iggy.
I went over to greet him but couldn’t get past the fact that his appearance and general demeanour were those of a completely crazy man. I took him to one side and asked what on earth he was doing on the premises. ‘I’m trying to get hold of some crank,’ he replied - ‘crank’ being US slang for speed. ‘And I heard there might be some here. Can you help me out?’ Oh boy - Iggy Pop on uppers: the most hyperactive man on the planet under the sway of the most hyperactive drug on the planet. It was a recipe for utter bedlam. He then invited me to join him for a ride around London in his limo parked outside. I told him I couldn’t help him obtain any amphetamine but followed along anyway simply to further our sudden reacquaintance. I ended up spending the rest of the evening in his company and wishing I hadn’t. He wasn’t unfriendly but he was so bizarrely different from the guy I’d known back in the Stooges that it felt like he’d assumed a whole new personality in the interim-a personality moreover that was bewilderingly hard to actually like. He’d strut around like a little banty rooster marshalling his troops - his tour organisers and general personnel - like the drug-deluded ghost of General Patton. Then I joined him on an impromptu midnight trek to the Roxy, London’s most notorious punk niterie, only to watch him behave there with such a haughty sense of self-entitlement he almost got punched out by the barely pubescent drummer of X-Ray Spex.
Still, Iggy managed to get two great albums out in 1977 and build a lucrative solo career for himself as a live act hither and yon, and these positive accomplishments ultimately far outweighed any negative energy and tricky karma still dogging his tracks. By any reckoning he’d be able to look back on the year as a providential one-a time of growth and dreams fulfilled. Other rock stars I’d known back in the early seventies wouldn’t be so lucky.
1977 came down like a jackhammer even on big boys like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Keith Richards got busted in Toronto that February by some Mounties who discovered enough heroin and cocaine in his hotel room to put him behind bars for several years. Many strings had to be pulled - many favours called in - but the Stones organisation somehow managed to keep him out of jail and out of Canada until an actual trial date was set. A rehab stint was set into motion but it evidently failed to have lasting results. In Ian McLagan’s autobiography All the Rage the former Faces keyboard player recalls doing sessions with the group in a Paris recording studio later the same year and witnessing the guitarist ‘jab a needle straight through his jeans into his bum and leave it there, the syringe sticking out as he walked around the room laughing loudly’.
With no fresh product to promote apart from a ropey in-concert album entitled Love You Live and a key member in big trouble, the group wisely opted not to tour that year. Led Zeppelin also had no new recordings to release during the same time frame, a singer still recovering from an auto accident in Greece eighteen months earlier that had come close to crippling him for life and two other band members in the early stages of heroin addiction. Even more alarmingly, their manager Peter Grant had just been put through a painful divorce by his once-devoted wife Gloria and was numbing the extensive emotional wounds brought on by no longer having a family to counterbalance the craziness of being at the helm of the world’s biggest rock attraction by consuming far too much cocaine for a man of his gargantuan girth. His mood quickly darkened and he began making bad business decisions, the most far-reachingly ill-conceived being his green-lighting of a huge Zeppelin tour booked into all the major cities in America throughout the spring and summer months of ’77.
To the group’s credit, they manage
d to perform well through most of the forty-nine shows despite ill health, frayed nerves and escalating levels of chemical refreshment. But the tour would end up going down in the history books not on its musical merits but for a single grotesque incident that will haunt the group for an eternity. In Oakland Coliseum just prior to the first of two Zeppelin concerts being presented by Bill Graham, the most powerful promoter in America, Peter Grant, bookended by John Bonham and Richard Cole, had savagely beaten up one of Graham’s security team, a young man named Jim Matzorkis. ‘Grant said “Hold him,”’ Matzorkis later testified, ‘and just started punching me in the face with his fists and kicking me in the balls.’ The victim then recalled a fourth accomplice of Grant’s ‘trying to rip my eyeballs out of their sockets. I think my lawyers found later that there was some incident where he did rip somebody’s eyes out. That scared the hell out of me.’
The identity of this fourth accomplice was made available under the banner headlines that prevailed in the world’s press when he, Grant, Bonham and Cole were formally arrested at Graham’s instigation in their San Francisco hotel two days after the attack and all charged with grievous assault. It was John Bindon, a well-known London-based career criminal who’d dabbled in acting - he played the slow-witted enforcer Moody in Performance - and improved his circumstances by becoming one of those colourful East End villain types that sections of the seventies aristocracy liked to adopt and invite to their soirées. Bindon wasn’t short on colour: he was supposed to be equipped with the largest penis in the whole South of England and was known to be a close personal friend of Princess Margaret, the Queen’s wayward little sister. But those bored rich folk who fell under his earthy charm generally preferred to remain blissfully ignorant of his shadow self and its gleeful ongoing involvement in murders and acts of bodily harm too gruesome to itemise here. In the same way that human excrement like Charles Manson could only make their homicidal mark in the LSDDRENCHED late sixties, someone as brutish and bloodthirsty as Bindon could only rise up and get himself integrated into the worlds of glamour and prestige that fell under the dark voyeuristic penchants of the seventies. When Grant and Richard Cole elected to have him be part of Led Zeppelin’s security staff that year, they unwittingly unloosed real demons within their organisation that were far more deadly and disruptive than anything Jimmy Page could have possibly conjured up in Aleister Crowley’s old lair with his occultist books and spells.
Why on earth did they embark on such a foolhardy collaboration? It was the drugs again. Everyone was so coked up they’d convinced themselves that the lives of the members of Led Zeppelin were under threat and that the only way to combat a possible assassination attempt whilst touring the States was to hand-pick the most vicious brutes known throughout the whole Western world to be on their team. When you think about it, it was a distinctly ‘punk’ way of reacting, particularly for a bunch who’d lately been branded ‘tired old farts’ by the same demographic. After all, back in London, Malcolm McLaren was behaving in an identical fashion and making out like a bandit on the publicity. His thugs just hadn’t killed anybody yet.
But razor-boys and the violence groupies who enable them were generally less tolerated in the American music business of the late seventies. Bill Graham had Grant and co. (briefly) jailed and fingerprinted and then went on the radio to denounce Led Zeppelin and their management as the closest thing in rock ’n’ roll to Nazi Germany. This must have sounded like serious fighting talk to Grant’s ears - he was Jewish after all - but he was still too chemically looped to fully comprehend the consequences of what he’d set into motion in Oakland. As Richard Cole later recalled, ‘Once we got out of jail we rounded up the troops, jumped on a plane and got the hell out of town. We went to New Orleans where we were going to be given the keys to the city! Led Zeppelin was to be the first group to play at their new stadium.’ The group hadn’t even had time to book into their New Orleans hotel when a phone call came to the reception area requesting the presence of Robert Plant. Plant - who’d apparently been unhappy about John Bindon being on the tour and who’d also been the only Zeppelin member to try and talk reasonably with Bill Graham on the day of the aggression - then learned that his six-year-old son Karac had suddenly died from a mysterious viral infection.
From that moment on, Led Zeppelin was never the same again. In his sorrow Plant turned away from the life he’d been living for the past ten years and even considered giving up music as a career and becoming a teacher instead. He was also apparently deeply hurt when Page, Jones and Grant failed to appear in person to pay their respects at his son’s funeral. But Grant had already exiled himself away deep inside his warped head-space. One of Bill Graham’s assistants, Nicholas Clainos, was in conference with his boss in their San Francisco office the night the news came through. The phone rang. ‘Bill’s secretary said, “There’s a guy on the line who says he’s Peter Grant,”’ Clainos later recalled. ‘Bill and I picked up the phone. Bill said “Hello.” The guy was speaking real low. He said, “I hope you’re happy.” Those were his exact words. Bill said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Thanks to you, Robert Plant’s kid died today.” And he hung up the phone. We found out later . . . [Led Zeppelin] had to go home. They cancelled New Orleans and they never played again in America as the original Led Zeppelin. In their eyes, it was all karma and all tied together. Whether Robert Plant ever thought that or only Peter Grant, I don’t know.’
The above testimony is just one eyewitness quote from a whole grizzly chapter dedicated to the Oakland incident and its repercussions that appears in Bill Graham Presents, the famed promoter’s posthumous autobiography. Published in the nineties, a copy of the book fell into the hands of Grant himself not long before his own death from heart failure in 1995. According to a friend whom he contacted as soon as he’d finished reading its contents, the revelations in the chapter entitled ‘Led Zeppelin’ caused the big man to weep uncontrollably. ‘Is it all true though?’ asked the friend, who happened to be Ed Bicknell, Dire Straits’ manager. ‘Yes,’ replied Grant through gulping tears. The truth had clearly mortified him. ‘I don’t want to be remembered as a bad person,’ he kept saying. But it was too late. History was about to shunt his positive accomplishments into the margins and portray him for the ages as some fearsome ogre who hired known killers to help further his omnipotence.
Virtually everyone in the rock ’n’ roll hemisphere seemed to be adrift in troubled waters during 1977. It was that kind of year. You might look enviously across the Atlantic at groups like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac raking in the cash, hogging the top slots in the hit parade and racking up multi-platinum sales for their latest output, but when you actually listened to either Hotel California or Rumours it became numbingly apparent that it was just more high-grade cocaine music for the masses. Bruce Springsteen, the country’s big hope, was out of action for most of the year, tied down by legal proceedings that threatened to jinx his future recording career. And the US heartland was generally unresponsive to the first New York-based punk recordings being made available. The Ramones still weren’t getting played on the radio and the debut albums by Talking Heads, Television and Richard Hell and the Voidoids were all destined to attain only meagre chart placings in their homeland. A few disaffected kids in every major city would cherish these records but there was no discernibly ‘mainstream’ youth shift towards all things ‘punk’ like there was that year throughout Britain.
It was still some kind of freak-show cult out there in the land of shopping malls and sagebrush. Some elemental galvanising force needed to arrive in the country much like the Beatles had in 1964 and then take the nation completely by storm. Iggy Pop was too old and the Ramones didn’t really have the right personalities for the job. The only logical candidates were the Sex Pistols. In late autumn of 1977, Bill Graham, Peter Grant’s new worst nightmare, contacted Malcolm McLaren and offered the band their very own San Francisco showcase at an old hippie venue he still ran known as the Winterland. McL
aren eventually took him up on his offer and scheduled a small tour of other US states to precede the show. And that - as history now clearly indicates - was the end of the Sex Pistols. America has a habit of decimating English groups on their first tour of the colonies and such was the case with Shepherd’s Bush’s finest. In the end they had the bollocks but lacked the stamina. If the New York Dolls were too much too soon, the Pistols were too little too fast.
I saw Sid maybe two weeks before he was due to ‘invade’ the United States. I was walking out of a dope house on Powis Square as he stumbled into the courtyard. He was wearing a black patch over his right eye like a pirate. ‘Is that for theatrical effect then?’ I asked him. It wasn’t, he cheerily insisted. He’d lately lost the vision in his right eye. It was all to do with him shooting up something he shouldn’t have and going temporarily blind as a consequence. Then he mentioned - apropos of nothing - that he’d overdosed thirteen times in the previous twelve weeks. He was grinning as he said it, like he was waving around some kind of junkie badge of courage. ‘Way to go, son. Way to go,’ I mumbled back. And then we went our separate ways. I knew I’d never see him again. The smell of death coming off him had become way too pungent.
It’s funny though - when Sid got booked for murdering Nancy over in Manhattan a few months into 1978, his mother, whom I’d never met before, sought me out at the NME’s new office in Carnaby Street. She was a well-spoken, small, birdlike woman - pencil-thin, quiet-natured, noticeably intelligent, younger-looking than I’d expected - and she asked me to help her in drumming up support for her son in his darkest hour. By chance, the Clash were having a record-company-sponsored knees-up for their latest recording only a few streets away and so I shepherded her over to the festivities and introduced her to Mick Jones and Paul Simonon. I think they actually ended up playing a special benefit show for Sid not long afterwards. In the brief time we were together, I pondered asking Ann Beverley how she felt now about having used heroin whilst her son was still in her womb. And what had actually transpired in their home environment to create such a monster - but left the questions unspoken. I didn’t want to cultivate any kind of relationship with the woman. I just wanted to be rid of the whole sordid Sid scenario and the hateful, barbaric time frame that had seen its rise and fall.